Linger

“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 na**d 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.

“I thought Beck wanted us—the new ones—to take care of the pack because there aren’t many left who turn human for long enough,” I said. Truthfully, I was relieved. I didn’t want responsibility; I wanted to slide into the darkness of a wolf’s skin for as much time as possible. “Why didn’t he just cure everybody?

“He didn’t know Sam was cured. If he’d known, he would’ve never made more wolves. And the cure doesn’t work for everybody.” Now Isabel’s voice was out-and-out hard, and I felt like I was somehow no longer a part of the conversation I’d started.

“Good thing I don’t want to be cured, then,” I said lightly.

She looked at me, and her voice was contemptuous. “Good thing.”

Suddenly I felt sort of done. Like in the end, she was going to see the truth about me no matter what I said, because that was what she did. She was going to see that when you took away NARKOTIKA, I was just Cole St. Clair, and inside me was absolutely nothing.

I felt the familiar hollow hunger inside, like my soul was rotting.

I wanted a fix. I needed to find a needle to slide under my skin or a pill to dissolve under my tongue.

No. What I needed was to be a wolf again.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Isabel asked, suddenly, and I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized I’d shut them. Her gaze was intense.

“Of what?”

“Of losing yourself?”

I told her the truth: “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

• ISABEL •

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I didn’t expect him to be honest with me. I wasn’t sure where we could go from here, because I wasn’t prepared to return the favor.

He lifted a dripping hand from the water, his fingertips a little wrinkled.

“You want to see if my fingers are done?” he asked.

Something in my stomach turned over as I took his wet hand and ran my fingers from his palm to his fingertips. His eyes were half-closed, and when I was through, he took his hand back and sat up, making the water slosh and crest around him. He leaned his hands on the edge of the bathtub, putting his face at my eye level. I knew we were going to kiss again and I knew that we shouldn’t, because he was already at rock bottom and I was getting there, too, but I couldn’t help myself. I was starving for him.

His mouth tasted like wolf and salt, and when he put his hand at the base of my neck to pull me closer, lukewarm water trailed down my collarbone into my shirt and between my br**sts.

“Ow,” he said into my mouth, and I pulled back. But he didn’t appear particularly concerned as he looked down at his shoulder, where my nails had broken the skin. I was still aching from kissing him, and this time, at least, he seemed to feel it, too, because when he dragged his still slightly damp hand flat down my neck to my breastbone, stopping just short of broaching the line of my camisole, I felt the wanting in the pressure of his fingertips.