BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 12: No, Non Je Regrette Rien

Last time, Jacob told Bella that Quil Ateara had imprinted with a two year old girl. So, he's fallen madly, obsessively in love with a baby. Somehow Bella resisted the urge to bash her head on a rock and get out of this nightmare forever. Where's the kick? Where's the kick? Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 8 (cont'd): Temper

“You are fucking kidding me, motherfucker,” I hissed, picking up a sharp object and heading toward Quil's house. “That asshole is DEAD, Jacob. DEAD. I am going to fucking END him.”

Okay, well, that is how Bella should have reacted. Instead she's shocked into silence.

“Claire is two,” Jacob told me.
Rain started to fall. I blinked furiously as the drops pelted my face.

Jacob points out that Quil is not actually aging, so he just has to wait a few decades and this girl will draw parallel to him. Bella is “horrified,” talk about an understatement. Jacob tries to placate all of us. It doesn't work.

“There's nothing romantic about it at all, not for Quil, not now.”

He likens the feeling of imprinting to a shift in gravity. “When you see her, suddenly it's not the earth holding you here anymore. She does.”

I'm sorry Jacob, but I was taught that shifts in gravity were supposed to lead to awesome fight scenes, not calls to Child Protective Services.

Joe Gordon Levitt is about to imprint on your FACE, Mr. Projection

And it gets worse. It just keeps getting worse.

“Quil will be the best, kindest big brother any kid ever had...And then, when she's older and needs a friend, he'll be more understanding, trustworthy, and reliable than anyone else she knows. And then, when she's grown up, they'll be as happy as Emily and Sam.”

Awesome. He will be the best big brother ever, until she grows up and he fucks her. Just like all great big brothers! And precisely when will these role-shifts occur? When will Claire be old enough to be Quil's wife? Thirteen? Fourteen? Never? Never would be the appropriate age, I think. Also left unsaid: whether or not Claire will have a face still.

“Doesn't Claire get a choice here?” Bella says. Oh, good point Bella! “Nope,” Jacob says. In so many words:

“Of course. But why wouldn't she choose him, in the end? He'll be her perfect match. Like he was designed for her alone.”

That is so how it works, Jacob. Girls always fall in love with their obsessive childhood babysitters! You can totally make any girl of any age fall in love with you out of sheer force of will. (How did S. Meyer meet her husband, by the way?) If the love doesn't take right away maybe Quil can keep Claire locked in a basement or something UNTIL SHE LEARNS TO APPRECIATE HIS SMOTHERING AFFECTION. I don't know, I'm just spitballing some ideas here! Anyway, Bella is fighting to keep the vomit out of her mouth, so naturally Jacob uses this opportunity to segue into another romantic overture. Nice work, Jacob. “I'll never see anyone else, Bella. I'll only see you. Even when I close my eyes and try to see something else.”

And he's not done yet, gang. Bella somewhat alarmingly pushes past the whole thing about she should probably call the police on Quil and goes out on her motorcycle with Jacob instead. Later they go to Jacob's shed to hang out; they drink soda and make stupid jokes about the shed being “Washington's little Taj Mahal.” Ha ha ha HEY WHAT IS THE AGE OF CONSENT IN INDIA? STILL NOT TWO, RIGHT? WHERE IS QUIL RIGHT NOW? IS SOMEONE KEEPING AN EYE ON HIM, OR BETTER A GUN ON HIM? Everything is normal between Jacob and Bella for all of thirty seconds. But Jacob brings up the treaty and Bella's plans for immortality. In flux though said plans may be, she lets slip that it might only be a few weeks away. Jacob loses his shit, but more than normal. What happens is Bella points out that Edward isn't aging past seventeen and says, “what else can I do?”

His words cracked like snaps of a whip. “Anything. Anything else. You'd be better off dead. I'd rather you were.”

OH NO YOU DIDN'T. “Fuck you!” Bella shouts (well, she should) and climbs onto her motorcycle and zooms off. Good. And that is the last we see of Jacob Black. Right? Guys? Please?

Bella gets soaked in the rain on her way back to Chez Cullen, where Alice is waiting in the garage. She's sitting on the hood of her Porche, apparently saying goodbye to it.

“Jasper and I didn't even get to fuck in the backseat,” she sighed.

She notes that Bella looks like she could use a hot shower – lesbian slashfic authors, start your engines – and asks if she wants to talk about what happened. “You wouldn't even fucking believe me if I told you,” Bella says. I still think Bella needs to make a few phone calls to some state agencies. Instead she goes to sleep.

She wakes up in the middle of the night, realizing she's been transported from Edward's couch to his ridiculous bed. He's there and, she finds his lips in the dark in a paragraph that I will concede is sort of sweet. She can't bring herself to be angry with him, and he apparently isn't angry with her. What is going on? How did these two change back from the self-absorbed nightmares they became in New Moon? They make out instead of fighting, and Edward even cops a feel:

His hand curved around my elbow, moving slowly down my arm, across my ribs and over my waist, tracing along my hip and down my leg, around my knee.

You skipped all of the good parts, Edward! But then he pulls Bella's leg up around his own hip. See how S. Meyer just cleverly avoided saying Bella is now straddling Edward? I see what you are doing there. “I felt suddenly warm,” Bella says. I'm not even going to go there, you already did it anyway. As it turns out, Edward has a nickname for his dick: The Ire.

“Not to bring on the ire prematurely,” he whispered, “but do you mind telling me what it is about this bed that you object to?”

The gold blankets? The butterfly decals? There is a lot to object to, but maybe we should start with the rest of the room. Bella is almost too horny to answer, though. “It's unnecessary” she manages to choke out as he climbs on top of her.

“That's debatable,” he disagreed. “This would be difficult on a couch.”

Whoa, what is going on? What is “this”? Bella is just as confused as we are. “Did you change your mind?” she asks. Translation: “Are we finally going to fuck?” Bringing it up is enough to shut Edward down. “I was just trying to illustrate the benefits of the bed you don't seem to like. Don't get carried away.” (If Edward thinks you can't do that on a couch he just hasn't tried hard enough.) Bella doesn't like having a taste of her own cock-teasing medicine.

“If we're not going to get carried away, what's the point?” Bella says. That's basically the thesis statement of this entire blog so far, nearly 200 posts later. Edward maintains that sex is too dangerous. Mind you, we're still not saying the word “sex,” here. If we can forgive those heavy layers of euphemism, we get some appealingly frank (for Twilight) moments. Bella says she is going to literally die if she doesn't have an orgasm soon (again, in so many words).

“I'll tell you what's dangerous,” I said quickly... “I'm going to spontaneously combust one of these days – and you'll have no one but yourself to blame.”

Somewhere in the house, Alice says “AHEM,” as loudly as possible. Edward apologizes for giving Bella the wrong impression. I think his penis has an even newer nickname: “I don't mind if you want to give me the wrong impression again,” Bella says. But Edward keeps apologizing instead, saying it was silly to have made Alice hold Bella hostage (“Silly and hot!”-Joey Tribbiani).

Bella asks if he's angry she went to La Push. Edward says no, and seems shocked at Bella's suggestion that he would take Alice's Porsche away. “Of course not. It was a gift,” he says. She asks if he wants to know what she did (as in ditching school and hanging out with Jacob), and Edward says she doesn't have to tell him unless she wants to. Whoa. Why is Edward a likeable guy all of a sudden? Compared to Jacob and Quil he already would have seemed like a saint, but now he's like the saint who also killed Hitler. Who is the patron saint of suicide? Any Catholic readers less lapsed than I am?

“I decided that you were right. My problem before was more about my... prejudice against werewolves than anything else. I'm going to try to be more reasonable and trust your judgment.”

“Wow,” Bella says. “Holy shit. This is fucking nuts,” she continues (more or less). We're all very surprised. Edward asks if she's going back to the Rez any time soon, and she says no. She tells him about Jacob wishing she was dead, and he hugs her and says, “I could quite literally kill him for saying that to you.” Tell him about Quil, Bella! But she's far too preoccupied something that came up a few chapter back: the part of Rosalie's story about all the vampire pussy in Denali. At first he doesn't want to answer, and Bella threatens to ask Alice. This happens:

“It's late,” he said. His voice had a little edge to it that was something new. Sort of nervous, maybe a little embarrassed. “Besides, I think Alice stepped out...”

He doesn't want to tell Bella that Alice and Jasper are christening the Porsche after all! I swear that is literally what it is for once. I see what you are doing there, S. Meyer, and I like it! Bella assumes the worst about the sluts in Denali, that some kind of super-ultra sexy Rosalie times 1000 was grinding on Edward all the time. It sounds like she's right: a girl named Tanya made a pass at Edward and got rejected. He reassures Bella: “I prefer brunettes.” So were there any brunettes in Denali? He kisses her until she gets too distracted to ask that question. “You're quite adorable when you're jealous,” he says. Of course he's the kind of dude who gets off on that.