Don't Look/No Promises

One

Summer - 1958

Bella

The girls stole the car at midnight.

It was always midnight. Always a different car. Always half a pint in. Always done with their teeth in their lips trying to muffle their drunken giggles and always for the thrill of it, nothing more than that. It was always boredom, small town life guarded by a great big forest. The options for amusement were few and far between and the girls had been trying to entertain themselves for far too long. By seventeen their creativity was running low, or not running at all, or only ran for the bad sorts of things because the only activities left were either dull and bland, or illegal.

This time it was a Thunderbird. A new one. Shiny baby blue paint and silver hubcaps. White leather seats. Sitting low and squat and perfect for picking.

Rose always claimed the backseat.

Alice always fiddled with the radio.

Bella always drove.

Always.

Bella loved the car the moment it growled to life. Not a purr, not a smooth turnover, but the roar of a mechanical beast. The big engine beneath the hood took up most of the vehicle and for good reason. It churned to life as laboriously as a dragon waking from a sixteen hundred year sleep, loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. The girls squealed as Bella pressed her foot to the gas too hard and the car leapt forward, slamming all of them back in their seats.

Their exit from the city limits took less than two minutes.

Roaring all the way.

Rose started it. She always started it. When she stole her mother’s lipstick in fourth grade and showed up to school with a cherry red mouth, she had gotten detention from the headmistress, a full week of writing lines and another of cleaning classrooms. By the next day, all the girls were sporting contraband makeup. She was twelve when she started to style her hair, bangs coiled high above her forehead in victory rolls and a ponytail that fell in one thick curl against her back. Thirteen when she started to roll her skirt up before school. Fifteen when she bought herself a bra. Sixteen when she let some guy feel her up in the back hall bathroom during a pep rally and almost seventeen when she got busted for smoking a cigarette in the same place. She liked to drink, liked to cuss, and liked to kiss boys just long enough to keep them strung around her middle finger. She was the daughter of a single mother who most of the town considered loose, so it didn’t surprise anyone that Rose was kind of loose herself.

Rose was always the spark and this spark liked to steal cars.

Alice didn’t start it. She always ended it. Buttoned Rose back up and tugged her back down when too much started to show, talked up security guards and talked down teachers when Rose took it too far. Alice put a stop to several things that could have gotten them killed or arrested or worse, beforehand or at just the right moment. She refused to drive to the city for a visit to a bar that had burned down later that night, and she drug Rose and Bella away from a party on the beach that got raided by Bella’s own father the moment they slipped into the trees. Alice was polite as a child, well-mannered as a kid, and polished as a teenager; her mouth and her particular brand of magic had gotten the girls out of many a tough spot, many a time.

Being the mayor’s daughter probably helped.

That left Bella somewhere in the middle. The padding between two rocks, the filling between two cookies. A plain Jane brunette bracketed on either side by a long, lithe blonde and a tiny dark-haired girl with just a touch of dwarfism. She was the daughter of a dead mom and a cop, average by her own standards. She wore the same pink silk jacket and slapped-on lipstick every morning. She drove the cars Rose wanted to steal and smoked the cigarettes she wanted to buy, let Alice dictate where she drove and then let her decide when it was time to return home.

She egged Rose on, but deferred to Alice. Always the enabler.

The girls cruised the backroads in the Thunderbird, gravel and mud and passing trees illuminated by headlights. The car drove like a dream. Like a beast, but like a dream too. Sailing over the ground like the tires weren’t even touching the earth, fishtailing around corners an inch above the dirt. They were halfway to the ocean and almost above the treeline when Rose finally ponied up. She held a little bottle full of amber liquid over the front seat, nudging Alice in the shoulder. Alice grinned as she took the bottle, taking a solid swig without a grimace before passing it along to Bella. Alice might be a good girl, the one who kept Rose on the straight, but Rose was Alice’s excuse to live a little and there was a wild child hiding somewhere just below Alice’s pretty facade. Which meant Alice didn’t put a stop to everything.

“How’d you get this anyway?” Bella took a small swallow and passed the bottle back, watching in the rearview as Rose took it with a smirk.

“I let that guy from the all-nighter in PA get off on my tits.” Rose pushed her breasts together. “Did you know a dick fits right in there between them like a saus-”

“Rose!” Alice squealed and then, “Bella!” as the car fishtailed in the gravel.

“Gross,” Bella chuckled under her breath, getting the beast back under control.

“What? So I let some guy rub himself on me for booze; you’re drinking it,” Rose sneered at Alice, taking a hefty swallow as she said it.

Alice pulled her lips back in the same kind of grimace that should have followed her shot of whiskey, but hadn’t. “Boys are disgusting. I don’t know how you can let them do that kind of stuff to you.”

“I don’t let them. I allow them,” Rose stated. “There’s a difference.”

The beast broke loose.

The tires touched down long enough to catch the gravel and send the steering wheel right out of Bella’s grip. The car twirled like a top and Bella glanced over her shoulder just once while the car was spinning. Alice was, predictably, screaming. Rose was, predictably, mid-drag off her cigarette, singing along to the radio as though she didn’t even care. Three full turns and the beast lurched to a stop in the middle of the road, facing the opposite direction. A bone-rattling shudder before the vehicle sighed one last time and died with a puff of acrid smoke from under the hood, metal grinding as the entire car slumped in defeat.

“Oh, shit,” Alice laughed. “Now look what we’ve done.”

---

Edward

Edward watched them steal his car.

Sat in the dark on his porch with a fading cigarette between his lips and allowed them to pick the lock. Three girls in matching jackets, matching curled hair, matching skirts. Rolled up short and tugged down tight, eyes lined  with wings and lips lined with blood. Hairdos and kitten heels and enough bared skin to make his mouth water.

Which was why he basically let them steal the Bird right out from underneath his nose.

He knew who they were, public school girls from the other side of town. There were no uniforms at Forks Municipal, which left them free to costume themselves. Girls at Highmeadow, his school, were just plain boring. Judies, all of em. Bangs that hid their eyes and collars clasped around their necks. Skirts to ankles, sleeves to wrists, so much left to the imagination that it wasn’t even worth the effort. But these girls, the ones in pink, they were all undone. Three buttons deep and you got cleavage. Two rolls up and you got thighs. One knot to the bottom and you got flashes of stomach. They swept their hair off their faces like they were proud to be looked at and they liked the ice cream shop a few blocks from his house, the tiny rundown one with the blackberry cobbler every Sunday, vanilla cream melting on top more like church than church, if you asked him. Like a message from God that life was a sweet mouthful if you just looked in the right places.

He’d been looking at those girls for a while now.

The blonde was too tall for him, nearly his height, which made him fidgety for some reason. He liked staring down at a girl, liked tucking them under his arm like they belonged to him somehow. But the other one was small, too small, so small he was sure she might still be a child. A near foot under short-statured.

The one he had his eye on, little-big-eyes, that long brown hair and those hips and the fuckme mouth painted pink instead of red, she was the one who got in behind the wheel.

He could have stopped them. But he didn’t.

He let them take off and then he raced the three miles to the reservation. Fuming. Hot. Itchy under the collar and he couldn’t quite figure out why. He threw rocks at the window until he shattered a pane, Jacob’s scowling, sleepy face behind it. Jacob didn’t miss a beat. Picked that rock up and lobbed it right back at Edward. Hard. Edward leapt aside as the rock buried itself in the grass less than a foot from where he stood and glared up at Jacob.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jacob grumbled.

“I got a problem,” Edward hissed. “The Bird was lifted.”

“Lifted?”

“Those girls, the ones with the ridiculous jackets and the ice cream? They fucking took it.”

“What do you mean they took it?”

“Shimmied the door. Got it started. Drove off.” Edward shrugged, not exactly sure he wanted to admit that he’d watched this happen.

“Well, fuck, man. What’dya expect me to do about it?” Jacob rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand.

“Help me get it back.”

They drove for hours, looking but not finding. Nothing on the main roads, nothing on the highway. The pavement was empty, middle of the night, and Jacob’s red Chevy was fresh off the line, brand spanking new. It drove like a champ and Edward knew Jacob was still testing the mechanical wonder but, by the time they had reached the gravel roads that led up the mountain, Jacob was not only testing the truck but Edward’s patience too.

“Will you slow the fuck down? You’re driving like a lunatic.” Edward resisted the urge to grab onto the door frame and Jacob took a turn too fast.

“It’s fun,” Jacob laughed, grinning and gunning the engine harder, spinning around the corner and nearly losing control in the gravel. The truck careened wildly, veering from side to side, slamming both of them around as the cab heaved.

“I said Slow. The. Fuck. Down!” Edward roared, reaching over to punch Jacob hard in the arm.

“Woah, dude, calm down. I got it handled,” Jacob grumbled, rubbing his shoulder without letting off the gas. The forest flashed by so fast it made Edward’s vision tremble. The truck suddenly felt oddly unstable, as though it could fall apart at any moment, a screw loose somewhere and it was only a matter of time. One good bump. One giant pothole, and the thing was going to come apart in a billion little pieces.

Edward hissed, his breath coming hard and uneven. “Pull over.”

“I ain’t pulling over.”

“Unless you want me putting my fist through this nice new dashboard of yours, you better pull the fuck over.”

Jacob didn’t do as Edward commanded. Simply stomped on the brakes and pulled the truck up short in the middle of the road. Edward fell out of the cab in a rage and met Jacob at the hood. Between the headlights and the giant cloud of dust settling around them and the anger, he could barely see anything.

“Give me that goddamned vest!” Edward yelled, red faced and panting. Jacob rolled his eyes and looked away.

“Look, man, you call me out here in the middle of the night to hunt down some girls who stole your ride, and then you give me shit about my driving? Lay off a little, I mean, shit . . .” Jacob complained.

“You think he’d appreciate you driving like a dickwad?” Edward stepped close enough to punch a finger hard to the left side of Jacob’s vest. “Or him?” A finger to the right.  “You wanna desecrate the damn thing, fine, but you aren’t gonna do it while I’m sitting right there next to you.”

Jacob took a step back, his face going stoic.“I wasn’t gonna kill us. I told you I had it handled.”

“Funny, I remember hearing that same thing before.” Edward stomped a few feet off and lit a cigarette, shaking too much to even enjoy it. The woods were quiet, still, but his blood was pumping so loud he couldn’t hear anything over it.

Two small pinpricks of light peered at him from far down the darkened road, hovering steadily just above the ground. A couple of steps forward revealed the Bird. Abandoned. Doors left wide open. Still smoking under the hood.

A hairpin on the driver’s seat.

That little bitch.

Next

Author's Note: 

This hot mess was written for and beta'd by my soul sister, my favorite, my little shining star, who typically goes by the name of Hadley Hemingway (I call her Momma Bee.) We sat on her porch at three am with a bottle of champagne, dreamed it up together, and oh man did we giggle. We finished the champagne long before we finished plotting. 

This is heavily influenced by the latest Arctic Monkeys album, and Alex Turner himself. *fans self* Google image that boy. You will not be disappointed.