A Different Center of Gravity

The creek was the line. It wasn't much, just a shallow cut in the forest floor, slick with dark, mossy stones. On one side stood Carlisle, Esme, and Edward. On the other, Sam Uley, Paul Lahote, and Jacob. I stood in the middle of it, my boots sinking slightly into the soft, damp earth. The water, cold from the constant Forks rain, seeped over the edges of my soles.

No one was speaking. The silence was the point, I think. It was a silence full of things that couldn't be said without starting a fight that would likely level several acres of protected national forest. Sam’s arms were crossed over his bare chest. Steam rose from his skin, a visible sign of the heat he was putting out. Paul stood beside him, his hands curled into fists at his sides, his jaw working. They were all in cutoff shorts, their feet bare on the pine needles, as if they had just stopped in the middle of a run.

The Cullens were a study in stillness. Carlisle had his hands in the pockets of his sensible tweed jacket, his expression one of polite, clinical concern. Esme’s face was soft with worry, her eyes on me. And Edward. He stood closest to me, so close I could feel the strange, refrigerated air that surrounded him. He was perfectly still, a statue carved from something harder than stone, but his golden eyes were fixed on Jacob, and they were black with something ancient and absolute.

“The scent was a half-mile past the line,” Sam finally said. His voice was a low rumble, the kind of sound that vibrates in your bones. “You know the agreement, Carlisle.”

“It was an oversight,” Carlisle said. His tone was smooth, reasonable. It was the voice of a man used to de-escalating things. “A tourist wandered off the trail. We were tracking him to ensure he was safe. The trail looped back immediately.”

“That’s not our problem,” Paul spat. The sound was sharp, ugly.

Edward made a sound, a soft hiss of air through his teeth. It was barely audible, but on the other side of the creek, Jacob’s whole body tensed. He took a half-step forward, his eyes leaving Edward to lock on me. His expression was a mess of anger and worry. Get behind me, his eyes said. Get away from him.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My presence here was the only thing keeping their hands off each other. I was the human shield, the walking, breathing embodiment of the treaty. If I stepped to one side or the other, it would be seen as a choice, and the fragile peace would shatter. The pressure of it was a physical weight on my shoulders. Their mutual hatred felt like a tangible force in the air, pressing in on me from both sides. It was a cold, unmoving mass from Edward and a radiating, furious heat from Jacob.

“It wasn’t a challenge, Sam,” I said. My voice sounded thin, ridiculously human. “They were just making sure no one got hurt.”

Sam’s dark eyes shifted to me. The fury there didn't lessen, but it was complicated by a sense of weary obligation. He was the pack’s alpha, but my alliance with the Cullens, and Jacob’s connection to me, made everything difficult.

“Stay out of it, Bella,” Jacob said. His voice was rough, tight with restraint. He didn’t want to be angry at me, but I was defending them. I was standing next to one of them.

Edward’s hand moved, a flicker of motion at his side, and I knew he was imagining the hundred different ways he could cross the creek and get to Jacob before anyone could blink. I felt a tremor run through him, a vibration of contained violence. I put my hand on his arm. It was like touching marble.

“Let’s just go home,” I said, looking from Carlisle to Sam. “Everyone. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

No one moved. They just stood there, staring at each other over the few feet of mud and rock that I occupied. The rain began to fall again, a soft, persistent drizzle that beaded on Edward’s perfect hair and slicked Jacob’s dark skin, and still, no one left.

Eventually, they dispersed. Carlisle gave a small, conciliatory nod to Sam, who did not return it, and then my side of the creek was empty. Edward’s hand was on my lower back, guiding me toward his car. He didn’t say anything on the drive back to my house. The silence was absolute. He parked, killed the engine, and just sat there, staring through the windshield at Charlie’s front door.

Later, he was in the living room with me, sitting in the worn armchair that smelled like Charlie and stale beer. He looked completely out of place, a piece of classical sculpture dropped into a thrift store. The anger from the woods had cooled, hardened into something else. It was a perfect, polished stillness that was more unnerving than the rage. The rage was something I could understand. This was not.

He watched me as I moved around the room, turning on a lamp, pretending I had things to do. The house was quiet. Charlie was on a fishing trip with Billy Black for the weekend, a fact that felt both like a relief and a terrible irony.

“Are you cold?” he asked. His voice was a low murmur, stripped of all emotion.

“No.”

He was silent for a moment. His golden eyes were fixed on the dark window, reflecting the dim light of the lamp. “Their lack of control is a liability,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the detached air of a physician diagnosing a terminal illness. “One of them could lose their temper, and you could be near. That’s all it would take.”

“They wouldn’t hurt me,” I said, my voice quiet. “Jacob would never.”

“He wouldn’t mean to,” Edward corrected, his gaze shifting to me. It was intense, but not warm. It was the look of a scientist examining a specimen. “But his nature, Bella. Their nature. It’s predicated on impulse. On rage. We’ve existed for a century in close proximity to humans without a single incident. They’ve existed for less than a year and have nearly broken the treaty half a dozen times.”

I sank onto the couch opposite him, pulling my knees up to my chest. He wasn’t wrong, not entirely. Paul had lost control before. But the way he said it, with such weary, ancient finality, it chilled me. He wasn’t talking about a group of teenage boys from La Push. He was talking about a different species, one he viewed as inherently flawed, inherently lesser.

“It’s because they’re protecting their home,” I argued weakly. “They see you as a threat.”

“We are not a threat to them, so long as they don’t cross the line,” he said. “We have never given them a reason to believe otherwise. Their animosity is baseless. It’s instinctual. Like a dog barking at a mailman.” He paused. “I don’t like you being near them. It’s a risk I’m not willing to tolerate.”

There it was. The possessiveness, dressed up as concern. It was the same tone he used when he took the distributor cap from my truck, the same logic he used to justify listening to my conversations. He moved then, unfolding from the chair with that impossible grace and coming to sit beside me on the couch. The cushion barely dipped under his weight. He took my hand. His skin was cold and hard, a shocking contrast to the memory of Jacob’s radiating heat.

“I only want you to be safe,” he said, his thumb stroking the back of my hand. The gesture was meant to be soothing, but it felt like an assertion of ownership. This hand, this girl, is mine. Not theirs.

I looked at our joined hands. His pale, perfect fingers wrapped around my own. He was framing it as a choice between safety and danger, between his control and their chaos. But I knew it wasn't that simple. It was a choice between two different kinds of prisons. His words weren’t born of simple fear for me. They were born of a hatred that was a century old, a deep, unshakeable prejudice that he saw as simple, obvious truth. And I was standing in the middle of it.

The next morning, the house felt empty and silent. I was still sitting on the couch when I heard the spluttering growl of Jacob’s rebuilt Rabbit coming down the street. It was a familiar, comforting sound, but today it just made my stomach tighten. A moment later, the front door opened without a knock and he was there, filling the doorway.

He brought the outside in with him. The smell of rain and wet woods, and underneath it, something warm and alive that was just him. He was wearing jeans and a faded t-shirt, his feet bare and leaving damp prints on the linoleum. His presence was so different from Edward’s. Where Edward absorbed the energy in a room, creating a pocket of cold silence, Jacob radiated it. The small house suddenly felt crowded, buzzing with his restless heat.

“Heard you had some trouble yesterday,” he said, shutting the door behind him. His eyes scanned the room, as if looking for any lingering trace of a vampire, before they settled on me. “You okay?”

“I’m fine, Jake. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened?” He gave a short, humorless laugh and started pacing the small space between the couch and the television. It was three steps one way, three steps back. “I saw his face, Bella. Sam had to practically hold Paul back. If you hadn’t been standing there…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.

He stopped pacing and looked at me, his dark eyes intense. “What did he say to you after? When he got you alone?”

“He was just worried.” The words sounded weak even to me.

“Worried,” Jacob repeated. The word was a sneer. “He’s not worried, Bella. He’s territorial. That’s all a leech knows how to be. Did he tell you to stay away from us? Did he tell you we’re dangerous?”

I didn’t answer. I just looked at him, at the frantic energy humming under his skin, at the way his hands were clenched at his sides. He was a furnace of protective rage.

He took my silence as an answer. “Of course he did. He wants to keep you locked up in his cold, dead house with his cold, dead family. They don’t see you, Bells. They just see a thing they want to own.”

He crossed the room in a single step and sat down next to me on the couch, his body sinking into the cushions, radiating an almost uncomfortable amount of heat. The air between us felt thick and warm. He reached out and took my hand, the one Edward had held the night before. His grip was firm, his palm and fingers scorching against my skin. It wasn’t a gentle touch. It was an anchor, a brand. The sheer temperature of him was a shock, a stark, living contrast to the memory of Edward’s cold, smooth fingers.

“We would never hurt you,” he said, his voice dropping lower, rougher. “You have to know that. Everything we do is to protect you. To protect our home from things like him.”

He was leaning closer now, his face just inches from mine. I could see the flecks of brown in his dark eyes, the furious, desperate sincerity there. He believed every word he was saying, with an absolute, unwavering conviction. He saw the world in a simple, brutal binary: us and them, warmth and cold, life and death. And in his eyes, I saw the exact same possessive certainty that I had seen in Edward’s. It was a mirror image, reflected in a darker, hotter glass. This hand, this girl, is mine. Not his.

I stared back at him, my own hand burning in his, and felt a wave of something like despair wash over me. He thought he was saving me from Edward. Edward thought he was protecting me from Jacob. And neither of them could see that I was just caught in the crossfire of their war, a piece of land they were both determined to conquer.

He left soon after that. I just sat there on the couch, the fabric still warm from his body, my hand tingling as if it had been burned. The house was quiet again, but the silence felt different now. It was filled with the echoes of their voices, Edward’s cold reason and Jacob’s furious heat, both of them speaking a language of possession that I was supposed to find comforting.

I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. It didn’t help. The walls seemed too close, the ceiling too low. I felt a tightness in my chest, a familiar pressure that had been building for months. I walked to the window and pressed my forehead against the cool glass, looking down at the street. It was empty. The rain had started again, turning the asphalt dark and slick, blurring the edges of the houses across the way. It was a view I had seen my entire life, but it had never looked so much like a cage.

They were both so certain. Edward, with his ancient, weary condescension, saw Jacob and the pack as a biological mistake, a chaotic variable that needed to be controlled or eliminated for my safety. Jacob, with his burning, righteous anger, saw Edward and his family as unnatural parasites, a cold sickness that needed to be purged for my protection. They had built their entire worldviews around this mutual hatred, and they had placed me at the center of it, the justification for their war.

I was the border. The disputed territory. The prize. My love was something to be won, my safety an excuse for their animosity. My choice was the final verdict in their generational conflict. Choose me, Bella, and you choose safety and civilization. Choose me, Bella, and you choose warmth and life. They didn’t leave any room for a third option, a choice that wasn’t about them. They didn’t leave any room for me.

The air in my lungs felt thin and inadequate. I breathed in, but the tightness in my chest only constricted further. I was a chess piece, and they were the only two players, moving me back and forth across the board, telling me it was for my own good. Each move they made, each argument they presented, was a wall, boxing me in. The pressure to finally tip the board, to declare a winner, was constant. It came from the cold weight of Edward’s hand and the feverish grip of Jacob’s. It was in their eyes, in the silences between their words. Choose. Choose. Choose.

But choosing felt like a surrender. To choose Edward was to agree that Jacob was a dangerous animal. To choose Jacob was to agree that Edward was a soulless monster. Both felt like lies. Both felt like a betrayal not just of one of them, but of myself. I would be validating a hatred that had nothing to do with me, and I would have to live with the consequences, forever defined by the side I had picked.

I stared out at the rain, at the gray, endless sky. A thought surfaced in my mind, so strange and out of place that it felt like it belonged to someone else. It was a wild, desperate little spark in the suffocating darkness. What if the problem wasn't who I chose? What if the problem was the choosing itself? The entire structure was wrong. The conflict was the thing that was alive, and it was feeding on me.

A hysterical bubble of something that might have been laughter rose in my throat, but I choked it down. The idea was insane. It was impossible. But it took root. The only way to stop being the reason for the war was to give them a different one. Or to give them something else entirely. The only way for there to be any real peace was if they just… stopped. If they stopped seeing each other as monsters, as obstacles. If they stopped focusing all of that intense, violent, protective energy on me.

What if they focused it somewhere else?

I pushed myself away from the window, the thought echoing in the sudden, quiet space of my mind. It was a fragile, ridiculous idea, a human trying to reprogram two of the most powerful creatures on the planet. But it was the only idea that offered a way out of the box. If I couldn't choose between them, maybe I could choose for them. Maybe I could make them look at each other and see something other than an enemy. Maybe I could make them find something else to care about.