Linger

He smelled incredibly of wolf, which my head read as a weird combination of Sam and Jack and Grace, and Beck’s house, but I didn’t care, because his mouth was a drug. Kissing him, all I could think about was needing to feel his lower lip between my lips and his hands gripping my body to him. Everything in me was tingling, alive. I couldn’t think about anything except the hungry way he kissed me back.

Far away downstairs, something thumped and smashed. Dad at work. It was a different planet, though, than this one with me and Cole. If Cole’s mouth transported me so far from my life, how much further would the rest of him take me? I reached for Cole’s jeans, my fingers fumbling over the waistband, and unbuttoned the button. Cole closed his eyes and sucked in a breath.

I broke away and backed onto my bed. My heart was pounding a million miles an hour, watching him, imagining his weight pressing me down into the mattress.

He didn’t follow me.

“Isabel,” he said. His hands hovered by his sides.

“What?” I said. I was, again, out of breath, and he didn’t even look like he was breathing. I thought about how I’d jogged that morning, hadn’t been anywhere yet to reapply makeup, fix my hair. Was that it? I pushed myself up onto my elbows; my body was shaking. Something was rippling up inside of me that I couldn’t identify. “What, Cole? Spit it out.”

Cole just kept looking at me, standing there with his jeans unbuttoned and his hands half fisted by his sides. “I can’t do this.”

My voice came out derisive as I swept my eyes down him. “Doesn’t look that way.”

“I mean, I can’t do this anymore.” He buttoned his jeans and kept looking at me.

I wished he wouldn’t. I turned my face away so that I didn’t have to see the expression on his face. It felt condescending, whether or not he meant it that way. There wasn’t anything he could say that wouldn’t feel condescending.

“Isabel,” he continued, “don’t sulk. I want to. I really want to.”

I didn’t say anything. I stared at a feather from one of my pillows that had escaped onto my pale lavender bedspread.

“God, Isabel, don’t make this harder, okay? I’m trying to remember how to be a decent person, okay? I’m trying to remember who I was before I couldn’t stand myself.”

“What, you didn’t screw girls back then?” I snarled. A fat tear ran out of one of my eyes.

I heard him move; when I glanced up, he had turned to look out the dormer window, his arms crossed over his chest. “I thought you said you were saving yourself.”

“What does that matter?”

“You don’t want to sleep with me. You don’t want to lose your virginity to some screwed-up singer. It’ll make you hate yourself for the rest of your life. Sex does that. It’s pretty awesome that way.” His voice was bitter now. “You just don’t want to feel anything, and it’ll work great for about an hour. But then it’ll be worse. Trust me.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” I said. Another tear ran down my face. I hadn’t cried since the week that Jack died. I just wanted Cole to go. Of all the people I might have wanted to see me finally cry, Cole St. Clair, king of the world, was not one of them.

Cole braced his arms on either side of the window; the last of the light coming through the clouds just barely illuminated his face. Not looking at me, he said, “I cheated on my first girlfriend. A lot. While I was on tour. When I got back, we fought about something else, so I told her I’d cheated on her with so many girls I couldn’t remember their names. I told her that I’d seen enough now to know she wasn’t anything special. We broke up. I guess I broke up with her. She was my best friend’s sister, so I basically forced them to choose between me and each other.” He laughed, a terrible, unfunny laugh. “And now Victor is out there in the woods somewhere, stuck as a wolf. Stuck as a guy becoming a wolf. I’m a great friend, aren’t I?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care about his ethical crisis.

“She was a virgin, too, Isabel,” Cole said, finally looking at me again. “She hates me. She hates herself. I don’t want to do that to you.”

I stared at him. “I didn’t ask for your help, did I? Did I invite you here for therapy? I don’t need you to save me from myself. Or from you. How weak do you think I am?” For a brief moment, I didn’t think I was going to say it. Then I did. “I should’ve just left you to kill yourself.”

And again that face, always that face. Where he should have been looking at me like I’d hurt him, and there was…nothing.

Tears were burning down my cheeks, pricking when they met under my chin. I didn’t even know what I was crying for.

“You’re not that girl,” Cole said, sounding tired. “Trust me, I’ve seen enough of them to know. Look. Don’t cry. You’re not that girl, either.”

“Oh, yeah? What girl am I?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out. Just don’t cry.”

The fact that he was pointing out my crying made it suddenly intolerable for him to see me doing it. I closed my eyes. “Just get out. Get out of my room.”

When I opened them again, he was gone.

• COLE •

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I’d felt as I came in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn’t before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again.

I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house’s depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone.

What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up—successful mad scientists generally are—but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked…lived in.

I made a wrong turn on the way to the kitchen and found myself in the Museum of Natural Minnesota History instead: a massive, high-ceilinged room populated by an army of stuffed animals. There were so many that I would’ve doubted their realness, if not for the musty barnyard smell that filled the room. Weren’t there animal extinction laws in Minnesota? Some of these animals looked pretty damned endangered; I’d never seen them in upstate New York, anyway. I peered at some sort of exotically patterned wildcat, which peered back at me. I remembered a snatch of earlier conversation with Isabel, back when I’d first met her—something about how her father had a penchant for shooting.

Sure enough, there was a wolf perpetually slinking by one of the walls, glass eyes glittering in the dim room. Sam must’ve been rubbing off on me, because suddenly, it seemed like a particularly horrible way to die, far away from your real body. Like an astronaut dying in space.

I glanced around at the animals—the line between them and me felt very thin—and pushed out a door on the other side of the room, one that I hoped would lead me back toward the kitchen.

I was wrong again. This was a plush round room, elegantly lit by the dying sunset coming through windows that made up half of the curving walls. At its center was a beautiful baby grand piano—and nothing else. Just the piano and the curving, burgundy walls. It was a room just for music.

I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sung.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d missed it.

I touched the edge of the piano; the smooth finish was cold beneath my fingertips. Somehow, right now, with the chill evening pressing in against the windows, waiting to change my skin, I was more human than I had been in a long time.

• ISABEL •

I sulked for a while and then pushed myself off the bed and got cleaned up in my tiny bathroom. After I’d fixed my face, I got up and went to the window that Cole had been looking out from, wondering how many miles away he was by now. To my surprise, I could see a flashlight cutting an erratic path through the deep blue evening, heading down through the woods, toward the mosaic clearing. Was it Cole? He couldn’t stay human in this weather, not when he’d been shuddering and close to the change before. My father?

I frowned at the enigmatic light, wondering if it meant trouble.

And then I heard the piano. I knew right off that it wasn’t my father, who didn’t even listen to music, and it had been months since my mother had played. Plus, it was not my mother’s delicate, precise playing. It was an unsettling, creeping melody that repeated again and again on the upper keys, the spare tinkering of someone who expected other instruments to fill in the rest.

It was at such odds with how I imagined Cole that I had to see him playing. I silently made my way downstairs to the music room and hesitated outside the door, leaning in just enough to see without being seen.

And there he was. Not properly sitting on the bench, but leaning across it on one knee like he hadn’t meant to stay that long. The musician’s fingers that I’d spotted earlier weren’t visible to me from this angle, but I didn’t need to see them. All I had to see was his face. Unaware of an audience, lost in the repeated rhythm of the piano riff, lit by the evening, it was like all of Cole’s armor had fallen off. This was not the aggressively handsome, cocky guy that I had met a few days ago. This was just a boy getting to know a tune. He looked young and uncertain and endearing, and I felt betrayed that he was somehow getting himself together when I couldn’t.

Somehow, he was yet again being honest, sharing another secret, when I didn’t have anything I was willing to give in return. For once, I saw something in his eyes. I saw that he was feeling again, and that whatever he was feeling was hurting him.

I wasn’t ready to hurt.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

• SAM •

The way home from Duluth was a collage of red taillights, highway signs suddenly looming out of the darkness only to disappear as quickly as they’d appeared, my voice coming out of the speakers and out of my mouth, Grace’s face illuminated in little flashes and flickers by oncoming headlights.

Grace’s eyes were half lidded with sleepiness, but I felt like I would never sleep again. I felt like this was the only day left in the world and I needed to be awake for it. I’d already told her about Cole, who he was, but I felt like there was more to say. I was probably annoying Grace, but she was being nice enough to not say anything about it. I said, again, “I thought he looked familiar. I just don’t understand why Beck would do it.”

Grace pulled her hands inside her sleeves and sealed the ends with her fingers. Her skin looked bluish by the light of the radio’s display. “Maybe Beck didn’t know who he was. I mean, I only kind of knew who NARKOTIKA was. I only know their one song. The one about breaking faces, or whatever.”

“But he had to have an idea. Beck found him in Canada. While Cole was on tour. On tour. How long until someone in Mercy Falls sees him and recognizes him? What if they come take him home and he turns into a wolf? Once he’s human for the summer, will he just hide in the house and hope no one recognizes him?”