in your veins. I pulled you out of that hole once. I’m on the edge looking in anyway, Cole. I can’t be around someone else who is. You’re dragging me down with you. I’m trying to get out.”
And again, this is how Isabel always worked her magic on me. That little bit of honesty from her — and it wasn’t that much — took the wind out of my sails. The anger I’d felt before was strangely hard to sustain. I took my legs off the counter, slowly, one at a time, and then I turned on the stool so I was facing her. Instead of backing up to give me more room, she stayed right there, standing between my legs. A challenge. Or maybe a surrender.
“That,” I said, “is a lie. You only found me in the rabbit hole because you were already down there.”
She was so close to me that I could smell her lipstick. I was painfully aware that her hips were only an inch away from my thighs.
“I’m not going to watch you kill yourself,” Isabel said. A long minute passed where we heard nothing but the roar of a delivery truck as it drove down the street outside. She was looking at my mouth, and suddenly she looked away. “God, I can’t stay here. Just tell Sam I’ll call him.”
I reached out and put my hands on her hips as she tried to turn. “Isabel,” I said. One of my thumbs was on bare skin, right above the waist of her jeans. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“Just chasing a high?” She attempted to turn again; I held on. I wasn’t holding tight enough to keep her, but she wasn’t pulling hard enough to get away, so we stayed as we were.
“I wasn’t trying to get high. I was trying to become a wolf.”
“Whatever. Semantics.” Isabel wouldn’t look at me now.
Letting go of her, I stood up so that we were face-to-face. I’d learned a long time ago that one of the finest weapons in my arsenal was my ability to invade personal space. She turned to look at me and it was her eyes and my eyes and I felt a surging sensation of rightness, of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person, that too-rare sensation of having the right thing to say and believing it, too:
“I’m only going to say this once, so you better believe me the first time. I’m looking for a cure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
• SAM •
She — Amy, I tried to think of her as Amy instead of as Grace’s mother — wrangled the door open and led me through a shady anteroom in a more muted purple than the front, and then into a startlingly bright main room full of canvases. The light was pouring in through the back wall of windows, which looked out onto a shabby lot with old tractors parked in it. If you ignored the view, the space itself was professional and classy — light gray walls, like a museum, with picture wires hanging from white molding along the ceiling. Paintings hung on the walls and leaned against the corners; some of them looked like they were still wet.
“Water?” she asked.
I stood in the middle of the room and tried not to touch anything. It took me a moment to put the word water in context: to drink, not to drown in.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
Before, when I’d seen Amy’s work, it had been strange and whimsical — animals in urban areas, lovers painted in odd colors. But all the canvases I saw now had been drained of life. Even if they were paintings of places — alleys and barns — they felt like barren planets. There were no animals, no lovers. No focal point. The only canvas that had any subject was the one currently on her easel. It was a huge canvas, nearly as tall as I was, and it was all white except for a very small figure sitting in the lower left corner. The girl’s back was to the viewer, shoulders hunched up, dark blond hair down her back. Even facing away, it was unmistakably Grace.
“Go ahead, psychoanalyze me,” Amy said as I looked at the paintings.
“I’m trying to quit,” I said. And making that little joke felt like a cheat, like last night, when I’d played the singing-the-next-line game with Cole when I should’ve been grilling him. I was consorting with the enemy.
“Say what you’re thinking,