Chapter Four

A bead of sweat trickled down the back of Renesmee's neck, forcing her to wipe it away and quickly fasten her hair into a knot at the top of her head. As soon as she had she moved her arms away from her pamphlet, all the once open pages had flipped close, and she successfully lost her place.

"Goddamn it," she whispered, careful not to draw too much attention from her classmates.

Summer didn't really start in Washington—even with the minimal global warming that had slowly but surely added with time—until July. Coincidentally, summer classes at the Peninsula College in Port Angeles didn't start until July, either, and there Renesmee and Jacob were, bright and somewhat early on July first. It wasn't the first time they'd gone to college, but things were different now, and Jacob hadn't been here in over a century.

Because Renesmee didn't feel like going away to a university so soon but wanted to escape her strange parents, PenCol was the ideal place. With her parents always doing the restrained, vampire-human, lovey-dovey shit (that she had graciously missed out on the first time) at home all the time, she felt even more alienated than usual, which was fucking huge to her. It wasn't huge enough to get her to move out, though. House-hunting was a bore, but she refused to let anyone else pick out a place. Community college was God's gift.

"You were on page twenty-six, Ness," Jacob told her, scanning his own pamphlet. He found it interesting how he'd decided to wait all this time to take criminal justice. It had been about time, honestly, and he was already enticed. It was incredible—with all this bottomless time, he could do just about anything.

"Thanks, Jake," Renesmee replied.

"Has anyone else in the family taken criminal justice some time or another?" Jacob wondered.

"Uncle Emmett, I think. Maybe my mom, too."

He nodded. "We should ask for pointers or something to get the main gist of it, you know?"

"Uncle Emmett's the way to go, then," she stated. "My mom's way too busy." She rolled her brown eyes.

"Yeah, okay," Jacob replied sarcastically. "What could she possibly be busy with?"

"Oh, you know, the usual. Staring into my dad's gorgeous green eyes as they lay down in an empty field or whatnot. That kinda boring romantic stuff."

Jacob chuckled. "That sounds a little bit too much like them."

She laughed softly. "Right?"

The lightness suddenly faded, and their little conversation was shrunken down to a whisper of how social they could actually be with each other. She couldn't get upset with him, though; she shouldn't have gotten her hopes up over nearly nothing.

He wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead, and she couldn't help but wish she could lick it off. Her ways were very conflicted in that way—sometimes she wanted to get him to open up again and touch him with her words in order for him to speak up after all this time, and other times she wanted to skip all of that and just touch him. She wanted to kiss his face, his chest, his everything. She wanted to kiss the lost words out of him and into her. Then she would understand his strange weather a little bit more. Her confusion was half-fueled with the endless desire to jump his bones with all the might in her body. She'd learned to suppress it with time, though, so it was always on the back burner, sometimes more prominent than other times, including now. She had places to go and things to do; constantly wetting her panties over him would be so distracting.

But understanding him just wasn't in the cards for her; the stars would never be aligned for Renesmee to understand Jacob Black and his silence. Alice had mentioned it one time to her, something about depression, but Renesmee didn't want to believe it. Her Jacob, the Jacob who had everything in the world, depressed? It just didn't add up. He had never expressed suicidal thoughts or anything, but there was the possibility (and she knew it) that he didn't have to be suicidal for something to be wrong.

It wasn't her job to worry, though. Worrying had never been a familiar feeling for Renesmee, but it wasn't her fault. Living with the Cullens, she was never put in an environment where she had to worry about anybody she loved, because everybody was in the family. She had never had many friends, mostly because she couldn't connect with people her age, and she strongly believed that there was nobody on this planet who could connect with her. There was Jacob and the rest of the family, but there were, albeit, different.

Worrying wasn't familiar for Renesmee, but loneliness was. That wasn't her fault, though; she couldn't help her conditions.

Only it actually was her fault. She had the power to change. She had all the power in the world.

So self-doubt and some slight self-loathing were common feelings, too, as well as narcissism, but it had been enough.

It's not always about just me, me, me, she reminded herself. A little bit of self-identifying (Jacob would call it self-demeaning if he knew) kept her feeling like a humble, tiny aspect of the universe when everybody else expected her to be oozing with pride and as vast as the universe itself.

When Renesmee looked at Jacob, she knew their problems were bigger than just the combination of just their individual lists. Their problems could have been just as tremendous as the very universe they occupied small parts of, but there was no way to tell. There was no way to explore that when they stood on opposite ends of that amazing universe. And that was what hurt her the most. And somewhere in his mind, in the parts that weren't completely numb, that hurt him, too. And the private, shared pain was what made all the difference.

They shared a public smile that hurt the both of them even further.

Renesmee came bustling into the cottage she still lived in with her parents that night, and her mother shushed her the moment she stepped in. "Your father's sleeping," Bella explained. She was snuggled on the couch with her nose in a book.

Nessie quietly set her keys down on the coffee table. "Oh, shit, sorry." Then she sat down on the couch next to Bella, who was stiffer than usual.

"Do you want to tell me why you're home at eleven on a school night?" the older woman asked. She flipped the page in her book. It smelled of various, uncorrelated scents and had water-damaged pages with ink that had bled plenty of times. It was the oldest book Renesmee had seen these days.

"I'm in college," she reminded her mother. "It's different."

"And?"

"And Jacob and I went to dinner after class," Nessie explained, "and then we watched a couple of movies on his computer." She undid her hair knot and shook out her bronze tresses, relaxing.

"How were the movies?" Bella asked.

"They were good. The Avengers was awesome. I felt indifferent about Let Me In."

"Did you see the original Avengers?"

Renesmee let out a single ha. "I wish," she said. "We couldn't find it for shit on the internet. We watched the third remake. It was almost as good as the original, though."

"That's nice to know." Bella's voice was totally absent.

Nessie peeked over her shoulder down onto the pages of her book. "Where'd you find a physical novel?" she asked.

Bella looked at Nessie with a smirk that had pride dripping from it. "I scavenged the entire town for it once Edward fell asleep."

"All of two blocks," Nessie replied. "Amazing."

"It is, trust me. Reading on devices is okay, but you know how I am about my books."

Nessie nodded and snuggled into the couch with her mother. Bella closed her book and set it down on the coffee table. With a free hand, she stroked her daughter's hair. "How was your day?" Bella asked.

"Typical."

"Typical?"

"Very much so." Nessie's eyes scanned the living room. "Tell me why the main house is all updated and fresh and everything while ours is still a century behind on trends? We've been back for six months now."

"You know how I feel about vintage things," Bella said. They chuckled. "But in all honesty, things have just been busy around here."

"How?"

"There are other things to get used to right now," Bella explained, "so we'll have to catch up on our home decor later."

Nessie nodded. "Do you have plans?"

"Not currently."

They were silent. Renesmee took six inhales and six exhales (Bella counted) before she spoke again.

"How was your day, Mom?"

"It was different," Bella said. Different had been her favorite word lately, quickly replacing forever, though her heart had been so set on it. The dial had been stuck on forever for the longest time, yet it hardly took a strain to turn it to the different setting.

"Did you hang out with Dad?" Nessie wondered.

"Yes."

"How was it?"

Not wanting to use the word different again, Bella exchanged it for something else. "It was interesting. He's so fragile now. I know it's been months since he changed, but it's still a bit hard to get used to. He's not nearly as quick, you know, and he's just so warm."

"So it's kind of like me and Jacob?"

"Something like that."

"What did you guys do today?" Nessie wondered. "Lay in a grassy field?"

Caught red-handed, Bella furrowed her brow. "How do you know about that?"

Nessie giggled. "Uncle Jasper clued me in on it."

"I'm gonna have to kick his ass for eavesdropping. And, well, we did do that for a while. Renesmee, I don't know if you've done this or not, but it's very interesting to just look at someone."

"I do that everyday."

"No, I mean really look at them, and notice all that they are. It was so incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around all that he is now. Your father... He's human. He's a living, breathing human being now."

"That must be quite the adjustment for you," Nessie remarked.

"It is," Bella said. "I promise. He has blood running through him, he has green eyes, he has to eat and use the restroom regularly, and... he is just. So. Warm. It's astonishing."

"What does that feel like to you?"

Bella shook her head and bit her lip as she stared out the window into the darkness. "Nothing. It feels like nothing. I can hardly touch him without him... without him reacting so strongly. He freaks the hell out, all the time. I don't think he trusts me, Renesmee."

Renesmee's voice was bleak. "Why?"

Bella inhaled deeply. "I mean it when I tell you this, Renesmee, and I hope to God that you never share this with anybody else, but he is much stronger than I am. He has a lot more restraint than I do. I think he's terrified of me."

"Mom, I highly doubt—"

"I don't understand how he dealt with all of this so long ago," Bella continued, going on a tangent. "I don't know why he decided to deal with all of this, either, but he did. He took that chance for me, and ran that risk for so long, thinking he was a monster the entire thing. And you know what's especially astonishing about all of this? He was never a monster. He was anything but that. And suddenly, due to some dim-witted idea, I'm a monster. I am the monster."

Bella paused, and Renesmee waited for her to be finished.

"You're not a monster, Mom," Nessie assured her, her voice shaking at the depth of her mother's confession. "None of us are. Things are just different. Do you think he'll go back?"

"I do," Bella replied. "I really do."

"You know him better than anybody," Renesmee pointed out. "Nobody can tell you otherwise. He's gonna go back, Mom. All you have to do is wait, and I know patience isn't really your thing, but..."

Bella calmed down enough to release a snicker. "Okay, you don't have to be a smart-ass, now."

"Totally not being a smart-ass," Nessie said, "but you're gonna have to be patient. And besides, men are slow, Mom. They need all the time they can get."

"Yeah, you're telling me."

They laughed, and a weight was lifted from Bella's chest. Perhaps the issue wasn't the way she had been feeling, but it was how she had kept it inside for months, building and building but never being relieved until just now. She had made a promise to Edward, though: she would give it a chance. And she was clearly giving everything a chance, so there was no reason to go to extremes as of now. He would go back eventually, and she knew it in her heart. She trusted his vibes better than his words. His words were why they she had been at the breaking point, after all.

So life as she knew it was just different now, and that beautiful forever was merely on hold. Renesmee was right: Bella knew Edward better than anybody else. Nobody could tell her otherwise.

A/N: And that was the fourth (fifth, according to this site's system) chapter. Please let me take the time to apologize on behalf of my sins. I'm so sorry about the late update! School's already kicking my ass and the third week hasn't started yet. Thank you all for the reviews, favorites, and follows. Also, prepare yourself. The next chapter contains some Bella x Edward sexiness, or at least my attempt at it.

Thanks again and until next chapter (as well as a happy birthday to Bella),

HalcyonSeasons