I dropped my eyes to my hands. “Not now you don’t.”
Sam reached across the bench seat and touched my hair, running a hand down it until he caught just the ends of it between his fingers. He studied the hairs like they might contain the secrets of Grace in their dull blonde strands. His cheeks flushed slightly; he still blushed when he complimented me. “No,” he admitted, “right in this moment, I can’t even remember what unhappy feels like.”
Somehow that made tears prick at the corners of my eyes. I blinked, glad he was still looking at my hair. There was a long pause.
He said, “You don’t remember being attacked.”
“What?”
“You don’t remember being attacked at all, do you?”
I frowned and pulled my backpack onto my lap, startled by the seemingly random change of topic. “I don’t know. Maybe. It seems like there were a lot of wolves, way more than I think there actually could’ve been. And I remember you—I remember you standing back, and then just touching my hand”—Sam touched my hand—“and my cheek”—he touched my cheek—“when the others were rough with me. I guess they wanted to eat me, right?”
His voice was soft. “You don’t remember what happened after that? How you survived?”
I tried to remember. It was all a flash of snow, and red, and breath on my face. Then Mom screaming. But there must’ve been something between all that. I must’ve gotten from the woods to the house somehow. I tried to imagine walking, stumbling through the snow. “Did I walk?”
He looked at me, waiting for me to answer my own question.
“I know I didn’t. I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?” I was frustrated now, with my own brain’s inability to comply. It seemed like such a simple request. But I only remembered the scent of Sam, Sam everywhere, and then the unfamiliar sound of Mom’s panic as she scrambled for the phone.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “It doesn’t matter.” But I thought it probably did.
I closed my eyes, recalling the scent of the woods that day and the jolting feeling of moving back toward the house, arms tight around me. I opened my eyes again. “You carried me.”
Sam looked at me abruptly.
It was coming back, in the way you remember fever dreams. “But you were human,” I said. “I remember seeing you as a wolf. But you must’ve been human to carry me. How did you do that?”
He shrugged, helplessly. “I don’t know how I shifted. It’s the same as when I was shot, and I was human when you found me.”
I felt something fluttering in my chest, like hope. “You can make yourself change?”
“It’s not like that. It was only two times. And I haven’t been able to do it again, ever, no matter how badly I’ve wanted to. And believe me, I’ve wanted it pretty badly.” Sam turned off the Bronco with an air of ending the conversation, and I reached into my backpack to pull out a hat. As he locked the car, I stood on the sidewalk and waited.
Sam came around the back of the car and stopped dead when he saw me. “Oh my God, what is that?”
I used my thumb and middle finger to flick the multicolored pom-pom on top of my head. “In my language, we call it a hat. It keeps my ears warm.”
“Oh my God,” Sam said again, and closed the distance between us. He cupped my face in his hands and studied me. “It’s horribly cute.” He kissed me, looked at the hat, and then he kissed me again.
I vowed never to lose the pom-pom hat. Sam was still holding my face; I was sure everyone in town was looking now. But I didn’t want to pull away, and I let him kiss me one more time, this time soft as the snow, barely a touch, and then he released me and took my hand instead.
It took me a moment to find my voice, and when I did, I couldn’t stop grinning. “Okay. Where are we going?” It was cold enough that I knew it had to be close; we couldn’t stay out here much longer.
Sam’s fingers were laced tightly with mine. “To a Grace-shop first. That’s what a proper gentleman would do.”
I giggled, completely unlike me, and Sam laughed because he knew it. I was drunk with Sam. I let him walk me down the stark concrete block to The Crooked Shelf, a little independent bookstore; I hadn’t been there for a year. It seemed stupid that I hadn’t, given how many books I read, but I was just a poor high schooler with a very limited allowance. I got my books from the library.
“This is a Grace-shop, right?” Sam pushed open the door without waiting for my answer. A wonderful wave of new-book smell came rushing out, reminding me immediately of Christmas. My parents always got me books for Christmas. With a melodic ding, the shop door swung shut behind us, and Sam released my hand. “Where to? I’ll buy you a book. I know you want one.”
I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to worlds unknown. “I could just live here,” I said.
Sam watched my face with obvious pleasure. “I remember watching you reading books on the tire swing. Even in the most stupid weather. Why didn’t you read inside when it was so cold?”
My eyes followed the rows and rows of books. “Books are more real when you read them outside.”
I bit my lip, eyes flitting from shelf to shelf. “I don’t know where to go first.”
“I’ll show you something,” Sam said. The way he said it made me believe that it was not only something but a very amazing something that he had waited all day to show me. He took my hand again and led me through the store, past the uninterested cashier, and up the silent stairs that swallowed the sounds of our footsteps and kept them.
Upstairs was a little loft, less than half the size of the store below, with a railing to keep us from tumbling back down to the ground floor.
“One summer, I worked here. Sit. Wait.” Sam guided me to a battered burgundy love seat that took up a large part of the floor space. I took off my hat and sat, charmed by his orders, and checked out his butt while he searched on the shelves for whatever he was looking for. Unaware of my stare, he crouched, running his fingers along spines like they were old friends. I watched the slope of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, the way one hand braced, fingers spread crablike on the floor, as he knelt by the shelves. Finally he found what he was looking for and he came over to the love seat.