Humiliation and anger clawed inside me.
He didn’t know I was here.
I was going to go.
I was going to go.
I was going to go. As soon as I could look away.
Cole saw me just as I managed to rip my feet from the floor and turn, my hand fumbling in my purse for my car keys. I saw his eyes find me, just for a second, and then I knew I’d stayed too long. Because now it was going to get — “Isabel! Hey! Hey.”
I kept walking. The door to the warehouse felt miles away.
I could see it, but it never got any closer. I didn’t turn around. I kept going. People moved out of my way.
“Isabel!”
Outside, in the black night, I sucked in breaths of empty air, trying to fill this hollowed-out cavity.
“Hey.” Cole grabbed my arm, stopping me. This close, I could smell the alcohol and weed. And wolf. Wolf wolf wolf. It was all over him.
I’d never left that house in Minnesota.
I spun. “Let. Go. Of. Me.”
In the dark of the lot, his eyes were bright and glittery, but there were bags beneath them. He was tired and awake. High and low. Going up and burning down. Turning people into objects and throwing them away.
“What is your problem?” he asked.
“That question is not even remotely appropriate for this situation,”
I replied. I felt like I needed to shout to be heard over the music, but really it was just that I could feel it in my feet from inside the building.
“What situation is that? Are you going to clue me in?”
I flicked a finger at him. “You! You are the situation!”
Cole narrowed his eyes. “So the situation is awesome?”
The wire-framed industrial light on the outside of the warehouse was twitching and trembling to the beat inside. Every time I thought of him with that girl on the couch, every time I inhaled and smelled the beer, something inside me did the same thing. I didn’t know why I thought I could do this. “You know what? Just — I’m not even.”
I jerked my arm out of his hand and started back toward my car. It was parked near the edge of the lot. It hadn’t seemed so far away when I’d gotten here.
“So now it’s a crime to exist,” Cole said. “That explains a lot.”
The indignation was too much. I snapped, “Call me when you’re sober. Or actually, don’t.”
There was a long pause, long enough that I unlocked my car and opened the door.
Then he said, “Sober? I am sober.”
This was so ludicrous that I turned to face him. “Come on, Cole. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”
His face was a broad expression of absolute persecution. He spread his arms out. “I haven’t been drinking.”
“I can smell it on you!” You didn’t grow up in my house without knowing the smell of hard liquor and beer and wine. Without knowing how exaggerated it made the drunk. How they became a caricature of themselves: silent if they were quiet, a hurricane if they were irritable.
“There is beer in the building,” Cole said. “There was beer on the couch. There is not beer inside me.”
“Right. And that girl?”
“What girl?”
“You were wearing her? That one?”
Dismissively, he said, “Magdalene. She’s a sloppy drunk.
That was nothing.”
Nothing. Maybe to him. Maybe to him it didn’t count unless you were naked. But to me, who had never been someone’s girlfriend — I was so done. I had driven out here for this stupid surprise, this birthday surprise, and I was tired, and I wished I’d never come and seen it and I wished he hadn’t ever come into .blush. in the first place and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted to go back to not giving any damns. I missed that Isabel.
Everything hurt. “And the wolf ?”
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes flickered an answer, swift and guilty. God, I couldn’t take it. I’d known it all along, and I’d just been playing pretend.
“So you’re just Cole again, is it?” I demanded. “Cole St.
Clair is back!”
“What? Oh. It’s not like that.”
I fired back, “Sure looks like that.”
“Looks and is aren’t the same. Otherwise they’d be the same word. Precision, Culpeper. I thought that was your thing. If you’d been here instead of always saying you weren’t going to be part of the Cole St. Clair show, you’d have seen what really happened here today. Not just been part of the audience, believing the hype.”
“Don’t try to make me feel guilty about not being a player in your life.”
“If you feel guilty, it’s because you put it there, not me. I never asked you to be on the show.”
“Asked! You didn’t have to. It’s like a giant cloud that follows me around!”
“What, so now I’m in trouble for things I didn’t even say?
For thinking I want more time with you?”
My eyes seared, like they were close to tears, even though I couldn’t feel any accompanying emotion. “Yes! You always want more from me. Be okay with na**d girls in your apartment. Be you on the Internet. Be happy with you smelling like a goddamn wolf. More, Isabel, more! Well, I don’t have any more! I’m giving you what I can give you without completely . . . And this is what you do?”
Cole laughed in a very unfunny way. “This? This? I don’t even know what this is. Breathing! Living! Being me! What a grand day this has become!” He did the little NARKOTIKA hand gesture that said he was revealing something new. “Happy birthday, Cole! Happy, happy birthday.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Telling me I screwed up!”
This was too much. “Because you did.”
He stepped right up next to me. I could tell he was angry, but I didn’t care. Wolf wolf wolf. “I. Am. Sober.”
Did he think I couldn’t smell him? “Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he echoed. “How about you take my word for it?”
“And why should I do that?”
“How about because you trust me?”
“Trust you? Does anyone do that? Of all the things I would do that are crazy, Cole, you can be sure that will never be one of them.”
Just like that, he was gone. His body was still there, but his eyes were empty. Cole St. Clair had left the building. A very tidy party trick, and the most cunning objectification of all: when he took the person that was him and threw him away. I would have felt guilty, but I had seen what I’d seen. I wasn’t making any of it up. I could smell the wolf, smell the beer, remember the girl’s arm draped possessively around his neck.