Stealing Butterflies

Chapter Nine

Jacob drinks his coffee black.

No sugar or milk or anything. Which, I think, is absolutely hilarious. I mean, come on: Jacob Black drinks his coffee black... Yeah. That's a knee-slapper.

Sam puts a lot of Coffee Mate crap in his that smells sickeningly sweet.

It's funny, because he's not even remotely sugary, let alone so much that it burns your tongue. He's harsh. And in the mornings he's even harsher because he hasn't fully woken up yet. His jaw is always set in this permanent scowl as he sits sipping his girly little drink, which I think looks absolutely hysterical.

Jared, he's boring. He just drinks coffee with some milk in it, so I don't really get any laughs out of it.

Seth, he only puts a few grains of sugar in it.

No kidding, he doesn't pour, like, five packets of sugar down there like a normal person. Really, he doesn't even use the whole packet. Nope. He opens the little thing, shakes a teeny tiny little pile into his hand then flicks half of it down into the coffee.

Which is more strange than funny, but I laugh anyway.

I don't really like coffee.

I'm more of a hot chocolate kind of guy.

Back on topic: the point of all this rambling on hot drinks is that imprinting is kind of like swimming.

When you're little, watching all the Big Kids at the beach, you want to go sprinting right in. You dream about it, wondering what it feels like to be totally underwater, and what everything looks like from down there and all. So you dip your toes in and laugh when your mom screams at you to get away from the water. You even take time to strategize, and mentally prepare yourself for hopping in for that first practice.

But nothing really prepares you for the real deal.

It's the same thing for imprinting.

You think about it, want it, dream and dream and dream about what it feels like to really know that she is The One. The only one for you. The perfect one to spend the rest of your life with.

Everybody tells you it's incredible to find her, but nobody tells you that the process itself is actually quite painful.

First, it feels like you've slammed headfirst into a wall. Then it's as if you're crashing through empty nothingness, only you can't breathe, so it's like freefalling through space. Time freezes and there's no tangible air, so you're just plummeting. And then, within seconds, you smack back on solid ground, where the whole world is disoriented. There's no real difference between direction and sound and sight.

Everything spins.

The whole dynamics of the universe get totally rearranged inside of you. It messes with your mind. Because, suddenly, gravity is just gone. Sure, I'd heard from my friends that it feels like the force becomes attached to your imprint, but they didn't tell you that the ground feels like Jell-O.

Really, it does.

It felt like I was floating on a waterbed or a river of thick chocolate. If I could even have collected my bearings at the time, I surely wouldn't have been able to walk.

Because the pull holding me to the Earth had been moved to inside of Katie. The whole axis itself had spun, so that down was now sideways and up was the other way sideways and east was down and west was up and... yeah.

That's the gist of it all.

Imprinting hurts. A lot.

But, even after all of that, I certainly wasn't expecting, right after realizing that the girl I had a kind-of-sort-of-crush on was my soul mate, to be sloshed with searing hot coffee.