Lightning illuminated the world again. Two seconds of light, and there they were. Eyes, colorless as they reflected the lightning. A wolf. Three yards away.
It was Shelby.
The world went dark.
I started to run.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
• SAM •
I woke up.
I blinked, my eyes momentarily mystified by the brightness of my bedroom light in the middle of the night. Slowly, my thoughts assembled themselves, and I remembered leaving the light on, thinking I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.
But here I was, my eyes uncertain from sleep, my desk lamp casting lopsided shadows from one side of the room. My notebook had slid partially off my chest, all the words inside it off-kilter. Above me, the paper cranes spun on their strings in frantic, lumpy circles, animated by the air vent in the ceiling. They looked desperate to escape their individual worlds.
When it became obvious that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I stretched my leg out and used my bare foot to turn on the CD player on the table at the end of my bed. Finger-picked guitar sounded through the speakers, each note in time with my heart. Lying sleepless in this bed reminded me of nights before Grace, when I’d lived in the house with Beck and the others. Back then, the population of paper cranes above me, scrawled with memories, had been in no danger of outgrowing their habitat as I slowly counted down toward my expiration date, the day when I’d lose myself to the woods. I’d stay awake long into the night, lost with wanting.
The longing then was abstract, though. I’d wanted something I knew I couldn’t have: a life after September, a life after twenty, a life with more time spent Sam than wolf.
But now what I longed for wasn’t an imagined future. It was a concrete memory of me slouched in the leather chair in the Brisbanes’ study, a novel — The Children of Men — in my hand while Grace sat at the desk, biting the end of a pencil while doing homework. Saying nothing, because we didn’t have to, just pleasantly intoxicated with the leather-scent of the chair around me and the vague smell of a roasted chicken hanging in the air and the sound of Grace sighing and turning her chair back and forth. Beside her, the radio hummed pop songs, top-40 hits that faded into the background until Grace tunelessly sang a refrain.
After a while, she lost interest in her homework and crawled into the chair with me. Make room, she said, though there was no way to make room. I protested when she pinched my thigh, trying to make herself fit into the seat beside me. Sorry for hurting you, she said right in my ear, but it wasn’t really an apology, because you don’t bite someone’s earlobe to tell them you’re sorry. I pinched her and she laughed as she pressed her face into my collarbone. One of her hands tunneled between the chair and my back to touch my shoulder blades. I pretended to read on and she pretended to rest against me, but she kept pinching my shoulder blade and I kept tickling her with my free hand, until she was laughing even as we kissed and kissed again.
There is no better taste than this: someone else’s laughter in your mouth.
After a while, Grace fell asleep for real on my chest, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to follow her. Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths. The weight of her pinned my fleeting thoughts to the ground, and in that moment, I was more in the world than I’d ever been.
So now, looking at the paper cranes tugging urgently on their strings, I knew exactly what I wanted, because I’d had it.
I couldn’t fall back asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
• GRACE •
I couldn’t outrun a wolf.
Neither of us could see very well in the dark, but Shelby had a wolf’s sense of smell and a wolf’s sense of hearing. I had bare feet tangled in thorns and blunt nails too short for attack and lungs that couldn’t seem to get enough air. I felt powerless in this stormy wood. All I could think about was my memories of teeth in my collarbone, hot breath on my face, snow leaching my blood away from me.
Thunder cracked again, leaving behind the painfully fast crashing of my heart.