Disclaimer: the usual Twilight/ SM stuff.

Hello again. I present: chapter 3!


Chapter 3: Bloody Mary's and Goodbyes

Nearly twenty-one, you no longer resembled the all-American football star golden-boy with a drinking problem you had seemed the last time we saw each other. No, you weren't the bulked out, self-concerned popular boy, but you did seem a little lost. You were leaner, and bits of the old you started to peak through your self-induced cracks like glitter. Small, but bright. We were still us together, though: Eddie and Bella. The same way since childhood. You were ghetto-gangster rap and I was indie-alternative rock, but we made it work. This time, however, we both knew we were heading into something together much bigger than either one of us even knew how to deal with.

I didn't see you after that for a week. Emmett took you on a camping trip and I spent more time with my college friends and Alice on the beaches of Lake Michigan. It felt like an eternity. You showed up on my parent's doorstep with a six-pack of Boulevard Wheat and a purple calla lily. Both of my favorites. How you knew, I'll never know...maybe I underestimated you. It was a balmy night, so we took our beers out back to the hammock and swung for hours, revealing secrets and baring our souls. We finally got it right. Through all my twisted tales of trauma of my early college experiences, you held my hand and made me feel safe. I listened as you revealed for the first time about your first stint in rehab as well as the events leading up to it.

I became enraged with your parents. I knew they were good people—Carlisle and Esme were lovely, wonderfully caring parents—but they put their pilot careers before yours and Elizabeth's happiness. Eddie, you were raised to be such a truly good person and the drugs and alcohol got in the way. You told me, for the first time, how lonely you really were, moving from place to place being uprooted from everyone and everything you had grown to care for. You said you understood that they needed to take these amazing opportunities, and as pilots it was necessary to relocate to wherever the government demanded, but you still harbored anger toward them. You told me that you thought a lot about our charmed childhood, and you started to resent your parents for taking away your stability. I couldn't blame you, but my heart broke for you and your family.

You found ways to fit in fast. The cool kids were always the ones living on the edge, recklessly. You were always a magnet to others, drawing people in. The only way to keep the attention was to party right alongside them. You drank for the first time at thirteen—just a few months after you visited me and the rest of the old neighborhood. My stomach dropped as I listened to you recall the increased consumption over the years. By seventeen, you were already bored with bud and booze and dropped acid for the first time. It wasn't your favorite, but you enjoyed the release from reality it provided. Molly was more your style, and you found rolling with her fun, but she didn't quite become your mistress. You dabbled, but always maintained your affair with Mary-Jane and alcohol. They were your comfort zone, the only friends that moved when you moved, and filled the loneliest places inside—if only for the short time the highs lasted. Somewhere in the mix, all the girls fit in there. I didn't ask, and you didn't tell, but I knew better than to assume otherwise. At least I was smart enough for that.

You graduated from high school, but not from your pals. You only made it a year in school, studying aviation to become a pilot yourself—how poetic. Eddie, you were so smart and it was such a waste. The daily partying and skipping class caught up with you and you decided school was no longer your style. Your parents decided rehab was. You cleaned up, gave it a shot. What else did you have to lose? Eddie, you were salvageable then. You stopped drinking for about a year and a half, so you told me. Then, you only drank beer as your twenty-first birthday was fast approaching next month in July. You thought you had control, and I thought that commendable. We were so stupid to think that, but I loved you and you were an addict. Love is blinding. That brought us up to the night in the hammock. Finally, we were together again, time and space, past and present.

We were young, but both broken down by the things that happened to us in our short lives. You were a lost, lonely soul that sought comfort in chemicals because you saw no other way out of it. I was a beaten, bruised, and shaking girl, abused and trying to pretend I was OK. But I wasn't ok, and neither were you. We loved so deeply that summer. We fed off each other's darkness for a while, but also healed our deepest wounds. We gave each other love and light.

You introduced me to dirty-chai lattes and I introduced to a better brand of cigarettes. Remember how I used to smoke back then? What an idiot. We took up hobbies like going for walks and adventuring—you know, things other than sex and partying, but we did a lot of those too. I made you come to the library with me, and you indulged my love of literature—partaking in a few books yourself. You liked Poe; his short stories held your ADD attention with their dark and twisted tales. You could relate to his alcoholic nature too, I'm sure. Movies were another form of escape and we saw them frequently. Though, strapped for cash we usually paid for the first and snuck into the second. Two-for-ones. You made me a delinquent and I relished in the adrenaline rush.

One morning we woke up tangled in my bed sheets with whiskey breath and sex-hair—my parents were out of town with the rest of my siblings, I hung back to be with you—and everything changed. I happened a glance at the calendar and I knew our love-bubble over the summer was about to burst. It was the first week of August, and I was going back to college in a week and a half. Your time with Emmett was coming to an end. Although I loved your tattooed chest holding me close, I was suffocating in its liquid warmth, and I rolled way from your over-heated embrace. The fan was on the highest setting, but even that couldn't cool me. I shook you awake, needing to talk about what we were to do from here. It was stiflingly hot. I told you …

Oh, Eddie! It's so hard to remember the ending of that summer… it physically hurts me now as I write this. I wish we could get it back. I wish I could change—so badly—what happened. But I can't, you made your choices, and now I must make mine. I have to do this; I have to write this goodbye letter to you. I need to.

I told you that I had to head back to school soon, and asked what we were going to do. Your hands were shaking, coming off the alcohol from the night before. I made you a bloody Mary—hoping to keep your DTs at bay—before I suggested you enroll, or find a job in the city and we could be together. You rolled your eyes, muttered something about the evils of organized education. You were drifting, and had taken temporary anchor over the summer with me… but even I started to drift along with you. I hadn't seen Alice in two weeks or had many days or nights sober. I was enabling you with bloody Mary mornings and whiskey nights. I knew it would only be a matter of time before things got worse if we didn't have a plan, a goal, or a target for our future. I was certain that mine held you in it, and wouldn't settle for anything less. I could save you from yourself, or so I was sure. I was, after all, studying psychology.

"Come with me to Colorado," you had pleaded instead, heading outside for a cigarette.

"Eddie, you know I only have two years left… we can move to Colorado when I go to Grad School." I suggested.

"Bella," you exhaled with smoke, pausing to light the smoke in my mouth, "Baby, I know you have your heart set on that, but I just can't …do the thing. My heart belongs in Colorado."

What you meant by do the thing was that you couldn't settle down. What I didn't know then was that you meant that you were subconsciously planning a slip. What you were heading toward, you didn't want to be stopped. I told you that I had plans, dreams, and goals. You told me that you were so, so proud of me, but you couldn't come with me. I told you that I loved, loved, loved you but I couldn't go with you. I needed to finish school. I needed a course-correction almost as badly as you did. We were good together, but clearly we needed to face our demons—exorcise them—before we could be good for each other. I told you that. You laughed. Did you hear my heart shatter with your laughter? Gone were the dirt hills we ruled, but you were still the King of breaking things, Eddie.

My soundless tears bathed my face in shame and letting go. You lost all bravado, shoulders slumped, and I knew your heart was breaking alongside mine. You just didn't have the courage to say so. I tapped out my cigarette in the ashtray; it had long ago stopped providing any comfort. I stared at you, my chocolate eyes full of questions and pleas unanswered. You flicked your cigarette into the grass, your eyes matching its hue and full of unspoken emotions.

"Bella I can't." You had said, shrugging, without any emotion in your voice. You smiled at me, and it didn't touch your eyes. I nodded, swallowing back a sob that threatened to rip my chest in half. "I love you."

"I know," I admitted. You always had.

"I will love you until the day I die."

"Eddie, I can't throw away my future on ski-instructing and selling pot in the Rockies." I knew it'd cut you, but I needed to make a point. I needed to exert my strength. I'm sorry that I hurt you. I wish I was stronger, then, and forced you into treatment again.

You took it in stride, crushing me with a kiss—the last kiss of the summer—before you walked away, ignoring my pleas, tears, and screams of your name. You had gone back to Emmett's, lit a joint, and smoked out with your oldest buddy. The next day you drove to your parent's new house in a northern Chicago suburb to collect your things and flew to Breckinridge.

I walked to Alice's and cried over you for the remainder of my time in the suburbs. Alice and I moved back to school in the city. I changed my minor to chemistry. I no longer wanted to go to graduate school to simply get my Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I wanted to go to medical school to become a psychiatrist and work with addictions.


A/N: Thank you for reading! Please, do tell me what you think?

Chapter 4 will be posted tomorrow. See ya then!

~FabulousiTyxXx~