His hands were slowly slipping from around me, and my mind raced frantically, trying to process everything he'd told me before they slipped away forever.
Jacob had imprinted. My greatest fear—both selfish and foolish, as it was greater than my fear of the vampires, of the endless violence of our lives, and even, if I were honest, greater than my fear of staying with Jacob and the raging wolf—was vanquished, made irrelevant in one night. I saw, in retrospect, how I had prepared myself for his rejection, and still come to Forks seeking to make amends, and how my plan had largely ended on that uncertain note. I was now further into unknown territory, legions of possibility swimming in and out of view as each new crisis waxed and waned; I was afraid of losing myself, of compromising who I'd become, to be with the wolf. Jacob hated the wolf, even more than I did, and because I could see that now I saw the way as clearly as if it were written on the white wall in front of me. We could do this. I was sure of it. And we could find a way to make sure our children were safe—and even if we didn't, I was positive we could find a way to make sure they were happy.
Edward had told me the truth—Jacob was searching for the way this would end. He'd determined it would, and yet wanted to be with me so badly that he was ripping himself in half—it had to stop. I grabbed his wrists with my hands and held them firmly.
"I can imagine," I whispered. "I do imagine it. I want children, with you. Little monsters of our very own." He was frozen, his eyes suddenly wide. "I know you, Jacob Black. None of this—none of these things can erase how amazing you are. I would be honored to have your children." I waited for him to move, but it seemed like he couldn't. He didn't blink, the pupils in his eyes constricting until they almost disappeared in the warm brown surrounding them. His chest was still. "I don't ever want to leave you. And now I don't think I ever will." The slight rise and fall told me he'd begun to breathe again. "Please don't keep anything from me again—please don't deprive me of the chance to show you how much I love you. You told me we could go on faith—" and here a wayward tear ran down his cheek, a split second before he buried his face once again between my breasts. "I have faith," I whispered to him, my arms around his shoulders, fingers interlaced with his hair. "I know who you are."
It hadn't occurred to me that Jacob had never really been able to detail his experiences. He'd introduced the idea of hunting to me when his body and mind were still unable to completely process human emotions and thoughts, and we'd never gotten the chance to return to the discussion; the fantasia of vampires had arrived and although we'd certainly found a way to make our emotions known to each other, this story had been waiting to be told the whole time. I pushed my fingers deeper against his scalp, capturing a handful of the soft black threads and then gently pulling my fingers through them. I slid one hand down over the bulk of his shoulder, laying it against his spine, and brought my head down to his while my other hand moved to cradle his cheek. "Jacob, you can do this. You don't have to act like this any more, and you can be with me." He didn't remove his face from where it lay against me, but he turned his ear slightly towards me, his eyes tightly shut. I kissed his cheek, tasting salt and cinders.
"Please don't leave me, Bells," he whispered. I sighed against his cheek, closing my eyes. I could feel his humiliation and despair as clearly as the heat radiating from him, and I again regretted my haste in bringing up the inevitable need to part with the wolf—but if I'd waited, when would we have been able to clear the air like this? Maybe it would have been just as uncomfortable, as painful, any other day or night. Maybe he just needed me to explain myself better, the way I'd needed to hear his story, in order to feel the same reassurance I had now.
"I thought…I thought that you might not want to give up being a wolf, or even worse…you couldn't," I murmured. "I guess I was worried that I would stay with you—and even if you can't imprint again, there were other obvious problems with it, like chair bashing and jumping out of trucks and never, ever knowing what was going to happen next—and I would be giving up who I've become." I could tell he was listening closely; he could probably hear the tiny vibrations in my thorax as they cooperated to produce my voice. "I don't want to be who I was before, either, Jake." We were both quiet together, silent in the long, broken years represented by that thought, before I continued. "But I just needed to know where you were coming from, honey." I rubbed one tear slicked cheek with my thumb while I kissed the other one, gently nuzzling him out of hiding. "I just needed to talk to you, like people in love do sometimes." This time there was a smile on my mouth when I kissed him, and he turned his head slightly so my lips grazed the corner of his. His eyes were now open.
"Like people do," he whispered, and I nodded. He stared at me, his expression caught between wanting to hope and being afraid to. "I just…I don't," his eyes closed tightly, then reopened, "I don't want to ever be—I can't live without—"
"—You don't have to," I soothed. My hands were both lost in his hair now, his head gently turned to finally face mine. "You just had to tell me that I wouldn't be living this way forever. And you did."
"But, you were so mad…" His eyebrows were irked black smudges, but his breathing was slowly becoming steady and the low rush of heat on my jaw reassured me. He was stabilizing, finding the solid path back to that murky, beautiful and tenuous future we both wanted and didn't understand. He watched me, his nose quivering, trying to follow me as I lead him towards a place where we were together. Permanently.
"I was. I was really mad. And I'm not sure I should have said what I did, at this exact moment in time. It was kind of a full conversation—but then again, we needed to talk. I'm not sure we would've gotten to this point if I hadn't been angry enough to throw an ultimatum at you." My voice was more normal in tone now, but I didn't remove my hands from framing his face. He took in what I said with his eyes still wide open. "I didn't understand what I was doing, when I did it." In the back of my mind, I wondered if he would be angry with me, and as the thought moved towards my waking conscience I braced for the possible retreat of Jacob, and the return of the temperamental wolf.
"So you can have tantrums, but I can't?" A delicate twitch told me he was on the verge of smiling, and when I grinned at him he grinned back. We stayed like that for a second before his faded, my smile painted by relief as much as joy. Worry replaced his. "Did you really mean what you said…about children? With me?"
"Of course," I said without hesitation. For a moment, I thought he might push his face into my chest again, sheltering against me, but he didn't. Instead his hands slid up my back from their awkward posts by my sides and he pulled my shoulders slightly down, tilting his face up. Our foreheads met before our lips did.
"It was impossible to believe, Bella—I just…"
"You can't complete a sentence at all right now, can you," I teased in a low voice, and then our mouths found each other, and he told me exactly what he was thinking.
*****
AN: Thank you to all reviewers—I've found that it's become almost dangerous to check my email, I get so excited about these reviews and start checking my email too often! I can't believe how nice some of the things yall have written are, it blows my mind. Someone also sent me a message saying I'd been nominated for something (totally unbeknownst to me) on the Sort of Beautiful site…and wow! I don't even know what to say about that. If it happens again, will you guys let me know? I spend a lot of time writing and almost no time learning how to use livejournl/fanfictiondotcom/the interwebs. My nerdliness is mostly old school. Anyway. Thank you, so much. This is a lot of fun.