Chapter 17

~Bella~

I hit my screen door like an earthquake, rattling the frame and warping the mesh. The wood groaned, but those newly sturdy hinges held despite the ten trillion pounds of me who barreled into them—freshly oiled and screwed tightly into place by the same hands that had just thrown me loose into the grass. I sagged against the door, flopping onto the porch with air burning in my lungs, head scattered, something boiling hot and fierce in my guts. The ache behind my ribs was worse, so much worse than the throbbing sting of my arm. My arm would bruise for certain. It felt like his million-watt handprint was burned into my skin. But, my heart…

My heart was throbbing like the sad, empty hollow of a gutted goldmine.

The fawn clattered up the steps after me, her eyes wide, her knees knocking, and her ears drooping. She knew we'd done something really bad. I didn't cry until she nosed up against me, then my arms around her as my insides finally reached the point of implosion. I cried myself dry, which happened surprisingly fast, and let the sun start to set around me. It had just touched its belly to the horizon when a crunch of gravel pulled my sticky face out of the fawn's fur.

The slam of the car door sent the fawn running down the backside of the porch toward the garden. I staggered to my feet, brushing my face free of tears, watching Jacob set his hat on his head and peer around the overgrown yard before he headed up the steps toward me.

"Ms. Swan." He took off his ridiculous hat, his head shaved clean. I'd only ever remember him with the long, black silk of hair that hung in his eyes all of our lives. His uniform was so crisp and nice and clean, such a change from the wild, dirty boy who used to throw mud at me and hated bathing more than he hated bedtime.

"You don't have to call me that, you know?"

"Protocol." Jacob shrugged and smiled. "Ask me in; we need to talk."

His eyes skittered toward Edward's house in the distance, narrowing at the corners while his brows pulled down in the middle. His gaze didn't loosen as he shifted it back across my worn-out porch and the ivy swallowing the siding. My red face. The too-short yellow dress. His mouth was as tight as his eyes. He looked funny in the uniform, like he was only playing dress up, though the serious look on his face was a completely different tune.

"Edward's not a problem," I blurted, biting the edge of my tongue on accident when his name got caught up in my mouth. I could taste a sting of blood and winced.

Jacob's eyebrows raised, one cocked just a little higher than the other. "I didn't say nothing bout him. Should I have?" He scanned the length of me: the cop in him looking for obvious signs of trauma, the friend in him looking for more subtle signs of impact. I tucked my arm bearing Edward's supernova handprint behind myself, glaring hard enough to keep him focused on my face instead of the rest of me.

"Don't you dare listen to a single word he says, Jacob. You and I both know he can't keep his damn trap shut." I was gonna give Jasper a piece of my mind, a big piece, the next time he showed up here. Of course he'd run to big brother Jacob. I knew for a fact that Jasper had probably spilled every bean he owned over a six pack, and that was why Jacob was standing here at sundown on a weeknight.

"Jasper ain't the only one talking, Bella." Jacob leaned over to press a hand to the screen door behind me, swinging it open and presenting the empty hallway to me as though he'd brought me a present. "After you."

We sat in the kitchen, and I gave him some water and some strawberries because I couldn't think straight with him sitting there like that. The specter of his former youth was bursting at the seams, the polyester shirt squeezing at his muscles. I was terrified of what he had to say and why he was here. My mind skittered across clumps of grass and clover and tree roots to a spot not nearly far enough away, the small freshly-dug grave hidden between a flagpole and big old empty expanse of nothing.

He didn't waste any time.

"Pickens is getting antsy." He shook his head. "He wants to find the gun."

"Why? She's dead. What does it even matter?"

"Where'd it even come from? I didn't know there was a gun in this house all those years."

"Me neither," I grumbled. "I never saw it. When I got down here, she was... and I didn't exactly have time to stop and look for the damn thing."

Lies taste like rotten strawberries and lead-laced water.

Jacob leaned forward on both elbows, peering hard at my face like he could see into my soul. "You're sure? Think, Bella. Think hard about it; you were right there." He glanced toward the hallway, and his eyes fell back to me, imploring me to play along.

"No shit," I hissed, eyeing him pointedly, knowing he'd remember her well enough. I'd called him over more than a few times to calm her down or at least get me out of here when he couldn't do that. She had more and more moments that were so unhinged from reality that it felt as though she was ripping the fabric of the universe in half. Separating herself with a ragged tear down the middle.

"You know how she was, Jacob. Everything was fine until it wasn't. She flipped. She was just there, right there." I pointed at the hallway, my voice rising and my hands trembling, fanning the flame of something small and half dead into a fury. "I didn't exactly give a shit about how it happened because all of a sudden, it was happening. I don't think I need to describe it for you."

I scowled, feeling some small taste of triumphant victory at the way his face paled around the edges, staring at the hallway. He'd been the first on the scene and found me crouching beside my dead mother, covered in blood. I stared at the hallway, my mouth going dry and my veins shaking. I'd never be able to forget the smell or forget the feel of it. Blood—warm and sticky and thick like maple syrup. My fingerprints were left all over her face and her hands and my neck. It took nine long, labored breaths for the light to slip out of her. Two agonizing minutes for her soul to push up out of the bullet wound in her chest. Five minutes for her grip on my hand to loosen.

Death doesn't come in a moment, instantaneously or rushed.

It comes in a slow motion fog that feels like a millennium has passed in the blink of an eye.

I almost screamed out loud when the fawn appeared suddenly right there in the hallway, glowing around the edges from the sunlight pouring through the open door, standing right over the spot where I'd been replaying my own personal tragedy before my eyes.

"What is that?" Jacob asked, sounding so much like Jasper that I wanted to hit him for it.

The fawn looked to the living room, then up the stairs, before she spotted me in the kitchen. She bounced across the linoleum, oblivious of Jacob, until she was halfway into the room. When she noticed him, she floundered against the slick floor, jumping two feet in the air and clambering wildly for me on a mess of spindly legs. She cowered beneath my chair, peering out from between my ankles. Jacob held a slow, steady hand out toward her, muttering something under his breath.

He was probably cursing my stupidity, but it sounded like he was coaxing her closer.

The fawn tottered forward, stretching her neck and trembling from head to foot, until the moment her nose made contact with Jacob's hand. She lunged forward, pressing up between his knees to rub her face into his stomach and get her ears scratched. It didn't surprise me in the least. He had always been good with wild things.

"This thing probably has fleas," he grumbled, scratching away anyhow. "Should take her to that wildlife rescue out by Dodge City."

"I'm feeding her," I protested.

"Needs more than just feeding, Bells."

"I want her—she's mine. I'm…" I faltered, a spark of something hot and sweet and light in my heart making me tear up a little, the creature almost smiling at me from beneath Jacob's hand. "I'm hers."

"She needs a bath, a good one. And don't give her too many strawberries. It'll make her stomach hurt."

"Noted."

"How's that leg, by the way? Old Man Johnson is a liar, I see; you obviously didn't have to get it amputated." Jacob grinned wryly, shaking his head. "Shoulda known better than to believe that old drunk."

"When people talk, Jacob, you just tell them to shut up. They don't know about anything. Ever." I scowled out the window—town just two miles away but loomed like an empire over my humble, dirty hovel.

Jacob gave a brief rundown of town gossip, which wasn't much considering the less-than-800 population. The Millers had finally gotten a divorce. Stacey Keenan had run off with some boy from Pierre, and rumor was, she was pregnant again. The Newtons were still waiting for their employee to come back to work; they missed her so and sorely needed the help. I glared extra hard at Jacob, clamping my jaw extra tight, until he gave up and went on. The school house needed a new roof, but the lead pipes at the police station were getting worse by the day, and there wasn't much money. Old Mel had cancer. Lisa Reid had a feral cat problem. Oh, and some new fellow had moved into the Jenkins place, next door to the young girl whose mom hadn't even been dead a week, God rest her broken soul. He'd painted his house funny and driven the girl to town once, full leg amputation 'cause her porch caved in.

Verified by the secretary's niece's daughter's boyfriend.

"Goddamn everyone and their talk, Jacob. Just goddamn them," I spit. "He's not what they think he is."

"Yeah, 'bout that guy." Jacob cleared his throat, not looking at me when he spoke. "Honest with you, Bella…" He shrugged. "Fuck everyone. I looked into him; he's clean. Seen some crazy shit in his time, but he's clean."

"Clean?"

"No arrests. No DUI. Not even a damn speeding ticket." He looked at me. "Clean. I think you're safe enough."

My vision went fish-eyed.

Edward spitting flame and vitriol. Edward looming over me like a mountain, unclimbable and potentially lethal. Edward grabbing me hard enough to make my bones yelp and marching me down the stairs like a child. Edward pushing me off the porch so hard all I could do was hit the ground running so I wouldn't fall right on my face.

I shifted in my chair, my skin feeling prickly and hot, trying to hide my arm and the red welts that were blushing my skin. Now, the temptation, the thirst for him was tainted with a hint of trepidation. Fear. Willful, reckless danger. His shell was only the beginning of it, his exterior rubbed raw and scarred. But his insides... I knew for certain that his insides were injured in a way that would warrant unfathomable survival from your physical form. His heart and his head had experienced something no human could withstand, and those kinds of injuries were often the ones that just never healed. Always open. Always weepy. Always oozing blood.

Despite it all, I wanted more. Despite the sharp, venomous fang of fear that tore through me, there was a flicker of something that I couldn't ignore. At a moment when I should have been worried about my mother and the house and what the hell I was going to do with my life, I was worried about not having enough time to figure this guy out before he disappeared.

Or I did.

I spent the night in her room.

Digging.

I didn't know what I was looking for.

Her bed was still made. I threw the doll across the room, and it hit with a thud in the far corner as I climbed onto the mattress. I pulled the velvet throw off the foot of the bed, wrapping it around myself. It still smelled like her. Her, but from far away—a ghost stuck in there just like Edward's had been stuck inside that jacket.

I lay on her bed, reading the dog-eared book from her nightstand as the sky finally went black. Trashy romance, go figure. The deer explored the room around me, tripping over piles of clothing and knocking over the lamp when her legs got tangled in the cord. She sniffed around the edge of the bed, a whine in her throat, until I hauled her up next to me, letting her snuggle close. She was all gangly legs and sharp hooves, smelling like grass and dust.

Jacob was right, she did need a bath.

Morning was creeping across the flatlands, the sky lightening up to deep lavender and blue. We took the green flower soap with us to the stream to wash up and watch the sun rise. It was warm—the air lifting and the birds coming awake, and I scrubbed up the fawn, blissful and still for the first moment in a long time, the water foaming soap lilies around us.

The sight of my arm, the fat purple bruise that was rising up from deep below my skin, peppered with soapy bubbles, ruined everything.

Edward taught me something brand new yesterday when he ripped his jacket from my shoulders. When he grabbed me in the dusty attic full of all of his dead memories and told me to shut up. When he shoved me away. He taught me something I didn't know yet. Now that I did... I couldn't understand how anyone could go through life without knowing it.

Someone else could come along and just plant a seed in you.

They could brush up against you and light a spark. Flick their fingers and send your whole universe tumbling. Without even asking. Without even a warning. In moments that felt like chaos and confusion, they could roll over everything like a wave of atomic heat and just crush all your mundane, boring problems to dust. It felt like licking the sun. Like kissing a falling comet. Like wrapping my arms around a supernova.

I could barely understand how he was able to do that.

To me.

He flung me around like a rag doll, and then he made me leave him there looking like a broken toy. And even though I felt older than every person on earth, as tired as a million-year-old mountain, I knew what he saw. A girl. I was small. Simple. Stuck here with sharp, homemade visions, nothing like his big, world-weary life. I hadn't seen pink beaches, or flower-covered mountains, or even a dead body before, save for one. I'd never been to the kinds of places where children carry guns larger than themselves or where songbirds were replaced by the hawks of war. I only knew about the open prairies: the green storms that blew across them and the way seedlings pushed up through the soil every spring without fail.

I rubbed down the fawn's neck, but all I could feel was his gaze—the scorching-fire one. All I could imagine was his mouth. The scratch of his beard. The dig of his fingers. All I could feel was his breath between my lips. Distracted by his tongue and his nose and his teeth. I thought about his hands, his knuckles and his wrists, and the hardest kinds of work that make hands look the way his did. I thought about his chest, covered in scars as though he'd been caught like a dove in a flurry of shrapnel and stone. I thought about how his jaw always looked clenched around some invisible ache. I thought about his eye, the green one. And that patch over the other.

I had to go back. The guilt was bubbling in my guts, and my heart felt as heavy as a stone dropped into the middle of a big empty ocean. If curiosity killed the cat, I was dead nine times over for that single transgression. The way he'd looked at me… the way his face pulled in at the middle, and his eye went sharp and frigid green like a spring-fresh tree suddenly plunged into the dead of winter… I felt myself shrivel up inside my skin.

All I could hear were those useless newscasters in my ears, warning me to hide, duck, and take cover. Goodnight and good luck. Good thing I didn't care.

Peering at a tsunami wave of destruction through a tiny crack in his dam.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

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HB&PB