Disclaimer: I don't own the Twilight saga or any of its characters.
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Chapter Six
By the end of the school day, Isabella found herself as a paranoid mess, as well as a borderline stalker. She was constantly listening to students conversations hoping to hear Jacob's name appear among them, without any luck. But not only that, she found herself perking up at any sound of footsteps passing through her door. For some odd reason she could not shake the immense need to see Jacob Black again. She could not explain the growing pull she felt towards him, nor was she ready to admit to anyone that she actually felt it.
All she wanted to do was get home, run a bath and take a long soak in it with a (large) glass of wine. She smiled at a group of freshman girls that said goodbye to her as they left the room after the final bell had rung. She gathered up some of her books from her desk and stuffed them into her canvas bag, then began to erase the chalkboard. Whenever she did this she was reminded of her mother telling stories about when she had been punished during her elementary years and was forced to clean the chalkboard erasers.
After she'd finished she tucked her hair behind her ears and gathered up her bag. She was far past being ready to go home. She had things to think about... Things to sort out. And yet, the previous day she had promised to wait after school to help Jacob Black with extra work. She smoothed out her shirt and sat back down behind her desk again. Smoothing her hair out she felt silly for a moment because this feeling was something she used to get in high school when she'd hear that her crush would be appearing at the same party as her.
It was foolish of her, but she couldn't bring herself to care quite that much. She tapped her pen against her desk avoiding looking at the door. She didn't want to seem too eager for him to walk through the door.
After almost ten minutes of trying to preoccupy herself at her desk, Isabella got up from her desk and decided to pick up around the room. She grabbed a few scrap papers off of some of the student's desks, cringing at some of the things she saw scratched into the tops of them. This room could do with a makeover. Scratch that, she thought, this school could do with a makeover. Not that Mr. Molina would agree with her...
Isabella spotted a pencil laying near the entrance to the classroom and crouched down to get it. As gravity would have it, she lost her balance while crouching and threw her hand out to steady herself. As soon as her hand splayed across the ground she felt a sharp pinch.
"Shit!" Isabella swore under her breath as she pulled her hand up from the floor, and stood up again without grabbing the pencil off the ground. She brought her hand up in front of her face and saw a long sliver of glass had embedded itself into her palm. She hissed in pain as she tried to pull it out, only to do the reverse and push it slightly deeper into her flesh. It was an angry red color around the sliver and the pain was sharp and insistent.
Isabella swore again under her breath at her bad luck, and as she looked up at the clock the crushing feeling returned to her chest. It was twenty minutes after school had let out. If Jacob hadn't showed up yet, he definitely wasn't coming. With this realization, Isabella stomped, if not a bit childishly, back to her desk and shoved the rest of her books into her bag.
She was mad. No, mad was an understatement. He had promised her to be here, and he hadn't shown up. She had waited for him and he had just blown her off!
Wait a minute. Isabella froze standing directly in the doorway of her classroom.
Why was she acting this way? She was appalled that she had overreacted to a student not showing up after school. Because that's all he was; a student. And of course he hadn't shown up! Why would he come after school and meet with a teacher? After growing up around here, and with what she knew of the rest of the faculty, he probably hadn't thought she was serious about extra help for him. She was a fool.
She could feel the sting of tears in her eyes, both from her humiliation, and at the pain radiating out of her palm.
As she neared the front doors, she briefly wondered if she'd see him walking back into the school with some excuse on her lips. Against her anger and her frustration she felt towards him, she wouldn't have cared what excuse he'd given her, as long as she could spend some time speaking to him again. But as she pushed the glass door open and stepped out into the cool, cloudy day her heart sunk in her chest.
There was no Jacob Black. There wasn't even a sign of any of his friends. And so she trudged to her car, her shoulders in a slump while her heart still raced in her chest. And she wondered in the back of her head why she even cared.
He was a nineteen year old boy. He didn't care about school, or anything inside of its walls. Especially an English teacher who was too concerned with students that haven't had to care about anything before, because they weren't expected to. She was the one that cared. She was the one who was so seemingly desperate for company, that she had thought that one of her nineteen year old students had actually cared.
But she knew he didn't. He probably was hanging out with his friends. Or maybe he was going to see a girl. The thought made a pang of pain pierce through her heart for some irrational reason. But of course he would have forgotten about Isabella. She wasn't a native and she wasn't a teenage girl anymore.
She was his English teacher. And she realized that she didn't matter to him.
-8-
If Isabella's college friends could see her now they would be so disappointed in her.
It was seven thirty on a tuesday night, and she was already in her pajamas, sitting on her butt in front of the television with a glass full of red wine in her hand and a microwave dinner on her lap. She'd tried to perform minor surgery on her hand to extract the piece of glass from her right palm without any success and had resigned herself to the fact that her day had been a complete failure.
She had crossed so many of her own neatly draw lines that she had a hard time keeping track of them all. The biggest one though, was the fact that she had thought of one of her students in a sexual way.
For a while she had tried to reason with herself that it was completely understandable. Jacob Black, along with his friends, were extremely handsome boys. And to be honest, if she hadn't been their English teacher she probably would have mistaken them for adults. She couldn't be blamed for her perverse thoughts of him. He was attractive, and she admitted that she was a tad sexually deprived... It had been... a while.
But then, the more she tried to convince herself that it was perfectly okay to have those thoughts, the more she felt disgusted with herself. What was she doing? This was wrong on so many levels. This could cost Isabella her job. This was definitely not okay, and there was no excuse on the planet that she could give to Mr. Molina if he were ever to catch wind of her less innocent affections toward one of her senior students.
And Jacob Black... Who knows? Maybe he had some twisted fantasy of getting with one of his teachers before he left for... not college... but whatever came after high school for him. Perhaps he had some spark inside of him, but it was not like Isabella's thoughts. There was no way that a teenage boy would ever care past getting what he wanted. If she gave into him and actually did break every rule in the book then she was positive that he would disappear and she would never hear from him again. She would be a notch on his bedpost, and she was sure a boy like him had many.
For some reason the tears began to spring from her eyes. The thought of how little she would mean to him. The thought of him walking out of her classroom and never come back again. To never hear his soothing voice. To never see a rare sunny smile from him. It all weighed heavily on her chest, and for the life of her she could not understand why. All she could understand was that she needed to nip her infatuation in the bud. She needed to put a stop to it, no matter what the cost.
If it meant being the worst person in the world to him so that he would hate her and leave her alone, then so be it. But she could not risk losing her job, and ruining her entire reputation for someone who would leave her. She was not that strong.
-8-
Isabella was mentally and physically drained on Wednesday morning.
After crying and thinking over her own problems for a few hours and shamelessly drinking an entire bottle of merlot on her living room couch, she had gone to bed at two in the morning. Only to lay in bed and stare at her ceiling for another hour and a half. She'd finally fallen asleep at four in the morning, but her dreams were hard to follow and left her tossing and turning under her covers. Her body couldn't decide if it was too cold or too hot and she had been uncomfortable no matter what she'd done.
When she'd looked in her bathroom morning only two hours after she'd fallen asleep she noticed the large, dark bags under her eyes and felt the familiar pounding of a hangover in her skull. She threw on a pair of dark jeans that she'd found in her dirty hamper since she hadn't done any laundry yet and she'd already decided against wearing formal clothes while feeling so crappy. She at least tried a little bit with a pair of modest black heels, although it didn't help much with the slightly wrinkled blouse she'd put on.
She even left her hair down, rather than put it in it's regular low bun she managed on other days. She grabbed a travel mug filled with coffee, not bothering to put any sugar or cream into it, because she truly needed to wake up. Not to mention her right hand had swelled slightly due to the stubborn sliver of glass that refused to leave her skin. She would probably have to call her doctor after work today so she could go in later today. There was no way she could let this get infected.
After putting around her apartment until it was time to leave she finally got into her car and drove to the school. She unpacked her bag on her desk once again and decided to give up on the discussion for the day, and she would go with them taking notes on the chapters they'd read out of their books. There was absolutely no way she was going to be able to stay focused if she had to lead a discussion. Especially considered how much lack of motivation in the classroom there was.
There was a click from the door and Isabella's heart broke out into a sprint as she looked up, unsurprised to see Jacob Black staring at her from the entrance to the classroom. His expression was worried, although there was another emotion just under the surface that she wasn't entirely sure about. His eyes widened as he looked at her face, and Isabella, seemingly forgetting all of her promises to herself looked down, embarrassed. She did not want him to see the dark circles that stained her skin, displaying her restlessness.
She hadn't even heard him move, but he was, all of a sudden, in front of her. Without warning his hand caught her chin gently in his palm. The contact of his hand on her skin sent the same humming sensation racing through her veins. The sudden need to push herself as close as possible to this man overcame her as he gently forced her face to look up at his. She watched with wide eyes as his own dark eyes traced every line on her face. Her heart galloped in her chest as he looked straight into her eyes, looking frantic and almost scared. She saw his other hand reach towards her, and she remembered where they were.
Her head jerked away so violently that she almost collided with the blackboard behind her. She stared at him, her chest heaving for air that she needed. She felt exhausted and the only thing she wanted was to go back to sleep and hope that this terrible morning was actually a bad dream.
"Jacob, you cannot touch me like that," Isabella finally found her voice, although it was a bit breathless.
Jacob seemed confused by this statement, but his eyes remained on her, "Isabella, are you hurt? Are you bleeding? What happened?" his voice held a timbre in it that vibrated Isabella's bones and made her flesh quiver. She wanted to hear that voice while his body hovered above her own, but at the moment she could not fantasize, since he clearly hadn't heard her.
"Jacob, do you understand how inappropriate it is for you to do things like that? And you cannot use my first name. I am not your friend, I am your professor," she said to him in a shaking voice. Even she didn't believe the words she'd said.
"I asked you what happened, Isabella. You need to tell me where you're hurt. Why do you look so tired, honey?" Jacob's voice was soft, though it had a tight edge on it. He took a step towards her, his eyes still wild and frantic as they raced over every corner of her body, searching. She felt completely exposed to him when he did that and instead of feeling uncomfortable, she only felt comforted by it. He would not harm her. He was concerned, but still, he was not listening.
"Jacob Black! You cannot say those kinds of things. It is none of your business, now please excuse me!" Isabella hissed at him as she darted towards the door of the classroom. Without warning she felt Jacob grab her right hand, which she had wrapped using some medical tape around a sterilized piece of gauze where the glass had entered her skin. "Ouch!" she gasped, wrenching her hand away from him and holding it to her chest.
It was almost in slow motion that Jacob's eyes zeroed in on her bandaged right hand, cradled against her chest. Isabella's heartbeat pounded in her ears as she watched his face turn from one of worry to one of raw panic.
"Tell me what happened now." Jacob's voice boomed. However, he had not yelled. It seemed loud to Isabella only because she felt every syllable vibrate through her body. He was no longer asking her anything, he was demanding she do as he told her. And yet, it was not frightening. It was not a harsh demand, or a rude one. It was one of unconditional concern and caring. He was truly worried about her. He made it seem as though his only purpose in that moment was making sure that she was alright.
"No, Jacob. That is none of your business, now go and take your seat," Isabella whispered in a surprisingly level voice. She was confused by his reaction, but there was also a million other thoughts racing through her mind. Buzzing thoughts that stung at her mind like angry bees.
Her whisper finally seemed to register for Jacob and his face fell in what could only be described as complete hurt. Isabella threw her hand over her mouth in shock as she realized that she had hurt Jacob. Not physically, but something much deeper. Something that ran through his soul, and she could feel it pierce directly through hers as well. Her eyebrows pinched together in confusion at the pain in her chest as she continued to stare into Jacob's defeated eyes.
She didn't even hear the two boys, Jared and Quil, both enter into the room and start pulling Jacob's arms making him back away from Isabella. All she could do was watch, until a hand ended up on her shoulder. She looked over to see Embry staring at her with a questioning gaze.
Before he could ask anything there was a loud snarl that echoed through the classroom, drawing Isabella's eyes back over to Jacob, who now looked irate as he glared at Embry. Immediately Embry's hand left her shoulder as if he had been burned. Isabella just stared at the feral expression on Jacob's face. For some reason she knew that any sane person should have been afraid of someone who looked like that, but she felt perfectly at ease. She felt as though he was protecting her. He would never hurt her. He was not able too.
Or maybe she was going certifiably insane.
In a split second Isabella had turned slightly to her right and snatched her bag off of her desk. She didn't bother to pick up the books she had already taken out of it as she brushed past Embry and sprinted out of the room. She felt her chest begin to throb as she ran back down the hallway and out the door into the parking lot. Her chest felt as though it was about to split apart. She couldn't breathe. She was having a panic attack, or something.
She finally made it to her car and wrenched open the door, throwing her bag inside of her car and jumping into the drivers seat. She didn't even bother looking back at the school as she drove out other parking lot and sped back out of the reservation.
This was something bigger than just an infatuation with a student. There was no explanation for the deep burning in her soul and the throbbing in her chest that threatened to split her apart.
Isabella knew in her bones that only Jacob would be able to make her feel better.
He was the only one who could make all of this stop.
He knew why all of these things were happening to her.
And she was determined to find out what it was.
Phew! I hope you liked it! Leave me your thoughts if you care to. Thanks for reading!