But there came a point when it wasn't enough. The shared looks, the gaping wounds they carved into their smiles weren't enough.
She could feel his laughter on the back of her neck whenever she smiled at another boy. He had captured her, possessed her with nothing more than the shape of his hands or the way he pronounced her name and smelled like gasoline and mint ice cream. His very being had taken over hers and she felt that she was trapped in his embrace, minus the embrace. It was primitive and scary and she was so very afraid sometimes. The way they knew each other without knowing each other… something was off.
He felt it too. He was used to constraints, but her gilded cage rendered him lost in a world of golden-orange eyes and secrets and he was afraid he would ruin her with his calculating blood, running just under his translucent skin. There was so much he saw, but he feared what lay beneath the pretense and false laughter. He was the only one who knew there was a pretense. Sometimes he sat for an hour or two in his room, just making shapes out of the light that had jumped from headlight to tree to his wall and he would think about the shallow filtered quality of everything in his life but her. She was not white bread or cookie cutter. She knew things. And he saw the pain in her eyes when she heard the word mother, saw her breath cut short as if the air was made of icicles and chill. He saw everything.
But he was not prepared, not prepared at all, when people started asking questions. They would catch him staring at her and ask why, as if he were looking at the blank-faced moon. And perhaps she was the moon, ever-changing and an enigma despite her never-ending candidness. He could read her face like ancient astronomers could read the sky. He knew what was happening, what was going to happen. He just didn't know why. And when people asked questions, he made an excuse or said he wasn't looking at her. This was high school. He was a freshman, she was a senior. He was a Mormon, an outcast by his own choosing. She could never, would never happen for him. He told himself it was a fantasy. And then, when anyone asked, he said it was hers – her fantasy, not his. And they would laugh at her, mock her. And she would look at him, her eyes plain old brown, hiding behind her curling hair and her books. She confronted him without saying a word. After all, he told himself, walking down Main Street and kicking pieces of decaying concrete to either side of him, the whole thing, this entire dream you've made yourself believe was without words, without definition. Why should heartbreak be any different? He laughed at his stupidity, smiling crookedly and shaking his head. Heartbreak is never audible. It is like snow falling quietly. Cold, very cold and as painful as frozen limbs sawed off at the joint.
When they asked her the same questions, she would blush, her blood – rosy and rushing to her cheeks joyfully – in marked contrast to his blue lips, blue veins. She'd smile and laugh, her eyes shining and people would shake their heads at her. "Really, Bella?" they'd ask, "A freshman?" She'd then proclaim that she couldn't help it, that she was in over her head, that it was out of her control, that she was free-falling every time he looked at her. He was different from anyone she'd ever met, she told them. They'd tell her about his family, his friends. They'd update her whenever they saw him. And before long, the rumor was that she was stalking him. She didn't mind, because the looks they exchanged were as loaded as ever. And when a person asked him if he wanted to go to the snow ball with her and he said "Who?" she knew that he was just keeping It a secret. Whatever It was.
And so it was that two teenagers, separated by age, by experience, by religion, by everything that should have kept them apart, dreamed of each other every night in the same way. In their dreams, they were separated only by the mere five miles between their homes. In their dreams, it was almost a possibility.