Chapter 1: Omen
"What the hell is she doing in there," I wondered as I glared through her bedroom doorway and down to the hall where the bathroom door was closed.
I stared hard at the closed door and clenched my fists in my pockets as I blew out a frustrated breath. I had considered busting open that door, several times, and then maybe grabbing her up in my arms and kissing her in some dramatically, lame-romantic-movie sort of way. I shook my head and closed my eyes tight, trying to erase that picture from my mind. I could almost hear Emmett's laughter booming inside my head as if he had just seen what I was thinking...or, more realistically, had been given a detailed description by Edward...
"Shit," I muttered under my breath as I clenched my pocketed-fists tighter. I had tried hard not to think about the possibility of my family being aware of what I was doing, but whenever I was left to my own devices for too long my imagination would start to wander. And with every extra second that she spent in that damn bathroom, this whole idea of skipping class to sneak-off to her house was sounding more and more like a bad one. But, my family finding out wasn't even the least of my worries. My girlfriends dad, on the other hand, was a whole other story.
I ground my teeth together as I turned my back to the doorway and moved towards the window that had a clear view of the driveway. I half-expected her dad to pull-up at any second, all guns blazing, and ready to dig a marked-grave that had my name on it. With that thought, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I raised up a hand to rub it, ruffling my hair as I did. I shrugged my shoulders then and rolled my head, trying to relax, but all this waiting was starting to psych me out. It was probably the guilt of knowing I was doing something that I shouldn't. And, I swear I could feel someone's eyes on me, staring me down. I leaned in closer to the window and scanned the trees across the street. I imagined that it was probably her dad...hiding in those trees...watching me through the scope of a rifle. I looked down to see if there was a little red laser dot aimed at my heart...
"BOO!" A loud sound cut through my silence and I grabbed for my chest as if I had been shot, but there was no blood, no bullet hole.
Feeling my heart pound under my hand, a good sign that I was alive, I turned around to face the source of the sound. A brown-haired girl with an amused expression on her face stood in the doorway and the pounding of my heart slowed.
"Amy," I breathed and rubbed my face with my hands, "Shit. Do you think you could have possibly made a quieter entrance?"
Amy closed the door behind her before tapping a finger to her chin and rolling her eyes up to the ceiling in contemplation.
"Sure," she said with a smile, and then quickly crossed the distance between us, "I could have done this!"
Before I had time to react, she attacked me with her fingers, poking them hard into my sides as she laughed. I jumped back, holding my hands out in front of me to block her, but the smile that had crept across my face only seemed to encourage her more. She came at me again with her hands, but this time I grabbed her wrist and spun her around until her back was pinned to my chest. She let out a playful scream and squirmed under my grasp as I wrapped my arms tight around her, crushing her to me.
"Air," she gasped breathlessly and I chuckled.
"If I let you go will you promise to keep your hands to yourself," I asked with a teasing grin.
She turned her head back and looked up at me through the corner of her eye. A dimple formed in her cheek as she smiled, and I studied her, waiting for an answer.
"I can't promise that," she said with a swallow and the action drew my eyes to her pale slender neck.
I instantly became transfixed on the spot just below her ear that was framed by a lock of her brown hair. I loosened my grip around her as I lowered my head to place a kiss on that delicate spot. The skin there felt soft and warm against my lips and the sweet smell of her shampoo added to the overall Amy-ambience that I was suddenly lost in. I found myself doing more than gently kissing her neck then. And Amy...giggled.
"Ok, ok," she said with amusement in her voice as she shrugged-up her shoulders to push me away, "Ease up on the fangs, Dracula."
My heart momentarily stopped at her words and I immediately dropped my arms from around her as I turned to face the window.
"Dracula," I repeated the word in my mind, "fangs?"
I shook my head and took a deep breathe. She had no idea how close to the mark she was. But, real vampires didn't have fangs and I wasn't a blood-drinker. I did know a few, though... Amy tapped her finger on my shoulder then and it distracted me from my blind-stare out the window.
"Are you watching for my dad," she asked in a bored tone.
I scowled out the window at the reminder of her dad. It really wasn't a surprise that he hated me. I was, afterall, keeping a huge secret from him and his daughter. I was, afterall, slightly more than just "human". Her dad had suspected enough to call my family "strange", but that was all. My brow furrowed as my eyes focused on the glass in front of me, seeing my own reflection in the window. Being suspicious of us at all was probably too much...
"Caleb," Amy said and I jumped at the sound of my own name, "I told you he's not coming. He's going to a stupid sports memorabilia auction as soon as he leaves work."
I ground my teeth together at the word "memorabilia" as it triggered the memory from the first time I had met her dad, and then inadvertently wrecked his collection of baseball memorabilia. The large glass case he had kept his collection in, which had been like a great shrine to the sport of baseball, had easily shattered by barely being bumped into. Well, maybe it had been more than just a little bump, but it didn't matter! I hadn't been thinking about her dad until she mentioned him. I was thinking the same thoughts that had plagued my mind since I had first met Amy: How close can I get to a human who knows nothing about my shape-shifting, blood-drinking family?
I turned around to face her, but "I" was the only word I could say before she grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me down until my mouth was level with hers. I hesitated for a moment as her lips moved against mine but as soon as the shock went away I shut my eyes and kissed her back. Her hands slid away from my collar then and down my chest until they found their way underneath my shirt. She pulled her lips from mine slightly and panted out a very audible, "Take your shirt off."
The concern of saving her from knowing about the existence of "monsters" and all that other right-and-wrong bullshit suddenly became lost on a thought-frequency that I was no longer tuned-in to. I quickly tugged the shirt off from over my head and let it drop to the floor. Amy reached out her hand then and slowly slid it up my bare chest, causing my muscles to quiver at her touch. And, before I had a chance to even consider an appropriate reaction to that, Amy pulled off her tank top…
I gulped involuntarily as I stared at that scant article of clothing that stood between my eyes and her bare breasts. The bra was strapless, with a single clasp at the front, and it was almost the exact same shade as her skin.Amy reached for my hand and balled-up my fingers into a fist with the exception of my index finger. My mind processed this and I realized what she intended to do with my hand. Just one flip of my finger and her bra would be on the floor! Suddenly, I went back to thinking that this was a bad idea. Shit! Was I really thinking that! I stared at the beautiful, half-naked girl in front of me. Did I really think THIS was a bad idea! I stared down at my hand, noting the contrast of my light-russet colored skin from hers, and it reminded me of our other differences. Yes. Definitely a bad idea. I pulled my hand from her grasp and she looked up at me with a confused expression. Did I really want to get this close to someone out-of-the-loop on the existence of mythical creatures? And, more importantly, would SHE want to be this close to me if she knew HOW much in-the-loop I was?
"Amy," I said and hesitantly reached out to place my hand on her bare waist as I wondered, like I always did, if our relationship was a mistake.
But, the moment my hand touched her skin, a shock went between us, and we both jerked away as a feeling like static electricity jolted our skin. But I knew better. It wasn't static electricity. There was no carpet and there was no cold inside of her well-insulated house to create a static charge. Besides, the shock didn't begin and end as we touched. The shock traveled back up my arm to my brain, filling my with a sense of doom. Ominousness. I shook off the unsettling feeling left by the shock and stared at Amy. She was laughing in response to our shared jolt as if that was all that it had been, but for me, the shock was a confirmation that this was wrong.
All of a sudden she seemed like prohibited territory. She was forbidden fruit. Something inside of me put up the red flag and yelled: "Warning!" I had a powerful urge to listen to it, but, before I could act on it, Amy's hands moved to the band of my jeans and a second later I felt them slide down to my knees. She then wrapped her arms around my neck, crushing her body against me as her hot mouth opened to mine. The warning instantly took the backseat in my mind as I groaned at the overall sensation of her tongue in my mouth and her soft, plush breasts mashing against my chest. I placed a hand on Amy's hips and held her tight against me as my other hand traveled northward. Amy's kiss became more urgent as my hand cupped the swell of her breast, but before I got my fingers near the clasp of her bra…
"AAAMMY!"
We froze. Amy stared wide-eyed at me for a second, and then she frantically began to gather our discarded tops from her bedroom floor.
"It's my dad," she yelled in a whisper as she threw my shirt at me.
I caught it, but I was still in a daze from just having had her warm, barely clothed body against mine. She pulled her tank top back on and I just stared at her wistfully, suddenly hating clothes...
"CALEB," Amy whisper-yelled and I shook my head, trying to snap-out-of-it.
But before I had a chance to move, the bedroom door flew open and my t-shirt fell from my hand. My eyes grew wide as the door banged against the wall so hard that something clattered to the floor. A stocky figure appeared in the doorway, then. I stared at Amy's father, who, not surprisingly, looked a lot more menacing today than he usually did.
There he stood, in the doorway, with an aluminum bat in his hands, and there I stood, shirtless, with my pants down to my knees, and his daughter in close proximity. I could almost see the steam rushing out of his ears and nostrils as he looked me up and down with wild, angry eyes. I half-grimaced, half-smiled, but tried damn-hard to look innocent.
"Uh, hello Mr. Johnson," I greeted through a smile of gritted teeth.
His response wasn't really in word-form, but, as he lunged at me with a bat...I got the message. Amy screamed as her father swung the bat at my head, but I managed to dodge the blow causing a porcelain lamp to take the hit for me instead.
"DADDY," Amy yelled as the lamp shattered to the floor.
The sound of his daughter's voice momentarily distracted him from me and I took the opportunity to run-for-it, leaving my shirt behind as he raised a scolding finger to her.
"Amy, you're grounded until the Mariners win the World Series," he grumbled and I nearly tripped over my fallen pants as I ran down the hallway, trying to pull them up.
With my pants zipped and buttoned, I dug my hand into my pocket for my car keys and then reached for the knob on the front door. But before I was even able to crack it open, the end of an aluminum bat appeared out of the corner of my eye and pressed against the door, holding it closed. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I was lucky that his weapon of choice was a bat. If he had had a gun…I'd probably be dead. I let go of the knob then and slowly turned around to face the man wielding the bat. I looked down at him, and he glared up at me with searing eyes.
"I don't care that you're guardian is a respectable doctor and I don't care how smart that might make him seem. But, to me, he's just a bad guidance counselor who throws caution to the wind when it comes to teen pregnancy. It's disgusting the way he lets you kids shack-up under his own roof the way you do," he looked away for a moment and scowled at the mere thought, but then his eyes snapped back to me.
"STOP THINKING WITH YOUR DICK," I nearly choked on my own spit as he suddenly yelled in my face, "Look jack-ass, I have two daughters older than Amy. I know the difference between guys like you and the guys that they are actually serious about. But, you're just another hormonally charged moron who wouldn't know the difference. Well," he paused as he tapped the bat firmly to my shoulder, "Listen up because I'm about to tell you how to differentiate. It's simple: the girlfriends that you have to work to get tend to last longer and be more worthwhile than the ones that come easy."
He stared at me for a moment as if he was waiting for some cue that he had gotten through to me or helped me come to some sort of revelation. But I didn't know what-in-the-hell he was talking about. And, I didn't really give a shit about his opinions or theories. I just wanted him to get his damn bat away from me. Mr. Johnson shook his head at me then and rolled his eyes as if he was giving-up on trying to explain anything to me.
"Kid, if I ever find you on my property again, you, and this bat," he said as he tapped the bat against my shoulder again, but harder this time, "will have an encounter that you will never forget. Got it?"
I got that. "Yes sir."
Mr. Johnson dropped his bat-wielding arm then and we stared at each for a moment as I waited for him to give me permission to leave. He took a step back.
"Get the hell out of my house."
No sooner did he say those words that I opened the door and flew out the second it was open. I jogged to the end of the driveway, where my car was waiting by the curb. It was sort of a miracle that my brain was functioning enough to get me there because I was pretty sure I was in some strange sort of shock from getting a life-lecture from my girlfriends dad. Without looking back at the house or up to the window where I imagined Amy was watching, I opened my car door and got behind the wheel. I cranked the engine as Mr. Johnson's voice rang in my head: "the difference between guys like you and the guys that they are actually serious about"...
My thoughts went back to the moment when I touched Amy's skin and felt a shock of electricity run through my veins. It must have been a omen. It wasn't some "spark" between us. It was just intuition; something telling me that her dad would bust in on us and try to bust me open with a bat. Right? I wanted to believe that anyway. I didn't want her dad's words to be true. I wanted her to be serious about me. She was the one person in my life who wasn't super-strong and who could get cut and bleed just as easily as I could. But, I still didn't know how honest I could be with her. I glanced back at her house one last time as I pulled away from the curb and into the street. I looked to her window, hoping to see her as the car rolled forward, but then a horn blared! My attention immediately snapped back to the road and to the mini-van that was headed straight for me! I cut the wheel and took a sharp left turn, avoiding a head-on collision but not avoiding all damage...
My body jumped forward as I slammed on the brakes, and then I turned in the direction of the clanking sound that was suddenly coming from the right side of the car. The side mirror dangled there, clanking against the car as it still swung back and forth from the abrupt stop. I turned around in my seat then to see that the mini-van had stopped too. A thin red streak of paint was scratched along the side of the white van. I could hear the driver of the van trying to calm a kid down who was screaming as if their van had rolled over twice and then fell off a cliff. I looked back at the dangling side mirror and suddenly wished there was a cliff that I could drive off of... In all of it's 35 years, the red BMW had never so much as gotten a ding from someone else's car door, and now, thanks to me, a pretty significant part of it was dangling from the side of the car. I swallowed hard.
"Shit. Rosalie's going to kill me."