AN: Yall, remember this is rated T, which I am basically basing on Meyer's books…emotronic gushery ahead. On the other hand, I am very grateful for all of the reviews, which I've become a little addicted to, and also thankful for the wonderful stories so many of you write! Thank you many times over for sharing both your talent and your time.

*****

And then I kissed him.

Jake was still, at first, his eyes blinking wide with recognition as our mouths collided—he felt me moving across him, kisses as fine as a spider's web woven across his face, my eyelashes and nose and mouth touching his cheekbone, eyelid, forehead and lips in turn. I couldn't stop myself--Wait! Panic and confusion blasted through the dim heat swarming over me. My hands propped my body above his, and suddenly my exhaustion pulled me down towards the floor, shocking me in to recognition…I didn't understand myself. Hadn't I promised myself to let Jake decide what to do? I pulled my body up, sat clumsily and shook the smooth feel of his skin from my mind.

"Sorry," I said. That was when he began to move.

He was not strong the way he could be, but what remained was still inhuman. He abruptly sat up and cradled me against him in the same movement. I was perched sideways against his chest, and I could feel his arms, all of their loneliness bare, crushing me to him. I felt his hands—awkward, long fingered and rough—catching my hair, turning me to face him. "It was impossible to believe…after everything…" He began, the honey in his rumbling voice intoxicating, but I interrupted him before I lost my way again.

"You need to understand some things, Jake," I whispered, and he pulled back a little bit, his breath caught. I didn't want to take away this moment; I wanted to leave it for later, to focus again on the heat of his pulse and the differing textures of his skin beneath my lips, but I couldn't. That was the Bella I didn't want to be—one who considered her own selfish desires before anything else, and called them kindness. I looked up at him. "I was serious when I said I wasn't the same person."

His right hand pushed my hair off of my face while his left slid beneath my legs and repositioned me so that I was sitting between his knees, facing his chest. "How so?" He whispered, but his voice carried and echoed around the tiny room. He let go and watched me; I could barely see the outline of his face in the starlight. A sad smile appeared in the shadows there. "Maybe it sounds dumb, but you couldn't be, Bella. Not so many years later…and not doing what you just did." He rubbed his eyes. "I wish I was still the same cocky kid that thought you were just catching up on what I already knew, but I'm not the same person either." He leaned towards me once again, though, and asked: "But just so I understand…what do you mean, when you say that?"

It touched me that he wanted to know. It would be so easy to write me off, I thought, as someone predestined to torment him; would I have been so understanding, if our positions were reversed? I'd like to think so, but my only relative experience was my obsession with Edward, something that suddenly seemed dissimilar to the years of pain Jake had gone through. Which brought me back to the uncomfortable point at hand. "I don't know—I don't know if you can feel the same way about me, not knowing me now. I just don't want us to rush, and then…I'm afraid you will regret not getting to know me."

"You're afraid I'm still in love with someone that doesn't exist any more?" His smile was a little predatory again, but only shades of the bitterness I'd seen that first night appeared. He shook his head and raised his hands up and behind his head, the pale light creating deep shadows along his ribs. "Of course I am," he said, and laughed. "And there's not much either of us can do about it."

"Then we should be friends," I said. The disappointment registered in my voice; Jake lowered his arms and leaned towards me again. I resisted the lure of his arms. "Jake, I have waited a long time…and thought really hard about everything. And I came back here to try to—to try and make things right. And believe me, I know how silly that sounds." I let the tears come, but I didn't let them overtake me. I was surprised, considering everything that had happened that day, that now was when they appeared, but it made a perverse sort of sense.

"It's not your job to make things right," Jake said. His tone was warm, achingly sweet. When I leaned away he leaned forward, his long arms gently wrapping around my body and pulling me towards him. "I was a stupid kid too…I kept ignoring what everyone else knew, and then I told you not to talk to me any more." He held me tightly, my body curled up in a ball against his massive frame. "I was no better than him." It suddenly occurred to me that the target of much of his bitterness was Jake himself, and I forcibly tore my head away and looked in to his face.

"You reacted exactly the way anybody should when they find out someone has been using them." He let me go. My words and voice were hard, punishing. I smeared my tears away with my fist and continued. "I was the worst kind of vampire, Jake. I'm not sure you know me well enough to love me now, and I don't really understand how you can stand to speak to me—"

"—I love you, Bella." He said it plainly. His hands found mine in the dark and kept them from my face, gently covering them, his thumbs rubbing wide circles across my palms. "And from what I've seen, I only love you more now. Now that you're determined to get rid of the parts of yourself that hurt us both…" Suddenly, it was there—the smile I'd missed so badly, in full bloom: "But it doesn't hurt to watch you mow down a vamp on the highway, I'll be honest."

We both laughed, then looked at each other once more. "I don't know what to say, Jake," I said with resignation. "It's hard for me to want to be loved and know I don't deserve it." I shrugged.

"I never loved youbecause you deserved it," he snorted, then looked serious. "I just couldn't help it. I didn't want to help it, and I was dumb and thought if I got all dramatic—like him—you'd know that you loved me." He laughed. "Is there anybody that really deserves to be loved?"

"You do," I said firmly. He laughed again, and then gently pushed me over so that he could lay down again. He seemed to be saying the conversation was over.

"I don't want you to love me because I deserve it," he said. "Maybe that's something you should know about me." He didn't sound bitter now, but the words had echoes of suffering in them. "I want to be loved…the way I love you. Just because." The sleepiness in his voice lulled me, and I laid down close to him, my eyes on his face.

"I didn't say that was the reason I loved you, Jake," I whispered. "I just said you deserve it. More than anyone else."

"In that case, everybody deserves it, and in that case, nobody is special," he said, grinning with his eyes closed.

"Jacob Black," I said in a louder voice, "I love you because you are the only man that could live in the wilderness for six years and come back out the same ass he was going in." His sharp hard laugh filled the room, almost blocking out my voice, but I knew he could hear me. "I love you because you were my first real friend, that wanted to be friends with me just because. I love you because you are true, and honest, and hilarious, and generous." He was very quiet now. "I love you because it is literally impossible for me not to love you."

"But you don't love me as much as you loved him," he simply said, and I saw the pale tracks of tears on his face. I touched him and he didn't flinch, so I moved closer.

"I am not who I was," I whispered, "and I can't love anything the way I loved him." I waited for him to get up, to push me away, to leave, but he did not. "I can just love you the way I do, it's all I can do."

"Am I still the runner up?" He asked, his voice shaking slightly.

"You tell me," I said. "It's just you and me here…what does that say?"

"I don't know," he said, and it truly sounded as though he didn't. I wasn't going to be able to make this right with words, I realized. Nothing could make what had happened right, peel the suffering off of the past and make the pain in his face unreal, but what could take the ache out of the present? My fingertips found their way to his face.

"Why couldn't you just let me enjoy kissing you?" He whispered, and I swept the hair back from his cheeks; his black eyes shone, the scars pale and crisp against his dark skin. "Why did we have to talk about this?" The look in his eyes was searching, the glistening tears gone. It was a good question.

"Because you don't believe me," I said; years of resolve and shame and self-searching darkened my tone. "I want you—I need you to believe me when I say…that I love you." You are the only one who can validate what I'm doing, I thought. You are the only one—if you don't love me back, if this is all foolish, if tomorrow you decide this never happened...I can live with that, as long as you know that I love you. As long as you know you were right. It was the only apology worth pursuing. Jacob's head tilted as he took me in; the wolf in him smelled my anxiety, and his abrupt strength once again appeared as he pulled me closer.

"We're even then," he whispered, "if you don't believe I love you now either—whatever you think might have changed the way I feel, it didn't." His dark eyes roamed across my face, the long lashes fluttering, and the rough skin of his hands caught me as they cupped my chin. "Maybe…maybe we could just go on faith," he whispered, and pressed his forehead against mine. "Maybe if I promise to try and believe, you can try to believe…"

And then we were kissing again.