Freedom Papers - Neon Moon Chapter 4 (Part 2)

Title: Neon Moon
Fandom: Twilight
Character: Bella
Rating: T
Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5727040/4/
Chapter 1 on ff.net, on LJ
Summary: New Moon A/U. Abandoned by the Cullens, Bella emerges from depression with a wall around her heart and a chip on her shoulder. Closed off and immersed in her college studies, she finds her emotional outlet in a surprising source.

You may have noticed the rating has gone up to M. This story is not rated for abuse. That's all I'm going to say.
Continued from Chapter 4 Part 1

 

October 2008

The Chatterbox

Vancouver, BC

I swallowed my fourth or fifth drink of the night.

You’re intoxicated by my very presence.

No shit, Edward. Wasn’t that your intent—?

“Motherfucker, you need to shut up before I shut you up!” The shout rang out over the sound of the jukebox from the other side of the room.

“Fuck you, cocksucker!”

I could hear the crunching sound of fist connecting with face followed by groaning, swearing, someone getting knocked over, and the distinct sounds of pissed off drunks. “Hey!” Brown snarled. “Take that shit outside!”

I looked up and saw two men yelling and a third person picking himself up off the floor, livid because his beer had been knocked over and this wasn’t his fight to begin with.

Ah, but it was now.

Shit.

The women closest to the door ran out, and the ones near the bathrooms hid in the ladies room. But I, in my far corner, had no door to retreat to.

Breaking glass. Fists flying.

Shit!

I grabbed my coat and slithered under the pool table. My jeans and boots would protect my legs from superficial scratches if any glass slid my way, and I used my jacket to protect my head. I waited it out, occasionally peeking to see boots scraping across the concrete floor and bodies falling. A few faces were actually smiling, which I found hilarious even through my last remaining particle of fear. An open knife slid across the room, stopping just within my reach. I grabbed for the handle as quickly as I could, gripping it tightly with a trembling fist, ready to use it if necessary. I had no illusions about what alcohol could make a man willing to do, even a man who’d never hurt me before, and I’d rather just die than suffer that.

Then there were distant sirens, women swearing, boots stomping out the door, and the sound of fifteen Harleys all being started up at once and peeling the fuck out. I lifted a corner of my coat to look.

“Bella?” Brown’s anxious voice called out. “Honey, where are you?”

“She’s under here,” another man answered. A pair of dirty, steel-toed work boots stopped a meter away from me, catching the yellow-white light from the lamp that hung over the pool table. Then there were denim knees, rough hands, and an olive-skinned face framed with inky black hair. “Miss Bella?”

I pulled the coat entirely away from my head, but kept the switchblade in my hand. It took me a few seconds before I recognized the face as one of the semi-regulars I served over the summer. A good tipper, he occasionally came in with a date and usually drank no more than three beers, always from local independent microbreweries—I laughed whenever he ordered Swans Oatmeal Stout. His knuckles were bruised from the fight, and he might have a shiner in the morning, but he smiled at me in a way that was reassuring. I stopped shaking.

“Why don’t you close that knife, Miss Bella, and I’ll help you up. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”

I considered my position for a moment. I didn’t know how to close a switchblade, so instead I dropped it and shoved it away from us, watching as it slid to a shadowed corner where wall met floor and bench seat—nobody would find it there for a long time. The man smiled again and offered me his uninjured hand. I took it, letting him gently drag me out from my hiding place and help me stand on my own feet.

“You okay?” he asked, holding my jacket open for me. His skin was one or two shades lighter than the Quileutes’ back home, and his eyes were bright and friendly.

“Yeah,” I whispered back, swaying just a little as I turned around to slip into the proffered sleeves. “You?”

“Nothing a little ice won’t fix,” he chuckled. “I’m Ben.”

“Right. Ben,” I remembered. “Bella.”

“I know.” He looked me over, but not in a creepy way. “First bar fight?”

“Mhmm,” I answered, leaning against the pool table. Whoever had been shooting solids was in the perfect position to bankshot the one-ball in the side pocket, but there was a rip in the felt that would have ruined the shot.

“You’re holding up pretty well,” Ben remarked, looking a little surprised. He flexed his hand a few times, testing for broken knuckles, I supposed.

Scratching at the long, divaricated scar on my arm beneath the scuffed-up suede sleeve, I calmly informed him, “I’ve seen worse fights.” Was he expecting me to cry or something? If a bunch of humans wanted to kick each other’s asses, it was fine by me as long as they left me alone. It wasn’t like they were trying to feed on me.

The creaking sound of the front door distracted us before Ben could reply. We both turned as the first Vancouver cop walked in and headed straight for Brown while the second one stared at us. Great.

With a long-suffering sigh I walked forward, forgoing a pretense at stumbling but ready to tell the cops I didn’t see anything. Truthfully, I didn’t see who threw the first punch or who pulled a knife, and I was technically too drunk to be a reliable witness even if I had. “C’mon Ben,” I called over my shoulder with a business-like tone, “let’s get some ice on that eye.”

He laughed, the sound strangely light coming from his deep voice. “Yes ma’am.”

That night, I got all the way home before I realized that in all the chaos, I forgot to be miserable.

 *   *   *

November 2008

The Chatterbox

Vancouver, BC

“So Brown,” I said off-handedly, centering the new green felt carefully over the tabletop, “how’d you meet Marty anyway?”

It was a Sunday, the middle of the month. The Chatterbox was closed today, which was the perfect opportunity for me to complete my project: resurfacing the pool table. Brown had been meaning to get around to it ever since a couple of drunk travelers on their way to California tried to shoot a game of eight-ball and ripped up the fabric with a cue stick. Since Brown and Marty had been taking turns passing bronchitis back and forth to each other for well over a month now, and I had some free time anyway, I offered to do this for them. The library had a book of instructions with photographs, and that guy Ben loaned us most of the necessary tools (which really weren’t anything too sophisticated, but they were things I didn’t have, like a putty knife). I checked and rechecked the fabric alignment before folding back one half of the felt.

“Met her here,” Brown answered hoarsely, holding a cigarette between his fingers but not lighting it—his doctor expressly forbid smoking at least until he’d completed his course of antibiotics. That, and I would be working with something flammable. “She moved down here from Prince George after her old man got locked up.”

I stopped what I was doing and stood up straight. “What?”

“She never told you?” Brown looked genuinely surprised.

“I knew she was divorced, but that’s it,” I clarified, remembering our garage conversations. “She never wanted to talk about it much, and I didn’t press her.” I didn’t push her, she didn’t push me, but we were both willing to listen—that was our understanding.

“Mhmm,” Brown nodded, putting on his paper face mask when he saw me reach for mine. “She was married to an asshole named Chris. They had their own garage. Did well, too. But sometimes he’d just be gone, and he didn’t have a good explanation. Marty thought he was cheating on her, but it turned out he was acquiring parts from stolen vehicles and trafficking heroin.” After a beat, he added, “And cheating on her.”

“Holy shit,” I hissed, propping a chair in front of the front door to hold it open. I hated to let out all the warm air when Brown was sick, but the need for ventilation was greater. “Talk about adding insult to injury.”

“Yeah,” Brown nodded. “The investigators concluded that Marty wasn’t involved in any criminal activity, but she lost everything. The business, her life savings, everything except her bike.”

Marty always seemed so well-adjusted and sensible to me. “I never would have guessed she went through such a clusterfuck.”

“That’s why she doesn’t want to own half the bar—I give her a management salary with profit-sharing instead.” Brown lowered his mask to sip at his coffee mug. “Anyway, after the conviction and the divorce, she scraped together a little money and came here to look for work and start over.”

“And then she met you,” I presumed, covering my eyes with safety glasses and shaking up a can of spray-on adhesive.

“Actually,” he corrected me, “she met my wife.”

I hesitated before I sprayed the pungent glue. “Come again?”

“Marty and Yvonne knew each other,” Brown explained while I worked. “They weren’t close friends, but sometimes we’d all talk when Marty came in for a few beers. When Yvonne left me, Marty stepped in to help me with the bar. Things just sort of grew from there.”

Brown switched on the box fan when I put my can of glue down, blowing the Krylon fumes away. Some of the epoxy got on my suede coat, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Rubbing down the felt over the glue with a circular motion, I sipped at my Sprite through a straw and let Brown change the subject. He always liked to hear me talk about my work at the museum, my research trips, and the people I met at the reserves. I figured it had to do with missing out on that part of his kids’ lives, but he said it was because it made him feel smarter, and because those things made me smile.

Thinking about what we had each lost, I decided that if Brown and Marty could go through life without wallowing in self-pity, I could, too. Maybe then I’d smile more often, and so would they.

 *   *   *

December 2008

Renee’s House

Jacksonville, FL

“Look who’s standing under the mistletoe!”

My mother, in her nefarious plot to socialize me like some six-week-old puppy, had special ordered ten pounds of mistletoe from some website and tacked it up all over the house for her annual holiday party. It was like an aerial assault. Fortunately for me, the only men she found even remotely close to my age were the gym teacher and computer lab teacher who taught at her school, a few of Phil’s younger cousins visiting from Arkansas and Louisiana, a couple of assistant coaches who worked at the local high school with Phil, and some neighbors who evidently were led to believe I was a globe-trotting supermodel instead of a normal person. I almost felt sorry for them, being set up for disappointment like that. That was Renee for you.

Times like this, I wished I had my lip pierced and that tattoo inked on my neck instead of my shoulder blade. Even though I rejected those things as a bit too Suicide Girl-ish for my taste, they would have suited my frayed jeans and vintage Harley t-shirt a lot better than this stupid Santa hat Renee insisted I wear. As it was, I was sure I would need to get very drunk to get through the rest of this damned party full of strangers. With a smile, I remembered that I was twenty-one now, and I didn’t have to hide my drinking from my mother. Technically I never hid it from her in the first place, but now I could be open about it and get hammered in this country.

So, rather than remain under the most evil of plants and let myself be kissed by some beer-goggled guy I’d never seen before tonight (honestly, what the hell was wrong with my mother? Some of these men were fifty!), I made my way over to the drink table, scooped a little ice from the cooler into a red plastic cup, and poured myself a generous serving of Jack mixed with about half a can of Coke. I knew Renee could see me and would probably suggest her weak-ass eggnog as more ‘my speed.’ With this in mind, I took a long swallow of my drink. The room, already warm from the throng of Phil and Renee’s guests, rapidly grew hotter, and I wished my mother would have opened more windows. After nearly four years in the northwest I hated too much heat, but I wasn’t such a baby that I couldn’t tolerate it for a while. There was an unadorned bit of ceiling next to the TV, so I moved to stand there, desperate to avoid being kissed. Of course, someone came to strike up a conversation immediately.

“What are you studying in school?” Neighbor Boy asked me with what must have been his most charming grin, a bottle of Bud in his hand.

“Linguistic anthropology,” I replied, relaxing just enough to smile back but not so much that I didn’t notice how close the guy was standing in front of me. I took a step backward automatically.

“Wow, really? That’s…awesome.” He looked uncomfortable with that information for some reason, but took a drink of his Budweiser to cover it. “How many languages do you speak so far?”

“Besides the two I learned growing up?” I asked. “Three. I specialize in aboriginal languages.” I wasn’t considered perfectly fluent in any of them yet, but I felt confident that I would be very soon—I was one of the top students in my Advanced language classes. Now that my university finally hired a teacher for it, I’d also picked up Ktunaxa, a language that was culturally isolated and unique, and I spent several weekends this semester visiting the Columbia Lake Band in Windermere to hear the sounds spoken firsthand by the few remaining fluent speakers. Beyond that, I found that I enjoyed having a variety of ways to express myself, I took pride in preserving something worth treasuring, and I loved the way mastering these languages made me feel, like I was connected to something greater than myself. But nobody ever thought that was interesting besides students and faculty in my department (and Brown), which was why I didn’t go into detail in casual conversation. Instead I said the usual: “I get to travel, meet some interesting people, and hear wonderful stories.”

“Cool,” Neighbor Boy said, trying to look like he meant it. Yeah, like he cared. “I speak a little French.”

“That’s nice,” I said as politely as my intoxication level would allow. That would have served him well in Quebec, but who takes French in Florida? I lived in Canada and even I didn’t feel the need to learn French yet. Cantonese, perhaps, but not French. Maybe he wanted to communicate with Haitian immigrants down in Miami; maybe he just took high school French because he had to meet his language requirement to graduate. Maybe I should stop mentally picking him apart and just have a civilized conversation. “What’s your major?”

I dutifully went through the same battery of monotonous questions I asked every time Shalice introduced me to a new friend of hers. Neighbor Boy was a nineteen-year-old freshman at Jacksonville U. He hadn’t picked a major, he still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he ‘grew up,’ his favorite show was Supernatural, he loved Anne Rice novels, and prior to college he played baseball at the school where Phil coached. As an outfielder.

I did not like Neighbor Boy very much at that point in the conversation, and then he tipped the scales. “I didn’t think Renee was old enough to have a daughter your age. She must have gotten started very young.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I smirked. “Her ego will overinflate.” Renee looked every bit of forty-one—we’d spent too many years in the desert sun for that not to be the case. Then I thought more carefully about what Neighbor Boy was saying. “Wait, how old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know, like, twenty-five or so?” He shrugged, pulled my red cup out of my hand, and took a sip of my drink, grimacing a little at the strength of it. “Yeah, no girls I know can stomach anything this hardcore. This is a man’s drink.” Asshole. Maybe the little girls he dated got sloshed on wine coolers, but grown women drank highballs all the time. I would know—I spent all summer serving them. Why did I always attract the sexist assholes?

I looked up at this doe-eyed teenager with his sun-streaked hair and goofy face. A deeper appraisal of his eyes told me he was very drunk. “And you think a twenty-five-year-old woman is hanging around with a nineteen-year-old boy because…?”

He grinned, swerved a little, and handed back my drink. Fucking lightweight. “You’re on vacation and you want non-committal action?”

“You think I want sex?” Un. Fucking. Believable. “You think I came to spend Christmas with my mother so I could have sex with the local jailbait?”

“Well…” Neighbor Boy frowned uncomfortably and ran his fingers through his hair nervously; the unintentional gesticular impersonation made me hate him by proxy. “Renee was at my parents’ house one night last week, and they all had a little too much wine. She said something about you needing to stop being so serious and just get laid. That’s when she invited me to—”

I was striding away from him and toward my tipsy mother in the next breath. If I’d been buzzed at all, I was sure as shit sober now. “Renee,” I hissed in her ear, clutching her arm like a vice, “I need to speak to you privately. Now.”

“Coming, sweet—”

I didn’t even let her finish speaking or excuse herself before dragging her off to the guestroom I was staying in and slamming the door behind us. “You brought me here,” I growled, “for a booty call?” Just saying it sounded ridiculous.

“Do you like him?” Renee giggled. “His name is Jonathan. He lives a few houses down, and—”

“Do I look especially pleased right now?” I interrupted. Renee stopped laughing. “Do I look like I’m ready to jump that kid’s bones? Do I look the slightest bit happy to you?”

My mother looked me up and down. “You look pissed off. And you look awfully uptight for someone dressed like a grease monkey.” She scowled at me, her expression just as disapproving as it had been when I refused to put on the girlie-looking green mini-dress she wanted me to wear for her party—she was wearing a red one just like it.

Outing myself as a biker wasn’t hard. Once I assured her I wasn’t gay, she seemed glad that I “found a hobby,” but otherwise didn’t take me seriously, understandable given that I had no bike. Condescension like that, I could endure patiently. Listening to Renee bitch about how hard it would be to attract a man while dressed like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider—that was another matter. Thankfully, Phil stepped in before I pointed out that she wanted the two of us to dress something like one of the prostitutes from the same movie. I didn’t see anything wrong with looking sexy, but I had my own definition. Peacekeeping aside, I wasn’t about to change who I was for her, nor was I going to put myself out on display on her showroom floor.

“Get this through your head, Mother,” I sneered, ripping the stupid Santa hat off my head and tossing it to the floor. “I am here to visit you. I am not here for a quick fuck. I’m well aware that you’re the daughter of former hippies, but I’m the daughter of a cop who was never around and a woman who left me alone in the house to raise myself. Your carefree attitude about this isn’t something I share.”

“It’s just sex,” Renee replied, looking around for something. “Jesus, lighten up. I thought bikers didn’t give a damn about anything.” She pulled a small box down off a top shelf and produced a pack of cigarettes and a cheap lighter, then headed over to one of the open windows.

“This isn’t the eighties anymore,” I groaned, sinking onto the bed. “Gay men aren’t the only ones who get AIDS. You can’t just sleep around because you’re bored and expect to get out of the consequences with an abortion or some penicillin.”

“So use a condom, Bella. Problem solved.” She tapped the green and white package expertly, withdrawing her cigarette and lifting it to her mouth. “I put some in the nightstand just in case.”

I smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead, then downed a little more of my drink. Ladies and gentleman, your hostess and colleague, my mother. “God, it was such a mistake for me to come here.” Every fucking time…

“Why, because I wanted you to have a good time with a guy?” Renee said petulantly, lighting her Salem with her pink plastic lighter.

“No,” I retorted hatefully, “because you think a ‘good time’ is going to solve anything. Because your idea of a good time is for me to have a one-night-stand with a perfect stranger. In your guestroom. Maybe that’s what you would have done at my age, but it’s not me. I’m not a broken Renee Junior. I’m different. I don’t need you to fix me. Can’t you just accept that I have my own way of having fun, and it doesn’t have to involve casual sex?”

“Don’t act like you’re so much better than everyone else, Isabella,” my mother mumbled around her cigarette. The scent of menthol smoke wafted toward me in spite of her efforts to exhale out the window. “And don’t go spouting ultra-feminist, separatist bullshit about how nobody needs a man for anything. Women didn’t get here all by ourselves. We do need men, and you’re no exception.”

“Mom, I’m not arguing the futility of the existence of the male gender or the impossibility of heterosexual relationships,” I moaned, trying to head off the familiar anti-Marilyn Frye rant she’d often spouted once I turned fourteen and started criticizing her dating habits and commitment issues. “I’m just trying to be an independent person, someone you can be proud of, someone I can be proud of. I’m trying to reach the goals I set for myself. At this point, a man would just get in the way. Is that really so hard to understand?”

Renee took a long drag. “So, just to be clear, you’re over That Boy, right?”

Oh hell. I successfully avoided this topic for as long as I could manage, but clearly she hadn’t forgotten. “For fuck’s sake,” I scoffed, standing up and pacing the room. “Here we go again. I thought we were finally talking about my real life in the present day. I don’t understand why every conversation has to lead back to the boyfriend I had when I was in high school. Three years, you’ve been harping on this. You’d think he broke up with you. Enough already!” I managed to sound quite convincing, actually, as if I didn’t think about this very subject every time I got really drunk.

“He changed you, Bella,” my mother argued, not realizing the true irony of her statement. “You were happy and content with life, and then he walked out on you, and you became a different person.” Naturally, my mother didn’t understand the difference between being content and being happy. This reminded me of Charlie, content with his lot in life but never a happy man.

“You walked out on Dad for no good reason,” I said coldly. “You think that didn’t do any damage to him?”

She said nothing, just stared at me, her mouth slightly agape.

“You destroyed my father because you were bored, and you never even thought about it,” I accused, “did you?”

“Yes,” she countered quietly, “I did. Eventually. But Bella, it’s not my fault he if he didn’t try to form a relationship with anyone else. We were so young—”

“Don’t make excuses. You knew he loved you—you’ve always known. You were plenty old enough to consider the consequences,” I growled. “And you weren’t much younger than I am now.”

“Yes, I know,” Renee huffed. The smoke drifted out her mouth and nose as she spoke. God, I hated the smell of menthols. “That’s part of my point. You’re young enough to start over fresh with someone new. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life pining for That Boy like your dad did for me. You don’t have to be this bitter old woman in a young girl’s body. Is it so terrible that I want you to move on with your life?”

“No, Mom,” I sighed, silently acknowledging her concern to myself, at least. “Moving on is not terrible, nor is having a little fun. The part I have a problem with is that you and Dad both have this idea that I’m not moving on or having a good time unless I’m fucking someone! ‘Are you seeing anyone? Are you seeing anyone?’ That’s all I ever hear from you two. I understand why Dad does it—he’s clearly the product of generations in a tiny town where everyone is the reflection of their spouse,” I waved my hand at her, “or lack thereof. But you? You and I lived on our own for sixteen years. Obviously I watched you date guys and eventually get married, but I don’t understand why you of all people think that’s the surest sign of a full life.”

Renee’s cigarette was half gone, and she did not look at me as she blew her smoke out the window and spoke. “My parents may have been hippies, but they were from a small town, too. They were hippies who got married, had a baby, and realized that those fifties-era social standards actually had a basis in reality: somebody had to work, and somebody had to stay home and actually raise the child. Pop knew how to work on cars, and before she got pregnant your Gran was more about peace, love, and marijuana than any of the intellectual issues of the day. She didn’t have a college education, and by the time she realized she needed one if she wanted to make more than a buck-thirty an hour at the dog food factory, she already had me. She was stuck.”

I shook my head, unable to follow her Renee-logic. “Mom, I don’t understand. If you know all this, shouldn’t you be encouraging me to put my degree first?”

“No, you really don’t understand,” Renee answered quietly. “I’m not discouraging you from pursuing your education. I’m trying to tell you that it’s okay to have the best of both worlds. If you spend your whole life fixated on only one part of living, you’ll find yourself in another rut when something happens to it, just like last time. Independence, education, and career should be balanced with personal fulfillment.”

“Are you fucking serious?” I demanded. “Who are you to judge whether or not I’m fulfilled?”

“I’m not blind, Bella,” she shook her head, “and I know you a hell of a lot better than you think. You, my dear, are a born workaholic, and that’s not a balanced life.”

“No, no, no,” I countered, eyes narrowed. “Don’t stand there and lecture me about balance. You were so busy ‘fulfilling’ yourself that you forgot to wash the dishes and pay the light bill and stock up on tampons and make sure my vaccines were up to date. Those things still needed to get done while you were at pottery class or Girls Night or on a date, and the only one left to do the mundane shit was me. I became a workaholic out of self-preservation.”

Renee’s cigarette was much smaller now, but still burning its tiny red light as she inhaled. “I suppose that’s true.”

“I’d like to add,” I said through gritted teeth, because I didn’t want anyone to hear me yell, “that telling Neighbor Boy out there that I came to Florida to have sex with a random stranger is not acceptable maternal behavior no matter which era you were born in. Nor is anyone’s penis going to provide me with anything that even remotely resembles ‘personal fulfillment.’ There’s no need to whore me out. If I’m in the mood, I have hand-held equipment for that.”

I had the satisfaction of seeing Renee’s eyes widen in shock.

“I never said I was living like a nun.” I took a deep swallow of my drink, finishing it off. “Like you said, Mother, it’s just sex. But once you bring another person and their feelings into the mix, it becomes more. I refuse to use anyone or let myself be used for selfish gratification. I may not be a religious person, but I do have ethics.”

Renee reached through the window, lowering her arm toward the root of the azalea hedge, and pulled up an ashtray. “I guess you’re right,” she sighed, stubbing out the remnant of her cigarette. “But someday your ‘equipment’ won’t be enough anymore. Batteries are no substitute for a warm body.”

And then the voice came.

I know love and lust don’t always keep the same company…

“If that day comes,” I replied softly, glad nobody could see me wince, “I would rather it mean more to me than whatever you thought was going to happen tonight.”

Cowed, Renee hid her ashtray and came to me for a quick hug. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I guess I didn’t really think this through.”

“You never do, Mom.” I hugged her back. “You rush in head first and think about the consequences later. I know Phil likes that about you and calls it ‘adventurous.’ It’s fine if the only person affected by it is you, but you can’t just do that with people’s lives. It’s hurtful and it’s not right.”

“I know, baby,” Renee mumbled, sounding chastised.

“If you know, you should act like it,” I chided her gently, even as I patted her back like a child. How I always wound up being the one to console her in these scenarios, I’d never figure out. Damn it, I needed to stop coming to Florida. “I’m going to bed now.” I pretended to yawn for effect.

“Okay, baby,” she smiled, pulling away and turning for the door. “Good night.”

I followed her to the bedroom door, intent on locking myself in should Neighbor Boy get any ideas. “Good night, Mom.”

“I love you,” she said expectantly, looking over her shoulder at me.

I knew what she wanted me to say, but I only nodded and closed the door, pressing the button lock and, after a moment’s thought, propping the desk chair under the doorknob. I’d probably regret not making a trip to the guest bathroom for a bedtime glass of water when I woke up with a fierce hangover, but I would willingly deal with that just to avoid contact with any more friends Renee may have ‘spoken to’ about me. Instead, I put my mother’s cigarettes and lighter away for her.

Decembers in Jacksonville were surprisingly cold, something like April in Vancouver, so I slid out of my jeans to make the most of the chill. The bed was cool and welcoming against my skin, with the night air blowing in through the windows and chasing Renee’s smoke away. I thought about Neighbor Boy, and about being wanted. Surely it wasn’t such an awful thing, having someone want me, was it? Maybe not that young idiot out there, but someone who cared about me as a person. With a deep breath and droopy eyes, I considered my reality. I was too driven academically to bother with frat boys, none of Shalice’s friends or my classmates really understood my outside interests or the accompanying attitude, and I wasn’t romantically interested in the middle-aged men at the Chatterbox. What I told Renee was true: I was too busy with my own life to put energy into a man anyway.

Much, much too busy for a man. Whether I was wanted or not.

I may not be human, but I am a man.

Liar. If you wanted me, you’d be here.

I closed my eyes and rolled over, settling into bed and forcing myself to dream of Haida legends, the auditory differential between a Sportster and a FatBoy, anything I could call up rather than His face. Men in canoes glided past, their tattoos winking at me. Women turned into birds and flocked around me and into the sky. Animals became spirits, spirits became men, men became animals. Chii’aḵaatl'lx̱a crept on the shore, casting their eyes about the land as x̱uuya cawed a warning. Something stalked me in the empty forest, and I slipped away silently, sprouting black wings and flying up into a tree, listening as the nameless, invisible thing prowled the forest floor.

Bella, a watery voice said beside me, what are you doing?

Shh. Stl'aay taad dang kil guudang gas ga.

Bella?

The cold hand monster will hear your voice.

 *   *   *

 

Chii’aḵaatl'lx̱a: (Haida) all Supernatural beings that come out of the ocean and change into humans

x̱uuya: (Haida) Raven, the trickster; a sly, selfish character, but ultimately his acts benefit others

Stl'aay taad dang kil guudang gas ga. (Haida) The cold hand monster will hear your voice.

A/N: Wondering about all the native languages? Please visit http://www.firstvoices.com/en/SENCOTEN and http://www.firstvoices.com/en/Hlgaagilda-Xaayda-Kil

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. All recognizable characters and song lyrics are the property of their respective copyright owners. Portions of Stephenie Meyer’s original work are reprinted, but no copyright violation is intended. References to real places and groups are used fictitiously, and certain elements of history are ignored. This story is in no way meant to reflect actual criminal events or territorial claims of gangs or motorcycle clubs in Vancouver or any other location.