I finally pulled my hand away and closed my eyes, trying to gather what was left of my sanity for a moment. When I opened my eyes and spoke, I said the most mundane thing possible. “It’s not spring. It’s September.”
I’m not the best at reading people, but I thought I saw a glimmer of anxiety behind his eyes before they cleared. “That’s not good,” he remarked. “Can I ask you a favor?”
I had to close my eyes again at the sound of his voice, because it shouldn’t have been familiar, but it was, speaking to me on some deep level just like his eyes always had as a wolf. It was turning out to be more difficult to accept this than I’d thought. I opened my eyes. He was still there. I tried again, closing and then opening them once more. But he was still there.
He laughed. “Are you having an epileptic fit? Maybe you should be in this bed.”
I glared at him, and he turned bright red as he realized another meaning for his words. I spared him from his mortification by answering his question. “What’s the favor?”
“I, uh, need some clothing. I need to get out of here before they figure out I’m a freak.”
“How do you mean? I didn’t see a tail.”
Sam reached up and began to pry at the edge of the dressings on his neck.
“Are you crazy?” I reached forward and grabbed at his hand, too late. He peeled away the gauze to reveal four new stitches dotting a short line through old scar tissue. There was no fresh wound still oozing blood, no evidence of the gunshot except for the pink, shiny scar.
My jaw dropped.
Sam smiled, clearly pleased by my reaction. “See, don’t you think they’d suspect something?”
“But there was so much blood—”
“Yeah. My skin just couldn’t heal when it was bleeding so much. Once they stitched me up—” He shrugged and made a little gesture with his hands, like he was opening a small book. “Abracadabra. There are some perks to being me.” His words were light, but his expression was anxious, watching me, seeing how I was taking all this. How I was taking the fact of his existence.
“Okay, I just have to see something here,” I told him. “I just—” I stepped forward and touched the end of my fingers to the scar tissue on his neck. Somehow feeling the smooth, firm skin convinced me in a way that his words couldn’t. Sam’s eyes slid to my face and away again, unsure of where to look while I felt the lump of old scar beneath the prickling black sutures. I let my hand linger on his neck for slightly longer than necessary, not on the scar, but on the smooth, wolf-scented skin beside it. “Okay. So obviously you need to leave before they look at it. But if you sign out against medical advice or just take off, they’ll try to track you down.”
He made a face. “No, they won’t. They’ll just figure I’m some derelict without insurance.
Which is true. Well, the insurance part.”
So much for being subtle. “No, they’ll think you left to avoid counseling. They think you shot yourself because of—” Sam’s face was puzzled.
I pointed to his wrists.
“Oh, that. I didn’t do that.”
I frowned at him again. I didn’t want to say something like, “It’s okay, you have an excuse” or “You can tell me, I won’t judge,” because, really, that’d be just as bad as Sunny, assuming that he’d tried to kill himself. But it wasn’t as though he could’ve gotten those scars tripping on the stairs.
He rubbed a thumb over one of his wrists, thoughtful. “My mom did this one. Dad did the other one. I remember they counted backward so they’d do it at the same time. I still can’t stand to look at a bathtub.”
It took me a moment to process what he meant. I don’t know what did it—the flat, emotionless way he said it, the image of the scene that swam in my head, or just the shock of the evening in general, but I suddenly felt dizzy. My head whirled, my heartbeat crashed in my ears, and I hit the sticky linoleum floor hard.
I don’t know how many seconds I was out, but I saw the curtain slide open at the same time that Sam thumped back down on the bed, slapping the bandage back over his neck.
Then a male nurse was kneeling beside me, helping me sit up.
“Are you okay?”
I’d fainted. I’d never fainted in my life. I closed my eyes and opened them again, until the nurse had one head instead of three heads floating side by side. Then I began to lie. “I just thought about all the blood when I found him…ohhhh…” I still felt woozy, so the ohhhh sounded very convincing.
“Don’t think about it,” suggested the nurse, smiling in a very friendly way. I thought his hand was slightly too close to my boob for casual contact, and that fact steeled my resolve to follow through with the humiliating plan that had just popped into my head.
“I think—I need to ask an embarrassing question,” I muttered, feeling my cheeks heat.
This was almost as bad as if I was telling the truth. “Do you think I could borrow a pair of scrubs? I—uh—my pants—”
“Oh!” cried the poor nurse. His embarrassment at my condition was probably sharpened by his earlier flirtatious smile. “Yes. Absolutely. I’ll be right back.”
Good as his word, he returned in a few minutes, holding a folded pair of sick-green scrubs in his hands. “They might be a little big, but they have strings that you can—you know.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “Uh, do you mind? I’ll just change here. He’s not looking at anything at the moment.” I gestured toward Sam, who was looking convincingly sedated.
The nurse vanished behind the curtains. Sam’s eyes flashed open again, distinctly amused.
He whispered, “Did you tell that man you went potty on yourself?”
“You. Shut. Up,” I hissed back furiously and chucked the scrubs at his head. “Hurry up before they find out I didn’t wet myself. You seriously owe me.”
He grinned and slid the scrubs beneath the thin hospital sheet, wrestling them on, then tugged the dressing from his neck and the blood pressure cuff from his arm. As the cuff dropped to the bed, he ripped off his gown and replaced it with the scrubs top. The monitor squealed in protest, flatlining and announcing his death to the staff.
“Time to go,” he said, and led the way out behind the curtains. As he paused, quickly taking in the room around us, I heard nurses rustling into his curtained area behind us.
“He was sedated.” Sunny’s voice rose above the others.
Sam reached out and grabbed my hand, the most natural thing in the world, and pulled me into the bright light of the hall. Now that he was clothed—in scrubs, no less—and not drowning in blood, nobody blinked an eye as he wended his way past the nurses’ station and on toward the exit. All the while, I could see his wolf’s mind analyzing the situation.
The tilt of his head told me what he was listening to, and the lift of his chin hinted of the scents he was gathering. Agile despite his lanky, loose-jointed build, he cut a deft path through the clutter until we were crossing the general lobby.
A syrupy country song was playing over the speaker system as my sneakers scrubbed across the ugly dark-blue tartan carpet; Sam’s bare feet made no sound. At this time of night, the lobby was empty, without even a receptionist at the desk. I felt so high on adrenaline I thought I could probably fly to Dad’s car. The eternally pragmatic corner of my mind reminded me that I needed to call the tow company to get my own car off the side of the road. But I couldn’t really work up proper annoyance about it, because all I could think about was Sam. My wolf was a cute guy and he was holding my hand. I could die happy.
Then I felt Sam’s hesitation. He held back, eyes fixed on the darkness that pressed against the glass door. “How cold is it out there?”
“Probably not too much colder than it was when I brought you. Why—will it make that much of a difference?”
Sam’s face darkened. “It’s right on the edge. I hate this time of year. I could be either.”
I heard the pain in his voice. “Does it hurt to change?”
He looked away from me. “I want to be human right now.”
I wanted him to be human, too. “I’ll go start the car and get the heater going. That way you’ll only be in the cold for a second.”
He looked a little helpless. “But I don’t know where to go.”
“Where do you normally live?” I was afraid he’d say something pitiful, like the homeless shelter downtown. I assumed he didn’t live with the parents who had cut his wrists.