i get so jealous / i can't even work
one. keep you up all night
Once upon a time, in that golden age when they still had the luxury of keeping secrets, Sam shared his with Leah.
They’re lying in Leah’s bed, eyes wide open. Fully clothed, just lying on top of her comforter. Her head is on his chest and they count the glow in the dark stars pasted on her wall. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they fall silent, just listening to each other’s breath. It’s three in the morning and now Sam is talking, murmuring, in case Leah’s parents hear him.
“… You know,” he says, softly, “I try and try to remember what it was like when my dad left us, but I can’t even picture his face. He’s just this big, blocky silhouette, his shoulders filling the doorway.”
Her cheek is pressed against his shoulder; she moves just slightly, lips barely pressing against the side of his throat. He’s warm, she thinks, absently, warmer than usual. She’s not even paying much attention to what he’s saying, just concentrating on the way it feels when they are lying like this together, her hand resting curled up on his chest. Every time he speaks, there’s a low vibration, his whole voice running soft, dark little echoes through her blood, as if his voice is settling into her bones, never to leave.
Never to leave.
“All I can really remember,” Sam says, even more softly still, “is my mom’s face, when he was walking away.”
two. then there’s you, screaming “say something”
Emily holds onto her like a lifeline, tears of rage spiking at her eyes. Emily’s hands are kind hands, slim and warm, hands that are meant to bake chocolate chip cookies and grow rosemary and basil and soothe the fevered foreheads of children and sew denim patches on ripped jeans. Right now they are clenched into angry fists, the skin straining over the knuckles because everything has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
When they were young, Emily used to hold Leah just like this - used to hold her back when her temper flared like a bonfire, when she was crazy and snarling, just mad to rip something apart, wishing that she had claws, jaws, the power to destroy.
Now Leah’s just an empty shell and now Emily’s the one weeping with rage.
Funny thing, role reversal.
“I’m going to kill him,” Emily says. Beautiful Emily. Just as beautiful as Leah. They look like sisters instead of second cousins. When they go out with the Black twins, they turn heads.
“He’s such a… a man,” Emily spits. “I can’t believe he would just leave you like that, and then… to come to me, and… I’m going to kill him. I am going to fucking kill him.”
Part of Leah wants to laugh, but she’s frozen like a tundra.
Sam Uley has just left her.
Emily Young is swearing.
The world must be ending.
three. i don’t like what i see
Leah hates Jacob and Jacob hates Leah and they both know exactly why they hate the other which doesn’t really fix anything. It’s a relationship built on mutual unaffection, and no, insight into your enemy’s heart doesn’t always make him your brother, but they are Pack, which there is no adequate synonym for, really. Whether you love the Pack or you hate the Pack, you are the Pack. Fighting that is like howling in a storm.
Bella Swan burns in Jacob’s mind like pure white flame, and that’s why Leah envies him most of all. There is no ambiguity in Jacob’s love. Sometimes he’s exasperated by Bella and sometimes he wants to shake her and sometimes he thinks she’s being really, really stupid, but it’s love, love, love, and Leah doesn’t want it in her. She doesn’t want that love living in her, she doesn’t want it staining her dreams and burning slowly in her blood, that impossibly painful sweetness.
Her love for Sam is mixed up with hate, with regret, with rage, and she clings to it, to the bitter aftertaste. She doesn’t want to remember how Sam’s mouth moved against hers, she doesn’t want to remember how he made her coffee with two sugars and two creams, she doesn’t want to remember placing a kiss at the hollow of his throat one late afternoon in July and mouthing the word Mine against his skin.
Nothing belongs to her anymore; everything belongs to the Pack. She hates feeling the pity that blurs in at her from all sides. If she isolates herself from then, it’s that much easier to figure out which part of herself is hers. She guards jealously everything that belongs to her, because so little does. It doesn’t matter if it’s nettles or thorns or sand or poison; she gathers it all in a pile, and growls that favourite word of hers : Mine. This is partly why she’s such a bitch - it’s so much more a relief to deal with straightforward hostility than this awkward, uncomfortable sympathy.
That’s why it’s so much easier to just hate. It has a purity of its own. Then Jacob Moron Black has to pull martyr and think of that damned leech-lover twenty-four seven. What pisses Leah off the most, maybe, is knowing that he’d settle for leftovers, for second best; if Bella Swan ever walked back into his life, he’d take her with open arms.
It pisses her off. It disturbs her. Because he reminds her too much of herself, sometimes.
four. fists on up, it looks that easy
This is not a paperback novel: high school romance just doesn’t happen.
Leah’s a smart girl (hard headed, her mother calls her) and she knows better than to just go out with the first boy that asks her, even if that boy is Sam Uley, even if she has… felt all prickly and weird about him ever since she was thirteen - and maybe even before that, if she’s really being honest with herself - but honestly, lies are so much easier to swallow down, don’t you think?
He stands by her locker, not nervous at all, not fiddling his collar or shifting from foot to foot or anything like that. His hands are in his pockets and his voice is measured and calm as he asks if she maybe wants to catch a movie, with him, sometime. Friday, maybe.
She’s not even looking at him; she’s busy slowly putting her Algebra textbook back onto its shelf. She straightens up and closes the locker door abruptly; his face is still smooth but she could’ve sworn that she saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. She can’t help but let her fascinated eyes follow the line of his throat, watch the way that his pulse jumps and -
“No,” she says. She is fourteen. She is, as her reflection tells her, beautiful. It is the first day of high school. She does not have some stupid sort of puppy crush on Sam Uley, although it’s terribly flattering to be asked out by a sophomore.
“Okay,” he says, still completely calm, and when he walks away his shoulders do not bow and his head does not drop and of course Leah does not watch him as he goes and she does not imagine what it would be like, in the middle of a dark theatre, to suddenly feel his warm hand covering hers.
Of course.
A bunch of the old grandmothers are over at the Clearwater when she gets home, playing bingo and gossiping. Leah avoids them like a plague, jams her headphones on, and flips on her music, girls screaming about how stupid love is to three quarter time and crazy guitar riffs.
All those old woman do is ask her a million stupid questions like Do you have a boyfriend yet? When are you gonna get some nice young man, eh? No matter how loud she pumps the (broken) volume on her crappy red mp3 player, she can still hear them gossiping downstairs.
“… And did you see that Uley boy, Sam? So and big and hulking already, and him not even sixteen. Something tells me he’s mixed up with some bad business, and that he’s going to turn out just like his old man…”
She doesn’t know which one of them said it, which doesn’t really stop her. Leah stomps downstairs and screams at them, just one incoherent howl that doesn’t even have words.
Her mother grounds her for two weeks, and it is completely worth it.
At the end of exactly two weeks, she marches right up to Sam Uley, and says, “You owe me a movie.”
five. i try so hard to get roughed up
The worst part is that she knows it real. Why do you love her? Leah challenges, agonized, and it unfolds before her, before Sam can even stop himself from thinking it.
Emily, Emily, Emily. A dab of flour on cheek, the scent of lavender and rosemary that follows her around, her extraordinary gentleness, the way she always seems to move in sunlight, how she has a gift for understanding everything about you without you having to open your mouth to say a single word. She knows how to make the perfect puff pastry (cold bowl, cold hands, so that your fingers don’t melt the butter) and she used to the play the flute in band, in high school, and she brews steaming cups of jasmine or peppermint or chamomile tea.
Leah is not Emily. Leah swears and is jealous and eats chiles that burn the lining of her throat and loves, in a vengeful kind of way, the way her skin scrapes beneath stone. She used to play the drums, noisy metallic snare drums, ever at the ready to burst into a fight song for war on the verge of breaking out. She drinks black coffee nowadays (no sugar, no cream), thick like sludge, like battery acid.
When they were young, Leah was the reckless loudmouthed who got into fistfights with boys and fell out of trees, and Emily was the one who smoothed Leah’s ruffled feathers and fetched Band Aids and read Hardy Boy novels aloud, that one time Leah was in the hospital with her leg broken from jumping off a roof on a dare.
Leah is the fearless one and Emily is the gentle one and they pretend that Leah is the one protecting Emily when the world knows Emily protects Leah from herself. Emily has no brothers so Leah was the one who ruthlessly inspected all the boys who dared to ask Emily out and threatened to tear off their nails if they hurt a single hair on Emily’s head.
Why do you love her? Leah challenges, agonized, and the agony is that she doesn’t need to ask Sam, to know why.
It’s the same reason that Leah loves Emily, after all.
six. i want the ocean right now
This isn’t what she’s going to remember. First dates, one year anniversaries, Valentines - all these things fade out of memory, eventually, turned to ashes and thorns by Hallmark speeches and the bitterness embedded in her heart.
She’s going to remember this, most of all : she’s sixteen and he’s seventeen, and they’re freezing their assess off even though it’s August, huddling in a blue sleeping bag on the beach. The wind off the ocean’s trying to tear her skin off, so she hides her face in Sam’s shoulder. She keeps on eye on the night sky; the wind’s blown the clouds away, and it’s just the time for shooting stars.
They’re just dozing off when Sam suddenly starts awake, his whole body shuddering. He pressed so close together that she feel him shaking; she asks him what’s wrong, is he cold?
No, exact opposite, he says. He’s actually feeling pretty warm. “I had a nightmare,” he says.
His voice is rough and dark and rushed, the words almost tumbling over each other. “I dreamed we were walking in the woods and there was a wolf call in the distance, and then I had to go - I just had to go, and I had to leave you behind, and it was the hardest thing, but my whole body was moving and you were tugging my hand and crying and you kept saying, Don’t go, but I had to and - what I’m just like my old man?” His voice drops to a bare thread of a whisper, as if it hurts him to speak. “What if I have to leave you one day, Leah?”
“Sam Uley,” she says, firmly. She takes his face in both of her hand, the pad of her fingers sliding up, just touching the soft skin behind his ears. “I chose you. You hear me? I don’t care what those old gossips say - you are nothing like your father.”
She comes even closer, until their foreheads touch and she says, “You are a good man. I chose you. And I know that you’ll never leave me.”
Her kiss is a promise, like the glow of birthday candles still on the cake, shining but all too brief. But when they finally break away, the wind leaves them colder than ever.
Your voice, it lives in my bones.
Never to leave.
end.