Cojones - A Twilight Fanfiction
Title: Cojones
Character(s): Quil, Embry, and Jacob
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Cojones (noun, plural) pronounced /kəˈhoʊneɪz/ and /kəˈhuːnəz/ in English: a vulgar Spanish word for testicles, denoting courage; it corresponds to balls in English. In US slang, cojones denotes “brazen, brave attitude." Example: Quil has cojones.
Notes: runningsissors posted the following prompt at forkshighschool: missing scene where Quil asks out that senior girl and then proceeds to get in a fight with said girl's boyfriend...it was mentioned in NM and I've always wanted to read this . Seeing as how she's responsible for my fondness for the three amigos, I couldn't help but adopt this prompt. Unbeta-ed, be kind.
Jake comes home from the grocery store to find Quil in his backyard with a bed sheet and a can of spray paint.
“You do have a home of your own, right?” Jake asks, slamming the door to the Rabbit.
“Yes, but my Dad will yell at me if I get spray paint on the grass, so I’m using your yard instead.”
“Right, cause it’s not like my Dad will yell at me or anything…” Jacob says, sarcasm dripping practically dripping off his words.
Quil just keeps painting, spelling out words with uncharacteristic meticulousness. “Yeah, but that doesn’t matter to me as much.”
“Ah. Of course.” Jake doesn’t ask any more questions after that. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know what, exactly, is going on.
From the beneath eaves of the garage, someone laughs. He turns and sees Embry lounging in the shade in a beat-up lawn chair. It’s uncharacteristically hot for September, and he’s staying out of the heat, apparently documenting Quil’s endeavors with a disposable camera.
“Seriously,” Jake barks, thinking of the mountain of homework waiting for him inside. “You both have families that love you and appreciate your company. Go bother them for a while.”
“No can do, Jake,” Embry says. “Quil’s about to get himself killed, and I’ve sworn to immortalize his final hours.”
Quil whirls around, wielding his can of Rustoleum like it’s some kind of firearm. “Okay, you two? You’re both total ass-hats who’re just jealous because I’ll be going to homecoming with the hottest senior this side of the Oregon border, while you’ll be going with each other.”
Embry just laughs and looks Jake up and down. “Fine, but you’re wearing the dress,” he says, before capturing Jake’s dumbfounded expression in a flash.
After a moment it feels like Jake’s brain re-boots. “Hold on. You’re not seriously going to ask Amy Youngblood to homecoming, are you?” he asks Quil.
“Yes,” Quil says proudly, returning to his work. “So you two pussies can just suck it.”
“But dude…” Jake stutters. He looks to Embry for support. “He’s not seriously-”
“Yes,” Embry assures him, continuing to look thoroughly amused by the entire situation. “Yes, he is.”
“But does she even know he exis-”
“Nope.”
“And isn’t she datin-”
“Yep.”
“So doesn’t that make this a seriously dumb ide-”
“Oh, absolutely.” Embry raises his camera and captures the way Jake’s mouth is hanging open, dumbfounded.
Absolutely stunned by the insanity that’s, literally, taking place in his own backyard, Jake decides that he wants no part in this mess. He storms back towards the house, pausing only long enough to admire Quil’s handiwork with the bed sheet, which reads “AMY - HOMECOMING WITH ME,” and groan in response. A moment before he can close the screen door behind him, and cut himself off from all this madness, Quil shouts at him.
“Oh Jake, one more thing. I’m gonna need the Rabbit right after school tomorrow. And a broomstick or a post or something. Oh, and I need you to ditch last period with me. Thanks, man!”
Jacob Black decides, at that very moment, that his friends are dicks, and that there’s no way Quil is borrowing his car.
***
“I cannot believe I let you talk me into this,” Jake says, banging his forehead against the steering wheel. He can feel the little ridges in the plastic carving divots into his skin.
Somewhere, in the school behind where they’re sitting in the parking lot, the dismissal bell sounds.
Quil rushes over the driver’s side door and sticks his head in the window. “Stop whining and be a good wingman,” he tells Jake. Behind him he’s toting what appears to be a bed sheet stapled to a broken hockey stick, turning it into a makeshift flag. “Now you remember the plan? You’re going to take the east exit out of the lot at exactly 3:06. Drive so that you end up in the lane closest to the front of the school. When you get to the intersection just honk the horn once to signal me.”
“Uh huh,” Jake agrees without really listening, wishing he was anywhere else but here.
Quil hits him upside the head. “Pay attention, man. This is important. Now you have to hit at least 40 in front of the school or this thing’s not gonna unfurl. It’s too damn long. Think you can handle that.”
“Sure. No problem. This is a wonderful idea. I’m so glad I agreed to do this. And where are you going to be exactly?” Jake asks.
Quil shakes his head - they’ve already been over this. “In the trunk, waiting for your signal. C’mon man, we gotta go. People are already leaving.”
As students begin to slowly spill out from the school, Quil runs around and leaps into the back, pulling the trunk down on top of him and holding it shut just before it locks. Jake briefly considers getting out of the car, slamming the trunk down, locking Quil in the back for the evening, and going home.
But, if nothing else, Jake is a dutiful wingman.
A minute later the digital clock on the dashboard hits 3:06, and Jake peels out the back exit of the parking lot. Hanging a right, he circles through traffic back toward the front of the school. He hits the crosswalk and taps the horn briefly as the front of the school comes into view through the mingling throngs of students.
The quad is swarming with kids, and square in the middle of the crowd Jake briefly glimpses Amy Youngblood. She’s tall, lithe, attractive, and completely out of Quil’s league. Hovering behind her looms Awan Walker, her doof of a boyfriend. Jake has a sinking sensation that tomorrow Awan is going to be responsible for shoving his head into a school toilet. But as Jake makes the final right turn in front of the school, Awan becomes the least of his problems.
“Shit,” he mutters to himself.
Behind him, as planned, Quil pushes open the trunk and holds his flag out behind him. “GO!” he screams. But Jake’s just inching forward in his lane. The busses are still loading, and because the school’s bus turn-around it being re-paved, they’re parked against the curb, blocking the lane ahead of them.
“Dude, go!” Quil shouts again.
Jake checks the lane on his left. The cars are backed up, letting traffic blocked by the busses move over. They’ll never get up to speed over there. He gauges the distance in front of them. He’s figures they’ve got about 200 yards before they’re both bugs splattered across the back bumper of a school bus.
“JAKE, she’s leaving!” Quil shouts one more time. “GO!”
Taking both their fates into his hands, Jake puts the Rabbit in neutral, revs the engine once, twice, three times, and then throws the car back into gear.
The car shoots forward with a squeal and Quil barely keeps from flying out of the trunk and splattering to the pavement steaming by below. But he hangs on and manages to upright the flag, which flutters out pathetically behind the car, making the words on it all but illegible.
“Faster!” Quil hollers. “Must go faster, must GO FASTER!”
All Jake can see in his rearview mirror are Quil’s knees and the hood of the trunk, but he figures that something must be going wrong. He leans on the gas and watches the speedometer break 40 mph, as the distance between him and the bus begins closing rapidly.
Finally, over the noise of the battered engine and the wind whipping through the open window, Jake hears a triumphant whoop. He glances briefly out the window, just in time to see the sheet unfurl behind the car. Then, with the blast from an air horn that Jake didn’t even know he had, Quil gets the attention of every student in front of the school.
A hundred sets of eyes, including those of the girl in question, turn to see Quil Ateara standing in the trunk of a beat up Volkswagen, proclaim his love for Amy Youngblood on the side of a faded sheet.
And despite himself, Jake grins. Yeah, they’re both probably going to get theirs asses handed to them over this. But anything worth doing is worth doing right. And there’s few men he can think of who’d have the balls to be in his friend’s shoes right now.
So for a moment, he feels a swell of triumph.
That is, until he sees the lights of the state trooper flashing behind him.
And remembers the bus looming in front of him.
As hard as he can, Jake slams his foot down on the brake. The car comes to a screeching halt, inches away from the bus fender. Behind then, the lights swerve. And a split-second later there’s a sickening crash as Quil, and the hood of the trunk, both go careening through the back windshield.
Panicked, panting, littered with glass, and watching nervously as Awan Walker storms in their direction with a murderous look on his face, Jake leans forward and slams his forehead down against the steering wheel.
From somewhere in the backseat, Quil just groans.
***
“I cannot believe it,” Jake mutters, sitting in the garage later that night. “You have a $300 speeding ticket, can’t see out of one eye, and don’t have a date to homecoming. Why the hell are you so fucking cheerful?!”
“You know, technically, you have a $300 ticket…” Embry adds helpfully, his voice trailing off as Jake whirls around, wielding a wrench menacingly. “Never mind.”
“Guys, you are missing the bigger picture here,” Quil tells them both, reclining on the front hood of the Rabbit, wearing a smug expression.”
Embry leans over him, looming. “What part of the picture are we missing here exactly? The part where you almost got arrested, the part where you got shot down, or the part where you got your ass kicked?”
“How about the part where Amy gave me this?” Quil asks with a grin. He pulls down the collar of his coat, exposing a perfectly round hickey on the side of this throat.
Despite themselves, Jake and Embry lean closer, staring at their friend incredulously.
“Did she reall-” Jake mummers in disbelief.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Wher--”
“Behind the school, in the parking lot.”
“When the hell did sh-”
“After the cops, before Awan caught us.”
“…Did-”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“Dude…” Embry and Jake exchange sidelong glances, ignoring Quil’s smug look. How are they supposed to feel now? Envious? Defeated? After all, no girl has ever given them a hickey, let alone a hot senior one. For a split second they both regard Quil with something close to awe. He has conquered that which could not be conquered. He has overcome that fear that all pubescent men feel when confronted by girls with lips and tits and hips while they’re still waiting for their voices to stop cracking.
“Well, at least you can use the money you were gonna spend on the dance to buy me a new rear window,” Jake finally says, breaking the awed silence. And with a deft push, he sends Quil skittering off the hood of the car. “So go get it, Romeo. And then you can figure out how to get the $300 for that ticket.”
“Awww, c’mon man, I don’t have $300!” Quil protests, picking himself up off the dusty floor.
“And that’s not my problem,” Jake tells him. “So get cracking.”
Dejected, Quil picks up his bike and starts the long ride home from the garage. But while he may be $300 and a new windshield in the hole, while he may not have a date to homecoming, and while his vision might be a fuzzy mess, none of that manages to dampen his mood.
Because for a brief, fleeting second, while Amy’s lips were pressed up against his, he was a God among men.
And you can’t put a price on an experience like that.
Character(s): Quil, Embry, and Jacob
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Cojones (noun, plural) pronounced /kəˈhoʊneɪz/ and /kəˈhuːnəz/ in English: a vulgar Spanish word for testicles, denoting courage; it corresponds to balls in English. In US slang, cojones denotes “brazen, brave attitude." Example: Quil has cojones.
Notes: runningsissors posted the following prompt at forkshighschool: missing scene where Quil asks out that senior girl and then proceeds to get in a fight with said girl's boyfriend...it was mentioned in NM and I've always wanted to read this . Seeing as how she's responsible for my fondness for the three amigos, I couldn't help but adopt this prompt. Unbeta-ed, be kind.
Jake comes home from the grocery store to find Quil in his backyard with a bed sheet and a can of spray paint.
“You do have a home of your own, right?” Jake asks, slamming the door to the Rabbit.
“Yes, but my Dad will yell at me if I get spray paint on the grass, so I’m using your yard instead.”
“Right, cause it’s not like my Dad will yell at me or anything…” Jacob says, sarcasm dripping practically dripping off his words.
Quil just keeps painting, spelling out words with uncharacteristic meticulousness. “Yeah, but that doesn’t matter to me as much.”
“Ah. Of course.” Jake doesn’t ask any more questions after that. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know what, exactly, is going on.
From the beneath eaves of the garage, someone laughs. He turns and sees Embry lounging in the shade in a beat-up lawn chair. It’s uncharacteristically hot for September, and he’s staying out of the heat, apparently documenting Quil’s endeavors with a disposable camera.
“Seriously,” Jake barks, thinking of the mountain of homework waiting for him inside. “You both have families that love you and appreciate your company. Go bother them for a while.”
“No can do, Jake,” Embry says. “Quil’s about to get himself killed, and I’ve sworn to immortalize his final hours.”
Quil whirls around, wielding his can of Rustoleum like it’s some kind of firearm. “Okay, you two? You’re both total ass-hats who’re just jealous because I’ll be going to homecoming with the hottest senior this side of the Oregon border, while you’ll be going with each other.”
Embry just laughs and looks Jake up and down. “Fine, but you’re wearing the dress,” he says, before capturing Jake’s dumbfounded expression in a flash.
After a moment it feels like Jake’s brain re-boots. “Hold on. You’re not seriously going to ask Amy Youngblood to homecoming, are you?” he asks Quil.
“Yes,” Quil says proudly, returning to his work. “So you two pussies can just suck it.”
“But dude…” Jake stutters. He looks to Embry for support. “He’s not seriously-”
“Yes,” Embry assures him, continuing to look thoroughly amused by the entire situation. “Yes, he is.”
“But does she even know he exis-”
“Nope.”
“And isn’t she datin-”
“Yep.”
“So doesn’t that make this a seriously dumb ide-”
“Oh, absolutely.” Embry raises his camera and captures the way Jake’s mouth is hanging open, dumbfounded.
Absolutely stunned by the insanity that’s, literally, taking place in his own backyard, Jake decides that he wants no part in this mess. He storms back towards the house, pausing only long enough to admire Quil’s handiwork with the bed sheet, which reads “AMY - HOMECOMING WITH ME,” and groan in response. A moment before he can close the screen door behind him, and cut himself off from all this madness, Quil shouts at him.
“Oh Jake, one more thing. I’m gonna need the Rabbit right after school tomorrow. And a broomstick or a post or something. Oh, and I need you to ditch last period with me. Thanks, man!”
Jacob Black decides, at that very moment, that his friends are dicks, and that there’s no way Quil is borrowing his car.
***
“I cannot believe I let you talk me into this,” Jake says, banging his forehead against the steering wheel. He can feel the little ridges in the plastic carving divots into his skin.
Somewhere, in the school behind where they’re sitting in the parking lot, the dismissal bell sounds.
Quil rushes over the driver’s side door and sticks his head in the window. “Stop whining and be a good wingman,” he tells Jake. Behind him he’s toting what appears to be a bed sheet stapled to a broken hockey stick, turning it into a makeshift flag. “Now you remember the plan? You’re going to take the east exit out of the lot at exactly 3:06. Drive so that you end up in the lane closest to the front of the school. When you get to the intersection just honk the horn once to signal me.”
“Uh huh,” Jake agrees without really listening, wishing he was anywhere else but here.
Quil hits him upside the head. “Pay attention, man. This is important. Now you have to hit at least 40 in front of the school or this thing’s not gonna unfurl. It’s too damn long. Think you can handle that.”
“Sure. No problem. This is a wonderful idea. I’m so glad I agreed to do this. And where are you going to be exactly?” Jake asks.
Quil shakes his head - they’ve already been over this. “In the trunk, waiting for your signal. C’mon man, we gotta go. People are already leaving.”
As students begin to slowly spill out from the school, Quil runs around and leaps into the back, pulling the trunk down on top of him and holding it shut just before it locks. Jake briefly considers getting out of the car, slamming the trunk down, locking Quil in the back for the evening, and going home.
But, if nothing else, Jake is a dutiful wingman.
A minute later the digital clock on the dashboard hits 3:06, and Jake peels out the back exit of the parking lot. Hanging a right, he circles through traffic back toward the front of the school. He hits the crosswalk and taps the horn briefly as the front of the school comes into view through the mingling throngs of students.
The quad is swarming with kids, and square in the middle of the crowd Jake briefly glimpses Amy Youngblood. She’s tall, lithe, attractive, and completely out of Quil’s league. Hovering behind her looms Awan Walker, her doof of a boyfriend. Jake has a sinking sensation that tomorrow Awan is going to be responsible for shoving his head into a school toilet. But as Jake makes the final right turn in front of the school, Awan becomes the least of his problems.
“Shit,” he mutters to himself.
Behind him, as planned, Quil pushes open the trunk and holds his flag out behind him. “GO!” he screams. But Jake’s just inching forward in his lane. The busses are still loading, and because the school’s bus turn-around it being re-paved, they’re parked against the curb, blocking the lane ahead of them.
“Dude, go!” Quil shouts again.
Jake checks the lane on his left. The cars are backed up, letting traffic blocked by the busses move over. They’ll never get up to speed over there. He gauges the distance in front of them. He’s figures they’ve got about 200 yards before they’re both bugs splattered across the back bumper of a school bus.
“JAKE, she’s leaving!” Quil shouts one more time. “GO!”
Taking both their fates into his hands, Jake puts the Rabbit in neutral, revs the engine once, twice, three times, and then throws the car back into gear.
The car shoots forward with a squeal and Quil barely keeps from flying out of the trunk and splattering to the pavement steaming by below. But he hangs on and manages to upright the flag, which flutters out pathetically behind the car, making the words on it all but illegible.
“Faster!” Quil hollers. “Must go faster, must GO FASTER!”
All Jake can see in his rearview mirror are Quil’s knees and the hood of the trunk, but he figures that something must be going wrong. He leans on the gas and watches the speedometer break 40 mph, as the distance between him and the bus begins closing rapidly.
Finally, over the noise of the battered engine and the wind whipping through the open window, Jake hears a triumphant whoop. He glances briefly out the window, just in time to see the sheet unfurl behind the car. Then, with the blast from an air horn that Jake didn’t even know he had, Quil gets the attention of every student in front of the school.
A hundred sets of eyes, including those of the girl in question, turn to see Quil Ateara standing in the trunk of a beat up Volkswagen, proclaim his love for Amy Youngblood on the side of a faded sheet.
And despite himself, Jake grins. Yeah, they’re both probably going to get theirs asses handed to them over this. But anything worth doing is worth doing right. And there’s few men he can think of who’d have the balls to be in his friend’s shoes right now.
So for a moment, he feels a swell of triumph.
That is, until he sees the lights of the state trooper flashing behind him.
And remembers the bus looming in front of him.
As hard as he can, Jake slams his foot down on the brake. The car comes to a screeching halt, inches away from the bus fender. Behind then, the lights swerve. And a split-second later there’s a sickening crash as Quil, and the hood of the trunk, both go careening through the back windshield.
Panicked, panting, littered with glass, and watching nervously as Awan Walker storms in their direction with a murderous look on his face, Jake leans forward and slams his forehead down against the steering wheel.
From somewhere in the backseat, Quil just groans.
***
“I cannot believe it,” Jake mutters, sitting in the garage later that night. “You have a $300 speeding ticket, can’t see out of one eye, and don’t have a date to homecoming. Why the hell are you so fucking cheerful?!”
“You know, technically, you have a $300 ticket…” Embry adds helpfully, his voice trailing off as Jake whirls around, wielding a wrench menacingly. “Never mind.”
“Guys, you are missing the bigger picture here,” Quil tells them both, reclining on the front hood of the Rabbit, wearing a smug expression.”
Embry leans over him, looming. “What part of the picture are we missing here exactly? The part where you almost got arrested, the part where you got shot down, or the part where you got your ass kicked?”
“How about the part where Amy gave me this?” Quil asks with a grin. He pulls down the collar of his coat, exposing a perfectly round hickey on the side of this throat.
Despite themselves, Jake and Embry lean closer, staring at their friend incredulously.
“Did she reall-” Jake mummers in disbelief.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Wher--”
“Behind the school, in the parking lot.”
“When the hell did sh-”
“After the cops, before Awan caught us.”
“…Did-”
“Yes, yes I did.”
“Dude…” Embry and Jake exchange sidelong glances, ignoring Quil’s smug look. How are they supposed to feel now? Envious? Defeated? After all, no girl has ever given them a hickey, let alone a hot senior one. For a split second they both regard Quil with something close to awe. He has conquered that which could not be conquered. He has overcome that fear that all pubescent men feel when confronted by girls with lips and tits and hips while they’re still waiting for their voices to stop cracking.
“Well, at least you can use the money you were gonna spend on the dance to buy me a new rear window,” Jake finally says, breaking the awed silence. And with a deft push, he sends Quil skittering off the hood of the car. “So go get it, Romeo. And then you can figure out how to get the $300 for that ticket.”
“Awww, c’mon man, I don’t have $300!” Quil protests, picking himself up off the dusty floor.
“And that’s not my problem,” Jake tells him. “So get cracking.”
Dejected, Quil picks up his bike and starts the long ride home from the garage. But while he may be $300 and a new windshield in the hole, while he may not have a date to homecoming, and while his vision might be a fuzzy mess, none of that manages to dampen his mood.
Because for a brief, fleeting second, while Amy’s lips were pressed up against his, he was a God among men.
And you can’t put a price on an experience like that.