A/N: Odd numbered chapters always seem that bit more difficult to write than even numbered chapters, and I can't for the life of me think why. That, and the fourteenth chapter of anything is always ludicously hard. Or, at least, that's how I find it. Hopefully, this isn't too awful.
Disclaimer: Je m'appelle Amy, pas Stephanie.
"Let's take the Aston Martin" Emmett suggested, seeing in my face that I was irritated and hurting.
"Yeah, sure" I replied morosely, but I couldn't help but get a tiny little bit excited as Emmett opened the Vanquish's door for me. "What is his problem with me?" I raged, and I would have lashed out again, except for the fact that I was sitting in a car even more precious than the Porsche.
"There's a couple of things" Emmett answered, flipping the car out of its space, and pressing the key to open the garage door. "Firstly, you're more beautiful than Bella, and that irritates him" I was about to intercede, to point out that I could accept anything but that, but he carried on, "Second, your gift is more impressive than his, and you're still human, that irritates him. Third, we don't have to go through everything that he and Bella did, and that irritates him too. Oh, and it's sort of my fault as well; I was pretty antagonising towards Bella when I first knew her, so he's just putting you through the same thing, in the name of Justice." To me, that wasn't Justice, it was plain petty.
"I'd ask you to crash it" I said, running my hands along the dashboard, "But, well, he's just not worth it."
We were cruising down a newly laid path; evidently the Cullens realised the inadequacies of living in the middle of the Yorkshire moors, and Emmett smiled, "I'll speak to him for you" he offered, "He doesn't mean to make you upset, and he had better not have meant to hurt you, I'll just explain to him. He'll stop."
Of course, I could always make him stop; it'd only take me a few words. But then, I'd promised myself, hadn't I? It sucked that I liked to keep my promises.
"Thank you" I replied sincerely, because it really did mean a lot to me. Vampirism was a difficult enough concept to get my head around, without Edward Cullen complicating matters. "Emmett?" I asked, after we'd spent a few minutes driving along, him admiring the view, and me the car. He turned his head to face me, smiling. "If I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?"
"Anything for you." The utter sweetness of those three words practically made me forget what it was that I wanted to ask. And maybe he'd meant for that to happen, because I got the feeling that he knew what I was going to ask.
"What will be perfect?" I had no doubt whatever it was would be perfect; Alice's judgement was impeccable.
Emmett looked uncomfortable, which, being his size, and in this car, wasn't unlikely.
"Katie, do you trust me?" I squeezed my eyes tightly shut on hearing that name, even seven years after my dad had died, it was still like a bullet to my heart.
"Yes" I swallowed, breathing through the pain. "I trust you." I took that to mean that he wouldn't be answering my question any time in the near future.
"You'll find out soon enough" he re-assured me, stroking my hair, dark like his.
"I better" I grumbled, letting my body relax into the seat for the first time. "I've known you about two days, yet have my body is already incapacitated. At this rate, Carlisle is going to have no choice but to turn me into a vampire to save my life." It had been a joke, at least, that's how I'd meant for it to be, but, for some reason, Emmett didn't find it as funny as I had.
"You will always have a choice" he said, far too sombrely for my liking, "Even if you're seconds away from death, I'm not forcing you into anything. I love you, and that can't change, and you, you beautiful girl, you love me back, for whatever reason. I'm not about to ask you why, I'm just acknowledging how lucky I am-"
"Emmett" I interrupted softly, "You're rambling." He didn't take any notice of me.
"I could always ask Edward why, I suppose, but I don't think that I really want to know. The best part of love, it's the fact that it's partially inexplicable, at least, that's the way I feel-"
"Emmett!" I all but shouted, "Do you even have a point anymore?"
He looked at me as if I'd slapped him.
"Of course I still have a point, silly Katie." The sting was less this time, maybe if Emmett kept at it, I'd eventually overcome my phobia of the name. "My point is that I don't want you to feel like you're being backed into a corner. And don't think that I love you because you're going to be one of us, and I'm lonely, and if we pair up the numbers will be neater. This is the real thing, no doubt in my mind."
"No doubt in my heart" I offered, and, as I looked at him, I felt something physically happening to my heart; a barrier being put up around it that only Emmett would ever be able to overcome. Then, giggling simultaneously, the moment was gone. "What's wrong with us?" I breathed, between laughter. "It's like something out of an Austen novel!"
The sight of Emmett laughing uncontrollably at the wheel of an Aston Martin Vanquish was, finally, too much for me to handle.
"Hey, Kate" Emmett said, taking his foot of the accelerator, and pulling to a stop, "What's the matter? You're crying." It was a fairly obvious statement to make, what with the tears falling down my face, and my body racking with sobs.
"It's nothing" I replied, honestly, "I, it's just-" I didn't get any further, just dissolved into more tears. Had it been anyone else, I'd have been ashamed, but Emmett waited patiently for my tears to dry up, looking me over steadily until I announced, "I'm fine, really. Just, you know, hormones."
Rather than putting his foot back on the accelerator, which is what I'd wanted him to do, he turned the ignition off. "I think it would have been easier if I'd never met you, Katherine Taylor."
Hearing that statement was like my heart being slowly broken into pieces, the very fact that I maintained consciousness to hear his justification was little short of a miracle.
"Edward was right, for all that time," Here, Emmett sighed, a cross between resigned and cynical, "When I said to him 'Tanya'd be much less trouble' and he wouldn't listen to me, I put it down to him being hard-headed, as usual, but I see what he meant now."
Bella had been through this? She'd put her heart in the hands of someone much more dangerous and much more powerful than herself, yet she hadn't felt the need to tell me how much it hurt? I seriously wondered why not.
"I can see how much this is hurting you, and all I can say is that I'm sorry. I can't be Edward, I can't try and do the noble thing by you, because not only does that lead to stupid complications, but I won't leave you, because it would hurt me much more, and I don't deal with pain well. "
Bella's accusation of Emmett being selfish was entirely accurate, I could see that now, yet, in his words, I couldn't see what this spelt for whatever we had together.
"I don't know about Bella" I replied coolly, as if my heart weren't made up of millions of tiny shards of cold, hard glass, each digging into my ribs and lungs, making every breath agony, torturing me, "But I'm a straight talking person. What I want to know is whether you feel that you can love me the way that I love you." Emmett opened his mouth, but I held up my hand to signal that I wasn't done. "I don't make a habit of bursting into tears, I think maybe I'm due some more co-codamol. And I think that my ankle might be sprained, or at least one of the tendons strained, from my encounter with Edward."
Instantaneously the mood was entirely different; the rate at which the atmosphere changed from 'heartbreaking' to 'rational' was slightly shocking, as if the conversation about emotions, and their implications had never happened. Emmett started up the car and noted, "We haven't even been gone half an hour yet, they'll be suspicious if we go back so early. Where do you want to go?"
As I told Emmett, it didn't bother me where we went, as long as he was there. That was my only stipulation. We ended up just driving for miles through the ferocious wilderness of the moors, both contemplating recent events, at the same time as putting up some rather spectacular fronts.
"Do you need air?" he asked, a little while later, despite the fact that I already had my window rolled down.
"I always needs air. I still breathe" I replied, and there was truly no attempt to be either sarcastic or funny. Emmett rolled his eyes at me regardless, as I watched the speedometer reach the dizzying heights of one hundred and sixty miles per hour. Dizzying, but oddly comforting, as if driving faster was in some way wiping away all the external issues, things not even related to vampires, leaving just me, Emmett and the car in perfect harmony.
A while later, when we still hadn't seen another soul on the roads, I felt like I needed the air that Emmett had previously offered. We got out of the car in the middle of nowhere, which was most places near where I lived, and I asked Emmett to let me try walking, even with two messed up feet. After twenty minutes, and very little progress made, we decided to stop.
"I take it Her Majesty won't want to risk getting her sweater wet again?" Emmett joked, as I hovered, desperate to take the weight off my rather aching feet, but, yes, not wanting to ruin a perfectly nice item of clothing. Emmett retrieved a fairly hefty looking boulder from around fifty yards away, and positioned it on the ground. I looked at it nervously, not quite sure what I was meant to do with it.
"You sit" Emmett hinted for me, gesturing at it.
"It doesn't look comfortable" I said, taking note of the nastily sharp edges. In response to this, Emmett flattened his palm into the surface of the rock. It yielded, as though it were play dough in a toddler's hands, allowing him to craft a little throne for me, which fit me perfectly. He smiled all the while he was doing it, and seeing that smile, and knowing that it meant that he was content inspired a particular feeling in me; I wasn't sure whether it had a name, but I certainly hadn't experienced it before. In simple terms, it was nice. 'Nice' is a generic word, but it fit this feeling rather the way that my new seat fit me; like a glove.
Emmett threw himself, irritatingly tidily, on the ground at my abused feet once I was settled, looking up at the murky sky.
"It's not Hollywood, and it's not New York, but somehow I've survived the past seventeen years in this place. I like it" I commented, in reference to where we were, where the temperature rarely exceeded 14 degrees Celsius, and the appearance of the sun was a magical and mystical occurrence.
"You're here. It's perfect" Emmett returned, inhaling deeply. "It smells so wonderful; a mixture of you, and heather, and fresh wool. I'll never forget it." I hoped that Emmett would never have the chance to forget those smells, that I'd always be right there beside him to refresh his memory. It didn't seem the prudent time to be making such emotional declarations about the future, I, at least, could still feel the salty tear tracks that my earlier tears had created, and I was in no rush to add to them.
"Can we just stay here forever?" I asked, dreamily, when my breathing had slowed to practically non-existent, and my thoughts were becoming worryingly incoherent,
"I could stay here forever, if I wanted" Emmett murmured back, "But you, I'm afraid, can't. You need food, and water, and warmth, and those things are fairly sparse around here." Silly idea, of course, but why mess with perfection?
"Especially warmth" I griped, holding out my hand so that it skimmed across Emmett's cheekbones. The low noise that emanated from his throat was fairly conclusive; he liked it when I did that. I watched as he stood up, closely, I thought, but I still couldn't see the connection between his knees bending, and his back straightening, and him holding a steady upright position. It looked like one fluid movement; Emmett on ground, to Emmett stood up in no time at all.
"I don't like it when you do that" I complained, as Emmett gathered me up in his cool arms, "It makes me feel inadequate."
Emmett kissing me on the top of my head should have presented some type of challenge, after all, there were eleven whole inches, practically a foot, between his 6'4" and my 5'5", but he managed it with the grace and fluidity that I was moaning about.
He led me in a phantom waltz, I was balanced all the time on his shoes, but his movement was as if it were he alone dancing on a Monday afternoon, on the Yorkshire Moors, as the heavens opened for the fifth time in a day, and soaked us through. So what, I hadn't managed to save my sweater from the rain? And my hair probably did look awful, but I didn't care. It was just me and Emmett, twirling around on those hills, like nothing could ever come between us.