LHM

I lay in bed, Jacy mumbling through her dreams beside me, the room dark. Crickets, the neighbor's tv, my rumbling, thumping heartbeat.

"Jacob," I whispered.

I talked to him about everything. Always at night, always alone, usually crying, sometimes raging mad. Never before had it been because I'd fallen for someone else. I never had a new love to push up against my old one, and it was super confusing to explain Edward to the first boy who had burned a hole through my heart. Now Edward was burning something through the rest of me, his supernova gift on my bedside table, diamonds winking at me through the shadows.

I told him about Jacy, mostly.

She loved him. Edward. Truly. There had never been anyone like him in her world—a man who was supposed to teach her how to do all kinds of useful things like use screwdrivers and change tires and fix your leaky faucet. Or Ollie a skateboard. Or hurl herself down a hill at top speeds and then accept a compliment with grace and humble tact.

Thank god she had Charlie, but also, thank god she had Edward, too.

I fully blamed her for how fast I'd fallen. She made it so easy to love him, her adoration coating my simple crush in sugar, making him sparkle sweeter and stronger. If my death came by gluttony, let it be him. I had found his wallet underneath couch yesterday, and he had a scrap of notebook paper tucked in with a few bills—Jacy's handwriting, my phone number.

She'd written "Mom" instead of my name.

Underneath it, he had written "Jack's fucking hot mom."

Moving seemed like a big step, but in the dark, squinting at it through my eyelashes, it was actually a small movement in Edward's grand scheme. Moving was just the first step in a long slow dance that had started at the outskirts of the skatepark and landed us here.

Jacy would die when she saw Mike's room and would gladly give up my spider basement, even if it meant switching schools. She would have her own bathroom, a huge closet, and the perfect window to escape out of at night. Not to mention that big gorgeous hill in his subdivision that she loved to ride.

They had gotten me out a few times, and I begrudgingly liked it, those moments in the dim evening streetlights, sailing down the pavement with the two of them. There was something about it, the grind of the wheels and the hovering, weightless feeling beneath your feet. Something about the push and pull of it, the give and take that sometimes had me tumbling into neighbor's yards to avoid the asphalt, but lately had me sailing clean up to the guardstation, upright, with Edward and Jacy jumping in circles around me.

There was something about the way Edward grinned at me all the way down that hill and didn't stop until he had me alone, hours later.

Telling my thighs how pretty they looked, sailing down that hill in a sundress.

It had been one year of him surprising me at every turn of the board, and I was hopeless. A pushover. Fallen. Can't get up and don't want to anyway. His face was perfect. His body was going to be the death of me in all of the best, secret ways. He loved my kid maybe more than she loved him. He mopped my floors, shirtless, just because he knew I liked it. He came to Jacy's school play and talked shit about the lead girl with her afterward, bolstering up her confidence until her "second grey mouse" position might as well have stolen the show. He left my bed smelling like him. He stashed a toothbrush in my bathroom and routinely lost his phone in the depths of my couch. He walked Jacy home from school and won over the neighbor's angry dog with bits of hamburger pushed through the fence, so it wouldn't bark its brains out every time we walked by.

He brought me flowers, left on my kitchen table, delivered to my work, picked from an unsuspecting woman's yard on an evening walk when he was feeling lovestrick and acting it out. He did things to me, at night in my bed, in the mornings—tasting like peaches, afternoon sunlight, and stolen moments—that made me seriously consider the possibility that miracles did exist.

And I loved him.

AN:

Bella loves Edward.

I love Hadley.

That is all.

xo

HBM