Take a Bow

Check out Take a Bow by Muse, on my profile.

Super duper thanks to vanessarae; she rocks my socks off and puts my disjointed pieces into place. Could not do this without my V!

Disclaimer: This mangled Bella, that's all I own.

I don't know how long I sat there. My ass was numb straight through. Shaking, shaken, in shock. My mind was not as anesthetized as I needed it to be, still too agitated to shut the hell up. Was it possible to feel your own heart--that pulsing, throbbing, blood-engorged organ that fueled life--breaking? Yes. Mine was tearing in two and the meaty shredding of that juicy thing that would not stop galumphing in my chest wanted to burst through my ribcage!

No ability, no right to feel pity. I could not expect mercy.

I had reaped what I'd sown.

I had cuckolded Edward.

I was anything but righteous.

Could you see another's heart being ripped to shreds?

Yes, you could. When Edward had heard my scrawny words, when he had raised his long lashes to unveil the traumatic terror beneath, when he had come so close to detaching from the last vestige of gentlemanliness--the one thing that I had thought I wanted but not in this manner, not by a long shot!--I'd heard the resounding rending of his heart that split him asunder. His torso tensed and his hands wanted to beat me. The violence spurred by the spurning of his wife. Of me. Then his eyes, the window to his spirit, his breathtakingly wholesome being, simply faded. The chasing, dancing, golden flecks hidden amongst the apple green extinguished. And that apple green itself turned rotten, eaten through by the worms of my impurity.

I'd thought I was being a vixen. I was no more than a rat.

No matter what I'd convinced myself of, this was no peccadillo, no mere dalliance that I could conceal, sweep under the heavy pile of our Oriental rug on which stood the trappings of our lives together. I glanced chillingly around the living room. Still on my ass, kicked in the stomach, stinking of fucking Jake, strafing through vitriolic emotions that would not die down and take their leave.

My haunches were desensitized.

My thoughts were not.

My witchery had cursed us. The devastation could not be more physical nor more incorporeal had I taken straight pins to tiny emblematic voodoo dolls of me and Edward!

The ramifications of my hex were yet to be divined.

The cold from the bare floorboards. The cool air from outside seeping beneath the black rubber underpinning of the door. Time tocked slowly on without my reckoning it.

My sin turned me to stone. Alone. Wondering what Edward's retaliation might be.

I wanted the lintel to crash down upon me. Where was an extreme act of God when you needed it? Where were the floods, the earthquakes, the locusts, the Apocalypse? The End of Days? A cataclysm to correspond with my own calamitous activities?

What was my revelation?

Edward and his goddamn glorious jade eyes, he saw right through me! I had never meant to tell him or even feel anything about this. Truth be told, I didn't feel anything. I was hollow, carved from the inside out, caving in on myself. There'd be no repeat performance with my stud jockey across the road; that was over. My initial thrill quickly dissipated. Abuzz replaced by gnawing fear. One look at Edward's face, that fucking pure love that always lived there, only made me sneer. I wanted to tear his gorgeous eyes out of his head so he could never see me again, not this beast that I had become. I wanted to stomp on his heart so he would never love me again. I couldn't even meet his gaze. With succinct, roughly-whispered, barely-there words, I told him everything!

Yeah take a fuckin' bow Bella….you idiot! You're no good, no thespian, no actress. There'd be no standing ovation, no encore, no clapping, no congratulations…and my name might be in lights, but only in Soho. As a cheap whore. A floozy. Fluorescents short-circuiting. With the conflagration of my confession, minute though it was --nothing more than Jake's name coupled with mine, my hands conjoining to elucidate the idea of our fucking-- all was made clear. My masquerade lay bare. Not even an attempt at a charade. In an instant I had doused every pure ideal Edward had palisaded around me. The citadel of our enduring love was made timely. It was riddled through with holes of my making. Falsehood made a mockery of the fortress that had been Bella and Edward.

Didn't matter what my intentions had been. Not one iota. It was of no consequence that I thought—naïvely--I could fuck another man and get away with it. One profound look from Edward to me, to my distorted face and my out-of-shape limbs hinting to the touch of someone other than himself, and he could see the truth. For all that he couldn't read my mind, Edward could bloody well unravel the telltale disingenuousness out of my every gesture and expression.

Un-suctioning myself from my cemented and stagnant stance hunkered over onto the baseboard, I slunk off to the bathroom. I felt ghoulish. A hobgoblin. A gargoyle. My skeletal wings starving to beat and propel me away, not up but down, down, down into Hades; claws tensed, my features sunken. Teeth bared. An otherwordly demonic representation of the Bella that had been blessed.

Everything I had known, I had corrupted. I brought death. I was the harbinger of all the ills of the world.

And self-commiseration still thought it could make its presence known.

No fucking way. I was a fiend and I deserved every single chastisement that Edward reaped upon me. I would welcome it. If only he'd come home!

My inner, irrational, rebellious teen was stupefied, silenced, in permanent detention, expelled. Flunking the fuck out. Of this marriage. For what? For a whoregasm? Well, several to be truthful, but that didn't matter. It was all for naught. Less than zero. I was nil. Null and void.

I'd been suicidal. I had completed an asinine kamikaze mission. I deserved to die in the long, slow, painful Japanese fashion of hara-kiri. But even seppuku, that Japanese ritual of self-disembowelment was too tame a retribution for what I'd done.

And I'd done it why?

Because I was bored? Because I thought this life would end with me and Edward, never having been with another? Because I could? Because, quite simply, most selfishly, I wanted to? Those reasons were not justifiable, not in the least.

My raison d'être had been Edward since the first moment I'd tripped over my silly size six feet and landed against his pulchritudinous chest. Aged 15, never having been noticed before. A misfit, a transplant, a small fish in a wide ass sea, and on my first day I had stumbled into the most divine, divining human being to ever walk the earth! And most stunningly, amazingly, outrageously, he had instantaneously latched onto me. Not just to halt my fall. To reciprocate the awe, the rampant teen lust, the good god! enormous swelling of heart and soul smashing into another's heart and soul. And body. Oh lord his body! As a man, full grown and fully capable, Edward was transcendent. As a boy on the cusp of that manhood, he had been swaggering. Arrogant. At once out of touch with his magnetism and yet oddly sensually bound to me. And so, so sexy and knowing. As if he was meant to be inside of me. From that very first clumsy clashing of awkward adolescence.

My touchstone. My steadying factor. My solstice and gravitational pull. When all else plummeted around me, Edward had been there. Solid. Rock solid. Granite. Stone. Unmovable. Unshakeable. At my side. Taking my shit. My insecurities. My ceaseless nightmares caused by the wrecked tumbled down shack of my home life.

Bearing me up.

Buttressing me.

Buffeting me.

Fashioning a whole out of the half-person I was.

Me and him.

Together.

One.

He mesmerized me. I could not quite ever believe that Edward Cullen was with Bella Swan. That I was his chosen. It took nine years together, through the remainder of high school, college, med school before I felt safe that this mythical creature would not leave me. Five years of marriage billeted me in the most beatific of loves, safe as houses and just as secure. Nothing Austen could ever have written would come close to touching the enormity, the eclipse, the earth-shattering peacefully triumphant feeling!

And then another five years found me playing dirty. Biliously. Bile swilled around my throat from the recesses of me empty stomach. Gnawing and corroding.

Why?

Because of Edward's inability to talk dirty? His disavowal of my sailor's mouth? His goodness, his charmed upbringing, his giftedness, his generosity, the silver spoon in his magnificent mouth that he never ever ate from without giving thanks where thanks were warranted? Everything about Edward was diametrically opposite to me. Made me lesser, suddenly. So I thought. Until I found a new dimension within myself that was separate from the completed conundrum that was us. A part of Bella that had never existed before. Someone else. Confident, sexy, superior, on my own.

Not simply as Edward's wife. Not solely Edward's wife.

I'd wanted to be on my own.

And now I was.

Why?

Because the past year had found me restless, because the things that used to be endearing had become a sudden irritant.

And my renunciations lead me to this entropy.

I stood at the vanity and glared at myself. Questioning myself. A catechism that had no answers.

Quixotic Edward. Romantic. Chivalrous. Even having been reared with the finest richest spoils at his command, he had eschewed the antique silver platter of debutantes galore and chosen me instead. Visionary, beholden to the thoughts of others, claiming that I, Isabella Cullen nee Swan, was the only woman to define him. To change him. In the one instance of my faltering feet, I alone had spelled an unbreakable transformation within his aloof nature that was permanent. Me and him.

And I had everlastingly broken it.

Never once mawkish. Not contrived. Triviality was not a bedfellow with Edward. He was sincere in all things. The most heartfelt of all husbands and friends and lovers!

The destruction I had wrought with one feckless act was more than gut-wrenching, it eviscerated me! Oh fucking god!

I invariably came like J.H. Christ or Mary or whoever, in his mouth, all over his dick, limbs trembling, eyes tearing.

More than that, oh fuck's sake, so much more than that, I loved him whole. Completely. With my soul. My stupid, forsaken, going to Hell for sure soul.

With the opening of my treacherous legs and the unfolding of my ignorant, lusty fuck fantasies, I had killed us. Just as surely as if I had taken razor-sharp vampire teeth to our conjoined jugulars. I was watching the life force spill and spew from the sanctity of Bella and Edward's love. I deserved to die. I wanted to be killed. My eyes were dismal; my face pallid, my heart…my heart no longer existed. It had dropped to the floor in Jake's bedroom alongside my panties. It was irretrievable unless Edward was somehow, unrealistically, able to forgive this monster indiscretion.

Stupid-ass whore, infidel, cheating, un-worthy wife.

What the fuck had I done?

Edward had left, uncharacteristically slamming the door so hard the brick and mortar of our house shook with the force. I could only imagine that he really wanted to hit me. And that he was off to search for someone else to slam into. With little regard to Jake's state of mind, I hoped Edward would go pummel him to the ground simply so that he wouldn't be hunting for some other woman to get even with. Even though Jake didn't deserve it, I was still that selfish. I'd rather have innocent Jake punished by my husband than to have my mate do exactly what I'd done.

Fuck someone else.

Not even wanting to contemplate that thought all the while knowing I deserved my penance no matter what form it tookl

My nostrils flared and quivered. My lips blanched. Pulled tight. Desolation.

I was on tenterhooks waiting for him to come back. So tightly drawn that I was completely withdrawn. A specter.

And I had to face the bald fact that I didn't even know if he would return to this harlot's hovel.

My broken body defiled even the mirror in the bathroom and I was unable to look at myself. I turned the lights off and groped my way to the shower, turning it on full hot. Scathing under the searing, pounding spray I scrubbed the shit out of my skin until I was as raw on the outside as I felt on the inside. Still sullied. I wrangled with my fucking hair, the tresses that Edward snuck his nose into looking to deliver himself from a hard days' work in my fruity, long, wavy, chestnut locks. Even the conditioner worked against me! Self-pity was trying to hold a party for me; all was wrong. Nothing was right in this world. But I was the errant bitch that had made it so. Sympathy had no place here.

Exiting the steamed shower door, slamming it so that it shuddered on its track and threatened to crack from baseline to top, nasty and naked, I took up the shears I used to trim the snagged lengths that brushed past my cretinous shoulders. The whiny mechanism of the scissors fought me. All was pitted against me. No place for feeling sorry for myself.

Hardened.

Carapace.

Scarab.

I flicked on the light.

With a creak and groan I forced the blades apart and forged them against the gathered shanks of my thick hair. Hacking it off haphazardly. To my shoulders. Shorter than it had been since I was a naïve twelve year old, a silly, clumsy kid who thought, even through the hateful home life that I endured, that the future--once freed of my parents niggling, vicious, nightly shouting matches--was mine for the taking.

And it had been. When I met Edward. The world was my oyster and he was the man, then only just out of boyhood, who had delivered it to me. For twenty years. Every single fucking day since I had so fortuitously, gauchely, fallen against him!

Shorn, I laughed half mad, realizing I'd just pulled a Britney! At least it was not in the full-on, blinding spotlight of the media. And I had not gone totally bald. Good God, was I not even as fucking bold and brave and fuck-stupid as that trashy teen pop icon? I eyed Edward's clippers maliciously. They stood between me and Mrs. Clean. Only the harsh fluorescent glow of our coiled energy saver bulbs lighting the jagged edges of my sad 'do made me think thrice about such stupidity.

Crazed hilarity was cut short. As abruptly as my hair. The last lengths of which coasted to the cold marble floor, floating on the hazy humid air that had spilled from the shower, landing like autumn leaves, red and brown and gold in drifts on the black tiled pallet beneath.

With the light came sight. Second sight. Foresight. I wished I'd been privy to hindsight.

Scars and imprinting from Jake's marks on my body.

Jake and his fucking hangdog expression when I'd left him on the landing of his stair. Bare and huge and suddenly looking all of his paltry young years. I was screwed in several thousand ways and none of them pleasant any longer.

The bruises. The fingerprinting. Like I was a felon. I was a villainess. Electrocution was too lenient a castigation for me. These markings were vile. I could do nothing to curb the ever-growing purplish pigmentation from spreading across my sad sallow skin, taking the form of Jake's fingers, Jake's hands, Jake's lips that had sucked so hard. Highschoolish hickeys littered the defiled crags and gorges of my body. Not dells, not swells. Not valleys nor swales. I was made hard and tough and jagged to the touch by this deed that I had done. This act I had encouraged. This vain fucking that I had pursued.

Only flaying, flogging, a horsehair shirt and self-mutilation and self-flagellation could scrape away those tissue-deep etchings that revealed the path of Jake's stalwart wanton wanderings all over me.

You'll burn in hell for all of your sins.

Even if Edward came home he would be disgusted anew at the sight of me. Like this.

I wanted him to be. I warranted it. My "just desserts". I'd made my bed…I'd had another man in his stunted single bed.

How could Edward ever love me, ever even touch me, caress me, worship me, revere me again?

Would he even come home?

What if he never came home?

To this den of iniquity. And shame.

I was the undead. Unable and unwilling to sleep. Inert and incapable of movement. I kept my vigil. Knowing I would sit in this exact same spot, rotting, rooted, decaying until I saw Edward's face again.

Enervated. Wasted. Ruinous, a destructress.

And Edward's face, when he did finally return, was bleached of color, blanched paler than his stark, starched, white Oxford. The shirt that was now emblazoned with spatters of metallic iron drops, like a Pollock masterpiece in the making, all crimson splotches on a pristine ivory backdrop. The canvas of Edward's magnificent soul that I had bloodied with one puerile act.

He didn't look at me. He was wasted. I had wasted away into nothingness in his eyes. Undeserving of even rage, hate, or jealousy! And the thin fragile skein of hope that had ruched through me at his homecoming was negated with his one action of tossing that ruined shirt in my direction. So that I might see and smell and torture myself over the images of his reprisal. I'd been shafted.

I recoiled. I scuttled like a fiddler crab, my body thrown off balance by the need to hate him weighting one hand, while the compulsion to fucking kill myself on the other hand threatened to topple me over. Gathering up his bedraggled shirt, the buttons of which had skittled across the gleaming floor, the only clean thing between us.

Totally fucked up and unable to stop myself, I tenderly gathered that fabric to treat with stain remover in the laundry room. A Stepford Wife in the making. Idle hands were the devil's playground. And there was nothing more for me to do. Completely warped and descending to another level of shock. Awe. Hurt almost didn't touch me.

Edward was home!

Sniffing at his collar. Like an animal. Suddenly smelling the alien perfume there.

Edward's shirt was rank.

I recoiled at the trace of another woman's cum lingering on the tails of his shirt!

The idea destroyed me. Ravaged me.

Edward had blazed right through the foyer and up the stairs, stopping only enough to shove his tart's trophy under my nose. Barreling straight to the bathroom and leaving me with this odorous scent that flared my nostrils. Relieved that he was back, I was fucked that he smelled of porn. Doused, soused, and sloshed in someone else's sex! Thinking of that revolted me ten thousand times more than I reviled myself!

I was indignant! I was self-righteous!

And I wanted Edward to suffer right alongside me. How could I not? I'd already demonstrated my utter selfishness. He had retaliated with unexpected force and I hated that more than my own actions! Edward was mine!

I just wanted him to fight me, fight with me, fight for me! Fuck me. Brutalize me. Anything, anything at all would be better than this robotic cyborg, this other Edward who blanked me out, destitute of emotion.

Penuriously, chafing, released from my gargoyle's stance, from my lackluster short-lived probation, I stormed after Edward, leaving just enough time that he might shed that slitherish-skin, the spewage of another woman from his body. That musculature, that sinew and ligature and lean taut build that bloody well belonged to me! This wasn't over.

What had he done?

What had I done?

Ornery. Onerous. Heavy, burdened with the weight of both our wrongdoing and fucking pissed off, I flung the bathroom door open. Hot mist swirled out, a fog of heat that blinded me before it swam out into our bedroom. Leaving a vacuum. A settled air the belied the lifelessness, the rage, the horror, the harrowing half-thread of love that still lingered beneath it all. And my clumps of hair remained smattered upon the floor sticking to Edward's bare feet in infinitesimal reddish-brown strands. Bits of me stuck to him. Not going to be brushed aside. And naked. Nude and beautiful. And mine. Still mine. Please Edward, still be mine!

I stared at his mirror image. My other half. Taking up half the mirror. Reflecting my treason back at me. Backfiring. Wishing he could backpedal. Just like me. Always me. Me and him. Bella and Edward.

Pissed off, culpable, and criminal.

I really just wanted to kick him, slap him, smack him, and punch. Hard.

And hug him, lick him, love him, reclaim him. Force his hand; make him face me instead of my licentious likeness, the echo of former myself.

I was headed for the slammer.

I shored myself up. I'd walk headlong into the nuclear fallout if it meant Edward would see me again.

If you've gotten this far, bless you! The final two to three chapters should be forthcoming. Within the next two weeks or so.

UPDATE: There's this group of absolutely in-fuckin'-credible women (both here and on Twi) who are shooting the shit with yours truly on a thread for Comeuppance at TwilightedDOTnet. Come on over and bring your music and eye candy!