Summary: Her life of obligatory solitude is interrupted in the plight of saving a life. But when he's saved, will their seclusion bring them together or tear them apart?
Pairing: Edward/Bella
Beta(s): Midnight Cougar
Rating: M
Originally a post the Straight thru the Heart contest, I removed it because of the fuckery over there.
Special thanks to Midnight Cougar for being fuckawesome.
Enjoy!
The Winter Bellflower
The cabin I call home is ten miles out of the nearest town, over Shadow's Pass, and nestled in a valley at the base of Mount Harris. My log cabin sits like a freckle, dotting the hand of that wild-grass valley as it stretches up and holds the mountain high from the sea. Eight thousand feet high, in fact.
Life in the Rocky Mountains isn't meant for all—it was never meant for me.
The air here is paper thin, the sun blistering as it burns through the wispy layers of atmosphere, and winters...winters are a bear coming to his hibernation den. He packs all his fat stores and settles in for the long, cold months in one heavy plop of twenty-six weeks and ten feet of snow.
But we survive—those of us who live in this blue and green and red wilderness. They survive because it's in their blood; I survive because it is the only choice left for me. And, in the end, we all survive because the spring is an awaited, annual guest that promises great reward if we hold out for her arrival. For spring brings summer, in his mastery and gaiety and warmth, and brooks alive with trout and ranchers pushing their cattle through valleys, such as mine. Autumn's harvest of hay and potatoes and berries ensures we all stay fed.
Life is complete in this circular world.
And this winter is no different, save one very real, very unnerving change.
"You have to sip the water," I whisper to this stranger I've brought into my home against all my better judgment. His lips are chapped from cold wind and dry, mountain air, and his face is blistered with second-degree burns from the unforgiving high-altitude sun.
I discovered him in my barn, huddling in the hay, dehydrated and in severe need of medical care. There was nothing to tell me who he was, though he was obviously a tourist from the small skiing town below who'd traveled too far up the mountain and become lost. In his pockets were a knife and a dead cell phone. Although, the latter does no good as the battery is likely frozen.
For three days and two nights, I remain beside the stranger, monitoring his temperature and ensuring hypothermia doesn't steal him away. On the evening of the third day, I allow myself an hour from him to bathe and prepare the guest room for when he awakens.
The water of the bath, pumped in from the hot spring beneath my land, is heavenly to my aching muscles. They're tired from the exertion of dragging a man twice my size from the barn to the house in the midst of the worst blizzard I've seen. I sit in the waters until my fingertips wrinkle and the mirrors are fogged. Alas, I step out and wrap my long, freshly-dyed, chestnut hair in a towel. When I lift my head and use my palm to wipe the fog from the mirror, the face of the man, standing in the doorway and watching me through the reflection, nearly stops my heart beating.
I whirl on him and demand to know what he's about, staring at a bathing woman who's saved his life, but the pallor in his face turns gray, and he slumps straight to the floor with a resounding thud.
So much for the loosening of my muscles. For the second time in three days, I'm forced to heft the man like a sack of potatoes and into bed.
Daily, the man's health improves—his skin healing and his strength regaining. His sleeping patterns normalize, and I find him bright in conversation, learning his name is Edward—an Anglo version of my dear brother's name, and the reason I'm here now.
"Where are you from?" he asks me. It's a night in the second week of his hospice with me, and we're snowed in even deeper than we were previously. We're feasting on bread I've baked fresh and blackberry jam I canned in the early autumn.
I wave my hand, indicating the cabin, though I'm sure he's more than smart enough to deduce the lilt in my voice is from nowhere around here.
With a roll of his eyes at his unanswered query, he tells me his story. "Grew up in Arizona," he says, "and got the hell out of there and to L.A. Played football in school…"
I allow him to continue speaking, yet I hear little of what he says. Instead, my eyes study his face, handsome and rugged with an unshaved beard and two weeks of red stubble decorating a square jaw. His eyes are a vivid shade of green, and when they catch me staring, the edges crinkle with a smile before I avert my gaze.
Already, I am astutely aware of his attraction to me. He's done nothing inappropriate, but whenever my lust and craving for human contact surfaces, I cannot stop myself from wishing we could be more.
He's in my home, locked up in the small confines of this space with me. Yet, the fact remains that I know nothing of him, and I am certain this is a recipe for heartache.
I can't eat, and sleep comes in fits of misplaced concentration. I could've sworn I was immune to feeling this way—it never happened. I've never been allowed to open myself as I have now—and it is as if my will has been taken from me and offered up. Whether it's the smile on his face while we sit, reading by the fireplace, the tenderness in his voice while he talks about his dog, Chewie, or the mere presence of another human being in my little world, I know I'm quickly becoming addicted to this high.
It's a matter of time and surrender; time we have in abundance, as the snow continues to fall beyond the shelter of the cabin walls and taps a light beat upon the tin roof. Surrender is another matter entirely.
When I found him in the barn three weeks ago, seeking shelter from a storm the likes of which this Los Angeleno man was ill prepared for, he was nothing more than a broken person in desperate need of help—someone to rescue him from the hunger, thirst, and onset hypothermia.
He'd anticipated backcountry snowboarding to be the adventure of a lifetime, he'd told me, but had never expected or planned for the way snow could fall down and drift up in unison, leaving him in a snow globe of misdirection and discombobulation. Anyone, even someone adapted to life in this sweet wilderness, could easily lose their way in a Rocky Mountain blizzard and be discovered the next spring, a frozen corpse, ten feet from their front door.
Edward is lucky to be alive. If the snow, coyotes, or the frostbite hadn't taken him, a step in the wrong direction could as easily have sent the man sprawling over a two hundred foot drop to a rocky death below.
Despite all, he's alive and he's here, and the way he looks at me says his feelings toward me have grown from those of gratitude and debt to something much deeper; something which should not yet exist in only a handful of weeks. But it does.
It's there in the softness of his eyes as they regard me with a mixture of admiration and desire. It's in the way he's learned enough of my tastes to know which coffee mug I like and how brown I prefer my bread toasted. It's the way we've learned so much of each other so quickly from the sole consequence of being forced together without reprieve from the other. It's the way I've come, so intensely, to crave him.
Last night was the first time he did not stave his affections or urges, and the electricity in the kiss we shared was as pure as the frozen waters of the creek that trickles a hundred meters from this house. It was purely by accident, something born the melding of simple need, common boredom, mutual appreciation, and burning lust.
This morning, though, my anxiety over seeing him and having to muster the courage to not balk from whatever discussion we may have over the innocence of what happened, or over the knowledge that something less innocent and much more wild is looming just beyond the stretch of our hands, is nearly debilitating. Yet, I muster up a courage that has been beaten into me, and descend the landing of the cabin; I've arrived at the moment of reckoning.
"Good morning," he says, smiling. I enter the kitchen, warm with the fire he's rekindled from embers which faded in the cold, cold night. The bittersweet aroma of percolating coffee swims toward me through air already static with the energy of desire between us.
"Hi," I speak, and the word tastes curdled on my tongue. I should have more to say to this man whom I've rescued from the elements that almost took his life, because I think he's saving me a little in return by giving me the gift of company. He's becoming a presence I long to see each day, and a security I wish to reach for in the darkness.
Edward's smile is small and knowing, like my mind is a book, open in front of him, and each thought is spelled out in black and white. I want to guard my secrets and close the book I am, but I forget how to do so each time he's near. Whenever he's looked at me like this in the past three weeks, leaf-green eyes full of the knowledge of my loneliness and the solitude of my existence, I've forced myself to look away. But not this time. This time I hold his gaze through the moments of discomfort, until the feeling fades and it is replaced by its antonym.
And maybe it's cabin fever, that real and natural phenomenon that grips a person with claws made of splintered wood, but I feel the need—the pull—to sit with him beside the fire today and allow him to rip out my seams and unweave the threads of my life, to build them up like a blanket around himself. I feel like a crooked rhyme that bitters the air around as it falls from a poet's lips, but I know—somehow, I just know—this man is capable of rearranging the syllables in me to make something so much more beautiful.
"Bella," he starts at the same moment I speak his name. "Sorry, I just…" I allow him to continue with the wave of my hand. "I just want to apologize if I pushed the boundaries a bit too far last night. I swear to god," he says and shakes his head, looking torn in two by shame and pride, "I'm a thirty-two year old man whose mother would beat his ass if she knew I'd taken advantage of a situation like this and forced something unwanted upon a wom—"
"Not unwanted," I blurt out swiftly, cutting him off mid-sentence. "It wasn't unwanted, Edward," I repeat when he remains paused. "It was unexpected, but not…objectionable."
"I…" His words fade between us with the crackling noise as wood splits in the heat of the fire. Or is it from the heat building between us?
"I'm pleased to see you're feeling well," I comment to fill the silent void. "I believe the snow will slow sometime this week, and then we should be able to make the journey into town and see that you receive proper medical care, to ensure there is no lasting damage from your wayfaring."
"Wayfaring?" He speaks the word with a laugh on his tongue. The moment of heaviness has lifted with his guffaw, and he turns to pour coffee into my favorite mug. "You and those big words, Bella. It's like you learned English from a 1930s manual." I don't tell him he isn't far off. "And your accent," he continues, cocking his head to the side. "What is that? Polish?"
"Czech," I lie. This isn't the first time he's questioned my origins, though I've so far managed to steer the subject to a new topic—a safer topic. There are things nobody needs to know about my life before the United States, before the here and now, and after the war.
I quickly pull the cup from his grasp when he hands me the life's blood of caffeine, our hands brush and a jolt of static electricity zips between us, and I turn to the window. The naked light is blinding, and restless rivers of snow slip down the windowpane, melting from the heat inside the cabin, as I lift the darkness to my lips and blow low on the smoky steam. It dances up and over the rippling waters, slick with oil. Deep brown lashes brush the top of my cheeks, and I sense them flushing rose in the wake of warm kisses rising from the depths I hold.
Coffee: sweet, pleasurable, life-giving coffee.
"Thank you," I say after the first sip. "It's wonderful." I turn back to see him tip his own mug in my direction, a salute of acknowledgment. "It's a shame I'll not be able to keep you around to make my coffee every day." The words spill out of my mouth, like coffee to the floor, before I realize the weight of their substance. "I mean…" But what do I mean?
Edward lowers the cup from his lips slowly and turns to place it on the kitchen island at his back. When he steps toward me, wrapping long fingers around the mug in my hand and pulling it from me, I let him. When he drops his mouth to mine, I don't resist, and when our kiss deepens and grows, expanding in the heated cabin like rising dough, I open my mouth in a gasp and allow him to push me to the door frame.
At once, his hands have trapped me there against the wall, while mine are at work on the Nirvana tee which hides the planes of his flat stomach and chest from me. He slips away only long enough to finish pulling the burdensome cotton over his head, then his hips are pinning me back to the wall, as his own fingers are busying themselves with the flannel shirt and lace bra I wear. Clothes are lost to the frenzy of want and need, combining in a nuclear fusion between us.
My breasts feel heavy and soft in his palms; the space between my legs warm and ready. So is he. It's been so long—too long—since I've known a man's touch. When I feel him lift me by the back of my thighs, I lock my legs around his narrow waist, and he walks us past the living area, past the bathroom, and into the room where he's taken up residence, near the back of the house.
Edward lays me on the bed, malleable from age and the down topper covering the mattress, and I raise my arms over my head to wrap my fingers around the brass rails of the headboard. The weight of him climbing over me and pressing on my still jean-clad center is jolting in the best of ways. He is firm and full above me, rubbing against me with such longing.
My back is arched when, finally, my jeans are pulled from my legs and he lifts me over his thighs as he sits back on his heels on the bed, and our middles meet. The feel of him, opening and filling me, is glorious. So glorious, in fact, that my nails press deeply into the tattooed muscles of his back and shoulders.
The Marine Corps crest is branded firmly above his heart, a place of honor amongst the other pieces of art adorning his body. I feel the familiar ache swell in my chest for those I've lost to that damn war.
The purpose of my emigration was never fulfilled. I've chosen to exist in solitude and wait out each day until my life fades away. But rebellion rises faster the deeper he presses, until I'm losing the strings of my old self to whatever may be with this purely American man. In spite of everything he represents, I feel the frayed threads snap from what I was and stitch themselves to who I am with him in this moment and place.
Our lovemaking is at once a furious battle and a gentle song, but lovemaking it is, I know. Because I've spent three weeks secluded with a stranger who has come to know me better than anyone else in my life, though he may understand only a little.
Can you love someone fully when you know naught save half-truths of them?
If he returns my affections, he does not speak them aloud, but then neither do I.
I feel them there in the way his fingers touch my most sensitive parts, and the way he draws from me the shuddering surrender I've held at bay, and in the way my heart seizes as his gallops beneath me as I move above him with my palms pressed flat to his chest. I feel it in the way he slips from my body before painting my leg and hip with his pleasure in grunting gasps. It's there when I curl up beside him on the soft, warm bed, and I feel sleep drawing me under sudden waves of comatose.
And I feel it leaving as he pulls himself from the bed many minutes later while a heavy weight encourages my eyelids to close.
In those final moments of consciousness, I hear the shifting of clothes and blankets and the noisy sliding of furniture away from the wall. What is he doing? I want to speak the words aloud, but I find my voice is paralyzed with the need to sleep.
"Masen here," I hear him speak, muddled and hazy in my dazed constitution. I force my eyelids to open to slits wide enough only to spy him standing over me, looking down, and pressing two fingers to the pulse thudding at my neck, as if to make certain my heart still beats. "I have Isabella Swan," he speaks into something. Maybe it's the cell phone that didn't work when I found him. "Yes, I did," he answers a query from the other side. "Yes, sir. That is correct: a positive ID on the Serbian national, Tanya Palović."
How? I wonder, and use all my strength to lift my head minutely from the pillow. How have they found me? I've been so careful.
Mama and Papa were killed by NATO forces the very day my brother, Filip-Eduard of the Kosovo Liberation Force, was killed as he attempted to move me into a refugee camp and away from conflict. NATO did this all, and I was raised up from the ashes of my crumbled country like a phoenix, to make those responsible pay for their crimes.
Except I could not do it. When I arrived in the United States, a trained assassin, ready to pick off leaders of what was called The Free World, I chose instead to disappear. I slipped away from my handlers and into the vast expanse of land and forest in the wilderness of America.
I've lived in quiet peace for six years…until him.
"No," he whispers to me, gingerly, lovingly—as though something meaningful has truly existed between us in these hours and weeks—pressing my head back to the pillow and kissing my brow. "It's for your own good, Bella."
I cannot tell how much time passes, but I feel Edward dressing me through my temporary paralysis, lifting my limbs to slip garments over them, and bundling me up for what I can only assume is a trek outside. My eyes are more alert now, yet my extremities cannot be willed to move.
And then I hear it: the swift chop, chop, chop of helicopter blades whipping the cold air like egg whites. The small groan of protest escapes my lips, but it's futile to argue or attempt to move. I am wholly at his will.
"All will be well." His promise is loud, echoing in my ear, as he steps from the cabin with me in his arms and into the frosty world with a helicopter waiting to take me to an unknown place. "Be glad I found you before they did, love." He shifts me into a gurney on the chopper. He presses his lips to my ear in the small moment before stepping back to watch me ascend above him like an apparition into the clouded sky.
A/N: Thanks!