Boys With Girlfriends -- Chapter Ten
Title: Boys With Girlfriends
Author: audreyii_fic
Fandom: Twilight (Team Jacob)
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Jacob, Bella, Edward (genderswap)
Genre: Romance/Humor/Angst
Warnings: Bad language and explicit sexuality.
banner courtesy of FatedFeathers
banner courtesy of blink_1nce
Summary: A boy gets dumped by a vampire and a wolfgirl tries to cheer him up. A genderswap rewrite of New Moon and Eclipse. ( Click here to start from the beginning.)
Eclipse Scene Four:
maybe i would've been something you'd be good at / maybe you would have been something I'd be good at
Tegan and Sara, "Call It Off"
Ruth is high as a fucking kite, which she suspects is gonna make this a whole lot easier. Well, easier in the sense of it being a bit more like a kick to the broken ribs, rather than like being dragged over broken glass, which is how she's been feeling lately.
There's a knock at the door, because of course he'd knock on a girl's bedroom door 'cause he'd think that's the right thing to do except it actually means she has to answer when she can't take a deep breath. She draws in the air anyway and it stabs. "Come on in," she calls.
Lucas does. The hesitant expression drops right off his face as his eyes widen. "Jesus, Ruth, you look like shit." She laughs a little, and winces when she does, which makes him turn all white. "Wait, I didn't mean it like that--"
"Yeah, you did," she says. "S'okay. I don't feel too bad. The bloodsucker pumped me full of something-or-other."
"I can come back later if you want--"
"Nah." She gives him a smile. "Let's just get all the rebreaking over with while I'm still numb, okay?"
His face goes even whiter, and Ruth really wishes that made her feel good.
***
It had turned out that Ruth Black sucked at hating Lucas Swan.
She'd tried. She'd tried hard. Whenever she thought about calling she remembered him jumping out of bed, and whenever she thought about going by she remembered him shoving sweatpants into her hands. Thinking like that made her throat close with humiliation and then she'd get generally furious with him for daring to exist in the first place. It wasn't fair, he shouldn't be real, he should've just stayed in Arizona and never turned up at First Beach and he definitely should never, ever have been born with eyes like that. She tried to focus on thinking mean thoughts, like Leah did about Sam, because maybe that'd be better.
Except it had just made her more miserable.
She missed him. She wasn't supposed to miss him. She was supposed to be righteously angry until he apologized for... for... something, Ruth didn't know what exactly, but she was positive there ought to be some groveling coming her way. She shouldn't be thinking about how her garage -- which used to be her place -- felt all empty without him. The lawn chair wasn't a lawn chair anymore, it was his lawn chair, and somehow she couldn't just fold it up and put it away, no matter how many mean things she thought.
So she tried even harder. She'd completely ignored him at that training session with the weird soldier leech and refused to make eye-contact because hmph. Except he ignored her too and... well, shit.
He didn't ignore the bloodsucker. He bent over backwards for it. Of course, it had been made epically clear by that point that Ruth did not rank anywhere near that bitch in Lucas' eyes and that just fuckin' sucked to think about. He'd tossed her out of his bedroom for a corpse. He was gonna become a vampire and it made her want to break things and sob at the same time.
What the fuck was she supposed to do to change his mind? She didn't have anything else.
She'd decided she would just have to keep working at the whole not-giving-a-shit thing.
***
Lucas sits down next to the bed and doesn't look her in the eye, but Ruth's pretty sure that's not because he's avoiding her. He just can't seem to stop staring at her bandages. "Well," he offers after a minute, "I heard you did really great in the battle, aside from the whole getting crushed thing."
"I did," she says proudly. "Kicked ass, took names, all that good stuff."
"Wish I could've seen it."
She'd shrug, but shit that would hurt like hell, painkillers or not. "Sounds like you were pretty busy not getting eaten."
"Yeah, that's true." And there's the smile that made her start falling in love with him in the first place. Even if she'd known what was coming she's pretty sure it would've happened anyway. "I get rescued a lot. It's kind of hard on the ego."
"You're human." Ruth smirks. "And you have weak little Tyrannosaur arms."
He rolls his eyes. "Thanks."
"No problem." These drugs are really awesome. She feels like she's floating a foot or two above her body and maybe is about that removed from this conversation, too. "I'm glad you got rescued, by the way. I wasn't sure you would be. Was your bloodsucker pissed?"
"No," he says. "She actually wasn't mad at all."
Of course not. The perfect little princess leech would never be that aggressive. Ruth throws wrenches but The Girlfriend is just so understanding.
No, wait, not The Girlfriend. The Fiancee.
"I guess that means you're still engaged," says Ruth.
Lucas bites at his lower lip and his shoulders slump. "Yep," he says.
Yeah, like that tone doesn't mean anything. The drugs give Ruth the freedom to say, "I wouldn't do that, you know. I wouldn't make you marry me. I wouldn't care."
"She's not making me."
"Uh-huh."
"She's not."
"Whose idea was it?"
"I asked her."
"So now you want to get married?"
"It doesn't matter one way or another."
"Real romantic."
"Look, it's done, okay?" he snaps, glaring at her. "I asked and it's done. I'm not going back on what I said. I'm a fuck up but I'm not going to do that."
Ruth closes her eyes. A moment later she hears, "Shit. I'm sorry, that was--"
"Nah, forget it." God, that bitch's hooks are in so fuckin' deep. Maybe it was a waste of time to ever try and get them out. Maybe the two of them were screwed right from the very beginning.
"We don't have to talk about it," Lucas says.
Ruth thinks she could get used to this fuzzy feeling. "You got a better topic of conversation?"
Silence.
***
In the tent she'd woken up to the feel of his cock pushing into her lower back. She wasn't all that conscious herself, but she might've shifted up so he was grinding against her ass instead. That had made him grunt in her ear and hold her tighter.
Ruth hadn't known it was possible to get that wet that fast.
After what happened in his bedroom it seemed like a bad idea to encourage him because she'd rather not go through that nightmare again, thanks... but she sure as hell wasn't gonna stop him. She'd closed her eyes and relaxed and thought about how this would be a lot more comfortable if there were a few more sleeping bags, and maybe it wasn't quite as cold, and if his hand were down her shorts the way she'd thought about a million times. She'd been starting to wonder if it would count as rude to get herself off when he'd frozen up and realized what he was doing.
But she'd asked him not to stop and he didn't. He came from just pretending to fuck her and see -- see! -- she'd been right all along, she could give him all kinds of stuff that dead thing couldn't and he'd been stupid to turn her down in the first place and now he would get it and be sorry.
Then she'd been mean to him like she'd been wanting. And it felt terrible instead of good. And she'd cried after he went back to sleep because apparently loving him had opened up this soft squishy thing inside her that made it impossible not to cry when she felt upset or glow when she felt happy or tamp down in general. She missed the days when stuff just rolled off her back. Now everything glomped on, good or bad.
She'd been trying to come up with a way to apologize that wouldn't just fuck things up more when the bloodsucker had oh-so-casually announced that, by the way, it and Lucas were engaged. Lucas, who hated the idea of marriage, was engaged to a vampire.
The hell with apologizing.
***
"So when's it supposed to happen?" Ruth asks.
"Which part?"
"Either."
He sighs. "The wedding's in August. I don't remember which weekend, I'll have to ask."
He doesn't even hear himself. "And dying?"
"After. Don't worry, we'll be in Alaska. It won't violate the treaty."
"Like I give a shit about that." She's getting tired. The whole werewolf healing thing is cool, given that it means she'll only be down for the count for a couple days instead of, y'know, forever, but it's taking every drop of her energy. "I'm guessing that if I ask you not to you're just gonna laugh me off again."
Lucas gives her a look. "I never laughed you off," he says seriously.
Okay, that's fair. "But you're not gonna change your mind, is what I mean. Right?"
He doesn't answer. Instead he does something she really didn't think he had in him -- he reaches over and brushes her hair out of her face. Ruth suspects The Girlfriend would hate that way more than what happened in the tent. "I can't change my mind," he says, and damn he sounds so sad, this is one of the sad days, she wishes she wasn't all banged up so she could hug the sad things out of him. "I don't have a choice. If I did I'd--"
"Uh-huh." Ruth really doesn't want him to finish than sentence. She just stares at the ceiling and thinks morphine-y thoughts. "We're exactly right for each other, though. It would've been really easy. I mean, you picked up on that, yeah?"
"Yeah," he says.
To Ruth's surprise that makes it a little better, instead of a lot worse. "I love you." It's still easy to say. "But I kinda think... maybe we should have a long distance friendship for awhile." That part's not easy to say.
"Alaska is long distance."
They're not gonna be friends after that, though. Not ever again, 'cause he'll be dead and Ruth's pretty sure if she sees her best friend all sparkly then she'll just break inside and never ever get better. "Well, long distance even before then. But maybe we'll see each other before the whole wedding thing. Once, at least." She really wants to see him one more time, when she's not stoned and maybe can say goodbye for real.
"Once," he echoes hollowly.
This all feels like the stuff she's supposed to be doing that'll make things better in the long run. Band-aid ripping and shit like that.
Except it just doesn't feel right at all.
***
It took until Ruth tightened the suicide screws in Lucas before she'd realized how much she didn't want to be treated like The Girlfriend. But she'd been out of ideas and had all this poison inside her and was thinking that she shouldn't be the one carrying it since it was his poison and it oughta stay with him, but didn't feel right or good or anything Ruth had hoped it would, and how the fuck did the bloodsucker get off on putting that look on his face? It was all messed up and Ruth only ever wanted to take those things away , not pile them on. Hurting him only hurt her back and maybe that was what being in love did to you.
She didn't want what The Girlfriend had with Lucas because, as it turned out, what The Girlfriend had with Lucas sucked.
But Ruth was absolutely one-hundred-percent fuckin' positive that Lucas didn't kiss The Girlfriend like that. Not the crappy weak one, or the pissed off hot one, but the one after that, the one where he'd kissed her like he seriously never wanted to stop. Like he loved her back.
And when he'd finally let her go he'd looked at her that way, too. Like he loved her back.
I gotta go, she'd said.
Uh-huh, he'd said. All wide-eyed and stunned. Like he loved her back.
The run was nothing, the newborns were nothing, she paid attention with her instincts but her human mind was up on a mountain top--
--and that had probably been how she ended up getting half her body crushed. Which, in addition to hurting like a bitch had the nasty side effect of bringing her back down to earth, where he loved her back but that didn't mean anything had changed.
***
She wants to stay awake so he'll stick around, but it's not gonna happen. Either the staying awake part or the sticking around part.
"I've got to go," Lucas says, leaning back away from her, "and you look like you're gonna pass out any second."
Ruth nods.
It's really obvious when he swallows. "But I can come back, right? Before?"
"Mm-hmm." She closes her eyes and turns her head away which is the best she can do 'cause she can't roll onto her side. "S'all right if I skip out on the wedding, yeah? Don't have a dress that fits."
There's sort of a smothered laugh, but it's not really all that funny.
She listens to him get up and how the chair scrapes across the floor and she wants to say something, explain that if he changes his mind then she'll be here right until the second his heart stops beating since fuck, where else would she be? But she doesn't because it's a mean guilt trip, and she's already been mean enough lately considering she knows that even though he's getting it all wrong it's because he's trying to get it right.
She can't win, and she can't hate him, so the next step is trying to let it go. Ruth's really not sure she'll be any better at that than she's been at the other stuff, but it's worth a shot.
"It probably doesn't matter," says Lucas, "but I love you too."
"Yeah," she says, "but I love you more."
He leaves, and for the next five minutes or so before she falls asleep Ruth reflects on the fact that yeah, fuck, letting go's gonna fail just as hard as everything else.
***
Next: Optional Scene (The Garage Again)
Author: audreyii_fic
Fandom: Twilight (Team Jacob)
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Jacob, Bella, Edward (genderswap)
Genre: Romance/Humor/Angst
Warnings: Bad language and explicit sexuality.
banner courtesy of FatedFeathers
banner courtesy of blink_1nce
Summary: A boy gets dumped by a vampire and a wolfgirl tries to cheer him up. A genderswap rewrite of New Moon and Eclipse. ( Click here to start from the beginning.)
Eclipse Scene Four:
maybe i would've been something you'd be good at / maybe you would have been something I'd be good at
Tegan and Sara, "Call It Off"
Ruth is high as a fucking kite, which she suspects is gonna make this a whole lot easier. Well, easier in the sense of it being a bit more like a kick to the broken ribs, rather than like being dragged over broken glass, which is how she's been feeling lately.
There's a knock at the door, because of course he'd knock on a girl's bedroom door 'cause he'd think that's the right thing to do except it actually means she has to answer when she can't take a deep breath. She draws in the air anyway and it stabs. "Come on in," she calls.
Lucas does. The hesitant expression drops right off his face as his eyes widen. "Jesus, Ruth, you look like shit." She laughs a little, and winces when she does, which makes him turn all white. "Wait, I didn't mean it like that--"
"Yeah, you did," she says. "S'okay. I don't feel too bad. The bloodsucker pumped me full of something-or-other."
"I can come back later if you want--"
"Nah." She gives him a smile. "Let's just get all the rebreaking over with while I'm still numb, okay?"
His face goes even whiter, and Ruth really wishes that made her feel good.
***
It had turned out that Ruth Black sucked at hating Lucas Swan.
She'd tried. She'd tried hard. Whenever she thought about calling she remembered him jumping out of bed, and whenever she thought about going by she remembered him shoving sweatpants into her hands. Thinking like that made her throat close with humiliation and then she'd get generally furious with him for daring to exist in the first place. It wasn't fair, he shouldn't be real, he should've just stayed in Arizona and never turned up at First Beach and he definitely should never, ever have been born with eyes like that. She tried to focus on thinking mean thoughts, like Leah did about Sam, because maybe that'd be better.
Except it had just made her more miserable.
She missed him. She wasn't supposed to miss him. She was supposed to be righteously angry until he apologized for... for... something, Ruth didn't know what exactly, but she was positive there ought to be some groveling coming her way. She shouldn't be thinking about how her garage -- which used to be her place -- felt all empty without him. The lawn chair wasn't a lawn chair anymore, it was his lawn chair, and somehow she couldn't just fold it up and put it away, no matter how many mean things she thought.
So she tried even harder. She'd completely ignored him at that training session with the weird soldier leech and refused to make eye-contact because hmph. Except he ignored her too and... well, shit.
He didn't ignore the bloodsucker. He bent over backwards for it. Of course, it had been made epically clear by that point that Ruth did not rank anywhere near that bitch in Lucas' eyes and that just fuckin' sucked to think about. He'd tossed her out of his bedroom for a corpse. He was gonna become a vampire and it made her want to break things and sob at the same time.
What the fuck was she supposed to do to change his mind? She didn't have anything else.
She'd decided she would just have to keep working at the whole not-giving-a-shit thing.
***
Lucas sits down next to the bed and doesn't look her in the eye, but Ruth's pretty sure that's not because he's avoiding her. He just can't seem to stop staring at her bandages. "Well," he offers after a minute, "I heard you did really great in the battle, aside from the whole getting crushed thing."
"I did," she says proudly. "Kicked ass, took names, all that good stuff."
"Wish I could've seen it."
She'd shrug, but shit that would hurt like hell, painkillers or not. "Sounds like you were pretty busy not getting eaten."
"Yeah, that's true." And there's the smile that made her start falling in love with him in the first place. Even if she'd known what was coming she's pretty sure it would've happened anyway. "I get rescued a lot. It's kind of hard on the ego."
"You're human." Ruth smirks. "And you have weak little Tyrannosaur arms."
He rolls his eyes. "Thanks."
"No problem." These drugs are really awesome. She feels like she's floating a foot or two above her body and maybe is about that removed from this conversation, too. "I'm glad you got rescued, by the way. I wasn't sure you would be. Was your bloodsucker pissed?"
"No," he says. "She actually wasn't mad at all."
Of course not. The perfect little princess leech would never be that aggressive. Ruth throws wrenches but The Girlfriend is just so understanding.
No, wait, not The Girlfriend. The Fiancee.
"I guess that means you're still engaged," says Ruth.
Lucas bites at his lower lip and his shoulders slump. "Yep," he says.
Yeah, like that tone doesn't mean anything. The drugs give Ruth the freedom to say, "I wouldn't do that, you know. I wouldn't make you marry me. I wouldn't care."
"She's not making me."
"Uh-huh."
"She's not."
"Whose idea was it?"
"I asked her."
"So now you want to get married?"
"It doesn't matter one way or another."
"Real romantic."
"Look, it's done, okay?" he snaps, glaring at her. "I asked and it's done. I'm not going back on what I said. I'm a fuck up but I'm not going to do that."
Ruth closes her eyes. A moment later she hears, "Shit. I'm sorry, that was--"
"Nah, forget it." God, that bitch's hooks are in so fuckin' deep. Maybe it was a waste of time to ever try and get them out. Maybe the two of them were screwed right from the very beginning.
"We don't have to talk about it," Lucas says.
Ruth thinks she could get used to this fuzzy feeling. "You got a better topic of conversation?"
Silence.
***
In the tent she'd woken up to the feel of his cock pushing into her lower back. She wasn't all that conscious herself, but she might've shifted up so he was grinding against her ass instead. That had made him grunt in her ear and hold her tighter.
Ruth hadn't known it was possible to get that wet that fast.
After what happened in his bedroom it seemed like a bad idea to encourage him because she'd rather not go through that nightmare again, thanks... but she sure as hell wasn't gonna stop him. She'd closed her eyes and relaxed and thought about how this would be a lot more comfortable if there were a few more sleeping bags, and maybe it wasn't quite as cold, and if his hand were down her shorts the way she'd thought about a million times. She'd been starting to wonder if it would count as rude to get herself off when he'd frozen up and realized what he was doing.
But she'd asked him not to stop and he didn't. He came from just pretending to fuck her and see -- see! -- she'd been right all along, she could give him all kinds of stuff that dead thing couldn't and he'd been stupid to turn her down in the first place and now he would get it and be sorry.
Then she'd been mean to him like she'd been wanting. And it felt terrible instead of good. And she'd cried after he went back to sleep because apparently loving him had opened up this soft squishy thing inside her that made it impossible not to cry when she felt upset or glow when she felt happy or tamp down in general. She missed the days when stuff just rolled off her back. Now everything glomped on, good or bad.
She'd been trying to come up with a way to apologize that wouldn't just fuck things up more when the bloodsucker had oh-so-casually announced that, by the way, it and Lucas were engaged. Lucas, who hated the idea of marriage, was engaged to a vampire.
The hell with apologizing.
***
"So when's it supposed to happen?" Ruth asks.
"Which part?"
"Either."
He sighs. "The wedding's in August. I don't remember which weekend, I'll have to ask."
He doesn't even hear himself. "And dying?"
"After. Don't worry, we'll be in Alaska. It won't violate the treaty."
"Like I give a shit about that." She's getting tired. The whole werewolf healing thing is cool, given that it means she'll only be down for the count for a couple days instead of, y'know, forever, but it's taking every drop of her energy. "I'm guessing that if I ask you not to you're just gonna laugh me off again."
Lucas gives her a look. "I never laughed you off," he says seriously.
Okay, that's fair. "But you're not gonna change your mind, is what I mean. Right?"
He doesn't answer. Instead he does something she really didn't think he had in him -- he reaches over and brushes her hair out of her face. Ruth suspects The Girlfriend would hate that way more than what happened in the tent. "I can't change my mind," he says, and damn he sounds so sad, this is one of the sad days, she wishes she wasn't all banged up so she could hug the sad things out of him. "I don't have a choice. If I did I'd--"
"Uh-huh." Ruth really doesn't want him to finish than sentence. She just stares at the ceiling and thinks morphine-y thoughts. "We're exactly right for each other, though. It would've been really easy. I mean, you picked up on that, yeah?"
"Yeah," he says.
To Ruth's surprise that makes it a little better, instead of a lot worse. "I love you." It's still easy to say. "But I kinda think... maybe we should have a long distance friendship for awhile." That part's not easy to say.
"Alaska is long distance."
They're not gonna be friends after that, though. Not ever again, 'cause he'll be dead and Ruth's pretty sure if she sees her best friend all sparkly then she'll just break inside and never ever get better. "Well, long distance even before then. But maybe we'll see each other before the whole wedding thing. Once, at least." She really wants to see him one more time, when she's not stoned and maybe can say goodbye for real.
"Once," he echoes hollowly.
This all feels like the stuff she's supposed to be doing that'll make things better in the long run. Band-aid ripping and shit like that.
Except it just doesn't feel right at all.
***
It took until Ruth tightened the suicide screws in Lucas before she'd realized how much she didn't want to be treated like The Girlfriend. But she'd been out of ideas and had all this poison inside her and was thinking that she shouldn't be the one carrying it since it was his poison and it oughta stay with him, but didn't feel right or good or anything Ruth had hoped it would, and how the fuck did the bloodsucker get off on putting that look on his face? It was all messed up and Ruth only ever wanted to take those things away , not pile them on. Hurting him only hurt her back and maybe that was what being in love did to you.
She didn't want what The Girlfriend had with Lucas because, as it turned out, what The Girlfriend had with Lucas sucked.
But Ruth was absolutely one-hundred-percent fuckin' positive that Lucas didn't kiss The Girlfriend like that. Not the crappy weak one, or the pissed off hot one, but the one after that, the one where he'd kissed her like he seriously never wanted to stop. Like he loved her back.
And when he'd finally let her go he'd looked at her that way, too. Like he loved her back.
I gotta go, she'd said.
Uh-huh, he'd said. All wide-eyed and stunned. Like he loved her back.
The run was nothing, the newborns were nothing, she paid attention with her instincts but her human mind was up on a mountain top--
--and that had probably been how she ended up getting half her body crushed. Which, in addition to hurting like a bitch had the nasty side effect of bringing her back down to earth, where he loved her back but that didn't mean anything had changed.
***
She wants to stay awake so he'll stick around, but it's not gonna happen. Either the staying awake part or the sticking around part.
"I've got to go," Lucas says, leaning back away from her, "and you look like you're gonna pass out any second."
Ruth nods.
It's really obvious when he swallows. "But I can come back, right? Before?"
"Mm-hmm." She closes her eyes and turns her head away which is the best she can do 'cause she can't roll onto her side. "S'all right if I skip out on the wedding, yeah? Don't have a dress that fits."
There's sort of a smothered laugh, but it's not really all that funny.
She listens to him get up and how the chair scrapes across the floor and she wants to say something, explain that if he changes his mind then she'll be here right until the second his heart stops beating since fuck, where else would she be? But she doesn't because it's a mean guilt trip, and she's already been mean enough lately considering she knows that even though he's getting it all wrong it's because he's trying to get it right.
She can't win, and she can't hate him, so the next step is trying to let it go. Ruth's really not sure she'll be any better at that than she's been at the other stuff, but it's worth a shot.
"It probably doesn't matter," says Lucas, "but I love you too."
"Yeah," she says, "but I love you more."
He leaves, and for the next five minutes or so before she falls asleep Ruth reflects on the fact that yeah, fuck, letting go's gonna fail just as hard as everything else.
***
Next: Optional Scene (The Garage Again)