The school day was dragging, every minute feeling like an eternity.  He looked up at the clock.  10:24.  Exactly 3 minutes since he last looked up.  It was a good thing his attention was usually elsewhere during class or someone might have noticed his absence from the discussion about the latest book he hadn't read for English.  It wasn't that he didn't enjoy reading, or even that the books weren't good, he just never managed to read them until long after the class had moved on.  If he ever read a book when he was supposed to he was pretty sure his teacher would die of shock.

Sometimes he even did the assignments, months after they were due, out of interest.  He thought about handing them in but always decided there was no real point, they wouldn't be marked, it would make no real difference to his grade if his teacher, Mrs. Weiss, saw that he understood the work.
"Timing is everything, Jacob," she had said, smirking, when she saw him reading the book they had studied more than two months ago in the hall the week before.  He had barely acknowledged what she said, being so engrossed in his book at the time, but when he thought about it he realized how painfully true it really was.

What was timing, but minutes and seconds out of phase?  The stumble before a fall, the streak of lighting before the crack of thunder.  The realizations that came just a split second too late.  Mara.  The car.  His complete immobility as he watched the accident happen in slow motion before his eyes, the whole time knowing that he had been so very capable of saving her, all he had needed to do was reach out, grab her arm and pull her back.  No, it went back further than that.

All he had needed to do was tell her.  To say what he felt, to reach out and sway her heart.  But he had remained silent, too scared to speak when she asked him point blank if he wanted her.  She had lay there in his bed next to him, looked up at him with those beautiful eyes, and asked him,
"Do you want to be with me, Jacob?"

A very simple question.  One that he had known the answer to for a very long time.  But his terror at being found out overtook him, and he just stared at her until the light faded from her eyes.  Without a word she nodded, found the grace to not look awkward getting dressed, and headed for the door.  His terror at being found out quickly became replaced by a new terror of losing her, and he jumped up, wrapping the sheet around him hastily.

"Mara, wait," he had said, but she just looked at him in that way that always stopped him in his tracks.
"For what?" she asked sadly.  She had left then, leaving him standing in the hallway, unable to follow her for lack of clothes.
"Shit," he said, running back to the bedroom to throw on his clothes before running after her.  He had run for four blocks before he caught up with her, but she wouldn't talk to him, just kept walking, her hurt eyes dead set ahead.  And then the car.  He replayed that scene in his mind over and over again, and each time he thought of another sweepingly romantic way to tell her he loved her, another way to save her from her fate.  And that was the worst part of looking back.