Sinner

Times three. What. The. Hell.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Is this happening?”

“Isabel,” Jeremy said mildly, “this is a positive space.”

Sofia suppressed a startled and watery giggle. I rolled my eyes. “Will this be long?”

“Is eternity long?” asked Jeremy.

“Oh my —”

He grinned. “I’m totally kidding. It’ll be five or ten minutes.”

I pointed outside. “I’ll be out there. Are you okay with that, Sofia?”

She was. Of course. Imaginary creatures are always happy with other imaginary creatures.

I had only made it a few yards out into the darkness when Cole appeared right in front of me. His eyes were hungry.

“Isabel —”

I just had enough time to feel his fingers seize my hand, pulling me aside, and then we were around the side of the mausoleum and kissing. It was such an instantaneous thing, something I’d wanted so much, that it was impossible for me to decide if he had begun it or if I had. Everything in my brain shut down except for his mouth, his body, his fingers banded tightly around my upper arm, the other hand hitching my skirt.

His hand on my thigh was a question: My hands pulling him closer was the answer.

It wasn’t really dark enough to hide us, Sofia could come out with Jeremy and see us, I was not supposed to be getting in too deep.

It didn’t matter.

I wanted him.

A flashlight swept across our faces. A warning.

“Hey, kids,” said a guy. Standard-issue security guard. “Get a room.”

Cole stopped kissing me, but he didn’t let go.

“Yeah,” he said, flashing a tense smile at the guard, who moved on. Then he whispered in my ear, all tongue and teeth, “Come back with me.”

My pulse crashed in my stomach and my thighs. I knew what he meant, but I said, “I was on my way back.”

“Not that,” Cole said. Then repeated, “Not that. After.

Come back with me.”

He wasn’t talking about making out. He was talking about sex.

I said, “I have to take Sofia back home.”

“I’ll pick you up,” Cole said.

My body hummed an answer for me. I tried to think clearly.

“How would I get home?”

“Home?” Cole echoed, as if he had no idea what the word meant. “Stay. I’ll take you back in the morning. Isabel —”

“Stay!” I whispered, suddenly hot. It wasn’t staying that I was afraid of. It was that I might like staying, and then what happened when one of us got tired of the other? I’d seen those sorts of fights often enough at the House of Misery to know I didn’t want it. Two days ago, he hadn’t been here, and now he wanted me to spend the night with him. Maybe he was a coolass rock star who’d laid a ton of girls, but I was just a possibly ex-Catholic girl who had gotten to third base a few times.

“What do you want from me?”

“I told you,” he said. “Dinner. Dessert. Sex. Life.”

Somehow hearing him say it sort of hurt, because of how much I wanted to believe it versus how much I really did believe it. I told him, “You’re saying that because you think you look good saying it.”

Cole made a dismissive sound. “I am, but I also mean it.”

I removed his hand from my ass so I could think better.

“Slower, Cole.”

He sighed, noisy and melodramatic. Then he dropped his head onto my shoulder, breathing into my collarbone. For once not moving, not needing, not asking, not doing. Just holding me, and letting me hold him up.

It was the most shocking thing.

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

And here was what I was most afraid of: that Cole St. Clair would fall in love with me, and I’d fall in love with him, both of us human weapons, and we’d both end up with broken hearts.

Chapter Fifteen

· cole ·

Isabel didn’t come back with me, which meant I was still in the apartment alone, the giant moon observing me through the glass deck doors. I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t think.

There were an uncountable number of minutes between now and morning.

I looked at the keyboard, and it looked back. Neither of us was interested in the other.

In the kitchen, I investigated the cameras affixed to the edge of the counter, pointed at the floor. I crouched in front of one and said, “Hello. I’m Cole St. Clair. And this is my instrument.”

I straightened and gyrated my h*ps in front of it for a minute or two. The camera wasn’t a satisfying audience.

I climbed onto the counter to see if I could reach the ceiling.

I could. I kicked the toaster onto the floor to see what sort of sound it would make. Not much.

It wasn’t morning yet.

I couldn’t understand Isabel’s resistance to my irresistibility.

I could only stand being this furious with wanting her if I thought that she was somewhere wanting me, too. I longed to call her and ask her if this was the case, but even I could tell that such a phone call would violate every parameter she had set for me.

The bed was too much of a commitment, so I crouched on one of the chairs in the living room and picked at threads on the arm until I fell asleep. I dreamed of being awake in a chair that smelled like old ocean water, and I woke up alone with a crick in my neck and the moon still in my face. My heart and lungs were still eating me from the inside, so I got my things and went up to the roof deck.

This late-early night-morning Los Angeles was cool and violet. The moon was just past full, but it was still close enough to be a wide-open eye. I heard the sounds of people laughing from a bar several streets over.

I prowled the deck, running my fingers under the deck railing and the edges of the furniture and around the potted lemon trees. There were no cameras, and I was above most of Venice; all I could see were other roofs. The deck next door was vacant; I thought the entire house was, actually. A rental. And the deck on the other side of that, barely visible in the dark, was also empty.

It was safe. Probably. It was out in the open, so technically it was not bulletproof. But it was close enough. The margin of risk was not large enough for me to even pretend I cared about it. I would get away with it for five to seven to twelve minutes.

I injected and I swallowed and I waited.

When I was a wolf, the space felt smaller. My senses felt fragmented.

I kept remembering a young man with a jittering pulse and I saw the world out of his eyes, higher, and then I forgot him. I paced the edge of this space, trapped high above the hissing ground below. The leaves of the lemon trees murmured to me. The smell of nearby food was hot and sweaty. Overhead, a star smeared noisily from one side of the sky to the other.