A/N: This is a sad little drabble, and I'm not sure if I feel I've done it justice or not.
Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight, and Charles Bukowski was a crazy man but a wonderful poet. I quote How Is Your Heart? in this.
--
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade –
this was the craziest kind of
contentment.
--
You don't exactly expect to be knocking on her door the night before her wedding.
It's just not something you planned – you never wanted to be the clichéd ex-lover, begging 'no' when the girl is standing at the alter. Maybe that's what brought you here, because it's so easy to pretend that you're not when you've changed the words to the story a little.
Her eyes are lazy when she opens the door and her expression doesn't change when you reach forward and kiss her. When you place your palms on her cheeks and push her against the open door, wood cracking on the white plaster wall, she doesn't protest. She puts both of her tiny hands around your waist even though they don't fit and kisses you back, and when you're both breathless and bleeding, she isn't turning red.
"Come with me," you say, and she surprises you both by nodding.
"Okay."
--
She shoves together an extra shirt and sweats and a toothbrush and not much else. By the time you're on the highway, you're enjoying the expanse of legs as she rests her cut-off clad ones on the dashboard, toes making little smudges in the glass.
"Where are we going?" she asks, finally, after a few hours on the road.
"Where we can be together," you tell her, and she nods again.
--
Four hours later you're standing in a Quick Stop and she's chewing on a power bar as you pump gasoline. Her feet are bare and she stares at the road with such an empty look in her eyes that you forget who she is for a second.
"Do you need anything?" you ask her, staring at the ground.
She pauses, swallowing. "I have to pee," she decides. You take her arm as you walk inside the store, where there is no air conditioning and the boy standing at the counter ringing up potato chips looks scared of you. She asks for the key to the bathroom and the boy looks at her broken face like she is an angel. It strikes you that it's the same look she used to use on you.
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"No," she says. "I'm not two years old, Jacob. I can make it to the bathroom by myself."
"I'm sorry," you explain. "I just don't trust gas stations."
For some reason, she finds this funny, and you watch as she giggles her way to the graffiti-covered metal door.
--
It's only been two days when you catch her at a pay-phone, staring at the receiver in her hand as she tries to make a choice.
"Hey," you tell her, "I thought you wanted this."
"I do," she says, looking up at you, and in her eyes you can see past the doubt and know it's true. "Charlie doesn't know where I am."
"Okay," you shrug. You give her a quarter to make the call, and she looks a little better when she returns to the car.
"Was he worried?" you ask.
She licks her lips, cracked from the heat. You've been out of the rain for a day and a half now and despite her desert-upbringing, her skin hasn't browned a bit. "I'm with you," she says plainly. "Why would he be worried?"
"I guess I just figured…" you trail off. "What about…them?"
She looks out the window. "Yes, I suppose they're worried. I'm with a werewolf, after all."
Something about the way she says it makes you take her chin in between your fingers; turn her face to yours. "You're safe with me, Bells, you know that, right?"
"Do you think I'd be here if I didn't?" she asks.
You realize that you don't actually know the answer. There is a part of her that has always been attracted to danger, and sometimes you're not sure if that's the reason she's there.
--
Five days in, you bring back Mexican food to where she's sitting on the hood of the car. You're parked in a clearing near the woods, and the night is warm with the stars still visible overhead. She thanks you and when you're both done eating, you lie down and look at the constellations.
When you reach for her hand, she takes it, and from the corner of your eye you see her crying. Your heart breaks a little for this girl who had too big of a choice, and when you move to kiss the tears away she unbuttons your shirt instead.
There, when the sun meets the line of trees somewhere in California, you lose your innocence like you always imagined you would, while the girl you love pretends that her cheeks aren't still wet.
--
It's another week, filled with the feel of her stomach under your hands and her smile on your skin, before you turn the car around.
It takes a considerably shorter time to get home than it did to get here; the middle of nowhere, America – the pit stop between this endless summer and giving her back to reality.
You kiss her in the car before walking her to the door, where she thanks you for always taking care of her.
Edward opens it with his eyes black. You try to cover what you're thinking by reciting Bukowski – and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror; see myself, ugly, grinning at it all – but the frown on his face tells you everything. He knows.
"Thank you for taking care of her," he says, repeating her words from before, and as he closes the door on your face, you see that empty-eyed girl standing behind him, waving, and you recite the last line of that poem – what matters most is how well you walk through the fire – and you realize that you would trade anything to get to walk through fire with her.
--
END