Many huge thanks to my beta, V. Let me tell you, girl's got her hands full with me ;).
Disclaimer: Eddie, Jizz and Bubba in the lowcountry? Mine. Twilight, etc.? Defs SM's.
This one goes out with a big wet sloppy to my Nordic Mistress;), BSTjerne…you've no idea how much I missed you. And, always, to my Dead Fed ladies!
Shake it Out
Shake it out, shake it out
God, I need another round
Another round, another round
Another, I could feel it now
I felt the Lord in my father's house
Then I could see, I could see
Standing, we were seventeen, make it clean
Are you the living ghost of what I need?
Are you giving me the best of me?
We will see
'Cause I'm done being alone
With the funerals at least for now
Are you tired of being alone?
Are you tired of being alone?
And I could see, I could see
God, I've never seen a thing, so complete
I am the living ghost of what you need
I am everything eternally, God, just speak
'Cause I'm done being done
With the funerals at least for now
Are you tired of being alone?
Are you tired of being alone?
So speak to me
I felt the world begin to peel off all my skin
And I felt the weight within
Reveal the bigger mess that you can't fix
I felt, I felt God lead me into my home
Don't stop, don't ever go
I swear you'll never know, you'll never know
Oh God, you gotta shake it out, shake it out
You gotta break it down, break it down
Shake it Out, Manchester Orchestra
Fart boy was road-dust. Sniffing the air and zeroing in on Bella, I followed the fragrant trace that became more and more fertile the closer I got to her. Freesia. I'd stumbled across her scent in Esme's garden to find the flowers that smelled of Bella blooming like pastel chrysalis in one of her many casket-cum-flower pots. Strawberries. I could still see the pulpy juice slurping down Bella's pointy chin at the festival. It felt like a coon's age since I'd seen her, even longer since that day when I had first talked to her, and yet it was scant more than two weeks.
I parked the Bronco in the small cemetery at Christ Church to tread the path of her luxuriously earthy aroma on foot, trespassing hallowed ground again. I came to a dead fucking standstill when I found the origin of her bouquet. A flotilla of motorcycles rested in the parking lot; their owners washing back brews and smoking tab ends to the nub. Shooting the shit, the hubbub was deafening as I tried to pinpoint Bella.
Strolling by, a loose gait taking him past the massed rough riders, a Kashi-eating, dread-locked, peg-eared peace lover grinned slackly and flashed a 'V' at the leather-head tribe. They raised their fists in return and yelled out, "Walk on, brother!" Grunge boy nodded his head slowly and carried on by me as if I was nonexistent. Jutting out of the back of his rucksack was a regulation sized American flag and a handwritten sign placarded to his pack beseeching: Nirvana or Bust?
Shee-it, the louse-haired git was headed towards downtown. I could tell him straight up that he was headed in the wrong direction! At the rate he was going, he'd be more likely to come across Woodstock--that formerly hippy-filled field that seemingly no one could accurately locate anymore.
Sniggering and feeling pissy, I laughed outright when I came face-to-face with a crooked signpost standing against the entrance of the bar: Hippies Use Side Door. Yeah, Pigpen, they're talkin' to you!
Richard's Fuckin' Tavern. Shit. Worse yet? The Wolf Mobile was front and center.
Bella plus her puppy dog plus Richard's equaled trouble. Even Bubba could do that math!
A magnet for the lowcountry's fuckwits and weirdoes, this place was going to be the death of me if Bella herself was not. I stepped inside and was taken aback by the clatter, the reek, and the crowd.
Returning early from the Gator hunt, I had given up, caved, threw in the towel.
Eddie was a competitor of the finest nature. This was unheard of!
But fuck me, I had missed Bella.
Stupidly thinking I could erase her from my body and mind if I just put enough space between us…nah. Not gonna' happen and I knew it the first day. More irritable than a grizzly, not even the salty, frothy, spewing life-force blood gushing from the innumerable gators we hunted satisfied me.
Em thought it was all too fuckin' funny. Him and his accursed Fart Boy.
He called me Bella's Bitch.
And I was.
I almost turned tail a-fuckin'-gain in this hotbed of misfits. Truculently, I parked my ass at the bar and ordered a beer.
It was murky inside. All the colors, but for the neon Pabst, Schlitz, Bud, and Busch signs, had bled. I almost felt at home; estranged, a nobody.
Hicks, riders, country bumpkins. White, black, Creole. People, a swampy overheated room chock-a-block with blood-plump people, milled about.
This greasy spoon that advertised Hot Food and Cold Beer stank of fried flipper and werewolf.
That right there just made me downright tetchy!
I hadn't caught sight of Bella yet and wasn't even sure I wanted her to see me. I looked around halfheartedly and chuckled when I came across Missus Snape. Paired up with a biker clad in the tanned and dyed skins of the mammals I ate every day; he was enraptured with her substantial tightly corseted grill, his thoughts were on endless loop, Thanks be for tits! Snapestress was still wearing those weapon-like stiletto boots on this hot-as-fuck night.
Now petulant, I started scanning the melee more closely for Bella.
A rotund woman swiveled through the fracas, and I followed the motion of her hips until she halted in front of a waist that had been held in my hands. Harshly swallowing the huge gulp of Pabst I'd just guzzled, I raised my eyes up to a simple peony-pink t-shirt, over a neck that I had licked and nuzzled, onto blousy lips that were wide with a welcoming grin, a grin that was not aimed at me.
"MAMA BROWN!" Bella swayed slightly on her feet that, when I swooped to stare lower, were shoed in fawn suede heels that were the perfect plinth for her gorgeous toes and sexy ankles.
The big, beautiful, black woman that I should have recognized from all the time I'd spent loitering about her establishment pulled Bella into a squeezing hug and climed, "Hey L'il Momma, what you doin' here?"
A scowl replaced the smile on Bella's mouth as she muttered, "Just trying to forget a man, Mama. Know what I mean?"
Mama's Geechee guttural voice growled back, "Mmm hmm, Sho' 'nuff, sister. It ain't nuthin' but a shame, Miss Bella. But you go and put your brave face on. Don't let no man get you down, sugah," stepping back and placing her soft knowledgeable hands on Bella's shoulders, she shook her head and continued, "L'il Momma, you are a damn fine woman!"
Pouty, I was growing increasingly pissed off.
Very fucking pissed off when Mama took her leave and Bella went back to her dance…with goldarned gumbo boy! Tossing her hair back so that it whipped the onlookers, Bella grooved and grinded with not one single misplaced foot or swirl or shake of her head!
Ah fuck. The woman knew how to rip a rug. Feeling the rhythm as it took hold of her movements, she gave a whole new meaning to the Ducks Unlimited motto Shake Your Tailfeathers!
I watched, famished for the sight of Bella, as her jeans slipped lower over the top slope of her ass with her sinuous movements.
She sensed me. She noted my arrival. She looked at me with all the hate she could muster and I deserved it. Glaring at me, she turned it down, and brought it on. Bella looked all biting at the bit and pissed off and destined to make a fool of me tonight!
My lust, as ever, and my irascibility knew no bounds.
In the background--while she milled those lithe hips and that sweetheart ass against Jake, and I desired nothing more than to rip their two bodies apart--pool balls banked and banged on the emerald green felt and veered off of one another. I needed Bella to career away from the bayou beastie's body. Right. Fucking. Now!
Skulking across the pastiche, pasted with sticky slop dance floor, I avoided the gruesome duo and sat in a back booth to get a better perspective. To flagellate myself just a wee bit more. Observing and willing my hands to not strangle the young furbag that had his own fucking mammoth hands all over Bella.
The sensuous way Bella dipped low and swiveled back up, brushing that curvaceous ass all along the mongrel's lower body until his half-mast eyes rolled around in his head like the question marks on a dimestore Magic 8 Ball, she was the epitome of all that was erogenous.
Full-force and gratuitously groping against Jacob, dancing furiously and all the while turning up the heat and furor in me, Bella unleashed her fury. I was enflamed as she thrust against her colossal toy-boy. I'd sure as hell show her a real man! Or a vampire at least!
Jaded.
Oh hell. I was so very lost.
Misplaced in a mental mélange of feeling. Good fucking God! How could I feel? I didn't even possess that seat of all human emotion...there was no heart beating within me!
Attempting detachment, I released my straining, tight-wire muscles and lounged back into the skanky surface of the booth, all mucky with spillage from these distasteful, ungraceful, undignified humans.
Glowering, glancing, displeased and moping, reveling in my own stupid anger-lonesomeness-sadness, I nursed a cold one. The frosty glass pulled from the ancient ice-chest was not as cold as my soul. Nor my body.
I was wishing Bella would nurse, or at the very least suck-off, my cold one!
Fiddles played, and I thought of my bursting fiddlehead. Bella's nipples were like cracking caramel coated fiddle faddle, and I'd never even tasted the shit! And fellatio, days of blow jobs was what I needed!
The most fucking abhorrent thing of all was that I didn't even want anyone else! I knew that not even doing a Heathcliff with a nameless bitch was going to right this fucked up situation. I'd never fucking ever given a second thought to cocking off before and then going all Rhett when the whiney manky morning breath whores had started in with their inevitable, "When are you gonna' call me, Eddie?" Always, always, I'd been able to fuck and then sneer and think Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn…about you Now get the fuck out of my trailer.
Now I was pondering way too fucking much and hurting for it all.
Right now, in Richard's, case in point. Women approached, waited, whiled and worried and wept away while I sat stiff and unmoving, entranced and infuriated. Messica Stanley and her sidekick Boring Lauren simpered up, chompin' Bubblicious like two cows chawin' cud and flapping their pink gums at me.
I simply waved them away.
Bitches were polluting my vision.
I pursed my full lips, jutted them just like a toddler in a time-out.
Watching, waiting, repulsed by it all. Loathing myself for what I wanted. Disgusted at Bella for what she made me want. Above it all, craving to rip that scalawag's wagging cock-blocker of a dick-tail from his groin and shove it up into his snout! All I heard from Bella was…nothing. Hushed silence. That would have been welcome were I not so petrified with fear over the thoughts I could almost see racing across her face.
All I smelled through the smoke of umpteen blazing unfiltered Camels, the PBR beer breath and sweat and Jack spiked Cokes, the creek-fresh fried shrimp was her.
Dancing. Freed. Limitless. Heavenly perfumed and pungent and poignant and fucking all mortal!
Maddening me with every sinking of her hips timed so lithely to the music.
This was what I found when I returned from my self-enforced exile from Bella.
Full-on emotional whiplash found me hunkering back into the booth and closing my eyes. I didn't even need to, could not even, sleep and I was fucking knackered!
Busted up.
When I looked up again, I cranked the lid of the table off its legs with the image before me. Oh hell no! There was a scrot-crotch redneck leering at Bella over his longneck! An alcohol-ridden, yellow-eyed, liver-putrefying geezer checking out her bumper and the motherfucker had better keep his hands off or I was going to make a goddamn deadneck out of him! I'd had just about enough of this shit.
By the looks of it, so had Bella. She flipped the bird to the crusty VD-riddled diehard, shook her hair out and glared at Jacob, silently entreating him to back the fuck off her ride, before she stalked to me.
Christ, here we go.
"What the hell are you doing here, Eddie?" Bella near but spit in my face that was four inches higher than hers, but a helluva lot closer with those fuck-me heels on her feet.
I tried for a charming half-smile as I backed up from her tirade, "Bella, I like to get me some quality face time," and my wink fell flat when she paced to me, grasped my flannel and pushed me out the saloon's doors, muttering, "I think we need to take this outside."
Shaking with vehemence, Bella fractured me with her fierce near-night eyes.
Incremental drops of wet fell upon us. A midnight shower, brought on from the mugginess of the day. Heavy weather blanketed Bella and I as we stood off in the car park.
A fat drop of rain hit the upmost hill of her breast that beat like hammers with her heartbeat. It wept down her cleavage and wet the front of her shirt. Another plonked against her scapula. Spattering out from that hard bone and running in an undiluted line down the ligature, the languor, of her spine.
I bit my upper lip as I watched the trail that the plastering quickening rain took over her body, wanting to sink my teeth into her béchamel flesh.
The nectar of her furiously pursed mouth had me hanging closer, close enough, delirious enough, that I didn't foresee the flat-handed smack she laid across my cheek!
Gusts of breath chopped out of her, raised her tits, tilted her spine, shook her legs and she held herself up on the dipped saddle of someone's sucky Kawasaki shored up on the pavement behind her.
While I was adjusting to the glorious enraged sight of her, becoming aware of the humid delta between her thighs that was hot with ire and need, Bella slapped me again, a mere tickling strike, on the opposite side of my face.
Full up on fight and not a little bit trashed, Bella brought that fucking suck-me glorious mouth within centimeters of mine before she gnashed out, "Listen here, Eddie. Unless you came to apologize to me, or fuck me, I don't want to hear it! So you can save your breath, boy-" – shit, was she taking lessons from Papa Swan or what? - , "If you even need to breathe, that is."
I should have focused on her words, but her iPod was shoved in her back pocket and those pink earbuds were dangling over her nipples and the miniature little fucker was turned on and I could hear the liquid strains of Where Have All the Cowboys Gone.
I shouldn't be thinking she was cute when she was about ready to kill me, but I couldn't help it! Bella had just hit me twice, obviously hated me, needed me just as I could not do without her, and I felt giddy. As the chorus traipsed around again, I lifted the bud from her breast, brushing the hard and hot tip under her rain-soaked shirt. Unable to resist, I placed the little speaker in her ear, fingered her lobe and took one gorgeous tit in my hand, warming the nipple with my palm so that it was engorged with sex instead of wet cold.
Where have all the cowboys gone…
I whispered in her free ear, plucking her nipple into a hill that I wanted inside of my mouth, "Right here, darling.'"
For one moment, Bella was emollient, soothing and caressed and careless. Reason found her quickly and she smarted my chest with her fists, brushes of pleasurable feathers only.
She would never be able to hit me hard enough.
But I was already stinging. Trite when I should have been contrite.
Seeking to hurt me physically, she had to know that I was already, fucking always, pained by this thing between us!
And it just didn't matter, because I was an asshole.
Bella hissed as she threw her clenched hand into my stomach, her lunge little more than a nurturing touch on my belly, "You FUCK! I thought I'd never see you again!"
I stepped back. She pursued. I was a cad, a heel, a dickhead.
She spat at me, "I had to hear from Charlie that you were having a good old time in the Glades?"
Silent, I was as gormless as that clod Jacob she'd left inside. A flurry of malevolence, Bella spellbound me with her moxie.
Scoffing, stomping the heel of her shoe into the top of my shitters, Bella bit out, "You bastard." Spinning around, her shoulders hunched and her hands rose to her face and I swear to fuck that if I had made her cry I would take myself straight to the Volturi in offering!
"Bella. Bella! Please don't," my hand limped and wasted away, inches from her broken back.
A sob rolled up through her spine before she quelled it, so much more singular, insulated, stronger than anyone I had ever met, her tear-swollen voice fed the air, "I just needed to see you."
And so I needed to see you, Bella.
"I can't…I don't know, Bella!" I called her back around to me, but had not escaped the landslide of her indignation.
"Eat me, Eddie," Bella sneered with her straight little nose pulled up and her blackening eyes sharpening on the cock-hard shape in my jeans. Her words were not an invitation, but an insult.
The savage senses that slumbered within me ate through human impulses, and when I checked Bella's expression again, my look must have been devilish, "I reckon I might could do just that, Bella."
"Fuck you!" She screamed at me in such a high pitch that I feared for the skuzzy windows of Richard's that threatened to shatter. "I don't even know how you found me here, you and your fucking ESPionage. I don't care how beautiful you are with your delicious smirks," Bella's eyes narrowed to nothing as she raked over my stunned form. "You and your tasty mouth," she looked like she wanted to punch it much more than kiss it, "Your perfect specimen of a body, your headfull of messy copper penny hair." I was hoping that her inspection would warm her to what she was describing, me in the beautiful skin that felt like all I had to offer, but she continued her assault as she shoved, futilely, against my shoulder. I stumbled back nonetheless with her next attack, "Newton's probably more of a man than you are!"
Shaken, gawping! I had known this confrontation was going to be an abominable homecoming, but to compare me to Eye of Newt and have him come out on top was fucking beyond the pale!
A tough gurgle of laughter curled Bella's lips that had never looked more wrong, "Shut your mouth, honey. That's a good way to catch flies."
The shards of my voice were nothing like velvet, nothing captivating, only pure aversion and leaking spleen, "Bella, I-"
Not done yet, no, not by a long shot, Bella advanced with her straight finger pointing into my chest and I kept stepping back so as not to break that digit with my obdurate torso, "How old are you anyway, Eddie?"
What the fuck? "What?" Confusion and despair scrunched my forehead, my mouth puckered around the question.
"Huh, you hard of hearing now as well as hard-headed and black hearted? I said: How. Old. Are. You!"
"Eighteen, Bella. Eighteen," or thereabouts, I muttered under my breath. And old enough to know better, older than you, old enough to be your great great fucking great grandpappy – fuck, that's a disgusting thought! Old enough to put you over my knee – much better, I was definitely going to revisit that idea at a later date!
Ballsy, bitchy, Bella broke it down for me, pushing me ever closer to the verge of 17 North, the road busy with cars whistling past. "I am not interested in playing games. And I am fucking sick to death" —that makes two of us, Bella-- "of your lies. So, Eddie, when you're ready to man up you could give me a call. I might answer."
My eyes were shining like the orange flames of a gas lantern.
Grow up? She wanted me to grow up? I'd seen more of life than I'd ever wanted to. Had matured into a fully formed vampire in the space of three awful arduous days. I'd lost my mother, my father, and had been murdered only to rise again as a monster to spend nearly a century alone and miserable. And this right here? This life in South Carolina had been my boyhood, until I met her. I didn't even know if I wanted to man up.
I was so blindsided by her insight that when her next heave came, I was off-kilter. Falling back from my ill-placed feet, my arms windmilled out behind me as I dipped into the whining mash of traffic, feeling the quick tornado of speed and a sideview mirror that sheared off against my head.
Instinct overtook ruse and in less space than it took to even think, I clutched Bella and flew us in a flash of light to the dank side of Richard's! Pushing her shoulders back against the wall to hold her still as some other new fight pervaded her features, I stilled motion. And closed my eyes that fired bright ashes.
Gasping, her sweet whiskey breath dampening my chin, weakly struggling, completely colorless and wild, Bella keened out, "That, THAT! is what I'm talking about! Dammit!" Her head beat back before I cushioned the blows with my hand, cupping her skull, fingers filled with her moistened seaweed tresses.
"Bella," the chilling fan of my breath licked her sweaty forehead and frosted over her widow's peak, "I'm sor-"
"Save it, Eddie! You don't owe me an apology this time," She laughed a thing that was tinged with the tiniest bit of hysteria as she shook her head and made me release her with eyes that begged distance. "In fact, you've made it quite clear that you don't owe me anything."
Stumbling away, Bella glanced down at her shoes and lifted her left foot. The heel she'd stabbed into my boot earlier was dangling. With a thorough crack, she tore it off, "Just fucking perfect." She flicked the sharp piece into the air and sniggered when it landed back out in the middle of the road, trampled just like Fart Boy beneath tire after tire.
The tavern door burst open, slopping out fresh scents of stale beer, fish-fry, perspiration.
Mama voluptuously rolled out.
She took in shrewd eyefuls and clucked her tongue, shook her majestic head, "Mmm mmm mmm. Hey there, l'il momma, you need a lift home?"
I hoped Bella would say no. I expected her to keep her eyes downcast.
Instead she looked right through me and acquiesced, "Yes, Mama, yes I believe I do."
"'S'what I thought," Mama said as she speared me and I could hear her thoughts: No 'count boy. Does my l'il momma know what y'are yet?
Ambling to Bella, pulling her into the corpulent bowl of her hips, Mama led Bella towards her pick-up.
She gunned it out of the parking lot and the truck backfired as if shitting on me one more time. The last thing I saw was her license plate that read SFNYOMF.
I felt stupid for wanting to wave her off. I lumbered to the Bronco, put her in gear, and made for the double wide. About halfway to Cainwhore, I heard it. QUACK! Ew, did somebody step on a duck?
No, Fart Boy, no. But Bella just stepped across my grave, and tossed another clod of dirt onto my already creaking coffin.
Em had stocked up, of fuckin' course. I was going to break his fool neck.
~~So, did ya' miss Eddie?~~
More Dead Confederates will be coming faster, hotter, and funnier.
Who knows what Mama's license plate reads, huh?
Review Please! Any little part you want, but if you need a starting point…How 'bout that Bella? Got a church sign, bumper sticker, t-shirt, billboard that screams Dead Confeds? Let me know.
Dead Confederates is up for some awards at The Faithful Shipper (Comeuppance is up for one as well)! 2nd Round Voting is in progress and ends September 30th:
Thefaithfulshipperawards(DOT)webs(DOT)com(SLASH)round2voting(DOT)htm
Right now I am writing two other things:
Incarcerated is my very angsty, sensual E/J slash. It is dark and delicious and full of their histories in such a way as has never been written before. If you read slash, this one will surprise and excite you. It's AU and again set in the South, but not all like our DC's. A short story, I am 1-2 chapters away from completing it. But never say never as there may be a sequel.
Portentous Prompted Tales is comprised of my entries for the Twilight Twenty-Five competition, hosted by the very fucking awesome queenofgrey. These stories are all oneshots or drabbles based on 25 prompts and I have to finish them by Dec. 1st. Ha fucking ha ha! So alert me to catch those too. I'll be doing mine all AU and male POV (because I need more of a challenge….NOT). And will be written in many different genres: dark, sweet, crack, poignant, erotic, humor. My first, Raindrops, is posted and is about Peter's backstory and his meeting Charlotte. My next three are done and just need posting, so stay tuned.
~~You can hang with me and the boys (and their biggest fans) in the Double Wide on the AU Twilighted Forums, if'n you want. Ta, Rie~~
