Forever Read Online Free PDF

me.
    The boy still didn’t see me. He’d just tossed his voice out into the emptiness, waiting for a reply.
    I was too afraid. Instincts pinned me to the ground. Grace. The word echoed inside me, losing meaning with each repetition.
    He turned, head bowed, and picked his way slowly away from me, toward the slanted light that marked the edge of the woods. Something like panic rose up inside me. Grace. I was losing the shape of the word. I was losing something. I was lost. I —
    I stood up. If he turned, I was unmistakable now, a dark gray wolf against the black trees. I needed him to stay. If he stayed, maybe it would ease this terrible feeling inside me. The force of standing there, in plain sight, so close to him, made my legs quiver beneath me.
    All he had to do was turn around.
    But he didn’t. He just kept walking, carrying the something that I’d lost with him, carrying the meaning of that word — Grace — never knowing how close he’d been.
    And I remained, silently watching him leave me behind.

• SAM •
    I lived in a war zone.
    When I pulled into the driveway, the music slapped its hands against the car windows. The air outside the house thumped with a booming bass line; the entire building was a speaker. The closest neighbors were acres away, so they were spared the symptoms of the disease that was Cole St. Clair. Cole’s very being was so big that it couldn’t be contained by four walls. It bled out the windows, crashed out of the stereo, shouted out suddenly in the middle of the night. When you took away the stage, you still had the rock star.
    Since he’d come to live in Beck’s house — no, my house — Cole had terraformed it into an alien landscape. It was as if he couldn’t help destroying things; chaos was a side effect to his very presence. He spread every single CD case in the house over the living room floor, left the television turned to infomercials, burned something sticky into the bottom of a skillet and then abandoned it on the stove top. The floorboards in the downstairs hallway were lined with deep dimples and claw marks that led from Cole’s room to the bathroom and back again, a lupine alphabet. He’d inexplicably take every glass out of the cupboard and organize them by size on the counter, leaving all the cabinet doors hanging open, or watch a dozen old ’80s movies halfway through and leave the cassettes unrewound on the floor in front of the VCR he’d excavated from somewhere in the basement.
    I made the mistake of taking it personally, the first time I camehome to the mess. It took me weeks to realize that it wasn’t about me. It was about him. For Cole, it was always about him.
    I got out of the Volkswagen and headed toward the house. I wasn’t planning on being here long enough to worry about Cole’s music. I had a very specific list of items to retrieve before I went back out again. Flashlight. Benadryl. The wire crate from the garage. I’d stop by the store to get some ground beef to put the drugs in.
    I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement. It was just — there were so many ways to effortlessly die as a wolf, just one moment too long on a highway, a few days without a successful hunt, one paw too far into the backyard of a drunk redneck with a rifle.
    I could feel that I was going to lose her.
    I couldn’t go another night with that in my head.
    When I opened the back door, the bass line resolved itself into music. The singer, voice distorted by volume, shouted to me: “Suffocate suffocate suffocate.” The timbre of the voice seemed familiar, and all at once I realized that this was NARKOTIKA, played loud enough for me to mistake the throbbing electronic backbeat for my heartbeat. My breastbone hummed with it.
    I didn’t bother to call