Linger

“Some of us are trying to sleep!” I shouted out into the darkness, which swallowed the lie.

The night went quiet. The darkness was frozen into silence; no birdcalls or rustling of leaves in this still, still night. Just the distant hiss of tires on a far-off road.

“Roooooooooooo!” I called out the window, feeling clownish as I prompted my pack.

A pause. Long enough that I realized how badly I wanted for them to need me.

Then they began to howl again, just as loud as before, their voices spilling over one another with new purpose.

I grinned.

A familiar voice behind me made me jerk; I caught myself just before I put a hand through the screen.

“I thought you were supposed to have animal cunning and the ability to hear a pin drop a mile away.”

Grace. Grace’s voice.

When I turned, she was standing in the doorway, a backpack slung on her shoulder. Her smile was…shy.

“And here I am, sneaking up on you while you—what were you doing, anyway?”

I pushed down the window and turned back around, blinking. Grace was standing here in the doorway to Beck’s bedroom. Grace, who was supposed to be home in her own bed. Grace, who haunted my thoughts when I couldn’t dream. I felt like I couldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t I known all along that she’d appear here? Hadn’t I just been waiting to find her in my doorway?

I finally regained control of my muscles and crossed the room to her. I was close enough to kiss her, but instead I reached for the dangling, loose strap of her backpack and ran my thumb along its ridged surface. The backpack’s presence answered one of my unasked questions. Another question was answered by the still-lingering wolf scent on her breath. And the host of other questions I wanted to ask—Do you know what will happen when they find out? Do you know this will change everything? Are you all right with how they will see you? How they will see me?—had already been answered “yes” by Grace, or she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have set a foot outside her bedroom door without thinking through everything.

Which meant I only had one question to ask: “Are you sure?”

Grace nodded.

And just like that, everything changed.

I tugged the backpack strap gently and sighed. “Oh, Grace.”

“Are you mad?”

I took her hands and rocked them back and forth, dancing without lifting a foot. My head was a jumble of Rilke—“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start”—her father’s voice—I’m trying really hard to not say something I’ll regret later—and longing personified, a physical being here, finally, in my wanting hands.

“I’m scared,” I said.

But I felt a smile on my face. And when she saw my smile, an anxious cloud that I hadn’t even noticed on her face sailed away, leaving only clear skies and finally, the sun.

“Hi,” I said, and I hugged her. I missed her more now that I actually had her in my arms than when I hadn’t.

• GRACE •

I felt hazy and slow, moving in a dream.

This was someone else’s life, where the girl ran away to her boyfriend’s house. This wasn’t reliable Grace, who never turned in homework late or stayed out partying or colored outside the lines. And yet, here I was, in this rebellious girl’s body, carefully laying my toothbrush beside Sam’s brand-new red one like I belonged here. Like I was going to be here a while. My eyes ached from fatigue, but my brain kept whirring, wide awake.

The pain was quieter now, calmed. I knew it was just hiding, pushed away by the knowledge that Sam was near, but I was glad of the respite.

On the bathroom floor, I saw a little half-moon of a toenail lying on the tile next to the base of the toilet. Its utter normalcy sort of drove home, with utter finality, that I was standing in Sam’s bathroom in Sam’s house and I was planning on spending the night in Sam’s bedroom with Sam.

My parents would kill me. What would they do first, in the morning? Call my cell phone? Hear it ringing wherever they’d hidden it? They could call the police, if they wanted to. Like my dad said, I was still under eighteen. I closed my eyes, imagining Officer Koenig knocking on the door, my parents standing behind him, waiting to drag me back home. My stomach turned over.

Sam softly knocked on the open bathroom door. “You okay?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him standing in the doorway. He had changed into some sweats, and a T-shirt with an octopus printed on it. Maybe this was a good idea after all.

“I’m okay.”

“You look cute in your pajamas,” he told me, his voice hesitant as if he were admitting something he hadn’t meant to.

I reached out and put a hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall through the thin fabric. “You do, too.”

Sam made a little rueful shape with his mouth and then peeled my hand from his chest. Using it to steer me, he switched off the bathroom light and led me down the hall, his bare feet padding on the floorboards.

His bedroom was illuminated only by the hall light and the ambient glow from the porch light through the window; I could just barely see the white shape of the blanket tidily turned down on the bed. Releasing my hand, Sam said, “I’ll turn off the hall light once you’re in, so you don’t smack into anything.”

He ducked his face away from me then, looking shy, and I sort of knew how he felt. It was like we were just meeting each other again for the first time, like we’d never kissed or spent the night together. Everything felt brand-new and shiny and terrifying.

I crept into the bed, the sheets cool under my hands as I edged toward the side of the mattress that met the wall. The hall went dark and I heard Sam sigh—a weighty, shaky sigh—before I heard the floorboards creak with his steps. The room was just light enough for me to see the edge of his shoulders as he climbed into the bed with me.

For a moment, we lay there, not touching, two strangers, and then Sam rolled toward me so that his head was on the same pillow as mine.

When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of all our kisses. I could feel the beat of his heart through his T-shirt, a rapid thud that sped even more when I twined our legs together.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he said softly. His face was right next to my neck, his words spoken right into my skin.

“I don’t, either,” I said. Nerves and the thing inside me twisted my stomach.