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Beneath his right palm, the material of my dress had made uneven waves. Surely vinyl wouldn’t move like that? I really didn’t know. Now I felt like I was going to have to look this up online.
He unzipped my dress straight down to my belly button.
So, I guessed this was happening. I kept waiting to feel half naked.
Mark leaned back.
“God,” he said, “you are beautiful.”
His voice sounded precisely like it did when he walked into the back room in the evenings to do paperwork. Precisely like it had when he’d asked me if I knew Cole. Which was to say, precisely like Mark, because he was Mark. What was the point to him even saying that? Possibly he’d misunderstood what this was all about.
I said, “I told you to shut up.”
He laughed.
I didn’t. I slapped his hand away and tugged up my zipper.
“We’re done here.”
“What?” he said. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
I expected him to protest, but he just ran a hand through his hair. His lips were smeary neon. From me. That was from my lips. Finally, he said, “Well, damn.”
Part of me wanted to tell him, No, really, let’s still go through with it. Because now I was just stuck with this bad taste in my mouth, and a dim feeling of hating him or hating me or hating everything.
“It was probably a bad idea anyway,” Mark said. “I’m not drunk enough.”
The more he spoke, and the longer it had been since he’d touched me, the more the truth was sinking in: I had almost slept with my boss’s husband. I had made out with my boss’s husband at a party. I was that girl.
“You should go,” I told him. My voice was this side of the crypt, but only barely. “Sierra’s looking for you.”
When he looked at me, his expression was confused for a second, and then it turned to something like pity. He laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, and it was at me or him. I felt naive and stupid. “No. She’s not.”
I leveled my gaze on him, blue eyes cold-dead behind their mask, and waited until the uncertainty crept back into his eyes.
Then I said, “I have to fix my lips.”
By the time I had fetched my purse, he was gone, the door barely cracked. I stood in front of the mirror and observed my neon-smeared lips. I cleaned them up and carefully drew my cool pink lips back on and readjusted my hair around my face and tugged the zipper of my dress until I looked the same as I had before.
Then I took my phone out of my purse. I redid my eyeliner, careful not to smudge the neon blue Sierra had put on my eyelids.
I took a breath.
I dialed Cole’s number.
“Are you sober?” I asked.
“Oh, come on. That’s what you —”
“Cole. Are you?”
A pause to convey irritation. “Yeah.”
I kept my voice very even, but it took a lot of effort. “Please come get me.”
Chapter Forty-Three
· cole ·
When I got to the party, I had to park way down the street, and then after I got in, it took me a while to find Isabel. Inside the house, the lights were out and black lights were wired up to make all of the girls glow in the UV. Outside, it was all glitter and experimental dancing because they were that sort of people.
I was recognized, because it was that sort of party, but no one cared, because it was that sort of party. The music made me want to punch a hippie.
Isabel stood by the pool in a group of people who moved their arms with the enthusiasm and gracelessness of the inebriated.
She was posed. One shoulder down, chin up. Her eye makeup was black and thick except for a line of neon blue that matched her eyes. Her mouth was a glass creation, still and chiseled. She wore a white leather dress that made her look one thousand times more sophisticated than most humans. Surrounded by all this glitter, in this noise and silliness, in a world that I clumsily and loudly inhabited, she was beautiful.
The guys in the group gazed at her with fearful awe. They looked at the face she wore right now and saw a stunning ice queen. Something to be thawed.
All I could see was how sad she was.
As I got closer, I heard their voices. The others were hysterical and loud. Isabel’s voice, lower, sounded bored and over it.
I walked up behind her. They saw me before she did. “Hi, princess,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me. “The world called. They want you back.”
She turned to me and her face, just in the split second when she saw me — I was murdered by it. Not because it was cruel, but the opposite. For one fraction of another fraction of a second, I saw na**d relief on her face. Then it was gone behind the mask. But I still had it inside me.
“What, are you going?” asked one of the other girls. She was blond and blue-eyed like Isabel, but slightly older and several degrees softer looking.
Isabel’s hand was between her leg and mine. Without any fanfare, I threaded my fingers through hers. “Yes, yes. I’m very needy. Don’t tell anyone.” I flashed a smile at her, a needy one, and the girl’s eyebrows shot up.
“I’ll see you on Thursday,” Isabel said. How easily she hid her misery in plain sight. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so upset. She might have said something else. I didn’t know. I was leading her away, out of there, through the people, through the gate, down the road, toward the Mustang. We were out of neon and into the dark, but I didn’t let go of her hand.
We got to the car.
“I want to drive,” she said.
I did not want to give her the keys. Wordlessly, I handed them over.
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?
Eyeliner in a white dress.
We were so little, when you took away all our sins.
As I linked my arms around his neck, I was crying.
What an idiot I was. This perfect moment, this perfect kiss, and I was crying. There was so much wrong with me. I was so incredibly messed up that I couldn’t cry when everything was wrong and I couldn’t not when everything was fine.
Our lips were salty with it. Cole didn’t stop or pause, but his hands crept up my back to hold me tighter. After a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine and I put my hands on his face and we just stayed like that, breathing each other’s breaths.
It was so much us and so little him and me. Us, us, us. The opposite of lonely was this.
Cole said, “You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
I replied, “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck.”
He kissed me again. My mouth, my throat, under my ear.
He hesitated. Pulling back, he said, “Tell me this means something to you.”
It was a strange thing to be asked. It seemed like it should have been the other way around. He was the one who had been the touring rock star with countless girls on countless nights.
He was the one with the cavalier smile and the easy laugh.
But that wasn’t the truth. Not really. Not now. Now the truth was that I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.
A tear dripped off my chin and onto my leg. It was gray with my eyeliner.
I said, “Don’t let me leave you.”
Then, in our secret bit of Los Angeles, we kissed and slid from our clothing. His hands adored my body and my mouth explored his and in the end it was this: us us us.
