it was you, breathless and tall
Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture a jail-break
And a recreation.
- Margaret Atwood, Snow
Jenny and the entire Sparrow family is invited to Sam and Emily’s wedding - and not, Jenny thinks, just because they happened to be second cousins to the Uley’s on her father’s side.
“You’re Pack now,” Sam tells her, quite simply, as if it’s obvious.
And maybe it is. Maybe it has been ever since that afternoon, months ago now, that she came home with donuts for her younger brothers and instead found two huge wolves in her living room, one a dark silvery grey like the bark of an ash tree, the other a mix of yellow and reddish fur, closer to a maple leaf. The box of donuts had dropped from her nerveless fingers; she stood there, numb and frozen, as the wolves lunged towards her - no, towards the box.
It was the way the wolves nosed through the box, the way they growled and snapped at each other over a Boston Cream, that tipped her off.
“Brady? Colin?” Her voice rose and cracked, and she felt inexplicably like crying. “What happened to you?”
The council of tribal elders explain it all. She rearranges the past few weeks in her head, and they start to make slightly more sense. That was why the strange disappearances, the growth spurts and the haircuts, the ever-increasing numbers of Sam Uley’s little band. Why they all missed the same days of school, Jacob and Quil and…
Embry.
Embry is… her mind fumbles for the right words. Helpful. Attentive. They had started running into each more and more often, especially since they usually happened to visit Billy at the same time over the summer, before Jacob came home. Embry had showed up a number of times, without a word, to escort her to her new job at the Crazy Horse Art and Supplies, even though it was within walking distance. He never complained about how early her shift started, either.
These mornings walks are the best part of her weekend shifts. She drinks green tea from a blue Thermos and sometimes he takes a sip. Sometimes they talk, brief murmurs and noises, syllables shifting like young leaves, like small breezes stirring the surface of a pond. Most of the time they just walk side by side, sharing the silence. Listening to the wind. Comfortable and unburdened by conversation.
Lately, he’s started walking her home from her after school shifts. It’s nice, she thinks, her heart thudding distantly, as if outside of her chest, to have a friend who’s a - a boy, a boy who understands things, who doesn’t make her tongue feel thick and clumsy in her throat, who doesn’t ask awkward questions, like -
“Are you going to eat that?”
Jenny starts. Brady and Colin, on her right, are both eyeing her plate of food, where half her roasted chicken and most of her scalloped potatoes are left over. If they had tails, she thinks, they would be wagging them.
She pushes the plate over to them. “Have at it,” she says, and they do so enthusiastically, almost immediately fighting over how to divide the remaining chicken.
Her father next to her drums his fingers on the white tablecloth, next to his glass of red wine. His collar is an almost icy white, perfectly starched and ironed, and his black suit is impeccable. He is not even pretending to pay attention to the conversation that his wife is having with one of the other wedding guests, another distant relative of the Uleys.
re you going to eat that?y gs, who doesn'tantly, as if outside of her chest, to have a friend.r everything or, more often, they
He catches Jenny staring at his drumming fingers and instantly stills them.
“Isn’t this a nice wedding,” he says stiffly, a statement more than a question.
Jenny inclines her head, a half nod, and turns away without a word. Beside her, she can feel her father let out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief at not being forced to make small talk. She sees the flash of gold out of the corner of her as he checks his watch for the sixth time.
The dishes are cleared away, and soon after - Brady and Colin make little growls of disappointment - and desert comes. Again, blindly, she pushes her plate of wedding cake towards her younger brothers.
She finds it easy to go hours without speaking; instead, she concentrates on remembering everything - the gleam of lights on the sea green dresses of the bridesmaids, the way her brothers split open the moist yellow flesh of the wedding cake, the way Emily’s veil settles over her dark hair like a cloud, the evening sky, perfectly clear for once, indigo blue melting into light blue melting into the palest of greens, and the way Jacob…
Jacob.
She tucks his name into a quiet corner of her mind, and tells it to stay there. To just stop disturbing her.
The music is starting already, and Sam and Emily step out onto the green to take their first dance as husband and wife, and she’s surprised by the crushing feeling around her rib cage and chest, as if her heart itself is being bruised. It hurts to look at them. It hurts to look away. The way they are looking at each other, the power of that look, the intensity of it, blue shivering, electric, it almost reminds her of Jacob and B -
Jenny finds herself stumbling to her feet. “Washroom,” she mumbles.
Her brothers are attacking third and fourth helpings of cake. Her mother is still talking to her neighbour. Her father lifts his hand carelessly, Go on.
Emily and Sam’s house is small, and unlighted, and mercifully empty. She finds herself simply standing in the middle of their living room, breathing in the smell of lemon polish and warm cookies.
Five minutes, she thinks numbly. Five minutes is all I need.
Maybe ten. Or fifteen.
She turns around, to face the music - and there is Embry.
She stands there, foolishly. Her eyes goes to work immediately, noticing how clean his lines are in a tuxedo, not awkward and straining, the way Quil or Paul look in theirs. Her mind goes to work mentally shading in the slightly ruffled edges and not quite perfectly symmetry of his black bow tie, getting down the nodding heads of the black buttons of his vest.
She doesn’t dare let herself look at his face.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she breathes.
He settles himself onto Emily’s blue sofa, with that same, unconscious grace that he and his brothers all share.
“… Jared brought out his guitar,” Embry says, as if this explains everything, like how he witnessed Jenny’s face darken and crumple, and then how he followed her slight, pale form as it fled into the tiny house. “He wrote a song for Sam and Emily. Mostly for Sam, though, I think.”
… Jenny feels the corner of her mouth twitch, slightly. She remembers the days when Jared was - wooing, to put it tactfully - Kim, how he serenaded her wherever she went, to her great mortification.
“Seth’s probably got it on video tape,” he says, still in that same, light tone. “You can watch it later.”
“I think I will,” she says, and finds herself sinking into an arm chair that’s a warm dusty rose colour, covered with doilies. She slips out of her sandals, and tucks her feet beneath her, as if she is a child.
She looks up and is conscious of Embry’s eyes on her, not with that easy teasing expression that he had just used to talk about Jared, but a look of steady, intense focus, like she’s an origami animal, a paper crane, that he’s trying to ever so carefully unfold.
“So how did Seth get stuck with video tape duty?” she asks, her voice sounding higher to herself, than usual.
“It was Alan’s turn, really,” he says, referring to the newest of the Pack brothers, “but he dragged Anne onto the dance floor and passed the camera off to Seth.” Anne was Alan’s twin, and Jenny’s friend - Jenny worked at the art store of Alan and Anne’s father. She had relied on the thought of being able to sit out on the dances and be a wallflower with Anne, but if Alan had gotten her to dance, there was no way Jenny would be allowed sit out.
“Seth will get him back later,” Jenny says. “He always - ”
“You look nice.”
The sudden change in conversation makes Jenny jump. “… You too,” she says, honestly. “But -” she reaches up to touch her hair, which is swept up with a few silver combs, for once. Her head feels oddly heavy, “ - do you think it’s too much, or - ”
“It’s perfect,” Embry says, simply, with that same focused intensity as before.
Her hand drops. It goes from her hair to the edges of her gown - a cream coloured tea dress from a thrift store in Seattle. She’d fixed the lace collar herself.
“… Thanks.” Then she says, softly, quickly, so that she doesn’t have time to be a coward, “Do you think we could just - stay here, for a bit? I don’t feel like going - out there - ”
“Of course.” The calm of Embry’s voice seems to soak into her bones; she finds herself sinking back into her chair, her muscles actually relaxing for the first time all night. “Of course.”
~
They step out of the house what feels like ages after. She stumbles a bit, upon her high heeled sandals; Embry catches her arm, and doesn’t let go. His hand slides down until it touches her own, and then he turns to her with that smile that’s becoming as familiar to her as the lines of her own palm, the veins in her wrist; that brief, leaf’s edge of a smile, flickering, shy. The smile that makes him look a boy again, instead of a man who’s been forced to grow up too fast.
“Dance with me?” he says.
She tries to tug her hand out of his, and fails - stupid werewolf strength - and says, panicked, “You promised not to make me!”
“I promised no such thing,” he says, amused. “Look - they have a real band now, not just Jared.”
She wants to say, I always sit out. I don’t dance. I really don’t - and maybe that’s what stops her more than anything.
… She is finally tired of saying no.
“One song, only."
“One song,” he agrees.
It’s all very good and well to finally say yes, but this dancing is an awkward business. She feels tiny next to him, her wrist seeming almost fragile in his grip. The humour fades from his face, which settles into that intense look again, slow and wordless, spreading like heat, and she can’t break it with a clumsy word, with a joke. This is the first silence that she doesn’t know how to handle. She doesn’t know where to look - not up at him, but she can’t look at where Sam and Emily are sitting at their nearby table, Emily with her head on Sam’s shoulder, glowing, content. She can’t even let her gaze wander towards the rather large group right next to them, tuxedo’d Pack brothers tussling and out drinking each other; she tries not to look at them too closely, to not pick out one specifically. Nowhere can she see Anne.
“Jacob left already,” Embry murmurs, and she almost freezes in his arms right then and there, but he’s not looking at her, he’s looking at the same table, and Jenny sees - Ah. She follows his line of sight and sees Quil Ateara, with a tiny girl in a white flowered dress perched on his shoulders. One of Emily Young’s - Emily Uley’s nieces, she thinks. Claire.
Oh, Quil. Wonderful, noisy, ridiculous Quil, with his laughter and his sparking grins and his run on mouth and his swinging arms.
She looks up, into Embry’s face -
And a great many things fall into place.
“Oh,” Jenny says, softly. “Oh.”
Embry looks down at her and she feels his grip suddenly tighten around her wrists, as if he’s remembered that she’s there, and that hunted look that he gets sometimes flickers wildly across his face before he shuts it down with a strained smile that seems to shut off whatever glow was in his face before.
“Yes?” he says.
Like in a dream, she slips one of her hands out of his - and touches the side of his face, very lightly. Neither of them are even pretending to dance anymore. Instead, they stand on the green lawn, Embry looking as if he wants nothing more to run away and hide, and Jenny with her heart blown wide open by the secret that she had carried the whole time without even quite knowing it herself.
Quil.
“So that’s who you belong to,” she says.
“I don’t - ” He sounds clumsy for once. “I - ”
“So you really do understand.” What it means to live, and love in silence, what it means to choke on the sounds of your own sobs in the middle of the night, before anyone else can hear.
Jacob came back, she thinks, distantly, but he never really came back.
Maybe you never really do.
“I - ”
Maybe it’s okay if you can’t.
She steps on the very tip of toes, straining - all these wolf boys are so tall - and very carefully, presses her lips against his. The touch is brief, like a dried flower settling on a page. When she comes back to earth, her heels settling on the ground beneath her, she knows that nothing has changed, really.
But everything has changed.
“I understand,” she says.
Later on, it rains. Everyone runs underneath the huge white tents set up just in case this should happen. Jenny stands at the very edge of one of these tents, almost leaning into the rain, and Embry stands beside her. He slips his jacket around shoulders, and then, with a courteous slowness, slips one of his arms around her waist.
Inside the tent, people continue drinking, eating, laughing, and dancing, but Jenny and Embry just keep staring into the rain. Watching the heavens pour down.
That night, they don’t dance with each other again. But they don’t dance with anyone else, either.
end.
.
The optic heart must venture a jail-break
And a recreation.
- Margaret Atwood, Snow
Jenny and the entire Sparrow family is invited to Sam and Emily’s wedding - and not, Jenny thinks, just because they happened to be second cousins to the Uley’s on her father’s side.
“You’re Pack now,” Sam tells her, quite simply, as if it’s obvious.
And maybe it is. Maybe it has been ever since that afternoon, months ago now, that she came home with donuts for her younger brothers and instead found two huge wolves in her living room, one a dark silvery grey like the bark of an ash tree, the other a mix of yellow and reddish fur, closer to a maple leaf. The box of donuts had dropped from her nerveless fingers; she stood there, numb and frozen, as the wolves lunged towards her - no, towards the box.
It was the way the wolves nosed through the box, the way they growled and snapped at each other over a Boston Cream, that tipped her off.
“Brady? Colin?” Her voice rose and cracked, and she felt inexplicably like crying. “What happened to you?”
The council of tribal elders explain it all. She rearranges the past few weeks in her head, and they start to make slightly more sense. That was why the strange disappearances, the growth spurts and the haircuts, the ever-increasing numbers of Sam Uley’s little band. Why they all missed the same days of school, Jacob and Quil and…
Embry.
Embry is… her mind fumbles for the right words. Helpful. Attentive. They had started running into each more and more often, especially since they usually happened to visit Billy at the same time over the summer, before Jacob came home. Embry had showed up a number of times, without a word, to escort her to her new job at the Crazy Horse Art and Supplies, even though it was within walking distance. He never complained about how early her shift started, either.
These mornings walks are the best part of her weekend shifts. She drinks green tea from a blue Thermos and sometimes he takes a sip. Sometimes they talk, brief murmurs and noises, syllables shifting like young leaves, like small breezes stirring the surface of a pond. Most of the time they just walk side by side, sharing the silence. Listening to the wind. Comfortable and unburdened by conversation.
Lately, he’s started walking her home from her after school shifts. It’s nice, she thinks, her heart thudding distantly, as if outside of her chest, to have a friend who’s a - a boy, a boy who understands things, who doesn’t make her tongue feel thick and clumsy in her throat, who doesn’t ask awkward questions, like -
“Are you going to eat that?”
Jenny starts. Brady and Colin, on her right, are both eyeing her plate of food, where half her roasted chicken and most of her scalloped potatoes are left over. If they had tails, she thinks, they would be wagging them.
She pushes the plate over to them. “Have at it,” she says, and they do so enthusiastically, almost immediately fighting over how to divide the remaining chicken.
Her father next to her drums his fingers on the white tablecloth, next to his glass of red wine. His collar is an almost icy white, perfectly starched and ironed, and his black suit is impeccable. He is not even pretending to pay attention to the conversation that his wife is having with one of the other wedding guests, another distant relative of the Uleys.
re you going to eat that?y gs, who doesn'tantly, as if outside of her chest, to have a friend.r everything or, more often, they
He catches Jenny staring at his drumming fingers and instantly stills them.
“Isn’t this a nice wedding,” he says stiffly, a statement more than a question.
Jenny inclines her head, a half nod, and turns away without a word. Beside her, she can feel her father let out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief at not being forced to make small talk. She sees the flash of gold out of the corner of her as he checks his watch for the sixth time.
The dishes are cleared away, and soon after - Brady and Colin make little growls of disappointment - and desert comes. Again, blindly, she pushes her plate of wedding cake towards her younger brothers.
She finds it easy to go hours without speaking; instead, she concentrates on remembering everything - the gleam of lights on the sea green dresses of the bridesmaids, the way her brothers split open the moist yellow flesh of the wedding cake, the way Emily’s veil settles over her dark hair like a cloud, the evening sky, perfectly clear for once, indigo blue melting into light blue melting into the palest of greens, and the way Jacob…
Jacob.
She tucks his name into a quiet corner of her mind, and tells it to stay there. To just stop disturbing her.
The music is starting already, and Sam and Emily step out onto the green to take their first dance as husband and wife, and she’s surprised by the crushing feeling around her rib cage and chest, as if her heart itself is being bruised. It hurts to look at them. It hurts to look away. The way they are looking at each other, the power of that look, the intensity of it, blue shivering, electric, it almost reminds her of Jacob and B -
Jenny finds herself stumbling to her feet. “Washroom,” she mumbles.
Her brothers are attacking third and fourth helpings of cake. Her mother is still talking to her neighbour. Her father lifts his hand carelessly, Go on.
Emily and Sam’s house is small, and unlighted, and mercifully empty. She finds herself simply standing in the middle of their living room, breathing in the smell of lemon polish and warm cookies.
Five minutes, she thinks numbly. Five minutes is all I need.
Maybe ten. Or fifteen.
She turns around, to face the music - and there is Embry.
She stands there, foolishly. Her eyes goes to work immediately, noticing how clean his lines are in a tuxedo, not awkward and straining, the way Quil or Paul look in theirs. Her mind goes to work mentally shading in the slightly ruffled edges and not quite perfectly symmetry of his black bow tie, getting down the nodding heads of the black buttons of his vest.
She doesn’t dare let herself look at his face.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she breathes.
He settles himself onto Emily’s blue sofa, with that same, unconscious grace that he and his brothers all share.
“… Jared brought out his guitar,” Embry says, as if this explains everything, like how he witnessed Jenny’s face darken and crumple, and then how he followed her slight, pale form as it fled into the tiny house. “He wrote a song for Sam and Emily. Mostly for Sam, though, I think.”
… Jenny feels the corner of her mouth twitch, slightly. She remembers the days when Jared was - wooing, to put it tactfully - Kim, how he serenaded her wherever she went, to her great mortification.
“Seth’s probably got it on video tape,” he says, still in that same, light tone. “You can watch it later.”
“I think I will,” she says, and finds herself sinking into an arm chair that’s a warm dusty rose colour, covered with doilies. She slips out of her sandals, and tucks her feet beneath her, as if she is a child.
She looks up and is conscious of Embry’s eyes on her, not with that easy teasing expression that he had just used to talk about Jared, but a look of steady, intense focus, like she’s an origami animal, a paper crane, that he’s trying to ever so carefully unfold.
“So how did Seth get stuck with video tape duty?” she asks, her voice sounding higher to herself, than usual.
“It was Alan’s turn, really,” he says, referring to the newest of the Pack brothers, “but he dragged Anne onto the dance floor and passed the camera off to Seth.” Anne was Alan’s twin, and Jenny’s friend - Jenny worked at the art store of Alan and Anne’s father. She had relied on the thought of being able to sit out on the dances and be a wallflower with Anne, but if Alan had gotten her to dance, there was no way Jenny would be allowed sit out.
“Seth will get him back later,” Jenny says. “He always - ”
“You look nice.”
The sudden change in conversation makes Jenny jump. “… You too,” she says, honestly. “But -” she reaches up to touch her hair, which is swept up with a few silver combs, for once. Her head feels oddly heavy, “ - do you think it’s too much, or - ”
“It’s perfect,” Embry says, simply, with that same focused intensity as before.
Her hand drops. It goes from her hair to the edges of her gown - a cream coloured tea dress from a thrift store in Seattle. She’d fixed the lace collar herself.
“… Thanks.” Then she says, softly, quickly, so that she doesn’t have time to be a coward, “Do you think we could just - stay here, for a bit? I don’t feel like going - out there - ”
“Of course.” The calm of Embry’s voice seems to soak into her bones; she finds herself sinking back into her chair, her muscles actually relaxing for the first time all night. “Of course.”
~
They step out of the house what feels like ages after. She stumbles a bit, upon her high heeled sandals; Embry catches her arm, and doesn’t let go. His hand slides down until it touches her own, and then he turns to her with that smile that’s becoming as familiar to her as the lines of her own palm, the veins in her wrist; that brief, leaf’s edge of a smile, flickering, shy. The smile that makes him look a boy again, instead of a man who’s been forced to grow up too fast.
“Dance with me?” he says.
She tries to tug her hand out of his, and fails - stupid werewolf strength - and says, panicked, “You promised not to make me!”
“I promised no such thing,” he says, amused. “Look - they have a real band now, not just Jared.”
She wants to say, I always sit out. I don’t dance. I really don’t - and maybe that’s what stops her more than anything.
… She is finally tired of saying no.
“One song, only."
“One song,” he agrees.
It’s all very good and well to finally say yes, but this dancing is an awkward business. She feels tiny next to him, her wrist seeming almost fragile in his grip. The humour fades from his face, which settles into that intense look again, slow and wordless, spreading like heat, and she can’t break it with a clumsy word, with a joke. This is the first silence that she doesn’t know how to handle. She doesn’t know where to look - not up at him, but she can’t look at where Sam and Emily are sitting at their nearby table, Emily with her head on Sam’s shoulder, glowing, content. She can’t even let her gaze wander towards the rather large group right next to them, tuxedo’d Pack brothers tussling and out drinking each other; she tries not to look at them too closely, to not pick out one specifically. Nowhere can she see Anne.
“Jacob left already,” Embry murmurs, and she almost freezes in his arms right then and there, but he’s not looking at her, he’s looking at the same table, and Jenny sees - Ah. She follows his line of sight and sees Quil Ateara, with a tiny girl in a white flowered dress perched on his shoulders. One of Emily Young’s - Emily Uley’s nieces, she thinks. Claire.
Oh, Quil. Wonderful, noisy, ridiculous Quil, with his laughter and his sparking grins and his run on mouth and his swinging arms.
She looks up, into Embry’s face -
And a great many things fall into place.
“Oh,” Jenny says, softly. “Oh.”
Embry looks down at her and she feels his grip suddenly tighten around her wrists, as if he’s remembered that she’s there, and that hunted look that he gets sometimes flickers wildly across his face before he shuts it down with a strained smile that seems to shut off whatever glow was in his face before.
“Yes?” he says.
Like in a dream, she slips one of her hands out of his - and touches the side of his face, very lightly. Neither of them are even pretending to dance anymore. Instead, they stand on the green lawn, Embry looking as if he wants nothing more to run away and hide, and Jenny with her heart blown wide open by the secret that she had carried the whole time without even quite knowing it herself.
Quil.
“So that’s who you belong to,” she says.
“I don’t - ” He sounds clumsy for once. “I - ”
“So you really do understand.” What it means to live, and love in silence, what it means to choke on the sounds of your own sobs in the middle of the night, before anyone else can hear.
Jacob came back, she thinks, distantly, but he never really came back.
Maybe you never really do.
“I - ”
Maybe it’s okay if you can’t.
She steps on the very tip of toes, straining - all these wolf boys are so tall - and very carefully, presses her lips against his. The touch is brief, like a dried flower settling on a page. When she comes back to earth, her heels settling on the ground beneath her, she knows that nothing has changed, really.
But everything has changed.
“I understand,” she says.
Later on, it rains. Everyone runs underneath the huge white tents set up just in case this should happen. Jenny stands at the very edge of one of these tents, almost leaning into the rain, and Embry stands beside her. He slips his jacket around shoulders, and then, with a courteous slowness, slips one of his arms around her waist.
Inside the tent, people continue drinking, eating, laughing, and dancing, but Jenny and Embry just keep staring into the rain. Watching the heavens pour down.
That night, they don’t dance with each other again. But they don’t dance with anyone else, either.
end.
.