Always an Edward
Summary: Bella wants to say yes to kind, handsome Ed…but can't stop meeting Eddie for martini lunches. Eduardo wonders why she's avoiding his yoga class. And who is this "Edward" leaving cryptic messages at work? A story about people and how they change.
~.~
Chapter Two: Friendship
On Thursday morning I blink awake extra early. I take a few lazy moments to watch Ed sleep. His tall, strong body, so impressive and purposeful when we walk down the street side by side, turns into a jumble of wayward limbs when he's asleep. He's all elbows and angles this way. All discombobulated. I like it. His muscles are warm under his smooth skin.
It isn't often that I'm the first one up. When it happens, I like to wake him with gentle kisses, challenging myself to ease him out of sleep more gradually every time. Ed laughs softly when he discovers the position his body is in, spread out and dangling one leg off the bed. He comes to life and wraps himself around me. He seems so happy to be woken up so sweetly, and then I feel happy that he's happy.
If I could live in this moment, I would. But we have our lives to get to. Forty minutes later, we're our workaday selves: showered, clothed, efficient. He sweetens my coffee. We juggle messenger bags and travel mugs to peck one another's lips goodbye.
~.~
When I look at the new numbers waiting in my inbox, I see that Wild Clallam is close to meeting a revenue goal that will mean expanding a much-loved wilderness immersion program. The subsequent planning work keeps me happily distracted all morning. Ed and I had a serious-business relationship talk last night, and if I didn't already have Eddie on tap for lunch today, I'd be calling him now for an emergency debriefing.
Periodically throughout the morning, Ed sends me snapshots from his cell phone. He's on a field trip to the Dungeness Spit with his advanced math students, and he's having them use mathematical formulas to describe the tides and create predictive models for the changing terrain.
He knows the Spit is one of my favorite places on the Peninsula. Most people associate wilderness with forests, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, but the sandy coastline is wilderness, too. I let myself daydream about the breezy openness of the miles-long sand bar. Solid land underfoot. Wide stretches of murky water blending into hazy sky on either side. The slate-gray shoreline always makes me feel a particular sense of calm and of wide-open possibilities.
Ed has a different way of looking at wide-open possibilities. He sees them as both a thrill and a threat. It's not good or bad; it's just him. I chuckle a bit to think of him guiding his students through an exercise of measuring and predicting the effects of nature using math. I don't have the heart to tell him that type of thinking is the polar opposite of everything I love about that spot.
When my email pings with a message from him entitled "Plotted important data for you," I bite my lip before opening the attachment. But then I'm laughing: it's a sketch of my breasts on graph paper.
I steal peeks at the clock until it's finally time to break, then I scurry past the yoga studio on my way to The Evergreen Lodge. I pretend to search for something in my bag in case Eduardo is pacing near the studio's picture window like he sometimes does. I'm fooling no one, of course. Underneath his even-keeled temperament, Eduardo takes notice of everything.
Eddie is ten minutes late meeting me, but at least he gives me his full attention as soon as he takes his seat. He makes a show of powering down his smartphone as he settles into our booth, grinning.
"See? It's off. More than silent—off! How are you, sweetness? Sorry I'm late." He cranes his neck, searching out the waiter. "My word, I'm starving. Emmett ran me halfway to the Rez this morning. I wanted to hip-check him into traffic. Except there wasn't any traffic."
"You'll be thanking him in a month. Right around mile twenty." They're training for the Olympia marathon in May.
"Oh, I'll be thanking him before then. What's going on with you?" He leans back as if to get a fuller perspective on me, tilting his head this way and that. "You're all…weird."
"Hmm. It could be that Ed and I had the marriage talk last night." I flip the specials table tent back and forth, inspecting both sides. I don't know why. It never changes.
"What, again? No, that's not it."
"Eddie, be serious. This time he got sort of emo."
"Yeah, but you didn't. Did you?" He watches me turn my face away. "I didn't think so. There's something else."
I play dumb and nod to Walter, who is hovering nearby. "I got a mystery hanger-upper call at the office on Tuesday. Seltzer with lime, please."
"Oh? Any heavy breathing, at least? I'll take a lemonade." Eddie barely glances up at Walter as he places his drink order.
"Lauren talked with him." I watch Eddie break a slim cracker in half. I adopt a nonchalant expression. "I think it was….Edward. One."
Eddie's eyes lock onto mine, even as he rotates his head in slow motion in the general direction of the wait station. "Walter, dear. Change of plan. Bring us two gin martinis. Four—no, six—olives. Total, not apiece."
"I have the board meeting to prepare for. I can't—"
"It's in four days, and you've been ready since Monday. Stop."
I scan the room to see if any of my donors or volunteers are in the restaurant.
"No one cares if you get sloshed, Bell. You're with the mayor, remember? For all they know, we're wheeling and dealing here."
This always makes me laugh, and he knows it—this mock self-importance. As mayor of Forks, Eddie is in charge of about one traffic light and not much more.
"So. Edward One, huh? As in college Edward? The man who made you throw your brokenhearted self into my capable arms?" He flexes a smallish bicep as if to punctuate his sarcasm.
I purse my lips to keep from laughing at the memory of my epically ill-advised fling with Eddie so soon after things ended with Edward. But then I shake my head. "I was hardly brokenhearted. I dated him for ten weeks; it was no big deal."
"So not a big deal. So much not—er, so little so—I mean, so very not-a-big-deal that you've never said a single word about it."
I shrug. "Maybe if you'd met him. I only rehash those other guys because, well, you know them. Knew them. Whatever."
"Right." Eddie flashes a brilliant smile at Walter, who is setting down our drinks. Then he turns his smile on me. "Right. Let's go with that, shall we? Why was he calling?"
"I don't know. He didn't leave a message."
Now I'm wondering why I even brought this up. But then again, I do know. Eddie knows how to do this dance with me. I float a conversation topic. He nibbles. I reel it in again. Things marinate. We revisit.
"Just…out of the blue, after twelve years, he calls and hangs up?"
"I'm not even sure it was him. He told Lauren he'd call back. Do you know what the soup is?"
He rolls his eyes. "Clam. Moving on. In a theoretically unrelated development, would you like to tell me why you won't get heterosexual-married to your current, very loving and handsome boyfriend?"
"Nothing's changed on that front. And I haven't said no. Is it the creamy kind or the tomato kind?" I squint at the chalkboard at the back of the restaurant, trying to make out the soup.
"New England. Creamy." He raises his glass to toast me. "To not saying no."
"To not saying no." The gin stings my lips and tongue. It's not altogether unpleasant.
I drag my olive-laden toothpick across the transparent oil spill lingering on the surface of my drink, and it occurs to me I've been sitting and draining martinis with Eddie off and on for more than a decade. It's not always martinis, either. Sometimes it's bowls of popcorn. Coffee. I never feel pressured with him. And I've never felt judged by him, even when he's needling me and giving me a hard time about owning up to my issues.
I don't have that with anyone else—not even Ed.
"But…" He chomps on an olive. "Not saying no isn't yes. Friend, I know you love that boy straight down to the champion stem cells in his blue-ribbon bone marrow. What's the issue?"
That's a turn of phrase I haven't heard from him before. It feels right, though. I love Ed. Hard. "I do."
Walter is back to take our orders, and while Eddie runs through a litany of substitutions and specifications for his sandwich, I think about how to get at what I'm feeling in a way that might be useful. And then Walter is gone, and Eddie is looking at me expectantly.
"He does this thing sometimes…I'll be reading or sorting through the mail, and I'll look up to see him just gazing at me. And that's when I can see that he has such high hopes for us…I mean, he really believes in us. For…forever." I can barely spit the word out—it unnerves me that much. "I'm just so afraid of disappointing him."
Eddie raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth, and I can just hear him saying, Sure, because standing there with a ring in your hand and no takers isn't at all disappointing.
"Wait, let me finish. When it comes to everyday life stuff…I find myself being kind to him instead of honest. Not that I'm hiding anything, exactly. It's just that he makes everything so smooth and pleasant, the only legitimate reaction is to appreciate him. And I do appreciate him. I just sometimes wish he would challenge me more. Ruffle my feathers. Otherwise, how will I know I can say literally anything to him, the way I can with you, you know?"
"And yet you find a way to say a hard thing when it really matters. For instance, each time you tell the man you aren't ready to marry him, how does he react then?"
"He lightens up. He makes himself understood, but he doesn't pressure me. He knows what's underlying everything, and he gets it." I shake my head.
What I understand from last night's talk is just how much Ed wants to get married. I can't make a mistake with this one. He's too good. That's why I need to be sure.
Eddie doesn't probe further. He knows I'm an expert at sending myself on guilt trips, unprompted. Ed might know it, too.
Our meals materialize, then a second round of drinks, then coffee and shortbread cookies. Bit by bit, Eddie eases me into a comfort zone and talks me through my options. This is why he's the rock of our one-stoplight town. He doesn't get stymied. He finds a way.
I call Lauren and ask her to email some files to me so I can work from home later, since I'm not going back to the office after this. By the time Eddie and I wrap things up, I've got a plan of action worked out.
"All right." Eddie shuffles our scribbled note pages into a neat pile. "Criteria one. I mean, criterion one. Singular. There." He pencils in the edit. "Do you want to read it, or should I?"
"You go."
"Criterion one: friendship. Totally reasonable. You want to marry your best friend…present company excluded, obviously. And you agree that means allowing a certain person to be your best friend."
I nod. At the outset of this little exercise of ours, Eddie made me promise I wouldn't look at it as a simple yes-or-no checklist, but as a sort of task list. Things to explore, build, share.
The list goes on: lifestyle compatibility; reliability; trust, which is just a shade different from reliability—but an important shade; emotional availability; and something Eddie tells me to call "dreaminess" for lack of a better word.
He makes me promise not to compromise on this last one. I think he's pantomiming how my face should look when I feel it, and then I realize Emmett is behind me, walking in from the street and switching a light on inside Eddie's soul somewhere.
I get a kiss on the cheek from Emmett, and Eddie gets his on the lips. By now Ed is back from his day at the Spit, so I call him and then there are four of us. We go for lemonades and a stroll in the park, then an early dinner. Two couples in love, simple and straightforward. I feel better than I have in weeks. The doubts and second thoughts stay at bay for longer than usual this time. Not forever, naturally. But for a good long while.
~.~
April 1999
Dear Alice,
Pardon me while I skip straight to venting. Ugh! I don't understand the madness that is my life. Unpredictable people are so…unpredictable. I've already described to you the drama between my parents. Well, it seems to be past the point of no return. My mom is looking at apartments in Forks, so now the whole town knows. Thanks, rumor mill. It's hard enough feeling this sad for them both and sorry for myself. Now I also get to have everyone watching me, waiting for me to have an epic public meltdown or something. Especially after the show I gave everyone a year ago.
I'd say I'm relieved to be living here on campus, insulated from it all, except that my roommate is almost worse. Rosalie is a raging bitch half the time, and moderately snotty the rest of the time. I thought it was getting better last fall, but then it suddenly got worse. When she's hooking up with someone, I don't see her for weeks on end—except from afar sometimes, walking around campus in this pack or that pack of people, at house parties, at concerts. She's friendly with Edward's friends. I haven't seen the two of them together, thank God.
That's the other thing. This business of sharing a campus with him is everything I was afraid of—and worse. His drawing studio meets at the same time as my writing seminar, and we all empty out into the same courtyard when it's time to take a break. He's smoking again, off and on. He usually sketches on a pad, even though it's break time, and I can see that he's giving his friends the cold shoulder. Other times, it's like he's holding court, everyone hanging on his every word, laughing.
Three weeks ago he sought me out and started making small talk about the X-Files and whether I liked the new Neutral Milk Hotel record. The next week he was back in his bubble again. Then I found a flyer about his mid-semester show taped to my mailbox, so I went. It was good, I guess. I liked it. Lots of abstract, figurative work. He wasn't there when I stopped by.
And then there was last week. The sun was out in the courtyard for maybe the first time since October, and it was so bright I spent the whole break wishing I had my sunglasses, wishing that I even knew where I'd stashed them away. Edward had his. I went inside to pick up a special order from the art library, and when I came back to collect my things, I saw some paper sticking out from between the pages of my journal. It was a simple line drawing of me with my hand shielding my face. It looked like I was hiding, the way he drew it. I recognized my posture and the turn of my wrist.
The next day, I was meeting with my study group in the International House and walked into the bathrooms to find this blond physics major named Heidi giving Edward a haircut. He had a towel draped over his shoulders. Her hands were in his hair, actually, and she was rubbing his neck. Clippings of his hair were sprinkled all over the towel and the floor. I turned on my heel and walked out. Rosalie told me Caius told her Heidi and Edward are hanging out now, which I think means they're sleeping together.
At least one thing is working out fine: classes. I have a chance to study abroad next year—Paris—and I think I should go. There's a grant to cover my travel and everything. It won't be until the Spring, because I need to take Research Methods first. This prof has ideas about me doing a project on the urban park systems, and he thinks it might be good preparation for grad school. Do I want that? I don't know. I didn't used to, as you know. I figure I'll work it as long as it's working. I wouldn't mind getting far away from here, that's for sure.
Do you remember how we used to plan out our lives in such painstaking detail, Alice? I can't bear to think about any of those plans now. None of it means anything without you here. I always knew we'd support each other no matter what…no matter how our dreams changed. I always knew if I made you proud, I'd be doing something right. I just never bargained for not having the chance.
Has it really been a year—only a year? I miss you every day. I'm sorry my life isn't anything like what I promised you. Enough happiness for both of us. I remember, and I'm trying, Alice. I really am. I owe you that much. It's just…difficult.
Love always,
Bella
~.~
AN: Thank you for reading! Hello and hooray to happymelt, faireyfan, and midsouthmama for beta-ing and pre-reading, and to someone I'll call midsouthpapa for the awesome banner he made. I'm curious to see if people have strong opinions about criteria lists or what have you! 'Til next time.
