Twilight: What She Doesn't See...

The Wrong Foot

11:17 p.m.

Like rivulets of water migrating horizontally across a tan, glistening desert, the skin above the boy's brow creased. A slight downward tug of a sinuous mouth and squaring jaw inscribed a very plain story of contempt upon an austere visage. Delectable, really.

If only that death glare wasn't aimed at Edward. The wolf held tremendous power over him, and it amazed Edward Cullen how Jacob was all the more ignorant toward it.

Jacob Black's teeth shimmered under the wan luminescence of the moon, trembling under the intensity of tightly compressing them to appear bared and menacing. The vampire knew it was to ward him away, to establish the wolf as a threat to his person, ready to pounce and bite, to rip his head off at a moment's notice, but Edward was only able to envision that mouth biting onto his shoulder as he rocked them to places Jacob had never been, to highs no lovers-if any- were able to reach or comprehend until the boy's body came undone and quivered at the vampire's chilling caress.

For a while, the silence was all that remained, a tension-filled fog between them. Trees bristled in the sharp wind, owls hooting from their boughs. Insects and grass were carried away on the unforgiving breeze. Heavy downpour was to come soon. In nineteen minutes exactly. He could already smell the musty petrichor from Taholah, Washington.

Keeping his breath held was almost unmanageable. Fulfilling some form of physical intimacy manifested into this dark animal of desire inside his mind. Implacable, unmitigated by its inability to be satiated. It was something horrible. The silence was needles branded to his dead heart. Even if it to tell Edward that he was going to kill him, he wanted, no needed him to speak. Needed to hear Jacob's voice.

Anger smoothed out and became callous indifference on Jacob Black's face. Then, it vanished. Running wouldn't solve anything. Edward held it as a fact of life. Even after his death running hadn't solved anything.

 Taut and sinewy back muscle shifted smoothly, growing farther away from Edward Cullen each second. Frustration gripped him, his fists clenched until his knuckles cracked. Something about the Native American made Edward lose control, lose his resolve.  Splaying his palm over the massive shoulder bone, he welcomed the thrill it brought as he pulled the boy back into the safety of the moonlight.  How was this wolf so mesmerizing. What breaths of perfect agony.

 As expected, the sixteen-year-old ripped his shoulder away.

 "Don't. Touch. Me," Jacob spit out with heavy vitriol. His first words tonight. 

 Jacob Black hated his very existence while he, himself, wanted more of the boy's existence. Insurmountable hunger, dark and passionate, welled inside of him just to be near Jacob. To just languidly drag his fingers across the human skin of the wolf's arm, invited a sense of completion he had never experienced. To just take the boy and claim him as he was on the moss-covered earth.

Veiled in the cloak of darkness once again, Jacob receded into the thickets of the trees with a snarl not as ferocious as his counterparts, but dangerous enough to warn Edward not to tailgate him.

"Don't..." the words forced out, tightly, his voice foreign to himself. "Don't walk away." 

The crunch of soil was all he received in response.  

"Why do you act this way?" Edward's disbelief at the insolent behavior poured out. "Running away from me won't stop the Volturi coming after us."

Jacob Black faltered in step, turning his head with beady eyes, his lengthy, native hair billowing behind him with a grace Edward wasn't familiar with in others that weren't vampires. Murderous. A black and murderous emotion took over. Jacob's mind was a full slate hidden by shields of impenetrable darkness. Presence, emotion, and anything that would classify a being as intelligent and self-conscious was there, but too away far to ascertain.