Promises to Keep-1Remember

Jacob's POV

I took a deep, deep breath and let my eyes wander through the canopy of fir trees that loomed overhead to watch the fingers of light cascading through the space between one tree and another.

The earth was wet and cool under my skin, but it didn't stay that way for long thanks to my insane body temperature. Every time I moved, the rich, fresh smell of damp earth wafted into my nostrils, as familiar to me now as my own scent.

Different smells and sounds bombarded my heightened senses but I tuned them out.

It took a moment for me—as it always did these days—to realize that I was in my human form and not my other.

My wolf form grew to be as familiar to me as the one I'd lived with for sixteen years, if not as much. After all, nowadays, I'd spent more time in my wolf form than in my human one.

Running. Always running.

Don't change anything. Sorry.

I never thought that what I wrote then actually has a double meaning now. The fact that she did love me didn't matter. The fact that she knew that she did, didn't change anything. I'm surprise that she didn't write that down and send it to me. That would've been a lovely closure.

Bitterness rose in my throat at the thought, but it didn't make it any less true.

I stayed still and held my breath as I waited for the bitterness to give away to pain.

To a pain so deep, so constricting, that it strangled my throat and clawed at my insides, making it hard to breathe.

It seems these days, I live in a perpetual state of aching.

Everything aches; my skin, my muscles, my head.

My heart.

And it was always there, no matter what form I was in.

There was no escape from it.

The pain didn't come as fast as it once did, but when it did come; it was still as blinding, still as new as it was weeks before.

It still ripped at my heart like a dull, jagged blade.

A small, tortured sound escaped from my lips but I bit down against it, refusing to let it out. I tried to swallow it down when it trembled in my throat.

Again—like every time the pain rushed inside me—I wondered if it will ever stop. Will it ever fade?

But perversely, I didn't want it to end.

Not yet, not now.

The pain changed somehow. It didn't lessen, true. It throbbed just as strongly, as mean spirited as it always did… but it sweetened somehow.

And the sweetness made it almost bearable, even when it added new and creative ways to carve at my bleeding heart.

I closed my eyes when I felt the first drop of rain, concentrating on the cool sensation it left on my skin as it slid along the dips and valleys of my body.

I couldn't quite remember the many times I did this.

Running myself ragged until exhaustion made me stumble, phasing back into my human form just as I was about to fold onto the ground in an unmoving heap of pain; going home only once I'd gotten so tired that I could do nothing but crash into a dreamless sleep.

Sometimes, when the pain was too great—when the memories were too vivid, when my feelings were too raw—I would continue to run, run until my mind blanked, until instincts took over and my human side disappeared with the added distance.

Like the memory of kissing her—the memory of when her lips came alive against mine—God, that was the worst and best of it all. The bittersweet memory of when she finally told me that she loved me—really loved me—that was a slow, agonizing pain that made my heart ached in ways that I never knew it could. Our long walks down the beach, they way we muddled through mud and rain on our motorcycles, every memory brought another fresh bout of pain that bullied my heart into submission.

My brothers tried to help, but eventually—at my resistance and persistence—they left me alone.

The patient, waiting look of my father was another matter.

I wondered whether this was how she felt back then, and the sweetness returned at the thought that I was experiencing something that she had once experienced, as if that brought me closer to her somehow.

But not close enough.

I clenched my eyes tightly against the sudden stab in my chest at the mere thought of her. As if I evoked her somehow, my mind supplied me with biased images of her face.

Frustration pummeled my brain and I let loose a low, threatening growl that was much more suited to my wolf side. But then… then the pain seeped through.

"Bella."

The whispered name was heavy with longing; it quivered with the emotions that were trapped inside me with no one to give them to. So, it raged inside me, searching for a way out, but found none.

"Bella."

My voice broke at the end as the storms of my emotions finally burst through all of my defenses.

And as if in sympathy, the gathering clouds released a sudden torrent of rain, drenching me until I can't distinguish where my tears end and the rain begins.

I didn't know how long I laid there in the rain and the mind numbing pain, but when the sun broke through the clouds and touched everything within my sight with gold, I figured out what I had to do.

I promised her, and damn myself if I didn't stick to it.

I stood up with a jerk of my body and wiped the rain from my face with a trembling hand. Shaking my long hair, I snapped my head back and let loose a determined howl that trickled out of my human throat and exited through my wolf one.

And I ran. This time, to her and not from her.

I promised her that I will always be there for her, so now… I had a wedding to go to.