Title: Beyond the Arch Bridge
Summary: Alone in a foreign city, Edward watches from the sidelines as people party and laugh until a girl with a hammer pulls him out of his blues and helps him figure out how to live—and maybe how to love as well.
Pairing: Edward/Bella
Rating: M
Word Count: 4994
Edward smiled.
He smiled indulgently, unwillingly, as if he were at one of those dinner parties that his mother so enjoyed dragging him to, and exhaled sharply through his nose, reminding himself for perhaps the twentieth time that it was not the fault of any of these people that he didn't have anything better to do on a summer night like this. A night when the sky was sweet and velvet-like and strewn with a hundred paper balloons that glinted in the distance like a bevy of moving stars, when everything was lovely and bright and— loud.
Why was the world so loud all of a sudden?
"Excuse me, are you in line?" he asked, his voice quiet against the backdrop of muffled whistles and generic music blasting painfully outside the grocery store.
The girl's eyes flickered up to his in surprise, her thumbnail scratching the label of the wine bottle in her hand as she shook her head.
She couldn't be older than eighteen, Edward thought, casting a glance at her from the corner of his eye as he paid for his Absolut. And yet she seemed so blasé while she looked through the spirit shelves that he felt almost younger than her, despite having turned nineteen four days ago, and he couldn't—
Couldn't shake off the spreading loneliness that settled into his ribcage. Couldn't help seeing a replica of a ghost when his eyes strayed and caught his reflection in the glass door, pale and ice-like under the store's fluorescent lighting.
He needed to talk to someone. Anyone.
Finding a place to sit on the stone steps of a vacant building, away from the bulk of the noise and all the plastic hammers and leek flowers, he scavenged through the contents of his backpack until he found his cell phone, realizing quickly that he had four missed calls from his mom. After only a moment of hesitancy, of resenting and relishing all at once the starkness of her name on the luminous screen, Edward called her back, his fingers drumming on the belly of his vodka bottle as he waited for the familiar sound of her voice to filter through the speaker.
Elizabeth picked up right after the second ring.
"Hey," she said, tired and groggy, an ocean and some hundred more miles away. "Thought you wouldn't call me tonight after all."
"Sorry, I was caught up. Want me to call you later? You sound like you just woke up."
"From a nap. Don't worry; I needed to get dinner started anyway. Shouldn't you be in bed, though, young man? It's two o'clock there already, isn't it?"
Edward freed a small sigh, stuck between wanting to roll his eyes and curling up like a child beneath her light-hearted berating.
"Uh, yeah. But there's a festival going on. I couldn't even get into the hostel now if I wanted." Which I don't, he thought to himself, remembering how a whole crowd had seemed to swarm around him just after the fireworks were over, waiting for the barricades to come down so they could return to the other side of the river. He'd probably have to go through all that a second time if he tried to cross over the bridge again.
Besides, he really did want to stay here even if the hollow anticipation in his belly ate away at him in the meantime.
"Well," his mother said hesitantly, her voice dragging with a hint of frail, forced hope as it slipped into his ear, "are you having a good time?"
Edward held his breath, wondering. He definitely wasn't meeting the promises of the travel brochures. Maybe he was vaguely feeling Oporto, but he wasn't—
He wasn't living Oporto.
"Yeah," he lied. Or told the truth. He didn't really know what the honest answer was. "I mean, there's so much to do and everything is so… authentic, I guess. People are really open and helpful and… You know what I mean? I love this place, but I just don't— I'm just not sure I like how it makes me feel."
"How does it make you feel?"
Like a hazy picture made up of faint pixels, dreamily breezing past, while all around him life pulsed raw and almost coarse through the flesh of half a million partygoers, hundreds of thousands scattered throughout the city as its narrowest streets and widest boulevards overflowed with heat and laughter.
"Just… like I'm missing out, I suppose."
He heard voices speaking very softly and got flustered thinking that somebody else could be listening to their conversation.
"This is all normal, Edward. You're in a completely different country, surrounded by people who act differently than what you're used to. Of course you're bound to feel out of your comfort zone."
"Mom," he interrupted, his cheeks growing warmer by the second, "did you put me on speaker phone?"
"I did, but it's just Eleazar with me—"
A male voice cut her off. "Hey, kid."
Edward winced, unsettled by the vague, inexplicable annoyance that pooled in his stomach. Of course he knew it shouldn't have anything to do with his mom's shrink boyfriend. He knew that. And yet he felt that same aggravation palpitating inside him as if it were Eleazar's fault that nothing, nobody, could fill in the gap where his dad had once been.
As if it were his fault that his dad had never really been present in the first place.
"You know what, Mom? I gotta go. I'll talk to you soon."
"Wait, Edward—"
"I love you. Bye."
Without waiting for her to echo his words, Edward hung up in what he suddenly thought to be a silly attempt to shield himself from Eleazar's Freudian inspection. Meanwhile a group of friends crouched around a paper balloon a short distance from him, their fingers pinching its fragile borders as they waited for the fire inside to lift it into the air.
He thought about what his mother had said, about his being afraid to leave his comfort zone, and let himself disagree without restraint. After all, he'd come here all the way from New York to do the exact opposite— to leave his discomfort zone, where things were foggy and weird and very confusing, and find at last some palpable ground on which he could move around, knowing exactly which ridges he wanted to stumble upon and which trails he wanted to follow and, more importantly, who the hell he was, because—
Edward blinked away his daze, his mind led suddenly astray by the sound of yet another plastic hammer falling onto his skull with a distinct squeak, and lifted his head to smile politely at the owner before realizing just how close she was to his face.
Indeed, she was so close he could see the valley between her breasts peeking at him from beneath the edge of her top.
"I'm sorry to bother you. Are you saving that bottle for something?"
Quickly, Edward averted his gaze, feeling a blush color his cheeks as he focused on her large blue eyes instead.
"Not really," he said honestly, wondering why in the hell he'd bought it in the first place. He wasn't used to drinking spirits, and besides, alcohol wasn't going to fix anything. "Do you want it?"
"Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to join me and my friends and share the bottle. We already have the juice."
"Oh…" Here Edward brought his knees up closer to his chest as if that would stop the modest freshness of her perfume from travelling up into his nose and pulling him in, while all at once, he was hit both with the daunting sense that he wouldn't be able to refuse her offer and the rather unsurprising realization that in fact…
In fact, he didn't really want to.
"I don't think I'm very good company right now."
She wasn't deterred— though then again, he hadn't meant to deter her— and was quick to give him a pleading grin that made her already small nose look droll and petite amidst the keen angles of her face.
"Come on. You can be good company some time later. For now, we can just drink."
Edward smiled and was struck after a moment by the sense that he hadn't done it in a while, that the edges of his lips were piercing his cheeks like this girl's request had pierced into his life, in a way that he found incredibly unpretentious— genuine and simple like most things in Oporto, where people still hung their clothes to dry from the wrought iron railings of their balconies and talked to strangers as if they'd known them all their lives.
And then— then she asked what his name was, and he felt his stomach twist and his eyes widen as though he were suddenly waking from a fleeting dream.
Settle down. You're just going to sit there and talk for a while. Maybe drink a little. And then you'll leave.
"I'm Edward," he said, and hunched his shoulders as an overexcited passerby hammered his head. "And you?"
"Tanya."
"It's nice to meet you, Tanya. You're from around here?"
"No, I'm from Presov, in Slovakia."
"That's nice. I'm from Chicago— originally, I mean. I recently moved to New York to study at Juilliard…"
"Really? That's interesting…"
And it went on like this, an easy give-and-take that was little more than plain chitchat. He told her he was here on vacation. She told him she was here on a student exchange program. He asked her what she was studying. She said she wanted to be a painter. Before he knew it, they'd reached the public square by the rectory building of the local university, where she took his hand to lead him towards the elaborate fountain in the middle and introduce him to her friends.
"All right, so this is Heidi. She's from Germany. And then there's Carmen, from Spain, and Stefan, who comes from Romania. And that one over there is Joham. He's from around here."
Edward sat with them by the fountain's edge, feeling his nerves coiling quickly into tight springs. Thankfully, one of the girls— Carmen was her name, he remembered— engaged him in a conversation not so different from the one he'd had with Tanya, and slowly the tension in his stomach began to ease, soothed by the simplicity of small talk.
It really was pretty much effortless, he realized, finding after a moment that he didn't need to force himself to focus on what she was saying. Everything they shared with the other was followed by a moment of appreciation, a curious brightness covering their eyes like a film, and an artless desire to know more.
Everything was nice or interesting in a way that seemed so bare of any insincerity that the two words suddenly gained a new meaning in Edward's head.
They decided to go down to the boulevard to see the band that was playing, and he strung along without a second thought. Carmen got caught in another conversation with Stefan about the referendum in Catalonia, and this time it was Edward who initiated a conversation by asking Heidi if she was also there on a student exchange program.
She was different from Carmen, he concluded after a while, more inclined to speak solely about herself and her achievements rather than ask any questions in return. But he found that he was okay with that— he was more than okay with that, in fact, because the night lights were casting an amber glow upon Tanya's pink-gold hair, and his green eyes were shining bright above his reddened cheeks in the reflected images in the store windows, and suddenly…
Suddenly, the world wasn't so loud anymore.
"Hey, Masen," Joham called, and Edward was still laughing at Tanya's imitation of Portuguese men when he looked at him. "You want some booze? Tanya, shut up."
"Sure."
"Oh, come on, baby," she cooed against Joham's ear with a fake male voice. "Gimme a kiss. Just one."
Edward winced at the bitter taste of barely sweetened vodka that flooded his mouth and gushed down his throat, but he didn't refrain from taking another swig. And another. When he handed the bottle back to Joham, an odd warmth different from anything he'd felt before was humming lowly underneath his skin, while in the distance the greens and reds of traffic lights flickered just slightly beyond the glass-like coating over his eyes.
He was a little drunk, and no children were crying yet. At least, not like he used to when his father came home at five in the morning with bourbon-scented breath and a rumpled shirt.
They immersed themselves in the middle of the crowd where the peeping of plastic hammers managed to be louder than anywhere else in the city while being nearly overshadowed by the music coming off the stage. Tanya asked him if he wanted to dance as her arms slipped around his shoulders, and Edward let his hands poise over the small of her back, feeling her body lean closer into him.
This isn't so easy, he thought amidst the happy mist around his head. Instead, it was a bit strange, a bit awkward, because he'd never danced with a girl outside a formal setting and had always thought he would do it with someone he knew better. But soon he realized that as quickly as she wrapped herself around him, she let him go and danced on her own, and it occurred to him that although this might be a tad more intimate than what he was used to, in reality it was also—
Nice. It was definitely very nice, as nice as the buzzing coursing through his veins as he sang along at the top of his lungs and danced unbidden to the rhythm of the music just because he could.
Heidi and Stefan left after a while, and Joham suggested that they go eat something after which they weaved their way through the crowd and walked up to a hot dog stand. By then it was almost four in the morning, and this time there were indeed a lot of children crying, clinging to their parents as they begged to go home.
Edward bent down in front of one of them, a little girl with tear-stained cheeks and a sudden, wondering look in her wide brown eyes as she looked up at him. It was that same look that'd always made him uncomfortable when he was around children, but this time he faced her, smiled at her, and angled his head so that she could hit it with the hammer in her tiny hands.
It was suddenly so easy to think he'd shared his discontentment with his mother last week and not just some hours ago that as he looked at the person responsible for it all, heard her easy laugh and listened to her playful chatter, he felt a sudden urge to thank her.
"I had a really good time tonight, Tanya," he told her, watching Carmen and Joham disappear into the multitude of people in front of the train station.
"Yeah?" she said after gulping down the last bit of her hot dog. With a smile that was all at once content and sly, she leaned towards him and spoke in his ear.
"What do you say we go back to my place then?"
With a quiet, muffled groan, Edward stilled, his face numb to the frantic flittering of crisp blond hair against his skin. At the same time, and through a haze, he heard voices shouting into the night, saw their shadows sprawled across the bedroom wall, and felt his member pulsing, shooting into the condom, and the nerves in his overheated body unraveling as he came down from the high, thinking faintly and through his light panting that this was it: he was no longer a virgin, and despite whatever worries or premade ideas he'd had until now, the world hadn't stopped spinning.
Tanya disappeared after a while into the bathroom, the used condom hanging from her pale, thin fingers, while he lay back against the soap-scented sheets of her bed, looking up at the thread-thin cracks in the ceiling with tired, blurry eyes.
A voice filtered through the mist around his head, overlapping the sound of water flushing in the toilet.
"When are you going back to the States?"
Edward sighed, something in him aching a little at the thought of leaving.
"Next week."
Tanya came back with her hair up in a bun, her legs pale and bare below the purple lace of her panties, and he noticed that her nipples were hard beneath the thin fabric of her white top. A cool breeze was flowing gently into the room through the open window.
"Well, we can still do this again until then," she said, lying down beside him. "If you want."
Of course I do, he wanted to say, holding up visions in his mind of the two of them together, holding hands, sharing kisses, sitting side by side on the flight back to New York, and then he let the meaning behind her words trickle into his conscience and realized slowly and almost torpidly exactly what she was proposing.
"We're not going to see each other after I leave, are we?" he asked, not very surprised by the casualness of his voice, tainted, too, by an undertone of confusion— of course, he probably knew in the back of his mind when she pulled his shirt over his head or when she guided him into her that this was just sex and nothing more, that he would fly back to New York and she would go back to Slovakia, and they would only vaguely remember one another, and yet—
Yet, he found the whole thing too hard to understand, not really how one could share something so intimate with a stranger but how he had managed to do it.
"Probably not. Why? Did you think…?"
Edward shifted onto his side and allowed his eyes to flicker between the different angles of her diamond-shaped face.
"You slept with me."
"I sleep with a lot of people."
"And don't you ever feel empty?"
Her eyes tightened, and he wished he'd chosen his words more carefully. He could see in the wavering line of her mouth that she thought he was reflecting his own feelings back to her, when in fact he was simply curious, just trying to find in her answers something that could help him catalyze his own.
"You think I'm a slut."
Edward fought the urge to flinch from the plain crudeness of the term. Tanya's storm-blue eyes were glinting with something close to fear (or with a fine veneer meant to cover up her fragility), and he felt sickened by every single person that'd made her think— almost fearfully— that this was how the world would treat her for making the rules as far as her body and her life were concerned.
"I don't think you're a slut. Nobody's a slut. I hate that word."
Tanya's frown loosened up somewhat, but there was still a slight hint of anxiety weighing on her brow. "Do you regret it?"
He wanted to say he didn't, but then he would be lying to her. Worse than that, he would be forced to resist the temptation to deceive himself as well. He did regret it, wished that things had been different, imagined how he would feel now if instead of pushing him down onto the bed and straddling his hips, she had looked into his eyes or whispered soft things in his ear or even brushed her lips against his with close, tempting strokes…
He imagined how he would feel now if she were someone he could love as more than a friend.
"It was good," he said simply, because that was true and besides—
Besides, though he probably didn't know who he was yet, at least now he knew who he was not.
Tanya smiled, turning her face back to the ceiling where the echo of night lights was slowly giving way to the pale grey luminosity of sunrise and a smooth, drowsy stillness began to sink down onto the cobblestone maze of narrow streets outside.
"Are you going back to your hostel now?" she asked, with a subdued voice laden with sleep.
Edward closed his eyes, feeling the first rays of morning sunshine caress his lids, and wondered what it would be like to be free to call someone other than his mother when the world got too loud and the hollow in his stomach became just… too much.
"We can still talk."
"Yeah, we can."
There was a promise in her tone, tired and faint as it was, and he found himself grinning without effort or a truly clear reason or even thinking about how long it had been since he'd done so because he'd been smiling and laughing all night, dizzy and smitten with the feeling that everything was just… nice.
Everything was just so very nice.
"It was really nice to meet you, Tanya."
"It was really nice to meet you, too, Edward."
He left a note with his number and a long string of parting words scribbled on it on her bedside table before he walked out. Outside, the first seagulls shrieked against the cool pale blue of the morning sky, where the sun was rising slowly and gently as if it, too, had just woken up, while a modest fleet of cargo boats began to slowly disperse across the dark width of the Douro River— a river that seemed to breach the city open as it ran in stout curves towards the ocean, grating harshly against its stone-made banks.
Edward took in a deep breath, smelling salt and seafood browning over coal in the tepid summer air. An old woman was roasting fish beside a cathedral, humming an old fado under her breath, and he recognized in the lyrics the story of a widow who'd lost her lover at sea.
He bought two sardines wrapped up in bread, and set off towards the lower deck of the bridge.
By now the sun was high enough in the sky for the intricate metal works of its arch to cast a solid shadow upon the river's green-blue waters, and Edward let his hand slide along the railing, feeling its warmth bleed into his flesh like something so vague and yet so sweet had seeped into his soul.
Something in him had changed; he was sure of that. He was sure because his nails were pattering on the steel beneath his fingers, creating a rhythm for the slowly forming melody in his head, and because finally, after months of shying away from every piano and keyboard outside his classes, he wanted to sit down on a bench and start writing again.
He wanted to— move on. He was ready to move on.
Walking up the street to the hostel, he heard the soft quivering of a guitar, a set of Mediterranean chords accompanying the sound of his footsteps as he made his way towards his bedroom. A group of university boys, all dressed up in dark suits and with black capes thrown over their shoulders, were playing and singing under his balcony, their tenor voices slipping through the French doors in the form of a sleepy serenade, while beside him, sitting on her own balcony, a woman peered deep into the space between the pages of her book, as if she wanted to squirm her way into the story.
Edward cast a glance at the grave letters on the yellow cover, surprised to see that she was reading an English translation of Baltasar and Blimunda— the first novel that he'd read after his father had died and which, to this day, he remembered as the reason he'd wanted to go to Juilliard.
He was convinced at the time both that failure lay in wait and that, quite simply, he needed to do it— just go to New York and give his best, regardless of the outcome.
And now that he thought of it, it occurred to him that it was that same contradictory, inexplicable need that'd pushed him to follow Tanya into her room and share something of his with her. It was that same need that'd made him pack his suitcase and travel across the ocean without a second thought.
Now it was clear to him that though caution was a virtue, fear was not.
"Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow," he muttered, speaking the words from memory.
The woman looked up suddenly, and Edward's breath stalled in his lungs, his mind taken off the swirl of gathering reflections and realizations that'd surrounded his head.
She was, he could say with certainty, unusually and… breathtakingly beautiful— not like Tanya, who was also lovely in her own way, but like something out of one of his reveries, with hair the color of fallen chestnuts and a pale face that seemed to have been shaped into a heart. A face that bore a confused expression and just the lightest, most endearing blush.
"Excuse me?"
"It's a quote," he said, trying only slightly to tear his gaze away from the dark depths of her wide brown eyes, "from the book you're reading."
The woman— or the girl, whom he reckoned to be around his age or just a tad older— glanced down at the hardback in her hands as if she'd suddenly remembered that it was there, and he was struck by a tickling curiosity, a need to know if there was any chance at all that she had also seen something beyond the usual pattern of her daily life.
"Oh," she breathed out, her eyes travelling down quickly and landing on her chest. Edward followed her gaze, allowing it to wander across the expanse of white skin below her collarbones towards the soft, minute lint on her shoulder, glinting golden in the mid-morning sunshine. "It's a lovely book."
There was just the barest hint of sarcasm dripping through her voice, like a glimpse of what she was like beneath her coy demeanor, and he felt a pressing desire to see another dozen glimpses, to lean closer and lay his fingertips on the swell of her cheekbone, and as his gaze strayed to the gentle bow of her upper lip, to—
Touch his mouth to hers. Taste her.
"It is... a bit disgusting, admittedly, in some parts."
She snickered, and a dimple appeared just below the side of her mouth as her eyes crinkled at the corners. A slow, beguiled smile tugged at the edge of Edward's lips, and he thought that in some way that was a glimpse of himself, too, a window into his gratitude for the unsought genuineness of her manner.
"I've read cruder things," she said, leaning closer to him over the railing of her balcony, and Edward moved towards her, too, his stomach clenching in the face of this sudden proximity, this strange magnetism that was quite possibly not real outside his head and which, all at once, scared him and reached out for the space in his chest that he thought couldn't be filled again. "Besides, Baltasar Seven-Suns and Blimunda Seven-Moons are just lovely, so bare of any reservations when they're together, so…"
"Simple," he finished.
So simple and yet so complex, he added in his head, wondering about the contradictory nature of her allure. So shy and yet so open with a voice that was all at once sweet and tinged with subtle traces of sardonic humor.
Edward moved closer still, watching her vibrant gaze flicker up to his and dance between the angles of his face.
"Moon, where are you?" he quoted, and her eyes widened, dark brown orbs flashing under the long sweep of her lashes.
"Sun, where are you going?"
A smile crept slowly onto their faces where the growing sunlight shone softly, mellowing out the edges of their features. She held out her hand after a moment, and he took it in his, feeling the warmth of her touch melt onto his skin.
"I'm Bella," she said, and the name echoed in his head like a mantra. "And you?"
Suddenly, he invoked the previous night. The almost natural fear that whatever followed his introduction to Tanya would wind up in tatters, shred by a mistake on his or her part or by a rushed decision to get too close, too attached, and eventually too badly burnt or too deeply marked by the guilt of having burnt her instead.
He invoked all of this and more— the two-second-long bond between him and a child on the street when he lowered his head for her to hit it with a hammer and then hit hers in return; Heidi's slight narcissism showing through her words as he listened to her speak; the acrid burn in his throat as he took a sip of the vodka; the tolerable regret over having sex with Tanya as he lay in bed with her minutes afterwards…
The world was so flawed and so beautiful, and he wasn't afraid anymore.
"Edward. My name is Edward."
Because there was always a chance that he would disappoint this girl, this beautiful woman whom he never wanted to hurt, just like there was a chance she would disappoint him as well, but in the end he thought— no, he was sure that he could work with that, because…
He could work with that, because even if they let each other down a little, he knew neither of them would let the other fall.
Bella smiled again, a radiant smile that made him feel his heartbeat on the side of his neck.
"It's lovely to meet you, Edward."
"It's lovely to meet you, too, Bella."
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