Author: Robin York

“As if I have time for another job.”

“That’s true. You’d have to stop sleeping. But it might be worth it to have chicks shoving cash in your jock.”

“They do that, anyway, whenever I go out dancing.”

“Oh, yeah?” Krishna’s face lights up. “You got moves?”

I don’t dance. If I need to get drunk, I do it at the bar in town that doesn’t card.

If I need to get laid, I find somebody who doesn’t go to the college, take her home, make her happy, and clear out. Townie women don’t expect anything from me.

“No,” I say. “I don’t need moves. I’ve got tight pants and an elephant dick.”

Krishna laughs.

“You’re not driving, are you?”

“I walked. I can knock on her window if you want. Send her your way.”

“Thanks, but no.” I turn him in the other direction, pointing him toward the apartment. It’s only two blocks, and I’ve never heard of anybody getting mugged in Putnam.

“Don’t forget my muffin,” he calls as he turns the corner.

After Krishna’s gone, the kitchen is so silent it seems to echo. This is my favorite part of the night, what comes next—the part when I dump out the proofed dough, weigh it into loaves, shape it, fill the pans, and fire up the ovens. It’s an act of creation, and I’m the god of the bread.

I look at the clock and measure out the minutes. Ten.

Ten, at a minimum, before I go look out the window. Maybe she’ll be gone, and I won’t have to do this. I can rule over this tiny world, messing with temperatures and proofing times, how much flour and how much liquid, how many minutes in the oven. It’s like pulling levers. Up or down. More or less. Simple.

I wish Caroline would let me do it—let me be the god of the bread and leave me alone. But she’s out there, messing up my kingdom, and I’m afraid of how much I want to go talk to her.

I think of Frankie on the phone. Of the money I sent my mom this afternoon.

I promise myself I won’t go to the door for fifteen minutes.

Fuck it, twenty. I won’t go for twenty.

I can’t give in to this, because the worst thing about Caroline is that I’ve never promised her anything, but she’s here, anyway. It’s as if she knows.

She doesn’t know. She can’t.

She can’t know that when I make a promise, I keep it.

Or that I’m afraid if I start promising her things, I won’t ever be able to quit.

“You want to come inside?”

That’s all it takes. When she says, “Yeah, sure,” I turn and go back in, and she closes her car up and follows me.

I put my iPod on shuffle and start it playing. I like having music for this part of the night—put it on any earlier, and the mixers are too loud to hear it. While I wash my hands, Caroline wanders around, doing a slow circuit of the room. Unlike Krishna, she doesn’t touch anything.

I tie my apron on over my jeans and go back to what I was doing.

“Bob makes the sweets,” I tell her. “I just stick them in the oven at the end of my shift. Not sure if you want to wait that long.”

As though she’s here for a cookie, and not because … fuck if I know. I clocked her ex, she showed up at the library, I mauled her, and she told me she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Then she started stalking me at work.

What am I supposed to think?

She shrugs.

I fling a chunk of bread off the scale onto the floured surface of the table. “So how’s it going?”

Caroline leans a hip against the table’s edge, all the way down at the far end. “Fine.”

Fine.

Everybody says they’re fine. It’s bullshit.

It’s not as though every conversation I have back home is deep and meaningful, but I never wasted so much time being polite as I do in Iowa.

Caroline’s wearing sweatpants and flip-flops and a hoodie you could fit seven of her in. Her toenail polish is chipped, and her hair’s in one of those lazy half ponytails, like she started to put it up but her arms got tired and she had to abandon the job before she finished.

There are chicks who dress the way Caroline is dressed all the time, but she’s not one of them. On the first day of history class, she wore jeans and a bright-blue sweater even though it was still ninety degrees outside. She lined her pen and her highlighter up perpendicular to her binder, the textbook and the syllabus all out in front of her.

There’s something about her that’s totally pulled together, even when she’s just wearing jeans and a shirt. Not the way she looks, I mean. Something inside her. Like she’s got it all figured out, knows what she wants, knows she deserves to get it.

I can still see how her face looked when she was sticking her nose inside my car, checking out all my stuff, asking me, “Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Tonight—lately—she’s all wrong. She isn’t fine. Not anymore.

And I can’t let it be.

“How come everybody lies when you ask them that?”

“What, how they are?”

“Yeah. You say, Hey, how’s it going? and everybody says, Oh, fine. Their hair could be on fire, and they’d still say, Fine, fine. Nobody ever says, You look like shit, or I don’t have enough money to make rent, or I just picked up a prescription for a really bad case of hemorrhoids.”

“People don’t like talking about hemorrhoids. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“But who decided it was the end of the fucking world to be uncomfortable? That’s what I want to know.”

She shrugs again. “I think it’s supposed to be like lubrication for society.”

“Lubrication?”

“Grease.”

I frown at her and toss a loaf down the counter. It’s filling up. I have to throw them down to her end. This one lands with a little pouf of flour that gets her black sweats messy, but she doesn’t brush the flour off.

I know what lubrication is. I just don’t get why we need it.

We didn’t need it at the library, when I was so fucked in the head from hitting Nate that I forgot I was supposed to even try to be polite.

It felt good punching that jackass.

It felt fucking great backing her up against the stacks, smelling her, getting my nose full of Caroline and my leg right up between hers, getting the taste of her on my tongue.

“It’s something my dad says,” she tells me. “Being polite is a form of social lubrication.”

“I thought that was booze.”

“What was?”

“I thought booze was for social lubrication.”

She smiles a little. “That, too.”

“I’m not sure you and me need lubricating.”

That earns me Caroline’s I’m-so-offended look. Those big ol’ brown eyes narrowed to slits.

I’d like to see her make that face at me when I have my tongue between her legs.

And that is not even a little bit what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

It’s impossible, though, to stop thinking about friction and lubrication, tongues and fingers and mouths, when she goes all red like that. When I know I’m getting her good and rattled. She pinked up that way once when I walked back to my room from the shower in a towel. Stared and stared at me with her neck flushing and her eyes huge.

I had a hard-on for a week.

“Why’d you come tonight?”

“You asked me to.”

“Before that. Why do you keep driving here, parking out front? What do you want?”

I throw the last piece of dough down the table, and it skids across the floured surface, stopping right in front of her.

“I don’t want anything.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She stares at me, nostrils flared, chin up. Starting to get pissed that I’m pressing.

Good. Let her be pissed. When she’s pissed, she talks.

“How’s it going, Caroline?”

This time, I lean into the words the way I might lean into the bread dough, pressing down hard with the heel of my hand. I want a real answer, because it’s the middle of the night and we can lie to each other in the daytime, on campus, in the library.

We do it already. Every time I pass her in the hallway and don’t grab her and push her up against a wall, kiss her stupid—every time it’s a lie.

I’m sick of it. I took this job expecting to be left alone, working when nobody was awake, not having to be polite or to say words I don’t mean, to act like I’m somebody I not. I need the job to give me that because I don’t get it otherwise, and it fucks it up when Krishna shows up and we have to pussyfoot around the fact that he drinks too much and hates himself. It fucks it up to have Caroline sitting outside in her car, not coming in. And now that she’s in, it’s fucking it up that she’s telling me she’s fine.

“It’s going,” she says.

“Yeah? Enjoying the fall weather? Classes treating you well?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose instead, high up, and closes her eyes. “You were right. Is that what you want me to say?”

“I want you to say whatever the truth is.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you ever tell anybody the truth. You’re awake at two in the morning. You look like shit. You’re exhausted. When I invite you in here, when I ask you how it’s going, you think I’m going to fucking buy it that you’re fine? You think that’s what I want you to say?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Yeah. It is. And if you’re going to get out of bed and come here and talk to me, the bare minimum you can do is assume I’m not everybody. When I ask you, I actually want to know how you are.”

“What if I don’t feel like telling you?”

“Then say that. How’s it going, Caroline? None of your fucking business, West. See how that works? It’s easy.”

For a minute she’s quiet, and I have a chance to appreciate what an asshole I am. I’ve got no right to be this way with her. I don’t know why I always want to be—to push at her, peel her apart, find out what’s underneath—but I do.

That’s the thing about Caroline. I want to strip her naked, and then I want to keep going. I want to learn what makes her tick. Not even want—I need to.

I need something from her, and that’s what I have to guard against. The most dangerous thing about her. Because if I need her, she’ll hurt me, distract me, maybe even break me into pieces and grind them under her heel. I’ve seen it happen with my mom.

And it’s not like I’m so dumb that I think love does that to everyone. Bo, Mom’s boyfriend now, he loves her, but he doesn’t love her that way—like a typhoon, a fucking tsunami knocking his feet out from under him. I know there’s love in the world that’s take-it-or-leave it, easygoing, slow and steady.

But that’s not what I feel around Caroline.

She could knock me on my ass so hard.

It’s not what I’m in Iowa for.

She exhales, a long whoosh of air. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” And then, after another pause, “Ask me again.”

“How’s it going?”

“Terrible.” She looks at the floor. “Every day,” she whispers. “Every single day is the worst day of my life.”

I flour the table in front of me, preparing to shape the loaves.

Bread practically makes itself, if you do it right. You just have to quit fighting it.

Caroline watches my hands. The way my fingers shape and pinch, set the bread on a tray to rise—I have a way of making not fighting it look like fighting it. I guess I’ve been digging my heels in so long, it’s hard to remember there’s another way to do things.