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anythingbutgreyso, basically, i can't come up with a thesis for my paper, and i'm posting this instead. because i'm impatient and fail at waiting for betas because i suck at life just that much. so, you all have full allowance to yell about anything you want and i'll fix it. and no, i don't like it very much, and yes, i know it's kind of trippy and flits between narration and and timelines. WHATEVER.
and, um, title? y/n?
and could i HAVE more author's notes? seriously.
Title: Tell Them This Love Hasn't Changed Me At All
Ship: Jacob/Bella
Rating: PG-13 for sexiness (sort of).
A/N: this is totally a companion to Love, Just Like Blood, Will Always Stain, so read it first. for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sortofbeautiful for kicking so much ass and having more members than you do. thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xpassionfadingx for her beta work and ppparasols for volunteering. sorry for me being so damn impatient and lame! :-/ title is from the tegan and sara song, I Know I Know I Know. For twilight_tables prompt Motion. And the definition of the past tense (you'll see) comes from the lovely wikipedia. Thanks to deadduck008 for accidentally making me discover a new clearly obvious fact about Bella Swan. She'll know what it is.
summary: The final prize of this scavenger hunt is absolution.
Her life does not flash before her eyes.
There is only fire, and the last delusionally human thing she thinks is this must be hell.
***
The pain blinks out and Edward gasps away from her.
She doesn’t even have to ask what is wrong, because he whispers, “I can hear you in my head.”
She scowls. That’s against the rules.
They don’t have much time to linger on that, though, because the bloodlust hits her hard and her throat is suddenly unbearably parched. She thrashes wildly and Edward holds her down, whispering that it will be alright.
Alright, alright.
All right.
Even the greatest fantasies sound beautiful in his mouth, not that either of them knows of any falsehoods just yet.
***
Jacob’s first time (that first time) goes like this:
He doesn’t remember her name in the morning. He knows it’s not Italian for beautiful, though, and that’s enough for him.
She wakes in the morning with a whisper of a hello before she mumbles something about being late for work and stumbles out of the room.
He doesn’t miss her nameless face, but he finds himself wishing for that skin on skin, the falsity of lust so bright it makes anything else (words like ‘love’) impossible to see.
***
Embry and Quil leave quiet messages on the machine in his ratty motel room with words like Please come home soon.
Everyone knows that old cliché about homes and hearts, and Jacob knows that if the heart stops beating there is no home for it.
(This message has been erased.)
No one ever calls to tell him when she changes, if they even know. All he knows is that the Cullens ran and Bella went with them.
The words ring with a death sentence, but he isn’t sure whose.
***
Bella’s first time (that first time) goes like this:
Edward is still unnaturally gentle, she is newly unnaturally strong, and she doesn’t even wince. They lie in the afterglow of finality and finally.
She smiles sweet grins and really kisses Edward, and neither of them fears anything.
A quiet fact sets up house in the back of her mind. It starts off as a whisper. Later, it will grow to a scream.
The truth of it is this: she expected to burn.
***
When things slow down to normal speed (a relative term), she stalks wolves behind trees and cries as she feeds.
Edward doesn’t say anything about her animal of choice.
***
He comes back because he can’t stand the quiet. He finds it ironic, truthfully, that he wanted nothing more than to escape the screaming in his head, then the pack in his head, then the echoes of a dead girl’s voice in his head, whispering after all else had finally been smothered.
Eventually, all that remained was silence and the soft murmurs of words Bella realized too late (love, love, love) and it was simply too much. Chicago did not have enough sex, drugs or rock ‘n roll to drown it out.
He phases back and tells Embry he is coming home.
Only later will he think about his choice of words.
***
Human memories fade like salt pushed into the sea, but, for her, everything remains clear as the present. If she could sleep to dream she would wake to her own voice screaming names of those who should be forgotten.
Edward can’t help but turn to her and promise it eventually stops hurting, eventually she will stop missing her family and her friends. A part of her wonders which category Jacob falls under and the only answer she can come up with is neither.
Edward hears that, of course, and she sees him wincing by the windowsill.
Once, she had no secrets from him and did not care if he saw inside. She wanted him to see, to grasp at her soul and call it his. It was his.
Now, though, she has too many secrets about teenage romance and skin that burned and memories she cannot shake.
She cannot help but think, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
Edward sighs and shifts in their bed.
(Something she will never admit: it goes like this for too long. )
***
Bella used to ski. Of course, being the clumsiest girl alive made that hobby die out quickly, but she did stumble down the bunny slope once or twice.
Their descent is not like the bunny slope. It is even more gradual. She doesn’t even notice it until they come back to Forks because she demands to and Edward’s protestations about treaties will not stop her.
“Why?” he asks.
She says, “It’s home, Edward. It’s my home.”
“I was home, once,” he mumbles, he lets slip, he doesn’t mean to say.
Her stomach twists and she wonders how even though she lost the clumsiness of humanity she still cannot see things clearly placed in front of her and even within her.
The truth of it is this: Perfection was a possibility destroyed by Jacob’s hand.
No. Not his hand. By him with his sounds and smells and mouth and, yes, hands too. It was so much easier to hate him than to love him. He understood that, of course. If it resided in Bella’s mind, it was unmistakably clear to him.
Her mind runs circles around words like idiocy and she grows too tired to stop.
She flees to him, then, because Jacob knew better than anyone how to make her stand still long enough to breathe.
Rosalie passes her on her way out and Bella can see she understands.
Rosalie nods. “I knew.”
It does not feel like an I told you so.
***
The knock on the door interrupts his meditation on the benefits of the Swiss cheese in front of him and he angrily stumbles to the door.
“Leah –” he begins before his jaw clamps shut and his teeth grind together at the sight of her.
Her.
Her mouth opens and closes like a book.
“Can I come in?” she finally asks, and he has already motioned her inside. It is simply impossible for him to hate her, no matter her smell, but he misses the way her eyes used to look. The warm amber makes him nauseous.
He sputters, “Can I get you something?” and gestures at the fridge before he remembers.
He remembers hard and no other word describes it because he simply forgets how to stand. He tries to make his descent into the nearest chair as subtle and graceful as possible, but fears she can see through him like he once saw through her.
They keep coming back to this place, her dead, him alive and desperately trying to save her. This time he is too late, and he feels less alive these days anyway, so maybe that explains his failures. Or perhaps it was the slow movement, perhaps he should have pulled her to him and never moved his lips from hers again a year ago, the day she found out he was a werewolf. He wanted to. The relief that day was unbearable, staggering, like surviving a car wreck. He never wanted her to leave his sight again.
He curses telephone lines and his nature, the fact that the Cullen seer could not see him and instead came running.
Things shouldn’t have turned out like this. It should have just been the two of them, human and together and so happy. They were the kind of love others would sigh over and wish they could feel too.
The past tense is a verb tense expressing action, activity, state or being in the past. He can’t get out.
“It’s okay,” she says when it’s not. She pretends to just be talking about food. “I still haven’t gotten used to it either.”
No, he thinks. And we never will.
Things stay quiet for a long time after that.
***
Their first time (that first time) goes like this:
She leaves half-moon circles of fingernails on his skin that fade an instant later and he clings to her cold skin like a high intensity magnet. He mumbles her name between gasps and sighs and neither says four letter words beginning with L. All one-night stands have unspoken rules.
That’s what it is, of course. A one night stand, an accident, an unrepeatable mistake. The skies grow grey and they part with handshakes at sunrise and hasty goodbyes.
He doesn’t expect her to come back and he’s even less sure if he wants her to.
(This, of course, is a lie.)
She returns to him and he worships the soul he is still somehow able to find. She can’t understand how he manages to drudge up facts of a world long deceased.
***
She says, “I’m going to outlive you and I don’t know what to do then.”
August, a night without wind and the sand feels like a blanket beneath her skin.
Jacob wants to take her by the shoulders and scream that she still loves him, but can’t. He’d have to admit he still loves her, too, and that’s against the rules. Neither of them knows who exactly established this order, the guidelines, the biblical code. He blames Sam, she blames Edward, and neither of them ever blames themselves.
He shakes his head. “I’ll just keep shifting. I’m not going to leave you, Bella.” He remembers Bella withering like dead flowers when Edward ran and shudders. He knew he loved her when he decided that her face when the Cullens were mentioned hurt him more than anything he himself had ever experienced. Ever.
(This includes his mother, but no one ever talks about that.)
“No,” she says with a ferocity that shocks him. “I won’t let you. You hate being a wolf, Jake. If you can stop, I want you to stop.”
He snickers. She really doesn’t get it.
“What’s funny?” she says, unable to hide the creeping hysteria in her voice.
“Bella,” he says, watching her sharply inhale at her name in his mouth. “I will do what I have to do to be with you. You make things so complicated sometimes.”
It always comes down to Bella.
Such a simple phrase. Everything funnels down to her.
***
It goes like this (the fourth, the fifth):
His confessions will not stay hidden under dusty tapestries, and she runs from them for a year. She goes back for a thousand reasons ending with but not because I lo—not because of him and ignores the voice in her head that says she is perpetually blind. The voice sounds like him, too, and she cannot escape his reflection in rivers or silver frames.
She doesn’t mean to make the list of things that remind her of him: the sea, the sun, fire, the forest, the elements of everything, but it compiles itself in her mind before she can stop herself.
She rolls the words (the words) around in her mouth like sucking candies in summer. Edward knows. She misses the secrets she could keep from him and hates the guilt that still stabs at her in the late afternoon as the sun moves westward and Edward watches her, waiting for her to leave.
The list of things she will not say grows shorter until it all molds into one phrase that she buries beneath hersandcastle. She verges on confession. They are a nightly event now. She arrives with the setting of the sun and has to push herself away at dawn.
She begins asking questions she should not ask.
“What would we be doing right now if I were alive?” is the first one and it makes him freeze, his hands shake, his eyes fall to the ground.
The final prize of this scavenger hunt is absolution. She lost all the clues, though, and now can do no more than scurry blind through dark corridors, hoping he can find her.
“If you were alive,” he says with tight control in his voice, “you’d still be with him.”
How ironic that she had to die to realize what she needed to live.
She lies down next to him, their heads relaxed on the sand and eyes frozen on each other.
“You need to sleep,” she says for the hundredth time.
He laughs low and warm. “I’ll survive,” he says, stretching out his fingers to trace the frame of her face.
She swallows. He smiles at her. She doesn’t understand how, even though so much has changed, they remain the same.
“Hypothetically. If I told you I loved you,” she says, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut her head hurts, “what would you do?”
He laughs. “Hypothetically, I’d say I told you so. Again.”
***
The fact is this: even rocks grow warm in the sunlight.
The overused metaphors of their lives play repeated on old records. She cherishes the scratches of noise, the signs of familiarity and affectionate use.
She says to him, “You make me feel almost alive,” and wishes she hadn’t, but he kisses her in a way that makes her nerve endings feel like they’ve been set to a match, in a way like he has done over and over again, and yet every time it feels so outrageously different. In the daylight hours, when she hides herself in old houses too big to have the comforting spirit of home, it is so easy to forget how he can make her body hum with a glance. In the nights, she remembers and never understands how she could ever banish memories of him from her mind.
There is an old Jewish saying: If I ever forget Jerusalem I forget myself.
Jacob is her Jerusalem and she is the pious believer begging forgiveness for endless sins.
She keeps her pleading pressed between her lips until she can’t anymore. It should feel cold the day in December when she whispers apologies against his skin and he takes her by the shoulders and says, “Don’t.”
Don’t. Stop. Please. Such words have never made her pause before.
His eyes burn like his skin does and it hurts like running warm water over frozen fingers in the dead of winter.
She can’t forgive herself and he sees it, hears her breath in gasps like she’s trying not to cry when they both know she can’t.
“I’m sorry,” she trembles, an infinite reflection in too many mirrors.
Even his lips on her mouth will not silence her and he pulls away and sighs.
“How can I get you to forgive yourself, Bella,” he asks. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not enough. You and I should… we shouldn’t be here.”
He can’t help but nod. “But we are. We’re here, and you’re… as you are, and I’m still me, but we’re together, Bells.”
She is wind chimes and church bells keeping time, the foundation of all.
She shakes her head. “That doesn’t change anything.”
He grins and she doesn’t know what’s happy about this, how he can smile when she feels herself collapsing, but his smiles are contagious. No, it doesn’t make her smile all sunshine and sparkles like he does, but it makes her hurt less and that’s almost enough.
“It changes everything,” he whispers.
***
They’d like to pretend the settings shift, that she throws her belongings into a bag and leaves the rest of her behind, hunts wolves in the woods of La Push and no one asks questions even though everyone knows.
But they still carry on like some lovers’ tryst, a phase, s/he’ll get over it, they were just bored, etc. etc., sneaking away in the evenings like they are secret from anyone at all.
Rosalie takes her aside. “You can get out.”
Bella shakes her head. She can get out, but she can’t escape. She thirsts too much, and her new nature whispers to her when no one is around, reminding her of what she chose to become. She can’t escape.
Rosalie sighs. “I warned you.”
Yes, Bella knows Rosalie is a bitch, but Rosalie also sees things more clearly than anyone else, and that gets frustrating after a couple of decades.
She tells Jacob because he is her confessional, her path to forgiveness (the road never ends, but at least she can see it clearly), and he runs his hand through his hair.
“What are you going to do?” he asks and by you he means we. Lately, all of his words sound like loaded guns.
She shrugs. It doesn’t really matter.
He says, “You can stay with me.”
She laughs, a bitter mockery of what it once was. She once said the same about him. “I can’t just run.”
“Why not?” he asks, shaking his head, looking at the sand instead of at her.
The sand reflects the moon. “I just can’t, Jake,” she says, and – he can’t help it – he watches the way her mouth forms his name and hates how it makes him fall.
He stands and she watches him and doesn’t believe his unspoken threat. “Make a decision, Bella.”
For the first time, he leaves her.
She doesn’t move all day.
***
He returns at sundown and neither of them feels surprised. Edward used to be the drugs, but things have become twisted and warped and now they are addicted to each other.
“This is different,” he insists.
How?
Someone asks it. Someone thinks it.
They teeter on the edge of love, and the closer they get to the ledge the more instinct commands they back away from it. Cliffs have gotten them into such trouble before. Love pushes them backwards, slams its heavy metal doors.
Thou shall not pass, but feel free to bang on the door in the rain and beg sanctuary.
***
Every door has a key, though, and he finds it in her old bedroom some afternoon when he shouldn’t be there.
Charlie hasn’t touched a thing. The space feels like the room of someone recently deceased.
Jacob sighs. Charlie was always more observant than Bella gave him credit for.
The note pokes out of a pile of books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, books worn by her fingers tracing lines.
He picks it up because it’s his handwriting, his words and so old.
Yeah, I miss you, too. A lot. Doesn’t change anything. Sorry.
But what gets him in the midst of all this swirling memory and how back then was actually easier is this:
It just makes it worse when I think about you too much, so don’t write anymore.
He remembers how that was such a lie.
***
He shoves the letter under her nose that evening. She blinks and takes it from him, quickly glancing over the page and wincing at the past.
“I remember this,” she says, far away and dreamy.
He nods. Her fingers trace the letters of his name like porcelain. They have both learned that memories are fragile things.
“I just wanted you to pick me,” he whispers and it sounds like an apology for fighting an uphillbattle war.
She takes his hand. “Don’t,” she says, and it’s everything in reverse, her pleading, him falling, and that’s how it is between them now, and how it has been for months.
His eyes shimmer when he looks at her and her insides feel like knives. When she realized his pain was her pain she should have known there was no escaping him. If his masks ever vanish like this, falter and fade away, she stands shaking by the sea with guilt too large to carry in her strong hands.
She whispers, “I just want to make you whole again,” and it truthfully just slips out, the words that have been pressed under her tongue like a thermometer for what feels like forever. She knows it’s really only been months.
Another fact: truthfully, it’s been years.
He blinks and leans away just slightly to look at her.
“You love me,” he says and he says it with almost a smile, the old kind of smile, before Sam, before she went and stumbled and knocked over everything in her typical clumsy ways.
She can’t help it, he’s contagious, and she grins too.
“Maybe,” she says with a light tease, like she’s 18 and alive.
He tugs her close to him and his mouth hovers just above hers and she reaches toward him like a magnet.
“Definitely,” he whispers, his breath warm against her face.
She swallows, but doesn’t move away.
She doesn’t move away because she can’t.
“I love you,” she says and it feels like the pressure released from a can of soda in July, heat rushing into the room in January snowstorms.
He smiles. “Told you so.”
“Don’t be so cocky,” she whispers, but it gets lost beneath his mouth on hers.
*
feedback?
and, um, title? y/n?
and could i HAVE more author's notes? seriously.
Title: Tell Them This Love Hasn't Changed Me At All
Ship: Jacob/Bella
Rating: PG-13 for sexiness (sort of).
A/N: this is totally a companion to Love, Just Like Blood, Will Always Stain, so read it first. for
sortofbeautiful for kicking so much ass and having more members than you do. thanks to xpassionfadingx for her beta work and ppparasols for volunteering. sorry for me being so damn impatient and lame! :-/ title is from the tegan and sara song, I Know I Know I Know. For twilight_tables prompt Motion. And the definition of the past tense (you'll see) comes from the lovely wikipedia. Thanks to deadduck008 for accidentally making me discover a new clearly obvious fact about Bella Swan. She'll know what it is.summary: The final prize of this scavenger hunt is absolution.
Her life does not flash before her eyes.
There is only fire, and the last delusionally human thing she thinks is this must be hell.
***
The pain blinks out and Edward gasps away from her.
She doesn’t even have to ask what is wrong, because he whispers, “I can hear you in my head.”
She scowls. That’s against the rules.
They don’t have much time to linger on that, though, because the bloodlust hits her hard and her throat is suddenly unbearably parched. She thrashes wildly and Edward holds her down, whispering that it will be alright.
Alright, alright.
All right.
Even the greatest fantasies sound beautiful in his mouth, not that either of them knows of any falsehoods just yet.
***
Jacob’s first time (that first time) goes like this:
He doesn’t remember her name in the morning. He knows it’s not Italian for beautiful, though, and that’s enough for him.
She wakes in the morning with a whisper of a hello before she mumbles something about being late for work and stumbles out of the room.
He doesn’t miss her nameless face, but he finds himself wishing for that skin on skin, the falsity of lust so bright it makes anything else (words like ‘love’) impossible to see.
***
Embry and Quil leave quiet messages on the machine in his ratty motel room with words like Please come home soon.
Everyone knows that old cliché about homes and hearts, and Jacob knows that if the heart stops beating there is no home for it.
(This message has been erased.)
No one ever calls to tell him when she changes, if they even know. All he knows is that the Cullens ran and Bella went with them.
The words ring with a death sentence, but he isn’t sure whose.
***
Bella’s first time (that first time) goes like this:
Edward is still unnaturally gentle, she is newly unnaturally strong, and she doesn’t even wince. They lie in the afterglow of finality and finally.
She smiles sweet grins and really kisses Edward, and neither of them fears anything.
A quiet fact sets up house in the back of her mind. It starts off as a whisper. Later, it will grow to a scream.
The truth of it is this: she expected to burn.
***
When things slow down to normal speed (a relative term), she stalks wolves behind trees and cries as she feeds.
Edward doesn’t say anything about her animal of choice.
***
He comes back because he can’t stand the quiet. He finds it ironic, truthfully, that he wanted nothing more than to escape the screaming in his head, then the pack in his head, then the echoes of a dead girl’s voice in his head, whispering after all else had finally been smothered.
Eventually, all that remained was silence and the soft murmurs of words Bella realized too late (love, love, love) and it was simply too much. Chicago did not have enough sex, drugs or rock ‘n roll to drown it out.
He phases back and tells Embry he is coming home.
Only later will he think about his choice of words.
***
Human memories fade like salt pushed into the sea, but, for her, everything remains clear as the present. If she could sleep to dream she would wake to her own voice screaming names of those who should be forgotten.
Edward can’t help but turn to her and promise it eventually stops hurting, eventually she will stop missing her family and her friends. A part of her wonders which category Jacob falls under and the only answer she can come up with is neither.
Edward hears that, of course, and she sees him wincing by the windowsill.
Once, she had no secrets from him and did not care if he saw inside. She wanted him to see, to grasp at her soul and call it his. It was his.
Now, though, she has too many secrets about teenage romance and skin that burned and memories she cannot shake.
She cannot help but think, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
Edward sighs and shifts in their bed.
(Something she will never admit: it goes like this for too long. )
***
Bella used to ski. Of course, being the clumsiest girl alive made that hobby die out quickly, but she did stumble down the bunny slope once or twice.
Their descent is not like the bunny slope. It is even more gradual. She doesn’t even notice it until they come back to Forks because she demands to and Edward’s protestations about treaties will not stop her.
“Why?” he asks.
She says, “It’s home, Edward. It’s my home.”
“I was home, once,” he mumbles, he lets slip, he doesn’t mean to say.
Her stomach twists and she wonders how even though she lost the clumsiness of humanity she still cannot see things clearly placed in front of her and even within her.
The truth of it is this: Perfection was a possibility destroyed by Jacob’s hand.
No. Not his hand. By him with his sounds and smells and mouth and, yes, hands too. It was so much easier to hate him than to love him. He understood that, of course. If it resided in Bella’s mind, it was unmistakably clear to him.
Her mind runs circles around words like idiocy and she grows too tired to stop.
She flees to him, then, because Jacob knew better than anyone how to make her stand still long enough to breathe.
Rosalie passes her on her way out and Bella can see she understands.
Rosalie nods. “I knew.”
It does not feel like an I told you so.
***
The knock on the door interrupts his meditation on the benefits of the Swiss cheese in front of him and he angrily stumbles to the door.
“Leah –” he begins before his jaw clamps shut and his teeth grind together at the sight of her.
Her.
Her mouth opens and closes like a book.
“Can I come in?” she finally asks, and he has already motioned her inside. It is simply impossible for him to hate her, no matter her smell, but he misses the way her eyes used to look. The warm amber makes him nauseous.
He sputters, “Can I get you something?” and gestures at the fridge before he remembers.
He remembers hard and no other word describes it because he simply forgets how to stand. He tries to make his descent into the nearest chair as subtle and graceful as possible, but fears she can see through him like he once saw through her.
They keep coming back to this place, her dead, him alive and desperately trying to save her. This time he is too late, and he feels less alive these days anyway, so maybe that explains his failures. Or perhaps it was the slow movement, perhaps he should have pulled her to him and never moved his lips from hers again a year ago, the day she found out he was a werewolf. He wanted to. The relief that day was unbearable, staggering, like surviving a car wreck. He never wanted her to leave his sight again.
He curses telephone lines and his nature, the fact that the Cullen seer could not see him and instead came running.
Things shouldn’t have turned out like this. It should have just been the two of them, human and together and so happy. They were the kind of love others would sigh over and wish they could feel too.
The past tense is a verb tense expressing action, activity, state or being in the past. He can’t get out.
“It’s okay,” she says when it’s not. She pretends to just be talking about food. “I still haven’t gotten used to it either.”
No, he thinks. And we never will.
Things stay quiet for a long time after that.
***
Their first time (that first time) goes like this:
She leaves half-moon circles of fingernails on his skin that fade an instant later and he clings to her cold skin like a high intensity magnet. He mumbles her name between gasps and sighs and neither says four letter words beginning with L. All one-night stands have unspoken rules.
That’s what it is, of course. A one night stand, an accident, an unrepeatable mistake. The skies grow grey and they part with handshakes at sunrise and hasty goodbyes.
He doesn’t expect her to come back and he’s even less sure if he wants her to.
(This, of course, is a lie.)
She returns to him and he worships the soul he is still somehow able to find. She can’t understand how he manages to drudge up facts of a world long deceased.
***
She says, “I’m going to outlive you and I don’t know what to do then.”
August, a night without wind and the sand feels like a blanket beneath her skin.
Jacob wants to take her by the shoulders and scream that she still loves him, but can’t. He’d have to admit he still loves her, too, and that’s against the rules. Neither of them knows who exactly established this order, the guidelines, the biblical code. He blames Sam, she blames Edward, and neither of them ever blames themselves.
He shakes his head. “I’ll just keep shifting. I’m not going to leave you, Bella.” He remembers Bella withering like dead flowers when Edward ran and shudders. He knew he loved her when he decided that her face when the Cullens were mentioned hurt him more than anything he himself had ever experienced. Ever.
(This includes his mother, but no one ever talks about that.)
“No,” she says with a ferocity that shocks him. “I won’t let you. You hate being a wolf, Jake. If you can stop, I want you to stop.”
He snickers. She really doesn’t get it.
“What’s funny?” she says, unable to hide the creeping hysteria in her voice.
“Bella,” he says, watching her sharply inhale at her name in his mouth. “I will do what I have to do to be with you. You make things so complicated sometimes.”
It always comes down to Bella.
Such a simple phrase. Everything funnels down to her.
***
It goes like this (the fourth, the fifth):
His confessions will not stay hidden under dusty tapestries, and she runs from them for a year. She goes back for a thousand reasons ending with but not because I lo—not because of him and ignores the voice in her head that says she is perpetually blind. The voice sounds like him, too, and she cannot escape his reflection in rivers or silver frames.
She doesn’t mean to make the list of things that remind her of him: the sea, the sun, fire, the forest, the elements of everything, but it compiles itself in her mind before she can stop herself.
She rolls the words (the words) around in her mouth like sucking candies in summer. Edward knows. She misses the secrets she could keep from him and hates the guilt that still stabs at her in the late afternoon as the sun moves westward and Edward watches her, waiting for her to leave.
The list of things she will not say grows shorter until it all molds into one phrase that she buries beneath her
She begins asking questions she should not ask.
“What would we be doing right now if I were alive?” is the first one and it makes him freeze, his hands shake, his eyes fall to the ground.
The final prize of this scavenger hunt is absolution. She lost all the clues, though, and now can do no more than scurry blind through dark corridors, hoping he can find her.
“If you were alive,” he says with tight control in his voice, “you’d still be with him.”
How ironic that she had to die to realize what she needed to live.
She lies down next to him, their heads relaxed on the sand and eyes frozen on each other.
“You need to sleep,” she says for the hundredth time.
He laughs low and warm. “I’ll survive,” he says, stretching out his fingers to trace the frame of her face.
She swallows. He smiles at her. She doesn’t understand how, even though so much has changed, they remain the same.
“Hypothetically. If I told you I loved you,” she says, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut her head hurts, “what would you do?”
He laughs. “Hypothetically, I’d say I told you so. Again.”
***
The fact is this: even rocks grow warm in the sunlight.
The overused metaphors of their lives play repeated on old records. She cherishes the scratches of noise, the signs of familiarity and affectionate use.
She says to him, “You make me feel almost alive,” and wishes she hadn’t, but he kisses her in a way that makes her nerve endings feel like they’ve been set to a match, in a way like he has done over and over again, and yet every time it feels so outrageously different. In the daylight hours, when she hides herself in old houses too big to have the comforting spirit of home, it is so easy to forget how he can make her body hum with a glance. In the nights, she remembers and never understands how she could ever banish memories of him from her mind.
There is an old Jewish saying: If I ever forget Jerusalem I forget myself.
Jacob is her Jerusalem and she is the pious believer begging forgiveness for endless sins.
She keeps her pleading pressed between her lips until she can’t anymore. It should feel cold the day in December when she whispers apologies against his skin and he takes her by the shoulders and says, “Don’t.”
Don’t. Stop. Please. Such words have never made her pause before.
His eyes burn like his skin does and it hurts like running warm water over frozen fingers in the dead of winter.
She can’t forgive herself and he sees it, hears her breath in gasps like she’s trying not to cry when they both know she can’t.
“I’m sorry,” she trembles, an infinite reflection in too many mirrors.
Even his lips on her mouth will not silence her and he pulls away and sighs.
“How can I get you to forgive yourself, Bella,” he asks. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not enough. You and I should… we shouldn’t be here.”
He can’t help but nod. “But we are. We’re here, and you’re… as you are, and I’m still me, but we’re together, Bells.”
She is wind chimes and church bells keeping time, the foundation of all.
She shakes her head. “That doesn’t change anything.”
He grins and she doesn’t know what’s happy about this, how he can smile when she feels herself collapsing, but his smiles are contagious. No, it doesn’t make her smile all sunshine and sparkles like he does, but it makes her hurt less and that’s almost enough.
“It changes everything,” he whispers.
***
They’d like to pretend the settings shift, that she throws her belongings into a bag and leaves the rest of her behind, hunts wolves in the woods of La Push and no one asks questions even though everyone knows.
But they still carry on like some lovers’ tryst, a phase, s/he’ll get over it, they were just bored, etc. etc., sneaking away in the evenings like they are secret from anyone at all.
Rosalie takes her aside. “You can get out.”
Bella shakes her head. She can get out, but she can’t escape. She thirsts too much, and her new nature whispers to her when no one is around, reminding her of what she chose to become. She can’t escape.
Rosalie sighs. “I warned you.”
Yes, Bella knows Rosalie is a bitch, but Rosalie also sees things more clearly than anyone else, and that gets frustrating after a couple of decades.
She tells Jacob because he is her confessional, her path to forgiveness (the road never ends, but at least she can see it clearly), and he runs his hand through his hair.
“What are you going to do?” he asks and by you he means we. Lately, all of his words sound like loaded guns.
She shrugs. It doesn’t really matter.
He says, “You can stay with me.”
She laughs, a bitter mockery of what it once was. She once said the same about him. “I can’t just run.”
“Why not?” he asks, shaking his head, looking at the sand instead of at her.
The sand reflects the moon. “I just can’t, Jake,” she says, and – he can’t help it – he watches the way her mouth forms his name and hates how it makes him fall.
He stands and she watches him and doesn’t believe his unspoken threat. “Make a decision, Bella.”
For the first time, he leaves her.
She doesn’t move all day.
***
He returns at sundown and neither of them feels surprised. Edward used to be the drugs, but things have become twisted and warped and now they are addicted to each other.
“This is different,” he insists.
How?
Someone asks it. Someone thinks it.
They teeter on the edge of love, and the closer they get to the ledge the more instinct commands they back away from it. Cliffs have gotten them into such trouble before. Love pushes them backwards, slams its heavy metal doors.
Thou shall not pass, but feel free to bang on the door in the rain and beg sanctuary.
***
Every door has a key, though, and he finds it in her old bedroom some afternoon when he shouldn’t be there.
Charlie hasn’t touched a thing. The space feels like the room of someone recently deceased.
Jacob sighs. Charlie was always more observant than Bella gave him credit for.
The note pokes out of a pile of books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, books worn by her fingers tracing lines.
He picks it up because it’s his handwriting, his words and so old.
Yeah, I miss you, too. A lot. Doesn’t change anything. Sorry.
But what gets him in the midst of all this swirling memory and how back then was actually easier is this:
It just makes it worse when I think about you too much, so don’t write anymore.
He remembers how that was such a lie.
***
He shoves the letter under her nose that evening. She blinks and takes it from him, quickly glancing over the page and wincing at the past.
“I remember this,” she says, far away and dreamy.
He nods. Her fingers trace the letters of his name like porcelain. They have both learned that memories are fragile things.
“I just wanted you to pick me,” he whispers and it sounds like an apology for fighting an uphill
She takes his hand. “Don’t,” she says, and it’s everything in reverse, her pleading, him falling, and that’s how it is between them now, and how it has been for months.
His eyes shimmer when he looks at her and her insides feel like knives. When she realized his pain was her pain she should have known there was no escaping him. If his masks ever vanish like this, falter and fade away, she stands shaking by the sea with guilt too large to carry in her strong hands.
She whispers, “I just want to make you whole again,” and it truthfully just slips out, the words that have been pressed under her tongue like a thermometer for what feels like forever. She knows it’s really only been months.
Another fact: truthfully, it’s been years.
He blinks and leans away just slightly to look at her.
“You love me,” he says and he says it with almost a smile, the old kind of smile, before Sam, before she went and stumbled and knocked over everything in her typical clumsy ways.
She can’t help it, he’s contagious, and she grins too.
“Maybe,” she says with a light tease, like she’s 18 and alive.
He tugs her close to him and his mouth hovers just above hers and she reaches toward him like a magnet.
“Definitely,” he whispers, his breath warm against her face.
She swallows, but doesn’t move away.
She doesn’t move away because she can’t.
“I love you,” she says and it feels like the pressure released from a can of soda in July, heat rushing into the room in January snowstorms.
He smiles. “Told you so.”
“Don’t be so cocky,” she whispers, but it gets lost beneath his mouth on hers.
*
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