Linger

The house was every bit as gargantuan as it had seemed from the outside and looked like some kind of spread in Better Homes and Gardens. Everything was hung on the walls just so, in perfect threes and fives, perfectly aligned or charmingly asymmetrical. A spotlessly clean rug in a color that was probably called “mauve” led me silently down the wood-floored hallway. Glancing behind me to make sure the coast was still clear, I narrowly avoided tripping over a pricey-looking vase that held a bunch of artfully arranged dead branches. I wondered if real people actually lived here.

More pressingly, I wondered if anyone who wore my size lived here.

I hesitated as the hall opened up. To my left, more dim hallway. To my right, a massive, dark staircase that looked like a murder scene out of a gothic horror movie. I wrestled briefly with logic and decided to go upstairs. If I were a rich guy in Minnesota, I’d have my bedroom upstairs. Because heat rises.

The stairs led me to a hallway that was open on one side to the stairs below. My toes burned against the plush green carpet as feeling slowly returned to them. The pain was a good thing. It meant they still had blood flow.

“Don’t move.”

A female voice halted me. It didn’t sound afraid, despite the fact that a naked guy was standing in the middle of her house, so I figured I would probably turn to find a rifle pointed at me. I was acutely aware of my heart beating normally in my chest; God, I missed adrenaline.

I turned around.

It was a girl. She was pretty much drop-dead gorgeous in an eat-your-heart kind of way, all huge blue eyes partially hidden behind a jagged fringe of blond hair. And a tilt to her shoulders like she knew it. When she swept her eyes up and down my body, I felt as if I’d been judged and found wanting.

I tried a smile. “Hi. Sorry. I’m naked.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Isabel,” she said. “What are you doing in my house?”

There wasn’t really a right answer to that question.

Below us, there was the sound of a door shutting, and Isabel and I both jerked to look down toward the noise. For a brief moment, my heart yammered in my chest and I was surprised to feel terror—to feel something after such a long stretch of nothing.

I couldn’t move.

“Oh my God!” A woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs, staring straight up at me through the railing of the balcony. Her eyes swiveled to Isabel. “Oh my God. What in—”

I was going to be killed by two generations of beautiful women. While naked.

“Mom,” Isabel snapped, interrupting. “Do you mind not staring? It’s totally perv.”

Both her mother and I blinked at her.

Isabel moved closer to me and leaned across the railing at her mother. “A little privacy, maybe?” she shouted down.

This brought her mother back to life. She shouted back, with a voice growing ever higher, “Isabel Rosemary Culpeper, are you even going to tell me what a naked boy is doing in this house?”

“What do you think?” Isabel replied. “What do you think I’m doing with a naked boy in this house? Didn’t Dr. Carrotnose warn you that I might act out if you kept ignoring me? Well, here it is, Mom! Here’s me acting out! That’s right, keep staring! I hope you’re liking it! I don’t know why you make us go to therapy if you aren’t even going to listen to what he has to say. Go on, punish me for your mistakes!”

“Baby,” her mother said, in a much quieter voice. “But this—”

“At least I’m not standing on some street corner selling myself!” Isabel screamed. She turned to me, and her face instantly softened. In a voice a million times lighter, she said, “Kitten, I don’t want you to see me like this. Why don’t you go back to the room?”

I was an actor in my own life.

Down below, her mother rubbed a hand over her forehead and tried not to look in my direction. “Please, please just tell him to get some clothing on before your father gets home. In the meantime, I’m going to go have a drink. I don’t want to see him again.”

As her mother turned around, Isabel grabbed my arm—somehow it shocked me to feel her hands on my skin—and tugged me down the hall and through one of the doors. It turned out to be a bathroom, all tiled in black and white, with a giant claw-footed bathtub taking up most of the space.

Isabel shoved me into the room so hard that I nearly fell into the bathtub, and then she shut the door behind us.

“What the hell are you doing human so early?” she demanded.

“You know what I am?” I asked. Stupid question.

“Please,” she said, and her voice oozed contempt in a way that threatened to turn me on. No one—no one—talked to me like that. “Either you’re one of Sam’s, or you’re a random naked pervert who smells like dog.”

“Sam? Beck,” I said.

“Not Beck. Sam, now,” Isabel corrected. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re naked, in my house, and you really ought to be a wolf right now. Why the crap aren’t you a wolf right now? What’s your name?”

For a single, crazy moment, I almost told her.

• ISABEL •

For a moment, his face flickered to someplace else, someplace uncertain, the first real expression he’d had on his face since I found him pretty much posing next to the balcony. And then the almost-smirk was back on his face, and he said, “Cole.”

Like it was a gift.

I tossed it back at him. “Well, why aren’t you a wolf right now, Cole?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you otherwise?” he suggested.

“Nice try,” I said, but I felt a hard smile twist my face. I knew enough about flirting, out of habit, to recognize it in action. And he was a cocky bastard, too; rather than getting more self-conscious as we spoke, he reached up and held the shower rod behind him with both hands, stretching himself out rather beautifully as he studied me.

“Why did you lie to your mom?” Cole asked. “Would you have done that if I’d been a paunchy real estate broker turned werewolf?”

“I doubt it. Kindness isn’t generally my thing.” What was my thing was the way that stretching his arms above his head bunched his shoulder muscles and tightened his chest. I tried to keep my eyes on the arrogant curl of his lips. “That said, we ought to get you some clothing.”

His lips curved more. “Eventually?”

I smiled nastily at him. “Yeah, let’s get that freak show covered up.”

He made a little whoo shape with his lips. “Harsh.”

I shrugged. “Stay here and don’t hurt yourself. I’ll be right back.”

Shutting the bathroom door, I headed down the hallway to my brother’s old bedroom. I hesitated outside the door for just a moment, and then pushed it open.

It had been long enough since he’d died that being in his room no longer felt intrusive. Plus, it didn’t really look like his room anymore. My mother had packed up a lot of his stuff in boxes on the advice of her last therapist, then had left the boxes in his room on the advice of her current one. All of his sports crap had been packed, as well as his big, homemade speaker system. Once you took those two things away, there wasn’t anything left to say Jack.

Moving into the dark room, I knocked my shin on the corner of one of the therapy boxes on my way to the floor lamp. I swore softly, clicked on the light, and for the first time contemplated what I was doing: digging through my dead brother’s stuff to find clothing for a totally swoonworthy but jerkish werewolf standing in my bathroom, after telling my mom that I’d been sleeping with him.

Maybe she was right and I did need therapy.

I twisted my way through the boxes and threw open the closet. A rush of Jack-smell came out—pretty gross, really. Partially washed jerseys and man-shampoo and old shoes. But for a second, just for a second, it made me stand still, staring at the dark shapes of the hanging clothing. Then I heard my mother, far away downstairs, drop something, and remembered that I needed to get Cole out of here before my father came home. Mom wouldn’t tell him. She was good like that. She didn’t like to see crap get broken any more than I did.

I found a ratty sweatshirt, a T-shirt, and a decent pair of jeans. Satisfied, I turned around—right into Cole.

I bit off another swearword, my heart thumping. I had to crane my head back a bit to see his face this close; he was pretty tall. The dim floor lamp cast his face in sharp relief, like a Rembrandt portrait.

“You were taking a long time,” Cole said, taking a step back for politeness’ sake. “I came to see if you’d gone to get a gun.”

I shoved the clothing at him. “You’ll have to go commando.”

“Is there any other way?” He tossed the shirt and sweater onto the bed and half turned to pull on the jeans. They hung a little loosely on him; I could see the lines of his hip bones casting shadows as they disappeared into the waist.

I looked away quickly as he turned back around, but I knew he had seen me watching. I wanted to scratch the cocky lift of his eyebrows from his face. He reached for the T-shirt, and as it unfolded in his hands, I saw that it was Jack’s favorite Vikings T-shirt, the bottom right edge of it smeared with a bit of white from when he’d painted the garage last year. He used to wear the shirt for days at a time, until eventually even he admitted it smelled. I’d hated it.

Cole stretched his arm above his head to put it on, and suddenly all I could think was that I couldn’t stand to see anyone but my brother wear that T-shirt. Unthinking, I grabbed a handful of the fabric and Cole froze, looking down at me, expression blank. Maybe a little puzzled.

I tugged, indicating what I wanted, and still with a vaguely curious expression, he released his fist, letting me pull the shirt from his hands. Once I had the shirt, I didn’t want to explain why I had taken it back, so I kissed him instead. It was easier kissing him, pressing him back up against the wall, trying out the shape of his smirk on my lips, than it was to sort out why Jack’s shirt in someone else’s hands made me feel so sharp and exposed inside.

And he was a good kisser. I felt his flat stomach and ribs slide up against mine, even though his hands didn’t lift to touch me. This close, he smelled like Sam had on the first night that I met him, all musky wolf and pine. There was a certain earnest hungriness to the way Cole pressed his mouth against mine that made me think there was more truth in him here, kissing me, than there was when he spoke.

When I pulled back, Cole stayed where he was, leaned back against the wall, fingers hooked in the pockets of his stillunzipped jeans, his head cocked to one side, just studying me. My heart was thumping in my chest, and my hands were trembling with the effort of not kissing him again, but he didn’t seem fazed. I could see how slow and soft his pulse was beating through the skin of his abdomen.

The fact that he wasn’t as revved up as I was instantly infuriated me, and I took a step back, throwing Jack’s sweatshirt at him. He reached up to catch it a second after it bounced off his chest.

“That bad?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, crossing my arms to keep them still. “It was like you were trying to eat an apple.”