I didn’t know. I felt unsteady on my legs. I started putting on clothing.

“I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded a lot more awake than his in this room. In the light from the streetlight, I could clearly see the dresser, the mirror, the glass sculpture in the corner of the room. It seemed like it was never dark in any place in this city. I longed suddenly and fiercely for actual night, for a perfect blackness to hide me more completely.

“No,” he replied simply. He lifted his entire arm now, and stretched it toward me. “Stay.”

“I can’t. People are — no one knows where I am. I need to go.”

“They’ll be okay till morning. Come back. Come sleep.”

“I’m not going to sleep. I need to —” I couldn’t seem to work out how to get my dress back on. No part of it was right side out. It was all wrong sides, and my fingers were clumsy.

Cole pushed himself up on an elbow to watch me struggle angrily with the garment. Finally, I aggressively zipped it; the zipper wasn’t even. Who was going to see it this time of night anyway? No one. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys. Maybe they were still out in the conservatory. I couldn’t find them on the side table or in my purse or on the floor or — no, no, I’d come in Cole’s car, I needed a cab, I’d have to call one, I couldn’t even think of — “Isabel,” Cole said from right behind me. He took my elbows and turned me around to him. I resisted, body stiff. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “If you have to go, I’ll drive you.

You’re out of your mind.”

“Please let go,” I said, and it was the meanest thing I’d ever said, and I didn’t even want what I was asking for.

He let go. I expected his face to be blank, the real Cole gone someplace where I couldn’t poke at him, but he was still there.

“Don’t do this to me.”

The emphasis, somehow, was on the word me. That he didn’t expect me to be able to stop from doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.

I wanted my hands to stop shaking. I wanted my brain to regain control of my body.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to go. Don’t be an asshole about it.”

I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just knew that I was going. I had everything together. I would call a cab. I would walk to Abbot Kinney and get into it.

Cole’s voice was raw. “Fine, Isabel. Just — I get it. You get to call the shots. Call me when it’s good for you, right? It doesn’t matter what I need. It doesn’t matter how much I . . . I get it.

Whatever. I’ll play your game.”

I didn’t reply. I was already gone.

Chapter Forty-Seven

· cole ·

light on which one looks good today

Maybe me

Maybe not do i match your shoes your hair your face

Maybe me

Maybe not back on the rack stretched but not worn i am the used

Chapter Forty-Eight

· cole ·

I wrote the album.

I had nothing else to do.

The L.A. sky turned overcast and smoggy. Everything looked different without the brilliant sun and saturated colors.

The houses were flatter, the cracks in the streets deeper, the palms drier. It didn’t feel like the L.A. I loved was gone, just like it was hiding or sleeping or had been knocked out and lay in a ditch waiting for me to find it.

I was tired of waiting. Of making. Of doing. I wanted some closure, an ending, a feeling I had gotten somewhere.

I wanted Isabel to call me and tell me she had been wrong, that she wanted me, that she loved me.

I called Leon. “Comrade. Do you want to get lunch with a famous person?”

“I wish I could,” he said kindly. “But I have pickups until midnight today.”

That was one thousand years from now. L.A. could be dead by then. I said, “Tomorrow, then. Chili dogs. Put it in your datebook. This time I get to drive.”

I got in the Mustang and drove. I didn’t know where I was going, but it took me to Santa Monica. I knew Isabel was here, but the car didn’t know she didn’t want to see me. I drove into a massive parking garage and sat there. I wanted to shoot up. I touched my skin where I would inject the wolf. I could almost feel it. I wondered if it was possible to invoke the shift without a needle or a temperature change, like that time I’d smelled of wolf when the topless girls came over.

I’d told Jeremy I was taking it off the table.

It was off the table. I’d meant it. It was just harder to really mean it than I’d expected. No. Not really. I knew it was going to be hard.

Withdrawal was never easy.

Isabel was just blocks away. I was tired of checking my phone for messages.

The car was getting stuffy. I opened the door and sat there in the dim blue parking garage and touched my wrist and the inside of my elbow and thought about disappearing.

I heard my name.

“Cole? Cole?”

I turned my head. It was a smallish sort of guy with a biggish nose and sort of greasy auburn curls, standing just outside the car. He was probably my age. His face had a religious cast to it. A familiar, glowing expression.

This was a fan.

I made sure I had my Cole St. Clair face on. I didn’t have a pen to sign anything, but maybe he’d brought one.

“Hey,” I said, climbing reluctantly from the car. I shut the door. “What’s up?”

He mouthed what’s up in a wondering, amazed way. “I’m, uh, I’m sort of, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I’m, uh, awkward, you’re just, I’m . . .”

“That’s okay, slick,” I told him. “Take your time.”

“I’m not a stalker, I swear, I totally am not,” he said.

This was never the best way to start a conversation, but I’d heard it before. I just waited.

“I saw you come in here, I’ve been watching the show, I’m a huge fan of NARKOTIKA. I have, like, all of your albums, twice, and I buy them all the time to recommend them to, like, everyone I know.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with what he was saying, but for some reason, I felt a little buzz in my throat when he said NARKOTIKA. A sort of claustrophobic squeeze. I had had this conversation, or one a lot like it, on tour. It felt like I was living a memory instead of a minute I was really in. Like I had dreamed two years and now I was waking up and I had never left my old life behind.