Linger

My heart was thumping with the confession, but it felt good, too—one less secret I was keeping from Rachel. By the time her mom arrived a few minutes later, we were both fairly giddy. Maybe it was time to tell her some of the other secrets, too.

• SAM •

It was eighteen degrees outside. In the bright light of the moon, a flat, pale disc behind a tangle of leafless branches, I folded my bare arms tightly across my chest and stared at my socks, waiting for Grace’s mother to vacate the kitchen. I softly cursed icy Minnesota springtimes, but the words swirled away in puffs of white in the darkness. It was strange to be standing in this cold, shaking with it, unable to feel my fingers or toes, my eyes burning with it, and to be no closer to being a wolf than I had been before.

Through the cracked sliding-glass door on the deck, Grace’s voice was just audible; she was talking with her mother about me. Her mother wondered gently if I would be coming over tomorrow night as well. Grace mused vaguely back that I probably would be, as that’s what boyfriends did. Her mother commented to no one in particular that some people might think that we were moving too fast. Grace asked her mother if she wanted any more chicken parmesan before she put it away in the fridge. I could hear the impatience in her voice, but her mother seemed oblivious, effectively holding me prisoner outside by her presence in the kitchen. Standing on the frigid wood of the deck in my jeans and thin Beatles T-shirt, I contemplated the possible wisdom of marrying Grace and living a young hippie life in the backseat of my Volkswagen, without parental constraints. It had never seemed like such a good idea as now, my teeth starting to chatter and my toes and ears going numb.

I heard Grace say, “Will you show me what you were working on upstairs?”

Her mom sounded vaguely suspicious as she said, “Okay.”

“Let me just get my sweater,” Grace said. She came over to the glass door of the deck, silently unlocking it as she got her sweater off the back of the kitchen table with her other hand. I saw her mouth Sorry to me. A little louder, she said, “It’s cold in here.”

I counted to twenty after they’d left the kitchen, and let myself in. I was shuddering uncontrollably with the cold, but I was still Sam.

I had all the evidence I needed that my cure was real, but I was still waiting for the punch line.

• GRACE •

Sam was still shaking so badly by the time I met him in my room that I completely forgot about my lingering headache. I shoved my bedroom door shut without turning on the light and followed the sound of his voice to the bed.

“M-m-maybe we need to rethink our lifestyle choices,” he whispered to me, teeth chattering, as I climbed into bed and wrapped my arms around him. My fingers brushed against the goose bumps that covered his arms; I could feel them even through the fabric of his shirt.

I tugged the blanket up to cover both of our heads and pressed my face against the frigid skin of his neck. It felt selfish to say it out loud. “I don’t want to sleep without you.”

He curled into a tiny ball—his feet, even through his socks, were freezing against my bare legs—and mumbled, “Me neither. B-but we have our whole—” His words piled up on top of one another; he had to stop and rub his hand over his lips to warm them before he went on. “Our whole lives ahead of us. To be together.”

“Our whole lives, starting now,” I said. Outside my bedroom door, I heard my dad’s voice—he must’ve gotten home just as I came into the room—and listened to my parents’ voices as they climbed up the stairs to their room, noisy and jostling against each other. For a brief moment, I envied their freedom to come and go as they pleased, no school, no parents, no rules. “I mean, you don’t have to stay here, if it makes you uncomfortable. If you don’t want to.” I paused. “I didn’t mean for that to sound so clingy.”

Sam rolled over to face me. I couldn’t see anything but the glint of his eyes in the darkness. “I’ll never get tired of this. I just didn’t want to get you in trouble. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to ask me to go. If it gets too difficult.”

I touched his cold cheek with my hand; it felt good against my skin. “You can be pretty stupid sometimes for such a smart guy.” I felt his smile curve against my palm as he pushed his body closer to mine.

“Either you’re really hot,” Sam said, “or I’m really cold.”

“Duh, I’m hot,” I whispered. “Soooo hot.”

Sam laughed soundlessly—a little, shaky, exhaling sound.

I reached down to clutch his fingers in mine; we held them like that, smashed between our bodies in a knot, until his fingers stopped feeling so frigid.

“Tell me about the new wolf,” I said.

Sam went still beside me. “There’s something wrong with him. He wasn’t afraid of me.”

“That’s weird.”

“It made me wonder what kind of person would choose to be a wolf. They must all be crazy, Grace, every one of Beck’s new wolves. Who would choose that?”

Now it was my turn to go still. I wondered if Sam remembered lying beside me last year, just like this, and me confessing that I wished I changed, too, to go with him. No, not just to go with him. To feel what it was like, to be one of the wolves, so simple and magical and elemental. I thought about Olivia again, now a white wolf, darting between trees with the rest of the pack, and something inside me felt a little raw. “Maybe they just love wolves,” I said finally. “And their lives weren’t so great.”

Sam’s body was right beside me, but his hand in mine was slack and I saw that his eyes were closed. His thoughts were far, far away from me, untouchable. Finally, he said, “I don’t trust him, Grace. I just feel like no good will come from these new wolves. I just…I wish Beck hadn’t done it. I wish he’d known to wait.”

“Go to sleep,” I told him, though I knew he wouldn’t. “Don’t worry about what might happen.”

But I knew he wouldn’t do that, either.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

• GRACE •

“Back again, Grace?”

The nurse looked up as I walked into her office. The three chairs that sat opposite her desk were full—one student’s head lolled back in a sleep posture too embarrassing to not be real, and the other two kids were reading. Mrs. Sanders was pretty famous for letting kids who were overwhelmed with life hang out in her office, which was fine until someone who had a pounding headache and just wanted to sit down walked in and found all the waiting chairs full.