They're both cursed, he thinks. Doomed. Damned to lose for all eternity. That's been his experience at least. Women enter his life and pass through like ghosts, leaving shambles in their wake.
He was too young to remember the day they buried Sarah. But he thinks back to a time when he was six and he sobbed into a photo album because they made mother's day cards at school and he didn't have one anymore. He recalls the scent of a perfume that he can't quite place.
He was too old to cry when Rebecca told him she was moving to Hawaii, but the little boy stuck inside his lanky frame wanted too. He was tired of his family breaking up, going away. He feared being alone in the house, with nothing but his own echoes to answer him back.
He cried too many tears for Bella Swan, but they evaporated before they could run down his cheeks. He mourned silently in the garage, holding a wrench and knowing that he would never feel the softness of her skin again. He put an unopened can of soda on his tool bench, just in case she ever decided to come back home.
He's haunted, but she understands. He's been inside her head before. Watched the memories like old movies, flickering and dim:
Sitting on the bank of the river with Harry's wide hand wrapped around her own wrapped around a fishing pole as he taught her how to cast. Sitting in the back of pickup truck with much different hands grasping her own.
She never cried for either of them, not once. He's not sure she knows how to.
But she understands – they understand each other, they understand loss. That's why her hands are under his shirt, that's why he's tracing his tongue down her neck. That's why they're kissing and nibbling and tumbling and pretending the other one is someone else.
He figures that if they're both going to be alone, at least they can be alone together.