Descending Star

WOOD

Zoey and Jacob lost track of the days, having stopped all the way up the coast for one idle entertainment or another. They had camped on the beach every night, at first in separate tents, and later on separate sides, with strictly imposed boundaries.

"We are sleeping together," she had told him, on the first night that they'd decided that two tents were too much work, "but we're not sleeping together. And you'll do well to remember that, Chief Jacob, when you're regaling all your gutter-mind friends around the campfire."

She had pledged to kick the tires, and no more than that. She wouldn't be taking him for a spin, anytime soon. Or vice-versa, for that matter, not that he would ever have dared, not after having seen what she could do with that body of hers. Kira and Caz had taken the Acura back to Phoenix, but she'd relieved the vehicle of the hangboard, and she set it up between trees and in restroom doors everywhere they went.

One fine day, whilst doing pull-ups on individual fingers, she had clearly laid out the boundaries, in no uncertain terms. "I've had more than my share of dick in my life," the technically chaste maiden had said to the mortified Quileute boy, "and these days I don't need another one. I want this summer free and clear of complication, got it?"

He got it.

But they did kiss, and Chief Jacob's kisses mauled her from all sides at once, with a hungry aggression that wore her to exhaustion and left her wanting more. Betwixt their frequent and heady makeout sessions he taught her to surf, badly, and he also taught her how to Jet Ski on underpowered rentals, and she taught him how to parasail, though she nearly killed him in the process, since she'd never once parasailed herself, and they went diving off a few bridges over the course of several rounds of Truth or Dare, and they caught themselves in an undertow, got swept out by a riptide, and lost themselves at sea.

She also tried reading him poetry from her diary. That didn't go quite so well. He didn't get a word of it, by his own admission, and he flat-out told her that poetry was pointless. She retorted, as she snapped the journal shut with a clap, that "In my considered experience, poetry is better than sex." Of course she had no experience to speak of, but Jacob, having even less than she, lacked the means to know that, and her innuendo effectively shut him up for awhile. 'Oh well,' she thought to herself, 'even if I end up stuck with this boy for a spell, I will still have my attentive and amiable Cleopatra for the diary readings.' This led to a period of melancholy and pining for her dearly missed Egyptian Princess.

All in all, she very much enjoyed the ridiculously pretty Quileute boy, and though she tried to resist his persistent and candid hunger for All Things Zoey, she could feel her carefree summer growing more cruel and complicated by the second.

Truly, apart from his disaffection for her crappy poetry, there were few points of friction to speak of. The only real topic of contention was her history with Ben Swan. He didn't want to be reminded of it, and he plainly still harbored the suspicion that she might really be going up to see her lifelong soulmate, and that he, Jacob, was only being used for a ride. Zoey was fine with steering clear of Ben, too, since she didn't want to think about him or talk about him, either. She did, however, cultivate intense curiosity about that singularly anti-human yet non-angelic girlfriend of his.

She put her California-bronzed legs up on his dashboard and demanded to know, for the umpteenth time, why his childhood girly-bud, Leah Clearwater, so intensely despised the Cullen girl, when they hadn't ever actually met, because said non-angel wasn't even allowed on their stupid Reservation in the first place. "I'm just trying to understand," Zoey insisted.

Jacob scowled at the Pacific Coast Highway and muttered, "First off screw the Treaty. Edythe recently hung out in my garage, and she scattered all the pieces of my transmission, or I would have been down to Yosemite a lot sooner. That said, this road isn't long enough to get into all of Leah's problems. That girl has more issues than I can count."