Disclaimer: Any Twilight characters that may appear in this story belong to Stephenie Meyer. The remainder is my original work. No reproduction is allowed without my written consent.
A/N – This is my first go at publishing fan fiction. It strays a bit from convention and will be on the angsty side, but you have to trust me that I am devoted to Edward and Bella. While I can't promise you any particular ending, I can promise you that if you have faith in them, it will be rewarded.
In The Clearing – Chapter 1
When moths whiten the windowpane after dusk, it's time to uncork a bottle and call home the solitary pioneers we became in the woods. We got drunk on avalanche lilies at midday and forgot each other, each of us turning away to the trees. I barely remember the forest's distraction, but as I draw the latch on the screen door for the evening, I feel the itch of pine needles pressed into the arch of my foot. Bats begin to make frantic passes beneath the porch canopy as we, too, fly blindly and faithfully toward the light. You swat mosquitos from the lamp while I construct a tower of twigs and logs to ignite. We pull the corners of the room around us and fly toward each other for warmth.
January 16, 2010
Dear Bella,
I am hallucinating. I know this, and yet the knowledge hasn't deadened the buzz of insects on the bare bulb, or the heat now growing on the hearth. I've been here before; so many times, in fact, that I no longer require physical conveyance to bring me. I imagine the plane, climbing out of the South, away from the California sun, with me its eager passenger bent toward the fog that rises from the hills around Forks. I smell the bus choking with fumes in the garage at Stewart Street, and then cleansed on the road west from Seattle toward Port Angeles. And I'm the driver of that car bearing down assuredly on each corner of the ascent to my family's mountain cabin outside of Olympic Park. I'm always on that road, at night, scanning the forest for two white eyes of a deer who might suddenly run at me and stare, more frightened by me than my car. I swear the deer know me when they look beyond the headlights. And I'm lying again on a mossy slope with my stomach to the mountain asking what it is I find each time I return.
They tell me I need rest. They tell me I'll recover. Worst of all, they tell me I'll learn to live without you. In secret, I write to you. My words spread out like fingers of the hand you held underwater, when we swam by each other's sides as children. I compose letters about our past and conjure our future at the same time that I nod at their advice. I try to sleep, but the narrow mattress sways under me in the night. To steady myself, I grip the metal bed frame and make promises to any imaginary ear who will listen that I'll find you on the mountain this summer.
Together we'll study the progress of paintbrush in June and wild blueberries in August. I'll finally cast out the shadows that crept over my mother's face when I told her about you. I wanted so badly for my parents to embrace us, for Esme and Carlisle to be glad for the lovers we've become. I wanted it so badly that I let them deceive me. And now they've taken you from me. I only hope you can forgive me when I find my way back to you.
Last week I tried to explain to Esme how you and I met. She was confused and insisted we'd known each other from infancy, and that you'd become her daughter. My sister.
"No," I said. "I met the woman I know later, as an adult."
It had been two years since you'd left for college. I hadn't seen you since the day you drove off in your battered Chevy truck and in your absence I had discovered loneliness for the first time in my life. Then one late morning in August you let yourself into the family cabin on the mountain outside of Olympic Park, and charged into my bedroom unannounced, as if you had never left. You were visiting from your new home in California and you wrapped your slender arms around me as we sat at the edge of the bed. You were still a bully. The same bully who had coaxed me past my own fears as a child. I felt drunk on your scent, so sweet I thought I could taste vanilla in the air around you.
My mother didn't want to hear this, but I persisted. "Bella's smell was intoxicating," I told her. I asked Esme if you had smelled of pine as a child. She couldn't answer me. She looked past me through the small window in my hospital room. I smelled the snow behind me and wondered if I had moved her at all.
"Bella was so confident," I said.
It's true, you were. Your back stood perfectly straight as you strode through the woods on the Cullen property, pointing out mushrooms and molds in the hollow of fallen branches. And in the evening you ordered me around the kitchen, fed every manner of vegetable to my hungry knife while you exhumed pots and pans from under the sink. You cooked with spices that had been forgotten behind cereal in the cupboard. "Mom," I said, "I love your cooking, but that night Bella made me a meal like none I've ever had."
And you told me about California, about the Sierra Nevada peaks that dwarf our Mount Olympus, and redwoods that loom taller than our hemlock and even our giant sitka spruce. I didn't know I was in love that day, but soon there was no other word for what I felt.
Esme began to cry. If I'm tempted to betray you ever, it's when my mother cries. I know I should stiffen and tell her it's only fear, and not sadness, wringing her tears. But I get nauseous when her mouth curls down and her eyes fade beneath the sodden tide. I have never felt ashamed to love you, not even in the presence of Esme's glowering pain. But I have felt sorry. This time I wasn't sorry. I was angry, and confused. Hasn't she won? She lured me from our home in California with promises of reconciliation. I believed she was sincere.
I was mistaken.
Esme visits me every day, watches me for hours; she holds me, and chokes out comfortless sympathy. She is convinced that she can talk me out of loving you. She speaks of healing, but hopes to cure. And she's enlisted an army of doctors to help her.
Perhaps not an army. I barely recognize them behind the unity of their solemn gaze, so it's possible they are merely a few. I know there is a woman among them, and she comes most often. She hopes I'll find her sympathetic. And I might, were she not mired in misguided pity. You would understand. You would recognize her expression as the one that met us on the faces of our oldest friends the night I publicly threaded a finger through your soft, brown hair. I promised you their worry would dissipate in the glow of what we felt. I promised that all of them – Alice, Jasper, Rose, Emmett - would eventually understand that we'd outgrown our sibling-like attachment. You trusted me; you cooked; they ate; and I was right.
This solemnity, this pity, and my mother's sorrow; they would suffocate if we could master the air together. If you were with me, Bella, we would season the air. You would sweeten the salt for them as you have for me, with coconuts and milk. It's corny, you'll say, to be writing to you this way.
Your faithful,
Edward
January 17, 2010
My beautiful Bella,
Another night in this sterile room. Another night spent bargaining with sleep to allow me a moment in the clearing with you. I am now the moth knocking at the windowpane, the bat skimming low ceilings and dropping pine needles at the edge of the forest with an urgent flap of the wing. Like these animals, strained by instinct to memory of smell and touch and sight. Half asleep, painfully conscious, with cold metal in the hand, I find you in a clearing, surrounded by ghastly evergreens and rooted there yourself like the forest's emissary. I arrive on shaky legs, thistles in my socks and one in my hair. You pass one calming hand over my cheek and trace my bottom lip with your thumb on the way to remove the thistle.
In this dream, this fantasy of mine, we don't speak. You have understood everything, and waited. The simple gesture of touch, your hand at my jaw, and the smell of you sprouting from the mulch. This is the magic the mind creates. I don't need to hear you tell me, "I've been waiting, Edward. I knew you'd come."
I don't need to say, "I'm sorry. Forgive me."
I don't have to explain that I was committed against my will, or that I tried to call. You've already forgiven Esme for the lies she asked me to believe about you. There, in the forest of our youth, you've managed to grow into the woman who loves me enough to forgive. Who loves me enough to confront Esme and Carlisle's judgment about the choice we made.
Am I crazy for wishing to find you bolder and stronger, when I should be thankful to find you at all? I know I have no right. But these are all fantasies. I am hallucinating.
You are somehow unharmed by the thistle, and now your fingers spread into my hair and slide around the back of my head. You scratch my scalp with your nails sending a shiver between my shoulder blades and down my back. I lean into your neck and bury my nose behind your ear to get closer to your scent. I would crawl under your flawless, milky skin if I could. I can never be close enough to you. My mouth finds yours, hungry for the press of your full lips into mine. The taste of you is always better than even the promise of it. You are the only woman whose reality exceeds all my fantasies. You are the only one.
You feel what you do to me in the weight of my erection against your hip and rub your hand over my cock through the denim while your tongue skims my bottom lip. I am torn between the need to feel your lips moving with mine, to taste your hot, wet tongue with mine, and the desire to step back and look at you. You are so beautiful.
I tip my head back just long enough to see you glowing in the grey-green light of the clearing, as though there were a halo around the cascade of your hair to match your luminous skin. I am drawn back to your pink lips and slide my hands along your torso, brushing the swell of your breasts through the cotton of your t-shirt with the pad of my thumbs, dragging my fingers over your ribs, circling your waist for a moment on the way down to cup your fine ass with both of my hands. Your mouth opens gently as my lips press into yours and our tongues find each other in the heat of our connection. This is where we meet. Warm and open to each other.
This is my fantasy, so I get to have you in every way I want. I don't need to rush. There is less urgency and I have greater control in my imagination. Instead of the desperate pace that overtakes us sometimes, I move in slow motion. I drop to my knees in a bed of pine needles and press my cheek against your stomach as I wrap my arms around your slender waist. I hold you immeasurably long. I feel the rise and fall of your breath in your abdomen and know there is a desire blooming there to match the longing that stretches from my now strained erection into my limbs.
I pull back and lock into your articulate stare before I unbutton and unzip your jeans. You sink your teeth into your bottom lip and your gaze tells me how wet I will find you. I slide your jeans over your hips, down your thighs, and to your ankles, above your bare feet, and hold tight for you to step out of them before I toss them aside. Even on my knees, I have to bend to nudge my nose into the heat of your sex. You are wet through your silk panties and I rub my nose where I know you are most sensitive, gently enough so that your knees tremble and you have to grip my shoulders to keep your balance. You let out an agonized groan from the back of your throat and I know you're throbbing now. You're desperate, and patient only because I'm dreaming.
With my nose still buried in you, I grasp your panties with one hand while I push under the hem of our shirt with the other, splaying my fingers across your stomach. In one quick tug I shred the flimsy silk from your body and press down with the hand on your stomach toward the top of your sex, just over your pubic bone.
"Oh, god, Edward," you moan and thrust your hips forward so that my nose and my tongue are now buried in you. I lick from the bottom up, spreading you open with my tongue and give a little nip to your clit, still pressing with my hand so that you are at the mercy of my mouth and my long fingers. The taste of you makes me rabid with want, but the fantasy me holds onto control I rarely have in real life.
I wrap the arm of my free hand around your leg at the knee and jerk your legs wider apart causing you to fall forward, more of your weight on my shoulders and another loud groan escaping your lips. "Oh, fuck, Edward…"
"Hold on, baby," I whisper into your sex before I press my tongue hard to your clit and begin to circle it, first slowly, and then faster so that your hips are now gyrating to the rhythm I've set. I press down harder on the mound above your clit while my other hand travels from the outside of your knee, along the inside of your thigh, and then my palm has cupped your sex from below and holds you while I continue to circle and nip you.
"Edward, please… oh, fuck, please…."
I torture you for a moment longer and finally slide my middle finger inside you, thrusting in and out before pushing my index finger in alongside it. I curl both fingers up inside you to press on the spot that sends your hips in full flex, so hard that I have to open my mouth around you to take you in. You are hot, wet, silk on the inside and I am the luckiest bastard on Earth.
You let out an incoherent scream as most of your weight is now pressing down around your sex. I'm holding you up with the hand inside you, the mouth around you and you're writhing and trembling over me. You taste divine and I want you to come but don't want to take my tongue off of you.
"Shit, Edward, I can't…" Your whole body is shaking now and I know you're close. I start to slow the circles of my tongue around your clit so that your body climbs to an aching climax. I can feel your legs start to close around me. Your knees are in danger of buckling, but I hold you up with my mouth and my hand and I use my elbow and the position of my body to keep your legs apart.
"Fuck, Edward!" you yell as you start to come and try to pull away. But I don't let you go. I press my tongue harder into your clit, press harder with my fingers on the inside right where I know you like it, and harder with my hand down above your clit so that you're trapped in your orgasm and shaking around me so violently I think you might shake apart. The fingers of your hands dig deep into my shoulders and you fall on me so that I'm bearing all of your weight.
"Edward… Edward," you cry as you ride what seem like endless waves of your orgasm. I can feel wet seeping from my cock. I am close to coming just from the sound of you, the taste of you, the clench of your muscles around my fingers. You drip wet over my hand and in my mouth and I want to hold you there forever.
Finally, you still. Your breath is fast and you gasp before you can take a few deep inhales. I've stilled my movements but haven't removed any of the pressure from the apex of your thighs.
You are nearly crying, "Edward, please…."
I know what you want, and so I give you one last lick to send another shudder through your body before removing my mouth. I drag my fingers out of you and rub them over your clit before I slide my wet hand over your hip and around your waist. I move my other hand to the opposite side of your waist and push you down to your knees so that I'm now looking down into those fathomless brown eyes.
You wrap your arms around my chest and lay your cheek on my shoulder, nuzzling into my neck, with a quiet sob, your body still shivering slightly.
"Hold me for a second," you whisper. And because this is a dream, I can hold you tight and press my erection into your hip and not fall apart myself. I have complete control.
"I love you," you sigh into my ear. "Show me how you love me, Edward."
You let go of the tight embrace enough to allow me to lay you down beneath me. I quickly grab the hem of my shirt and lift it over my head, and then unbutton and unzip my own jeans while you watch me. While I pull my jeans off from my kneeling position, somehow without struggle, you lift your own t-shirt over your head and toss it into the heap of clothes we've created. You arch your back slightly and reach behind you to unclasp your bra and I watch and wait while you slide it off your shoulders, revealing the velvet skin of your breasts and the teasing pink of your nipples. Your nipples are hard in the cool air of the forest, and from your arousal. I reach down with one hand and rub a single finger over one of your nipples, teasing while I watch you wriggle again and raise your hips slightly toward me. You smile and lick your bottom lip. Even in this fantasy, your body is losing patience.
This fantasy. It is a fantasy.
Your slave,
Edward