The afternoon light was dying quickly. A long, dark cloud slashed through the sky in the west. Not a rain cloud for us. Just bad weather on its way somewhere else.
I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to know. It seemed to me that knowing would be more work than not knowing. But it wasn’t like we could really put the genie back in the lamp now that it was out, could we? “Does it matter?”
Cole said, “I want you to know.”
Now I looked at him, at his dangerously handsome face that even now called, in unsafe and dulcet tones, Isabel, kiss me, lose yourself in me. It was a sad face, once you knew to look for it. “Do you really?”
“I have to know if anybody other than ten-year-olds know who I am,” Cole said. “Or I really will have to kill myself.”
I gave him a withering look.
“Should I guess?” I asked. Without waiting for him to answer, I remembered his deft fingers and thought of his pretty face and said, “Keyboardist for a boy band.”
“Lead singer of NARKOTIKA,” Cole said.
I waited a long beat, waited for him to say kidding.
But he didn’t.
• COLE •
Her face didn’t change. Maybe my target audience really was preteens. It was all very anticlimactic.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Just because I didn’t recognize your face doesn’t mean I haven’t heard your music. Everyone and Jesus has heard your music.”
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say, really? The entire conversation felt very déjà vu or something; like I’d known all along I was going to have it with her, here in her car, the afternoon growing cold under the clouds.
“What?” Isabel asked, leaning over to look me straight in the face. “What? You think I give a crap about you being a rock star?”
“It’s not about the music,” I said.
Isabel pressed her finger into the crook of my elbow, on my track marks. “Let me guess. Drugs, girls, lots of swearing. What is there about you that you haven’t already told me? This morning you were lying naked on the floor and telling me you wanted to kill yourself. So, what, you think that me knowing you’re lead singer of omigod NARKOTIKA is going to change anything?”
“Yeah. No.” I didn’t know what I was. Relieved? Disappointed? Did I want it to change things?
“What do you want me to say?” Isabel asked me. “‘You’re going to corrupt me, get out of my car’? Too late. I’m already way beyond your influence.”
At that, I laughed, though I felt bad for doing it because I knew she’d take it as an insult, though really it wasn’t. “Oh, believe me, you are not. There are tiny, dirty rabbit holes that you have not been down that I have. I have taken people down into those tunnels with me, and they’ve never come out.”
I was right. She was offended. She thought I found her naive.
“I’m not trying to piss you off. I’m just giving you fair warning. I’m far more famous for that than my music.” Her face had gone utterly frosty, so I thought I was getting through to her. “I am, quite possibly, utterly incapable of making a decision that is not self-serving in absolutely every way.”
Now Isabel started to laugh, a high, cruel laugh that was so sure of itself that it kind of turned me on. She put the car in reverse. “I keep waiting for you to tell me something that I don’t already know.”
• ISABEL •
I took Cole home, knowing full well it was a bad idea—and maybe doing it because it was a bad idea. By the time we got there, it was a dazzling evening, almost tacky in its beauty, the entire sky painted a color pink that I’d only ever seen here in northern Minnesota.
We were back where we’d first met, only now we knew each other’s names. There was a car parked in the driveway: my dad’s smoke blue BMW.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I pulled up on the other side of the circular driveway and put the SUV in park. “That’s my dad. It’s a weekend, so he’ll be in the basement with some hard liquor to keep him company. He won’t even know we’re home.”
Cole didn’t comment, just slid out of the car, into the chilly, cloud-covered air. He rubbed his arms and looked at me, his eyes blank and dark in the shadows. “Hurry,” he said.
I felt the bite of the wind and knew what he meant. I didn’t want him to be a wolf right now, so I grabbed his arm and turned him toward the side door, the one that opened right at the base of the second staircase. “There.”
He was shuddering by the time I shut the door behind him, trapping us both in a stairwell the size of a closet. He had to crouch, one hand braced against the wall, for about ten seconds while I stood over him with my hand on the doorknob, waiting to see if I’d have to open the door for him as a wolf.
Finally, he stood up, smelling wolfish but still wearing his own face. “That’s the first time I’ve ever tried not to be a wolf,” he told me. Then he turned and went up the stairs without waiting for me to tell him where to go.
I followed him up the narrow stairway, everything about him invisible except for the flash of his hands on the loose rail. I had this feeling that he and I, in this moment, were a car crash, and instead of putting on the brakes, I was hitting the accelerator.
At the top of the stairs, Cole hesitated, but I didn’t. I took his hand and went past him, pulling him after me to another set of stairs, leading him all the way up to my room in the attic. Cole ducked to keep from hitting his head on the steeply slanted walls, and I turned and grabbed the back of his neck before he had time to straighten.
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.”