A great gust of wind blew into the café, the small-town business's heating unable to keep the chill from entering the room. The café, as tacky as it was, was the best meeting place she could have hoped for. The bland, lacklustre shop was homely and practically deserted, except for a few small-town folk, going about their own business. The heat from their steaming mugs rose in smoky wisps in the cold air, and their breaths hung the same. As ordinary as it was, it was exquisite to see the human race going along at an orderly pace, doing orderly things. None of them, she hoped, knew the terror that had just entered the shop.
The bell above the doorframe, upon her entrance, chimed. It still tolled in her ears, making her migraine ever worse, moments after the last ring. She had not hunted for months, which made it just that much harder to keep herself tame in the presence of humans. With this in mind, she kept to the shadows on the wall, the café being dimly lit in the dead of night, choosing a booth furthest away from the throng of late night wanderers. Slipping into the seat, she withdrew the hood of her cloak from her blonde curls, fastening it around her neck, letting the hair fall around her face. Her eyes, blood red, were hidden by large sunglasses, black in colour.
This girl, or woman, as she was just of age, was nothing like these small-town folks had ever seen. They all peered over their booths at her, craning their necks to get a better look, like she was a monkey in a cage. Their private mutterings, or so they thought to be private, were heard by her super-sensitive hearing, their voices just mere hums in the background of expresso machines, the clink of coffee cups and splashes from the dishwashing area behind closed doors.
She worried that she was certainly drawing attention to herself as she sat in the booth, still as a statue. These folks, or small-town hicks as some might call them, would have never seen such a creature like her. If only they knew what she was capable of; with one slip of her self-control, the self-control she had been taught by her clan, she could massacre the entire shop, the entire town, in just minutes. How she longed to, how their blood sang to her. She could do it; she'd done it before. She fretted, just thinking of what her family would say, how ashamed they would be. She would surely have to leave, and she most definitely did not want to do that.
If only he would hurry up. Her thoughts would not be wandering in such directions like the aforementioned if he sat before her, making light conversation as he always had. She busied herself, thinking about the café's reaction upon his entering. They had not seen anything yet; they had not seen real beauty. She delved evermore into her thoughts, or fantasies, more so. She was so preoccupied with them that she didn't even hear the waitress ask for her order.
"Tanya," he would say, standing in her wake before slipping into the seat opposite her, his presence making the café all that more appealing, the weathered, leather seat he sat in looking more antique than road show. "How great it is to see you again," she'd say, shifting in her seat slightly, her eyes alive with anticipation and excitement. "How is your clan?" He would raise his hand, calling over the waitress. "Yes, hello, may I please order? Can I please have a glass of water? And how about yourself, will you be tempted by something?" He would ask, motioning between the two while the waitress wrote the order down on a lined notepad, waiting for her answer. She would simply shake her head, that no, she didn't need anything. All she had ever needed sat before her.
"Thankyou," he would say, dismissing the waitress who would wander off into the kitchens, her heart a flurry just like Tanya's would be...if her heart still beat. "My clan is…the same, I suppose. Our lives couldn't be simpler and human interaction is easy to come by. I would suppose that your life would be of the same, would it not?" She would answer that yes, yes it was, with great graciousness towards her fellows.
"Do you think Carlisle would mind if I bagged myself one of them?" he would ask below his voice, his thumb pointing behind him at what was a table of young women, giggling behind their hands. "I have no doubt he would," she would say, looking wary at the girls, her tone reflecting how he would feel about this. "And I have no doubt which of the girls you would choose." She would be able to smell the girl from here, the smell of wild berries and musk. Would she be jealous of this girl, this human, this mortal? What could she do that Tanya couldn't? Nothing at all. She possessed nothing that he could really want. She would see that he too was restraining himself, his blood-red eyes peering out from under his eyelashes, pointing more so down at the table, where his hands were balled into fists, than at herself, who would be busying herself with a strand of her well groomed hair.
"So," she would say, under her voice, "have you found love where you reside?" She was, at the present moment, very much curious to his situation in Washington, where his supposed short term stay had turned into a permanent residence. "No," he would say distantly, his voice faraway, though he would still be looking at her. "But I didn't come to talk about that, Tanya. I came to see you." She would smile and bite down on her lower lip as she would extend a milky white leg from a fold in her cloak to rub it against his. "Well, I want to talk about you," she would imagine herself purring, her lips parted. He would jerk away, be the gentleman of things, but no one, absolutely no one, would be able to mistake the metallic glint in his eyes, the glint of malice, deception and dark passion. The glint that he had had in his eye when the two had ran away, two young vampires with a lost cause.
Her fantasy drew to an end as the bell chimed again, the café falling silent again. She turned in her seat the slightest, looking out of the corner of her eye. And there he was, never to be mistaken for another customer, for who could mistake him for anything else but a gift from the heavens? He made his way over to where she had sat, stalking across the floor, the collar of his jacket upturned. One could tell, by the way he walked, that he was prim and proper, and was most definitely not from this neck of town. He did not walk with the air of a slob, but more of the strut of an overconfident man. Tanya let the grains of sugar she had been absentmindedly crushing between her pale fingers float down to the table as he sat opposite her, just as she had imagined him to. He let the hood of his coat fall off too, just in the manner she had.
"Tanya, what a pleasant surprise it is to see you," Edward said mutely, smiling in the slightest, sending her a flutter.