i don't feel so well, i thought that you should know before you fall
Title: I Thought That You Should Know Before You Fall
Rating: PG
Summary: She raises an eyebrow at him, like it’s a secret between the two of them and she’ll never tell. Jacob/Angela.
Author’s Note: The title comes from the Vienna Teng song “I Don’t Feel So Well”. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. It’s definitely one of my calmer, less depressing and wordy fics and I have absolutely zero experience with either characters… Well, I tried my best.
This one is for the amazing apresmoi, who introduced me to this ship.
He stands in the space where sand and water meet, eyes closed, daring the waves to carry him away. She watches him, notes that the empty expression he wears over his features seems to say gone gone gone gone gone like they did a year ago.
His name comes to her like a childhood rhyme, but she had hardly known him a year ago and she knows him even less now. Her backpack swings heavily from her left shoulder. Her bare feet make an abstract trail of prints on the sand as she makes her way down to him.
Ten steps away from where he is standing, she stops herself. What can she say to him? What excuse can she use to justify watching something so private?
“It’s a really nice day today, isn’t it?” turning to her, looking at her, his lips forming a smile. The greeting casts warmth over her; she didn’t expect it to.
“It’s hard to believe that I’m actually in Forks.” After high school, after what happened the summer of her graduation, is what she leaves unsaid, a one-sided agreement. She feels so old now, knowing that he too knew Bella, knowing that what had happened affected him infinitely more than her, but in the end, what difference does it makes? Faking a smile, she says, “I’m in town for the summer.”
“You’re Angela, right?” he suddenly realizes, putting out his hand like he had forgotten something deeply important. “I’m-”
As if she doesn’t know. As if she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. “Jacob Black?” She takes his outstretched hand and shakes it; his grip is firm and her hand lost within his.
“Yeah.” Then: “Looking out at the water makes me feel that, for a second, like everything is okay.” His dark eyes soften when the light in the horizon reaches them. “I’m probably scaring you.” She wonders if she is projecting onto him, when she hears
She raises an eyebrow at him, like it’s a secret between the two of them and she’ll never tell.
***
Angela knew that he was in love with Bella, catching the tender sidelong glances and aching in his movements before her friend ever did. Jacob behaved with Bella the way Bella behaved around Edward, and that was what was most painful for her to observe, even if mere snippets of these sadder, more exciting lives were all she had.
Seeing Jacob is only a reminder of how there isn’t someone there, waiting by the water for her to return. College hasn’t changed her that much. She knows that he thinks that she will never understanding what he has gone through and is still trying to surpass, but the faraway expression in his eyes makes her want to feel that hurt for herself.
People die, and others are left longing for things they can’t have; that’s just the way things are.
***
Two days later, they find each other in the same place, and Angela thinks its fate until happy surprise fades into coincidence. He must come here every day before she began to interrupt his thoughts without her presence, though she cannot bring herself to leave now that she is here. They do not look at each other, preferring to keep their feelings in the slim crescents their fingernails form on their palms. The knowledge is there, though, looming in the distance between them like a veil.
When she bottles up enough courage to speak, the first thing she asks is, “Do you come here every day?”
His smile, awkward and impossibly fascinating, echoes her own. “Nah,” he tells her, shrugging nonchalantly. “I try to come here whenever I have a day off. I’m working at this place for the summer. You know the Newtons’, right?”
“I went to school with Mike.” She thinks of Mike Newton and his handsome smile, nothing like the one Jacob wears so self-consciously. She had thought herself madly in love with him when she was younger, but it was just lust and too much hope; she had been desperate and he had been kind in his way. And then he wasn’t, and there Ben was.
“I know,” his voice strained. “I always thought he was an arrogant-” He glances at her hesitantly, wringing his nervous hands.
Angela laughs and finishes it for him, “Bastard? Asshole?” What she wants to ask is, how did you bear it when you realized Mike was a potential rival for you? Were you aggressive to him? How can every guy fall in love with one girl? She bites those questions back, forcing them down her throat like a bitter medicine, like just swallowing them will make her better.
“Exactly.”
“Right-o.” She winces when she hears herself say this, knowing that she is tongue-tied, ungraceful, wound up tight. He looks at her devilishly, like, Oh really? And: I can’t believe you just said that. She is a nervous high school girl all of over again, wanting to know what being Jacob really means. “What are you thinking?”
“That you’re not a liar.”
“Thank… you?” She is baffled.
“You want to talk about her.” Steady gaze, tight jaw, tense shoulders.
“Would you think less of me if I pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about?” she asks, lowering her eyes.
He is pressing on. It’s too sudden, too cruel to either of them. “Just say it. Say her name.”
“Bella.” Bella Bella Bella. There it is, the curse word, the forbidden topic, the name that they pretend to forget, freed from behind her lips. That she pretends to forget, for his sake. “I didn’t think you’d want to talk about her.”
“I didn’t think I did either,” he says, a sigh in his voice. She takes a step forward to be closer to him, the only thing she dares to do to help him, but they are never less than three feet apart.
***
Ben broke up with her a month after the end of school. It’s not like we have any in common anymore, he told her, rational when she wanted him to be anything but. And we’ll meet other people in college, so there’s no use pretending this was going to last anyways.
His face is a bright light. Her eyes stung and she couldn’t look at him straight in the face again. They had danced and kissed, the taste of his lips was familiar on hers. She had loved him though she had never told him, hiding it between the tangle of their legs and whispered words. Now she will never tell him and she is glad.
***
Jacob is waiting for her this time, his long limbs spread out, looking every bit at ease even though the blue picnic blanket is not enough for his length. He smirks, something she has never seen him done, at her as she settles down in the small space next to him. “I got the blanket, you got the food?” he says wryly.
“It’s in a basket and everything.” She gestures with her arm.
“How festive,” rolling his eyes good-naturedly. She merely laughs. They do not talk as they trawl through Angela’s picnic basket in unison. His fingers wrap around an apple as she reaches for the same one, stopping herself on time before their skin can touch. It would have been too easy, and at the same time hard, to let herself go and brush his hand just briefly-she can’t allow something like this.
He does not notice her, or her hands, when she eyes him, secretly, even though it hurts. “I can’t forget her and I can’t stop loving her. Sometimes I feel like I can just start over somewhere new, and then I’ll go to sleep at night and she is all I dream about. I know she chose Edward and not me and they’re gone.” He closes his eyes. “I know.”
“I-” she begins to say. There is nothing. Ben is nothing. She is nothing. There can be nothing for her to see, understand, remember except Jacob.
“She loves me too, you know.”
It’s hard not to, thinks Angela as she hands a paper towel to him.
***
How perfect it would have been for her to take his large hands in hers and hold him while he washed away his memories of Bella in tears. That is not what happened. She watched, like the silent observer she was and is, and he talked. I think she broke a part of me.
I think we break a little every time we love someone.
Have you ever loved someone?
No.
Then I must seem so pathetic to you.
Also no.
She doesn’t want him to know that she can see him falling apart at her touch.
***
“What I don’t get, Ange, is how you can put up with listening to me whine about how life sucks. Twice a week. All the time,” he is saying to her, half-joking. It is during their biweekly meeting, which can only last until the end of her summer, but Angela tries not to think about that, the twists and turns of half-opening future.
“Well. It’s not because of your classic good looks and way with words,” she shoots back, shivering as she cups a handful of cold seawater in her hands.
“I’m so insulted. There are plenty of girls who would want a ride on my love train,” he says, appearing shocked. She douses him with the water, laughing as he shakes the droplets of salty water from his hair like a startled puppy.
“Jacob! Never, ever say that again.” She tries to shudder, appear horrified, but the idea of his love train is laughable and at the same time, completely insane.
“Say Jake,” he commands, with utmost authority.
“Jake,” she murmurs, bewildered.
He grins. “That’s much better.” He ruffles her wet hair and she holds his gaze, bravely, for a shadow of a moment, finding it hard to breathe.
***
She is going to leave tomorrow, but they haven’t discussed it yet. The boxes and suitcases are packed once more, waiting to be lifted into her old, barely functioning car, as the sunlight grows fainter with every passing day and summer wilts into fall. If she believes in grand gestures, if the broken-down parts within them can heal in time, now is the time for Angela’s own Grand Gesture. It is not going well. Her hair is choppy and just alien to her from a haircut she got yesterday for the occasion, there are shadows of sleep deprivation, dark purple, beneath her aching eyes, and he is not here.
She feels the disappointment beginning to rise within her, and there is little she can do to stop it.
It’s not like she didn’t anticipate it-the stab in her gut that makes her feel like nothing is ever going to be okay again. It’s there, it’s there.
“You’re not going to cry on me, are you?”
She whirls around, tripping on her own too-large feet as though she is going to topple over. “No. Why on earth would I be crying, Jake?” she says, slightly sharp.
“Good,” he declares, smugly. “So what are we doing here again?”
Same old place. She wonders if he knows that the sand glitters, just a little, in the evening, when you come as the sun is setting, because there are no sunsets and sparkles here for them today. “I’m leaving tomorrow, and I just thought-” She bites her lip. “I want you to know-”
“I know.”
It doesn’t matter if they are internally broken or that the air will soon turn cold or that things are hardly ever okay most of the time when their lips meet for the first time. Jake wraps an arm around Angela’s waist and she gasps, trying to ebb the sting in her eyes.
“Well-good.”
The next morning, as the clock strikes nine, Angela finds him, grinning like he knows something she doesn’t, on her front porch.
fin
Rating: PG
Summary: She raises an eyebrow at him, like it’s a secret between the two of them and she’ll never tell. Jacob/Angela.
Author’s Note: The title comes from the Vienna Teng song “I Don’t Feel So Well”. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. It’s definitely one of my calmer, less depressing and wordy fics and I have absolutely zero experience with either characters… Well, I tried my best.
This one is for the amazing apresmoi, who introduced me to this ship.
He stands in the space where sand and water meet, eyes closed, daring the waves to carry him away. She watches him, notes that the empty expression he wears over his features seems to say gone gone gone gone gone like they did a year ago.
His name comes to her like a childhood rhyme, but she had hardly known him a year ago and she knows him even less now. Her backpack swings heavily from her left shoulder. Her bare feet make an abstract trail of prints on the sand as she makes her way down to him.
Ten steps away from where he is standing, she stops herself. What can she say to him? What excuse can she use to justify watching something so private?
“It’s a really nice day today, isn’t it?” turning to her, looking at her, his lips forming a smile. The greeting casts warmth over her; she didn’t expect it to.
“It’s hard to believe that I’m actually in Forks.” After high school, after what happened the summer of her graduation, is what she leaves unsaid, a one-sided agreement. She feels so old now, knowing that he too knew Bella, knowing that what had happened affected him infinitely more than her, but in the end, what difference does it makes? Faking a smile, she says, “I’m in town for the summer.”
“You’re Angela, right?” he suddenly realizes, putting out his hand like he had forgotten something deeply important. “I’m-”
As if she doesn’t know. As if she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. “Jacob Black?” She takes his outstretched hand and shakes it; his grip is firm and her hand lost within his.
“Yeah.” Then: “Looking out at the water makes me feel that, for a second, like everything is okay.” His dark eyes soften when the light in the horizon reaches them. “I’m probably scaring you.” She wonders if she is projecting onto him, when she hears
She raises an eyebrow at him, like it’s a secret between the two of them and she’ll never tell.
***
Angela knew that he was in love with Bella, catching the tender sidelong glances and aching in his movements before her friend ever did. Jacob behaved with Bella the way Bella behaved around Edward, and that was what was most painful for her to observe, even if mere snippets of these sadder, more exciting lives were all she had.
Seeing Jacob is only a reminder of how there isn’t someone there, waiting by the water for her to return. College hasn’t changed her that much. She knows that he thinks that she will never understanding what he has gone through and is still trying to surpass, but the faraway expression in his eyes makes her want to feel that hurt for herself.
People die, and others are left longing for things they can’t have; that’s just the way things are.
***
Two days later, they find each other in the same place, and Angela thinks its fate until happy surprise fades into coincidence. He must come here every day before she began to interrupt his thoughts without her presence, though she cannot bring herself to leave now that she is here. They do not look at each other, preferring to keep their feelings in the slim crescents their fingernails form on their palms. The knowledge is there, though, looming in the distance between them like a veil.
When she bottles up enough courage to speak, the first thing she asks is, “Do you come here every day?”
His smile, awkward and impossibly fascinating, echoes her own. “Nah,” he tells her, shrugging nonchalantly. “I try to come here whenever I have a day off. I’m working at this place for the summer. You know the Newtons’, right?”
“I went to school with Mike.” She thinks of Mike Newton and his handsome smile, nothing like the one Jacob wears so self-consciously. She had thought herself madly in love with him when she was younger, but it was just lust and too much hope; she had been desperate and he had been kind in his way. And then he wasn’t, and there Ben was.
“I know,” his voice strained. “I always thought he was an arrogant-” He glances at her hesitantly, wringing his nervous hands.
Angela laughs and finishes it for him, “Bastard? Asshole?” What she wants to ask is, how did you bear it when you realized Mike was a potential rival for you? Were you aggressive to him? How can every guy fall in love with one girl? She bites those questions back, forcing them down her throat like a bitter medicine, like just swallowing them will make her better.
“Exactly.”
“Right-o.” She winces when she hears herself say this, knowing that she is tongue-tied, ungraceful, wound up tight. He looks at her devilishly, like, Oh really? And: I can’t believe you just said that. She is a nervous high school girl all of over again, wanting to know what being Jacob really means. “What are you thinking?”
“That you’re not a liar.”
“Thank… you?” She is baffled.
“You want to talk about her.” Steady gaze, tight jaw, tense shoulders.
“Would you think less of me if I pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about?” she asks, lowering her eyes.
He is pressing on. It’s too sudden, too cruel to either of them. “Just say it. Say her name.”
“Bella.” Bella Bella Bella. There it is, the curse word, the forbidden topic, the name that they pretend to forget, freed from behind her lips. That she pretends to forget, for his sake. “I didn’t think you’d want to talk about her.”
“I didn’t think I did either,” he says, a sigh in his voice. She takes a step forward to be closer to him, the only thing she dares to do to help him, but they are never less than three feet apart.
***
Ben broke up with her a month after the end of school. It’s not like we have any in common anymore, he told her, rational when she wanted him to be anything but. And we’ll meet other people in college, so there’s no use pretending this was going to last anyways.
His face is a bright light. Her eyes stung and she couldn’t look at him straight in the face again. They had danced and kissed, the taste of his lips was familiar on hers. She had loved him though she had never told him, hiding it between the tangle of their legs and whispered words. Now she will never tell him and she is glad.
***
Jacob is waiting for her this time, his long limbs spread out, looking every bit at ease even though the blue picnic blanket is not enough for his length. He smirks, something she has never seen him done, at her as she settles down in the small space next to him. “I got the blanket, you got the food?” he says wryly.
“It’s in a basket and everything.” She gestures with her arm.
“How festive,” rolling his eyes good-naturedly. She merely laughs. They do not talk as they trawl through Angela’s picnic basket in unison. His fingers wrap around an apple as she reaches for the same one, stopping herself on time before their skin can touch. It would have been too easy, and at the same time hard, to let herself go and brush his hand just briefly-she can’t allow something like this.
He does not notice her, or her hands, when she eyes him, secretly, even though it hurts. “I can’t forget her and I can’t stop loving her. Sometimes I feel like I can just start over somewhere new, and then I’ll go to sleep at night and she is all I dream about. I know she chose Edward and not me and they’re gone.” He closes his eyes. “I know.”
“I-” she begins to say. There is nothing. Ben is nothing. She is nothing. There can be nothing for her to see, understand, remember except Jacob.
“She loves me too, you know.”
It’s hard not to, thinks Angela as she hands a paper towel to him.
***
How perfect it would have been for her to take his large hands in hers and hold him while he washed away his memories of Bella in tears. That is not what happened. She watched, like the silent observer she was and is, and he talked. I think she broke a part of me.
I think we break a little every time we love someone.
Have you ever loved someone?
No.
Then I must seem so pathetic to you.
Also no.
She doesn’t want him to know that she can see him falling apart at her touch.
***
“What I don’t get, Ange, is how you can put up with listening to me whine about how life sucks. Twice a week. All the time,” he is saying to her, half-joking. It is during their biweekly meeting, which can only last until the end of her summer, but Angela tries not to think about that, the twists and turns of half-opening future.
“Well. It’s not because of your classic good looks and way with words,” she shoots back, shivering as she cups a handful of cold seawater in her hands.
“I’m so insulted. There are plenty of girls who would want a ride on my love train,” he says, appearing shocked. She douses him with the water, laughing as he shakes the droplets of salty water from his hair like a startled puppy.
“Jacob! Never, ever say that again.” She tries to shudder, appear horrified, but the idea of his love train is laughable and at the same time, completely insane.
“Say Jake,” he commands, with utmost authority.
“Jake,” she murmurs, bewildered.
He grins. “That’s much better.” He ruffles her wet hair and she holds his gaze, bravely, for a shadow of a moment, finding it hard to breathe.
***
She is going to leave tomorrow, but they haven’t discussed it yet. The boxes and suitcases are packed once more, waiting to be lifted into her old, barely functioning car, as the sunlight grows fainter with every passing day and summer wilts into fall. If she believes in grand gestures, if the broken-down parts within them can heal in time, now is the time for Angela’s own Grand Gesture. It is not going well. Her hair is choppy and just alien to her from a haircut she got yesterday for the occasion, there are shadows of sleep deprivation, dark purple, beneath her aching eyes, and he is not here.
She feels the disappointment beginning to rise within her, and there is little she can do to stop it.
It’s not like she didn’t anticipate it-the stab in her gut that makes her feel like nothing is ever going to be okay again. It’s there, it’s there.
“You’re not going to cry on me, are you?”
She whirls around, tripping on her own too-large feet as though she is going to topple over. “No. Why on earth would I be crying, Jake?” she says, slightly sharp.
“Good,” he declares, smugly. “So what are we doing here again?”
Same old place. She wonders if he knows that the sand glitters, just a little, in the evening, when you come as the sun is setting, because there are no sunsets and sparkles here for them today. “I’m leaving tomorrow, and I just thought-” She bites her lip. “I want you to know-”
“I know.”
It doesn’t matter if they are internally broken or that the air will soon turn cold or that things are hardly ever okay most of the time when their lips meet for the first time. Jake wraps an arm around Angela’s waist and she gasps, trying to ebb the sting in her eyes.
“Well-good.”
The next morning, as the clock strikes nine, Angela finds him, grinning like he knows something she doesn’t, on her front porch.
fin