Leah Clearwater:: This Is Your Life.

I awoke with a start, my heart racing and my head filled with the replay of yesterday's events.

The first memory to emerge from my fatigued mind was my loss of control: the way I had stormed into the house and taken it all out on Bella. The truth was, though, that it wasn't her fault. It wasn't her fault that Jacob was in love with her, and not her fault that she loved him as a best friend and nothing more. But it didn't stop the pain I felt emanating from Jacob whenever he looked at her, whenever Edward held her hand, or ran his hand over the huge bump that was their baby.

So I suppose I wasn't fully justified in what I had done to Bella yesterday. I blamed her for Jacob's pain, when what I really wanted was a substitute for my own suffering. How my heart ached when I saw the way Jacob looked at her, how the tears welled up inside my eyes but how I refused to let them fall.

I couldn't help it. I was in love with Jacob Black.

You know what they say, that love is sometimes strangely easy to mistake for loathing?

That had been my shelter for all these years now; whenever I felt the pain well up inside of me, I had taken it out on him. Little, stupid things I liked to bug him with: they distracted me from myself.

For a time, the pain would subside and I could become the Leah that he hated with a passion, the Leah that was always there when he wanted peace, the Leah that was just the older, most annoying member of the pack.

I didn't really care what he thought of me then, at least I was with him.

My mind wandered back to the conversation I had had with him after the day Bella had chosen Edward over him, how I had annoyed him again as usual, and some of the things I had said to him came flooding back.

I smiled at the memory.

"I can't stand being in your head any more! Get over her already!" I had said, "Time to move on, boy."

I laughed without humour. I remembered how I had felt such a hypocrite saying it. I could talk, couldn't I. The one who had taken years to get over Sam. The scars were still there, and I still felt the small spasm of pain whenever Emily caught his eye from across the room.

But Jacob was the one who could make that all go away. I knew, from days of being stuck in the pack's shared mind, that at one time he had thought of me as pretty. Beautiful, in fact. But those days were long gone.

No-one thought of me that way anymore.

Years of pain and tears had hardened me. I saw it in myself now, as I glanced over to the mirror on the opposite wall of my room.

My face was pinched, a thin crease between my eyebrows that slanted upwards at the corners and my features held a slightly sour, tortured expression.

I looked at my body as a whole, then. Wow. Years of grieving had hunched my shoulders up tight against my neck, and I was thin. Too thin. Gaunt, in fact. I sighed.

I remembered something else I had said to Jacob, that day.

"You have no idea how hard this is for me."

I didn't just mean having to hear him obsess over Bella, but how was I supposed to tell him that I longed for it to be me that he wanted, not that jumped-up blood-sucker-loving freak from Phoenix?

Sorry Bella. I didn't mean that.

Oh great. Now I was talking to someone who wasn't even there.