Jacob/Bella Big Bang fic: This Is The Night (Part 2)
Title: This Is The Night (Part 2)
Author: midnight_jo
Artist: bluesuzanne
Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight (thank God), therefore I do not own Bella and Jacob.
Book: Eclipse-ish
Rating: G
Word Count: 15644
Character/Pairing(s): Jacob/Bella
Warnings: Mild language, some angst, Bella being Bella.
Summary: The night provides an escape for Bella, but it also brings uncertainty. It's a good thing she isn't afraid of the dark.
Author's Note(s): Part Two
Link to Art: HERE (Banners, Wallpapers, Icons, Fic Mix)
Link to Part One: HERE
PART TWO
“Do your parents know where you are?” the driver casually attempted to slip into the awkward silence.
“Excuse me!?” Her answering laughter came out sounding more like an indignant, juvenile scoff. “I’m twenty-one years old,” she lied. It was almost true (though her tone was obviously bitter enough to lend an air of improbability to her claim).
“Alright, alright!” He raised one hand off the wheel and held it up in mock-surrender. “No more questions, then.”
A few more seconds of silence passed, and she began to get antsy. The cabdriver’s assumption - that she was nothing but flighty, childish fugitive - had gotten under her skin, and she wasn’t about to just sit there and allow herself to be pigeonholed.
“Can I ask you something?”
He lifted his shoulders in a mild, slightly detached shrug. “Give ‘er.”
“Does this seem stupid to you?”
He pretended not to understand the question. “Does what seem stupid to me?” he repeated almost verbatim.
She raised her hands and waved them around her own head. “This. Me… out here by myself in the middle of the night taking a ridiculously expensive taxi ride to the beach. This This. Does it seem stupid? Does it seem like… I dunno… a bad idea?”
He narrowed his eyes, jerking his chin backwards until it eventually became indistinguishable from his neck. “I’m supposed to know whether your ideas are good or bad?” he asked, employing the sort of ambiguous sarcasm that just came naturally to some people, and that also made him hard to read. “Last I checked I wasn’t no psychologist. Or wait… psychiatrist? I can never remember what the difference is. I should know, too… my sister-in-law is one of them,” he rambled, his tone almost too relaxed. “Look, regardless, I’m not a shrink. I picked you up, you told me where go, and I’m taking you there. That’s the extent of my job description. No judgment here.”
She couldn’t accept this, though.
“But you did judge me,” she said. “You thought it was weird when I asked to be taken to La Push. You said so.”
He shoulder-checked unnecessarily - purely out of habit - and merged into the left-hand lane.
“I thought it was weird that someone would want to pay an extra fifty bucks for a taxi to come all the way from Port Angeles when there are drivers in Forks, and then ask to be driven even further west--”
“I have my reasons,” she butted in, not caring whether or not he was finished.
He laughed, “I’m sure you do. Just so I’m clear, though, I’m not gonna end up on the six o’clock news or anything tomorrow, am I?”
She was stunned into silence for a moment, couldn’t come up with anything more intelligent to say than, “Um… no?” It made her sound dubious, like she was throwing the question back at him. She immediately wished for a do-over.
His shoulders bobbed with noiseless laughter for a few seconds, then he cleared his throat again and said, “You haven’t done this before, have you? Running away from home, or… whatever it is you’re doing?”
Her head snapped up from where she’d been looking down, picking at the spot on her jeans where a hole was already threatening to wear through. “What!? What makes you think I’m… I’m not running away from home!” She tried to make it sound like she was amused by the hilarity of his assumption, but, just like when he’d caught her off guard with the age thing, her tone of voice betrayed her.
“Oh, I believe you,” he chuckled, proving her point. “Millions wouldn’t…” She didn’t need to actually see his eyes to know they’d just followed a high arc across the car’s interior.
“Look, I’m just… confused,” she continued, ignoring the voice in her head that was screaming shut up, shut up, shut up you idiot. “I’ll figure it out. That’s why… I need to go to La Push. I have to talk to someone.”
“Riiight…” the driver drawled. She could see the grin in his eyes; the mirror above his head allowed her get an accurate gauge on his level of his sincerity. “What is it, like a secret boyfriend or something?”
“No!” she snapped a little too aggressively.
“Oh, I’m sorry… fiancée?” he corrected himself, stretching his neck up and staring down his nose into the mirror, directing an undeniably pointed glance at the diamond on her finger. She immediately placed her right hand over the back of her left.
It occurred to her in that instant that she might want to have him change their course, to drive instead to where the streetlights yielded to the heavily-forested road that bordered the National Park. They would hang a left at the seventh mailbox, about fifteen minutes in, and follow the long, narrow driveway up towards a large, familiar house with floor-to-ceiling walls of glass and clean, geometric lines. She also wouldn’t have to walk as far, because there’d be no need to worry about the engine's noise waking anyone up.
“Look. Please… I’m really tired.” Her voice wavered; a few rogue tears had somehow managed to slip unnoticed past her body’s internal security. The vision of the house disappeared again, and she released her own tense knuckles from her own tense grip, the stone’s indentation remaining - pink and angry and sore - on her right palm.
“Okay,” he relented slightly. “It’s just… are you sure that--”
“You said no more questions,” she cut in, “and you’ve already asked me like… five.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m done.”
……………………………………
You’re probably thinking I’ve lost my conscience along with my mind, and really… I’d be the last person on Earth to disagree with you there. I can’t allow myself to step back too far, though, because that’s when the second-guessing starts, and it’s that second-guessing that’s kept me from doing this so much sooner. It’s what keeps me in my comfort zone. It’s what tells me that it’s okay to ignore these little pieces of myself that haven’t seen the light of day in so many years.
………………………………
“You can let me out here.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No…”
“I’m not letting you out here.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not letting you wander along the side of the highway by yourself at three am.”
“It’s not three am, it’s… quarter to three...”
“Oh, well in that case…”
“I’m serious.”
“And you think I’m not?”
He was really starting to frustrate her now, and this conversation - this fruitless argument - was as much in need of some brakes as the cab itself.
“Pull over, please,” she barked, the words themselves implying a certain level of politeness that didn’t correspond with the tone in which they were delivered.
He drove a little bit faster, clearly prepared to take the verbal abuse if it meant getting her as close to the center of town as possible.
“Hey!” she piped up again, realizing she wasn’t going to get a response, “I’m not joking. Stop!” She had graduated to almost shouting now, leaning forward in her seat and making it impossible for him to ignore her.
He let out an obnoxiously deliberate sigh and rolled slowly towards the edge of the pavement.
“This really isn’t safe. I could get in a lot of trouble for this if anyone at the depot found out.” His eyebrows in the mirror were angled up so high that they almost met near the centre of his forehead.
She started fishing inside of her bag, rustling its contents around in search of her wallet and mumbling under her breath, “Well, then it’s a good thing I plan on taking this to the grave…”
“What was that?” he asked her, shifting the car into park and turning around, stretching his arms out to drape over the tops of both front seats.
She pulled out four twenties, then looked up from this task to stare him right in the eye.
“I’m not gonna tell anyone,” she said, as if it couldn’t be more obvious.
For reasons that they both understood but wouldn’t voice, she didn’t ask for any change, even though the final total only came to $68.80. Only.
When he eventually drove away, he stuck to a slow crawl for the first fifty yards or so, then gradually picked up speed until the red glow of the taillights had no choice but to completely disappear behind the trees.
She hoisted her bag up onto her shoulders and marched - completely unafraid for the first time tonight - into the reassuring darkness.
……………………………………………
You’d absolutely hate it where I’m going, anyway… I think I understand you well enough by now to know that there are few places in this world that fit you like Forks does. Would you have sacrificed your life here in order to follow me? See, the answer is (to me, at least) pretty obvious. Maybe it isn’t to you. But that’s beside the point, because the question is irrelevant. I’d never ask you to come with me. I’d never forgive myself for tearing you away from your home.
……………………………………………
Jacob’s window was only open a crack, and with the whole house situated up on its crawlspace, she could barely touch the sill with her fingertips when she stood on her toes.
That’s okay, she thought to herself, I don’t have to be able to reach.
She turned around and jogged over to the edge of the driveway, stooping to scrape up a handful of gravel, which she shook around in her loosely-cupped fingers to sift out the sand as she walked slowly back towards the house.
Positioning herself a few feet back from the wall, she plucked a couple of rocks from the centre of her left palm and held them up in front of her face as if aiming them at an eye-level dartboard rather than a high window. She hoped that this would work, knew that it at least had the potential to; she had been roused in this manner before. So, taking her cue from Jacob himself, she straightened her arm and, with a graceless little hop, lobbed the stones up towards the glass.
Both rocks sailed straight through the three-inch opening.
For a moment she could only gawk at this development, her jaw simply dangling in mid-air, one eyebrow arched to the high heavens. After a few quick beats, however, she released an epic snort of laughter, bringing her hands up to her mouth to muffle the mad cackling that followed.
She couldn’t believe it. If, at this very moment, someone pulled into Jacob’s driveway with an honest-to-goodness time machine and offered to pay her a billion dollars to redo what she’d just done, those two rocks would be in the rain-gutter for sure. She made a quick mental note to re-enact this impressive feat for Jake later, since he enjoyed hearing about her little fluky moments almost as much as he loved ridiculing her for her lack of coordination.
She brought her hands down to rest on her thighs, propping up her contorted torso as she tried to reign in her giddiness. Suddenly, a noise not unlike a footstep made her spine straighten and her chin perk up. She ventured a hasty guess…
“Jake?”
Her eyes darted back and forth expectantly. She waited for him to come to the window... ten, twenty, thirty seconds... but nothing happened. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the remainder of the rocks, releasing them with a gentle underhand toss. This time they all hit the glass with a loud clatter and rebounded onto the lawn.
“JAKE!” she repeated, a little louder this time.
She waited again... and once again: Nothing.
Frustrated, she tightened the straps on her backpack, securing it flush against the curve of her spine.
After yet another brief jog, this time to the patch of long grass near the edge of the trees that Jacob didn’t bother to cut anymore because ‘Billy can’t see behind the garage, anyway,” she returned with a rather sturdy-looking twig. Perfect.
Reaching up, she carefully threaded the branch through the opening in the window and slowly but patiently levered it open enough to facilitate the second phase of her plan. It took her a few good low-squatted jumps to get a decent grip on the windowsill, but once her fingers found purchase on the ledge, she was able to scramble her sneakers far enough up the siding to hook one calf over the sill next to her hands.
After eventually inching her entire leg over the threshold with a few well-planned spurts of momentum, the whole thing got a lot easier, even if it wasn’t much more elegantly executed. Her knee preceded her hips, which were followed by her shoulders, and then her other knee. Soon she found herself crouched triumphantly in an awkward sort of one-legged squat on the windowsill. She was pretty certain that if anyone were awake to witness this lame attempt at stealth, they’d be in hysterics.
She stretched one hand out uncomfortably, desperately searching for something to support her weight against. Jacob’s dresser was conveniently located right next to the window, so its top drawer provided the perfect handle on which her fingers could achieve a reassuring hold.
She remained in this position for a few seconds, regaining her breath and feeling the veins in her legs slowly begin to tingle, before making her next move.
When she tried to get both feet over the edge, however, everything fell apart. One of her ankles remained stuck on the windowsill as she turned her body around to lower herself to the ground. In the end, she had to tilt herself at a precarious diagonal to dislodge her foot, which sent her tumbling across the floor rather noisily, taking the entire dresser drawer with her. It smashed against the wooden floor with a *bang*, its contents scattering across the room.
“Ow…” she whispered, drawing in several hissing breaths between clenched teeth, trying desperately to get her bearings. “Owowowowow…”
She sat up, and spun around with a slight jolt as a low voice called out from somewhere on the other side of the bedroom door: “Jacob?”
“SHIT!” she hissed rather uncharacteristically, “SHITSHITSHIT…” She frantically attempted to tidy the mess she’d made, raking her arms across the bedroom floor, trying to gather up as much of the strewn clothing as she could.
“JACOB? What’s going on in there?” Billy’s voice was louder now, more serious. "Are you okay?"
Bella stood up in a panic, her arms overflowing with…
She looked down:
Boxer briefs.
She let out a small yelp, whipping her hands back down to her sides and standing, rigid as a soldier, allowing the offending items to redistribute themselves at her feet. Her head darted frantically from side to side, and she bit down hard on her lower lip. She kept her eyes glued to the door as she approached the huge, sheet-covered lump on the bed, which was expanding and contracting softly, emitting a muted, peaceful buzz.
Immediately opting against the standard cheery 'rise and shine!' she pounded violently on his upper arm with the softest parts of her balled-up hands, whispering between clenched teeth, “JAKE! WAKE UP!”
“Unngghrr?” the blob moaned, shifting until it was no longer just a lump, but a face with a neck and a set of shoulders… and a long arm that emerged sleepily from beneath the sheet to effortlessly quell her fists of fury with a single swipe.
“JAKE! Billy’s asking for you… Wake UP!” she was almost growling now. If Billy found out she was here, then Charlie would find out too… and then it would all be over.
Jacob’s eyes cracked open slightly. The dark black pupil was only barely visible thanks to the bluish glint of the moonlight against his eyeball. His eyebrows drew together, and his head retreated further back into the pillow as if he were trying achieve better focus by lengthening the distance between them, even if only by half an inch. After about three seconds of silence, both of his hands floated up towards his face, their heels gradually digging into his eye sockets. “Bella...” he breathed out almost incoherently, “wuhyoudoinere?”
She grabbed his shoulder again, kneading it like a lump of dough and eyeing the door again with concern.
“Jake, I just… I think…” she paused to listen carefully for any sign of movement outside the door, but could only hear two sets of lungs operating at different speeds. “It doesn’t matter why I’m here right now, I think your dad heard me! You’ve gotta get up!” she spat at him, grabbing his wrist and yanking one hand away from his face. She leaned back and pulled his arm towards the door using the weight of her entire body.
“Okay, okay, jeez…” He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and running his fingers lazily back and forth over his only-just-recently-shorn head. When he eventually lumbered to his feet, slightly unstable at first, she noticed for the first time that he was barely clothed - even more so than usual, or rather… less so than usual.
She blushed and looked away, back at the destruction she’d caused.
He opened the door, made to step outside, and a floorboard creaked under his carelessly heavy footsteps, causing Billy to pipe up once more, “Jacob? Are you sleepwalking or something?” There was a brief pause, then a barely-discernable, “Goddamn it. Not again.”
“No…” Jake started to speak, but she cut him off with a violent tug on his hand.
“DON’T TELL HIM I’M HERE,” she mouthed exaggeratedly without any sound, shaking her head from side to side and slashing her free hand across her neck in fierce horizontal strokes.
He roughly freed his fingers from hers and waved his entire arm dismissively in her direction without so much as a backward glance, trudging out into the hallway and shutting the door behind him… right in her face.
She pressed her ear up against the wood, trying to make out what he was saying, but only catching certain words.
“What?”… “Nothing”… “Fell”… “Sorry”… “Careful”… “G’night”…
His return was so silent that she only noticed he was back when the door handle started to jiggle. Before she had a chance to make it look like she hadn’t just been eavesdropping on him, he nudged the door open a little too swiftly, sending it clunking against her hip, shoulder, and forehead in succession: *buh-buh-bump*.
“Aaach…” she gasped, stumbling backwards into his closet door, which consequently slammed shut against its frame.
“SHHHH!” he hissed out through gritted teeth. He once again passed a hand repeatedly over the top of his head, eventually palming his entire skull like a basketball and rolling it around on his neck to observe the ceiling briefly, not even trying to hide his frustration.
Tiptoeing, she centred herself in the room, as far away from any one object as she could get.
They stared at each other for a moment before he finally took some initiative, widening his eyes and rotating both loosely-fanned-out hands on their respective wrists, entreating her reply in complete silence.
She responded in kind, arching her own brows and lifting her shoulders up in a clearly defiant What!?
“Umm…” he drew the sound out, pressing his lips together tightly before separating them with a slight pop. “What the hell!?” He kept his voice low.
She took a second, swivelling her head around to observe the chaos. If she was being honest, it didn’t really look that much worse than the usual state of his room, but still… it was noticeable. When she snuck her head back around to face him, he was still waiting for her answer.
But no words came. She only wished she had the guts to go ahead and play their usual game, to shoot him a wry response that was sure to provoke an equally snarky counterattack, but nothing came to her. All she had was honesty, and she silently cursed her absent imagination.
“I just…” she started, allowing her chin to dip until all she could see was the collage of rumpled clothing at their feet. “I needed to see you.” Reaching up, she clamped one hand onto the back of her own neck, rubbing gently at the spot where the friction from her bag’s strap had burnt an angry red line onto the delicate skin.
“So… you decided to run night-ops? Nice.” The chill in his voice was more than apparent as he reached around her to grab the window by its frame and slide it back to almost-shut. He turned and bent at the waist, scooping the entire scattered contents of his underwear drawer up between both large hands and depositing it all back in its proper place. “I’ve gotta say, though, your B&E could use a little work.”
Suddenly, her head snapped up. She took a threatening step forward, raising her index finger like a weapon. “I wouldn’t have to break into your house if you had the decency to answer my phone calls, or even just… write me a freakin’ note or something,” she spat at him. “Where the hell have you been, Jacob? You tell me to come by and then you disappear for four days?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he drawled in an almost eerily calm monotone. “What’s wrong with the truck this time, then?”
“You-” she began before suddenly jerking her head back, changing her course mid-accusation, “wait, what?”
“The truck. What is it this time? Spark plugs?” She could see him struggling to find his words, “Flat tire? Chipped window? Wiper blades need replacing?”
She played dumb, “Why would you assume--”
“Because I get it now, Bella. It’s cool.” Judging from the tone of his voice and the disturbingly inappropriate smile on his face, it was pretty obvious that, whatever ‘it’ was, it most definitely wasn’t cool. He continued to explain himself, “You come to me when something needs fixing, and then you skip off on your merry little way.” He flung his hand out to the side. “So… spit it out. What’s wrong with the truck?”
She was now glaring at him with absolute rage, arms locked together over her chest, lip so close to quivering that she had to hold back her words for a moment while she attempted a few measured breaths through flared nostrils. She finally forced her mouth open, mumbled, “The truck’s not even here, you big jerk.”
His eyes narrowed, but not menacingly; he looked genuinely confused. “How did you get here, then?” he questioned, forgetting about his - and her - anger for a second, knowing that she couldn’t have used her motorcycle, because it was out in the garage under a sheet of heavy canvas.
“I took a cab,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“You took a cab?” he repeated with more than just a tinge of incredulity.
“I took a cab.” Her eyes dared him to ask her why.
But instead he turned his back to her, exhaling deeply, his aggravation more than apparent. He took two steps back towards the door and whipped a pair of shorts off the ground, pulling them swiftly on. He gripped the doorknob tightly, almost furiously, turning it clockwise about an inch before she interrupted him:
“Where are you going now?”
“You’re coming with me,” he said, turning his head to glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m driving you home.”
“No,” she asserted, dumbstruck, backing up until she was pressed tightly into the corner between the wall and the dresser. She wrapped both hands pathetically around one of his flimsy drapes, clutching it to her chest as if his entire bedroom was some sort of beloved doll. “I’m not going back home.”
His eyes grazed the ceiling for a millisecond, and he let out a blatantly derisive sigh. When he realized this wasn’t going to be enough to dislodge her, he once again flapped his hand indifferently in her general direction and muttered, “Well then I’m going back to bed.”
She wasn’t sure if he realized that she meant she was never going home, but it suddenly didn’t matter to her what he thought. His aloofness had finally worn her patience down to a thin, tenuous wire.
She produced a tiny, high-pitched sound that might've resembled a laugh had it contained even an ounce of amusement. Her hands released the drapes. “What’s your problem, anyway?” she barked at him, forgetting for a second to keep her voice down.
His expression immediately changed, and he snarled in a low baritone, “I’m angry at you. Is that against some sort of grand cosmic law or something? I’m not allowed to be angry at you for using me?”
“I wasn’t using-”
“Bull. Shit. That’s total bullshit and you know it!”
“Jake...”
“No, don’t ‘Jake’ me. You think it’s that easy, don’t you? Flash me the look and I’ll just forget anything ever happened, huh?”
“Stop yelling at me.”
“I’m whispering!”
“Whatever! Stop being so irrational.”
He balked at this. “No! You get pissy with me all the time and I don’t tell you to stop being irrational!” He raised his voice up ridiculously high and proceeded to mimic her: “Jake, stop eating all my chocolate chips. Jake, change the channel. Jake, put some shoes on. Jake, stop hating the bloodsucker.” He rolled his eyes dramatically at her. “Well, screw you, Bella. I can be as angry as I want to be. And just so you’re clear, for the past few days I’ve been pretty damned angry.”
She blinked a few wide blinks. It appeared as though she’d just had the wind beaten out of her with a crowbar. “Screw you?” she repeated, her eyes beginning to blur.
A slightly guilty look flared up in his eyes for a second, like he sort of wished he could go back in time a few minutes and make some slight adjustments to his little diatribe, but that guilt still wasn’t enough to overshadow the pain. Even an unbiased onlooker would've easily been able to tell that he was hurting, and not just a little bit.
He ducked his head and stepped back over to the mattress, sitting down heavily.
A sudden, strange look of discomfort passed over his face, and he shifted himself a few inches to the side, reaching down and plucking a small piece of rock from underneath his leg. He stared down at it, thoroughly perplexed, pinching it between his fingertips, rotating his hand to consider it from all angles.
Bella tried her hardest to stifle an inappropriate giggle. It felt so weird layered on top of her anger and tears.
Jacob ultimately lost interest and tossed the stone onto the floor. He then stretched out on the bed and rolled over, putting her right back in the position she’d occupied upon her arrival: in the centre of his room, surrounded by his mess, staring at his back.
She remained still for a moment before finally sighing and walking over to the bed. She repeated her last declaration, “I’m not going home.”
He was completely silent.
“So, what? You’re just going to ignore me, then?”
He didn’t respond, didn’t move.
“Jake?”
Nothing.
She sighed and rolled her eyes at his childishness, but it didn’t take long for her to start to feel cold... alone... and really, really stupid.
Without hesitation, she planted both hands on his side and swung one leg over him, then the other, landing with a graceless plop on the bed between him and the wall. The whole thing squeaked and bounced under her added weight. She sat there cross-legged with her back against the wall for a few moments, staring at him, marvelling at his unflinching stillness. Only when she grasped the true depth of his stubbornness did she allow herself to stretch out next to him, not right next to him, but a good foot and a half away.
She was facing him, staring him right in the eye... lids. His breathing was not steady enough to come from a deeply unconscious place. He was still awake... obviously, but he just didn’t want to talk to her. Again: Obviously.
It was time for her to make some real decisions. She had to at least try to convince him, and if she couldn’t... then she had to believe she was ready to turn her back on literally everything.
………………………………………….
We both have so much life left to live, and I just can’t go on believing that this is my forever. I look at the idea of forever here with you and I just can’t see it working, no matter how much I wish it were enough. We’re such different people, you and I. We want different things in life. You know I never wanted marriage, that I was happy to just be with you. I still can’t get over the fact that I feel so young, so out-of-place with this ring on my hand, and I can’t help but feel like I was never really ready for this to happen. It’s important to you, though, I appreciate that… but it’s just one of many things that make me realize how different we really are.
…………………………………….
“Jake?” she whispered into the empty space between them.
He didn’t so much as twitch. His breathing remained steady and heavy.
She reached out a hand and poked him in the arm. “Jake!” This time it was a demand rather than a question.
As before, the lines of his features remained abnormally frozen, as if they were formed out of wax.
“I’m leaving Forks,” she whispered to his unresponsive face. “I’m serious.” For a split second she regretted tacking on this silly addendum, realizing that it only served to make everything seem less serious.
Nonetheless, she continued to allow the words to leak out of her like so many breaths of air, because… it was Jacob; she’d always been able to lay herself bare with him, to tell him absolutely everything, even the things she might not have the courage to say to anyone else. And she knew he was always listening, even when he was trying to make it seem like he wasn’t.
“I never… thought about… what it would be like to just…” Her inability to find the right words halted her mid-sentence. She let out the remainder of the deep breath that had served as the platform for her attempted declaration, its long, sonorous exhale having carried the words as far as they could be taken.
Her course changed in a heartbeat, “I feel like everything I have here, everything I’ve come to base my entire life around is a lie.” She paused, bringing one set of fingers up to her forehead, stroking outwards, smoothing the lines. “I’ve been lying to myself.”
She noticed his eyes just barely twitching beneath their lids, yet still they refused to open.
“What did he do?” His mouth appeared to be moving independently of the rest of his body.
“He didn’t do anything…” she answered with a single low, bitter grunt, knowing that this was the truth, that she was villain in this entire messed-up scenario. She was the one who deserved to be chastised, and she was prepared to argue until her last breath, even with Jacob, to preserve the good image that Edward deserved.
“Oh really…” Jacob’s deadpan voice was still mostly a whisper, but it was loud enough for her to pick out the abundant sarcasm it contained. “He didn’t do anything?” One of his eyes cracked open, and his hand emerged from under the sheets to find her left wrist. He raised it gently with one extended index finger before letting it drop lifelessly back onto the mattress.
She felt her stomach plunge, and, for the second time that night, she concealed the ring beneath the palm of her opposite hand.
“It means nothing.” She pushed her head up an inch or so on the pillow so that she could look directly into his tiny sliver of exposed pupil. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything that it represents.”
His mouth, again, was the only thing that moved. “And yet you’re still wearing it.”
She frowned at the implied simplicity of it all. “What do you want me to do, sprint out to the cliffs screaming my foolish head off and, like… heave it dramatically into the sea? Some overblown symbolic gesture? Does that sound at all like me to you?”
The edges of his lips twitched upwards the tiniest bit, and if she hadn’t been staring at his face so intently, she wouldn’t even have noticed.
“I’m not gonna keep it,” she muttered down at her hand, twirling the ring around and around on her finger. “I just… don’t know what to do with it right now.”
“But you’re wearing it, so that means…” He opened his eyes and tried desperately to look anywhere except at her face, but the only other object in his line of sight was the blank wall behind her head, so he was forced to reluctantly return her gaze. “That means you said yes,” he stated resolutely, knowing that there was no point in phrasing it as a question.
She searched for a justification, but instead allowed the lamest phrase that had ever passed her lips to sneak out: “I didn’t know what else to say.”
He laughed at this, a rough sound almost like a cough that came from the back of his throat. “How ‘bout no.” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, rolling onto his back and folding both hands together to rest on his torso.
“Yeah, that probably would’ve been smarter…” she trailed off under her breath, a sweet sadness coming through in her tone.
“It definitely would have been smarter,” he grumbled, his eyes now closed again.
“Oh, like all of your decisions are so freaking intelligent,” she piped up, reaching out to shove his shoulder with her fingertips.
He smiled the tiniest smile, and she could tell he was remembering something, possibly one of their many fights, one of the many times they’d succeeded in hurting each other with any number of horrible choices, one of their moments: Jacob and Bella and their veritable mountain of reciprocal stupidity.
Then suddenly his mouth flat-lined, and his expression hardened so fast that she almost forgot she’d seen him smile at all.
“Stop it,” he growled.
“Stop what?”
“Stop… trying to make me forget I’m pissed off.”
She sighed, crestfallen. It seemed there was nothing else to say. Nonetheless, she decided to give one last desperate try.
“Fine,” she whispered. “I won’t say anything else until morning, and then I’ll leave.” She paused, waiting to see if he had anything to offer, then, when it became clear that he didn’t, continued, “I really wish you’d come with me, but I know I can’t make you.”
Shuffling closer to him on the mattress, but still not too close, she directed her next breath right at his ear, because if there was ever one thing she wanted him to know was coming straight from her heart, this was it.
“You…” her bottom lip passed between her teeth for a moment of brief hesitation. She didn’t know how to say things like this… honest, vulnerable things that stripped away all pretenses and left her feeling brutally exposed. Still, she couldn’t just give him the first word and not finish. She inhaled the deepest of breaths and resumed her course, “You’ll be the hardest thing to leave behind.”
And with that, she reached up and gently disentangled the fingers of his right hand from those of his left. His entire body stiffened for a second, but she held fast, pulling his arm down to his side and curling all of her pasty little fingers around his thumb, their palms pressed flat against each other. She placed her other hand on the back of his, running her own thumb over his strained knuckles and begging, “Please. Just until the morning. Last time, I promise.”
And when his hand softened against hers, it was impossible to tell exactly what he was accepting: her offer, or the long-awaited proclamation of his final release.
………………………………………..
There’s a certain calm that comes with letting things go. Yes, there’s also sadness, and confusion, and possibly even regret, but those things will hopefully pass. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this certain about anything, and I know it’s because there is something better - maybe even something perfect - for me out there… somewhere. I am going to find it. If I didn’t believe this with all my heart, then I’d never, not even for one second, dream of hurting you.
………………………………………..
The motorcycle was buried somewhere beneath a huge tarp, and she was struggling to free it without inadvertently knocking it over or something. The last thing she wanted was to have to sheepishly slink back into his room and ask him to right the goddamned bike for her.
He hadn’t said a word when she’d finally released his hand and raised herself into a sitting position on his creaky mattress. He could’ve just been asleep, but still… she didn’t want to resume a conversation that he obviously wasn’t interested in having. She’d said all that needed to be said, and he’d clearly held his ground. The time had come to let go.
Still, the tears were now spilling out, tapping one-by-one onto the heavy canvas she was wrestling with.
She knew she would have to push the bike a ways, far enough from the house that the thunderous ripping and snarling of its engine firing up wouldn’t stir Billy from his sleep for a second time that night. She hoped she would remember how to ride it, hoped that her limbs would cease their shaking when she finally climbed onto the seat.
She flipped the last corner of the tarp off the handlebars, sniffling pathetically at the same time, and nearly jumped out of her skin when a voice appeared behind her in the rapidly dissolving darkness.
“You think it’s that easy for me to just trust you?” His voice wavered with a mixture of fatigue and emotion. She turned around and easily found him - silhouetted against the distant glow of the streetlamp at the end of his driveway, framed almost dead-center within the borders of the garage’s cavernous mouth.
She couldn’t quite decide how to respond, so she said the most honest thing she could think of.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“So then listen. You know how long I’ve waited to hear you say those things you just said in there?” He pointed towards the bedroom with one hand, gripped his neck with the other, the latent anxiety revealing itself in the tense bulge of his upper arm. “A long freaking time, Bella. So long, in fact, that just this week I’d managed to finally convince myself that it’s never going to happen. And… now this? I’m… it’s just… it’s hard to take it seriously, y’know?”
“I know,” she reluctantly agreed, taking a step forward and then stopping as he barrelled on.
“I can’t do this anymore, Bells. I can’t keep torturing myself like this. It’s exhausting.” His hand dropped back to his side, and she waited, breath held inside her lungs, to see if he was finished.
He was.
“So then why come out here?” She sniffed, her composure almost completely re-established now, her sadness replaced with indignation. “Why ignore me for three hours, let me get up and leave, and then come running out here now with your excuses?”
“Because,” he slurred softly, his vocal chords finally catching on to how tired his brain was, “I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you… how this is going to work. If I come with you, there’s to be no more indecisiveness. I won’t have you driving off and leaving me on the side of the road again.”
“Jake, I’m not--”
“Just…” He shut his eyes and brought one hand up to rub his temple, clearly not in the mood for any type of discussion. “Don’t argue. Just promise me you won’t--”
“I won’t.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I used to think that I was far too dependent on you, that my whole world would collapse if you decided to leave me. But I’ve thought about it a lot, considered every scenario, and I’ve come to see that I was being stupid, because you would never leave me. It’s that simple. I just can’t picture you walking away. It’s like trying to imagine a goldfish jumping voluntarily from its bowl. Sometimes I feel like I can see you on your own, and I know that you are strong, and you forgive me, and you’re okay without me, but other times I wonder if my rash decisions will only serve to destroy you. I can’t bear the thought of you struggling to live on your own, and yet, even more than that, I can’t bear the thought of living one more day on this side of the glass.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He was taking too long.
Bella checked the time on her phone, then glanced at the side-view mirror, hoping to catch sight of him jogging across the lawn towards the Rabbit where she sat waiting impatiently. He was still inside the house, though; all she could see was the sky behind her - to the east - temporarily static in its transition from deep indigo to mauve, the overlying treetops like cut-outs in a shadow box. It made her nervous, this encroaching daylight. For the first time in however many months she didn’t have even the slightest idea what was going to happen when the sun came up, and this filled her with an energy that was sort of like fear, though not entirely. There was something else too-
The driver’s door abruptly popped open, making her jump for the second time in the past twenty minutes. Jacob quickly ducked inside, rubbing his hands together for whatever reason, perhaps momentarily forgetting that it was impossible for them to be cold.
She didn’t look him in the eye, simply held her bag on her lap and blurted out, “You told him, didn’t you?”
“Wha?” he responded absently, still trying to convince himself - and her - that his hands needed warming up.
“I’m not stupid, Jake. I know why you took so long. You told him, didn’t you?”
“He doesn’t care, Bells. He’s cool with it.”
“Yes, Jacob, but Charlie will care.”
He took a second to absorb these words, then shrugged and turned to face her.
“Then I guess you’re just going to have to explain yourself to Charlie in the next few days.” His expression was calm, certain. “You’re a legal adult, Bells. All he can do is yell at you. By the time we come back he’ll have had plenty of time to simmer down.”
She didn’t say anything in response, simply stared at him with a combination of confusion and annoyance.
“What?” he finally asked, squirming under her scrutiny.
“You don’t get it, Jake. This is it for me. I don’t want to come back. ”
His lips pressed firmly together to form a straight horizontal line, then finally opened to allow him to push a string of incoherent words out through his teeth.
Her head tilted to the side in puzzlement; it made her look like a startled owl. “What? I can’t pack for little-league?”
“You. Came. Back. From. I-ta-ly.” He over-enunciated each repeated word as if he were attempting to teach Green Eggs and Ham to a five-year-old.
She turned to face him, curling her left leg underneath her to achieve a better viewing angle. “Yes, but I wasn’t running away then,” she explained.
“No, you were running towards him, weren’t you?” Jacob’s tone wasn’t really angry or bitter like it had been in his bedroom, but quiet… contemplative… as if, in simply voicing his jumbled thoughts, he hoped to eventually obtain some clarity.
“What is this even about?” she asked, sick and tired of dancing around the subject, wanting to get a move-on. “Why are we talking about Italy?”
“Because,” he started, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, “we don’t do this, you and me...” He began to distractedly pull on an elastic band that was looped over the Rabbit’s gearshift, snapping it in a slow, steady rhythm. “Every time you take off somewhere… it always has something to do with him.”
“That’s not true.”
“Bells, don’t--”
“I asked you once, a long time ago,” she interjected. Her voice was reduced to an almost-whisper, and she tried to sneak her head around to find his eyes, which were diverted on purpose, trained on the centre of the steering wheel, or maybe the speedometer. “Hey,” she quietly spoke, waiting for him to reluctantly drag his eyes over to meet hers, “I asked you to run away with me once and it had nothing to do with him.”
He already had his answer ready: “And I asked you to come with me four days ago, and you said no.”
She wanted so badly to tell him why she’d said no: Because she hadn’t realized at the time that Edward wasn’t - as she’d always believed - her only choice, that he was merely the easiest choice. She wanted to look Jacob in the eye and tell him the truth, or the closest thing to the truth that she could articulate…
You’re not a constant, Jake. You’re not a guarantee, and I love you, and it scares me so much, and--
*Snap… snap… snap…*
Bella reached down and stilled his hand, holding it gently between both of her own. He squeezed her fingers a little, and she looked down, immediately noticing that the elastic he’d been playing with was one of hers - one of the cute, glittery hair bands that Renee had sent her for Christmas last year.
And before she even had a chance to think, she scooted so enthusiastically towards him that she ended up almost sitting on the gearshift. Her hands climbed up his arm one over the other… over the other… over the other… until she’d successfully pulled his entire upper body down to her level.
The meeting of their lips was like a car crash, swift, and painful, and out-of-the-blue. There were no hands on faces, no gentle touches or softly moving mouths, just pure force, pressure, desperation.
When it was over, the fireworks were quick to fizzle, and she immediately collapsed in upon herself, mumbling a horrified “Oh, God” into her hands. “Oh God… Shit.”
“BELLS!” he exclaimed with amused disbelief, partially because of the kiss, partially from hearing the dreaded S-word fall from her lips.
She ignored his exaggerated reaction, instead continued to mumble, “Oh God, Oh God, I’m such an idiot. What the hell did I do?”
He scratched the back of his neck, blinking, stunned. “Uh… you kissed me?”
Her hand shot out to the side, smacking him hard on the arm. “Shut up!” she moaned, fighting to swallow the lump in her throat.
He gave a laugh that shook the whole car along with his shoulders. “Wow…thanks…” he chuckled. “Really. I can feel the love, Bells…”
She moaned, her face pressed into her fingers again as he continued to laugh silently.
“I didn’t mean to… I mean… that wasn’t… I’m not even…” she stumbled over her words like a unfortunate slasher-movie victim barrelling through a dark forest - one that was completely overrun with convenient roots and stumps. She finally gathered her wits enough to make a complete sentence: “I hadn’t planned for that to happen.”
His grin widened to the point of ridiculousness, “Uh… yeah! That’s what made it AWEsome…”
A single, pathetic little laugh managed to surface from somewhere deep in her lungs, and before she knew it, she was smiling too. She shoved his shoulder playfully with the heel of her hand, right where she’d only just recently tried to bruise him, then tilted her head back until she was staring at the ceiling. Her voice came out sounding strained, her neck bent at its most awkward of angles, “Jake, I have no idea what the hell’s going on in my brain these days. I just-“
But he cut her off with an over-exaggerated scoff, then, with the most genuine, uninhibited smile, said, “Oh, please. Like all of your decisions are so freaking intelligent.”
……………………………………………
Do you remember that night in Astoria when we drank that whole box of wine and decided we needed to find a way down to the foot of the old bridge? It’s a wonder we didn’t fall in and drown. It was the Fourth of July, remember? And the boats were drifting in and we sat on the stones and played with the passing lights, making animal shapes with our hands against the retaining wall. Do you remember the story I told you about the shadows in the cave? You laughed and said you thought it sounded pretentious, and I refused to look at you after that… until you almost broke your foot trying to follow me, stumbling over the rocks. I was angry because you wouldn’t even try to open your mind. You didn’t want to believe that there might be something better out there for us, and I was too stupid to realize that maybe you didn’t want things to change. But I get it now. We weren’t meant to want the same things, and I can’t go on pretending to be satisfied with shadows on a wall.
……………………………………………
He didn’t expect her to speak because her eyes were closed and she’d been completely still for the past half hour or more, so when she did, he flinched.
“I’ve been here before.”
“Huh?”
“This is the same road she drove. I’ve been here before.” She shifted in her seat, bent her left knee up again so that she was sitting on her ankle, facing slightly towards him. “Though, I don’t remember it.”
“Who are you talking about?” He asked, eyes still on the road.
“My mother.”
This revelation was followed by a heavy silence, one that neither of them could quite figure out how to fill.
Bella turned and stared out the window, pressing her temple against the glass as the world sped by and thinking: This is the same road, and these are the same trees, and that is the same exit sign, and this is the same feeling - this freedom, this apprehension.
“I don’t even know if she ever realized,” she finally spoke, though not to anyone or anything in particular, “how much she hurt him.”
He suddenly caught on to what the comparison implied. “You’re his daughter, Bells. You were going to leave him sooner or later. It’s not the same thing at all. He knows that.”
“I’m not talking about Charlie, Jake,” she retorted, keeping her eyes focused on the side of his head. He refused to move, refused to verbally acknowledge that yes, he knew damned well who she was talking about, and no, he wasn’t eager to have this conversation at this point in the trip.
“You’re not your mother, Bella,” he tried not to sound like he was grumbling, kept his eyes glued to the road. “Every decision you make is yours.”
Her fingers floated across the empty space to land right on top of his, right on the wheel, and she held them there, strong and sure. Settling back into her seat, she seemed to have to strain her arm to keep it outstretched, but she refused to let go; she needed him to know that she was in this with him, that they were doing this together, that this was them moving forward, not him helping her escape.
“I know,” she agreed, tightening her fingers even more, “and I never said it was a bad thing.”
He subtly glanced down, trying not to move his head, and - in a moment that would make his lips press together in a secret smile, and his heartbeat rise to the back of his throat, rattling against those three simple yet cliché words that would continue to go unsaid until maybe after they passed the state line, or maybe even later - visually confirmed what he thought he’d noticed three seconds ago when her hand had first breached the gap between them.
The ring was gone.
He didn’t dare ask where it went.
And they sat like this for a while… in the stillness that existed only between them, straining their eyes against the blinding dawn, and she felt the fear of uncertainty that accompanied the sunrise, and she embraced it.
And they drove - past the trees, and past the exit signs, and past the houses where the people were stirring from their sleep and whispering to each other in the half-light that it was time to get up and make something of the day.
…………………………………………
I’m not asking for your permission, that much is probably obvious by now, but I’m begging you again to at least try to forgive me. It hurts me like you wouldn’t believe, knowing that I’m forcing you to give up this life you've helped build for us, this life that means so much to you, but I’ll never lose hope that some day you’ll be happier than you ever could’ve been with my apathy on your conscience. You deserve to be happy, and I need to believe that you will be… because I love you, Charlie. I love you, and I don’t want to do this to you, and that’s the one thing that makes me want to tear this up and go back to bed and never even think about leaving you ever again. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that… I’m sorry. You know me... I’ve never been very good at these things.
Please just know that I’m going to be okay. I know that’s probably not enough, but it’s all I can offer.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Renee.
***************************
So there you have it. This was a labour of love-hate, but I'm SO HAPPY it's finally finished. Thanks so much again to bluesuzanne for being such a huge help as I was writing this. <3
Author: midnight_jo
Artist: bluesuzanne
Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight (thank God), therefore I do not own Bella and Jacob.
Book: Eclipse-ish
Rating: G
Word Count: 15644
Character/Pairing(s): Jacob/Bella
Warnings: Mild language, some angst, Bella being Bella.
Summary: The night provides an escape for Bella, but it also brings uncertainty. It's a good thing she isn't afraid of the dark.
Author's Note(s): Part Two
Link to Art: HERE (Banners, Wallpapers, Icons, Fic Mix)
Link to Part One: HERE
PART TWO
“Do your parents know where you are?” the driver casually attempted to slip into the awkward silence.
“Excuse me!?” Her answering laughter came out sounding more like an indignant, juvenile scoff. “I’m twenty-one years old,” she lied. It was almost true (though her tone was obviously bitter enough to lend an air of improbability to her claim).
“Alright, alright!” He raised one hand off the wheel and held it up in mock-surrender. “No more questions, then.”
A few more seconds of silence passed, and she began to get antsy. The cabdriver’s assumption - that she was nothing but flighty, childish fugitive - had gotten under her skin, and she wasn’t about to just sit there and allow herself to be pigeonholed.
“Can I ask you something?”
He lifted his shoulders in a mild, slightly detached shrug. “Give ‘er.”
“Does this seem stupid to you?”
He pretended not to understand the question. “Does what seem stupid to me?” he repeated almost verbatim.
She raised her hands and waved them around her own head. “This. Me… out here by myself in the middle of the night taking a ridiculously expensive taxi ride to the beach. This This. Does it seem stupid? Does it seem like… I dunno… a bad idea?”
He narrowed his eyes, jerking his chin backwards until it eventually became indistinguishable from his neck. “I’m supposed to know whether your ideas are good or bad?” he asked, employing the sort of ambiguous sarcasm that just came naturally to some people, and that also made him hard to read. “Last I checked I wasn’t no psychologist. Or wait… psychiatrist? I can never remember what the difference is. I should know, too… my sister-in-law is one of them,” he rambled, his tone almost too relaxed. “Look, regardless, I’m not a shrink. I picked you up, you told me where go, and I’m taking you there. That’s the extent of my job description. No judgment here.”
She couldn’t accept this, though.
“But you did judge me,” she said. “You thought it was weird when I asked to be taken to La Push. You said so.”
He shoulder-checked unnecessarily - purely out of habit - and merged into the left-hand lane.
“I thought it was weird that someone would want to pay an extra fifty bucks for a taxi to come all the way from Port Angeles when there are drivers in Forks, and then ask to be driven even further west--”
“I have my reasons,” she butted in, not caring whether or not he was finished.
He laughed, “I’m sure you do. Just so I’m clear, though, I’m not gonna end up on the six o’clock news or anything tomorrow, am I?”
She was stunned into silence for a moment, couldn’t come up with anything more intelligent to say than, “Um… no?” It made her sound dubious, like she was throwing the question back at him. She immediately wished for a do-over.
His shoulders bobbed with noiseless laughter for a few seconds, then he cleared his throat again and said, “You haven’t done this before, have you? Running away from home, or… whatever it is you’re doing?”
Her head snapped up from where she’d been looking down, picking at the spot on her jeans where a hole was already threatening to wear through. “What!? What makes you think I’m… I’m not running away from home!” She tried to make it sound like she was amused by the hilarity of his assumption, but, just like when he’d caught her off guard with the age thing, her tone of voice betrayed her.
“Oh, I believe you,” he chuckled, proving her point. “Millions wouldn’t…” She didn’t need to actually see his eyes to know they’d just followed a high arc across the car’s interior.
“Look, I’m just… confused,” she continued, ignoring the voice in her head that was screaming shut up, shut up, shut up you idiot. “I’ll figure it out. That’s why… I need to go to La Push. I have to talk to someone.”
“Riiight…” the driver drawled. She could see the grin in his eyes; the mirror above his head allowed her get an accurate gauge on his level of his sincerity. “What is it, like a secret boyfriend or something?”
“No!” she snapped a little too aggressively.
“Oh, I’m sorry… fiancée?” he corrected himself, stretching his neck up and staring down his nose into the mirror, directing an undeniably pointed glance at the diamond on her finger. She immediately placed her right hand over the back of her left.
It occurred to her in that instant that she might want to have him change their course, to drive instead to where the streetlights yielded to the heavily-forested road that bordered the National Park. They would hang a left at the seventh mailbox, about fifteen minutes in, and follow the long, narrow driveway up towards a large, familiar house with floor-to-ceiling walls of glass and clean, geometric lines. She also wouldn’t have to walk as far, because there’d be no need to worry about the engine's noise waking anyone up.
“Look. Please… I’m really tired.” Her voice wavered; a few rogue tears had somehow managed to slip unnoticed past her body’s internal security. The vision of the house disappeared again, and she released her own tense knuckles from her own tense grip, the stone’s indentation remaining - pink and angry and sore - on her right palm.
“Okay,” he relented slightly. “It’s just… are you sure that--”
“You said no more questions,” she cut in, “and you’ve already asked me like… five.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m done.”
……………………………………
You’re probably thinking I’ve lost my conscience along with my mind, and really… I’d be the last person on Earth to disagree with you there. I can’t allow myself to step back too far, though, because that’s when the second-guessing starts, and it’s that second-guessing that’s kept me from doing this so much sooner. It’s what keeps me in my comfort zone. It’s what tells me that it’s okay to ignore these little pieces of myself that haven’t seen the light of day in so many years.
………………………………
“You can let me out here.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No…”
“I’m not letting you out here.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not letting you wander along the side of the highway by yourself at three am.”
“It’s not three am, it’s… quarter to three...”
“Oh, well in that case…”
“I’m serious.”
“And you think I’m not?”
He was really starting to frustrate her now, and this conversation - this fruitless argument - was as much in need of some brakes as the cab itself.
“Pull over, please,” she barked, the words themselves implying a certain level of politeness that didn’t correspond with the tone in which they were delivered.
He drove a little bit faster, clearly prepared to take the verbal abuse if it meant getting her as close to the center of town as possible.
“Hey!” she piped up again, realizing she wasn’t going to get a response, “I’m not joking. Stop!” She had graduated to almost shouting now, leaning forward in her seat and making it impossible for him to ignore her.
He let out an obnoxiously deliberate sigh and rolled slowly towards the edge of the pavement.
“This really isn’t safe. I could get in a lot of trouble for this if anyone at the depot found out.” His eyebrows in the mirror were angled up so high that they almost met near the centre of his forehead.
She started fishing inside of her bag, rustling its contents around in search of her wallet and mumbling under her breath, “Well, then it’s a good thing I plan on taking this to the grave…”
“What was that?” he asked her, shifting the car into park and turning around, stretching his arms out to drape over the tops of both front seats.
She pulled out four twenties, then looked up from this task to stare him right in the eye.
“I’m not gonna tell anyone,” she said, as if it couldn’t be more obvious.
For reasons that they both understood but wouldn’t voice, she didn’t ask for any change, even though the final total only came to $68.80. Only.
When he eventually drove away, he stuck to a slow crawl for the first fifty yards or so, then gradually picked up speed until the red glow of the taillights had no choice but to completely disappear behind the trees.
She hoisted her bag up onto her shoulders and marched - completely unafraid for the first time tonight - into the reassuring darkness.
……………………………………………
You’d absolutely hate it where I’m going, anyway… I think I understand you well enough by now to know that there are few places in this world that fit you like Forks does. Would you have sacrificed your life here in order to follow me? See, the answer is (to me, at least) pretty obvious. Maybe it isn’t to you. But that’s beside the point, because the question is irrelevant. I’d never ask you to come with me. I’d never forgive myself for tearing you away from your home.
……………………………………………
Jacob’s window was only open a crack, and with the whole house situated up on its crawlspace, she could barely touch the sill with her fingertips when she stood on her toes.
That’s okay, she thought to herself, I don’t have to be able to reach.
She turned around and jogged over to the edge of the driveway, stooping to scrape up a handful of gravel, which she shook around in her loosely-cupped fingers to sift out the sand as she walked slowly back towards the house.
Positioning herself a few feet back from the wall, she plucked a couple of rocks from the centre of her left palm and held them up in front of her face as if aiming them at an eye-level dartboard rather than a high window. She hoped that this would work, knew that it at least had the potential to; she had been roused in this manner before. So, taking her cue from Jacob himself, she straightened her arm and, with a graceless little hop, lobbed the stones up towards the glass.
Both rocks sailed straight through the three-inch opening.
For a moment she could only gawk at this development, her jaw simply dangling in mid-air, one eyebrow arched to the high heavens. After a few quick beats, however, she released an epic snort of laughter, bringing her hands up to her mouth to muffle the mad cackling that followed.
She couldn’t believe it. If, at this very moment, someone pulled into Jacob’s driveway with an honest-to-goodness time machine and offered to pay her a billion dollars to redo what she’d just done, those two rocks would be in the rain-gutter for sure. She made a quick mental note to re-enact this impressive feat for Jake later, since he enjoyed hearing about her little fluky moments almost as much as he loved ridiculing her for her lack of coordination.
She brought her hands down to rest on her thighs, propping up her contorted torso as she tried to reign in her giddiness. Suddenly, a noise not unlike a footstep made her spine straighten and her chin perk up. She ventured a hasty guess…
“Jake?”
Her eyes darted back and forth expectantly. She waited for him to come to the window... ten, twenty, thirty seconds... but nothing happened. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the remainder of the rocks, releasing them with a gentle underhand toss. This time they all hit the glass with a loud clatter and rebounded onto the lawn.
“JAKE!” she repeated, a little louder this time.
She waited again... and once again: Nothing.
Frustrated, she tightened the straps on her backpack, securing it flush against the curve of her spine.
After yet another brief jog, this time to the patch of long grass near the edge of the trees that Jacob didn’t bother to cut anymore because ‘Billy can’t see behind the garage, anyway,” she returned with a rather sturdy-looking twig. Perfect.
Reaching up, she carefully threaded the branch through the opening in the window and slowly but patiently levered it open enough to facilitate the second phase of her plan. It took her a few good low-squatted jumps to get a decent grip on the windowsill, but once her fingers found purchase on the ledge, she was able to scramble her sneakers far enough up the siding to hook one calf over the sill next to her hands.
After eventually inching her entire leg over the threshold with a few well-planned spurts of momentum, the whole thing got a lot easier, even if it wasn’t much more elegantly executed. Her knee preceded her hips, which were followed by her shoulders, and then her other knee. Soon she found herself crouched triumphantly in an awkward sort of one-legged squat on the windowsill. She was pretty certain that if anyone were awake to witness this lame attempt at stealth, they’d be in hysterics.
She stretched one hand out uncomfortably, desperately searching for something to support her weight against. Jacob’s dresser was conveniently located right next to the window, so its top drawer provided the perfect handle on which her fingers could achieve a reassuring hold.
She remained in this position for a few seconds, regaining her breath and feeling the veins in her legs slowly begin to tingle, before making her next move.
When she tried to get both feet over the edge, however, everything fell apart. One of her ankles remained stuck on the windowsill as she turned her body around to lower herself to the ground. In the end, she had to tilt herself at a precarious diagonal to dislodge her foot, which sent her tumbling across the floor rather noisily, taking the entire dresser drawer with her. It smashed against the wooden floor with a *bang*, its contents scattering across the room.
“Ow…” she whispered, drawing in several hissing breaths between clenched teeth, trying desperately to get her bearings. “Owowowowow…”
She sat up, and spun around with a slight jolt as a low voice called out from somewhere on the other side of the bedroom door: “Jacob?”
“SHIT!” she hissed rather uncharacteristically, “SHITSHITSHIT…” She frantically attempted to tidy the mess she’d made, raking her arms across the bedroom floor, trying to gather up as much of the strewn clothing as she could.
“JACOB? What’s going on in there?” Billy’s voice was louder now, more serious. "Are you okay?"
Bella stood up in a panic, her arms overflowing with…
She looked down:
Boxer briefs.
She let out a small yelp, whipping her hands back down to her sides and standing, rigid as a soldier, allowing the offending items to redistribute themselves at her feet. Her head darted frantically from side to side, and she bit down hard on her lower lip. She kept her eyes glued to the door as she approached the huge, sheet-covered lump on the bed, which was expanding and contracting softly, emitting a muted, peaceful buzz.
Immediately opting against the standard cheery 'rise and shine!' she pounded violently on his upper arm with the softest parts of her balled-up hands, whispering between clenched teeth, “JAKE! WAKE UP!”
“Unngghrr?” the blob moaned, shifting until it was no longer just a lump, but a face with a neck and a set of shoulders… and a long arm that emerged sleepily from beneath the sheet to effortlessly quell her fists of fury with a single swipe.
“JAKE! Billy’s asking for you… Wake UP!” she was almost growling now. If Billy found out she was here, then Charlie would find out too… and then it would all be over.
Jacob’s eyes cracked open slightly. The dark black pupil was only barely visible thanks to the bluish glint of the moonlight against his eyeball. His eyebrows drew together, and his head retreated further back into the pillow as if he were trying achieve better focus by lengthening the distance between them, even if only by half an inch. After about three seconds of silence, both of his hands floated up towards his face, their heels gradually digging into his eye sockets. “Bella...” he breathed out almost incoherently, “wuhyoudoinere?”
She grabbed his shoulder again, kneading it like a lump of dough and eyeing the door again with concern.
“Jake, I just… I think…” she paused to listen carefully for any sign of movement outside the door, but could only hear two sets of lungs operating at different speeds. “It doesn’t matter why I’m here right now, I think your dad heard me! You’ve gotta get up!” she spat at him, grabbing his wrist and yanking one hand away from his face. She leaned back and pulled his arm towards the door using the weight of her entire body.
“Okay, okay, jeez…” He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and running his fingers lazily back and forth over his only-just-recently-shorn head. When he eventually lumbered to his feet, slightly unstable at first, she noticed for the first time that he was barely clothed - even more so than usual, or rather… less so than usual.
She blushed and looked away, back at the destruction she’d caused.
He opened the door, made to step outside, and a floorboard creaked under his carelessly heavy footsteps, causing Billy to pipe up once more, “Jacob? Are you sleepwalking or something?” There was a brief pause, then a barely-discernable, “Goddamn it. Not again.”
“No…” Jake started to speak, but she cut him off with a violent tug on his hand.
“DON’T TELL HIM I’M HERE,” she mouthed exaggeratedly without any sound, shaking her head from side to side and slashing her free hand across her neck in fierce horizontal strokes.
He roughly freed his fingers from hers and waved his entire arm dismissively in her direction without so much as a backward glance, trudging out into the hallway and shutting the door behind him… right in her face.
She pressed her ear up against the wood, trying to make out what he was saying, but only catching certain words.
“What?”… “Nothing”… “Fell”… “Sorry”… “Careful”… “G’night”…
His return was so silent that she only noticed he was back when the door handle started to jiggle. Before she had a chance to make it look like she hadn’t just been eavesdropping on him, he nudged the door open a little too swiftly, sending it clunking against her hip, shoulder, and forehead in succession: *buh-buh-bump*.
“Aaach…” she gasped, stumbling backwards into his closet door, which consequently slammed shut against its frame.
“SHHHH!” he hissed out through gritted teeth. He once again passed a hand repeatedly over the top of his head, eventually palming his entire skull like a basketball and rolling it around on his neck to observe the ceiling briefly, not even trying to hide his frustration.
Tiptoeing, she centred herself in the room, as far away from any one object as she could get.
They stared at each other for a moment before he finally took some initiative, widening his eyes and rotating both loosely-fanned-out hands on their respective wrists, entreating her reply in complete silence.
She responded in kind, arching her own brows and lifting her shoulders up in a clearly defiant What!?
“Umm…” he drew the sound out, pressing his lips together tightly before separating them with a slight pop. “What the hell!?” He kept his voice low.
She took a second, swivelling her head around to observe the chaos. If she was being honest, it didn’t really look that much worse than the usual state of his room, but still… it was noticeable. When she snuck her head back around to face him, he was still waiting for her answer.
But no words came. She only wished she had the guts to go ahead and play their usual game, to shoot him a wry response that was sure to provoke an equally snarky counterattack, but nothing came to her. All she had was honesty, and she silently cursed her absent imagination.
“I just…” she started, allowing her chin to dip until all she could see was the collage of rumpled clothing at their feet. “I needed to see you.” Reaching up, she clamped one hand onto the back of her own neck, rubbing gently at the spot where the friction from her bag’s strap had burnt an angry red line onto the delicate skin.
“So… you decided to run night-ops? Nice.” The chill in his voice was more than apparent as he reached around her to grab the window by its frame and slide it back to almost-shut. He turned and bent at the waist, scooping the entire scattered contents of his underwear drawer up between both large hands and depositing it all back in its proper place. “I’ve gotta say, though, your B&E could use a little work.”
Suddenly, her head snapped up. She took a threatening step forward, raising her index finger like a weapon. “I wouldn’t have to break into your house if you had the decency to answer my phone calls, or even just… write me a freakin’ note or something,” she spat at him. “Where the hell have you been, Jacob? You tell me to come by and then you disappear for four days?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he drawled in an almost eerily calm monotone. “What’s wrong with the truck this time, then?”
“You-” she began before suddenly jerking her head back, changing her course mid-accusation, “wait, what?”
“The truck. What is it this time? Spark plugs?” She could see him struggling to find his words, “Flat tire? Chipped window? Wiper blades need replacing?”
She played dumb, “Why would you assume--”
“Because I get it now, Bella. It’s cool.” Judging from the tone of his voice and the disturbingly inappropriate smile on his face, it was pretty obvious that, whatever ‘it’ was, it most definitely wasn’t cool. He continued to explain himself, “You come to me when something needs fixing, and then you skip off on your merry little way.” He flung his hand out to the side. “So… spit it out. What’s wrong with the truck?”
She was now glaring at him with absolute rage, arms locked together over her chest, lip so close to quivering that she had to hold back her words for a moment while she attempted a few measured breaths through flared nostrils. She finally forced her mouth open, mumbled, “The truck’s not even here, you big jerk.”
His eyes narrowed, but not menacingly; he looked genuinely confused. “How did you get here, then?” he questioned, forgetting about his - and her - anger for a second, knowing that she couldn’t have used her motorcycle, because it was out in the garage under a sheet of heavy canvas.
“I took a cab,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“You took a cab?” he repeated with more than just a tinge of incredulity.
“I took a cab.” Her eyes dared him to ask her why.
But instead he turned his back to her, exhaling deeply, his aggravation more than apparent. He took two steps back towards the door and whipped a pair of shorts off the ground, pulling them swiftly on. He gripped the doorknob tightly, almost furiously, turning it clockwise about an inch before she interrupted him:
“Where are you going now?”
“You’re coming with me,” he said, turning his head to glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m driving you home.”
“No,” she asserted, dumbstruck, backing up until she was pressed tightly into the corner between the wall and the dresser. She wrapped both hands pathetically around one of his flimsy drapes, clutching it to her chest as if his entire bedroom was some sort of beloved doll. “I’m not going back home.”
His eyes grazed the ceiling for a millisecond, and he let out a blatantly derisive sigh. When he realized this wasn’t going to be enough to dislodge her, he once again flapped his hand indifferently in her general direction and muttered, “Well then I’m going back to bed.”
She wasn’t sure if he realized that she meant she was never going home, but it suddenly didn’t matter to her what he thought. His aloofness had finally worn her patience down to a thin, tenuous wire.
She produced a tiny, high-pitched sound that might've resembled a laugh had it contained even an ounce of amusement. Her hands released the drapes. “What’s your problem, anyway?” she barked at him, forgetting for a second to keep her voice down.
His expression immediately changed, and he snarled in a low baritone, “I’m angry at you. Is that against some sort of grand cosmic law or something? I’m not allowed to be angry at you for using me?”
“I wasn’t using-”
“Bull. Shit. That’s total bullshit and you know it!”
“Jake...”
“No, don’t ‘Jake’ me. You think it’s that easy, don’t you? Flash me the look and I’ll just forget anything ever happened, huh?”
“Stop yelling at me.”
“I’m whispering!”
“Whatever! Stop being so irrational.”
He balked at this. “No! You get pissy with me all the time and I don’t tell you to stop being irrational!” He raised his voice up ridiculously high and proceeded to mimic her: “Jake, stop eating all my chocolate chips. Jake, change the channel. Jake, put some shoes on. Jake, stop hating the bloodsucker.” He rolled his eyes dramatically at her. “Well, screw you, Bella. I can be as angry as I want to be. And just so you’re clear, for the past few days I’ve been pretty damned angry.”
She blinked a few wide blinks. It appeared as though she’d just had the wind beaten out of her with a crowbar. “Screw you?” she repeated, her eyes beginning to blur.
A slightly guilty look flared up in his eyes for a second, like he sort of wished he could go back in time a few minutes and make some slight adjustments to his little diatribe, but that guilt still wasn’t enough to overshadow the pain. Even an unbiased onlooker would've easily been able to tell that he was hurting, and not just a little bit.
He ducked his head and stepped back over to the mattress, sitting down heavily.
A sudden, strange look of discomfort passed over his face, and he shifted himself a few inches to the side, reaching down and plucking a small piece of rock from underneath his leg. He stared down at it, thoroughly perplexed, pinching it between his fingertips, rotating his hand to consider it from all angles.
Bella tried her hardest to stifle an inappropriate giggle. It felt so weird layered on top of her anger and tears.
Jacob ultimately lost interest and tossed the stone onto the floor. He then stretched out on the bed and rolled over, putting her right back in the position she’d occupied upon her arrival: in the centre of his room, surrounded by his mess, staring at his back.
She remained still for a moment before finally sighing and walking over to the bed. She repeated her last declaration, “I’m not going home.”
He was completely silent.
“So, what? You’re just going to ignore me, then?”
He didn’t respond, didn’t move.
“Jake?”
Nothing.
She sighed and rolled her eyes at his childishness, but it didn’t take long for her to start to feel cold... alone... and really, really stupid.
Without hesitation, she planted both hands on his side and swung one leg over him, then the other, landing with a graceless plop on the bed between him and the wall. The whole thing squeaked and bounced under her added weight. She sat there cross-legged with her back against the wall for a few moments, staring at him, marvelling at his unflinching stillness. Only when she grasped the true depth of his stubbornness did she allow herself to stretch out next to him, not right next to him, but a good foot and a half away.
She was facing him, staring him right in the eye... lids. His breathing was not steady enough to come from a deeply unconscious place. He was still awake... obviously, but he just didn’t want to talk to her. Again: Obviously.
It was time for her to make some real decisions. She had to at least try to convince him, and if she couldn’t... then she had to believe she was ready to turn her back on literally everything.
………………………………………….
We both have so much life left to live, and I just can’t go on believing that this is my forever. I look at the idea of forever here with you and I just can’t see it working, no matter how much I wish it were enough. We’re such different people, you and I. We want different things in life. You know I never wanted marriage, that I was happy to just be with you. I still can’t get over the fact that I feel so young, so out-of-place with this ring on my hand, and I can’t help but feel like I was never really ready for this to happen. It’s important to you, though, I appreciate that… but it’s just one of many things that make me realize how different we really are.
…………………………………….
“Jake?” she whispered into the empty space between them.
He didn’t so much as twitch. His breathing remained steady and heavy.
She reached out a hand and poked him in the arm. “Jake!” This time it was a demand rather than a question.
As before, the lines of his features remained abnormally frozen, as if they were formed out of wax.
“I’m leaving Forks,” she whispered to his unresponsive face. “I’m serious.” For a split second she regretted tacking on this silly addendum, realizing that it only served to make everything seem less serious.
Nonetheless, she continued to allow the words to leak out of her like so many breaths of air, because… it was Jacob; she’d always been able to lay herself bare with him, to tell him absolutely everything, even the things she might not have the courage to say to anyone else. And she knew he was always listening, even when he was trying to make it seem like he wasn’t.
“I never… thought about… what it would be like to just…” Her inability to find the right words halted her mid-sentence. She let out the remainder of the deep breath that had served as the platform for her attempted declaration, its long, sonorous exhale having carried the words as far as they could be taken.
Her course changed in a heartbeat, “I feel like everything I have here, everything I’ve come to base my entire life around is a lie.” She paused, bringing one set of fingers up to her forehead, stroking outwards, smoothing the lines. “I’ve been lying to myself.”
She noticed his eyes just barely twitching beneath their lids, yet still they refused to open.
“What did he do?” His mouth appeared to be moving independently of the rest of his body.
“He didn’t do anything…” she answered with a single low, bitter grunt, knowing that this was the truth, that she was villain in this entire messed-up scenario. She was the one who deserved to be chastised, and she was prepared to argue until her last breath, even with Jacob, to preserve the good image that Edward deserved.
“Oh really…” Jacob’s deadpan voice was still mostly a whisper, but it was loud enough for her to pick out the abundant sarcasm it contained. “He didn’t do anything?” One of his eyes cracked open, and his hand emerged from under the sheets to find her left wrist. He raised it gently with one extended index finger before letting it drop lifelessly back onto the mattress.
She felt her stomach plunge, and, for the second time that night, she concealed the ring beneath the palm of her opposite hand.
“It means nothing.” She pushed her head up an inch or so on the pillow so that she could look directly into his tiny sliver of exposed pupil. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything that it represents.”
His mouth, again, was the only thing that moved. “And yet you’re still wearing it.”
She frowned at the implied simplicity of it all. “What do you want me to do, sprint out to the cliffs screaming my foolish head off and, like… heave it dramatically into the sea? Some overblown symbolic gesture? Does that sound at all like me to you?”
The edges of his lips twitched upwards the tiniest bit, and if she hadn’t been staring at his face so intently, she wouldn’t even have noticed.
“I’m not gonna keep it,” she muttered down at her hand, twirling the ring around and around on her finger. “I just… don’t know what to do with it right now.”
“But you’re wearing it, so that means…” He opened his eyes and tried desperately to look anywhere except at her face, but the only other object in his line of sight was the blank wall behind her head, so he was forced to reluctantly return her gaze. “That means you said yes,” he stated resolutely, knowing that there was no point in phrasing it as a question.
She searched for a justification, but instead allowed the lamest phrase that had ever passed her lips to sneak out: “I didn’t know what else to say.”
He laughed at this, a rough sound almost like a cough that came from the back of his throat. “How ‘bout no.” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, rolling onto his back and folding both hands together to rest on his torso.
“Yeah, that probably would’ve been smarter…” she trailed off under her breath, a sweet sadness coming through in her tone.
“It definitely would have been smarter,” he grumbled, his eyes now closed again.
“Oh, like all of your decisions are so freaking intelligent,” she piped up, reaching out to shove his shoulder with her fingertips.
He smiled the tiniest smile, and she could tell he was remembering something, possibly one of their many fights, one of the many times they’d succeeded in hurting each other with any number of horrible choices, one of their moments: Jacob and Bella and their veritable mountain of reciprocal stupidity.
Then suddenly his mouth flat-lined, and his expression hardened so fast that she almost forgot she’d seen him smile at all.
“Stop it,” he growled.
“Stop what?”
“Stop… trying to make me forget I’m pissed off.”
She sighed, crestfallen. It seemed there was nothing else to say. Nonetheless, she decided to give one last desperate try.
“Fine,” she whispered. “I won’t say anything else until morning, and then I’ll leave.” She paused, waiting to see if he had anything to offer, then, when it became clear that he didn’t, continued, “I really wish you’d come with me, but I know I can’t make you.”
Shuffling closer to him on the mattress, but still not too close, she directed her next breath right at his ear, because if there was ever one thing she wanted him to know was coming straight from her heart, this was it.
“You…” her bottom lip passed between her teeth for a moment of brief hesitation. She didn’t know how to say things like this… honest, vulnerable things that stripped away all pretenses and left her feeling brutally exposed. Still, she couldn’t just give him the first word and not finish. She inhaled the deepest of breaths and resumed her course, “You’ll be the hardest thing to leave behind.”
And with that, she reached up and gently disentangled the fingers of his right hand from those of his left. His entire body stiffened for a second, but she held fast, pulling his arm down to his side and curling all of her pasty little fingers around his thumb, their palms pressed flat against each other. She placed her other hand on the back of his, running her own thumb over his strained knuckles and begging, “Please. Just until the morning. Last time, I promise.”
And when his hand softened against hers, it was impossible to tell exactly what he was accepting: her offer, or the long-awaited proclamation of his final release.
………………………………………..
There’s a certain calm that comes with letting things go. Yes, there’s also sadness, and confusion, and possibly even regret, but those things will hopefully pass. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this certain about anything, and I know it’s because there is something better - maybe even something perfect - for me out there… somewhere. I am going to find it. If I didn’t believe this with all my heart, then I’d never, not even for one second, dream of hurting you.
………………………………………..
The motorcycle was buried somewhere beneath a huge tarp, and she was struggling to free it without inadvertently knocking it over or something. The last thing she wanted was to have to sheepishly slink back into his room and ask him to right the goddamned bike for her.
He hadn’t said a word when she’d finally released his hand and raised herself into a sitting position on his creaky mattress. He could’ve just been asleep, but still… she didn’t want to resume a conversation that he obviously wasn’t interested in having. She’d said all that needed to be said, and he’d clearly held his ground. The time had come to let go.
Still, the tears were now spilling out, tapping one-by-one onto the heavy canvas she was wrestling with.
She knew she would have to push the bike a ways, far enough from the house that the thunderous ripping and snarling of its engine firing up wouldn’t stir Billy from his sleep for a second time that night. She hoped she would remember how to ride it, hoped that her limbs would cease their shaking when she finally climbed onto the seat.
She flipped the last corner of the tarp off the handlebars, sniffling pathetically at the same time, and nearly jumped out of her skin when a voice appeared behind her in the rapidly dissolving darkness.
“You think it’s that easy for me to just trust you?” His voice wavered with a mixture of fatigue and emotion. She turned around and easily found him - silhouetted against the distant glow of the streetlamp at the end of his driveway, framed almost dead-center within the borders of the garage’s cavernous mouth.
She couldn’t quite decide how to respond, so she said the most honest thing she could think of.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“So then listen. You know how long I’ve waited to hear you say those things you just said in there?” He pointed towards the bedroom with one hand, gripped his neck with the other, the latent anxiety revealing itself in the tense bulge of his upper arm. “A long freaking time, Bella. So long, in fact, that just this week I’d managed to finally convince myself that it’s never going to happen. And… now this? I’m… it’s just… it’s hard to take it seriously, y’know?”
“I know,” she reluctantly agreed, taking a step forward and then stopping as he barrelled on.
“I can’t do this anymore, Bells. I can’t keep torturing myself like this. It’s exhausting.” His hand dropped back to his side, and she waited, breath held inside her lungs, to see if he was finished.
He was.
“So then why come out here?” She sniffed, her composure almost completely re-established now, her sadness replaced with indignation. “Why ignore me for three hours, let me get up and leave, and then come running out here now with your excuses?”
“Because,” he slurred softly, his vocal chords finally catching on to how tired his brain was, “I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you… how this is going to work. If I come with you, there’s to be no more indecisiveness. I won’t have you driving off and leaving me on the side of the road again.”
“Jake, I’m not--”
“Just…” He shut his eyes and brought one hand up to rub his temple, clearly not in the mood for any type of discussion. “Don’t argue. Just promise me you won’t--”
“I won’t.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I used to think that I was far too dependent on you, that my whole world would collapse if you decided to leave me. But I’ve thought about it a lot, considered every scenario, and I’ve come to see that I was being stupid, because you would never leave me. It’s that simple. I just can’t picture you walking away. It’s like trying to imagine a goldfish jumping voluntarily from its bowl. Sometimes I feel like I can see you on your own, and I know that you are strong, and you forgive me, and you’re okay without me, but other times I wonder if my rash decisions will only serve to destroy you. I can’t bear the thought of you struggling to live on your own, and yet, even more than that, I can’t bear the thought of living one more day on this side of the glass.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He was taking too long.
Bella checked the time on her phone, then glanced at the side-view mirror, hoping to catch sight of him jogging across the lawn towards the Rabbit where she sat waiting impatiently. He was still inside the house, though; all she could see was the sky behind her - to the east - temporarily static in its transition from deep indigo to mauve, the overlying treetops like cut-outs in a shadow box. It made her nervous, this encroaching daylight. For the first time in however many months she didn’t have even the slightest idea what was going to happen when the sun came up, and this filled her with an energy that was sort of like fear, though not entirely. There was something else too-
The driver’s door abruptly popped open, making her jump for the second time in the past twenty minutes. Jacob quickly ducked inside, rubbing his hands together for whatever reason, perhaps momentarily forgetting that it was impossible for them to be cold.
She didn’t look him in the eye, simply held her bag on her lap and blurted out, “You told him, didn’t you?”
“Wha?” he responded absently, still trying to convince himself - and her - that his hands needed warming up.
“I’m not stupid, Jake. I know why you took so long. You told him, didn’t you?”
“He doesn’t care, Bells. He’s cool with it.”
“Yes, Jacob, but Charlie will care.”
He took a second to absorb these words, then shrugged and turned to face her.
“Then I guess you’re just going to have to explain yourself to Charlie in the next few days.” His expression was calm, certain. “You’re a legal adult, Bells. All he can do is yell at you. By the time we come back he’ll have had plenty of time to simmer down.”
She didn’t say anything in response, simply stared at him with a combination of confusion and annoyance.
“What?” he finally asked, squirming under her scrutiny.
“You don’t get it, Jake. This is it for me. I don’t want to come back. ”
His lips pressed firmly together to form a straight horizontal line, then finally opened to allow him to push a string of incoherent words out through his teeth.
Her head tilted to the side in puzzlement; it made her look like a startled owl. “What? I can’t pack for little-league?”
“You. Came. Back. From. I-ta-ly.” He over-enunciated each repeated word as if he were attempting to teach Green Eggs and Ham to a five-year-old.
She turned to face him, curling her left leg underneath her to achieve a better viewing angle. “Yes, but I wasn’t running away then,” she explained.
“No, you were running towards him, weren’t you?” Jacob’s tone wasn’t really angry or bitter like it had been in his bedroom, but quiet… contemplative… as if, in simply voicing his jumbled thoughts, he hoped to eventually obtain some clarity.
“What is this even about?” she asked, sick and tired of dancing around the subject, wanting to get a move-on. “Why are we talking about Italy?”
“Because,” he started, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, “we don’t do this, you and me...” He began to distractedly pull on an elastic band that was looped over the Rabbit’s gearshift, snapping it in a slow, steady rhythm. “Every time you take off somewhere… it always has something to do with him.”
“That’s not true.”
“Bells, don’t--”
“I asked you once, a long time ago,” she interjected. Her voice was reduced to an almost-whisper, and she tried to sneak her head around to find his eyes, which were diverted on purpose, trained on the centre of the steering wheel, or maybe the speedometer. “Hey,” she quietly spoke, waiting for him to reluctantly drag his eyes over to meet hers, “I asked you to run away with me once and it had nothing to do with him.”
He already had his answer ready: “And I asked you to come with me four days ago, and you said no.”
She wanted so badly to tell him why she’d said no: Because she hadn’t realized at the time that Edward wasn’t - as she’d always believed - her only choice, that he was merely the easiest choice. She wanted to look Jacob in the eye and tell him the truth, or the closest thing to the truth that she could articulate…
You’re not a constant, Jake. You’re not a guarantee, and I love you, and it scares me so much, and--
*Snap… snap… snap…*
Bella reached down and stilled his hand, holding it gently between both of her own. He squeezed her fingers a little, and she looked down, immediately noticing that the elastic he’d been playing with was one of hers - one of the cute, glittery hair bands that Renee had sent her for Christmas last year.
And before she even had a chance to think, she scooted so enthusiastically towards him that she ended up almost sitting on the gearshift. Her hands climbed up his arm one over the other… over the other… over the other… until she’d successfully pulled his entire upper body down to her level.
The meeting of their lips was like a car crash, swift, and painful, and out-of-the-blue. There were no hands on faces, no gentle touches or softly moving mouths, just pure force, pressure, desperation.
When it was over, the fireworks were quick to fizzle, and she immediately collapsed in upon herself, mumbling a horrified “Oh, God” into her hands. “Oh God… Shit.”
“BELLS!” he exclaimed with amused disbelief, partially because of the kiss, partially from hearing the dreaded S-word fall from her lips.
She ignored his exaggerated reaction, instead continued to mumble, “Oh God, Oh God, I’m such an idiot. What the hell did I do?”
He scratched the back of his neck, blinking, stunned. “Uh… you kissed me?”
Her hand shot out to the side, smacking him hard on the arm. “Shut up!” she moaned, fighting to swallow the lump in her throat.
He gave a laugh that shook the whole car along with his shoulders. “Wow…thanks…” he chuckled. “Really. I can feel the love, Bells…”
She moaned, her face pressed into her fingers again as he continued to laugh silently.
“I didn’t mean to… I mean… that wasn’t… I’m not even…” she stumbled over her words like a unfortunate slasher-movie victim barrelling through a dark forest - one that was completely overrun with convenient roots and stumps. She finally gathered her wits enough to make a complete sentence: “I hadn’t planned for that to happen.”
His grin widened to the point of ridiculousness, “Uh… yeah! That’s what made it AWEsome…”
A single, pathetic little laugh managed to surface from somewhere deep in her lungs, and before she knew it, she was smiling too. She shoved his shoulder playfully with the heel of her hand, right where she’d only just recently tried to bruise him, then tilted her head back until she was staring at the ceiling. Her voice came out sounding strained, her neck bent at its most awkward of angles, “Jake, I have no idea what the hell’s going on in my brain these days. I just-“
But he cut her off with an over-exaggerated scoff, then, with the most genuine, uninhibited smile, said, “Oh, please. Like all of your decisions are so freaking intelligent.”
……………………………………………
Do you remember that night in Astoria when we drank that whole box of wine and decided we needed to find a way down to the foot of the old bridge? It’s a wonder we didn’t fall in and drown. It was the Fourth of July, remember? And the boats were drifting in and we sat on the stones and played with the passing lights, making animal shapes with our hands against the retaining wall. Do you remember the story I told you about the shadows in the cave? You laughed and said you thought it sounded pretentious, and I refused to look at you after that… until you almost broke your foot trying to follow me, stumbling over the rocks. I was angry because you wouldn’t even try to open your mind. You didn’t want to believe that there might be something better out there for us, and I was too stupid to realize that maybe you didn’t want things to change. But I get it now. We weren’t meant to want the same things, and I can’t go on pretending to be satisfied with shadows on a wall.
……………………………………………
He didn’t expect her to speak because her eyes were closed and she’d been completely still for the past half hour or more, so when she did, he flinched.
“I’ve been here before.”
“Huh?”
“This is the same road she drove. I’ve been here before.” She shifted in her seat, bent her left knee up again so that she was sitting on her ankle, facing slightly towards him. “Though, I don’t remember it.”
“Who are you talking about?” He asked, eyes still on the road.
“My mother.”
This revelation was followed by a heavy silence, one that neither of them could quite figure out how to fill.
Bella turned and stared out the window, pressing her temple against the glass as the world sped by and thinking: This is the same road, and these are the same trees, and that is the same exit sign, and this is the same feeling - this freedom, this apprehension.
“I don’t even know if she ever realized,” she finally spoke, though not to anyone or anything in particular, “how much she hurt him.”
He suddenly caught on to what the comparison implied. “You’re his daughter, Bells. You were going to leave him sooner or later. It’s not the same thing at all. He knows that.”
“I’m not talking about Charlie, Jake,” she retorted, keeping her eyes focused on the side of his head. He refused to move, refused to verbally acknowledge that yes, he knew damned well who she was talking about, and no, he wasn’t eager to have this conversation at this point in the trip.
“You’re not your mother, Bella,” he tried not to sound like he was grumbling, kept his eyes glued to the road. “Every decision you make is yours.”
Her fingers floated across the empty space to land right on top of his, right on the wheel, and she held them there, strong and sure. Settling back into her seat, she seemed to have to strain her arm to keep it outstretched, but she refused to let go; she needed him to know that she was in this with him, that they were doing this together, that this was them moving forward, not him helping her escape.
“I know,” she agreed, tightening her fingers even more, “and I never said it was a bad thing.”
He subtly glanced down, trying not to move his head, and - in a moment that would make his lips press together in a secret smile, and his heartbeat rise to the back of his throat, rattling against those three simple yet cliché words that would continue to go unsaid until maybe after they passed the state line, or maybe even later - visually confirmed what he thought he’d noticed three seconds ago when her hand had first breached the gap between them.
The ring was gone.
He didn’t dare ask where it went.
And they sat like this for a while… in the stillness that existed only between them, straining their eyes against the blinding dawn, and she felt the fear of uncertainty that accompanied the sunrise, and she embraced it.
And they drove - past the trees, and past the exit signs, and past the houses where the people were stirring from their sleep and whispering to each other in the half-light that it was time to get up and make something of the day.
…………………………………………
I’m not asking for your permission, that much is probably obvious by now, but I’m begging you again to at least try to forgive me. It hurts me like you wouldn’t believe, knowing that I’m forcing you to give up this life you've helped build for us, this life that means so much to you, but I’ll never lose hope that some day you’ll be happier than you ever could’ve been with my apathy on your conscience. You deserve to be happy, and I need to believe that you will be… because I love you, Charlie. I love you, and I don’t want to do this to you, and that’s the one thing that makes me want to tear this up and go back to bed and never even think about leaving you ever again. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that… I’m sorry. You know me... I’ve never been very good at these things.
Please just know that I’m going to be okay. I know that’s probably not enough, but it’s all I can offer.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Renee.
***************************
So there you have it. This was a labour of love-hate, but I'm SO HAPPY it's finally finished. Thanks so much again to bluesuzanne for being such a huge help as I was writing this. <3