Sinner

She drove too fast, and she braked too late, but the thing about Isabel Culpeper was that she always managed to pull herself up before she went over the edge.

“Whose party was that?” I asked.

Isabel’s mouth went thin. She didn’t look away from the road. “My boss.”

She floored the Mustang away from a light. We were going to die. I was ceaselessly turned on.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

The engine snarled away in the silence. I didn’t think I’d ever been in a car without the radio turned on before. It felt like the end of the world.

“Why can’t I do it?” she asked, suddenly angry. We screamed around a turn. It was possible this night would end with the car getting impounded, but it seemed like a bad idea to tell her.

“Do what?”

“Just forget about everything. Just go somewhere and get smashed and pretend like there are no problems or consequences. I know why. Because there are still problems and consequences.

And going and — and — partying doesn’t make them go away.

I feel like I’m the only sane person in the world. I don’t get why this whole world runs on stupidity.”

Her voice was getting flatter instead of louder. “You do it.

I saw you drunk. And I know you became a wolf again. I can smell it. I’m not an idiot.”

I didn’t answer for a long time. I knew it maddened her more, but I didn’t know what to say. It was too raw that she hadn’t trusted me, and too raw that, in the end, I hadn’t been trustworthy after all.

I had been sober, but I had also been a wolf, and that was worse.

Isabel didn’t look away from the road. She tore around another turn. “Be afraid. Why aren’t you ever afraid?”

“What do you want me to be afraid of?”

The tires scuffed as we scudded to a noisy, bouncing stop at an unoccupied red light.

“Dying. Failure. Anything.”

I’m afraid you won’t pick up the phone.

I said, “Where are we going, Isabel?”

I sort of meant right then, but I also sort of meant more.

She repeated, “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go home?”

She didn’t answer. That was a no. That was good. I didn’t want to take her home.

“Do you want to go to my place?”

“I don’t want to be on camera.”

That, at least, I knew how to take care of.

Chapter Forty-Four

· isabel ·

Cole didn’t quite take me home. He directed me to park the Mustang behind his place, but when we got out, he led the way away from the gate and toward the house next door.

“It’s empty,” he told me. “It’s a rental. I checked it out the other day.”

Inside, it was dark in a way that Sierra’s house hadn’t been.

It was dark in a way that was dusky and imperfect, comforting in its realness. The furniture was shabby chic, sparse and pleasant and inexpensive in the way of rental furniture.

Cole gave me a tour, throwing open doors, barely looking inside each. “Bedroom. Kitchen. Mudroom. Half bath. Stair to roof deck. Bedroom. Hallway to side yard.”

Then he led me through a tiny sitting area to a sliding door hidden by a bamboo shade. He threw his shoulder against it until it gave way. On the other side, impossibly, was a miniature garden world. I couldn’t understand it until I stepped through the door. A white sofa sat in the middle of it; just ten feet away was another sliding door to the rest of the house. In between, in this small room, the walls climbed and sprouted and unfolded tropical leaves of all shapes and sizes. Oranges studded one tree, lemons another. Ferns crowded densely at the bases of small palms. Mysterious flowers like exotic birds revealed themselves only slowly, only on a second look. The air smelled like growing things and beautiful things, things people put in bottles and rubbed behind their ears.

Cole put his hand around my hair and used it to pull my head back until I was gazing straight up. I saw what he was directing my attention to: the ceiling, far overhead, peaked and made of glass. This was a greenhouse. No, what was the proper word? A conservatory.

The walls of plants and the night eliminated any road or party noise. We were in the middle of nowhere. Back in Minnesota again. No, farther than that, stranger than that.

Someplace no one else had ever been.

Cole walked to the couch and threw himself onto it as if he had seen the entire world and was bored with it. After a moment, he sighed deeply enough that I saw it instead of heard it, the great lift of his chest and then the release.

I set my purse beside the couch and sat on the other end of the sofa. Throwing my legs across his, I leaned back on the sofa arm and released a sigh of my own. Cole rested his arms on top of my legs and blinked at the wall opposite. There was something threadbare about his expression.

We sat like that for several gray-green minutes, the fronds of palms and ferns barely moving. Beside me, a lustrous trumpet flower hung like a waiting silent bell. We didn’t say anything.

Cole kept looking at the wall, and I kept looking at him and at the orange tree on the other side of him.

Cole moved his hand, brushing his fingers over the knob of my anklebone.

I breathed in.

His fingers lingered, playing over my skin, nearly tickling.

With them, he described the shape of my ankle, the edge of my sandal: a sculptor’s hands.

I looked at him. He looked back.

Carefully, he unbuckled the strap of my sandal. The heel hit the floor first. He slid his hand over my foot, my ankle, up my calf. Goose bumps trailed after his fingers.

I breathed out.

The second sandal joined the first. Again he ran his palms up my leg. I was caught in the way that he touched me. It was as if his fingers found me beautiful. As if I were a lovely thing. As if it were a privilege just to trace his fingertips across my body.

I didn’t move. He didn’t know how only hours before, back at the party, I’d let someone else touch me, and had touched him back.

But —

Cole stretched forward to meet my lips. This kiss — his mouth was hungry, wanting. But still his hands were on my back and pressed against my hip, and still his touch was a silent shout: I love you.

How stupid I’d been to think I couldn’t tell the difference between this kiss and Mark’s kiss. How ridiculous to reduce Cole to his mess and his loudness, to be so furious with him that I erased the other true parts. What was I with the kindness scrubbed from the record?