Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 6-A)
Jan. 9th, 2010 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tearsTitle: The Last Sleep
Characters/Pairings: Bella, Jacob, Edward, Rosalie. Jacob/Bella, some Edward/Bella.
Rating: PG-13
Jacob awoke after the smell of her in his dreams, his senses following it to the foot of his bed, and then his body freezing to a calm attention of the figure blotting into his vision. She was sitting close to his legs looking pure and anciently still, like she belonged there as a statue lives in a cemetery, giving him the feeling that he’d been sleeping for years while she was sculpted there in the dark dust of his bedroom.
He knew that she could have appeared there only seconds ago. Even though he sat up in bed with drowsily silenced shock, her glance remained forward out the window to the right of his bed. Her appearance was smart and glamorous: she’d managed to style a slight wave to her glossy wisps of hair and wore a timelessly elegant coat along with fine gloves; like an unexpected cold wind, she moved to take them off.
He finally said, “Bella,” with half a question mark on the end of it, because of course nothing about her had aged, but there still was something different.
She looked at him then and smiled like there was something about him she didn’t expect, or like the sight of him saddened her less than she’d anticipated. In the dark her black clothing and pale skin painted the scene of a black and white movie, but with her smile there was a brilliant bronze tint in her eyes.
She said, “Hello.” Clearly as water, without the slight wavering in her voice he’d always known her to have. For a moment they were both completely still. Then Jacob moved without really knowing what he was moving to do, nothing much more than his legs curling up under the blanket, and Bella smiled again, reacting like that action was an invitation; she slipped off her shoes and easily shimmied over Jacob’s body to sit on his other side against the headboard. Seeming a little anxious, she smoothed her skirt over her tights. Looking at him now, she couldn’t help marveling, “You’ve grown.”
Jacob needed only one more second to adjust; he then grinned and said a matter-of-fact, “Yes.” Bella chuckled, and a little more seriously, he simply replied, “You look...better.”
“I am better,” she admitted a little hesitantly. Then his name slipped into her next sentence like it had been clinging in her mouth for years, disarming the rest of her words into less solidity. “Though—Jacob, God, I missed you...”
He was still looking at her like she might be a dream, like he was waiting for the pinch. But he easily replied, “Of course you did.”
With a reminiscent but somber expression she finally explained, “I needed to see if you were okay.”
Jacob looked down at his hands, a couple fingers teasing a loose knot in the woven throw above his lap. “I’m always okay.”
“Good to see you’re living in a decent place now,” she seemed to say as a weak consolation. But her tone lightened as she added, “You know, it took longer than I expected to figure out where you’d moved to, but I actually stumbled in on your workplace tonight. I needed some transmission fluid, and your name tag was hanging up by the door...”
Jacob gave an incredulous little scoff and then started to process that. “ ‘Stumbled in’? We aren’t open very late...”
“No, you’re not. I left a twenty tucked under the cash register. You might as well take it.”
Jacob smiled crookedly. “I never exactly imagined myself doing oil changes all day. Then again, I don’t know if I used to imagine myself doing anything in particular. It’s decent money. You’re not driving some American piece of shit, are you?”
Bella pressed her lips together, a little proud when she answered, “It’s a ‘69 Mercedes-Benz. Drives like it was made yesterday.”
Jacob’s eyes widened approvingly. “SL series?”
She nodded.
“Got yourself a nice ride.”
Bella bit her lip. “It’s for you,” she said.
Jacob looked more directly at Bella, his emotions more raw as the seconds passed. “Bells...”
“It’s yours,” she stated. “I really don’t need it. There are getting to be too many cars in the family.”
For a moment Jacob went very silent, and gave what he seemed to feel was a pathetically ineffectual response. “Thanks.”
“I’m sorry...” Bella practically interrupted him, collapsing in nervous guilt. “You don’t have to take it, if you hate that. It feels weird for me to give you something like that and maybe it’s stupid for me to wake you up like this. It’s just that I’ve known you a long time and never gotten you even a birthday present, so if you—”
“Bella,” Jacob looked softly alarmed, not expecting such sudden vulnerability from her. He hesitated before taking her hand; she remembered the feel of it instantly and curled her fingers around the warmth, which was dimmer now but still a cozy bright-colored sensation to her cold skin. He said, measuringly, “I might as well be the one to bring it up before you freak out...I am still going to do it. I said I would. Whatever you’re here to do, let’s just...not go there.”
Calmed now, Bella said, “You smell nicer.”
After a second Jacob relished his nose into an upper section of her hair, an action that reminded Bella of how he used to rest his cheek upon her head.
“Yeah, you smell great,” he agreed. “Still kind of sweeter than I’d prefer. But nice.”
Bella closed her eyes and allowed her thoughts to relax for only a moment. Then she said, “If I was around all the time, though...You’d change again, wouldn’t you?”
After a moment he sighed, “I guess so.”
Something about the way he said it made Bella fully realize he sounded older than before. “Listen...If it’s okay, I’m going to be checking up on you every once in a while. I need to.” She slowly added, “I may not...come in, if you know what I mean.”
She waited for an amount of devastation to settle into his features, but when his hand decidedly tightened around hers, she sensed that there was some sudden relief in having an actual certainty about her even as his body somewhat sighed out of it its previous elation.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way.” Bella explained, “It will only get harder to live without you. You believe me when I tell you that?...In the end, I do need you. But what I think I need more is for you to live without me.”
Jacob’s face seemed slightly more grim then, like a certain thought had set a slight tightness in his mouth. After his silence was stretching into the sleepy hum of the wind outside, he admitted, “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
With a fragile crack of a smile, Bella said, “I’m sure I do.”
“It sounds to me,” Jacob said guiltlessly, “like you’ve learned from his mistakes.”
Bella’s smile fell but not exactly to a frown. She said, “Edward” like readily clearing her throat to speak about him. “Edward can’t be blamed for what happened to me.”
“No, and I never said that,” Jacob shook his head, his eyes clouding with distant recollection. “What happened to you...I couldn’t help hating him for it, but I never blamed him. It was just what he was. Same way it made me sick being around you sometimes.”
Bella closed her eyes for a moment.
“But it might be partly his fault you always felt all that guilt.” After Jacob’s voice quieted that to her, she bowed her head away from him slightly, and a light curtain of her hair shadowed half of her face. His tone intensified as he went on with a freshly renewed agitation, even as he seemed to be trying to suppress it. “Maybe this is just my take on things, but if you love somebody, and if they’re about to walk out in front of a moving car..."
Bella’s mouth opened, but he interrupted, “No, it’s not like that at all, though, it’s more like when you see that they’re about to hit somebody. You—I mean, you yell, right? Sam’s always told me that you’ll realize more than ever how much you love somebody if it really messes you up when they do something really bad. And I know he wasn’t okay with it and you had to argue and insist that it was your choice, which it was...”
He let things absorb for a second before feeling like he could go on.
“But he should’ve shook some sense into you; he should’ve told you exactly how everything was going to feel afterwards, and he didn’t even yell. If I’d been him, I would’ve screamed at you. I might have been hard enough that you would’ve hated me. But to hurt even one person like that just to be with someone—especially if it had been me—it would’ve ruined you; you wouldn’t even be the same person to me. And sometimes I could just swear to you that you were going to change your mind if you’d still gotten a choice, just cause I still look at you and see Bella. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with how you felt about me; I just can’t feel that you would’ve gone through with it. I don’t believe it.”
Bella let this all sink in with a calm clarity. Then she solidly admitted, “I do wish he’d told me more. We should’ve had more time to talk about what it would be like, but I wonder if it even occurred to him how easy I told myself it would be...In my mind, I was descending into a fairy tale, this...pure place where I could spend my life with him forever. But it was a dream. Living so long isn’t any simpler. It just seems like it, and you have to trick yourself into not falling off the edge and ending up like the rest. I didn’t understand how things can become so terrifyingly magnified, maybe because Edward couldn’t even see that in himself. In a life like this, you can’t just live for one person; there has to be other things. I keep wondering, if one of these creatures eventually took him away from me, would I be one of them, with nothing else to do but avenge him? What would be left of me?”
Even though the question was not meant to be answered, Jacob solemnly shook his head in a slight incredulous response.
After a moment Bella looked at him affectionately. “When you said that about being so sure that I was still me...I couldn’t help thinking how much I needed to hear something like that a long time ago.”
“I know,” Jacob disclaimed. “I know. But all that came out of how furious I always was with you—still was—for the sake of people like your dad because of what you’d wanted to do, and I wouldn’t have dared to bring that up before.”
Bella seemed to cringe a little.
“Sorry,” Jacob immediately said. “Maybe it’s still not right to...”
“That’s not it. It’s just that I was reminded...” Bella pressed her lips together, ran her fingers through her bangs. “Before I flew here, I was in Arizona looking in on my mother...She’s been fighting cancer.”
Jacob’s face became earnest. “I was wondering if you’d found out.”
She looked at him with a few surprised blinks. “How did you know?”
“I’ve actually been talking to Reneé for a while. Well, writing.” In response to Bella’s open curiosity, he explained, “It was shortly after you left...I just decided one day to look her up and write her a letter, since I was sure you’d mentioned me to her a couple times. I just thought, since we both knew things about you that the other didn’t—though I obviously couldn’t tell her most of the stuff I know—maybe it would make us both feel a little better. I didn’t really expect to get a response, but she wrote me back within that week, and we’ve been in correspondence ever since. God knows what I’ve been filling up those pages with all this time. I’m terrible at writing letters.”
“I’m sure you’ve improved by now,” Bella assured him with a delicate laugh. “That’s really...That’s wonderful, Jacob. I don’t even know what to say.”
“Have you seen Dita?”
“Yes, and she’s grown up to look a lot like me. Takes after Phil, though, considering she’s into soccer and...things.”
Smiling, Jacob considered for a second, and then turned to swing his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Bella watched him walk around the bed to her side before he held out his hand with a subdued inviting look. While perplexed, she took it and let him pull her up and off the bed.
Jacob bent just slightly to hit a button on his little boxy alarm clock, settling for what was currently playing on the cassette tape, then careened both their bodies into the wider space of the room, suggesting, “Want to take a break from talking for a while?”
“You’re joking,” Bella said with a laugh. “You were never much of the dancing type...unless that’s changed.”
He chuckled almost silently, as he pulled her in at the waist, holding one of her hands close to his chest. “Humor me. This is the last of any time we really get to spend together...and well, we never did this before.”
She looked up at him sort of accusingly. “But we did.”
His eyes were snickering. “Swaying in place is not dancing.” And with that he eagerly tested her by slowly swinging her under his arm; she easily went with the motion in a smooth pirouette. It didn’t quite fit with the music, an entrancingly moody but harder number than anything she and Edward would have ever danced to. Despite Jacob’s remark, they found themselves in a woozy sway, Bella sampling different levels of closeness her sense of smell could tolerate until she finally rested her head against his chest, feeling the calming warmth of him through his undershirt.
After a moment Jacob made a monosyllabic chuckle, realizing, “We must look like an odd pair.”
“You still look beautiful, Jacob,” she said in a kind of reassuring grunt. She felt him beginning to laugh. “No, you do. You know what’s funny is it’s kind of fitting. Remember how we used to argue about how mentally old we were? You always came out at least twenty years ahead.”
Jacob’s breathing became slightly shuddered for half a moment. With his lips close in her hair, he muttered, “I can’t believe you remember that.” There was an edge of forever ago in his tone, like that memory lived in the farmost corner of even his mind.
“I’ve built up quite an inventory.” Bella hesitated. “To be honest, I’m a little surprised that everything’s still...kind of vivid for you. I was prepared for you to not really have any interest in talking to me. Or to at least think it wasn’t a good idea.”
“It’s usually a terrible idea, honey,” Jacob said at more of an affectionate whisper. “You’re a little hard to forget. You know I’ll be okay, though.”
Bella shook her head like there was a thought she couldn’t make sense of. “Will you?”
They’d stopped dancing.
Bella was looking him all over searchingly as she stammered, like the consolation she wanted was somewhere on his body, somewhere in the room. “If you can’t live your own life, if you can’t get on with your life, I have no right asking...You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you couldn’t take it? I could just...I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d do something else...”
Neither of them were capable of fully imagining her other options. The distant, unhinged look that came into Bella’s eyes when she’d said that, the something else. It made Jacob’s mind go to the reason she’d left him in the first place, ages ago. It wasn’t the first time he’d scared himself by imagining that dark realm of possibility in which she might just get on a plane to Europe...
She was clutching at him slightly, anxiously looking him in the eyes. Jacob wondered right then: After all these years, was she still such a total fool?
Or did she know he was going to lie?
“I’ll be fine,” he muttered, his head rested above hers so that she didn’t see his eyes. “I am fine.”
Later that night, if he had felt like being absurdly polite, he might have asked if she was expected back somewhere, tried to measure out on her means how much time they had. Instead he pulled on a jacket, remarking that it would be morning within the hour and that if they walked to the beach they could watch the sun rise. He then waited while she hesitantly but then rapidly put on her coat without buttoning it, not bothering with the gloves either. They’d come to an unspoken understanding between them since he’d woken up; he couldn’t go so far as to accusingly insist that she owed him anything, but she wasn’t about to deny him anything he wanted from her. Neither of them knew when the visit was going to end.
The walk down the road took up about half an hour and was downright surreal in its sudden feel of normalcy. The badly lit area had houses spaced so far apart it was hard to imagine a neighborly atmosphere, so Bella was a little surprised when a younger-middle-aged woman came carting a Vespa down the driveway, saw them and exclaimed, “Mr. Black? Where the hell have you been?”
“On vacation,” Jacob offered with a smile. As they got closer he said, “Bella, this is Nadine. She...passes my house sometimes. Walking the dog.”
The woman smiled and came forward to shake Bella’s hand. When she got a close look at her piercingly pretty features, her hand faltered just a second longer than might have been normal. “You an old friend, Bella? I didn’t think he had any that weren’t men.”
“Not really, I guess,” Jacob muttered. “Just Bells.”
It made Bella uncomfortable that Nadine looked so partly awestruck. She herself was quite pretty, with a deep and soft look in her dark eyes and the kind of olive skin tone Bella had always envied. When she and Jacob had finished their spell of small talk, the woman motored down the opposite direction, leaving the pair with half-awkward smiles.
“She’s...cute,” Bella volunteered.
“Sure, sure,” Jacob agreed in a laugh. After his face straightened up, he gestured to the house they’d now passed, explaining. “Actually, she lives there with this other woman, I’m pretty sure they’re together...The girlfriend makes these amazing glasswork sculptures that sell for about a thousand a pop. At least I think so, she’s Czech or something, and I can hardly understand a damn thing she says...”
Bella laughed, suddenly brightened up rather than disoriented by the casual feel of their walk. Jacob was treating her like a good friend, a family member that comes around every couple years. She wanted to forget that as far as Jacob was concerned, she wouldn’t be coming back. Not for a very long time.
She also knew this was the last time she could really see him, not through his window or from far off in the trees, with their association having any kind of semblance to its old rhythms. She looked down at Jacob’s hand, and after a second reached out and held it. He gave her a warm look and gripped it eagerly.
The beach was textured with a mild wind and wasn’t as rocky as theirs in La Push. Jacob commented on one of his few complaints: though the cliffs were pretty ideal for diving, the park district had made it illegal to do any of that several years ago. “A young girl drowned here a few years back,” he added grimly. “I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.”
They were now approaching pretty close to the water, and the sky had a pretty electric blue hue. Bella kept her hand closed around Jacob’s, tucking the other one into her pocket.
“Why did you leave?” she finally asked. “I never really imagined you would.”
“It’s not like I went very far.” Jacob shrugged. “I needed to find work. It’s nice to be able to support my dad. I’m not alone, though, I’ve got Embry. He moved in with his girlfriend out here before me, said his manager could use another mechanic...”
Bella, half-pleased, cocked an eyebrow. “And by ‘girlfriend,’ do you mean...”
“No, no...” Jacob was shaking his head with amusement. “He didn’t imprint. The way those two make fun of each other, it’s like the opposite of that. Thing is...Embry and I were the only guys that didn’t imprint in the end, and we’re the only ones that left. Even Seth, he met this older woman four or five years ago...That was a first. And she moved in on the rez. Thing is, Quil isn’t mad or anything that we left, and he comes down here whenever he feels like it, but sometimes I think he sees this rift between us that isn’t even there.”
Jacob’s worrisome look immediately affected Bella; she rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand and said, “That’ll get better.”
He smiled faintly at her, then looked away before he awkwardly pressed on to a topic that had hardly ever been initiated by him. “What about everything with your...folks. I find it hard to imagine they all understand...”
Bella forced a smile in defense to the stinging rush. “For most of them, I think the best they can do is accept that they can’t understand. And they don’t try to talk me out of it. They know what that would do to me. Rosalie, though, she sort of...checks up on me. She asks me from day to day what I’m feeling about things, and the fact that she doesn’t say anything back basically says...well." She tersely neglected finishing that thought.
A look from Jacob conveyed to her that he remembered the small amount of Rosalie’s past Bella had explained to him in the mere handful of conversations they’d had about her life with the Cullens. Any elaboration on Bella’s relationship with Rosalie had required some perspective on the bitter story of her transformation.
After a moment Bella’s face started to fill with remorse; she winced her eyes shut briefly. “Rosalie...The way she is makes me feel so weak. I used to not believe how cold and reserved she can be, but...She literally feels all this pain every single day. It’s never going away for her, and she just deals with it, year by year. And I have that pain—I hurt like something’s burning me whenever I’m alone, and I start to understand why so many of our kind just go so sour and cruel, and I feel just horrifying that way...And I know I can’t do it.”
The sun was mostly up, bringing faint light through the occasional sprinkles of rainfall that had started while they’d stood there watching the sea; they were indifferent to their surroundings for the moment, isolated from their setting as well as completely alone on the drafty beach.
“But a few months ago?” Bella continued, her voice rising gradually to more distressed heights. “Most of us are sitting down watching a movie, and I’m suddenly reminded of something that makes me have this unbearable thought; my first reaction is that my face is going to show everything, and Edward can’t see me like that, so I just tell everyone I’m going hunting and I run outside. A minute later Rosalie comes up behind me, asking what’s going on. I tell her...” Bella faltered a couple seconds. “I told her something, this thing I remembered that’s so horrible I couldn’t bear for so long for anyone to know about it but me...How he made me choose where I wanted the pain to start. He threatened me with a slower death if I didn’t—He made me practically beg him to bite me, somewhere on my body, taking advantage of the fact that I knew how much it would hurt. He got it out of me pretty fast, and then he held me down and just waited, laughing at my horror, until just before...”
Jacob’s hand had clenched tight around Bella’s, shaking in a purely human, vulnerable rage, a small voiceless sound escaping him.
“I told her that what made me suddenly so anguished was realizing that they might have done a similar thing to my dad. And Rosalie thought about it for a moment and then she suddenly just said, ‘I think you’re making the right decision.’ She told me she thinks I won’t be able to get on like she did because I’ll never be selfish enough. She even said the fact that I’d run out of the house instead of letting Edward share my pain was enough to prove this.” Bella spoke more calmly now, her voice transitioning to a more distant tone. "It explains a lot about her, than she needed to be that way, that her mind just pushed her life away from her so that it would survive, and she hardly remembers anyone. She told me I'm too in-between, that I'm still living for things that are just going to be ghosts...It’s too late to fix the way I think. The only way is this one thing, the most selfish thing I’ll ever do.”
At that last comment Bella had kind of automatically pulled her hand away from Jacob’s and tucked it deep in her pocket. Jacob looked unsettled then, slipping out of his sandles and pacing slowly backwards toward the tide so that the thin rolling end of it licked smoothly past his heels. “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” he mumbled.
“I do, though,” Bella protested, following him out to the shallow water. “I need you to know that it’s not like I’m leaving you. It’s practically the opposite. Maybe the best way I know how to balance things out in the end is to give him the life I have left...and just...”
Her voice trailed off, and Jacob’s eyes were set with subdued flames as he now suddenly turned, took her by both wrists and pulled her closer in the water now reaching up to his knees. “I can handle it. Just say it.”
She was caught off guard, and now her true hold on it in her mind, the euphemism, was knocked out of her. It left the sudden naked and impassioned edge to her voice when she let the truth breathe out of her more like an alarmed question than a statement: “I want to die with you.”
After a slowly disarming pause, Jacob sighed, moving one hand more gently to the side of her head, but his face remained tensed by tremorous ghosts of thoughts.
“I’m living for you as much as for any of them, and it’s not supposed to work that way,” Bella admitted, her eyes fixed lovingly up and down him, even now newly gathering his grown features. “It will be hard enough when my mother passes, but after you’re gone...I don’t even want to know what that would be like.”
A long silence passed between them as Jacob’s features relaxed just slightly and he brought his hands down around her elbows, pulling and resting her arms up to his chest. The water billowed up Bella’s coat so that the fabric was a rocking, deeply colored island around her except where her waist was poised against him. They could stand like this, even silently, for hours. But they both felt the draining push, that it was time to say whatever was left that needed to be said. They weren’t sure if it was all something that could be spoken.
“Why couldn’t you tell me anything like this before?” Jacob said almost at a whisper. “I had to hear it the first time from him.”
She was somewhat speechless, then just sighed.
“Your man told me you loved me. Edward did. You didn’t. And I don’t think you were denying it, I think you really knew most of the time.”
“That’s the thing,” Bella confessed. “I had a pretty good skill for self-denial my whole life. But it kind of inverted when I was changed. You have to see things more clearly to manipulate people’s perceptions of them...From the day I survived, I could keep anything from anybody, keep them in the dark.
"But I could see everything in myself; it was all crystal-clear and undebatable, like a heavy bound book about my whole life, my whole mind. And you were in a lot more of the book than I’d realized, and I could no longer argue with myself because there it was. I loved you, and I wanted you, once. But I was ashamed still. It wasn’t my fault for the way I felt, of course, but still...Shame, it’s just the story of my life.”
They might have unconsciously waded out farther, or maybe the tide was rising, but it was swishing past their knees now, their clothes thinning heavily and sticking at their sides.
“You know what’s strange,” Jacob said. “I spent years being so bitter about how things turned out that year, when we became close so fast, thinking to myself that things shouldn’t be this way because there shouldn’t be any monsters, like I still didn’t want it to be real. I just wanted to keep being a kid with a good-sized hole in my heart for a best girl friend because that was nice and complicated in a very regular way.
"But a long time ago, somewhere I got to thinking...how it would be if you were a wolf too. The way we used to mess around in the woods all day, we could do that forever. Maybe not what a vampire would call forever but enough of an eternity I could live with. It makes me kind of understand what you thought you were doing when you wanted to always be with him. I even wonder if you deceived yourself sometimes, with my ability to stop aging. I think it took you a while to realize we couldn’t keep doing it until the world ended.”
“I could have, and would have.” Bella’s solemn tone indicated she’d given similar reflection. “But I didn’t want you to. That too was a dream. And I’m so sorry—”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” he interrupted, his distant tone muttering out to the horizon. “Please keep telling yourself that. Loving somebody isn’t a reason to be sorry. And I don’t think you often acted on much of anything else.”
Her gaze deepened and softened as he spoke. He reached and pushed some stray strands away from her cheekbone; his touch lingered.
“And I’m not sorry,” he told her, his body shaking just a little, and sadly. Both his hands gently moved to her face, his thumbs brushing over the pale skin, and then travelled down her arms. He added with finality, “I’m not sorry about this.”
She didn’t stop him—How could she have stopped him?—He grabbed her just above the waist and hoisted her steadily up to him, clutching her body into his and kissing her softly and cautiously; their mouths were just slightly open and mostly unmoving and there was hardly any lust in it, more like a painting of a kiss than an actual kiss.
But her arms moved up, clutching around his shoulders; she was more than allowing it. What her senses wanted to memorize more than the joining of their lips was the feeling of surrender in her body from being lifted up against him, his one hand clutching now at the back of her neck and the slight tremble in his stomach she felt through the sopping fabric that seemed to mirror the tremulous but motionless feeling in her own body of so much sadness and happiness and longing and love sifting into her chest and joining into one invisible pulse, the memories conveniently and cruelly indexing themselves under the one phrase, My Jacob.
Some of his breath came fevered through her lips; the dormant creature she smelled in him gave her throat a raw tingle, but the burn seemed to fuel a low fury that only made her want to latch onto him closer. It seemed out of sensing this that he slowly, softly pulled his mouth away and just hugged her as closely as he could, rocking her in his arms a little.
After a minute he slowly set her feet back down in the sand, a motion through the water like plucking a floating angel to the ground. He placed one kiss on her forehead and said, “Love you.” He closed his eyes just briefly, probably knowing that when he opened them she’d be gone.
It was still strange to her, how in the most brutal emotions she could feel like she was numbly sleepwalking through her path even when she was moving at lightning speed. She made her entire way back to Edward like a blind person grappling for a familiar hand.
Arriving at the hotel, she clenched her teeth with the effort of not walking through the lobby and upstairs any faster than was human; for a vampire it felt like the span of miles. She blankly greeted a guest at the bottom of the staircase just so he might hear her voice from their room. Finally, on the third floor, he met her flinging open the door as she came to it. She threw her arms around him with a small moan of relief, hardly looking at his face before she did so, but it didn’t matter; they quickly let the door shut behind them, their motions winding tangled into an inhuman acrobatic fervor before they heard the short slam, Bella pulling Edward around her like she wanted him to crush her into sawdust. A lamp was knocked to the wall and cracked its miniature sound of wreckage as their bodies slipped and locked, just clutching tighter and tighter and tighter in a cradling embrace on the bed. They did not fill her newly quaked chasms; they flung themselves bravely to the bottom, together.
She wasn’t sorry.
On the morning after that night in the hotel, Bella and Edward had gone hunting together in a baited silence...
Characters/Pairings: Bella, Jacob, Edward, Rosalie. Jacob/Bella, some Edward/Bella.
Rating: PG-13
Jacob awoke after the smell of her in his dreams, his senses following it to the foot of his bed, and then his body freezing to a calm attention of the figure blotting into his vision. She was sitting close to his legs looking pure and anciently still, like she belonged there as a statue lives in a cemetery, giving him the feeling that he’d been sleeping for years while she was sculpted there in the dark dust of his bedroom.
He knew that she could have appeared there only seconds ago. Even though he sat up in bed with drowsily silenced shock, her glance remained forward out the window to the right of his bed. Her appearance was smart and glamorous: she’d managed to style a slight wave to her glossy wisps of hair and wore a timelessly elegant coat along with fine gloves; like an unexpected cold wind, she moved to take them off.
He finally said, “Bella,” with half a question mark on the end of it, because of course nothing about her had aged, but there still was something different.
She looked at him then and smiled like there was something about him she didn’t expect, or like the sight of him saddened her less than she’d anticipated. In the dark her black clothing and pale skin painted the scene of a black and white movie, but with her smile there was a brilliant bronze tint in her eyes.
She said, “Hello.” Clearly as water, without the slight wavering in her voice he’d always known her to have. For a moment they were both completely still. Then Jacob moved without really knowing what he was moving to do, nothing much more than his legs curling up under the blanket, and Bella smiled again, reacting like that action was an invitation; she slipped off her shoes and easily shimmied over Jacob’s body to sit on his other side against the headboard. Seeming a little anxious, she smoothed her skirt over her tights. Looking at him now, she couldn’t help marveling, “You’ve grown.”
Jacob needed only one more second to adjust; he then grinned and said a matter-of-fact, “Yes.” Bella chuckled, and a little more seriously, he simply replied, “You look...better.”
“I am better,” she admitted a little hesitantly. Then his name slipped into her next sentence like it had been clinging in her mouth for years, disarming the rest of her words into less solidity. “Though—Jacob, God, I missed you...”
He was still looking at her like she might be a dream, like he was waiting for the pinch. But he easily replied, “Of course you did.”
With a reminiscent but somber expression she finally explained, “I needed to see if you were okay.”
Jacob looked down at his hands, a couple fingers teasing a loose knot in the woven throw above his lap. “I’m always okay.”
“Good to see you’re living in a decent place now,” she seemed to say as a weak consolation. But her tone lightened as she added, “You know, it took longer than I expected to figure out where you’d moved to, but I actually stumbled in on your workplace tonight. I needed some transmission fluid, and your name tag was hanging up by the door...”
Jacob gave an incredulous little scoff and then started to process that. “ ‘Stumbled in’? We aren’t open very late...”
“No, you’re not. I left a twenty tucked under the cash register. You might as well take it.”
Jacob smiled crookedly. “I never exactly imagined myself doing oil changes all day. Then again, I don’t know if I used to imagine myself doing anything in particular. It’s decent money. You’re not driving some American piece of shit, are you?”
Bella pressed her lips together, a little proud when she answered, “It’s a ‘69 Mercedes-Benz. Drives like it was made yesterday.”
Jacob’s eyes widened approvingly. “SL series?”
She nodded.
“Got yourself a nice ride.”
Bella bit her lip. “It’s for you,” she said.
Jacob looked more directly at Bella, his emotions more raw as the seconds passed. “Bells...”
“It’s yours,” she stated. “I really don’t need it. There are getting to be too many cars in the family.”
For a moment Jacob went very silent, and gave what he seemed to feel was a pathetically ineffectual response. “Thanks.”
“I’m sorry...” Bella practically interrupted him, collapsing in nervous guilt. “You don’t have to take it, if you hate that. It feels weird for me to give you something like that and maybe it’s stupid for me to wake you up like this. It’s just that I’ve known you a long time and never gotten you even a birthday present, so if you—”
“Bella,” Jacob looked softly alarmed, not expecting such sudden vulnerability from her. He hesitated before taking her hand; she remembered the feel of it instantly and curled her fingers around the warmth, which was dimmer now but still a cozy bright-colored sensation to her cold skin. He said, measuringly, “I might as well be the one to bring it up before you freak out...I am still going to do it. I said I would. Whatever you’re here to do, let’s just...not go there.”
Calmed now, Bella said, “You smell nicer.”
After a second Jacob relished his nose into an upper section of her hair, an action that reminded Bella of how he used to rest his cheek upon her head.
“Yeah, you smell great,” he agreed. “Still kind of sweeter than I’d prefer. But nice.”
Bella closed her eyes and allowed her thoughts to relax for only a moment. Then she said, “If I was around all the time, though...You’d change again, wouldn’t you?”
After a moment he sighed, “I guess so.”
Something about the way he said it made Bella fully realize he sounded older than before. “Listen...If it’s okay, I’m going to be checking up on you every once in a while. I need to.” She slowly added, “I may not...come in, if you know what I mean.”
She waited for an amount of devastation to settle into his features, but when his hand decidedly tightened around hers, she sensed that there was some sudden relief in having an actual certainty about her even as his body somewhat sighed out of it its previous elation.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way.” Bella explained, “It will only get harder to live without you. You believe me when I tell you that?...In the end, I do need you. But what I think I need more is for you to live without me.”
Jacob’s face seemed slightly more grim then, like a certain thought had set a slight tightness in his mouth. After his silence was stretching into the sleepy hum of the wind outside, he admitted, “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
With a fragile crack of a smile, Bella said, “I’m sure I do.”
“It sounds to me,” Jacob said guiltlessly, “like you’ve learned from his mistakes.”
Bella’s smile fell but not exactly to a frown. She said, “Edward” like readily clearing her throat to speak about him. “Edward can’t be blamed for what happened to me.”
“No, and I never said that,” Jacob shook his head, his eyes clouding with distant recollection. “What happened to you...I couldn’t help hating him for it, but I never blamed him. It was just what he was. Same way it made me sick being around you sometimes.”
Bella closed her eyes for a moment.
“But it might be partly his fault you always felt all that guilt.” After Jacob’s voice quieted that to her, she bowed her head away from him slightly, and a light curtain of her hair shadowed half of her face. His tone intensified as he went on with a freshly renewed agitation, even as he seemed to be trying to suppress it. “Maybe this is just my take on things, but if you love somebody, and if they’re about to walk out in front of a moving car..."
Bella’s mouth opened, but he interrupted, “No, it’s not like that at all, though, it’s more like when you see that they’re about to hit somebody. You—I mean, you yell, right? Sam’s always told me that you’ll realize more than ever how much you love somebody if it really messes you up when they do something really bad. And I know he wasn’t okay with it and you had to argue and insist that it was your choice, which it was...”
He let things absorb for a second before feeling like he could go on.
“But he should’ve shook some sense into you; he should’ve told you exactly how everything was going to feel afterwards, and he didn’t even yell. If I’d been him, I would’ve screamed at you. I might have been hard enough that you would’ve hated me. But to hurt even one person like that just to be with someone—especially if it had been me—it would’ve ruined you; you wouldn’t even be the same person to me. And sometimes I could just swear to you that you were going to change your mind if you’d still gotten a choice, just cause I still look at you and see Bella. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with how you felt about me; I just can’t feel that you would’ve gone through with it. I don’t believe it.”
Bella let this all sink in with a calm clarity. Then she solidly admitted, “I do wish he’d told me more. We should’ve had more time to talk about what it would be like, but I wonder if it even occurred to him how easy I told myself it would be...In my mind, I was descending into a fairy tale, this...pure place where I could spend my life with him forever. But it was a dream. Living so long isn’t any simpler. It just seems like it, and you have to trick yourself into not falling off the edge and ending up like the rest. I didn’t understand how things can become so terrifyingly magnified, maybe because Edward couldn’t even see that in himself. In a life like this, you can’t just live for one person; there has to be other things. I keep wondering, if one of these creatures eventually took him away from me, would I be one of them, with nothing else to do but avenge him? What would be left of me?”
Even though the question was not meant to be answered, Jacob solemnly shook his head in a slight incredulous response.
After a moment Bella looked at him affectionately. “When you said that about being so sure that I was still me...I couldn’t help thinking how much I needed to hear something like that a long time ago.”
“I know,” Jacob disclaimed. “I know. But all that came out of how furious I always was with you—still was—for the sake of people like your dad because of what you’d wanted to do, and I wouldn’t have dared to bring that up before.”
Bella seemed to cringe a little.
“Sorry,” Jacob immediately said. “Maybe it’s still not right to...”
“That’s not it. It’s just that I was reminded...” Bella pressed her lips together, ran her fingers through her bangs. “Before I flew here, I was in Arizona looking in on my mother...She’s been fighting cancer.”
Jacob’s face became earnest. “I was wondering if you’d found out.”
She looked at him with a few surprised blinks. “How did you know?”
“I’ve actually been talking to Reneé for a while. Well, writing.” In response to Bella’s open curiosity, he explained, “It was shortly after you left...I just decided one day to look her up and write her a letter, since I was sure you’d mentioned me to her a couple times. I just thought, since we both knew things about you that the other didn’t—though I obviously couldn’t tell her most of the stuff I know—maybe it would make us both feel a little better. I didn’t really expect to get a response, but she wrote me back within that week, and we’ve been in correspondence ever since. God knows what I’ve been filling up those pages with all this time. I’m terrible at writing letters.”
“I’m sure you’ve improved by now,” Bella assured him with a delicate laugh. “That’s really...That’s wonderful, Jacob. I don’t even know what to say.”
“Have you seen Dita?”
“Yes, and she’s grown up to look a lot like me. Takes after Phil, though, considering she’s into soccer and...things.”
Smiling, Jacob considered for a second, and then turned to swing his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Bella watched him walk around the bed to her side before he held out his hand with a subdued inviting look. While perplexed, she took it and let him pull her up and off the bed.
Jacob bent just slightly to hit a button on his little boxy alarm clock, settling for what was currently playing on the cassette tape, then careened both their bodies into the wider space of the room, suggesting, “Want to take a break from talking for a while?”
“You’re joking,” Bella said with a laugh. “You were never much of the dancing type...unless that’s changed.”
He chuckled almost silently, as he pulled her in at the waist, holding one of her hands close to his chest. “Humor me. This is the last of any time we really get to spend together...and well, we never did this before.”
She looked up at him sort of accusingly. “But we did.”
His eyes were snickering. “Swaying in place is not dancing.” And with that he eagerly tested her by slowly swinging her under his arm; she easily went with the motion in a smooth pirouette. It didn’t quite fit with the music, an entrancingly moody but harder number than anything she and Edward would have ever danced to. Despite Jacob’s remark, they found themselves in a woozy sway, Bella sampling different levels of closeness her sense of smell could tolerate until she finally rested her head against his chest, feeling the calming warmth of him through his undershirt.
After a moment Jacob made a monosyllabic chuckle, realizing, “We must look like an odd pair.”
“You still look beautiful, Jacob,” she said in a kind of reassuring grunt. She felt him beginning to laugh. “No, you do. You know what’s funny is it’s kind of fitting. Remember how we used to argue about how mentally old we were? You always came out at least twenty years ahead.”
Jacob’s breathing became slightly shuddered for half a moment. With his lips close in her hair, he muttered, “I can’t believe you remember that.” There was an edge of forever ago in his tone, like that memory lived in the farmost corner of even his mind.
“I’ve built up quite an inventory.” Bella hesitated. “To be honest, I’m a little surprised that everything’s still...kind of vivid for you. I was prepared for you to not really have any interest in talking to me. Or to at least think it wasn’t a good idea.”
“It’s usually a terrible idea, honey,” Jacob said at more of an affectionate whisper. “You’re a little hard to forget. You know I’ll be okay, though.”
Bella shook her head like there was a thought she couldn’t make sense of. “Will you?”
They’d stopped dancing.
Bella was looking him all over searchingly as she stammered, like the consolation she wanted was somewhere on his body, somewhere in the room. “If you can’t live your own life, if you can’t get on with your life, I have no right asking...You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you couldn’t take it? I could just...I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d do something else...”
Neither of them were capable of fully imagining her other options. The distant, unhinged look that came into Bella’s eyes when she’d said that, the something else. It made Jacob’s mind go to the reason she’d left him in the first place, ages ago. It wasn’t the first time he’d scared himself by imagining that dark realm of possibility in which she might just get on a plane to Europe...
She was clutching at him slightly, anxiously looking him in the eyes. Jacob wondered right then: After all these years, was she still such a total fool?
Or did she know he was going to lie?
“I’ll be fine,” he muttered, his head rested above hers so that she didn’t see his eyes. “I am fine.”
==================
Later that night, if he had felt like being absurdly polite, he might have asked if she was expected back somewhere, tried to measure out on her means how much time they had. Instead he pulled on a jacket, remarking that it would be morning within the hour and that if they walked to the beach they could watch the sun rise. He then waited while she hesitantly but then rapidly put on her coat without buttoning it, not bothering with the gloves either. They’d come to an unspoken understanding between them since he’d woken up; he couldn’t go so far as to accusingly insist that she owed him anything, but she wasn’t about to deny him anything he wanted from her. Neither of them knew when the visit was going to end.
The walk down the road took up about half an hour and was downright surreal in its sudden feel of normalcy. The badly lit area had houses spaced so far apart it was hard to imagine a neighborly atmosphere, so Bella was a little surprised when a younger-middle-aged woman came carting a Vespa down the driveway, saw them and exclaimed, “Mr. Black? Where the hell have you been?”
“On vacation,” Jacob offered with a smile. As they got closer he said, “Bella, this is Nadine. She...passes my house sometimes. Walking the dog.”
The woman smiled and came forward to shake Bella’s hand. When she got a close look at her piercingly pretty features, her hand faltered just a second longer than might have been normal. “You an old friend, Bella? I didn’t think he had any that weren’t men.”
“Not really, I guess,” Jacob muttered. “Just Bells.”
It made Bella uncomfortable that Nadine looked so partly awestruck. She herself was quite pretty, with a deep and soft look in her dark eyes and the kind of olive skin tone Bella had always envied. When she and Jacob had finished their spell of small talk, the woman motored down the opposite direction, leaving the pair with half-awkward smiles.
“She’s...cute,” Bella volunteered.
“Sure, sure,” Jacob agreed in a laugh. After his face straightened up, he gestured to the house they’d now passed, explaining. “Actually, she lives there with this other woman, I’m pretty sure they’re together...The girlfriend makes these amazing glasswork sculptures that sell for about a thousand a pop. At least I think so, she’s Czech or something, and I can hardly understand a damn thing she says...”
Bella laughed, suddenly brightened up rather than disoriented by the casual feel of their walk. Jacob was treating her like a good friend, a family member that comes around every couple years. She wanted to forget that as far as Jacob was concerned, she wouldn’t be coming back. Not for a very long time.
She also knew this was the last time she could really see him, not through his window or from far off in the trees, with their association having any kind of semblance to its old rhythms. She looked down at Jacob’s hand, and after a second reached out and held it. He gave her a warm look and gripped it eagerly.
The beach was textured with a mild wind and wasn’t as rocky as theirs in La Push. Jacob commented on one of his few complaints: though the cliffs were pretty ideal for diving, the park district had made it illegal to do any of that several years ago. “A young girl drowned here a few years back,” he added grimly. “I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.”
They were now approaching pretty close to the water, and the sky had a pretty electric blue hue. Bella kept her hand closed around Jacob’s, tucking the other one into her pocket.
“Why did you leave?” she finally asked. “I never really imagined you would.”
“It’s not like I went very far.” Jacob shrugged. “I needed to find work. It’s nice to be able to support my dad. I’m not alone, though, I’ve got Embry. He moved in with his girlfriend out here before me, said his manager could use another mechanic...”
Bella, half-pleased, cocked an eyebrow. “And by ‘girlfriend,’ do you mean...”
“No, no...” Jacob was shaking his head with amusement. “He didn’t imprint. The way those two make fun of each other, it’s like the opposite of that. Thing is...Embry and I were the only guys that didn’t imprint in the end, and we’re the only ones that left. Even Seth, he met this older woman four or five years ago...That was a first. And she moved in on the rez. Thing is, Quil isn’t mad or anything that we left, and he comes down here whenever he feels like it, but sometimes I think he sees this rift between us that isn’t even there.”
Jacob’s worrisome look immediately affected Bella; she rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand and said, “That’ll get better.”
He smiled faintly at her, then looked away before he awkwardly pressed on to a topic that had hardly ever been initiated by him. “What about everything with your...folks. I find it hard to imagine they all understand...”
Bella forced a smile in defense to the stinging rush. “For most of them, I think the best they can do is accept that they can’t understand. And they don’t try to talk me out of it. They know what that would do to me. Rosalie, though, she sort of...checks up on me. She asks me from day to day what I’m feeling about things, and the fact that she doesn’t say anything back basically says...well." She tersely neglected finishing that thought.
A look from Jacob conveyed to her that he remembered the small amount of Rosalie’s past Bella had explained to him in the mere handful of conversations they’d had about her life with the Cullens. Any elaboration on Bella’s relationship with Rosalie had required some perspective on the bitter story of her transformation.
After a moment Bella’s face started to fill with remorse; she winced her eyes shut briefly. “Rosalie...The way she is makes me feel so weak. I used to not believe how cold and reserved she can be, but...She literally feels all this pain every single day. It’s never going away for her, and she just deals with it, year by year. And I have that pain—I hurt like something’s burning me whenever I’m alone, and I start to understand why so many of our kind just go so sour and cruel, and I feel just horrifying that way...And I know I can’t do it.”
The sun was mostly up, bringing faint light through the occasional sprinkles of rainfall that had started while they’d stood there watching the sea; they were indifferent to their surroundings for the moment, isolated from their setting as well as completely alone on the drafty beach.
“But a few months ago?” Bella continued, her voice rising gradually to more distressed heights. “Most of us are sitting down watching a movie, and I’m suddenly reminded of something that makes me have this unbearable thought; my first reaction is that my face is going to show everything, and Edward can’t see me like that, so I just tell everyone I’m going hunting and I run outside. A minute later Rosalie comes up behind me, asking what’s going on. I tell her...” Bella faltered a couple seconds. “I told her something, this thing I remembered that’s so horrible I couldn’t bear for so long for anyone to know about it but me...How he made me choose where I wanted the pain to start. He threatened me with a slower death if I didn’t—He made me practically beg him to bite me, somewhere on my body, taking advantage of the fact that I knew how much it would hurt. He got it out of me pretty fast, and then he held me down and just waited, laughing at my horror, until just before...”
Jacob’s hand had clenched tight around Bella’s, shaking in a purely human, vulnerable rage, a small voiceless sound escaping him.
“I told her that what made me suddenly so anguished was realizing that they might have done a similar thing to my dad. And Rosalie thought about it for a moment and then she suddenly just said, ‘I think you’re making the right decision.’ She told me she thinks I won’t be able to get on like she did because I’ll never be selfish enough. She even said the fact that I’d run out of the house instead of letting Edward share my pain was enough to prove this.” Bella spoke more calmly now, her voice transitioning to a more distant tone. "It explains a lot about her, than she needed to be that way, that her mind just pushed her life away from her so that it would survive, and she hardly remembers anyone. She told me I'm too in-between, that I'm still living for things that are just going to be ghosts...It’s too late to fix the way I think. The only way is this one thing, the most selfish thing I’ll ever do.”
At that last comment Bella had kind of automatically pulled her hand away from Jacob’s and tucked it deep in her pocket. Jacob looked unsettled then, slipping out of his sandles and pacing slowly backwards toward the tide so that the thin rolling end of it licked smoothly past his heels. “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” he mumbled.
“I do, though,” Bella protested, following him out to the shallow water. “I need you to know that it’s not like I’m leaving you. It’s practically the opposite. Maybe the best way I know how to balance things out in the end is to give him the life I have left...and just...”
Her voice trailed off, and Jacob’s eyes were set with subdued flames as he now suddenly turned, took her by both wrists and pulled her closer in the water now reaching up to his knees. “I can handle it. Just say it.”
She was caught off guard, and now her true hold on it in her mind, the euphemism, was knocked out of her. It left the sudden naked and impassioned edge to her voice when she let the truth breathe out of her more like an alarmed question than a statement: “I want to die with you.”
After a slowly disarming pause, Jacob sighed, moving one hand more gently to the side of her head, but his face remained tensed by tremorous ghosts of thoughts.
“I’m living for you as much as for any of them, and it’s not supposed to work that way,” Bella admitted, her eyes fixed lovingly up and down him, even now newly gathering his grown features. “It will be hard enough when my mother passes, but after you’re gone...I don’t even want to know what that would be like.”
A long silence passed between them as Jacob’s features relaxed just slightly and he brought his hands down around her elbows, pulling and resting her arms up to his chest. The water billowed up Bella’s coat so that the fabric was a rocking, deeply colored island around her except where her waist was poised against him. They could stand like this, even silently, for hours. But they both felt the draining push, that it was time to say whatever was left that needed to be said. They weren’t sure if it was all something that could be spoken.
“Why couldn’t you tell me anything like this before?” Jacob said almost at a whisper. “I had to hear it the first time from him.”
She was somewhat speechless, then just sighed.
“Your man told me you loved me. Edward did. You didn’t. And I don’t think you were denying it, I think you really knew most of the time.”
“That’s the thing,” Bella confessed. “I had a pretty good skill for self-denial my whole life. But it kind of inverted when I was changed. You have to see things more clearly to manipulate people’s perceptions of them...From the day I survived, I could keep anything from anybody, keep them in the dark.
"But I could see everything in myself; it was all crystal-clear and undebatable, like a heavy bound book about my whole life, my whole mind. And you were in a lot more of the book than I’d realized, and I could no longer argue with myself because there it was. I loved you, and I wanted you, once. But I was ashamed still. It wasn’t my fault for the way I felt, of course, but still...Shame, it’s just the story of my life.”
They might have unconsciously waded out farther, or maybe the tide was rising, but it was swishing past their knees now, their clothes thinning heavily and sticking at their sides.
“You know what’s strange,” Jacob said. “I spent years being so bitter about how things turned out that year, when we became close so fast, thinking to myself that things shouldn’t be this way because there shouldn’t be any monsters, like I still didn’t want it to be real. I just wanted to keep being a kid with a good-sized hole in my heart for a best girl friend because that was nice and complicated in a very regular way.
"But a long time ago, somewhere I got to thinking...how it would be if you were a wolf too. The way we used to mess around in the woods all day, we could do that forever. Maybe not what a vampire would call forever but enough of an eternity I could live with. It makes me kind of understand what you thought you were doing when you wanted to always be with him. I even wonder if you deceived yourself sometimes, with my ability to stop aging. I think it took you a while to realize we couldn’t keep doing it until the world ended.”
“I could have, and would have.” Bella’s solemn tone indicated she’d given similar reflection. “But I didn’t want you to. That too was a dream. And I’m so sorry—”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” he interrupted, his distant tone muttering out to the horizon. “Please keep telling yourself that. Loving somebody isn’t a reason to be sorry. And I don’t think you often acted on much of anything else.”
Her gaze deepened and softened as he spoke. He reached and pushed some stray strands away from her cheekbone; his touch lingered.
“And I’m not sorry,” he told her, his body shaking just a little, and sadly. Both his hands gently moved to her face, his thumbs brushing over the pale skin, and then travelled down her arms. He added with finality, “I’m not sorry about this.”
She didn’t stop him—How could she have stopped him?—He grabbed her just above the waist and hoisted her steadily up to him, clutching her body into his and kissing her softly and cautiously; their mouths were just slightly open and mostly unmoving and there was hardly any lust in it, more like a painting of a kiss than an actual kiss.
But her arms moved up, clutching around his shoulders; she was more than allowing it. What her senses wanted to memorize more than the joining of their lips was the feeling of surrender in her body from being lifted up against him, his one hand clutching now at the back of her neck and the slight tremble in his stomach she felt through the sopping fabric that seemed to mirror the tremulous but motionless feeling in her own body of so much sadness and happiness and longing and love sifting into her chest and joining into one invisible pulse, the memories conveniently and cruelly indexing themselves under the one phrase, My Jacob.
Some of his breath came fevered through her lips; the dormant creature she smelled in him gave her throat a raw tingle, but the burn seemed to fuel a low fury that only made her want to latch onto him closer. It seemed out of sensing this that he slowly, softly pulled his mouth away and just hugged her as closely as he could, rocking her in his arms a little.
After a minute he slowly set her feet back down in the sand, a motion through the water like plucking a floating angel to the ground. He placed one kiss on her forehead and said, “Love you.” He closed his eyes just briefly, probably knowing that when he opened them she’d be gone.
It was still strange to her, how in the most brutal emotions she could feel like she was numbly sleepwalking through her path even when she was moving at lightning speed. She made her entire way back to Edward like a blind person grappling for a familiar hand.
Arriving at the hotel, she clenched her teeth with the effort of not walking through the lobby and upstairs any faster than was human; for a vampire it felt like the span of miles. She blankly greeted a guest at the bottom of the staircase just so he might hear her voice from their room. Finally, on the third floor, he met her flinging open the door as she came to it. She threw her arms around him with a small moan of relief, hardly looking at his face before she did so, but it didn’t matter; they quickly let the door shut behind them, their motions winding tangled into an inhuman acrobatic fervor before they heard the short slam, Bella pulling Edward around her like she wanted him to crush her into sawdust. A lamp was knocked to the wall and cracked its miniature sound of wreckage as their bodies slipped and locked, just clutching tighter and tighter and tighter in a cradling embrace on the bed. They did not fill her newly quaked chasms; they flung themselves bravely to the bottom, together.
She wasn’t sorry.
==================
On the morning after that night in the hotel, Bella and Edward had gone hunting together in a baited silence...
