Hey all. This is chapter 18 (Pissy Exhausted Werewolf Asshole) of The Slow Burn, written from Jacob's point of view. If you need to reread that chapter, it's easy to find through my profile page, but even if you've never read TSB this works as a stand-alone vignette. The title is taken from "Witch," by Maps and Atlases (not at all the sort of music Jacob would listen to, but I kept hearing it while working on this story and it does seem to fit).

Before you read the story, I'd like to quote Dan Bergstein, whose views on movie Jacob exactly mirror my own.

"The Jacob in my head does not look like a cashier at Forever21. In my head, he looks like a Native American Han Solo, with rugged good looks, a world-weary face, abs that make you whisper, "Yes," to an empty room, and powerful legs so long that they go all the way to the…I'm straight. Totally straight. You know what I like? Hot chicks with boobs and butts and bikinis. Boobs are completely what I'm interested in. And estrogen."

That is the Jacob in my head, too. He has a prominent nose that's been broken one too many times, and his feet are really gross and coarse, and his hands are basically never free of motor oil/dirt/blood, and he has one crooked tooth that shows every time he smiles. In other words, he's a person. Enjoy.

"God dammit stupid bitch ass…" I muttered a steady stream of abuse at the ridiculous piece of flawed machinery in my garage. This '06 Ford Mustang had practically fallen into my hands, and it was such a shitty car that I felt pity for it instead of harvesting scraps off of it like I should have. What a lemon. It and me.

"Balls! Fuck you, you shitty, useless—" I heard a familiar whistle outside the garage and the sound of my front door latching. My rage at the car took an abrupt nosedive. I could be mad at this piece of shit tomorrow. I was tired and sweaty and dirty and my favorite human being on the planet was waiting for me in the house.

I wiped my hands on a rag, which spread the filth around but didn't actually clean them, and went in. Nessie was lying on her stomach on the floor of my living room, feet in the air and crossed at the ankles, giggling at Wallace and Gromit. Her scent hit me as soon as I came in the door. Sweet and dark. A sugar maple in a forest fire.

Damn. Every time I thought I was used to the way she smelled, it grabbed me by the nuts and squeezed.

"Hey, Ness," I said, a little too loudly. "Been drinking? Lemme get a clean glass and I'll catch up."

I hurried through to the kitchen and started scrubbing my hands with the gritty soap. The grease wasn't really coming off, but at least it wasn't smearing around anymore. That was good. I didn't want to track dirty black junk all over her when I hugged her and played with her hair and...

Shit. This was exactly the sort of thinking I was trying to avoid. Ever since she'd left that dickweed teacher and come back to live in Forks, a fundamental part of our relationship had been replaced by something more complicated and a hell of a lot more frustrating. At least, on my side it had: I couldn't look at her anymore without dwelling on all those curves I wanted to see closer, the little pad of flesh that covered her lower abdomen, the place where her thighs just touched each other, the…

Stop! Stop stop stop. I had never had any trouble with my love for Nessie. It had always been the most satisfying and the simplest part of my life. Family, but easier. When the imprint took twenty-six years ago, Nessie didn't become a stand-in for her mother, but she did put her in perspective. Bella was stripped of that haze of romantic desirability, and she did not hold up well to impartial scrutiny: after Nessie was born, Bella was revealed to me as rather more whiny, needy, and ungracious than I'd previously realized. I fell in love with other women. I came real close to proposing to Maya, probably would have if she hadn't taken that job in Boston.

I never saw Nessie that way. On our visits to each other, all the casual easy rough-housing was how we stayed close. It was amazingly similar to the way I interacted with my pack. It was as natural as running for us. I didn't really like Jonathan or any of his successors, but not because I saw them as threats. They just all seemed too earthbound and stuffy for a girl like her. She assured me her boyfriends were much cooler when I wasn't around, but I had to take her word on that because every time I saw them they were wound up tight as a jack-in-the-box. The last one had shown promise. Sam, his name was. And Sam broke her heart, the little shit.

Out of the blue one day I'd felt that imprint-y tug that made me pull out my phone and call her, and she was asking me to meet her at her house, and somehow that was the last time things were normal. She raced out to meet me in her front yard before I even put the Rabbit in park.

We went right to each other as always for a hug, and I felt little shudders running through her body that quickly turned into absolute wrenching sobs. She cried and cried and cried, drenching the shoulder of my shirt, and then cried some more. She didn't look up until she was done and hiccups were all that were left. Her cheeks were blotchy red, her nose was pink, her eyes were red-rimmed, and little flakes of black were peppered down her face, the only fragments of makeup that had survived the flood.

For some reason, seeing her like that flipped a switch in my brain. This was not the girl I had always known. This was a woman who had just had her heart broken, and the total destructive sadness that was broadcast all over her face and body was beautiful to me in a way I'd never experienced before. At that moment Leah's words to me years ago made sense.

"So you're not into her," she'd stated.

"I love her more than anything, but not, you know…"

"Not the way everyone expects you to."

"Yeah. Hey, I like it this way. I'm done trying to figure out what evolutionary purpose imprinting serves. All I know is that little girl is the most important thing on earth, and anyone who tries to hurt her will end up as wolf pellets in the forest."

"Well then, I guess you're two kinds of mythical creature, aren't you?"

"How's that?"

"Not only are you a werewolf, you're also the only straight male who's ever seen that chick and not wanted to put his dick in her. Good for you, Jacob."She'd rolled her eyes then, and the subject was dropped.

And now I was taking three cold showers a day, ordering my wolves around with unnecessary force, trying to shove her back into the comfortable asexual box in which she'd lived for twenty-five years. Mostly I was successful. Sometimes I wasn't, and I jerked off furtively in the shower to mental pictures of her, and felt like a lecherous freak for days afterward.

I couldn't tell what it was that made it feel so taboo. Our difference in age was much less pronounced now than it had been when she first hit adulthood. Twenty-five year olds hooked up with forty-two year olds and it wasn't even worth commenting on, and the fact was that she'd been an adult almost as long as I had. I still had the body and voice and hormones of a guy in his mid-twenties, and I still did stupid shit that I was supposed to have outgrown by now, and I still voted Democratic. Those forty-two years hadn't turned me into my dad, probably because half of them were spent as a wolf. Sure, I paid taxes and bills and helped the younger wolves with college tuition, and I got snippy when they made fun of music I listened to when I was their age, but I didn't feel middle-aged and I sure as hell didn't act it. And the longer we both lived, the less our relative ages would matter anyway.

But she had been a non-sexual being in my eyes for so long that I could barely bring myself to face it now. It felt subversive and unfamiliar.

Besides, she wasn't hurting for boyfriends. The last thing I wanted was to destroy our easy joyful friendship on a gamble. Just because the switch had been flipped in my brain didn't mean it had been flipped in hers. She clearly still saw me as she'd always seen me: dependable, fun, dickless.

Drag.

It occurred to me that she was saying something.

"…Doesn't have to," she chirped, "Because he's English, see?"

"Clear as kidney stones," I said. She popped up in the doorway to the kitchen and I steeled myself to face her, to talk about something normal and non-lecherous. "I hate that stupid car—" I started to say.

"Oh, fie, young one!" she said, cutting me off. "All you need is a hug!" She was so adorable when she'd had booze. She never seemed to make it past the bubbly, humorous stage. She was way funnier than me when we drank, although I was admittedly biased: I thought she was way funnier than everyone, always.

I held out my arms and regretted it almost instantly as she bounded into them, because from the outline of her breasts under that green shirt there was no way that girl was wearing a bra. She pressed against me and I fervently wished I had on fourteen layers, anything to keep me from feeling so vividly the contours of her chest, those teardrop-shaped tits with silky nipples sliding around under her sweater. I swallowed hard and thanked all the gods that it wasn't cold in here, because if her nipples had been en garde I would have had to run screaming into the night.

I took a deep breath, which wasn't helpful because it smelled like her and that did very bad things to my anatomy. She hadn't smelled this way when she was younger. Part of it was that she simply smelled adult now, but also she smelled more human as she got older. The traces of sweet leech-ness that hadn't bothered me much five years ago were now totally gone.

I broke the hug and grabbed a cup from the sink, gripping it like a life-raft. The cold impersonal chime of glass steadied me a little. Ness gave a sigh and turned toward the table. In passing her hand grazed my lower belly and all the blood in my body made a beeline for that area and parts south, and I squeezed too hard on the glass in my hand and felt it crackle like cellophane.

"God dammit!" I shouted, dropping the glass on the floor and turning to the sink. "Fucking shit ass hell crap!" I turned the faucet on as cold as it would go and held my gashed-open hand under the stream. The pain and cold water helped restore the balance of fluids in my body. Or in other words, my raging boner went down. I wrapped up the hand and turned to apologize to Ness, but she wasn't there. "Hey, where'd you go?"

She crawled out from beneath my kitchen table with eyes wide and lips slightly parted. "Under here," she said, cleaning lint off her pants. I wasn't going to be able to do this tonight. Usually I could, but not right now. Just seeing her run her hands down her tight-panted legs to brush away dust and hair—no, fur, my fur—was too much for me.

"Sorry," I said. "I've had a long day. I think I have to call it a night." Her face fell, and before I could do something stupid, like give her another hug, I headed toward my room.

"Jake, wait!" I felt her hand on my back and stopped moving. Why, oh why hadn't I worn a shirt? Oh, right, because shirts were stupid. But a nice parka would be good about now, at least I wouldn't have to feel her warm, soft fingers cupping my shoulder blade…I started to think about what else I'd like her to do to me with those fingers and shivered a little. The hand dropped. "Okay…well, good night, Jake. Love you." I couldn't bring myself to turn and look at her. She would look sad and pretty and that mouth and those eyes…

Do the right thing, you asshole. Do the right thing. "G'night, Ness. Love you back." I went into my room and closed the door, and then leaned heavily against it for a while. After I heard the front door close I lay down on my bed and whipped out my dick, feeling like a hound and hoping against hope that the next time I saw her, she would be wearing a goddamn bra.

Like it? Hate it? Bored? Want a cookie/biscuit? Can't remember what the hell I'm talking about? Let me know!