Yay, we reached 100! Keep 'em coming, wonderful people!

In answer to a couple confused people-- THERE IS A REASON why Edward and co. have not shown up! Firstly because I don't like them very much (except for Alice) and secondly because of an actual plot point that will be revealed in few chapters.

He didn't see it coming. The pain. He expected her anger, the brittle sound of her voice as she hissed at him about her bruised face; he expected the wash of humor it sent through him. The sight of this girl, this slender, short human girl, threatening him. Warning him off.

What he didn't expect was the flash, hot and cold all at once, of actual physical pain that lanced through his chest when he broke her wrist. Well. Not when he broke it, exactly, but when she screamed. When her body convulsed in his arms, big dark eyes wide and shocked and somehow betrayed, staring at him like she hadn't actually thought… Like she had forgotten what he was, what he did, and…

James glanced at her in the seat beside him, sitting crumpled against the window, snapped wrist up against her chest. She wasn't looking at him. She wasn't making sounds anymore, at least, or spasming; now it was reduced to a slight trembling that was only really noticeable in the hands. The tears had dried salty on her cheeks, her eyes reddish. Like his own, almost. He frowned. This wasn't right.

There had been no pleasure, see. No burst of satisfaction at the snapping sound, no excitement at the muffled scream. There had only been grim awareness, the knowledge that this thing had happened and that he had done it, followed almost immediately by an odd sort of queasiness. Not guilt, surely, not regret, nothing so concise or simple… but it was there all the same, churning in his gut, and when he picked her up and felt her shivering against his chest, the taste of her cold, tearstreaked lips still lingering on his tongue, James found himself wanting to hush her, to calm her. To comfort her?

A low growl rumbling in his chest, he pulled into the parking lot of a CVS in the small Iowa town closest to the inn they'd stayed at.

"Stay here," he told Bella, and went inside. The girl at the desk flirted with him when he bought the wrist splint and bottle of painkillers, or tried to. He ignored her, mind on other things. Such as the troubling memory of the girl—of Bella—clutching at him in her sleep, mumbling to herself, mumbling things that were not what he'd expected. Things like his name. Such as the hot, startlingly passionate way she'd kissed him, the equally startling inner tug her soft moans had awakened in him. And the alarmingly intoxicating scent of her skin, freshly bathed, mingling with his own earthy smell; while her scent wasn't the most fascinating or enticingly perfumed he'd ever encountered, something about the utter normalcy of it made it all the more potent. And the way she'd looked at him after he'd left and come back, the hurt she'd tried and failed to hide; she hadn't liked that he had left. And she had still been there when he'd returned. Which was all vaguely mind-blowing.

Because while his hunt seemed to be going well, the game playing out just as he'd hoped… it was having some unintended side effects. Side effects he'd meant to quell this morning, to quash down before they had a chance to become even more pronounced, first by explaining to her just exactly how far he was from her perfect faux-human boy toy and then by breaking her oh-so-delicate wrist after she'd had the audacity to… to what? To put her hand into the pocket of his jacket while trying it on and then reading the piece of paper she found there? For bringing up thoughts of something he would rather forget? (And wasn't that special, all things considered?) He resisted the urge to snarl, hating the fact that there was a human present. He wasn't good at hiding what he was; had no use for acting. But even now, even now it was happening. He was doubting himself, something he hated even more than playing human.

She's nothing, he reminded himself. A game, a piece of temporary entertainment. A toy. And still, he couldn't help but feel as though something had gone, was still going, terribly wrong. Unwillingly shaken, he returned to the stolen Taurus and, after doping her with several of the highest-strength OTC painkillers the CVS pharmacy sold, splinted her left wrist.

***********

Drugs, I decided, as the several thousand milligrams of extra-strength Tylenol James had given me started to take effect, were great. Really, really great. In fact, as I closed my eyes and let him adjust my brand new tan splint, I found that I was able to focus on something other than the fact that my wrist was broken. For instance, as he finished with the splint, the soft brush of his hand across my face tucking my hair behind my ear. My heart lurched at the gentle touch, despite my every order to remain immune. I opened my eyes and glared at him.

"If I say something stupid and insulting will you break my other arm? Like, 'Please don't touch me like you didn't just snap my wrist'?" Why did I say that? Why was I pushing him? Was it not enough that I'd proved to myself he was a monster, a heartless, soulless asshole who cared less about me than he did about his own personal entertainment? James just looked at me, though, red eyes glinting. "I don't understand," I said then, not realizing I was going to speak until the words were in the air. The bitterness was out of my voice, replaced by a pitiful, pained confusion. "Why are you doing this to me?" Maybe I thought if I just asked the question over and over again, I'd get a different answer.

Again, though, he said nothing. James just shrugged out of his coat and laid it across my lap, almost gruff in this small, inexplicable kindness. Looking down at it as he pulled out of the CVS parking lot and onto the road that led towards the interstate, I felt like crying. Instead, I ran my good fingers over the pockets on the front of his jacket. For the first time, I noticed the small collection of rings looped through one zipper. I touched them, slipping my fingers around the cold metal bands. One of them looked to be a wedding ring.

"What are these from?" I asked quietly, studying the rings. James didn't answer for a long moment, and I glanced up at him. Was this the new pattern? The silent treatment? Then, he cleared his throat and spoke.

"I don't know." I frowned.

"They're not yours?"

"I don't know where they're from," he repeated, a funny emphasis on the words.

"Were they on it when you got it?" I wondered if I should stop asking, but the fact that he was finally answering my questions (no matter how pointless) was too much to pass up. James grimaced.

"It's from… before," he told me shortly. My lips parted in surprise.

"This was yours when you were alive," I clarified, voice very soft. I felt like speaking loudly would break the spell I hadn't even noticed descending. James nodded.

"The rings were on it when I—came back. The buttons, too." I glanced at the other pocket, on my right thigh, and touched the pins there. "I don't… remember what they are," he said, slowly. "Why I put them there." There was a kind of pain in his voice, so subtle I nearly missed it altogether. And finally, I understood.

"Oh." My chest ached, and I knew a different kind of tragedy. It must be horrible, I thought, not to know. Not to remember. I touched the rings again, lingering on the wedding band, and tried to feel an essence, a ghost. There was nothing. Just metal and stone, whatever echoes of the lives they'd once seen locked away too deep to reach. James was looking straight ahead, profile as smooth as a Greek statue's. I wondered if he'd ever run his fingers over these cold, silent rings, or played with the pins arranged on the breast pocket, looking for the same things. I wondered what it felt like to lose your past so completely, to have such a thing as intimate as your memory wiped clean in a spray of blood and death. And he still wore the jacket now, so many decades later, the rings and buttons still in place. I thought of the poem in the pocket. Was it from before, too? Had he just kept copying it as the years passed, maintaining the verse like he maintained the coat itself, just in case the memory came back to claim it? Or was that from immediately after the change, when there must have been nothing but pain and confusion and hate?

For the first time, I wondered who had turned James into what he was. I knew about Edward, about the rest of the Cullen clan; they'd had Carlisle to guide them, to love them, to bring them out of the shadows of death and into the twilight of immortality. How had it happened for James?

We drove in silence, my head spinning. Too many conflicting emotions were bombarding me at once, despite the effects of the Tylenol that should have numbed me into a sort of stupor. Fury at his actions. Fear of him. Self-disgust for my own responses to him. Sorrow for the past he'd lost forever, and the useless reminders of that loss he had carried since his death. Fragile happiness that he'd told me. Betrayal. Uncertainty. Pain.

I rolled down my window with my good hand, and let the wind whip me away.

A/N: James's jacket, in the movie, does actually have rings and pins on it. They're probably supposed to be trophies, from people he's killed, but I used them differently. Call it artistic license.