Chapter 12
Embry's POV
The next three months I spent doing one of two things. Either living for the fifteen minute period of time twice a day five days a week that I got to spend with Cathryn, and dreading the weekend, when I would have to figure out some way to see her or just follow her around as a wolf, making sure she was okay. The first couple of weeks of this she just listened to her ipod, barely talking to me at all. But I stopped that by telling her that she could only listen to music if she did it on my radio, and it had to be on a station I liked. Not that she followed the rule. But it did piss her off when I tried to boss her around like that, and it usually got her talking.
I started making lists in my head. The things she liked: music, dancing, her dog, making people she didn't like angry. And anything dangerous enough to give me a heart attack, which happened on a fairly regular basis since Quil had started teaching her to skateboard. Even after I practically got down on my knees-hunches, whichever- begging him not to. The things she didn't like: losing arguments, Lizzie, football, running out of itunes money, and Nessie and Cocoa. The things she didn't pay ay attention to: much too long for me to even comprehend. She was one of the ditsiest people I'd ever met. Most of the time. When she wasn't in lala land, however, she was so observant it was scary. So it was probably a good thing that she paid attention to nothing, because if she did she might have figured out I was a werewolf by now. Or at least not entirely human.
I also learned that she was fiercely protective of her friends and family. I found that amusing, since half of the things people said that made her angry were things that she said about them herself. She hated thinking about the future, or things that made her sad, or anything else that she didn't totally and completely understand. She loved little kids, especially Claire. I guess I shouldn't have found that surprising, seeing as she was like a small child herself.
As the months went by, I started to delude myself into thinking that this could all be all right. That I would know just the right time to tell her everything, and that she would be okay with it, and I wouldn't have to worry about her tongue ending up in that Ethan guy's mouth. Or, you know, that it would happen close to that. None of the other imprints had cared all that much. Not in the end. We were perfect together, so it had to work out.
Then came that day in December.
Everybody was psyched about Christmas. School was almost out for Cathryn and Keilly and Seth and Brady and Drew. College courses had already ended for the break. Paul was going to propose to Rachel at Kim and Jared's wedding, which was on New Year's. Jacob and Billy had gritted their teeth over that one, but everyone else was happy for them. My mom and I had been getting along really well since I'd moved in with Jacob and Quil in October. Sam and Emily finally decided on a name for their kid. Nate for a boy, and Natalie for a girl. Emily's stomach was steadily getting bigger, Sam's drunken fatherly happiness steadily getting more pronounced. Cocoa's mood wasn't great, but her trademark glare was gone. Jacob and Rosalie, for the first time in all of history, weren't at each other's throats. A Christmas miracle, in my opinion. Cathryn was getting better at skateboarding, which meant less injuries for her, and less chasing Quil all over the Olympic peninsula for me.
I had virtually nothing to distract me from Cathryn, so I was just hanging around the tribal school, a place I'd once sworn to myself I would never again willingly go. Usually, I didn't use my ears for much when I was human. Amazing hearing was only cool if there was something worth hearing. But since I'd imprinted, I found myself using it a lot more often. Like now, when Cat was in Foreign Language, her last period of the day. Also the subject she was failing. Stupid as it seemed that I worried about her in there, it was true. But whenever somebody said or did something to her that made me angry, Drew or Brady always beat me to the punch. Literally. Not that happened too much, as Cathryn was more than capable of taking care of herself. I was pretty sure Cathryn was listening to her ipod in the back of the room. I could hear Paramore, one of her favorite bands, playing softly as background music to Ms. Lippman's droning French. Occasionally she would sigh as she tapped her foot to the rhythm of the music.
I was paying attention to this so closely that at first I didn't feel my phone vibrating in my pocket. "Hello?" I asked, not bothering to read the caller ID.
"Embry," It was Sam, "Where are you?"
"Waiting for Cathryn's class to let out." I replied.
"As soon as you get her, come over to the hospital. And get in touch with Seth and Keilly and all the others still in school, will you?" He said all of this calmly, but I could hear the strain in his voice.
"What's up?" I asked. There weren't a lot of things that got Sam worked up. Just vampires, and-
"Emily's water broke," He told me. "Everything's going good right now, but it'll be premature, and-"
"Right," I said quickly. I could imagine how Sam felt. I'd be scared to death too, if I was about to become a parent. And if Cathryn was the one going through the very painful delivery, I'd go nuts. "Yeah, I'll let them know ASAP. Later."
Chapter 13 Truth
Cathryn's POV
I sighed in relief as the bell rang. Even after almost a whole semester, I'd still never really made friends. The only time I needed people to talk to was during lunch, and I had the high school kids for that. I gathered up my books as quickly as possible and was in the hall and putting them in my locker before anybody else. I did not understand why my parent's wouldn't let me skip the rest of the semester. We'd already taken the finals, now all we were doing was watching movies and making little snowmen out of cardboard. Not very beneficial for later life, in my opinion. But both Bob and my mom were firm. Personally, I thought that they just wanted time alone during the criminally few days they had off.
As soon as I was outside, Embry's beat up truck pulled over in front of me. I was used to him being early, so I didn't suspect much. "Get in," He commanded, leaning over and opening the passenger door.
I didn't get in. "Where's the fire?" I asked.
"Cathryn! For God's sake, are you this freaking stubborn just so you can annoy me?"
"Yes," I told him.
"Emily's in labor. I already called your folks, they don't expect you home until about nine tonight. If it looks like it'll be later, I'll take you home."
"Uh. No you won't. I'm going to be there if it takes all night."
"Which it probably will," He pointed out.
I waited, staring him down.
"Get. In. The. Car." He emphasized each word, speaking as if I were dense.
This time, I did what he said. I know. I was surprised, too. "Is she okay?" I asked, closing the door.
"I think so," he stepped hard on the gas pedal, and we lurched forward. "But I talked to Sam about half an hour ago. Things could have changed."
"I thought the baby wasn't due until January?"
He nodded. "The twenty fourth."
When we got to the hospital, it was obvious that Embry and I were the last ones there. I scanned the waiting room quickly. Jared and Kim, Paul and Rachel, Seth and Keilly, Drew, Brady, Collin, Cocoa, Andrew, Greg, Leah, Luke, Michael, Ricky, Tommy, Jacob and Renesmee, Quil and Claire, Billy and Sue, the council Elders, and Charlie, Sue's husband and chief of police. And a few other elderly people whom I suspected were the grandparents.
"Where's Sam?" I asked.
"Oh, he's at home watching ESPN, not worried at all about the fact that Emily is giving birth to his baby." Quil said, giving me a very sarcastic look. "He's in the room with Emily, scaring the midwives. Where else would he be?"
Poor Sam.
Poor doctors. Of all the La Push giants, Jacob was the biggest. But only by a little. Sam and Embry came next. I pitied the doctor who had been assigned to Emily. At least I knew that she and the baby would be okay though. The chances of any body making a critical mistake when a seven foot tall body builder is breathing down your neck and threatening your life-which is what Sam was probably doing- were very slim. I sat down in a chair and took out my ipod. This was going to take awhile.
"Okay. I'm bored." I told Embry about two hours later. As there hadn't been any more chairs in the room after I'd sat down, he was leaning against the leg of mine.
"And what am I supposed to do about that?" Embry looked at me tiredly.
"Lets play a game." I told him.
"He grinned. "How old are we?"
"Well, I know you can't be younger than forty…."
He rolled his eyes. "Fine. What do you want to play?"
"Truth."
"Truth?"
"Yes. I read about it in a book once."
He raised his dark eyebrows. "You read about it."
"Yep."
"In a book."
"Mmm, hmm."
"Okay," He said gamely, up for anything I wanted, as usual. "How do we play?"
"You take turns asking questions. The other person has to answer it truthfully."
"Hence the name."
"Hence the name," I agreed. "If you don't want to answer it, you say 'pass'. Then you ask a question. If the person answers it, then they win."
"All right." Embry adjusted his position so that he was leaning against the coffee table, facing me. Well, I guess it wasn't really a coffee table, it was blue plastic and completely covered in magazines, but I think that's what the hospital people meant it to be. "You start."
"What's you favorite color?" I asked, being nice for once and giving him an easy one first.
"Aren't these questions supposed to be hard to answer?" Embry asked me skeptically. "Like, personal and stuff?"
"That is personal." I told him. "If your favorite color was pink, I'd be holding it over your head for the rest of our lives."
"But it isn't pink."
"Then what is it?"
"Green. My turn."
"Go for it."
"Okay. For all your crap about how sucky this place is, would you really leave it if you got the chance?"
Chapter 14 Baby, Baby
Embry's POV
"I don't know…" Cathryn said slowly, thinking. "Because of the place itself? Definitely."
I winced.
"But the people here I would miss. Can I, Like, take everybody with me?"
"Nope."
"I guess I'd stay." Cathryn said finally, uncertainly.
Well. That was okay then.
"Hmmm..." She thought about it for a minute. "What was the…the grossest thing you've ever done?"
I laughed. How random. "The grossest thing?" I repeated.
"Yep."
I thought for a moment. "Okay. There was this one time…."
"What?" She pressed eagerly.
"In my defense, I was only eleven. I went over to Quil's place with Jacob, and we got bored."
"So…."
"So Quil decided to dare me to drink a bottle of ketchup."
"Oh my God." Her eyes popped wide open in shock. "You didn't!"
"Yeah, I did. It was terrible. I got so sick. That's why you will never, ever, see me eating ketchup. I can't even look at it."
Cathryn threw back her head and laughed, her whole body shaking. "Brilliant!" She gasped.
"Yeah, not so brilliant when you're on the bathroom floor covered in tomato smelling barf."
"Wow." She shook her head, still grinning.
"All right. I want your top three pet peeves."
"Easy. Doctors, Charlie Brown, and the sound of an alarm clock going off." She grimaced.
"I don't blame you about the alarm clock thing," I told her, "But the people who save lives for a living? One of the most wholesome, all American tv-"
"Oh, Puh-lease," Cathryn groaned, "Doctors are so full of themselves. Whatch, when Emily has the baby, if there is something wrong, they'll ask her all these totally random questions, and if the answers to any of them are yes, they'll tell her that that's why it happened. It'll be her fault."
"Nessie's granddad is a doctor," I told her, trying to be more diplomatic.
"Well, there you go," Cathryn muttered. "Another reason for me to hate her."
"What about Charlie brown?"
"Sooo depressing. All of them involve Charlie trying to do something sweet but way dumb and then all of his friends making fun of him for it. Who enjoys that?"
"Most people, apparently."
Cathryn made a face. "Since when am I most people?"
Well, she had me there.
Cathryn was silent for a moment. "Okay," She said softly, "Now you gotta tell me something hard.
I waited.
"What happened to…what happened with your dad?" She asked.
Crap.
She would, of course, find out about him eventually. That my father was somewhere right under my nose being the father of one of my best friends. With one of the werewolves, we were brothers in more than one sense. But this wasn't something I could easily tell her now. It was too close to THE secret. Too close to my not being entirely human. I wondered how I was going to tell her without getting into that.
I took a deep breath and opened my mouth. "I-"
"Guys," Sam's loud voice drowned out everything else. We all turned towards the hall at the front of which he was standing. I'm not going to say that he was all aglow with the enlightenment of having become a parent or anything like that. In all honesty, the guy looked a little crazy. His eyes were shining with some sort of mad gleam, his cheeks flushed underneath the copper. "It's a boy," He breathed.
The reaction was instantaneous. Everyone stood up and thundered down the hall, Cathryn at the front of everyone, right behind Sam. Of course she would want to be the first to see Baby Nate. I walked a little bit behind her, next to Leah. She was walking rapidly, her brow furrowed. I felt a brief wave of sympathy towards her. Even after all this time, all these years of being free from Sam's mind, it was still hard for her to be around him. She had made amends with Emily soon after joining Jacob's pack, and that relationship was almost entirely restored to their previous sisterhood. But things would never be okay with her and Sam. Leah would always be attracted to him.
It was obvious which door Emily was in. The one with all the nurses running in and out, carrying equipment and trash bags and cloths drenched with blood. It was one of these nurses that stopped Cathryn from running straight in there.
"Family members only," She said, glaring at Cathryn. I felt a rush of anger. How was Cathryn supposed to have known that?
Mrs. Uley and The Youngs pushed their way inside, followed by the Clearwaters. "Lucky," I heard Cathryn mutter resentfully.
Their entering was followed by a lot of tears and 'Oh, baby, he's perfect's.' Typical birth. At least, that's what I thought at first. Had I been paying more attention, I would have heard Leah's gasp, heard her heart stutter twice, then set off galloping at about twice its normal rate. It was a good while before anyone noticed.
Then Sam gasped. That one though, I heard. "Leah," he snarled, "You didn't."
"Can I…Can I hold him?" Leah asked breathlessly, failing to notice the anger in his voice.
"Wha…Leah, no!" Emily exclaimed, fresh tears in her voice. These though, were not happy ones.
The rest of the pack exchanged fearful glances. Sam was pissed off, obviously. Leah had just made his Emily cry. We all knew what that meant.
Sure enough, about three seconds later we were all very rudely jostled by Sam, his previous delirium relplaced by uncontrollable anger, dragging Leah behind him. The rest of both packs followed him, knowing that a lot was going to need to be discussed. If Sam wanted to discuss it. More likely though, we would all just have to defend Leah, as he was probably ready to kill her. Leah, however, didn't look worried at all. She wasn't even looking at him. Her head was turned, staring through the opened doors of Emily's room at the tiny baby in her ams. In her eyes I could see all the things I'd felt for Cathryn when I first saw her, and still did. Love, need, peace, mad addiction, protectiveness, and certainty.
Leah had imprinted.