The song for this chapter is She Said (Goodbye) by Dave Gahan.
Stephenie Meyer owns the rights to the Twilight books and her characters.
That night we walked hand in hand as we strolled through the city. We shouldn't have been out so late, but we knew we were only happy together away from home. Edward's hand felt warm and comforting in mine, and I reveled in the silence of the night. It was crisp and cold this late in the year. October had brought a cold front that lasted for weeks here in northern Washington, but we didn't notice it as we continued towards the woods. A place where we could be alone together, a place where we didn't have to explain ourselves.
We felt bothered when we passed into the strange world that the forest belonged to at night. It felt as if a strange energy always held the forest under its control, and I couldn't help but enjoy the thrill of it. We moved to sit on a log and leaned against each other. Here the sounds of owls and wind and leaves surrounded us, but the noises only made it more serene and abnormal.
"I love you, Bella," he said quietly. He turned to look at me, to gauge my reaction, but I knew he didn't need to. He gripped my hand tighter and let out a sigh heavy as the world.
My eyes found his, and for a moment we just stared at each other. He looked at me with concentration. The serious expression on his face didn't match his boyish looks, his short dark hair, his soft green eyes, the goofy grin he usually displayed. I felt a flurry of excitement in my stomach, and I whispered, "I love you, too."
Edward smiled then, showing hints of his shockingly white teeth. I could just make out the small creases that appeared at the sides of his eyes in the darkness. His face was smug, but his relaxed shoulders told me he genuinely enjoyed hearing me say it aloud. His face settled into the young, confident expression he usually wore, but it was slightly different now that something had passed between us that changed everything. He leaned his head slowly toward mine, and I took a moment to think that he was actually going to kiss me and I hope I remembered to brush my teeth before I left. His lips came down softly on mine, and he gently wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me to him so our bodies were touching.
Touching Edward this way felt so right, and I never wanted this moment to end. He was so warm as our lips moved together, and I couldn't control the breathy moan that escaped me as he pulled me onto his lap. I felt his tongue trace my lips sensuously for a moment before I opened my mouth to him. Our tongues slid together, and I thought I might die from the passion I felt spark between us. Just as I began to tangle my hands into his thick hair, a branched cracked a few feet beyond where we sat, breaking the spell.
We broke apart unwillingly and moved to see what had disturbed our moment. From behind the tree a few feet beyond us a figure with long hair stretched toward the ground in a feline gesture. The dark silhouette lingered with its hand on the ground for a moment, and Edward and I both sat transfixed. The movement of what looked like a woman was entrancingly fluid, yet calculated, and in the dimly moonlit forest, it looked almost like she was just a figment of our imaginations. We sat stunned as she straightened slowly, and then seemed to turn toward us. Edward stiffened and my heart began racing when she started walking to us. She made no sound as she stopped in front of us, and we could not see her face in the dark. Her head tilted to the side a second in thought, and then she moved back suddenly and hid behind the tree. I let out a huge breath I'd been holding, and noticed my hands were shaking.
Something from my dream passed through my mind, and I felt déjà vu. Still tangled in Edward's arms, I started to get up and made my away around the log.
"Hello?" I called in a very clichéd whisper.
"Bella, what are you doing?" Edward whispered loudly, clearly agitated. "Come back!"
"I just want to see what she put down," I murmured, very disturbed by the strange occurrence of the woman in the woods with us. I walked to the tree quietly and saw no on around. "She's not here," I said. "How is she not here? She just was…"
"Bella, really, let's just go. It doesn't matter what she left," Edward urged me as I bent down and felt the spot she'd touched on the forest floor.
"It's nothing, I guess." I was disappointed as I felt only moss and rocks. I can't explain what I expected to find or why I cared so much, but the bizarre and disconcerting appearance of the woman had piqued my curiosity like nothing else. The ground was cold and wet as I ran my hands blindly along the rough surface until I felt something smooth, like a large rock, but it was cut like crystal. I picked it up and examined it in the low light, my pulse picking up when I realized that it was a cut stone.
"What is it?" Edward asked, walking over and taking it from me. He held the giant stone in the palm of his hand, and we both tried to examine it as best we could. It was dark blue, almost black, and was cut like a large sapphire. It had scratches on some of its many faces, and Edward and I were silent for a moment as her turned it over a few times in his hand.
A sharp wind blew threw the trees and struck us in that moment, pulling me out of my reverie. "Ok, what the hell is all this?" I wondered aloud. "Why are we still here, and who the hell was that person?"
I don't know how I wanted him to answer, but the eerie calm that had passed over me before was gone, and I was thoroughly creeped out. He said, in a scarily serene voice, "I don't know, let's just go home."
We hurried out of the woods, and walked quickly down the street to Edward's car. The wind was starting to pick up, and my thin jacket was doing nothing to shelter me from the cold. "It was probably just some crazy person, you know?" I reasoned. "Like those people you hear about that escape from asylums.
Edward just nodded and didn't say anything, and to be honest I was starting to get a little freaked out by the fact that he seemed pretty calm and unperturbed about having just encountered a silent, yet clearly disturbed person alone in the forest at night.
"Ok, then," I said uneasily as we pulled away from the curb and headed home.
Edward drove silently, and when we got to his house, he went inside and I headed home next door without a word. In my room, I looked out my window that faced his, but his blinds were drawn. He never drew his blinds, and I started to get a terribly melodramatic feeling of worry in the pit of my stomach. Edward and I had lived next door to each other since birth. We were closer than any two people who were not married, and every night since we were five, we would talk through our open windows on the second story until we fell asleep. Fourteen years of the same habit every night is not an easy thing to stop suddenly.
Sighing heavily, I closed my window and curtains, and took my jacket and shoes off. This had definitely been the strangest day I'd ever had, and I tried to sort it all out as I lay down on my bed. Except, I couldn't make sense of any of it. Why Edward had decided to tell me something so important, why we had been in the woods, why she had been in the woods, and why Edward was now acting so stoic.
And what the hell was the giant stone I now realized was still in my jacket pocket? I took it out and turned it around a few times, seeing now in the light of my lamp that it was a sapphire, or at least looked like one to my untrained eye. It was scratched on almost every one of its different surfaces, and some of the corners had been dulled over what looked like a long time. But, it was beautiful. The color was so deep, so pure, that it seemed as though this stone held such involved secrets and mysteries that no amount of time would ever let them be discovered. Who knows? I'll show it to mom and dad in the morning, I thought as a wave of sleepiness came over me, and I was out before I could set the stone down on my nightstand.