Twilight -- I Want to See the Sun Rise Anywhere But Here (2/2)

[anythingbutgrey]

Title: I Want to See the Sun Rise Anywhere But Here (2/2)
Ship (Fandom): Jacob/Bella (Twilight)
A/N: Many many many many thanks to snowfire for being my beta, cheerleader, and co-fangirl in arms. The title is from The Rescues' Break Me Out. This is an AU fic set in the middle of New Moon. None of this business belongs to me. WARNING: May be triggering for attempted rape.
Summary: Her hands are shaking at her sides, but he knows can’t go with her. He knows he can’t say yes. It doesn’t matter how much he needs her or how much this terrifies him. He doesn’t know if by “this” he means Bella or the wolf. AU.

Part One: Jacob
Part Two: Bella

When they get to New York it’s raining, and it keeps raining all week. It reminds Bella of home, though she doesn’t know when Forks started being home, and she doesn’t like it. With Edward gone, she’s not sure she can even classify it as that anymore. These days, she just feels nomadic.

She and Jacob both get jobs at the same diner - a weathered, fraying sort of place five blocks down from their apartment. It has those fake leather red booths with the fabric tearing off. Every night after work she takes eternally long showers in an effort to get the smell of bacon grease out of her hair. Their first night she scrubbed so hard she started bleeding at the knee and Jacob just stared at the spot as she sat in their room in shorts and a t-shirt. He probably thought she did it on purpose, and after a few minutes of his stares she switched to sweatpants. He’s been watching her too closely ever since, though, in the way her father used to watch her after Edward left, like she was on the verge of something destructive.

The truth is that she’s always on the verge, but she does a good enough job of hiding it. It’s harder to wander down back alleyways in search of danger these days. Jacob is always around, not because he’s trying to be overbearing, but because they work and live together. He’ll get sick of her soon, she imagines, what with her tendency to sit silently all evening, stare off into space, scream in her sleep. Their studio walkup is the smallest space she’s ever had to share with another person, but it’s Jake, so for now at least it’s fine. If it’s a choice between a tiny space with Jacob in a city she doesn’t understand and Forks, where he could be snatched away from her at any moment, she will always take the former.

She’d be lying, though, if she said that everything was anywhere close to perfect. She’s never seen Jacob as a werewolf, but it still somehow scares her, like it’s some sort of monster lurking beneath the bed, ready to spring up. From the way Jacob describes it, that’s a pretty accurate analogy. They’ve taken to practicing yoga and scented candles to reduce their overall stress level and keep the wolf at bay. It was her idea, obviously, and Jacob had scoffed at the notion at first, but with a quiet, hopeful look in his eye that meant he’d agreed to it pretty quickly. If you think it’ll help, he had said, and looked at her with a gaze she couldn’t meet.

Which is another thing that isn’t perfect. Sometimes Jacob looks at her with this look of surprise, like he’s surprised to see her or even surprised that she exists. She knows that look. Edward had one too, one quieter and further away, but still there. Bella doesn’t like that Jacob has one too. It’s not that she’s not flattered; it’s just that he seems to think she could fall in love with him one day, and she won’t. The ability left when Edward did. Jacob should understand that by now. Maybe – she doesn’t know, maybe someday she could give him some paler version of the love that came before. He deserves so much more than that, though, and she doesn’t deserve him.

She looks at Jacob across the room, an auto mechanics book across his lap. Jacob probably already knows everything in there, but he wants to get his license, get out of the diner, and do something he likes. They don’t know how long they’ll be here. Jacob is staring at the ceiling, chewing on the end of his pen while he thinks. One of his hands holds the pen; the other is splayed flat on the open page, fingers spread. Bella can’t help but think about how beautiful he is. It was carefully relegated to being a joke when she said it out loud, but she did mean it. The concussion just excused it. It was safer for everyone as a joke. He’s not beautiful the same way Edward is – was, she corrects. Edward was statuesque, a sight that made her body feel unworthy. His body was an ice sculpture, perfectly crafted, cold to the touch.

Jacob, on the other hand, reminds her of everything that’s alive. Sometimes just sitting next to him means she has to roll up the long sleeves of her sweaters. His laugh is low and loud. He always smells of cedar wood and the ocean, even in this grey city, even with the stench of grease she can never get out of her hair. Jacob never smells that way, and she doesn’t know how he does it. Whenever she brings it up he just laughs and buries his nose in her hair, inhales deeply, and tells her she still smells like strawberries. She assumes he’s lying. But Jacob, he really is wonderful, inside and out and in between, in the creases of his palms. She does miss his hair, but it’s getting longer now, long enough that she could reach over and run her fingers through if she wanted. If she wanted to do such a thing.

“What are you staring at?” Jacob asks, laughing without looking up from the book.

She smiles a little. It’s not a real smile, not the kind she used to wear. That old smile almost came back the week before, cackled its way out on the side of the San Francisco highway, but then she swallowed it back. Her body can’t sustain such things anymore, flickers of light. She has gotten better, yes, but sometimes she just thinks that’s like sitting next to Jacob on the couch, letting his warmth hit her but not quite making it hers. If she were ever alone she thinks the absence would crawl back in again.

“You,” she finds herself answering. There is probably little point in making up an excuse anyway; Jacob would obviously know. He seems to know everything about her without her saying so. She doesn’t know how he does that. Even Edward had to ask.

Jacob stills for a moment, not looking at her, and then places the pen between the pages of the book. It whispers shut. When he turns to look at her, he wears an expression she can’t read, something deep and overwhelmingly complicated. Edward never had a look quite like it, so she doesn’t know what it means. One day she’ll stop comparing and start being human. The thought makes her shiver. It’s been a while since she felt comfortable being a permanent fixture in the category of homo sapien.

But she doesn’t say anything, and Jacob doesn’t seem to know what to say, and so after a minute he turns back to his book, attempts to smile, fails, and says, “You’re an interesting one, Bella Swan.”

She reflexively closes her eyes at the way he says her name and tries not to think of it as a betrayal. She fails. When they go to bed that evening, she on her cheap used futon, he on his, she watches his stilled, peaceful face for at least an hour before falling asleep and dreaming of nothing. It’s one of the calmer nights she’s had in weeks.

Jacob is already awake when she gets up. He wordlessly nudges a cup of coffee in her direction. Neither of them are morning people. They are, however, coffee people. Two cups at home, one when they get to work, and they’re almost functional. She really hates the diner, though. It’s not even the stench of fried everything; it’s the customers. It’s the hands reaching out and grabbing her. It’s the way she’ll jump every time and make sure Jacob hasn’t seen. So far she’s been lucky.

Today she isn’t lucky. It’s just after ten when a pair of overweight, bearded, shuffling construction workers enter the diner. She doesn’t like them from the second they enter, the way they step through the threshold and immediately eye her with a leering grin. They get seated in her area, of course. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, almost empty, and there are only three waiters other than her on staff: Jacob, a cute blond named Carol who should be in college but isn’t, and Louise, who is in her forties and should be doing anything else, but isn’t. So, statistically speaking, it’s not improbable Bella would end up with these men, but it’s still an accident of fate she doesn’t like. She shoots Jacob a weary look over her orders pad. He gives a soft smile back.

Most of the meal is fine. The bigger of the two, the one the other refers to as Bernie, makes a couple crude comments; the other, Jim, tries to grab her butt a few times, but she always steps out of reach just in time. Jacob’s going back and forth between the kitchen and the upcoming lunch buffet bar, bringing in dishes and ice for cold dishes, and doesn’t see what’s going on with Bella. She’s more than fine with that. She can handle herself. Bernie and Jim can’t handle a werewolf. Jacob could get in trouble, though, and she doesn’t want trouble anywhere near him. If she knew how protective of him she is, he’d laugh for days.

There is a problem with Bernie and Jim, though, and it arises over paying the check. She stops by their table, placing the paper on the table without looking either of them in the eye. Their stares feel like pressure on her bones, her body somehow feeling like the site of a battlefield.

“Sweetheart,” Bernie says, and when she glances at him she sees he’s talking to her breasts. “You’ve taken such good care of us today.”

The fake leather squeaks as he stands from the booth. Bella takes a step back, but Jim is already standing behind her. She collides with his protruding belly and looks back and forth between the two men, no longer breathing. She tries to get a look around the diner, but Louise is outside having a smoke and Carol has her head ducked down, texting on her phone and hoping no one sees. Jacob is nowhere in sight.

“Please stop,” she breathes, and her words sound like a rattling gasp. With the two of them around her, she can’t see anything else.

Bernie wraps a hand around her elbow. “Come on,” he says, laughing into her ear. “We could have some fun, you and me.”

“No,” she says again in that same gasping, breathy voice. “Please.”

From somewhere outside the manmade cell she’s trapped in, she hears someone call her name, a voice she immediately recognizes as Jacob’s, but laced with panic and a frightening hint of rage. Before she can think, Bernie is pulled away from her. Jacob punches him so hard that he goes flying back into the booth, his head ricocheting off the wall. His nose is already spurting blood, and he shakes his head incoherently. Jim doesn’t even wait to save his friend; he takes one look at Jacob, huge and shaking, and runs out the door. Jacob doesn’t go after him, but he does lift Bernie up in the air by the collar of his jacket. Bella hovers behind Jacob, gripping the table she’s leaning on, and watches as Bernie’s eyes widen beyond what she imagines they should. Jacob’s entire body is shaking now. If he doesn’t calm down, the wolf will come roaring out.

Somewhere in her mind Edward yells for her to stop, that it’s dangerous, and while the sound of his voice startles her beyond belief, it is also the first time she decides she doesn’t care. No, it’s not that. She wants to freeze time and listen to the Edward in her head tell her to stop what she’s doing. But she can’t afford to step back. Instead, she takes a step forward, placing a tentative hand on Jacob’s arm. He’s wearing a short sleeve shirt and his skin is absolutely burning. It stings like a hot bath.

“Jacob,” she says, trying to keep her voice calm and even.

He doesn’t seem to even acknowledge her. Bernie is whispering pleas of forgiveness and Jacob isn’t listening. He shakes his head, and his body is beginning to fold.

“Jacob,” Bella says, louder now, rushing around Jacob so she can look him in the eye. It takes him a moment to turn away from Bernie and look at her. The expression on his face is one she has never seen before, something primal and enraged and so far from Jacob that she feels a brief, inexplicable stab of fear. She has to remind herself that she’s still with Jacob, that it’s still him, before she can continue.

“Jacob,” she says and vaguely thinks about how much she’s saying his name, like trying to call him out of the dark. “I need you to calm down.”

“I saw what they were trying to do to you,” he says through gritted teeth, and not looking at her.

“You can’t hurt them, Jacob,” she says, and it sounds like begging. “You can’t.”

“And why is that, Bella,” he says. He chokes on her name. She can hear it. There was a flash of something in his eye when he said it, something she knows. Something that’s hers.

“If you hurt him, I’ll lose you,” she whispers. Her eyes sting. When she blinks, a tear starts slithering down the side of her face. She automatically wipes it away, embarrassed. “You won’t be my Jacob anymore.”

Jacob’s jaw locks. He lowers Bernie’s shaking body to the floor, but he doesn’t let him go. He still towers of Bernie, still shaking, still with an inhuman sound emerging from his throat.

“Jacob,” she says with a shaking voice. “Please.”

With a deep inhale, Jacob lets go of Bernie’s collar. He stumbles back and out of the diner, and Jacob is still shaking. Louise and Carol have both gathered and are staring at Bella and Jacob with open mouths. Bella ignores them. She steps up to Jacob. He’s still staring out the doorway, where Bernie has just run away. She takes one of his hands in hers; she rests the other hand on his cheek and directs his gaze toward her. His eyes are the last things to turn toward her and when they do the pain and confusion she finds inside them makes her body sting.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s me. Come back.”

The hand she holds shakes so forcefully she has to grip his fingers tightly to keep hold. But she does keep hold, and Jacob closes his eyes and leans into the palm of her hand, breathing. She stands that way, barely moving, barely breathing, for a good five minutes, until the shaking begins to slow. The next several minutes are a decrescendo where Bella teaches herself how to breathe again. Finally, Jacob’s shakes slow to a tremor. He opens his eyes, and whispers, “Bella,” in a way she is quite certain she has never heard before.

She takes an immediate step away from him. This is already going somewhere it shouldn’t. Jacob reaches toward her a little, just an inch, and then his hand falls to his side and, with resignation she can see in his shoulders, he walks away.

Later, she overhears Louise and Carol whisper, “I’ve never seen any two people look at each other like that.” Bella tries not to think about it, about the way Jacob looked at her that morning, the way Jacob looks at her too often, and she certainly does not think about the way she might look back. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t.

But that night she doesn’t fall asleep for a long time and, from what she hears of Jacob’s still quick breathing, he doesn’t fall asleep either. The next morning they don’t speak over breakfast or even at work, but he doesn’t let her out of his sight all afternoon, like the men could come back, finish what they started. The thought makes her shiver as she counts out change from the cash register. But the day passes without event, and the next day passes without event, and she says to Jacob, “It’s okay,” and she watches him breathe just a little easier. But his hands still shake whenever he’s too close, not because of the wolf, she knows, but because of something else.

That night she sits down next to him as he reads his mechanics book. He appears a little startled when she approaches and watches her as she sits down. He looks at her clavicle, not her eyes.

“What’s up,” he says, and she hears a sticking sound in the back of his throat.

She ducks her head to try and meet his line of sight, but he just looks away. She reaches and holds his hand, half expecting him to pull away. He doesn’t, and she laces her fingers with his. Something inside her feels like it’s shattering; it’s hard for her to breathe, and she doesn’t understand what any of it means. She looks at their hands and knows Jacob is looking at them too. It shouldn’t mean anything; they’ve always held hands; fire pulses through her fingers only because Jacob’s skin is so warm. But it does mean something. She can’t put a name to it. She doesn’t dare.

“You won’t look at me,” she murmurs, and her voice is low, too husky, reveals too much. She doesn’t look him in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is a mirror of her own, quiet, deep, and a performance of its own. “It’s not you.”

This sounds like a conversation they had before, weeks ago in La Push. She hasn’t forgotten. She still remembers how painful that was, like a scalding knife to the gut that slid into her like a mocking laugh. Maybe that’s what this is. Jacob wants to leave her. She understands that. She is easy to leave. Her breathing is coming in short spurts now, verging on hyperventilating. She wishes she could see herself as others see her, point out all the flaws, make a chart, fix whatever is broken on the inside. She could do that. She could change.

“I get it,” she says. “You want to leave. I understand.”

She tugs her hand out of his and scrambles to her feet. Jacob stands with her, catching her wrist. She stops mid-flight out of the apartment. When she turns around he has stepped close to her, and the space between them is absolutely miniscule. Her body wants to touch him and her brain is telling her to stop. She closes her eyes and looks for Edward to tell her what to do, to tell her Jacob is dangerous, but she knows Jacob isn’t dangerous and Edward is nowhere to be found. With Jacob this close the hole in her chest won’t stay open. Instead, it feels like something new is funneling in.

“No,” Jacob says, and his voice is firm. “I’m not leaving. I’m never leaving.”

She has heard such words before. It’ll be a long time, if ever, before she’ll believe them again.

“Then what’s wrong?” she asks, staring at the stitching in the fabric of his shirt. She doesn’t really believe that he’s not leaving, but she’ll listen to the excuses he’ll give.

He sighs. She watches the way his chest rises and falls. “I almost lost it the other day, Bells. I almost lost control.”

She looks at him sharply. “But you kept control. Everything’s okay.”

“It’s not the control that’s the problem,” he says. “It’s not the wolf. It’s me. I thought I was about to lose you, Bella.”

He says this last sentence with rush of air. When she meets his gaze it is now him that looks away.

“I don’t understand,” she confesses.

He closes his eyes. “I didn’t know what those men were doing when I saw them. I just saw a glimmer of you trapped there, and I didn’t know what they were doing to you. I thought they – I thought I almost lost you.”

Jacob takes a step back so they can easily look each other in the eye. “It keeps happening. When we were in Sacramento, when I came back to the motel and you were screaming, and the next day when you almost fainted. I have almost lost you too many times. Every time it feels like I’m losing part of myself I’ll never get back, just thinking about how I could lose you one day. Not even from something hurting you, you could just –”

She waits for him to finish, but he doesn’t. The fragment hangs between them and sticks like cobwebs.

“So, not talking to me,” she says after a prickling minute. “Were you trying to distance yourself or something?”

Jacob shakes his head immediately. “Never,” he promises with a look in his eye that she recognizes as sincerity. “I don’t know what I was doing, I just had to do it.”

She frowns. None of this is making any sense.

“It shakes me,” he says, and doesn’t even blink. “Every time I’m with you, it shakes me. Every part of me. And so when I think of anything happening to you, even for a second, I – I shut down. And after what happened in the diner, I can’t stop seeing it in my head on this constant time loop. I wasn’t trying to push you away, Bella; I was just trying to remember you’re still here.”

Bella has the sudden realization she hasn’t breathed in too long and takes a short, shallow inhale. “I’m right here,” she says, taking his hands once more, one in each of hers. Their hands hang at their sides. There’s hardly any space between them at all. If she shifts even the slightest her body will press against his. That wouldn’t end well.

“Bells,” he murmurs so quietly she barely hears it, and somewhere muffled in the back of her mind she wonders why Jacob speaks to her the way he does, like she is something warm and familiar and understood. With Jacob she is always understood. It doesn’t make sense.

She thinks that only for a moment, though, because Jacob is ducking his head toward her, slow and cautious and, she realizes, completely unsure. She’s not sure of anything anymore, but she does know she’s not pulling away. She should. She can’t love Jacob like she should. She can’t love Jacob like she wants to. But, for the first time, she realizes, she does want to. Not because he deserves it, even though he does. Not even because she deserves it, which she realizes in a rush that she does. Rather, she wants to because she wants to, wants it more than she’s wanted anything in recent months, wants to feel something again, wants to be human, wants to feel a fire arise from the flashes of sparklight Jacob has already lit inside her.

Bella lets Jacob kiss her. She doesn’t stop him, she doesn’t pull away, she closes her eyes and reaches toward him and he kisses her. For a brief, panicked moment, she doesn’t know what to do. Kissing Edward was a cautious performance. Kissing Jacob, she can tell immediately, is none of those things. With Jacob, she can’t perform; she has to let go of the scaffolding she has been amassing around her and just go, and she doesn’t know how to do that.

She doesn’t think about it for long though, because Jacob loops a hand around her waist and she immediately, without thinking, wraps a hand through his hair. Her hips press against him and for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe ever, she doesn’t think about anything at all. There’s no space. Every fragment of her is Jacob. All of a sudden he lifts her into the air and she instinctively wraps her legs around his waist. Still, her mouth breaks away from his in surprise and a light laugh escapes her lips as he carries her over to his futon, a fixture that makes her laugh again because it’s so much of a cliché college student, and yet they are none of these things. He kisses her cheeks, her eyelids, the side of her neck into the pool of her clavicle and her body reaches toward him in a way that she once knew with Edward but forgot about.

And just like that, just thinking the name, Edward comes back into the picture. She should hate him for it, but she can’t.

“Stop,” she says, immediately sorry but unable to stop herself. The last thing Jacob needs is to be kissing a girl who keeps thinking of someone else. Jacob looks at her with a look that bespeaks confusion and sadness and understanding of exactly why she has told him to stop.

He steps back and sits on her futon, watching her. She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to look back. After a moment, she feels his hand, warm and rough, brush her cheek.

“It’s okay, Bells,” he says, and she doesn’t believe him for a second because he sounds so sad. “I can wait.”

But Bella knows no one can wait forever, no matter how long Jacob can proclaim he’ll try.







It stops raining a few days later. The first day of sunlight, Jacob steps grinning out the front door and pauses at the curb, head tilted toward the light. She watches him with the smallest of smiles. She doesn’t understand how any person can carry so much light inside. Maybe he could teach it to her. He would if she asked. Jacob would do anything if she asked. It’s not a fact she’s comfortable with. She can’t give it back. But she does want to give it back now, and maybe that’s something.

She asks him that morning, walking in step with him on their way to the diner. “How are you always so warm, Jacob?”

He looks at her, quizzical. “The wolf, Bella. I told you.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, your insides. You’re like a ball of sunshine.”

Jacob laughs. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” he sings, off-key and without restraint.

“Exactly,” she says, a schoolgirl giggle escaping her. It doesn’t sound like it belongs to her. “How do you do that? I was never like that, even before –”

Jacob shrugs and in doing so seems to brush off the memories that were about to lunge into her mind, scratch out from the inside. She really is getting better here, on this coast and in this city with all the hustle and bustle, rude pedestrians, worse cab drivers, and terrible coffee. This weather itself is something new for her, a far cry from both the dry heat of Phoenix and the sulking, murky humidity of Forks. From what she understands, New York can be like this often, this clear, sunny sky. She still needs a jacket, but it will get warmer.

It seems perfect for Jacob. He walks around the city streets in a t-shirt and no one takes a second look. Sometimes people will look him up and down as though stunned by the mere height of him, though, not even noticing the girl walking beside him until they look to see the size of his hands and see him holding onto someone else’s fingers. It’s not a big deal; they can hold hands. They did before the wolf and they will do it after. Somewhere inside she knows she shouldn’t hold his hand. She shouldn’t even touch him. It’ll just hurt him more in the end. But Jacob has always been magnetic, the gravitational pull of him too all-encompassing to resist.

“I think you need to work at it,” he says, obviously unsure. She frowns up at him. “The sunshine,” he explains very delicately, and his voice is low, dips at times beneath the sound of whizzing taxicabs. “You have to make the decision to move forward, Bella. I’m not – I’m not saying you have move on, but moving forward might be good for you. If you want it. But you have to want it, Bella.” He stops on the street corner and turns to her, his dark eyes staring deep into her to the inside parts she doesn’t want him to see. “It’s a conscious decision. It’s a process. You have to choose it.”

She shakes her head before she can stop herself. Bella doesn’t have choices. She fell in love with Edward because fate compelled her and without him she can’t be tethered. She lost her choices in all of this a long time ago.

“You do have choices in this, Bella,” Jacob says and for a moment she’s surprised he knows what she’s thinking before she remembers this is Jacob; this is what he does. “You always have a choice.”

He turns away from her and moves along with the rushing pedestrian traffic. They don’t speak until well after they get to the diner, and Bella stays buried in the crevices of her thought patterns, trying to decide what Being Bella Swan even means. Maybe if she thinks of Edward in the past tense enough he’ll go there. She doesn’t know if that’s what she wants. No – she knows that is not what she wants. But Jacob believes in her. He believes there’s something inside of her worth saving, and she could be a better person for him because he deserves that. She doesn’t know if she deserves anything at all, but she knows Jacob deserves the world.

“Do you think you could help me?” Bella asks him while they dry plates fresh from the dishwasher. The hot ceramic stings her fingertips, and she dances the plate from hand to hand, recovering and then burning all over again.

Jacob turns to her and frowns, confused. Then he understands what she’s asking, and a wide smile spreads across his face. Bella can’t help but smile back, but it feels her insides might shatter even as she grins. Her hands shake as she rests the plate in her hand on the stack on the table, the ceramic clanking together.

“It won’t be easy,” she whispers, turning away from Jacob and staring at her murky reflection in the freshly scrubbed plate. She should warn him. She doesn’t think she can be fixed.

Jacob shrugs. She can see the movement of his shoulders out of the corner of her eye. His hand brushes her shoulder for just a second, so quickly she doesn’t even have time to pull away. “I don’t need easy,” Jacob says, and they are quiet for a long time.

That evening, after she showers, she sits next to Jacob on the floor, her legs crossed, and watches him. He wears a tiny smile and looks up at her from his book every few minutes. She has a copy of Wuthering Heights propped open on her lap but she hasn’t even made it through the first chapter. Her fingers tap out the beat to a song she once knew on the corner of the page. She looks away from Jacob and stares out the dirty window. In the distance, she can see an entire city. A passing group of college kids are laughing loudly. A car horn screams. Construction drills whiz down the street. She can faintly smell the familiar scent of the pizza shop next door. She still hasn’t had New York pizza; Jacob has had at least three whole pies. She believes in home cooking. But right now she really wants pizza. Her mouth waters. It’s not about pizza, of course. It’s about looking out that window and seeing a whole world. Jacob said she had to try to be better, and she has spent the day cracking down walls with her tiny chisel of strength. This couldn’t be the immediate effect of that, though. She’s only just begun to make a hole.

“We should do something,” Bella announces, and even while she’s speaking she’s surprised to hear it. She gets to her feet. Jacob blinks in surprise and looks up at her. It’s interesting for her to be taller than him for just a moment, while he sits on the floor and she stands. Her toes are tingling and she can’t stop smiling and she feels a little drunk, to be quite honest. There’s a giggle in the back of her throat that is pounding its way out. She might be losing her mind. She doesn’t care.

“Do something?” Jacob asks. He looks to be caught between alarm and excitement. That makes sense. Bella hasn’t acted like this – well, ever, but certainly not since knowing Jacob. Maybe she’s scaring him. She should calm down, but she can’t calm down. She rolls back and forth on the balls of her feet, so it looks like she’s dancing.

“Let’s get pizza,” she says. “You’re always hungry; you can eat more. And then we can go to a movie. Or for a walk. Explore. We never explored here.”

She’s talking really fast – Jessica fast, and probably sounds just as ridiculous but she still can’t care. Something inside her is breaking open.

Jacob gets to his feet, laughing at her. “Okay,” he says. “Let me grab the keys.”

He stands and passes by her to get the keys tossed on the kitchen table. As he does so, his arm brushes against hers and she feels the warmth of his skin against hers and, just as suddenly as it overtook her, the surreal lightheadedness falls away. She’s back to being Bella Swan in a city she doesn’t understand with a man she can’t love right. Her eyes flutter shut even as she tries to keep them open.

“Jacob,” she whispers because she thinks she’s going to faint but she also can’t move her feet toward the futon. He’s there in an instant, and she grabs his wrist.

“Bella,” he whispers, low and urgent and, she realizes, terrified. Hadn’t she just spoken to him about how worried he was he’d lose her? She can’t keep doing this to him. She can’t keep falling apart. He’s worth more than that. She is worth more than that, and the realization makes her even dizzier. She used to think she was worth something as a person, many years ago. Bella wonders what happened to that girl.

Jacob picks her up and takes her to the futon; Bella’s head droops against his shoulder until he sets her down gently.

“I’m fine,” she mumbles with her eyes closed. Jacob has one of her hands in both of his but her hands are still shaking. “I’m fine. Just dizzy.”

Jacob lays a warm hand on her sweaty cheek. “You can’t keep doing this,” he says, pretending to laugh and failing miserably. His chuckle sounds like a cry. “I’m starting to think we should get you checked out for anemia and we definitely don’t have health insurance.”

Bella smiles a little, her eyes still shut. It’s only when she opens them that she realizes she has started to cry. Not a few tears either, but streams of them, and her throat catches up to the realization last as a sudden, high pitched sob escapes from her and she has to gasp for breath. Jacob’s eyes are wide and pained.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and sobs break up her words. Her throat burns with the sorrow she’s been carrying for months finally breaking up inside of her, small pieces of shadow pushing out. She had been right, earlier, when she said something inside of her was breaking open. It wasn’t joy, though. It was the tight shell she had kept her life in, the concrete box that encircled her spirit and commanded she be broken because that seemed the only life possible for her. She wasn’t a person before Edward, not really. She had no friends, no real relationships of any sort. Edward gave her a family and she took it and she loved him and them with a ferocity beyond her years. But then he left and she crawled into the cave of herself. Jacob has been pulling her out inch by inch for months and she doesn’t deserve this kindness for her broken, cracking shell, and she tells him so, she says, “I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve any of this. You’re so wonderful to me and I –.”

She doesn’t finish. She can’t. Jacob moves to sit on the futon next to her and she watches every movement, the tendons in his arms, the bend of his wrist, as he shifts and sits down.

“Listen,” he says and he doesn’t look at her. “I’m going to tell you something because you need to hear it, and it’s going to scare you. Is that okay?”

He looks at her. Her heart aches in its ribcage husk. She nods. He breathes in, and she waits.

“I love you,” he says, and is careful to enunciate every word. “I’m in love with you. And I know who you are, Bella, sometimes better than I know who I am. You are a person worth being loved. You’re –” his voice catches and she takes in a hiccup of breath. He doesn’t finish his sentence. His eyes search hers like he’s trying to find a word but he can’t seem to manage it, and she understands. She had expected his words – as unsurprising as they are – to shock her like a jellyfish sting, but instead they just seem to warm her, fill the crevices of her fractured soul and close up the gaps, make her whole again. She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes flutter shut. A few tears spill out of each eye and Jacob brushes them away, his thumb calloused and warm and familiar.

Bella Swan doesn’t know a lot about love. This realization crashes into her head like a tossed stone. She thought she understood it, down to the atomic makeup, but that was a different sort of love. Not wrong, just different. Loving Edward meant losing herself in him. With Jacob, it has been so entirely distinct it doesn’t surprise her she has been unable to put a name to it. Edward was a sudden, rupturing event, something that jarred her out of herself. Jacob was slower, quieter, a wisp of smoke that drifted inside of her and, she now realizes, left her irrevocably changed. She wonders if maybe loving someone means reaching inside and carving out something beautiful from all the musky pain that came before. Maybe it means being able to grow and change with someone, not stay stuck forever in a porcelain model of perfection. Maybe it means looking at someone and loving yourself a little bit more in the process because they love you and you love them and you could ask for nothing more. She could ask for nothing more than this, this creaking apartment and Jacob Black so close to her and smelling of home.

When she opens her eyes again Jacob is so near to her that she can’t see anything else and in that one, singular moment, she can imagine an entire life filled with him. The image makes her smile though her eyesight is still blurry and Jacob smiles a little in response the way he always does and half-laughs, “What?”

She shakes her head, and she really laughs, long and loud and surprised while still crying and hurting so much she could shrivel. Every passing second feels like something being torn out of her, the pieces of herself she saved for Edward cut away and leaving her body with every exhalation. For a minute it feels like all the emotions inside of her, loud and raucous, will turn her to dust. But, then, suddenly, it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. The last, tiny sliver of Edward floats away. It would be so easy to cling to what once was instead of facing the terrifying of what could be, but she lets it go. She doesn’t forget; she knows that’s impossible. And it still hurts, it burns, but her pain is lighter now, pain she now knows will one day be healed. It might take years, but she’ll be okay. She has that strength inside of her, and on the days she doesn’t, she has Jacob.

Jacob is still staring at her with a half-shocked smile. She grabs the fingers of his left hand and holds on tight. He stares down at their hands, the smile melting away so that only that look of surprise remains.

“I love you,” she says, and she has to laugh while saying it because it seems almost impossible that she has ended up here, in love and alive and so full of that love she doesn’t have space for much else. It surprises even her to say the words and Jacob takes in a sharp inhale of breath. A slow, indescribable smile spreads across his face and for a moment the two of them are frozen, simply staring at each other with a grin.

Then, she leans forward, precariously, slowly, without any sort of certainty as to what she’s doing, and kisses him. She only knows how to be careful. Edward meant walking on eggshells and Jacob means being free to be herself, something frighteningly new. She kisses him slowly, the tips of her fingers on his face and he reaches up and gently laces his fingers in her hair. This is different than their last kiss, when the two of them were so fitfully caught up in the possibility of losing that one moment. This time there is no danger of loss. She knows she’s not going anywhere. Jacob rests his free hand on the small of her back and she steps up and straddles his lap. She can’t hear the sounds of the city outside anymore; all she can see or feel or hear is Jacob. She tucks her hands under the loose fabric of his t-shirt, palms pressing flat against the muscles of his back and as if on cue he reaches under her shirt, pushing against the small of her back, pulling her into him.

Jacob pulls away from her for a moment and she shivers a little. With the connection broken, even just a little, she feels suddenly frozen. The small space between them feels too large. She stares at him, worrying she did something wrong, that she moved too quickly, that he doesn’t want her anymore, and Jacob says, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

She blinks and then smiles. It’s okay, she thinks. He loves you. She repeats the phrase in her head a couple dozen times: he loves you, he loves you, like one day it will stop being the most amazing phrase she has ever heard. He loves you. She never wants it to stop being amazing. She means amazing in all its senses, both surprising and wonderful, because she has spent the last six months thinking no one could ever love her and now she has it, she can take it in her hands and drink it in.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling so hard it’s difficult to speak. “This is all I want.”

Jacob won’t stop looking at her like he’s never seen anything quite like her and it cuts into her in a way she can’t describe. When he kisses her again it is more surefooted, like he is beginning to understand that this time, finally, this time she will not go running out the door. He tugs her shirt over her head and needs to help her get his clothes off just because he’s so much taller than she is. She has to help him with the clasp of her bra and she laughs at him for being such a boy, “They’re not that complicated, Jacob,” and she swats him on the arm when he pulls a box of condoms out of his backpack next to his bed – “I figured we’d get here eventually,” he says – and the sex is kind of awkward and kind of hurts and she bleeds a little and Jacob freaks out like he he’s damaged some internal organ but she calmly explains that’s just how it goes sometimes and please don’t stop, and when it’s over she’s breathless and sweaty and she wraps her tiny ankles around him and pretends she is building a birdcage with her body.

“Bells,” Jacob whispers, his voice heavy with a happy exhaustion. She has her nose pressed up against Jacob’s and her eyes shut, drifting off to sleep.

She opens her eyes. His remains shut, a tired smile on his face. She wants to take a picture of it, keep it in her pocket at all times so she never even runs the risk of forgetting this.

“Yeah,” she says, urging him to continue.

He shrugs a little. The sheet rustles under his movement. “I love you,” he says.

She laughs a little, the little puffs of breath shaking his eyelashes. “I love you too,” she whispers back, but Jacob’s breathing is already changing to soft and slow. She kisses him lightly, pulls herself closer to him, and falls asleep.

They call in sick to work the next day. They have to use the payphone outside because they can’t afford a phone line. Jacob blames their absence on the stomach flu while she waits in the apartment, littering the air with her guilty giggles. She’s in one of his oversized t-shirts and when he gets back, he changes into boxers and she sits in his lap for hours eating ice cream for every meal. Everything feels different. It’s not just the sex, though that’s part of it. But it’s not the act itself. It’s just that Jacob is so irrevocably a part of her now, and their love making – a term she always hated but now understands so completely – is just a reflection of that. That morning and afternoon is spent just talking – well, mostly talking. Secrets and fears and worries and joys spill out of her like a rushing spring. Jacob does his share of talking too, and tells her things that make her hate herself for not talking to him about earlier. She was so caught up in her own turmoil she didn’t even try peeling the layers of him. He tells her about his mother’s death and his voice gets really quiet and far away. She turns around to look at him and they’re both already crying and she kisses him for a very long time in a vain attempt to make the pain disappear. The sparkling light comes back into his eyes in a bit, but something inside of her remains so sore for him.

She reads him portions of Wuthering Heights and her voice catches on, “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” He picks it up from her later on and she shivers at “Do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” She watches him as he reads that. He pauses, thumbing the corner of the page and re-reading it again, whispering it under his breath. Bella can feel those words cutting into both of them, twisting the knife into their guts. Jacob looks up at her.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost you,” he says, and his voice is low and pained just imagining it.

She shakes her head, a lump already forming in her throat. “That’ll never happen,” she promises, but afterward they are quiet for a long time, her ear pressed against his chest and listening to his ever-beating heart, and his palm pressed against her ribcage, feeling the pulse of the muscle beneath.







Later, when the silence melts away and they go back to laughing and kissing and making love, Bella makes the unfortunate mistake of looking over toward the kitchen, where the trash has begun to spill over. She sighs, pulling her tousled hair back into a ponytail, and moves to put on a pair of jeans to take the trash outside. The instant she tries to pull away, Jacob latches a hand around her waist.

“Don’t even think about getting out of this bed,” he says, mocking sincerity. The futons have been pushed together, so they actually sort of do look like a bed now.

She laughs. “I’ll be right back, I’m just going to take the trash out. My OCD beckons.”

Jacob glances toward the kitchen, looking guilty. “I’ll do it,” he says instantly but she turns and places a finger on his lips, stopping him short. His mouth moves into a smile under her touch.

“Don’t even think about getting out of this bed,” she smirks, and kisses him fully before forcing herself to pull away.

After 24 hours of being so close to Jacob, outside feels absolutely freezing. The sun has just begun to set, and looking out onto the city feels like looking into a world born anew. Strangers pass and Bella has to resist the urge to run up to them, ask them if they’re in love and, if not, tell them what they’re missing. She sighs, smiling, and turns the corner into the alleyway next to their apartment to toss the garbage into the dumpster.

“Look at this,” a voice calls behind her, something low and sleazy and all too familiar. An instant, freezing sweat drips down her back. In the back of her mind, Edward hisses. Bella turns around very, very slowly.

At the edge of the alleyway stand Jim and Bernie, the two men from the diner who had attacked. There’s a new man with them now, taller and thinner than the others. Bella can’t see his face well from where they stand in the shadow of the alleyway. She can’t see Jim or Bernie’s faces very well either, but she has a feeling she’ll never forget their faces. She takes an automatic step back and glances behind her. A fence blocks the other end of the alleyway. She could try climbing over it, but by the time she makes the calculation to run, Bernie has grabbed her wrist.

“I didn’t appreciate your boyfriend interfering last time, girl,” Bernie says, a light flickering of saliva landing on her cheek. She tries to turn her face away from the heavy scent of alcohol on his breath. “But I don’t see him around right now, and I think my boys and I deserve some fun. We’ve had a long day.”

Bella tries to tug her wrist away, but Bernie is too strong. “He’s just upstairs,” Bella says, and her voice sounds less defiant and more as terrified as she feels. “I’ll scream.”

Bernie seems to start a little. His eyes grow wide for an instant and his grip around her wrist loosens, though she still can’t quite pull away.

“I think she’s bluffing,” says the new, unnamed man.

Bela tries to swallow and fails. “I’ll scream,” she warns again. She doesn’t want Jacob involved in this unless he has to be. Bernie’s scared plenty; if she can get away it’ll be best. She just needs to get away.

Jim steps forward almost out of nowhere and snakes an arm around her waist. “I don’t know; I like Joey’s logic, don’t you, girl?” With his free hand, he unbuttons her jeans, and Bella screams so loudly the birds on the rooftop burst into flight, but Jim doesn’t stop. She kicks and keeps screaming but Bernie seems to be more confident now, and pulls on her shirt, tearing the seams. Bella keeps kicking and Jim throws her to the ground, her head crashing against the concrete.

“Stop fighting,” Jim snarls and then, behind him, a loud, ferocious growl rings. Jim freezes mid-motion but before anyone, even Bella, still lying on the ground, can try to see the source of the sound, Jim is flying into the air and crashing into the brick wall of the alley. A huge, brown wolf stands before them, and even though Bella knows it’s Jacob a pulse of fear still ripples through her. Bernie and the third man – Joey, was it? – try to run, but Jacob swats at them with an enormous paw, sending them too crashing into the wall.

“Stop,” Bella screams, or at least she tries to. Her collision with the ground seems to have given her a concussion, and the world is muted, blurry, spinning. “Jacob, don’t,” she tries again, this time louder. The wolf looks toward her and she gasps a little, because even in her dizziest state she can still see Jacob there, and he doesn’t look angry at all. He looks petrified. The three men are still cowering by the wall. Jacob takes a step toward her and away from them, and at that they scurry to their feet and race out of the alley. Bella reaches behind her head and cringes to find her fingers sticky with blood. She pulls her hand out from behind her head and stares at her soaked fingertips while her spinning head tries to piece together what just happened. Her entire body seems to be shaking and something inside of her is buckling under the weight of something heavy and beyond any words she can fathom.

She doesn’t even notice when Jacob shifts back and carries her back into the apartment. She just keeps staring at the blood on her hands. Jacob pulls on a pair of cutoffs and doesn’t look away from her for a second.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” he whispers, low and pained, examining the back of her head.

She protests immediately. “I hate hospitals. We can bandage me up here.”

“Bella –” he starts, but she shakes her heavy head again and he sighs, defeated. He runs to the bathroom to get some bandages – Bella bought a first aid kit last week; she’s prone to trouble – and he’s gone and back faster than she’s seen any human move. She pushes herself up and leans against the wall so Jacob can get at her skull. She winces at the sting of Neosporin.

It doesn’t feel like her life. It feels like watching a filmstrip of someone else’s catastrophe. She feels indescribably numb, more vacant and desolate than she has ever felt in her entire life. Here she thought nothing could leave her as irrevocably damaged as the departure of a boy she loved. What a fool I have been, she thinks, and wraps an arm around her stomach to keep from crashing down.

“What can I do?” Jacob whispers, stopping patching up her head to look her in the eye. His eyes are red and wet. “Tell me what to do, please, Bella. I can’t – you – if I hadn’t been there –”

“Shh,” she whispers, laying a hand on his and that’s it, the thin wall she had positioned between her and the world begins to shrivel. It doesn’t break, not yet, but it begins to wear thin and she knows it won’t be long until she can’t keep it in anymore. She just keeps her eyes on Jacob and knows that when she does crack, he will guide the reconstruction.

Wrapping the bandages around her head takes half a dozen tries because Jacob’s hands won’t stop shaking. She would help but her hands can’t stop shaking either, and by the time they have finally finished patching up her physical wounds the two of them are shivering like frozen children unable to get out of the cold. Jacob presses his forehead against hers.

“Jesus, Bella,” he breathes. “I have never been so terrified in my entire life.”

“Me too,” she whispers, her arms looped around him and holding him as tightly as she would any other lifesaver when lost at sea. “Me too.”

They stay there, shaking, clutching at each other for what feels like hours, and when they’re both too tired for that anymore, Jacob folds her into his arms and lies down on the futons. She nestles against his chest, breathing evenly and pretending she is not now a statistic of nearly-shattered women. Neither of them sleeps that night, but they go from dusk until dawn listening to each other breathe, and for Bella it’s enough to keep going. She falls asleep just before the sun begins to rise.

Jacob is still awake when she opens her eyes a few nightmare-ridden hours later. He looks absolutely exhausted, all the color drained from his face and his eyelids drooping. She traces the frown in his eyebrows with her thumb, tries to smooth out the worried lines etched in his skin. He closes his eyes at her touch.

“You should sleep,” she whispers. A deep anxiety is already shaking her after just a few moments awake, but seeing Jacob asleep will calm her. Maybe she could even get more rest.

“I can’t,” he whispers. His eyes open and he still carries that abject terror she saw in his eyes the night before. It hasn’t faded. The emptiness in her gut hasn’t faded either. Her very spirit seems carved out, leaving a boulder-sized hole where a part of her used to be. She winces, physically pained at the still-crisp memories of the night before, and grips Jacob’s fingers.

“What time is it?” she asks, because when they’re talking she’s not thinking and when she’s not thinking it’s easier to breathe. Jacob looks toward the clock in the kitchen. Bella can’t see the time from this distance, but the light in the room is grey; she suspects early morning.

“Seven,” Jacob confirms. Her stomach aches with exhaustion, but if she tries to close her eyes she gets transported right back to the alleyway, right back to those harsh, tearing hands.

“Hey,” Jacob says and she looks at him. She can see a searing sadness in him that makes her assume her memories have been playing across her face. The entire scene feels like a slow motion film in her head: the windswept terror in her lungs, the feel of her back pressed against the dumpster, the crashing thud of her skull against the pavement, the blood, the blood. The night before she had been too stunned to process anything at all, but her brief sleep seems to have further thinned her walls. This isn’t something she can keep out, nor does she have to. She has someone who loves her, someone who will keep out all her oncoming storms. By the time she looks Jacob in the eye she’s already crying.

“I was so scared,” she sobs. “I was so scared.”

Jacob takes her face in his hands and kisses her tear-streaked cheeks. Her hands cling to his very skin, clamoring for solid footing.

“I love you,” Jacob whispers like he knows that doesn’t fix everything but for Bella it’s still the most amazing thing she’s ever heard. It cycles for hours, her crying, him crying, I love you spoken like pleas for salvation in the dark, and ultimately they are once again exhausted, but this time finally able to sleep.

When Bella wakes up a few hours later, she finds a note and a sandwich where Jacob had just been. At first she panics, fearing Jacob had gone after the men who attacked her, which – it’s not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just that she knows that if Jacob hurts them it will chip away at that humanity he’s clinging to. That humanity she loves. She won’t see him lose any fragment of himself because of her.

She picks up the note with cold, twitching fingers. It reads, “I’ll be back before you know it. I went to make a phone call. Enjoy the sandwich. Love, Jacob.”

Bella doesn’t touch the sandwich. She puts the plate on the floor and pulls the pillow that had been resting under Jacob’s head to her, buries her nose in it, then pulls her knees to her chest and the blanket above her head, closes her eyes and breathes him in. A few minutes later, Jacob comes back into the apartment. She pokes her head out of the blanket as soon as she hears the key in the door, her heart already pounding in her ears even though she knows it could only be Jake. Still. He still looks exhausted, still looks indescribably sad, and there’s something new there. It’s a look she can’t quite place, and that makes her nervous. She thought she understood every facet of his expressions by now. This is a look placed somewhere between resignation and determination. She doesn’t know what it means.

“What’s going on?” she asks as Jacob sits next to her on the futon and smoothes her hair. He won’t look her in the eye and she doesn’t like it for a second. A small, vicious part of her thinks he looks at her now and sees someone irreparable. She shirks away from his touch and he catches her wrist.

“It’s not about us,” he says, and she breathes a little easier. He closes his eyes and breathes in deep. “It does concern us, though,” he continues, his eyes still shut and with a grimace on his face. “You’re not going to like it.”

Unable to breathe very well, she waits for him to say more. There’s a knot in her stomach that reminds her of tying boats at shipyards – thick, tight, unbreakable.

The words stumble out of his mouth like a crashing wave. “We have to go back to Forks.”

She pulls away from him instantly and presses her back against the wall. Her eyes widen and her jaw drops open. The knot in her stomach tightens and she thinks she’s going to be sick.

“They got to you,” she whispers. “They caught you in wolf form and commanded you to go back.” This is all her fault.

Jacob shakes his head instantly. “They didn’t command anything,” he promises.

That doesn’t make her feel any better. “So you just want to go back?” she asks, her voice rising. “You know that they won’t let you near me, and you just want to go?”

“Bella,” he says, harried, and moves forward to touch her. She looks away, but he cups her cheek anyway. “I’m not going to leave you. I made Sam promise he wouldn’t make me stay away from you. Besides, I don’t think that command would really work anymore anyway.”

At this last sentence, his voice sounds far away, like he’s thinking of a story years old.

“Then why are we going back?” she asks. Her hands are shaking. Even with Jacob so close to her, she feels frozen on the inside.

Jacob sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Victoria.”

Bella feels immediately dizzy, but not as woozy as she once did at the mere sound of that name. Maybe she learned more on this trip than she expected. Maybe more than she wanted to.

“They need you?” she asks but it sounds like someone else asking the question.

Jacob nods. She takes both of his huge hands in her small ones, clutching to the ends of his fingertips more than anything else, and closes her eyes. She leans forward, resting his hands on her knees and her head on his hands, just trying to breathe evenly. To be honest, she doesn’t trust Sam Uley, even if he did pull her out of the woods all those months ago. And if they take Jacob from her she might not survive this time. There are too many holes in her. It will only take one more wound to make the frame of her body collapse.

When she thinks about it, though, it is so much more than that. It’s not just her frailties. It’s that this man, this man whose skin is almost as familiar to her as her own, she loves him. The gravity of it pushes against her, because only love this strong could make her feel so alive and yet so afraid at the same time. She has learned from everything with Edward that she can survive the loss of love; that is only part of her concern. But she would have to rebuild herself, re-teach herself the motions of her body without Jacob, if he leaves her or is forced to leave her. There was such uninhibited joy with Jacob, something completely unlike how things were with Edward, where everything was so serious, so precarious, so literally life-threatening. Jacob’s absence, though survivable, would be devastating. Yes, she could live without Jacob, but she really, really doesn’t want to. That skin of him that she now knows so well, there’s so much more to learn about it, the dips and crevices of his bones, the tiny secrets he keeps tucked in the back of his mind that she hasn’t heard yet. She wants to crawl up inside of him, fuse herself to his soul and see what’s inside. It has nothing to do with her at all, beyond that desire to see inside of him. That’s a new feeling. With Edward she always wanted something, a way out of the dreary life she was leading and aging through. With Jacob, she just wants to understand his ticks, to be able to reflect his thoughts the way he can reflect hers, to help him understand himself on the days he loses track. She wants to be for him what he has always been for her. She doesn’t understand how Sam Uley – how anyone – could ever think that sort of love is wrong.

“Bella,” Jacob whispers and shakes her out of her thoughts. She lifts her eyes to look at him. His eyes are red and wet again. It cuts something deep inside of her and she lifts a hand, brushing away tears not yet present.

“I love you,” Jacob says, and it sounds like a promise. A promise of never leave you and you’re everything. That is something Bella understands. When she says it to Jacob, that’s what she means, too. The entire history of the last six months swirls in her head, the stepping stones that broke her and the man that fixed her and everything leading her to understanding herself in a way she never would have if Jacob had not agreed to go on this trip with her. She left to save him and ended up saving herself. She doesn’t really know how she ended up the rescued one, but something tells her Jacob wouldn’t be surprised. Now it’s her turn to step back, let him save his family this time.

“We’ll go. And I am going to wait at Emily’s until this war is over and you have to come back to me. You come back to me,” she whispers, low and gravely and already crying all over again and Jacob smiles wide through those still wet eyes and says, “Always.”

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Epilogue