Cole put his hand around my hair and used it to pull my head back until I was gazing straight up. I saw what he was directing my attention to: the ceiling, far overhead, peaked and made of glass. This was a greenhouse. No, what was the proper word? A conservatory.

The walls of plants and the night eliminated any road or party noise. We were in the middle of nowhere. Back in Minnesota again. No, farther than that, stranger than that.

Someplace no one else had ever been.

Cole walked to the couch and threw himself onto it as if he had seen the entire world and was bored with it. After a moment, he sighed deeply enough that I saw it instead of heard it, the great lift of his chest and then the release.

I set my purse beside the couch and sat on the other end of the sofa. Throwing my legs across his, I leaned back on the sofa arm and released a sigh of my own. Cole rested his arms on top of my legs and blinked at the wall opposite. There was something threadbare about his expression.

We sat like that for several gray-green minutes, the fronds of palms and ferns barely moving. Beside me, a lustrous trumpet flower hung like a waiting silent bell. We didn’t say anything.

Cole kept looking at the wall, and I kept looking at him and at the orange tree on the other side of him.

Cole moved his hand, brushing his fingers over the knob of my anklebone.

I breathed in.

His fingers lingered, playing over my skin, nearly tickling.

With them, he described the shape of my ankle, the edge of my sandal: a sculptor’s hands.

I looked at him. He looked back.

Carefully, he unbuckled the strap of my sandal. The heel hit the floor first. He slid his hand over my foot, my ankle, up my calf. Goose bumps trailed after his fingers.

I breathed out.

The second sandal joined the first. Again he ran his palms up my leg. I was caught in the way that he touched me. It was as if his fingers found me beautiful. As if I were a lovely thing. As if it were a privilege just to trace his fingertips across my body.

I didn’t move. He didn’t know how only hours before, back at the party, I’d let someone else touch me, and had touched him back.

But —

Cole stretched forward to meet my lips. This kiss — his mouth was hungry, wanting. But still his hands were on my back and pressed against my hip, and still his touch was a silent shout: I love you.

How stupid I’d been to think I couldn’t tell the difference between this kiss and Mark’s kiss. How ridiculous to reduce Cole to his mess and his loudness, to be so furious with him that I erased the other true parts. What was I with the kindness scrubbed from the record?

Eyeliner in a white dress.

We were so little, when you took away all our sins.

As I linked my arms around his neck, I was crying.

What an idiot I was. This perfect moment, this perfect kiss, and I was crying. There was so much wrong with me. I was so incredibly messed up that I couldn’t cry when everything was wrong and I couldn’t not when everything was fine.

Our lips were salty with it. Cole didn’t stop or pause, but his hands crept up my back to hold me tighter. After a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine and I put my hands on his face and we just stayed like that, breathing each other’s breaths.

It was so much us and so little him and me. Us, us, us. The opposite of lonely was this.

Cole said, “You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

I replied, “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck.”

He kissed me again. My mouth, my throat, under my ear.

He hesitated. Pulling back, he said, “Tell me this means something to you.”

It was a strange thing to be asked. It seemed like it should have been the other way around. He was the one who had been the touring rock star with countless girls on countless nights.

He was the one with the cavalier smile and the easy laugh.

But that wasn’t the truth. Not really. Not now. Now the truth was that I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.

A tear dripped off my chin and onto my leg. It was gray with my eyeliner.

I said, “Don’t let me leave you.”

Then, in our secret bit of Los Angeles, we kissed and slid from our clothing. His hands adored my body and my mouth explored his and in the end it was this: us us us.

Chapter Forty-Fi v e

· cole ·

This place, this place. Dry Venice, invented Eden, glowing New Age hipster palace where people come to believe in fate and destiny and karma and all of the things that are only true here and only if you make them true.

I was dead in Los Angeles once.

Chapter Forty-Six

· isabel ·

I opened my eyes and didn’t know where I was. And then, even after waking more fully, I suddenly knew, but I didn’t understand.

My brain was a tangle of images and sensations. My own bare legs on top of a comforter, a streetlight moon outside a cracked window, a spidery shadow cast on the wall from a pitcher of dried baby’s breath. Cole’s stubbled chin in the curve of my breastbone, his side, tan and even and endless, his belly button, his hips, his legs, one of his ankles hooked over one of mine, one of his hands carelessly sprawled up against my neck, the other curled in the silky space below my breasts.

My mind took the images, finally, and put them all together into thoughts and memory. Finally, I understood: I was so, so naked.

We were in one of the bedrooms of the rental. Drunk with each other, existing in a sweaty place outside of logic, we’d stumbled in here last night and fallen asleep on top of the comforter here. Now it was some ungodly time of the morning and — What was I even doing? Who was this other person? What was I thinking?

I extricated myself from Cole and found my clothing on the floor. I reached past it to where my phone was tucked into my purse. Two a.m. My mother would still be at work; she wouldn’t be worried. But of course Sofia had been watching and waiting with sleepless owl eyes, anxious for my welfare. I had four missed calls from her.

“Hey,” Cole said. He looked young and uncomplicated and half asleep. He lifted just his fingers from the comforter in my direction. Sleepily, he said again, “Hey.”

I was suddenly petrified that he would say a name other than mine. I knew in a bruising, truthful way that if he said another girl’s name right now, it would break my heart.

“Isabel,” he said, “what are you doing?”