“Tell them,” Cole started, then paused. “Tell them I am making them a present. And tell me that you’ll dance to it.”

Chapter Twenty

· cole ·

That night, I returned to the apartment, too tired to be restless.

I was the sort of tired that came from finishing something, from emptying myself. I’d chased this feeling before, too, with fancy drinks and cheap drinks and pills that made you slow. But just like how the drug highs could never quite match the highs of creating music, the induced lows could never match this real peace that came from having created.

If I were always making an album, I would never be unhappy.

I lay on my bed and put my headphones on and listened to the track on repeat. It was impossible to get tired of listening to a new song the first day I breathed it into life. I texted Isabel. I did my homework.

She texted back: I’m checking your work.

In the end, I’d pulled the imperfect, lo-fi audio from T’s video footage and used it as a scratchy intro. Then I’d had us rip into a harder version with the tinny operatic singing pieced through. It sounded like we’d meant for it to turn out this way all along.

I was glad Isabel was checking my work. But I didn’t need anyone else to tell me I’d gotten a passing grade.

I drifted off with the song still playing in my ears. I dreamed about drifting off with the song still playing in my ears.

I woke to the sound of my door opening.

Isabel —

I heard a breathy giggle.

Not Isabel.

I had locked the door, I thought. I had been tired, but I remembered the action of turning the bolt.

My headphones hissed; my music player battery had died. I pulled them off an ear and heard another little snort. The giggles were traveling in packs. I felt like I was living a memory.

My wolf ears heard hands scrubbing over walls. Smelled perfume and sweat. The light came on.

Three topless girls stood in my living room area, peering at me through the see-through IKEA bookshelf into my bedroom.

One of them had artfully written my name across her br**sts.

COLE on one. CLAIR on the other. ST. in small letters on her breastbone.

“I think you have the wrong place,” I told them pleasantly, not sitting up. This inspired another round of giggles. They remained in my apartment. They remained topless. I remained in bed.

In the old days, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Bored and horny and high, I would have entertained them all if not myself, and then passed out on the deck.

But now I was not only on camera, but I very much wanted Isabel Culpeper to keep taking my calls. I was working arduously and single-mindedly toward my gold star, and there was nothing about this situation that was going to get me that.

“I’m sure I locked that door,” I said, sitting up.

One of the girls held up a key. She flashed a million-dollar smile at me.

Oh, Baby.

The girl with my name written large informed me that she was a virgin.

“I’m proud of you,” I said. I held up a finger and called Isabel, keeping one eye on my half-naked visitors. “Pumpkin, do you have Virtual Cole with you?”

“Pumpkin,” repeated Isabel.

“Da. Yes. Pumpkin.” I got up, glad that I had fallen asleep fully clothed.

“I do, but I’m driving. I’m pretty sure there’s a cameraman following me. Isn’t that funny?”

The girls drifted closer. They were astonishingly drunk.

Every camera in the apartment had a shot of boob. I was so untempted that I felt positively saintly. I wasn’t sure how I could be so slain by Isabel clothed and so disinterested in these girls.

“Everything about today is funny,” I replied. “Could you please broadcast to the world that there are better ways to show your support of my album-making efforts than showing up on my doorstep? Also, why are you driving? Surely there is nowhere in the world you long to drive to at this hour besides me.”

I heard a petulant honk from outside the window. The three girls and I all looked out the window. Isabel’s SUV was pulling up in the alley behind the apartment. A van pulled up behind with Joan inside.

The timing was tediously coincidental.

“I think you ought to go,” I told the girls, who were all invading my personal space in very unself-conscious ways. I began to herd them back the way they came. I paused to pry one from my arm. “It’s about to get unpleasant.”

As if on cue, the door burst open, the sound in perfect timing with the explosion of my heartbeat.

Isabel Culpeper clicked in, sporting a cropped leopard-print top, black leather pants, and a pair of boots with heels to stab usurpers. She also wore crocheted gloves that went up to her elbows. Nothing about her was out of place. There was not an integer in this world to represent how many times sexier she was than the half-naked girls.

I could not believe that Baby had had the gall to ruin the moment with three topless fans. I felt rather old and weary just then. How many lives had I lived in order to get to a place where these gigglers were merely an inconvenience?

Isabel pursed her red lips. The girls looked at her with the fearlessness of the drunk. Joan and her camera peeked in the doorway.

“Did you broadcast my special request?” I asked Isabel.

I felt strangely nervous that Isabel wouldn’t believe my innocence.

“I did,” she said. “Pumpkin.” Her eyes had found my name jiggling on the intruders. I was no prude, and history will support this claim, but at the moment I was very uncomfortable with the number of bare br**sts in the room. It was as if all of my hard-won cynicism had been murdered, orphaning a far more naive sixteen-year-old Cole, nervous that his crush wouldn’t agree to go out with him.

This seemed like a very dangerous place for that Cole to reemerge.

Please don’t be angry. You have to know this isn’t real. Please, Isabel — I wasn’t sure what I could say, not with Joan’s camera watching us carefully from just outside the apartment. The cameras inside the apartment watched carefully from everywhere else.

“I think you should give me that key,” I told the girls. “And you shouldn’t accept keys from strangers. You never know what you’ll find on the other side of the door.”

“Chop-chop,” Isabel suggested, her voice so cool that a nearby semitropical plant dropped dead.

“Are you his girlfriend?” the girl with the key asked, her voice ugly. “Because really —”

Isabel interrupted, “Don’t say anything we’ll both regret later. You can give the key to me, actually.”

She held out an imperious gloved hand. The girl relinquished the key with a sort of hiss. The virginal one crept by Isabel. The third spit at Isabel’s boots on her way out.

There was a pause. The spitter stopped just beyond Joan, a challenge in her face.

Isabel laughed, nasty and dismissive. I suddenly had a very clear idea of what she must have been like in high school.

“Oh, please,” she said.

She slammed the door shut, right in Joan’s face.

Silence.

My heart was thudding in my chest. I almost couldn’t believe how nervous I was, when I’d done nothing wrong, when I didn’t care what anybody thought, when I had spent so long being numb.

“Let’s have a little discussion in your office,” she said, throwing a hand toward the bathroom. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

I closed the door behind us and, as she opened her mouth, held a finger to my lips. Joan and her camera had come into the apartment. My wolf hearing could pick up her breathing on the other side of the door and then the shuffling as she worked to get the boom microphone as close to our voices as possible.

Isabel went to the sink and turned the tap on full blast, the movement of her wrist crisp and vicious. I leaned into the shower and spun the knobs.

Then, with the hissing white noise of wasted water behind us, we gathered by the toilet, heads close.

“God, you smell nice,” I said, low and hushed, because someone had to say it, and to let some of my anxiety escape.

“You smell like —” Isabel stopped herself. She said, “What’s going on here, exactly?”

It was not at all the reaction I’d expected. Not much stopped Isabel in her tracks. I lifted my palm to my hand and inhaled.

Wolf.

Earth and musk, night and instinct.

I didn’t know why it was there, only that it was. It was as if the wolf in me seeped through my pores, released by my anxiety.

Part of me wistfully thought of that wolf body and how just a minute in it would instantly ease all of my jostled feelings.

“Isabel —”

“This is not okay,” she interrupted. “I’m not okay with any of this.”

“It wasn’t me. Baby —”

“I know it was Baby!”

“Then I don’t get it.”

We looked at each other. My fingers had that feeling like my arms had been asleep but now they were waking up. Somehow I was both obviously innocent and obviously in trouble. I still couldn’t tell from her face what she was thinking. She was wearing enough eyeliner to black out the finer points of most emotions.

“I will never feel good about walking into a room with you and three half-naked girls, Cole. I don’t want to see that ever again.”

The problem was that this was part of being me, part of being Cole St. Clair, part of having a band, signing up to be on a voyeuristic TV show. “I can only control myself.”

“Can you?”

“I just said it.”

“Can you control yourself ?”

Hadn’t I just? “Do you not trust me — is that what this is?”

Isabel opened her mouth and then shut it. She turned away, crossed her arms, scowled into the shower. “I haven’t been with one hundred other people, Cole. I haven’t seen a hundred other people naked. I don’t know what —”

She shook her head like she was mad. But I knew Isabel, and I knew that every one of her emotions looked like anger from the outside. It didn’t make this any fairer, because I hadn’t invited the girls over, nor had I known Isabel when I’d slept with all the others. But I’d known when I started this whole thing that we were different in this important way: Isabel had spent her teen years caring who touched her, and I hadn’t.

“I’m not here for anybody else,” I said. This seemed too earnest for her to handle, so I added, “Culpeper. I came here for you.”

She still didn’t look at me. The light came through her iceblond hair, lighting her cheek and chin and neck. I still wanted my gold star, even though I knew there was no way I was getting it tonight. She answered, “Me and that little show you’re doing.”

“That’s my job.”

“Hiding in bathrooms?”

“Making music.”

“I could handle dating someone whose job was making music,” Isabel said. “But I don’t think that’s what your job is.”

I thought I could remember having this conversation with Leyla, and I hadn’t liked it much better then.

“Nobody just makes music. You can’t make a living just making music. I thought this would be better than a label. I thought I’d have more control. You know what? I’ve said all these things. I can remember my face saying them.”

Isabel laughed, as mean and thin as she had when the girl spit, but I was relieved, because it seemed to somehow soften her. She pulled out Virtual Cole and began thumbing through screens. “You thought signing up with Baby North would be better than a label? Even though all of her people end up twitching and drooling on the floor. Nobody makes it out.”

“I’m not like anyone else.”

Isabel stopped scrolling. Her voice was wry and sexy as she said, “Thank God.”

We looked at each other. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were sky blue and unblinking. I hated that I could still feel the remnants of the anxiety batting around inside me. I didn’t want her to go, though I could tell by the way everything had happened and the way she was standing and the way Joan was outside trying to eavesdrop that she had to.

I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

I wanted to tell her Isabel, stay. And I wanted to tell her, Isabel, I love you.

I hadn’t said anything out loud, but Isabel shook her head a little, like don’t.

So I just said, “What about my gold star?”

“Ha!” Her laugh was bitter and annoyed. “Baby has taken your gold star. Breasts have taken your gold star.”

“Do you want, at least, to hear my brilliance? Like, as it is meant to be heard?”

She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t move. So I turned off the shower, wiped down the tiled seat inside with a towel, and folded another towel to act as a cushion. I tossed my useless battery-dead headphones into the sink. Then I sat on the shower seat, pulled my MP3 player from my back pocket, and patted the spot beside me.

“This has to stop,” she told me, but she joined me, crossing her epically long legs as she sat. God, she was so beautiful I couldn’t take it.

“Sure,” I agreed. “Earbuds?” She handed me her purse, and I rummaged for them (they were leopard print). Plugging them into my player, I put one bud in my right ear and one bud in her left ear. I scooted closer so that our shoulders were crushed together. As she readjusted the earbud, I checked the screen and then hit play.

For the first minute, she listened. Then her head moved, just a little, the memory of dancing. She could make even that look sexy. I watched her — her eyes were closed, she was just listening, her lips parted a little. I couldn’t get it. I felt like I could only pull off sexy when I thought about it, but I was just as attracted to her when she was trying to attract me as when she wasn’t.