Linger

I crashed down on one foot and rolled up against the brick wall of the stairwell, laughing my ass off. Nobody asked if I was okay. Jeremy was yawning, Victor was giving me the finger, and the photographer and the assistant were exclaiming over their viewfinder.

“Have some inspiration,” I told them, and stood up. “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t even feeling any pain.

After that, they let me do what I wanted for the shoot. Humming and singing my new song, I led them up and down the stairs, pressing my fingers against the wall like I was about to push it over; down to the lobby, where I stood in a potted plant; and finally into the alley behind the studio, where I jumped on top of the car that had brought us from the hotel, leaving dents in the roof so the car would remember me.

When the photographer called it a day, his assistant came over to me and asked for my hand. I offered my palm, and she pulled it around so that it faced the sky. Then she wrote her name and number on it while Victor watched from just behind her.

Victor grabbed my shoulder as soon as she’d gone back inside. “What about Angie?” he demanded, with a half smile on his face like he knew I was going to give him an answer he liked.

“What about her?” I asked.

The smile disappeared, and he gripped the hand with the number on it. “I don’t think she’d be really happy about this.”

“Vic. Dude. None of your business.”

“She’s my sister. It’s my business.”

The conversation was definitely ruining my good mood. “Well, then, here it is: Angie and I are over. We’ve been over so long, they’re teaching it in history classes. And it’s still none of your business.”

“You bastard,” Victor said. “You’re going to leave her like that? You ruin her life and just walk away?”

It was really ruining my good mood. It was starting to feel like time for a needle or a beer or a razor. “Hey, I asked her. She said she’d rather go it alone.”

“And you believed her? You know, you think you’re so good. You and your goddamn genius. You think you’re going to live forever like this? No one’s going to remember your face when you’re twenty. No one’s going to remember you.”

He was deflating, though. He was almost done. If I said sorry or even just stayed quiet, he’d probably turn away and go back to the hotel.

I waited a beat, and then I said, “At least the girls call me by my name, dude.” I watched his face, a smirk on mine. “At least I’m not always ‘NARKOTIKA’s drummer.’”

Victor punched me. It was a good punch, but not everything he had. In any case, I was still standing, though I thought he’d probably split my lip. I could still feel my face and I could still remember what we were talking about. I looked at him.

Jeremy appeared by Victor’s elbow, probably clued in by the sound of Victor’s fist smacking my face that this wasn’t one of our usual arguments.

“Don’t just stand there!” Victor shouted, and he hit me again, right in the jaw, and this time I had to stagger to stay up. “Hit me, you piece of crap. Hit me.”

“Boys,” Jeremy said, but didn’t move.

Victor slammed his shoulder into my chest, one hundred and eighty pounds of repressed anger, and this time I crashed to the ground, a piece of asphalt grinding into my back. “You’re such a waste of space. Life is one big ego trip for you, you privileged son of a bitch.” He was kicking me now, and Jeremy was watching, arms crossed.

“That’s enough,” Jeremy said.

“I—want—to—smash—that—smile—off—your—face,” Victor said between kicks. He was out of breath now, and finally, one of his kicks threw him off balance and he fell heavily to the ground next to me.

I stared up at the rectangle of gray-white sky above us, framed in by the dark buildings, and felt blood trickle from my nose. I thought about Angie back at home and the way she’d looked when she told me she’d rather go it alone, and I wished she could’ve watched Victor kick the crap out of me.

Above me, Jeremy held out his camera phone and took a picture of the two of us lying on the asphalt in some city I couldn’t even remember the name of.

Three weeks later, that photo of me flying off the stairs, Jeremy and Victor watching me, hit magazine stands and made the front page of the mag. My face was everywhere. No one was forgetting me anytime soon. I was everywhere.

Later in the afternoon, lying on the floor of Beck’s house, the shift became urgent inside me, so insistent that I realized that my nausea earlier had only been pretend, nothing like the real thing, which bit and tore and ripped at my guts. I made my way again to the back door and opened it, standing and looking out at the grass. It was surprisingly warm outside, the overcast sky gone, but an occasional stiff breeze reminded me it was still March. This time, when a cold gust of wind blew, it cut right through my human body to the wolf inside. Goose bumps raced across my skin. I stepped onto the concrete stoop and hesitated, wondering if I should go to the shed and leave my clothing there to make it easier to retrieve later. But the next gust sent me double with shudders. I wasn’t going to make it to the shed.

My stomach groaned and pinched; I crouched and waited.

But the shift didn’t come right away, like it had before. Having been human for almost a day now, my body was more sure of its form, and it didn’t seem like it wanted to give it up easily.

C’mon, shift, I thought, as the wind pulled another rack of shuddering from me. My stomach churned. I tried to remember that it was just a reaction to the shifting process; I didn’t really need to throw up. If I just resisted the impulse, I’d be fine.

I braced my fingers against the cold concrete, willing the wind to push me into a wolf. Out of the blue, I remembered Angie’s number, and I felt an irrational desire to go back inside and dial it, just to hear her say hello before I hung up. I wondered what Victor was thinking right now, after all this.

My chest ached.

Get me out of this body. Get me out of Cole, I thought.

But that was just one more thing out of my control.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

• GRACE •

That night, there was nothing different about my bed without Sam there. There was nothing unfamiliar about the shape of the mattress. The sheets were no larger without him. I was no less tired without the steady sound of his breathing, and in the dark, I could not see the absence of his square shoulder beside me. The pillow still smelled like him, like he’d gotten up to get his book and had forgotten to come back.