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The Sky at Dusk
Chapter 3: In Which They Go to the Meadow and Discuss the Angel
Here, in the vampire's meadow of Eden there's a scissor-trimmed carpet of green, green grass, and flowers of every exotic type and color. Flowers can be found here that people thought only grew in the remotest of tropical islands. Among them are pinkish and tall ones, with centers big enough to swallow a person or vampire whole. Unafraid, the girl leans her back against one of the stems of these flowers. Sturdy as a tree trunk, it doesn't give at all. The boy thinks she looks like a forest fairy.
The boy runs faster than the fastest vampire, climbs a tree, spins around on a branch, comes back down to earth and returns to the girl. She has barely seen him move.
"You're like heroin to me," he says to her. The images of heroin addicts in her mind are scary and repulsive, so she prefers to change the subject.
"I'm just a stupid lamb," she says, sliding down the flower stem to sit upon the forest grass. She doesn't think that lambs are all that stupid, though. They're fuzzy, and much cuter than heroin addicts. Their cuteness makes them almost perfect.
The boy chuckles because she's so adorable, and he wants to say something clever about lambs and falling in love, but he can't think of anything that hasn't already been written about in books, or tattooed on women's bodies, and he prefers to remain original, not quote books.
"You're a flightless bird," he says. Apparently he doesn't have any trouble quoting songs made popular by movies adapted from books.
The girl isn't quite sure what this means, but she thinks maybe he's saying that she's being held back from her dreams, and since her most important dream is to be with him forever she bites her lip in agreement. She has no control over her flight; he has the control.
When the sun peeks its beaming round face through a cloud, the boy doesn't sparkle because the couple are under the shade of the massive flower. He pulls the monstrous flower out of the ground and throws it miles away to reveal both his strength and his sparkles simultaneously.
Far from even vampire sight, the head of the flower lands on a minivan driven by one of the nameless schoolboys, and spins it out of control. Luckily there is no girl who is rescued from a near-crushing, so Carlisle doesn't have to go into work today.
Even though he was impossibly beautiful to begin with, the sparkles make the boy impossibly-impossibly beautiful. The girl nearly screams, not because she's afraid, but because she's never been around such beauty in her life. Unsure how to handle all the perfection, she spins in circles.
"You're like diamonds. Diamonds!" The image of a draped in diamonds, pink dress donning Marilyn Monroe singing about diamonds flashes through the girl's mind. Her spinning stops. "You're my best friend."
"I know. It's all part of the killers' plan. We lure you in because you humans stupidly think we're beautiful."
He comes over to her slower than human speed and sinks down next to her in the grass. He pokes a finger at her face, and when he doesn't kill her after that, he pokes her throat. That turns out okay, too, so he decides to fingertip-caress her in every place her skin is showing from her forehead, down her cheek, over her ear, along her jaw, her throat, her collarbone, the top of her chest, and then her arms, her wrist, her hand, her fingers, and her ankles. She's wearing shoes so he can't caress her toes.
She shivers.
When he touches her, she learns what it feels like to be touched by diamonds. And while her skin doesn't sparkle, her skin knows what it feels like to sparkle. There are sparkly things going on in her panties that she's afraid to talk about or admit to, but that make her want to remove all her clothing, straddle the vampire, strategically placing her breast near his lips and say, "Make my body feel like diamonds."
She can't say or do any of that, though, in a teen novel, so she just sits there with her lips parted and her eyes closed, letting out chaste and needy gasps when necessary, and blushing so deeply she can feel the heat in her shoe-covered toes.
Maybe we can have toe-curling sex someday, she dreams behind her closed eyes. Off the page. He dips his head and his nose grazes her jaw line, down her throat to her chest. She gasps and blushes into her toes. And the happenings in her panties really want this to be an erotic novel. She is begging for it deep inside, saying please, please, please.
"You're trembling," the boy says in a voice of water-stained taffeta.
She swallows. "Because of you." Her voice sounds like crinkling aluminum foil to her, but to the boy her voice is the sound of Purity begging him to take her virginity.
He takes a second to muse over whether she would object to Purity as a pet name.
He knows that for her safety they can never attempt sex, but he won't share this with her until he's certain she's irrevocably in love with him. If only he could read her mind.
If he could read her mind and she admitted in her brain to being irrevocably in love with him, he might discover that she's unsure how to pronounce irrevocably correctly.
Because the girl has grown the nerve to start caressing his smooth, cold, hard skin, the vampire is discovering that there's a growing appendage in his pants that also needs to get that No-Sex-Ever memo. He closes his eyes because even if he is a vampire, the feeling of her warm soft touch over his bare, bare arm is overwhelming to him.
While the vampire, the reader, and the author know with certainty that there will never be sex in this story, hope is still alive because the girl wants it so badly.
As the vampire begins to lie back, the girl starts to roll on top of him, and he has to steel himself to move her away. Just then, the sun breaks through the clouds on cue, bringing the sparkles out of him for a second time, and distracting the girl from sex, temporarily.
She watches the sparkles dance over his skin just as her fingers did only moments ago.
He's like an angel. She searches for his wings, moving behind him, looking closely, lifting his shirt.
"Where are they?"
"What?" This is his least favorite question, but he has to ask it because he can't read her mind.
"Your wings."
He doesn't know what to say at first. Her inquiry has him confounded. "Vampires don't fly." He wonders if this revelation disappoints her, and can't bring himself to meet her eyes.
She continues to search for the wings, moving her hands over his back, sure they'll bump into wings eventually.
"I don't have any," he says when she doesn't stop rubbing circles on his back looking for them.
"But you're an angel."
"No, you're an angel." He gives her a sure smile, pulling her like a feather-tipped wing into his lap.
"You are," she says.
"You are." They argue this argument back and forth well into the night. We'll never know the winner of this argument because it fades to black. It's a blackness the girl can't see through, but that doesn't matter because the boy has night-vision enough for the both of them. All she has to do is climb onto his back.
And when the author writes "climb onto his back" she means that he pulls the girl onto his back with a swift gracefulness that can only be rivaled by his dancing sister, Alice. (The author is relieved that she mentioned Alice's grace in the first chapter; this saves her from an awkward, forced mention of it now. However, when Alice's boyfriend, Jasper, uses his gift, the reader might witness an awkward forced mention, since he's one of the only vampires in their animal-blood drinking family who has yet to be introduced. Esme is another one, but sadly the mother and nurturer of their family doesn't do much but stand about unnoticed by author and reader alike.)
It's too dark for the girl and she's saying she has to go home so she doesn't make her father angry. And this time, it is possible he'll catch her if she stays out too late, because he just happened to stop home for a beer.
The vampire gracefully and swiftly pulls his girl onto his back.
"You're my wings," he says, and now perhaps we know who's won the argument.
A/N: (Okay, so sometimes the author isn't sure what will or will not be answered until it's written.)
Real A/N: Thanks for reading!
See ya next chapter: In Which They Kiss and One of Them Says I Love You