Linger by Maggie Stiefvater Page B

hmm.”
    So I kept teasing her skin with my fingers. I thought abouttelling her what I was thinking, like You’re beautiful and You’re my angel , but the thing about Grace was that words like that meant more to me than to her. They were throwaway phrases to her, things that made her smile for a second but were just … gone after that, too corny to be real. To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her.
    When I leaned in to kiss her, I caught just the tiniest trace of that sweet, nutty smell from the wolf she’d found, so faint that I could have been imagining it. But just the thought of it was enough to throw me from the moment.
    â€œLet’s go home,” I said.
    â€œThis is your home,” Grace said, with a playful smile. “You can’t fool me.”
    But I stood up, tugging both her hands to pull her after me.
    â€œI want to get home before your parents do,” I said. “They’ve been getting home really early.”
    â€œLet’s elope,” Grace said lightly, bending to collect our leftover sandwiches and drinks. I held out the bag so that she could toss everything inside, and watched as she retrieved the sandwich-paper crane before we headed down the stairs.
    Hand in hand, we retreated through the now-dark store and out back, where Grace’s white Mazda was parked. When she got into the driver’s seat, I lifted my palm to my nose, trying to catch a whiff of the scent from before. I couldn’t smell it, but the wolf in me couldn’t ignore the memory of it in that kiss.
    It was like a low voice whispering in a foreign language, breathing a secret that I couldn’t understand.

• SAM •
    Something woke me.
    Surrounded by the dull, familiar darkness of Grace’s bedroom, I wasn’t sure what it was. There was no sound outside, and the rest of the house lay in the half-aware silence of night. Grace, too, was quiet, rolled away from me. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose against the back of her soap-scented neck. The tiny blond hairs at her nape tickled my nostrils. I jerked my face away from them and Grace sighed in her sleep, curling her back tighter against the shape of my body as she did. I should’ve slept, too — I had inventory work at the store early the next day — but something in my subconscious hummed with an uneasy watchfulness. So I lay against her, close as two spoons in a drawer, until her skin was too hot to be comfortable.
    I slid a few inches away, keeping a hand on her side. Normally, the soft up-and-down of her ribs under my palm lulled me to sleep when nothing else would. But not tonight.
    Tonight, I couldn’t stop remembering what it had felt like when I’d been just about to shift. The way the cold had crawledalong my skin, trailing goose bumps behind it. The turn, turn, turn of my stomach, aching nausea unfurling. The slow sun-burst of pain up my spine as it stretched according to memories of another shape. My thoughts slipping away from me, crushed and reformed to fit my winter skull.
    Sleep evaded me, just out of my grasp. My instincts prickled relentlessly, urging me to alertness. The darkness pressed against my eyes while the wolf inside me sang something is not right .
    Outside, the wolves began to howl.
    â€¢ GRACE •
    I was too hot. The sheets stuck to my damp calves; I tasted sweat at the corner of my lips. As the wolves howled, my skin tingled with the heat, a hundred tiny needle pricks all over my face and hands. Everything felt painful: the blanket’s uncomfortable weight on me, Sam’s cold hand on my hip, the wailing, high cries of the wolves outside, the memory of Sam’s fingers pressed into his temples, the shape of my skin on my body.
    I was asleep; I was dreaming. Or I was awake, coming out of a dream. I couldn’t decide.
    In my mind, I saw all the people