Linger

I heard her rezipping her backpack and felt the cushions rocking as she rearranged herself on the couch.

“Do you remember the first time we came up here?” she asked as I sat there, half-alone in the darkness of my closed eyes.

It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, so I just smiled.

“Do you remember how you made me close my eyes, and you read me that poem from Rilke?” Grace’s voice was closer; I felt her knee touch mine. “I loved you so much right then, Sam Roth.”

My skin tightened in a shiver, and I swallowed. I knew she loved me, but she almost never said it. That alone could’ve been her birthday gift for me. My hands lay open in my lap; I felt her press something into them. She closed one of my hands over the top of the other. Paper.

“I didn’t think I could ever be as romantic as you,” she said. “You know I’m not good at that. But—well.” And she did a funny little laugh at herself, so endearing that I nearly forgot myself and opened my eyes to see her face when she did it. “Well, I can’t wait anymore. Open your eyes.”

I opened them. There was a folded piece of computer paper in my hands. I could see the ghost of the printing that was on the inside, but not what it was.

Grace could barely sit still. Her expectation was hard to bear, because I didn’t know if I could live up to it. “Open it.”

I tried to remember the happy face. The upward tilt of my eyebrows, the open grin, the squinty eyes.

I opened the paper.

And I completely forgot about what my face was supposed to look like. I just sat there, staring at the words on the paper, not really believing them. It wasn’t the hugest of presents, though for Grace, it must’ve been difficult to manage. What was amazing was that it was me, a resolution I hadn’t been brave enough to write down. It was something that said she knew me. Something that made the I love yous real.

It was an invoice. For five hours of studio time.

I looked up at Grace and saw that her anticipation had melted away into something entirely different. Smugness. Complete and total smugness, so whatever my face had done on its own accord must’ve given me away.

“Grace,” I said, and my voice was lower than I’d planned.

Her smug little smile threatened to break into a bigger one. She asked, unnecessarily, “You like it?”

“I…”

She saved me from having to compose the rest of a sentence. “It’s in Duluth. I scheduled it for one of our mutual days off. I figured you could play some of your songs and…I don’t know. Do whatever you hope you’ll do with them.”

“A demo,” I said softly. The gift was more than she knew—or maybe she realized everything that it meant. It was more than just a nod to me doing more with my music. It was an acknowledgment that I could move forward. That there was going to be a next week and a next month and a next year for me. Studio time was about making plans for a brand-new future. Studio time said that if I gave someone my demo and they said, “I’ll get back to you in a month,” I’d still be human by the time they did.

“God, I love you, Grace,” I said. Still holding the invoice, I hugged her, tight, around her neck. I pressed my lips against the side of her head and hugged her hard again. I put down the paper beside the Subway crane.

“Are you going to make it into a crane, too?” she asked, then closed her eyes so I could kiss her again.

But I didn’t. I just stroked the hair away from her face so I could look at her with her eyes closed. She made me think of those angels that were on top of graves, eyes closed, faces lifted up, hands folded.

“You’re hot again,” I said. “Do you feel all right?”

Grace didn’t open her eyes, just let me continue tracing around the edge of her face as if I were still pushing her hair away from her skin. My fingers felt cold against her warm skin. She said, “Mmm hmm.”

So I kept teasing her skin with my fingers. I thought about telling her what I was thinking, like You’re beautiful and You’re my angel, but the thing about Grace was that words like that meant more to me than to her. They were throwaway phrases to her, things that made her smile for a second but were just…gone after that, too corny to be real. To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her.

When I leaned in to kiss her, I caught just the tiniest trace of that sweet, nutty smell from the wolf she’d found, so faint that I could have been imagining it. But just the thought of it was enough to throw me from the moment.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

“This is your home,” Grace said, with a playful smile. “You can’t fool me.”

But I stood up, tugging both her hands to pull her after me.

“I want to get home before your parents do,” I said. “They’ve been getting home really early.”

“Let’s elope,” Grace said lightly, bending to collect our leftover sandwiches and drinks. I held out the bag so that she could toss everything inside, and watched as she retrieved the sandwich-paper crane before we headed down the stairs.

Hand in hand, we retreated through the now-dark store and out back, where Grace’s white Mazda was parked. When she got into the driver’s seat, I lifted my palm to my nose, trying to catch a whiff of the scent from before. I couldn’t smell it, but the wolf in me couldn’t ignore the memory of it in that kiss.

It was like a low voice whispering in a foreign language, breathing a secret that I couldn’t understand.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

• SAM •

Something woke me.

Surrounded by the dull, familiar darkness of Grace’s bedroom, I wasn’t sure what it was. There was no sound outside, and the rest of the house lay in the half-aware silence of night. Grace, too, was quiet, rolled away from me. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose against the back of her soapscented neck. The tiny blond hairs at her nape tickled my nostrils. I jerked my face away from them and Grace sighed in her sleep, curling her back tighter against the shape of my body as she did. I should’ve slept, too—I had inventory work at the store early the next day—but something in my subconscious hummed with an uneasy watchfulness. So I lay against her, close as two spoons in a drawer, until her skin was too hot to be comfortable.

I slid a few inches away, keeping a hand on her side. Normally, the soft up-and-down of her ribs under my palm lulled me to sleep when nothing else would. But not tonight.

Tonight, I couldn’t stop remembering what it had felt like when I’d been just about to shift. The way the cold had crawled along my skin, trailing goose bumps behind it. The turn, turn, turn of my stomach, aching nausea unfurling. The slow sunburst of pain up my spine as it stretched according to memories of another shape. My thoughts slipping away from me, crushed and reformed to fit my winter skull.

Sleep evaded me, just out of my grasp. My instincts prickled relentlessly, urging me to alertness. The darkness pressed against my eyes while the wolf inside me sang something is not right.

Outside, the wolves began to howl.

• GRACE •

I was too hot. The sheets stuck to my damp calves; I tasted sweat at the corner of my lips. As the wolves howled, my skin tingled with the heat, a hundred tiny needle pricks all over my face and hands. Everything felt painful: the blanket’s uncomfortable weight on me, Sam’s cold hand on my hip, the wailing, high cries of the wolves outside, the memory of Sam’s fingers pressed into his temples, the shape of my skin on my body.

I was asleep; I was dreaming. Or I was awake, coming out of a dream. I couldn’t decide.

In my mind, I saw all the people I’d ever seen shift into wolves: Sam, mournful and agonized, Beck, strong and controlled, Jack, savage and painful, Olivia, swift and easy. They all observed me from the woods, dozens of eyes watching me: the outsider, the one who didn’t change.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my sandpaper mouth. I wanted to lift my face from my damp pillow, but it felt like too much trouble. I waited restlessly for sleep, but my eyes hurt too much to close.

If I hadn’t been cured, I wondered, what would my shift have been like? What sort of wolf would I have been? Looking at my hands, I imagined them dark gray, banded with white and black. I felt the weight of a ruff hanging on my shoulders, felt the nausea kick in my gut.

For a single, brilliant moment, I felt nothing but the cold air of my room on my skin and heard nothing but Sam breathing beside me. But then the wolves began to howl again, and my body shuddered with a sensation that was both new and somehow familiar.

I was going to shift.

I choked on the wolf rising up inside me, pressing against the lining of my stomach, clawing inside my skin, trying to peel me inside out.

I wanted it, and my muscles burned and groaned.

Pain split me

I had no voice

I was on fire.

I sprang from the bed, shaking off my skin.

• SAM •

I jerked awake, stung by Grace’s scream. She was one hundred million degrees, close enough to burn me but too far away for me to reach.

“Grace!” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

The sheets swept off my body as she rolled away from me, crying out again. In the dim light, I could only see her shoulder, and I reached out for it, cupping her arm with my hand. She was drenched with sweat, and her skin trembled beneath my palm, an unstable, unfamiliar flutter.

“Grace, wake up! Are you okay?” My heart was pounding so loud that it felt like I wouldn’t hear her even if she did answer.

She thrashed beneath my touch and then bolted upright, eyes wild, body volatile and quivering. I didn’t know her.

“Grace, talk to me,” I whispered, though whispering seemed pointless in light of her earlier scream.

Grace stared at her hands with a kind of wonder. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead; she was appallingly hot, hotter than I thought anyone could be. I laid my palms on both sides of her neck, and she shuddered as if they were ice.

“I think you’re sick,” I said, my own stomach turning over. “You have a fever.”

She spread her fingers wide and studied her shaking hands. “I dreamed—I dreamed I shifted. I thought I—”

She suddenly let out a terrible wail and curled away from me, clutching her arms around her stomach.

I didn’t know what to do.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. “I’m getting you some Tylenol or something. In the bathroom?”

She just whimpered. It was terrifying.

I leaned forward to see her face, and that’s when I smelled it.

She stank of wolf.

Wolf, wolf, wolf.

From Grace.

The scent of wolf.

It wasn’t possible. It had to be me. I prayed it was me.

I turned my face into my own shoulder, inhaled. Lifted my hand to my nose, the one that had just touched her forehead.

Wolf.

My heart stopped.

And then the door came open and light flooded in from the hall.

“Grace?” Her father’s voice. The bedroom light came on, and his eyes found me sitting next to her. “Sam?”