Y'all are patient. Thanks. I'm getting better at typing one handed. Spotzle is raising money for an industrial sized cattle prod to use on my belated butt. Send her monopoly money or something. ;)

Chapter 10

The worst is over now and we can breathe again
I want to hold you high, you steal my pain away
There's so much left to learn, and no one left to fight
I want to hold you high and steal your pain

-Seether

Tears were tracking down my face and dripping off my chin before I even hit the tree line. I barreled blindly into the woods, not knowing or caring if Quil was following me… much.

The signals he sent were so mixed, I couldn't figure anything out. He seemed to care for me, doing things as if I was his child or his responsibility. He said that he lived for me - LIVED for me! - and yet, when I got close to him… There was that moment when I could have sworn that he was about to kiss me, but I was only disappointed.

I was obviously very wrong about that.

My mind chased itself in circles as I walked towards the house. Quil was a werewolf. Werewolves were real. REAL! He imprinted on me when I was a baby. He lived for me. He was bound to me. He got sick when I left. He didn't know that I would get sick, too. So there must be something freaky with me. But I'm not a werewolf, Quil's the werewolf. Werewolves are real…

I came to a stop outside the house, my foot on the first step leading up to the deck. Quil got sick when I went away. He said that he was bound to me. My stomach fell to my feet as I remembered. He never said anything about feelings one way or the other to me. He was only bound to me – to live for me sounded romantic if you thought about all those movies where the hero would use that kind of line… but maybe it wasn't like that in this case. Maybe being bound to me was more… binding. Maybe it was more restrictive than romantic. Maybe he hated it. It wouldn't be a stretch to hate something that put you into an extreme depression that lasted nearly two decades. He probably didn't want to do all those nice things for me – he was compelled to do them instead. He would tolerate me because he had to for both of us to get well, but beyond that…

I sank down to sit on the step, staring off into the woods. There was no sign of Quil. Even though I was still warmed through from being with him all day, I felt cold and wretched deep down on the inside, like the very center of me had turned into the very blackest ice. I wrapped my arms around my knees, waiting, but he never came.

Finally, I had to give up and force myself to continue on up the steps and into the house. The ease of movement in my knees as I mounted the stairs made we want to start crying all over again, but I held myself together and opened the door.

Emily poked her head around a doorframe as I came inside. The expectant look on her face fell a bit as she took me in. I didn't know what to tell her.

She stared at me silently for a moment, and then asked me gently, "Claire, are you okay?"

I tried to say something, but nothing would come out, so I shrugged my shoulders and gave her a watery smile.

"Oh, honey." She wrapped her arms around me and guided me to sit at the kitchen table. I rested my head on my folded arms and listened to her bustling around the room behind me. A few minutes later she set a cup of tea on the table in front of me.

"What did he tell you?"

I reached out and wrapped my hands around the cup of warm liquid, tracing my thumb over the handle. "He told me that he's a werewolf, and about imprinting." I looked up into her limpid brown eyes. "When did Sam tell you?"

"About the imprinting?" she asked.

"He imprinted on you?"

She raised her hand to the scar on her cheek and nodded. "Yes," she said, quietly. She stared at my cup for a few moments, lost in thought, and then came to with a little jerk.

"It was a bad situation, for us."

"How bad?"

She sighed and brought her hand back to the table. "Sam was practically engaged to someone else when we met for the first time. That's how it works, you know, the imprinting. It's the first time they see you after they phase.

"So, Sam saw me, and all of a sudden he didn't care much about Leah anymore. Leah was his girlfriend, but it's more complicated than that since she's my cousin, too."

My eyes grew wide, my own problems momentarily forgotten with her story.

"Yeah," Emily said, agreeing with my expression. "It was pretty bad. Of course I didn't give him the time of day. I mean, how could he be in love with my cousin and then suddenly drop her," she placed her hand on her chest, "for me? What kind of guy would do that? I didn't even give him a chance to explain. I just avoided him." She grimaced. "And then it all hit the fan."

"What?" I asked, breathlessly.

"He was trying, again, to explain everything. And I was doing my best, again, to ignore him. But he wouldn't give up and it got heated. I was yelling at him about what a jerk he was, and he was pleading with me to understand… and then he phased." She touched her scar again.

My mouth was hanging open. I shut it with a snap and swallowed. "Did Sam… Did he… He didn't do that to you?"

"It's part of why your mom wanted to get you away so quickly when we told her about Quil," she answered. "You see, when werewolves are young they have a hard time keeping themselves under control. Any little thing can set them off. They get mad, and poof! They phase. They get scared, frustrated, anything… the fur explodes out and they can't figure out where their limbs are going when it happens. Sam phased, and I was too close. That's all there was to it. If I'd been two feet further away, I would have gotten a big scare and a huge shock – since I didn't know he was a werewolf at that time – but I wouldn't have been injured.

"We told everyone that I'd been attacked by a bear, but then when we had to tell your mom about Quil she figured it out." She looked ruefully at me. "Your mama is a very hard person to fool.

"We tried to explain that accidents like that were really rare. That it wouldn't happen to you. That Quil would be so careful, and so gentle, and he would be your greatest protector. But she didn't hear a word of it. She only saw my face and saw it all as a threat." She shook her head. "Honestly, I don't know if she would have even believed in the werewolves if not for this scar." She touched her cheek again, briefly. "Funny, how the thing that made her believe, was also the thing that drove her away."

"But how did you end up married to Sam?" I was having a hard time wrapping my head around that idea. The guy halfway took her face off, but then she married him? And had a kid with him? And what about her cousin?

Emily sighed. "Sam was inconsolable after that. I was a mess, because I'd just seen this guy burst into fur right before he slashed my face." She shook her head again. "Things like that just weren't supposed to happen in the real world, you know?

"So while I was healing, all the elders of the tribe came to see me, one at a time." She put her hand on my hand. "You know, your mom and I are Makah instead of Quileute, so I didn't even know them. They told me legends and explained things, and it was all so crazy I just had to believe it. I mean, I couldn't doubt it because I'd seen it happen with my own eyes, and there I was healing from it, too.

"And then they brought Sam in." She gazed at the wall, remembering. "He didn't want to come, but he couldn't stay away. He was so broken, all he could do was cry. And even though it didn't seem like it could really be… real… knowing his story, what he had been going though, and then seeing him like that…" She shrugged. "It put it into a whole different perspective. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself."

She looked back at me again. "It all just kind of happened after that. I kept trying to help him feel better about something that he couldn't help, and he didn't mean to do. He kept trying to make it up to me. Somewhere in there, we fell in love." She smiled. "It's like he sees my scars, but he doesn't really see them anymore. He'll kiss them, almost like he's apologizing for it, even now after it's been so long. But all the every day stuff? He just tells me I'm beautiful. And the funny thing is that when he says it, I believe him."

"So you just forgave him, and that was it?"

"Yes and no," she laughed. "These guys, they're kind of thick sometimes. We had a lot of miscommunication and a lot of misunderstanding. He couldn't believe that I'd love someone who hurt me so badly. I couldn't get him to get over himself. And we both still felt bad about Leah, his cousin. So it sounds easy when I talk about it, but it took us a while to get everything figured out."

"What happened to Leah?"

"Oh she's part of the pack, now – the only female werewolf. But she imprinted about 5 years ago and they moved north. British Columbia, last I heard." She took a deep breath and sighed. "But all that was about me. What happened out there with you two?"

I told Emily about what had happened, but I left out my fears and the realization that maybe being bound wasn't all that great. I didn't think she'd understand, since her imprinting thing had worked out so well. She probably would have tried to talk me around to her way of thinking.

"Thick as a brick, just like Sam," she muttered, when I got to the part about Quil saying that it was desperation. She got up from the table and started flinging food into the skillet, sputtering the entire time.

"It's that thick wolf skull, that's what it is," she said, turning and brandishing the spatula at me with one hand on her hip. "Nothing can penetrate it. Makes you want to smack them if it wouldn't hurt your hand." She scrunched up a rag and threw it in the sink.

I couldn't think of how to respond, so I just sat there watching her until she slapped plate of eggs on the table in front of me.

She wrapped her arms around my shoulders again and squeezed me, resting her cheek on top of my head. "Hang in there, Claire. It takes them a while, but they figure it out eventually," she said. Then she walked off, leaving me to my food.

She obviously thought that Quil and I would end up together, together. I choked back a sob at that and stared up at the ceiling, blinking my eyes hard and fast to hold back the tears. I would have loved that. It could have been wonderful. But it seemed that we were too broken for anything like that to work. The time that we had been separated had caused too many changes, and too many hurts.

I shoved the plate away and rested my head on my arms once again. I couldn't eat a bite.

:-:o:-:

I woke up the next morning in my bed. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I tried to orient myself. I was still in my clothes, but had been tucked into bed. Someone – Quil? – had put me to bed after I'd fallen asleep at the table.

I wondered if Emily had spoken to him. I wondered if he even cared. If I tried to talk to him he would probably see it as more desperation.

The house was silent. I crept out into the hall and looked around. The house was empty, as far as I could tell. Quil's door was firmly closed, so there was no way to know if he was home without knocking. And I wasn't going to knock.

What a difference 24 hours made. Yesterday I'd woken up in Quil's arms, warm and safe and protected. This morning, I was all alone. I remembered him whispering that he would never leave, and yet here I was, alone. He'd probably meant that he couldn't ever leave. He probably resented it even more since I'd pushed the boundaries.

I stood silently in the hallway as I remembered the bone crushing pain that had led to that whole situation in the first place. Fear grabbed my heart. When would the pain be back? How would I even begin to cope if it was as bad as it was the other night?

I walked numbly down the hall to the kitchen. I had been unable to eat the night before, and still wasn't hungry, but I knew my body needed some sort of fuel. I grabbed a can of Ensure that Emily had gotten for the days when my appetite wasn't so good.

I took the can back to my room. I felt like I was hiding, but I didn't know what else to do with myself. I'd unconsciously been orienting myself around Quil since I'd come to La Push. He'd quietly become the center of my gravity, and I felt cast adrift with nowhere to land.

I felt pathetic and woebegone. I'd always been my own center. I'd had my family around me, but emotionally I'd always depended on myself, seen my own self through the difficulties and troubles. How had this happened to me? Had I lost myself in this imprinting? Or had I been emotionally stunted before, unable to share my real self with anyone around me?

No man is an island. No girl is either. But I had been, as much as it was possible for a person to be. I'd been close with my sisters, but even they had never known the whole me, the me I'd hidden from them to try to keep from hurting them.

The me I'd shared, unthinkingly bit by bit, with Quil.

I curled up on my bed and waited for the pain to come back.

It never did.

:-:o:-:

The next few weeks went by like life in a vacuum. I didn't know what to do with myself or how to be. I no longer hurt, my labs were actually improving, but I felt insubstantial. I ghosted through a house that always seemed empty. I didn't know how I was staying well when I never even spoke to Quil. We slept in rooms only a few feet away from each other, but it was like that barrier that had separated Quil from the rest of the world had now sprung up between us.

It was more lonely to be around him than it ever was before he'd become a part of my life, and I ached for that simple togetherness we'd shared before that picnic by the cliff. Sometimes I felt like he was looking at me, but I would glance up only to find his eyes elsewhere. Several times I had words on the end of my tongue, but they always died there before I got them out.

I would almost want the pain back, if only to have things be the way they'd been before. Scratch that, I would welcome it back with open arms, as long as it brought Quil back with it.

Emily did her best to fill my hours, and Annie was a constant at my side when she wasn't at school, but it wasn't the same. I did my best to please them, but I knew I was falling short.

Some days went by in minutes. Some minutes took hours.

I dwelled on what Emily had told me about her and Sam. Sometimes I would try to imagine that Quil cherished me like he did her. The fantasies were fun while I was in them, but coming back to Earth always left me bereft, and I would resolve to not put myself through that again.

It wasn't just Emily and Sam, either. I learned that other members of the pack had imprinted, and each time they ended up married. Quil and I were the odd ones – the anomalies in the already out-of-ordinary world I found myself in. It hurt even more to know that it was what should have been. I can't say it's what would have happened in a more normal life, because our true difference in age would have made that impossible. But, in a more normal course of our lives, if we'd never been separated… yeah. Knowing that made it hurt even more.

If he would have really looked at me, I would have tried to talk to him, to break through that barrier. He didn't, and I didn't have the courage to try without some kind of positive sign.

It was like I was waiting for something… the other shoe to drop, a big fight with Quil, a car crash… something that would shake me out of this suspended reality and back into my real life – the life that no longer had an approaching expiration date. Because if this is how I was going to spend the rest of my days, did I even want to have them?

Wouldn't it be better to fall in love and go out in a blaze of glory instead of lingering and withering on for a normal lifespan?

Would I ever get over it? Would Quil even care if I found someone else? It didn't seem to matter since all men I knew were part of the pack, and as Quil's imprintee I was off limits.

Did I even want to move on? I chuckled dryly. I would be lying to myself if I even tried. How was I supposed to move on when it felt like everyone around me, myself included, was waiting for us to just get on with things?

If only he would get on with things.

I cried myself to sleep a lot. I slept a lot – more than I had in years. In my dreams, we were together. He held my hand and talked to me, called me beautiful, touched my hair. In my dreams he didn't let desperation hold him back. It's no wonder I escaped there so often.

Maybe I knew, in the back of my mind, and that's why I dreamed him with me so often. My body knew, even when my heart and my mind were despairing. It was shocking, but not unexpected, that morning I woke up and found him there.

He was asleep, leaning on his arm as he sat on the floor next to my bed. His large hand was wrapped around my wrist and most of my hand. The heat radiated up my arm and I closed my eyes to savor it and took a deep breath in.

The sound must have awakened him, because his hand tightened slightly. I looked into his deep brown eyes, his expression that of a boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

Neither of us said a word for a few moments, but he didn't let go, and his name tumbled from my lips.

"Quil?"