“Pumpkin,” repeated Isabel.

“Da. Yes. Pumpkin.” I got up, glad that I had fallen asleep fully clothed.

“I do, but I’m driving. I’m pretty sure there’s a cameraman following me. Isn’t that funny?”

The girls drifted closer. They were astonishingly drunk.

Every camera in the apartment had a shot of boob. I was so untempted that I felt positively saintly. I wasn’t sure how I could be so slain by Isabel clothed and so disinterested in these girls.

“Everything about today is funny,” I replied. “Could you please broadcast to the world that there are better ways to show your support of my album-making efforts than showing up on my doorstep? Also, why are you driving? Surely there is nowhere in the world you long to drive to at this hour besides me.”

I heard a petulant honk from outside the window. The three girls and I all looked out the window. Isabel’s SUV was pulling up in the alley behind the apartment. A van pulled up behind with Joan inside.

The timing was tediously coincidental.

“I think you ought to go,” I told the girls, who were all invading my personal space in very unself-conscious ways. I began to herd them back the way they came. I paused to pry one from my arm. “It’s about to get unpleasant.”

As if on cue, the door burst open, the sound in perfect timing with the explosion of my heartbeat.

Isabel Culpeper clicked in, sporting a cropped leopard-print top, black leather pants, and a pair of boots with heels to stab usurpers. She also wore crocheted gloves that went up to her elbows. Nothing about her was out of place. There was not an integer in this world to represent how many times sexier she was than the half-naked girls.

I could not believe that Baby had had the gall to ruin the moment with three topless fans. I felt rather old and weary just then. How many lives had I lived in order to get to a place where these gigglers were merely an inconvenience?

Isabel pursed her red lips. The girls looked at her with the fearlessness of the drunk. Joan and her camera peeked in the doorway.

“Did you broadcast my special request?” I asked Isabel.

I felt strangely nervous that Isabel wouldn’t believe my innocence.

“I did,” she said. “Pumpkin.” Her eyes had found my name jiggling on the intruders. I was no prude, and history will support this claim, but at the moment I was very uncomfortable with the number of bare breasts in the room. It was as if all of my hard-won cynicism had been murdered, orphaning a far more naive sixteen-year-old Cole, nervous that his crush wouldn’t agree to go out with him.

This seemed like a very dangerous place for that Cole to reemerge.

Please don’t be angry. You have to know this isn’t real. Please, Isabel — I wasn’t sure what I could say, not with Joan’s camera watching us carefully from just outside the apartment. The cameras inside the apartment watched carefully from everywhere else.

“I think you should give me that key,” I told the girls. “And you shouldn’t accept keys from strangers. You never know what you’ll find on the other side of the door.”

“Chop-chop,” Isabel suggested, her voice so cool that a nearby semitropical plant dropped dead.

“Are you his girlfriend?” the girl with the key asked, her voice ugly. “Because really —”

Isabel interrupted, “Don’t say anything we’ll both regret later. You can give the key to me, actually.”

She held out an imperious gloved hand. The girl relinquished the key with a sort of hiss. The virginal one crept by Isabel. The third spit at Isabel’s boots on her way out.

There was a pause. The spitter stopped just beyond Joan, a challenge in her face.

Isabel laughed, nasty and dismissive. I suddenly had a very clear idea of what she must have been like in high school.

“Oh, please,” she said.

She slammed the door shut, right in Joan’s face.

Silence.

My heart was thudding in my chest. I almost couldn’t believe how nervous I was, when I’d done nothing wrong, when I didn’t care what anybody thought, when I had spent so long being numb.

“Let’s have a little discussion in your office,” she said, throwing a hand toward the bathroom. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

I closed the door behind us and, as she opened her mouth, held a finger to my lips. Joan and her camera had come into the apartment. My wolf hearing could pick up her breathing on the other side of the door and then the shuffling as she worked to get the boom microphone as close to our voices as possible.

Isabel went to the sink and turned the tap on full blast, the movement of her wrist crisp and vicious. I leaned into the shower and spun the knobs.

Then, with the hissing white noise of wasted water behind us, we gathered by the toilet, heads close.

“God, you smell nice,” I said, low and hushed, because someone had to say it, and to let some of my anxiety escape.

“You smell like —” Isabel stopped herself. She said, “What’s going on here, exactly?”

It was not at all the reaction I’d expected. Not much stopped Isabel in her tracks. I lifted my palm to my hand and inhaled.

Wolf.

Earth and musk, night and instinct.

I didn’t know why it was there, only that it was. It was as if the wolf in me seeped through my pores, released by my anxiety.

Part of me wistfully thought of that wolf body and how just a minute in it would instantly ease all of my jostled feelings.

“Isabel —”

“This is not okay,” she interrupted. “I’m not okay with any of this.”

“It wasn’t me. Baby —”

“I know it was Baby!”

“Then I don’t get it.”

We looked at each other. My fingers had that feeling like my arms had been asleep but now they were waking up. Somehow I was both obviously innocent and obviously in trouble. I still couldn’t tell from her face what she was thinking. She was wearing enough eyeliner to black out the finer points of most emotions.

“I will never feel good about walking into a room with you and three half-naked girls, Cole. I don’t want to see that ever again.”

The problem was that this was part of being me, part of being Cole St. Clair, part of having a band, signing up to be on a voyeuristic TV show. “I can only control myself.”

“Can you?”