"A little dust never stopped me now...
Sometimes I can hold my tongue
Sometimes not, when you just...
And you know what you're doin'
So don't even"

Tori Amos, Honey

Okay, so I know that I cannot just write a fucking story from beginning to end and I'm okay with that. I will inform you of the time line, I promise. Maybe I'll even draw one up and post it as a teaser. ;)

Sometimes, the way the story needs to be told cannot be done chronologically. Maybe that is a bullshit, lame excuse and I should be ashamed that I cannot give it to you straight. Straight has never been my thing. I do promise to give it to you hard and make you cry out, it hurts so good.

Thank you, Allysue08 and Detroitangel.

The night that made them fight in the first place.

July, 2004.

~Bella~

To tell how many times I sat at that same table, week after week, just wouldn't quite do the trouble justice. I toed the metal leg, my flip-flops loose underneath me, my bare heel touched the cold marble floor and I wondered if being here this time was going to make us, or break us. The beer was bitter, too much hops. I could feel it churning in my stomach already. I smiled and wished I had ordered something different, but I downed it anyway. He said it was good. It was on special, as well.

Dark bars, dark streets, dark hearts and secrets, that was all we were. It may have been what we had always been. Something was clandestine the whole time. Even when we first met it seemed like we shouldn't be looking at each other, shouldn't be speaking, staring in each others eyes, or sitting so close together. At twelve, what does one know about fate, the stars, or how forces align? He felt familiar, like I thought I felt. We were so soft and scared and new; it was both our first days.

He sat behind me and I leaned back as he leaned in. We were inches from each other. I said hi and he looked away. His cheeks reddened and his eyes watered. I turned away, afraid of seeing this pretty little blonde boy cry.

It was hard to pay attention to the teacher. I could hear his every breath and it ached, deep inside my chest. The urge to go to him, run away with him, was intense, but I ignored him. There was so much feeling in my little body and I sat there day after day, listening to him breathe. Eventually he talked. Not to me, but to James. He sat next to Jasper. They seemed to hit it off well, talking of music and comics and normal twelve year old boy stuff. I was somewhat interested, but feigned the dis of it.

I was nothing much to look at, that was for sure. As a pubescent, plump, awkward girl with unevenly cut hair and bright clothes, I was practically ignored and often mocked. Not straying too far out of my comfort zone, I wasn't needy and rarely cared for any attention. Wanting to be liked and the steps involved in that process just didn't appeal to me. With a few girl friends I managed to finish my first semester without much incident.

He still shared his sighing, from behind, and I still reveled in it. I could feel it on the back of my neck, like he was whispering his hello, but he paid me no mind. I was nobody. I knew that, but I leaned back anyway. I swear he always moved forward.

The last day of the sixth grade he finally talked to me. I was reading, minding my own business and the lights were off because it was 90 freaking degrees outside and the school couldn't afford air conditioning. James had taken to insulting me on a daily basis, for reasons unknown. He never went so far as to actually hurt my feelings. It took a little more than him saying I was too poor for new clothes, or that I was too ugly to have ever kissed a boy, to get me upset.

I was unaware, but he had evidently been shooting small spit-wads into my hair for God knows how long. Suddenly, Jasper punched him, hard, on the arm. I actually felt the impact through our desks.

"Stop it, jerk!" he hissed under his breath, not wanting to alert the teacher to the fooling around. I turned to see what was going on, still oblivious that there were about twenty little spit covered balls of paper in my hair.

James looked at Jasper like he had been possessed. Then he smiled like someone had told him a huge secret.

"Aww, she your girlfriend, now?" he asked. "What are you gonna do, Whitlock? She's ugly. These make her more... interesting looking." He laughed, sneering at me as I noticed a few of the white clumps fall around me.

As I shook my hair out, hoping there weren't too many and that I wouldn't be plucking them out all day, the bell rang. James punched Jasper in the chest and ran out the door. He winced, but didn't move or make a sound. I turned away, not caring if anything remained in my hair and began to gather my things.

"I'm sorry," came that breathy voice. I stopped, my hand halfway to the ground for my bag. "I shouldn't have let him do that in the first place. He's an ass, but I guess it was funny the first time."

"I bet," I said, not looking at him. He was standing there, blocking me as I turned to leave the room. We were the only two left. His gray eyes were shining and too wet looking, like that first day, and it made me avert my gaze. His round cheeks might have been tinged with embarrassment, but I couldn't tell. He reached out and pulled another little ball from my hair and threw it to the ground.

His wrist flexed and I inhaled raising my eyes to his. He let out a staggered breath and it washed over me. I couldn't tell you what it reminded me of. The scent seemed too intimate, too familiar, even though I could not place it. It made me think of turquoise and iron. Strange pictures flashed through my head and I felt a surge of some emotion I wasn't used to.

"Um, thanks. I guess." I scurried around him, bolting out the door and not looking back.

If I had any fucking sense, it would have dawned on me then that nothing but doom would find us. His first words to me were an apology and I thanked him for it. We have been some version of that first conversation for the last twelve years. Each apology stung and each thank you was insincere. It needed to be the other way around. I thanked him for the pain and somehow, it never hurt as much as it should have. I couldn't make it hurt enough. Believe me, I tried.

His apologies never meant a thing. He couldn't look me in the eye anymore when he said those words. We were forged and flawed forever that seemingly insignificant moment in that dim, washed-out classroom. His eyes, then, seemed sincere and honestly ashamed that he had let James go on for so long. Now, they were portals of vacancy and pain. Iron corrodes and stone eventually turns to dust. He'd seen too much, felt too much. He was weary and needed rest. He wouldn't seek it and I could do nothing but stand by and watch as he crumbled to pieces all around me. I didn't want him in pieces. I wasn't sure how much longer there would be anything at all left to want.

The bar filled in with needy patrons looking for their own hiding places. An hour passed as I sat at that off-kilter table waiting. Another beer and one more smoke and I was out of there. Instinctively, I knew he wasn't going to show. I almost hadn't, and that was the one glaring difference between us. He ran. I stayed. Always. I'd lost count of all the no-shows and unreturned phone calls. Promises that Jasper made were broken nine times out of ten. This was the third in as many months. It didn't really matter that I kept a tally, that I was the one willing to put myself out there and show up, no matter what. We did nothing but fight and fuck anymore. As guilty as I knew I should feel, it didn't stop the depraved cycle we had started.

It didn't seem possible to stop. I craved him like air and water—suffocating when it ebbed and choking when it flowed. So, I hid, smiled and pretended. Once again, he let me down. Once again, I thought I wouldn't care, but the tears would come, eventually, and there would be no end to us—even if this was it.

~Jasper~

She was in the bathroom singing. Her voice was off, even as the raging shower drowned most of it out, and I cringed at the sound. Why the fuck was I still here? I couldn't bring myself to leave, yet every second spent here, with her, killed me. Truly, I had no where to go. I'd dug this hole too deep to climb out of and now was buried.

Last week when I met Bella at the bar, we hardly made it through our first round before we were running for the car. I had her naked within seconds of closing the hotel room door and she came twice before I even took my jeans off. Something about tasting her first, before any other sense registered, made being with her something sacred and made for me alone. I hated that spiritual shit, but the fact that nothing else existed except for us when part of me was inside her blew my mind. It was more natural and more foreign than anything I had ever experienced and it terrified me.

Sitting in the dark trying to come up with another excuse to be leaving at 9:30 on a Tuesday night had me shaking. Just thinking about the last time made me unsure that I could go through with it again. Bella seemed so capable, so at ease, when we were together. It was nothing for her to be with me. She gave in and let whatever we were take over.

I couldn't do that. A few times I felt my mind and body really connecting, focusing and becoming one with hers. For a few minutes at a time the room blurred and the world outside lost meaning. I knew though, that the second I lost the focus on myself, on the fucked up shit I was doing to everyone around me, and focused on her I would be lost forever. I would have to break away, just say the words and force the actions. She would come with me and I would make her mine. I would steal her from her family, friends, and fiancé and she would let me. It would be the easiest thing I had ever done. It killed me that in reality it would be so hard for her.

When it was just fucking—tearing clothes and bruising and sucking—I could handle it. When she looked in my eyes as she came and I really saw her, the woman she was, I was in awe and there was nothing in the world more beautiful or powerful. She would crush me every day. She had. She did. I was too in love with her, and then not enough. So many times I had begged her to stay with me. I would hold her panties hostage, hide her keys. I plied her with promises and she saw right through me. This was just fucking to her. That was all it had ever been.

Maybe once, a long time ago, it wasn't. Now, it was convenient. We couldn't deny it, so we didn't try. In that hotel room, nothing mattered except her flesh and mine. The words that would come out of her mouth... she shit she would say to me... they simultaneously nourished and destroyed me. She would get so wet, so much more so than any woman I had been with. Everything about her made me crazy, dizzy with want. I would dip my fingers into the well and my whole body would scream out to be covered. The thirst I had for her could not be quelled. I could drown in it and still want more.

I was more sure that I loved Bella than I was about anything else. Impossible as it was when we tried to be together, those were the best thirty days of my life. I woke up next to her, smelled her first and last thing each day. I was never rid of her taste. It covered me like my own, like we were finally merging, but something had changed. When I looked in her eyes, the dead stared back. We would never be what she wanted us to be. I could see that it hurt her, so I slowly faded away. Rather than ruin her, I would kill myself. Each day I counted the number of times I touched her and every day I took one away.

With her panting and gasping, laying underneath me, I could dry all of the wretched tears I wanted to spill. When she looked at me, features that used to be so warm iced over because there was always something I wasn't doing, wasn't saying. She was too proud to ask and too fucking stubborn to confront me and so she whimpered my name, almost like that first time, but never the same way.

I'd mixed my tears with her arousal countless times and as we moved toward our end, it wasn't just her salt we were covered in. I couldn't hold it back and the rain pounded as I pounded and I would think I saw a flicker in her eye, a smile on her lips, but it was just a shadow, always a shadow.

It was near six in the morning and the sun had barely opened its eye when I felt her weight leave the bed. I didn't speak, instead I pretended to still sleep. I shut my eyes tightly and made fists into my hair as I heard the front door click shut. Her bag had been in the living room. I saw it before we went to bed.

When I met with her two days later, I tried to make it her fault. I told her any lie I could. She was wonderful, but not enough. I was in love with someone else. She was a lying whore and was just using me and I would never forgive her for it. I didn't want her anymore.

Her tears never came. Her face barely twitched and for three months that face haunted me, until I couldn't stay away any longer. Of course, she had moved on quickly and I found it difficult to accept that she was happy with another man. So, I kept my distance as best I could, but we quickly fell back into our old pattern.

Her man, Edward, was a decent guy. I couldn't hate him, he'd done nothing to me, but he didn't factor into our equation at all. I had one last chance to convince her to be with me. I'd never put any planning into us before and maybe that was what had been so wrong for so long. I was too much of a pussy to lay it out there for her to take.

Soon, we were meeting weekly and I swallowed down the searing pain that rose inside me every time I was with her. She was no closer to leaving him, no closer to being mine. I could still see the hate in her eyes for what I had done. I would fuck her harder, assaulting her for leaving me first. Every time she came, the ache mixed with the pleasure and her warm face contorted, showing me just how miserable she was. It paled in comparison to my own misery, but I enjoyed seeing it nonetheless. The longer we went on this way, the more violent and intense our trysts would become and I wondered when it would finally morph and turn into the rage we both suppressed. Would we be pushing and pulling into and out of each other one second, desperate to release the hate, and then the next be slapping and punching and crying out our love?

I wanted her to strike me, I wanted some sort of emotion from her other than these horrid feelings. Anger was a good one, one she rarely expressed. I couldn't push enough. Even leaving a twenty on the dresser before I took off didn't get me there. I was helping pay for our night in more ways than one and making her feel like a whore was one way she could pay me, as well.

I would do it all again. Every moment, I would live again. I leaned back on the couch and took out my phone. I attempted to text her three times, but words failed, even typed ones. Maggie was out of the shower and still singing. I closed my eyes, already regretting and relieved that I'd stood her up. If I couldn't stop this, it would never end. I needed maybe a month to put something together, but I was certain that soon I would be nothing but a ghost to Bella.

Two hours later standing in my dark bedroom, I looked from my cock, buried in Maggie's inadequate mouth, to my cell phone. I drove to Bella in my mind. She walked out her front door leaving Edward standing there, gaping after her. She ran to my car and hopped in. We took off together and never looked back.