Linger

“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.”

“I mean, I can’t do this anymore.” He buttoned his jeans and kept looking at me.

I wished he wouldn’t. I turned my face away so that I didn’t have to see the expression on his face. It felt condescending, whether or not he meant it that way. There wasn’t anything he could say that wouldn’t feel condescending.

“Isabel,” he continued, “don’t sulk. I want to. I really want to.”

I didn’t say anything. I stared at a feather from one of my pillows that had escaped onto my pale lavender bedspread.

“God, Isabel, don’t make this harder, okay? I’m trying to remember how to be a decent person, okay? I’m trying to remember who I was before I couldn’t stand myself.”

“What, you didn’t screw girls back then?” I snarled. A fat tear ran out of one of my eyes.

I heard him move; when I glanced up, he had turned to look out the dormer window, his arms crossed over his chest. “I thought you said you were saving yourself.”

“What does that matter?”

“You don’t want to sleep with me. You don’t want to lose your virginity to some screwed-up singer. It’ll make you hate yourself for the rest of your life. Sex does that. It’s pretty awesome that way.” His voice was bitter now. “You just don’t want to feel anything, and it’ll work great for about an hour. But then it’ll be worse. Trust me.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” I said. Another tear ran down my face. I hadn’t cried since the week that Jack died. I just wanted Cole to go. Of all the people I might have wanted to see me finally cry, Cole St. Clair, king of the world, was not one of them.