Work Text:
i.
All the rez boys are six foot-something, with shiny black hair and palms double the size of her fist (or Angela thinks as much).They look like giants walking through the pieces of driftwood and green sea foam on the beach.
One walks a step behind the rest. Embry has long brown limbs and sharp eyes and hair that swings just above his broad shoulders. He looks at her, crinkles his nose in a grin, chews the lollipop between his teeth.
Hey, he says. What’s your name?
She goes home and fills up three pages of her journal.
ii.
Jessica and Lauren go to Florida for the summer. Angela listens to them talk of tanning and hot surfers over the phone. She smiles. Her summer is empty coke bottles by the pier, whispered I love you’s over the rim of coffee mugs, warm fingers wrapped around her wrist. He kisses her between the library bookcases; he tastes like mint and sugar, with all the over-eager enthusiasm of a teenage boy.
She sits in church each Sunday and thinks of his hands around her waist, counts down the minutes until she can feel them again.
iii.
Jessica and Lauren come back too soon. Jess calls Angela a bitch for not telling her. “Angie,” she says. Angela hates that name, hates how childish it makes her sound. She tells Jessica she didn’t for a reason. That shuts her up.
Embry grows his hair out. She likes the feel of it slipping through her fingers like silk. She likes the way he says her name, how the syllables roll around on his tongue. She says as much, and Aw shit he mumbles and hides behind his hands. He does that when he’s shy. Angela loves it almost as much as when he walks up behind her and presses his face in between her shoulder blades. (He’s so tall he has to hunch over to do it.)
Angela presses each flower, dries each bouquet Embry gets her. Roses, tulips, lilacs. (He thinks lilacs are her favorite, but she likes the sunflowers. They remind her of the way he smiles.) He writes her love letters, real ones, cursive letters and red wax seals. He says he learned how just for her. He lets her paint his nails, too. He goes back to school with chipped purple and black fingernails, messy and splashed out over his cuticles.
So when he tells her—so nervous he almost cries—that he’s not quite human, not quite wolf, she kisses him, tells him it doesn’t matter. She feels the soft hairs on the back of his neck under the pad of her thumbs, feels his fingertips trace the frames of her glasses.
Only this matters.
iv.
Angela meets the rest of the pack, considers them close enough to call them family(—almost more than her own). She sits with Embry and Quil and Jacob in the garage, smiles when Paul calls her little sister. She helps Kim with her algebra, lets Leah give her cd mixes, and though rock music has never really been her thing, she starts to like it.
She likes the pack bonfires the best, likes digging her toes into the wet sand of the beach and listening to the elders talk of old legends and strong warriors. Sometimes she sees Bella there too, under Jacob’s jacket, small fingers curling around his. They don’t talk much, just smile at each other from across the flames.
Chin in her hand, she looks up at Embry, watches him stare into the night sky. The reflection of the fire flickers orange and red in his eyes. He gets like this when he’s thinking hard—a little distant, like he’s somewhere far away in his mind. He squeezes her hand, anyway.
Angela dreams of wolves and ocean tides almost every night that year.
v.
Then one day he wakes up with pink lipgloss smeared across his lips and tells her that she’s not enough he’s been accepted into a college too far away. It feels like someone has dropped burning tar down her throat and it’s settled into the pit of her stomach. He doesn’t say anything else—hasn’t said it yet, but she can read in between the lines.
She feels sick the rest of the week.
But she just sits and watches and waits, because that’s what she’s always been best at doing. Sits through his last bonfire, the graduation (she cheers the loudest of them all), watches him pack the trunk and hug his mother. Wishes him luck. Waits for his calls.
And they come—every so often. He’s studying engineering. His hair is short again. The campus is nice , he says. Yeah, classes are going well. Yeah, I miss Forks.
She wonders if he’s found anyone else. She only asks him once, when he calls her for Christmas. He tells her no.
It was only you for me, Angela.
Was.
She sits in the cold chair at the hair salon and tells Jessica that they were never that serious, anyway. She sits in her hard pew at church, listens to her father talk of abominations and judgment day, and thinks of his brown eyes.
She goes home and pretends she can’t hear when they ask why her room is full of dead flowers.