Still Breathing [Jacob Black]

Chapter Nineteen

Felicity

I was stalling. Kind of. I mean, I wasn't lying when I said I needed to process. I did need that. But my mind had enough of a grasp on it all to be full of questions—questions I was currently too much of a chicken to ask. Hence, the stalling.

So I sat in the kitchen table with Jacob and Paul pretending not to stare at me while I ate my way through a box of Cheez-Its. Not the healthiest of options, but the box was out on the counter and they looked good so they were fine for me.

Jacob pushed a bottle of water toward me after a few minutes, and I removed the lid and gulped down the liquid. I was such a mess I hadn't even noticed how thirsty I was. Lucky for me Jacob had my back. I pondered that as I munched on my snack. Jacob and I had clicked basically right away. Well, after we'd actually talked. Our first meeting didn't really count. Crashing into him in the hallway was just an unfortunate mishap. But once we'd talked and been civil with each other, then became friends...we clicked well. I couldn't deny that. Wasn't it so recently when I was wondering if I was falling for him? Maybe I wasn't wrong to be feeling so strongly for him so soon after Elijah. Maybe there was a reason.

Dr. Cullen's ramblings about "imprinting" weren't exactly conclusive, however, so I had no idea. I was simply trying to make connections in my head. The only way to know for sure would be to ask Jacob.

But to ask Jacob about that, I had to also confront the very real possibility that Dr. Cullen hadn't been insane and was citing the truth when he said Jacob and his friends were werewolves. And that was the thing my mind wanted to reject. It was tough to even force myself to focus on it. How could a mythological creature be real? And how could I have so conveniently stumbled upon them as two of the people I was closest too?

That question alone brought my brain around again to the imprinting thing—I'd known Jacob for such a short time and he was already someone I was closest to? Being so close to Paul made sense, since we were literally living together at this point, but Jacob...

Sitting straighter in my chair, I decided to face this head on. No more chickening out. The sooner I asked questions and sorted my head out, the sooner things could go back to normal—or as close to it as possible.

"You're werewolves," I said firmly, shifting my stare between them and daring them to contradict me.

They glanced at each other. Paul shrugged. Jacob sighed. "Not exactly," Jacob said. "But we do turn into wolves."

That...had not been the answer I was expecting. The wind effectively blown out of my sails, I slumped in my chair. "Oh?"

He shook his head. "Werewolves implied needing some sort of trigger to change into the wolf. We're more like...shifters. We can phase whenever we want. Though it's harder to control when we're angry. If we get too angry it's actually impossible to control and we shift whether we want to or not. That hasn't been much of an issue lately, though," he added, as if I'd given any sort of reaction to the new information. In actuality I was just staring at him. "Sam was the first of us to change. He didn't really know much about the transformation or how it worked. So when he and Emily were arguing in their early days, he learned the hard way that anger made phasing uncontrollable."

Now I had a reaction as my eyes widened. "Emily's scars."

Jacob nodded. "Yes."

Paul inserted himself into the conversation. "I actually had a little lapse not too long ago, too. I didn't hurt anybody, but I did phase kind of near Bella Swan. It was dangerous. In theory. I wouldn't have hurt her, but the rest of the pack thought otherwise."