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Bella had imagined things would be different after learning Jacob was a werewolf.
Not for the obvious reasons. If it had been Jessica hanging around Jake, and Jake had suddenly revealed one day after a Pizza Hut run by the way Jess, I'm a werewolf, maybe she would have run for the hills. Maybe. Bella didn't know much about how normal girls behaved. They'd never seemed to hold much court with Edw—with the extraordinary. Maybe she should have been running, too.
But she didn't, because to run away had a requirement. It required thinking that werewolves were dangerous or scary, or categorically Bad for Your Health. And Bella didn't think any of those things. Jake himself seemed the same as always—always smiling, always covered with engine grease, only now several inches taller and packing a ridiculous amount of muscle. Those last two facts weren't exactly threatening.
She did miss his hair, though.
No, what she thought would change was the nature of their friendship. That is, everything would move slowly, indeterminately from companionship and fun, until all that remained between them was business: the business of Protecting Bella Swan From Vampires. Incorporated.
It was her fault, after all, that Jake was a werewolf. Her fault that he had killed for the very first time (the wolf in him knew Laurent only for a vampire; while the boy, undoubtedly, would have seen the shape of the human he assumed). Her fault that he now knew the territory—the deep forests and plunging rivers, rich with scents and alive (or was that dead) with vampire detritus—of La Push better than he knew the inside of his own home. The little red house that Bella used to visit every week, solely to hear the voice of someone who didn't want her anymore.
But what she'd told Jake had been true. If it hadn't been the bikes, it would have been something else to bring her to him; from the very first Jake held some strange magnetism, found ways to attract her to him without even trying. In many ways, Jake was about as normal as you got—and that was even after you factored in the tribal werewolf ancestry.
Something inside Bella still ached for that. The normalcy.
Jacob patrolled several times a week with his friends—now turned spirit brothers, as the gene responsible for their transformations bound them in ways transcending circumstance and blood. Sam wasn't a slavedriver, exactly; but Jake didn't get a lot of breaks, so those he did he put to good use. Almost always he asked for Bella to come with, as if he was still the young kid who had tried to beat out Mike Newton for her hand at the movie theater, had lit up with happiness like a Christmas tree when she'd been a complete phony to him just to hear the Quileute stories. Even after all this, he still wanted to be with Bella.
They still did many of the things they used to, before Jake had fallen ill and before his revelation. They still visited the gnarled and twisted driftwood tree at First Beach, walking along its great white length as the waves lapped gently at the sand; but now their bare feet guided them towards the tide pools, too, the tiny ecosystems of flora and fauna that Bella had loved as a child. Jake's steady arm kept her from falling in as she dipped a net beneath the warm shallow water, raised it to reveal the rainbow shine of barnacles, starfish, sea slugs shaped like lemon peel. Anemones and sea sponges glistened like aquatic treasures at the pool's bottom, vague contours of pink and turquoise in the shimmering shadows.
Sometimes—not every time, but enough to confuse her—when Jake reached out a hand for his turn with the net, Bella's vision would disappear in a flash of memory. A young child's voice would carry on the salt-flavored air, as the huge hand in which the net's tip disappeared suddenly looked more like the hand of a little boy, eagerly clutching with sand-encrusted fingernails. The moment clung to the edges of Bella's vision with the tenacity of the barnacles and starfish until she was back in her own room hours later, marveling at what she remembered now of herself and Jacob Black when they were children, wondering what other memories might have been lost to the passing of years.
Bella still enjoyed the motorcycles, too. Their use hadn't fallen completely by the wayside in the pack's unerring mission to protect her from vengeful vampires, but said protection following spring break included telling her to go straight home from school or work if she wasn't in the company of one of them or to spend her nights at a pack member's house if she was able; and consequently, the bikes saw far less action. Even so, the motorcycles were the very thing that had first brought her to Jacob Black's garage, changed her life even more irrevocably than it'd already been changed. It wouldn't be right to just abandon them.
And anyway, Jake had been a boy before he became a wolf. A sixteen-year-old boy. He was up for any way to have fun.
You don't ever worry about it? she'd asked last week, as they'd enjoyed another reprieve from the guard, her fumbling with the fuschia straps of a helmet so bedazzled and lousy with sequins she would have thought it was a gift from Ali—a little girl. Jacob had found it at a rummage sale on the reservation, insisted she wear it if they both wanted to look totally bitchin' on their motorcycles. You don't worry about getting in an accident? You don't even wear a helmet.
Hey now, he'd laughed. It was a sound she was beginning to love—a rumble tumbling like a piece of coal out of the furnace she knew was hiding somewhere inside his chest. If you love motorcycling enough, it'll definitely kill you, eventually. The trick is to survive long enough that something else kills you first.
Yeah, she'd said. Unless your name is Bella Swan. Then you survive for five minutes before tripping over your own shoelaces and falling down a manhole.
She got the helmet on and they rode. Bella had made it about a mile down Ocean Front, the section of the fifteen-mile route to Forks that occupied beachfront before disappearing into massive thickets of western hemlock and Sitka spruce—the air ripping through her body, invigorating like a cold drink of water for her skin, the coastal line of white sand and low red houses blurring past her so that she felt like a discharged bullet—when the sand and the sky flipped over and she was literally flying, colliding with a rag doll's strength against a huge wide wall of wolf. Jacob's own motorcycle lay in a heap where he'd leapt from it in a desperate attempt to phase and cushion her fall. Another spinout.
Of course, that wasn't the awkward part—with Bella, spinouts came standard. The awkward part came when Jake realized he had no clothes now, that he would have to take Bella home by more unconventional means. The motorcycles were moved off the road and into the trees, to be fetched later under the cover of dark, and Bella had the strange and unique pleasure of clambering up the broad furred back. That was even more fun than motorcycles, even if, with her luck, she felt she was liable to slip off at a moment's notice; she snatched up pieces of fur and held to them with all her strength, as Jake moved through the forest with unnaturally lithe grace, his movements more feline than wolf. The sun went down on them like that, dusky light penetrating the dome of the forest to bathe the towering evergreens golden, and Bella wasn't so sure that Jake wasn't taking a few little detours to extend the trip. What she remembered, more than his scent or the slow swaying walk that gave itself over to the sensations of a gentle rocking boat—more than the incredible warmth baking off his body, so that she wasn't the least bit cold, even after stripping down to a plain thin tee shirt—was how the light lit up his fur in lines of flame, singed it in shades of orange and red and gold.
.
.
Tonight was another night off for Jake. They'd gone to the movies. The Hills Have Eyes was playing—at first Jacob wavered on the choice of film (in light of the fact a vampire wanted to give her a horror movie death), but Bella knew that Jake was a horror fan, even if she couldn't tell The Hills Have Eyes from Silent Hill from The House on Haunted Hill if her life depended on it, and had insisted. They split an extra-large popcorn with extra butter, which Jake quickly demolished when Bella lost interest in it five minutes after the previews started rolling.
The Hills movie was pretty good. Bella wasn't scared at all—how one could be scared of anything after being in the presence of Victoria, whose desire to possess and eat her still haunted her dreams, was the real quandary—but it had some neat imagery, and in the end, the good guys won, which was important. To her immense relief, Jacob didn't try to hold her hand; although that might have had more to do with the butter that still dripped from his fingers than anything to do with Bella's weak, capricious heart. Her hand still found the sleeve of his leather jacket during the film's climactic bloodbath of a sequence involving Doug Bukowski taking the fight to the mutants on their home turf—and while she didn't seek out his face in the darkness, she could just imagine his smile lighting it up like a floodlight.
Jake was still hungry after the movie, so Bella left him to chatter happily about his favorite moments as he steered the Rabbit out of the movie theater's parking lot and into the nearest drive-through. A light rain had picked up, growing in strength as he ordered several burgers for himself and a Coke for Bella; by the time they got back on the road, the rain was coming down like fingers to touch the earth, drumming the elements with such soft vibrations they seemed to be thrown back into the air in a tremorous fog.
"What do you say?" Jacob asked. "Want to just drive around for a bit?"
"It's not a school night," Bella replied.
"Very enthusiastic, Bells," he said, but his grin was happy enough for both of them. It was infectious—Bella soon found she was smiling, too. She took a sip of her Coke and watched the view go by; the sun had slipped beneath the horizon hours ago, so that the only light shed was from streetlights, neon billboards, the odd convenience store or gas station that hadn't shuttered for the night. But even these had taken on the sleepy quality of the rest of the world, which waited around them like a held breath as the enveloping fog smeared the lights and shapes into an indistinct, drizzling blur; the clouds beyond, so dark in the black sky they resembled mountains lying in repose. No one moved on the streets; no other cars passed them on the lonely roads. Where the clouds, cocoonlike, parted revealed a full moon, which seemed to regard them with a watchful guardian's eye.
Jake turned on the radio to a soft rock station, the volume so soft it was nearly a whisper. Bella caught snatches of Heart and Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. Jacob loved hard rock and long guitar solos, she knew; they'd listened to his LPs from bands whose names she couldn't keep straight while working on the bikes. She didn't like music—and anything she might have wanted to listen to, whether that was her Debussy or Linkin Park albums, had been spirited away so far they might as well have never existed—but Jake's was all right. One time she had asked Jacob for the name of a "Jefferson Speedwagon" song and he'd laughed so hard he slapped his knees, which was something she thought only happened in movies.
Speaking of movies. "That was a lot better than Crosshairs," Bella finally remarked as their journey down backroads and through residential neighborhoods brought them to State Route 110, heading west into La Push. Jacob huffed amusement.
"Howard the Duck is better than Crosshairs," he said. Bella, who had made the mistake of taking a drink at that moment, snorted so hard Coke came out her nose. Emboldened, Jake continued: "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is better than Crosshairs. Freaking Baby Geniuses 2 is better than Crosshairs. Trust me—it's not a high bar to clear. That movie sucked."
Bella was lost to a full-body guffaw. She snatched a napkin from Jake's pocket and tried to rescue her flannel shirt from the Coke spit—it was a favorite, gifted to her by Charlie the Christmas before she moved to Forks. Jake's eyes, which had shone so bright to see her laugh, lifted with concern. "You need help?"
"No," Bella wheezed as she pressed the napkin to every damp spot on her shirt. The giggle still rocked her shoulders, like it was trying to work its way out of her body. "You can't just say things like that, Jake," she said, once she got her breath back. "It's dangerous."
"That's me. Dangerous Wolf Man. Cracking the really dangerous jokes."
"That just sounds like the name of a terrible superhero. With really terrible powers."
"More terrible than Howard the Duck?"
"Jake—" Now she was laughing even harder. "They're equally bad," she huffed at last, dumping the napkin in the car's footwell and stomping on it pointedly with her heel.
Jake chuckled.
The laughter faded away, but not Bella's mirth. Distantly, and for no reason at all, she wondered when she'd first laughed like this after moving to Forks. There weren't very many things she'd found funny those first few months. That was back when her life seemed stagnant; herself doomed to an eternal holding pattern in the darkest, wettest part of the country. A girl from Phoenix, Arizona could only drown, never thrive, in that near-constant cloud cover. And from September to Christmas, she remembered... nothing. But even in the period between those two bookends, that sweet span of seven months, she never remembered Edward making her laugh with such—
Just the name set her heart to freezing. A deep crack ran down the middle, splintering in ice. She gasped.
There was a sudden cessation of motion: Jake pulling the Rabbit to a frantic stop. "Bella? Bella!" he cried. His hand went to her heart, as if seeking a beat there, or a breath. When she didn't respond, just gasped like a fish, he leaned over—he wasn't wearing a seatbelt—and she watched as his face descended to hers, beautiful dark eyes blown wide with concern.
Yes. His eyes were beautiful. More than sort of beautiful. She could say that, because she wasn't his. She wasn't—anyone's.
For a long moment Jake just looked at her, as if willing her to come back to him. "Bella," he whispered. "Come on, Bella. You can do it. Come on, honey. Just breathe. Breathe."
Just breathe, breathe. Bella breathed. The air where had he exhaled those words was hot, and painfully sweet, so that it seemed it was his very own breath that she lived on as her ribs expanded and contracted, as her chest rose and fell. The hole in her heart, galvanized by this strange elixir, seemed to slowly put itself back together, stitch by tender stitch.
Not perfectly, not completely, but she was breathing now. She was alive.
"Is it him?"
Jake said the words with such anger she thought he might phase right there, run out into the rain to find him, a creature of bared claws and soaked fur. Bella hesitated.
"Yeah," she whispered finally, unable to hold to any kind of charade. She hugged her arms as far as they could go around her sides. "It's him."
For the length of half a minute the lines of Jake's body shook. "I hate him," he whispered fiercely. The vibration of his form made him look like he was actually becoming part of the hail, building to a storm.
"Please—" Bella's voice rose, haltingly. "Don't say that, Jake," she begged. "Please."
"I'm not saying that because of what he is. It's what he did to you," Jacob snarled. "He hurt you." God, even as she hated what he was saying, she had to love that protectiveness on Jake's face. She just hated the reason for it. She didn't need people worrying about her in that way. She simply hadn't been good enough for hi—Edward. For Edward. That was all. And now she'd brought all her stormclouds, all her gloom-and-doom-ridden crap, and dumped it all over Jake's sunshine.
"Let's not." She realized she was still begging. "Let's not ruin tonight with this. I'm fine, Jake. Really."
The expression of barely chained fury held on Jake's face. That deep growl—born of unconditional protectiveness—still threatened to erupt from his throat. "No, you're not," he said. Then she sensed him soften before her, and the animal growl receded, fell off. "But... I guess..."
Bella raised her face to his, a question on her lips, and dark lashes dipped as his eyes grew hooded, unusually troubled. "Maybe I understand," he mumbled. "Why it hurts so much. And why it's not so easy to move on."
That was better, but still wrong. "I don't think you do understand, Jake," Bella said. Not meanly, but—no one could understand what it meant to lose Edward Cullen. No one.
Jake pulled away from her then. She regretted the loss of his warmth, worried that she'd angered him, until she realized he was staring, like a small and vulnerable boy, at his hands in his lap. The rain slipped down the glass behind his profile, resembling shed tears. After a moment of some internal, silent struggle, he said at last:
"I was dumped, too."
The admission fell like a bolt of lightning from the clouds to disintegrate all her understanding. For an instant she actually forgot the ice in her chest. Now there was only stupid, heedless shock. Before she could even think— "You had a girlfriend?" Bella said, and some part of her cringed at how brokenly she posed the question, how shocked she sounded. Like Jake couldn't have had his pick of any girl from the beginning, even before he'd topped six feet and put on muscle. "When—who—why?" she stammered.
Jake turned and held her gaze very solemnly. There was the sound of a click, followed by a greater awareness of the rain's sussurations; Bella looked down to see that he had silently switched the radio off. His eyes were full with a pain she'd never seen in him before, except when he had tried to scare her off the week after his transformation. Seeing that pain made her hurt, too—hurt terribly. "Sorry," he murmured, the sound of it still and small in the car's cabin. "I don't know why I said that. Just forget about it."
That look of pain, of emptiness—she couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear to ignore anything that brought Jacob Black pain. "I can't," Bella said, simply.
For a long time Jake said nothing, eyes flickering with a foreign emotion—insecurity—to his hands resting in his lap. Then:
"I was fourteen when she came to La Push." His voice, when it came, was as dry as the bleached-white driftwood of the beach. "She was a little bit older than me. Not by much. Just a few months or so. She was heading back home from a road trip with her friends over spring break. I was instantly impressed by that—a girl that young and celebrating spring break like a college student? I had to get to know her."
Bella listened in silence.
"We started talking. It turned out we were super alike. She lived on a reservation, like me, but more than that, we shared all the same interests. I mean all the same interests, Bella. She was into cars and hard rock and the Mariners and just—all this stuff that I loved, she loved too. It only took me one day to fall for her—maybe even one hour. On the last day of her trip, before she headed back home, I asked her out. I remember it was the last day because suddenly she was asking everyone how she could hide the new tattoo on her shoulder. A little dolphin. I told her she could draw over it with Sharpie and tell her parents one of her friends pranked her. I didn't know if that would really work. I just wanted to impress her.
"It was so whirlwind. Man, I know that makes me sound like the lamest guy in the world, but it's true. We talked on the phone every single day. Her older sister had a car and would drive her up to visit me on the weekends. Sometimes she'd be the one driving the car. She was a natural. My dad didn't really like it, but who cared what he thought? I was in love. And then one day..."
Jake's voice caught in his throat. He swallowed, hard.
"One day she was just—over it. Over me. She never explained anything. I never figured it out. All she did was leave a voicemail on my dad's machine saying she didn't want to see me anymore. She was from the rez down the Hoh, so it was easy enough for her not to come back to La Push. The end."
The end? No, that couldn't be the end. Horror ripped free the stitches in the hole in Bella's heart. Sam turning his back on Leah for Emily, the Cullen house standing gray and empty as a tomb, Edward disappearing into the shroud of wild and wanton trees without a backward glance. "You never saw her again?"
After a long moment, he gave the slightest incline of his head. The stitches broke, dissolved, and she pressed a palm to her ice-burned chest.
"But you always seemed so." She didn't know how to finish that sentence. Happy. How could he have ever given her that huge, sweet smile when he met her? How could he have ever smiled again? "How could you..." She stopped, wet her lips. "How did you get through it?"
"It wasn't easy," Jacob replied. "But I had, you know, my dad. Friends and family on the reservation. Quil and Embry." He wrinkled his nose. "Maybe Quil not so much. The dork had this crazy idea that he was my wingman and he was going to find me a new babe. Like it was that easy to replace someone I was so sure was for forever..."
He let go a sigh just then. His breath was so huge and warm Bella could swear the cabin had heated up by ten degrees. It also had the effect of soothing the frigid burn in her heart. "I wrote a lot of sad poems and let myself get a few D's in school and threw myself into the Rabbit," he continued. "I tried to pick up my dad's guitar. I got back on my feet. And by the time I saw you again, I was better. But I wanted you to know—I understand. I get it. I can't even hate her."
Bella stared down at her tennis shoes. They were burnished the color of rust—the result of kicking up a thousand red clouds after taking a thousand spills off the dirt bike. Jake had bent, but he had not broken. He actually did something with himself, she thought, suddenly furious. What have I done? Except abuse the hell out of Charlie's deductible. Her eyes flew back up to Jake. And trick a boy into thinking I might want to be with him like—
Had Jake awoken in the middle of the night, shaking and sobbing with the nightmare of true love lost? What if he thought (wrongly) that he might have it again?
"Jake," she said, and the word nearly came out in a growl. "I'm... so sorry. If I had ever known, I wouldn't—"
His eyes rested quietly on her face. "Wouldn't what, Bells?"
"I wouldn't..." She swallowed the lump in her throat. "Hurt you like this. I wouldn't be selfish."
Even as she said it, she cursed herself. Because it was a lie. Still, she had to match her action to her words, and gingerly, carefully, she pushed her palms into the seat on either side of her and began shuffling to the other side of the cabin, away from Jacob's heat and light. But her reluctance was supreme. What flower, having emerged from the gloom of solitary bedrock, would ever want to leave its sun?
Her butt had barely lifted off the seat when Jacob surged forward and fetched her up in both arms, dropping her right in his lap like she had a permanent address there.
"Nah," he said. "This doesn't hurt me."
Bella blinked up at him, boggled, and he gave a little grimace. "Well, it kind of does—it's a good kind of pain," he explained, quickly. And in a quieter voice: "It's worth it." He smiled down at her, so sweetly that she felt herself relax, and she slowly bent her head to touch his chest.
"She sucks, anyway," Bella muttered, into the place where his heart thudded hardest. "For leaving you. You're worth a hundred of her, Jake. A thousand."
For an instant Jake went very still—with surprise, offense, she couldn't be sure. Then a laugh tugged free from his lips, the sound echoing in her ears to the rhythm of the rain. His fingers wrapped around her wrists, and he drew back to favor her with a smile.
"Thanks, Bells." His eyes radiated happiness once more. Bella's heart filled to see it. "You know," he added, "ever since Naomi left me, my heart's always been a little scarred. But I don't feel any of that when I'm with you. Just being around you, Bella... it makes me really happy. Makes me not remember her at all."
Happy. She made him happy. Then she realized what he had said—about the forgetting. For one traitorous instant Bella wondered what she was capable of. She added, timorously: "Do you want to remember her?"
Sadness scudded over his face like clouds. "At first I did," he admitted. "Every second. But over time that—faded. And when I'm with you?" That smile sprang to his face again, so quickly she wasn't sure it had ever left. "Not at all. You're way cooler than her."
Bella just continued to look up at him, awed. She wasn't as strong as him. She knew she could never forget
Edward's touch, Edward's eyes, Edward's kiss
nor that she could give up this closeness to protect Jacob—this or any other chance to be near him. He was too precious to her. Too precious to her, and too good for her, too.
That knowledge was surely reflected in Jake's eyes. But they merely filled with warmth as he tipped his head down, close enough for their foreheads to touch. His skin was as hot as a roaring fire when it pressed to hers; his breath, too, when it swept over her mouth and across her nose. It should have burned her, but it didn't.
"I know what you're thinking," was all he said.
Edward didn't even know what she was thinking. If he had, maybe he wouldn't have left.
Her eyes slipped close, and in the dark her hand reached out and found his. His big palm held her there, cradled her safe. She allowed the tiniest sip of air and nearly gasped when she realized his breath was even sweeter than Edward's. Tears of anguished surprise pricked her eyes; even a day ago—an hour ago—the idea that any boy could equal what Edward had to offer would never have burrowed into her mind with such unwelcome certainty. And yet sweet and hot—those were exactly the right words for Jacob Black.
Jake didn't move, not an inch. Desperately, she wanted to know what he was thinking. How could he read her so well, without the benefit of vampiric ability? How could she be so human and inept to not know his heart as well? She wanted him to move to claim her—not like the wolf he was now, but like the little boy that used to build her crumbling sandcastles in the La Push surf, whose voice she sometimes heard once her nightmares had spent themselves down to ordinary dreams—and at the same time she wanted to throw herself out of the cabin and never stop running until she was in Edward's arms again. Those frozen arms might still hold her close; crystallize her and compress all her past, present, and future into one perfect eternal moment.
The tears continued to fall.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "You told me this awful thing that happened to you, and all I'm doing is crying for myself."
There were tears on Jacob's shirt now, quickly disappearing. "You're crying for us both, honey," he murmured, drawing her eyes back up to him. "You're crying because it's the same pain."
"What makes you so sure?"
"You really suck at lying, Bells." His laugh landed soft on her cheek. "Also, we established that I'm like ninety years old now, remember? So this old man knows things." He rocked back against the seat and crossed his arms, nodding like a sage of the advanced years he claimed.
And that did it. The moment was gone. The tension drained away like a departing mist. "Yeah," Bella giggled, under her breath. "And I already told you that last one didn't count—being able to quote the entire script to Die Hard isn't an adult skill."
"You must not have seen my resume, then," Jacob said. His head gave a little shake. "But seriously, though," he murmured. "You're just... so damn hard on yourself. And you really don't have to be."
She considered his words as they relaxed back into one another. In the lengthening silence, the wind continued to beat against the window at her back, no doubt bearing a cold pressure born of the coming storm, but it never found its way into the shelter of the cabin. It seemed Jacob's very presence was able to do that much—ward off the bad mojo, the ominous signs, all the things of the world that spelled disaster and misery.
"I'm glad that we met," she said, suddenly inspired. "I'm glad that we're friends."
"I'm glad we're friends too." Jacob paused. "Best friends."
Bella smiled. "Best friends."
Now the silence was complete. All she could hear was their breathing, soft and undisturbed, the only adjoining sound that of the undercurrent, made faded and distant by Jake's presence. The moon drifted behind a cloud, plunging them in near darkness. Then Jacob spoke again.
"I know, Bella." His hand curled around her to cup her neck. His voice was solemn, and supremely confident. "It hurts so much, and it feels like if things used to be one way, they can't ever be another way. But they can. They will. And you're so strong, I know that you'll find another way to be. It just takes time. And whatever you choose—whatever you choose, I mean that—I'll wait."
I'll wait. The words thudded in Bella's ears, echoed inside her heart. Her heart, still fraught with ice and gaping wounds, even on her best days. She wished suddenly—so much—that he had not said that. Why couldn't he understand that she would only hurt him? Would only leave him as bereft and empty as his first love? Why was he asking for her to do this thing to him?
No matter how much she wanted him—may have wanted him—there was no coming back from someone like Edward. There just wasn't.
"I'm not as strong as you, Jake." This whispered more like a creed than an expression of doubt. Bella Swan is not strong.
Jake's reply was instant. "Sure you are, honey," he said. But the tears were returning now, renewed in strength.
Because every scale was falling from her eyes, and she could see it—a picture more clear and impossible than a mirage in the desert. Like a succession of kaleidoscopic images, she could see her world shifting and bending, planes of reality and her own stubborn perception inexorably tilting until the ground beneath her feet pointed her towards Jacob Black only. Her future in La Push, not Forks; her companions the werewolves, not the vampires. If they lived through Victoria—
The vision was becoming clearer all the time now. She could leave behind the memory of promised immortality. She could leave behind the allure of witnessing marble, godlike flesh move among the lesser creatures. She could even (oh God help her) leave behind the Cullens.
But to leave behind Edward—
She didn't realize how hard she was crying until she distantly registered the texture of sandpaper in her throat; her helpless, gaping sobs had scraped it raw. She'd never cried like this in front of anyone—wept really, in this ugly, wretched way. Worst of all was how Jake could see it. Who she really was. Before, she could put up a front for the world—long years of practice with Charlie and Renee had hardened her mask of stoicism until it wasn't really a mask—but now she had no defense at all from the world. From Jacob, who had somehow pierced it with nothing more than his own voice.
"Oh honey, oh God, I'm sorry," that voice was saying now, instead of how pathetic, I'm sick of your games, goodbye. She felt walls of heat descend on either side of her face: his hands, impossibly, reaching out to comfort. She let them. From somewhere inside herself emerged the angelic whisper of a vampire, its voice reduced to earnest begging—don't cry, love, don't cry, be happy—but then Jake's face was right in front of hers again and he was saying "it's okay to cry, honey, it's okay. Let it out."
Heeding the greater voice—the one that was here, that she somehow understood now would always be here—she did.
It was pain unfathomable, and not just for Edward. She sobbed for Alice, the sister she'd never had and now never would, who wouldn't answer a single email, even when Bella had sent a final desperate message (no subject line, one sentence—Alice please help) the week before finding the motorcycles. She cried for Carlisle and Esme, parents who demanded nothing and offered everything, who didn't need to be fed or protected from themselves but only wanted to sustain and protect her, to welcome her into their family. And then, with her mask in pieces at her feet and the floodgates flung wide, she found herself reaching even further back than that—traveling years into a past she hadn't even remembered until now—crying over two older Quileute girls and their little brother, because she had to leave them every summer, because her parents didn't love each other enough to get back together, not even for her sake.
And so I pulled away, and then I stopped visiting—because even when I was eleven Renee needed me, I couldn't choose Charlie over her—and I wasn't even there for you when your mom died, and I'm sorry, Jake, I'm just so sorry—
Jacob listened to the words tumble from her in silence. When it was over, when no more words would come, he leaned forward, his expression inexpressibly pained.
"I'm so sorry, Bella," he said. To her shock, he meant it completely. "You've had to deal with so much. I didn't know how deep it ran... and how much pain you were always in..."
"It's nothing," she whispered. Breathlessly, because none of it had been anything she had consciously known. She'd never known that she always loved Jacob Black. "Compared to what you've been through, it's nothing." And then, past the trembling of her lips: "I told you, Jake. I'm not... someone you can fix. I'm too damaged."
"I don't want to fix you," Jake said. "I just want you."
His hands trembled on her face, then became unnaturally still. His face was still inches from hers, and he had only a single breath to close the gap. His eyes seemed to study her face, darken as he resolved himself to some course of action.
The wolves were not known for their self-control. But Bella couldn't imagine the restraint Jacob showed now, to balance her face between his two big palms and bring his head forward until his lips brushed the place where her cheek bones met the dark shadows of her eyes. She watched, transfixed, as the tear captured between his full lips instantly evaporated in his scorching heat.
It wasn't a kiss. They both knew that. And so he did it again—only pausing for a moment to regard her with an unfathomable expression—bending his lips to touch like butterfly wings to her eyelashes, her cheeks, her chin. The urgency behind his questing mouth increased—she could feel it in his breath, growing so ragged and hot she felt like she was sitting on the surface of the sun—but it never hastened, never quickened, only continued to drag with slow precision across the map of her skin. Bella's hands came up and grasped the wrists that held her, feeling the big wolf heartbeat that thrummed beneath the lovely russet skin, when those lips came forward and opened one on top of the other to catch a tear on the tip of her nose; she sensed the tiniest nip of teeth, and then the big hands tilting her head down so they could take care of her eyes, separating long enough to release sweet hot breaths that banished the tears completely.
It went on and on like that; the distant murmur of the rain, and the peaceful throb of his own pulse, had long ago replaced the beating of her heart in her ribs. She drifted on that music as every last tear was borne away on Jacob Black's lips. She felt like a painting that had dissolved into individual strokes of color and water, some joining the rain that descended from the perpetual cloud cover to slake the dark groves of trees, others disappearing into the Quillayute to be swept downriver into the mouth of the Pacific Ocean. And Jacob was everywhere, too; in the air, the trees, the water, the fingers that curled through the hair at her neck seeming to spread out and touch every part of her. Even the smell of him clung to every inch of her skin like a physical thing. The communion of two spirits had never seemed so complete, nor assured beyond all doubt.
But it was not kissing.
She had not betrayed Edward.
When she came back into herself, crept back into her body with the softness of a child sneaking back to bed in the middle of the night, she was aware of a large, dark hand gliding through her hair. Her head was on Jacob's chest. She surrendered to the warmth of his palm as it traveled across the crown of her head, before the fan of his fingers slowly separated to clasp her cheek in five burning points. Her arms were closed around his waist, her own fingers locked deep in the leather of his jacket. She held herself tighter to him.
"Jacob," she said, and it sounded like I'm sorry.
"Bella." You don't have to be.
"Let's... maybe we should go home," she whispered.
"Yeah."
His voice came low and thick, like he too hesitated to disturb the dream. Without uncurling his hand from her face, he started the car with his other and they left. She hardly remembered the way back. The Rabbit glided through the shower like a creature softly padding through the forest; and now, as the headlights of opposing traffic approached and the moon emerged fully from the clouds, their momentary light washed Jacob's face to something white and nearly holy. Bella gazed up at him until her eyelids trembled and closed. Then, after a length of time she could not measure, the car's engine ceased and she had only the vaguest impressions of her body being lifted until she was resting in impossibly strong arms, floating several feet above the ground—followed by the familiar scent of the tree outside her window, the crackle of branches whipping away tiny showerbursts of leaves, the cool breath of the air rising and falling past her...
A few more steps across a wooden floor, and she was in her own bed. She expected to lie alone, to be left to her darkness, but the presence of Jacob hovered close.
"I missed you, too." The whispers that fell on her ear could have been words, or more echoes of the rain inside her head. They were endowed with incredible gratitude. "Thank you for coming back to me."
The words left Bella before she was aware of them, nearly submerged beneath sleep. "I'll always come back, Jake." It was a promise.
Behind her closed eyes, she sensed the darkness fill with his smile. Then he was gone—but his warmth remained inside her, a lit spark.
The last thing Bella realized before she, too, surrendered to the fall of sleep was that the shadow that had constricted her heart, been her companion for nearly seven long months, had departed; and her face was completely dry.