I Never Meant to Start a War

Any other person would tell the truth; that the gaze only lasted for half a minute, rather than the millennium it felt like it had from my standpoint, staring up at this figure that towered over me with the most hypnotic brown eyes I had ever seen. And he stared down at me, looking at me as if I was the treasure and he was the searcher and he had finally found it. That everything he had worked so hard for had finally evened out and made sense, and he was the hero, and everything was perfect. No matter the analogy, there would always be one to describe the look in this stranger’s eyes when he first saw me.

I assume I knew mine.

Surprise. That was my dominant emotion at first, because I had walked into him, because he was handsomer than I would ever admit aloud, and because I realized that I had just met my second werewolf and he was everything.

And then came shock.

No. No, it couldn’t be.

And then horror.

And then I looked down, looked down at my hand holding my sunglasses and at my feet wearing a pair of boots that were the only ones that could keep my feet warm and look good at once, and I felt embarrassed.

He snapped out of it. “Hello.”

“Sorry,” I said, hoping that he wouldn’t stop me when I turned to continue to the alpha’s house, but his hand caught my wrist. He turned me back around so that I could see his smile, perfect in all ways imaginable, as he said:

“My name’s Paul.”

I didn’t know what to say at first, but my mind eventually knew that I now had nothing to lose. “Marie.”

“A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” he purred, if dogs could purr. I felt heat building through my entire body, crushing my heart. “So, Marie, I doubt I have ever seen you before—I probably would have remembered someone as beautiful as you.”

He was trying to be so charming, but he didn’t know that I could read people, and that I could see every emotion in his eyes and that I knew he was trying to make a glorious first impression. He was quicker than the rest were. If they were in this position, they probably would have still been gawking after my retreating back as they tried to understand what had happened. So he was smarter than he let on—I wouldn’t be surprised. People were just lazy.

The only reason I didn’t want to look into his eyes was to see the proof of what I knew had just happened. And I felt nothing but horror and dirtiness.

How had I let this happen?

I swallowed and said, a little painfully, “You wouldn’t have seen me; I live in Forks. Usually I stay there, too.”

How dare some invisible force try to tear apart all of the chords that connected me to the one I loved? How dare some kind of off-kilter form of predestination get in the way?

He smiled despite my obvious warning, knowing just as well as I did that Forks was basically no-man’s-land. “So what are you doing here?”

“Looking for somewhere,” I told him, continuing walking, breathing the heaviest sigh of all time when he immediately followed after me, matching my pace perfectly. Of course he would follow me. Seeing as I was headed to the werewolf headquarters, how had I thought that I could keep away from him for long?

“I could help,” he immediately offered. “I do live here.”

I shrugged and continued to look for myself, looking over numbers. Slowly, slowly they were going up. Perfect. Or disastrous, depending on what will happen when he finds out that I will never want him, that I am in love with his biggest enemy, that the one thing he had been looking for was untouchable.

It hadn’t hit him yet.

“Who are you going to see?” Paul pressed on. I wondered why he was so persistent to keep me talking. Maybe to learn more about me, or to hear me speak after long days of wondering what my voice would sound like? I didn’t know. And I probably never would.

“I don’t know them well,” I admitted cryptically as we neared the place that would inevitably take me straight into where the dominoes will begin to fall. “I’m here with a friend, and she knows them. I was just along for the ride.”

“Okay.”

I couldn’t help but to study him, because that was something I had taken to doing lately: I dissected the way he radiated with self-confidence, read that same confidence in the squared shoulders, noticed that his eyes leaped with joy every time he snuck a glance at me, and I didn’t like it. He shouldn’t get his hopes up. I wasn’t going to give into this imprint. I wasn’t . . .

We had arrived.

“Oh,” I said. “Here it is.”

“Are you sure?” he immediately choked out, staring in awe as I began to walk up the drive to the place he more than likely had just left. I looked back at him, playing innocent.

“Yeah. Why?” I played the part perfectly. “You know the people who live here?”

“Yeah, I do, actually,” he said slowly, uncertainly as he moved in front of me to climb up the porch steps first, opening the front door and releasing the sounds of arguing teenage males invade every crevice of the air around us, and I walked inside. I glanced around and immediately spotted Bella beside Jacob, and they both looked over to me when the talking in the room suddenly cut off. I glanced around at the silent werewolves watching me with a strange expression as I walked over to Bella, a smirk on my lips.

“Am I going to get any introductions?” I asked, feeling above it all, like I was high, but not mighty, and I was looking down at the scene. Everything was moving too fast. Adrenaline was pumping through my veins and, for once, I didn’t have to try to control my heartbeat.

Paul was still standing in the doorway, looking as though he had been hit by a frying pan. I knew it wasn’t from my audacity, but rather the fact that all of the werewolves but him and Jacob were looking at me in a bit of disgust, a lot of dislike. He opened his mouth to ask when Jake overlapped him. “Guys, this is Marie. She’s the other leech lover.”

“What?” Paul’s voice was completely monotone.

“Oh, the silent one, right?” one asked.

“Jasper,” Bella and I answered immediately, Bella because she was used to filling in names for the werewolves’ nicknames, and me because I was used to people calling him Hale or Cullen and felt to correct them each time. The wolf who had imprinted on me was frozen in the doorway, angled as if he was about to run out at any moment, a slightly shaking hand reaching toward the doorknob as he stared at me with wide eyes.

Immediately a figure jumped up from the couch. “Sam Uley,” he said in a voice that told me without introduction that this was the alpha. His tone and his stance alone showed authority, his eyes showing a kind of professionalism at the same time as interest and a bit of dislike. I didn’t give him my hand to shake, knowing he wasn’t going to offer me his.

I smiled at him. “Nice to meet you.” I cut my eyes to the rest of them. “As well as the rest of you.”

Silence fell, and they turned to the other and started their conversations back up in low tones, as if they didn’t want me to know what useless subject they were talking about, but one foreign tongue murmured something that hovered over all of them: “Leech lover.”

And Paul stormed out of the room, letting the front door slam behind him as we caught sight of him running toward the woods. The wolves all frowned after him and looked to me, as if I knew. I did, but I didn’t let them know that, just shrugged, making it look as though I was just as confused as them.

“Well, Marie,” Sam said slowly, weighing his words cautiously, “it was nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

Before the underlying hostility could make its presence known, a figure bustled over, a woman this time. She was beautiful but marred with scars that would never fully fade, and I knew her name, which had been whispered on Bella’s tongue more than once—Emily Young. Beautiful, kind Emily Young. The wolf-girl.

“Hi!” Emily beamed at me, and I found myself smiling back warmly, taking a liking to her overall aura. She radiated a pleasant atmosphere, and like Jasper would have, I felt myself growing much more comfortable. She held a hand out for me to shake, and I saw Sam’s hand twitch as if he was going to pull it back. “I’m Emily!”

“I’m Marie, in case you haven’t heard.” I smiled a little sourly as I shook her hand. “The leech lover.” But I winked, and she was smiling again.

“How about you join me in the kitchen, to get away from the overpowering sense of male?” she asked, and I laughed genuinely, surprised but immediately feeling welcome. Even Sam relaxed, his shoulders relaxing, as he smiled softly down at his imprint. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen, all smiles. “It’s not often that we get to meet new people, unless they’re in the pack, and usually by the time I get to talk to them they’re tired from a six hour shift and don’t hear a word I say.”

“I do believe you are just describing a man in general,” I teased, and she laughed. I had a feeling we were going to be friends, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing yet.

She gestured toward the wooden table. “You can sit if you want,” she offered but I didn’t move from the doorway. It didn’t feel like I belonged any deeper than where I stood. She went back to the long expanse of countertop, where an assortment of foodstuffs were laid out over the surface of it. I stared in surprise.

“Unbelievable hunger?”

“You have no idea; these boys would starve if I didn’t like to cook.”

Just when I was sure I was about to hit sensory overload, the door to the kitchen swung over, knocking into me, when a small Quileute girl slipped in, immediately squealing.

“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were standing there! I’m Kim,” she introduced, shaking my hand as well. I didn’t bother to say my name and status once more, just waved my hand. She smirked at me and settled down at the table, the midway point between the wolf-girl and the vampire-girl. She looked at me for a long while before she spoke again: “So how’d you meet Paul?”

“What do you mean?” I played dumb.

“You showed up at the same time.”

“Oh, yeah, I had to ask for directions. I didn’t have a clue of how to find this house.”

She nodded and smiled, and I didn’t really like it one bit. No, don’t get me wrong, she seemed nice. But there was a secret behind that façade, a glimmer of light in her eyes that told me something important—she could tell what had happened. She was almost one hundred percent certain that Paul had imprinted on me. And, like any girl with investigative tendencies, she thought to come and interrogate it out of me.

Other than that, she seemed nice, with a small figure that was taller than me but shorter than Emily, with a face that said she smiled often and laughed as a hobby. I could assume that she was an imprint. I didn’t think that females could phase.

Kim knew exactly what to say. “Is it weird to say that I absolutely love the color of your eyes?”

To me? No. I was used to the praise of my genetic ice blue eyes, so I smiled and waved it off with a thank you and an uncertain look to the floor boards.

But I was really thinking about just how clever this girl was—she knew that I would know about imprinting, and that I would know scholarly and firsthand that it happens when they look them in the eye.

She was waiting for me to slip up. And I was waiting for her to fail.

I didn’t give her a lot of time; after about ten minutes of a meaningless conversation of how chemistry was probably the most difficult science ever to grace the earth with its presence, I got to my feet and excused myself, strolling back into the main part of the house and catching sight of where Bella and Jacob were sitting close together, having a heated argument. My words cut through the atmosphere, my every word hated by those around me.

“Hey, Bella,” I called. “I don’t trust your truck to let you drive it after nightfall. I think we should head back.”

Some of the pack couldn’t help but to laugh, obviously knowing all about the truck, and she turned red and nodded. I nodded back and wandered outside, over to the old truck that I should have noticed when I was walking, but I, of course, had been distracted. I stood there for a moment, just stood there, before I suddenly lashed out and struck the body of the truck with my foot, letting out my impersonation of a growl as I raked my hands violently though my hair. I heard a twig crack behind me and I spun around.

One of the wolves was hesitating in the middle of the lawn behind me, someone who had been inside. He wore a smirk, but it was pained as he looked at me. I registered in the back of my mind that he had been the one sitting next to Kim.

I looked away from him.

Only a beat later, the wind brought his words.

“Welcome to the pack.”

I let out a breath and turned around, and his smirk fell immediately as he looked at the real me that I had been hiding with so many different faces, so many different hostile expressions, some smiles, even. He saw the girl that no one usually did, not even Jasper—he saw the girl that was lost in the world around her, that looked around and saw nothing but something unfamiliar. He could see a confused girl in my unguarded expression, and maybe he even saw the pleading expression I had read in my own eyes. The one that was begging for me to be found.

He looked at me for a long moment before he turned around and walked away, and I morphed back into a fake.