Chapter Eight
Three weeks passed before Bella saw Dr Edward Cullen again and when she did, it was the last place on Earth that she'd ever expect to see him – or anybody else for that matter.
She'd found the meadow in high school, accidentally. It had been during a time in which she felt as though she were drowning under the pressure of her senior year, of having to decide what to do next, of where to go next and she'd desperately needed to breathe. She'd been walking for hours when she'd stumbled across it, on her way back to her car after wandering aimlessly through the woods, marking her trail on a map half-heartedly.
It had taken her breath away.
Filled with wild flowers and sunlight, it had been everything she'd needed that day. She had stayed there until the last possible second, with her back to the grass and her eyes closed to the warm sunlight filtering in through the clouds. She'd returned almost monthly after that until she'd graduated and left Forks.
It had been her secret garden; her own private sanctum and in that moment, Edward Cullen was sitting in it.
He sat with his knees bent, his arms resting atop them casually but something in the way he held his hands made her feel like it wasn't casual, that something was bothering him. He was impossibly more beautiful sitting in her meadow with his head to the sky, as if willing the sun to come out and shine down upon him and she could not help the small gasp that left her lips when she noticed him.
"Dr Cullen," she said, just loudly enough for him to hear, her voice surprised.
He turned his head, his eyes meeting hers and she immediately noted how tired he looked with his glasses slightly skewed, shirt rumpled, butterscotch eyes and the shadows beneath them far darker than she remembered.
"Miss Swan," he replied, sounding far less surprised than she.
"You're in my meadow." The words left her lips before she could think about them and she immediately wanted to groan. She probably sounded as strange as she was feeling.
"Your meadow?" he questioned, one perfect eyebrow raised and heat filled her cheeks. She dropped her gaze in embarrassment and took a few tentative steps forward.
"I came here in high school," she explained hastily. "It was my secret place, I suppose you could say. The one that made everything feel better."
He tilted his head and his eyes widened just the slightest bit in surprise. "What would you need a secret place for?"
She moved closer to where he sat then, taking off her backpack and setting it on the ground before sitting down herself, a few feet away from him. It wasn't yet warm enough for any of the wildflowers to have bloomed, but the meadow still took her breath away.
"It wasn't as though high school was hard for me, I've always had a lot of trouble talking to people, so it was difficult for me to make friends and with the whole 'time bomb' thing, I found it easier to spend my time with fictional people rather than real ones. I knew how all of the books ended and it was easy that way, knowing that Mr Darcy would never let me down. And this place, well it's something out a novel, something so wonderful it almost doesn't seem real and it helped me just escape it all for a little while."
The words had left her mouth before she'd even had the chance to think about them and she realised sadly that it might have been the first time she'd ever admitted out loud how hard it had been for her in her final year and a half of high school. She'd also noticed that he'd flinched ever so slightly when she'd mentioned the cruel nickname again.
"Was it hard? Living here while going to high school? The monotony of it all made it very hard for me after a while, there are only so many times you can witness teenage angst and be around raging hormones before it becomes unbearable," he said and she almost grinned at the fact that he was talking to her.
"I don't suppose it was hard, I was never truly bullied and my father, while quiet, has always supported me but at the time…At the time it felt as though something was wrong with me, like I had a glitch in my brain or something. It just seemed easier for everyone else I suppose but I think if I asked any of them now they would probably tell me differently."
He quietly contemplated her words and she moved to pull her lunch out of the bag. She had been putting in much more of an effort to regain weight since her hospital visit and she refused to think about why.
It was as she pulled the lid off of the macaroni salad that she realised he didn't have anything with him. No bag or jacket or even appropriate hiking shoes. In fact, it looked as though he'd simply taken off his lab coat, rolled his sleeves up and then walked to the meadow. She hadn't even seen any cars nearby when she'd parked hers near the start of her trail.
Something in the back of her mind told her not to bring it up however, so she didn't and instead she ate a few bites of pasta and enjoyed the sight of her meadow, trying not to ogle the man sitting in it.
"I looked at your file," he said so softly she almost hadn't heard it and her body went stiff. She looked up at him and their eyes met, her heart skipping a beat involuntarily.
"Do you get it now? The name? The jokes?" she asked nonchalantly but felt anything but.
"You nearly died, Bella and nothing could make me condone the name or the jokes," he told her, softly but firmly.
"I should have died," she stated bluntly, putting her lunch down. "And before you say anything, if you read my file, you know it's true, it was a miracle the swelling went down. It was a miracle I woke up."
She thought about the week she'd spent in a coma a few weeks after she'd arrived in Forks, when Tyler Crowley and his van had hit a patch of black ice and then her. She still had the scar from the surgery and she'd had to wear her hair up for a year before enough hair on the patch they'd had to shave had grown back for her to let it down.
"It was a miracle," he replied and the way he said it made her bite her lip. He had spoken with surprise and something that sounded a lot like…awe. It made sense, she decided. He was a doctor and for all intents and purposes her miraculous recovery would be shocking to a lot of people in the medical field. It might have been, anyway, if she had given permission for it to be published.
"Life is full of them I suppose," she shrugged and picked her food back up. They sat in silence while she finished it. She took that time to think about the days after she'd broken her arm, about her students relieved faces when they'd seen her back at school and the stilted, awkward conversations between her and Mrs Cope who had been driving her home each day since, desperately trying to convince Bella to date her unemployed but 'still very handsome' son of thirty-eight. he had two children to two women but Mrs Cope was convinced that Bella would be the woman to sort him out.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked her when she'd finished her food. "I'm normally very good at reading people, it helps in my line of work but admittedly I find you very difficult to read."
She smiled at him then. "Mrs Cope is trying to get me to date her son."
He did something then that took her breath away, completely and utterly; he leaned his head back and laughed.
It only took her a second to join in with them and they laughed together for a short while and when her laughter subsided, she grinned as she watched him shake his head at the absurd idea before he turned his attention back to her.
"And what do you think about that?" he asked her with a crooked grin that she was sure matched her wonky smile.
"I think I'd rather wrestle a mountain lion."
It was later that night, when Bella went over and over in her head about the afternoon they spent together that she realised it was the closest to a real date she'd been on since high school, when Mike Newton had taken her to a restaurant in Port Angeles before prom. A decision they'd both regretted as soon as it became apparent that he wasn't actually interested in anything Bella had to say and she wasn't interested in sleeping with him.
But her afternoon with Edward it had been wonderful.
He hadn't laughed at her mountain lion comment, instead getting a strange look in his eye that made her wonder what he was thinking about, so she asked him.
"How you're going to tell Shelley Cope no in a way that she'll accept," he'd teased.
She'd groaned at the thought and from there they'd spent the rest of the time equal parts talking and enjoying the beauty of the meadow in silence. She'd shown him her cast, the one Alice had carefully glued pages of a very worn copy of Persuasion onto, over which she'd painted a few, very beautiful and intricate wildflowers before sealing it.
He'd looked at it and smiled a little. "Persuasion?" he'd asked and the hour that followed was filled with debates about classic novels. He hated the Bronte Sisters but liked Austen and she hated Tolkein's writing style but had read all of Anna Karenina.
She'd also learned more about him, about how he'd blitzed through medical school and was therefore (at twenty-five) the youngest doctor they'd ever had on staff in Forks and how his family's history was complicated as almost every member had met in foster care and formed a mismatched but obviously loving family of seven.
Edward, she knew from Mrs Cope's ramblings, was the only single one of them all and even Alice was taken by "that tall blonde one with the southern accent". Mrs Cope had even informed her with a sly smile that the family was loaded, with Carlisle having received a huge fortune the day he'd turned eighteen by a long lost family member.
They had talked and talked and talked until her phone buzzed in her pocket, letting her know that she would have to leave then if she wanted to be home in time to make dinner. She'd told Edward just that, the disappointment on her face probably obvious to him and she'd moved to pack everything back in her bag.
When she turned back to say goodbye to him, she found him standing, his hands in his pockets and a determined but almost angry look on his face. She got to her feet then and opened her mouth to talk but he beat her to it.
"Bella, I don't think we should be friends," he told her, his voice once again that of the distant doctor she'd met three weeks prior.
"Why?" she asked him, shocked.
"I just don't think that I would be very good for you," he explained but instead of feeling sadness at his words, she'd gotten annoyed.
"You don't get to decide that for me, Dr Cullen," she mocked. She watched as his eyes widened in shock at her tone. He hadn't expected her to argue with him.
"Bella, I'm trying to make this easy for you," he almost pleaded. She exhaled loudly and clenched her jaw.
"Then you should have left when I got here, instead of spending what was one of the best afternoons of my life with me!" even she had been shocked by her outburst but she'd spent such a long time feeling zero control over her life that she wasn't going to give it up now that she had it back.
"I'm sorry, Bella," he'd told her and she knew that he meant it but that didn't mean it hurt any less.
"So am I," she'd told him before grabbing her bag and walking away.
A tear fell from the corner of her eye as she thought about how sad he'd looked when he'd apologised but she quickly wiped it away in irritation. She didn't know why she felt like this after only being in the man's presence twice, it made no rational sense but it still hurt and that tugging in her chest felt far worse now than it had before.
"Tomorrow will be better," she whispered to herself, vowing to lock away all thoughts of Edward Cullen where she couldn't find them.
She went to sleep already knowing that it wasn't possible.
