“Tonight?”
He nodded, very broken and honest, and I couldn’t quite look at him. “Yeah. I got here a little before you did.”
The fierce glow of every light in the house suddenly seemed more significant. I wasn’t sure if I admired him for feeling everything so hard and fiercely, or if I was contemptuous of him for having so much emotion that he had to spill it out every window of the house. I didn’t know how I felt.
“But, um…” Sam said, and in just those two words, I heard him getting himself back together, like a horse assembling its legs beneath itself before standing up. “Anyway. Tell me about Cole. How did you end up with him?”
I looked at him sharply until I realized he meant How did you end up here with him? “Long story, wolf-boy,” I said, and crashed down on the sofa. “I couldn’t sleep, and I heard him outside the house. It was pretty obvious what he was, and pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to change back. I didn’t want my parents to find out and freak, so, the end.”
Sam’s mouth did something unreadable. “That’s awfully nice of you.”
I smiled thinly. “It happens.”
“Does it?” Sam asked. “I think most people would’ve left a naked stranger outside.”
“I didn’t want to step in a pile of his fingers tomorrow on my way to the car,” I said. I felt like Sam was probing me to say something else, like he’d somehow guessed that this was the second time that we’d met and that the first time had involved my tongue introducing itself to Cole’s, and vice versa. I used the topic of Cole’s fingers to redirect the conversation. “Speaking of which, I wonder how he’s getting along in there.” I looked down the hallway toward the bathroom.
Sam hesitated. For some reason, I remembered that the light in the bathroom had been the only light not turned on. Finally, Sam said, “Why don’t you go knock on the door and find out? I’m going to go upstairs to get a room ready for him. I just—I need a minute to think.”
“Okay, whatever,” I said.
He nodded, and just as he turned to go upstairs, I caught a glimpse of some private emotion on his face that made me think he wasn’t as much of an open book as I’d thought. It made me want to stop him and ask him to fill in the blanks of our conversation—how Grace was sick, why the bathroom light wasn’t on, what he was going to do now—but it was way too late, and, anyway, I wasn’t that girl yet.
• COLE •
The worst of the pain was already over, and I was just lying in the water, floating my hands on top of the bathwater and imagining falling asleep in it, when I heard a knock on the bathroom door.
Isabel’s voice followed the knock, the force of which opened the unlatched door an inch. “Have you drowned?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Mind if I come in?” But she didn’t wait for my answer; she just let herself in, sitting on the toilet beside the tub. The fluffy, fur-lined hood of her jacket made her look like she had a hunchback. Her hair was jagged on her cheek. She looked like an ad for something. For toilets. For jackets. For antidepressants. Whatever it was for, I’d buy it. She looked down at me.
“I’m naked,” I said.
“So am I,” Isabel replied. “Under my clothing.”
I cracked a grin. Had to give credit where credit was due.
“Are your feet going to fall off?” she asked.
Because of the size of the bathtub, I had to lift and straighten my leg to look at my toes. They were a little red, but I could wiggle them and feel all of them except for my pinkie toe, which was still mostly numb. “Not today, I don’t think.”
“Are you going to stay in there forever?”
“Probably.” I sank my shoulders farther into the water to show my commitment to the plan. I glanced up at her. “Care to join me?”
She raised a knowing eyebrow. “Looks a little small in there.”
I closed my eyes with another smile. “Zing.” With my eyes shut, I felt warm and floaty and invisible. They should invent a drug that made you feel like this. “I miss my Mustang,” I said, mostly because it was the sort of statement that would make her react.
“Lying naked in a bathtub made you think of your car?”
“It had a rockin’ heater. You could really cook the hell out of yourself in there,” I said. It was a lot easier to talk to her with my eyes closed, too. Not so much of a pissing contest. “I wish I’d had it earlier tonight.”
“Where is it?”
“Home.”
I heard her take her coat off; it shushed on the bathroom counter. The toilet creaked as she sat back down. “Where’s home?”
“New York.”
“City?”
“State.” I thought about the Mustang. Black, shiny, soupedup, sitting in my parents’ garage because I was never home to drive it. It had been the first thing that I’d bought when my first big check came in, and, in the irony of the century, I’d been on tour too much to ever drive it.
“I thought you came from Canada.”
“I was on”—I stopped just short of saying tour. I was liking my anonymity too much—“vacation.” I opened my eyes and saw in her hard expression that she’d heard the lie. I was beginning to realize that she didn’t miss much.
“Some vacation,” she replied. “Must’ve sucked for you to choose this.” She was looking now at the track-mark scars on my arms, but not in the way that I expected her to. Not like judging. More like hungry. Between that and the fact that she was wearing only a camisole beneath her coat, I was having a hard time focusing.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “How about you? How do you know about the wolves?”
Isabel’s eyes betrayed something for just a second, so fast that I couldn’t tell what it was. In between that and her makeupless face, young and soft-looking, I felt bad for asking.
Then I wondered why I bothered to feel bad for this girl I hardly knew.
“I’m friends with Sam’s girlfriend,” Isabel said. I’d done enough lying, or at least telling of partial truths, to know what it sounded like. But since she hadn’t called me out on my own partial truth, I returned the favor.
“Right. Sam,” I echoed. “Tell me more about him.”
“I already told you that he’s like Beck’s son and he’s basically taking over for him. What more do you want to know? It’s not like I’m his girlfriend.” But her voice was admiring; she liked him. I didn’t know what I thought of him yet.
I said the thing that had been bugging me since I’d met him. “It’s cold. He’s human.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, Beck led me to believe that was a pretty hard thing to accomplish, if not impossible.”
Isabel seemed to be contemplating something—I saw a tiny, silent battle waging in her eyes—and finally she shrugged and said, “He’s cured. He gave himself a high fever and it cured him.” This was a clue of some kind. To Isabel. Something in her voice wasn’t quite right when she said it, but I wasn’t sure how it fit into the overall picture.