Title: Little Slugger
Author: realgirl-imaginarylife
A/N: Thanks, as always, to my wonderful beta girls, Tiffanyanne3 and Batgirl8968, my Twilighted validation beta Strider and special thanks to the wonderful SunKing, who helped this chapter along in many ways - as writing buddy, pre-reader and impromptu beta. Also, much love and thanks to all my very patient readers and to the late-night WC crew on twitter - cheers, ladies ;)
Song for this chapter is Head On by The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Nope, not mine.
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Last time on Little Slugger...
She opened her mouth to blurt out God knows what...but it was Edward who spoke first, his voice quiet but clear.
"Hi."
"Hi."
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Chapter Ten - Because
Following the liberation of those two long-awaited words, the silence between them loomed large and heavy like a wet snowdrift as Bella rifled through her brain, trying to think of something to say. She was reminded of the week previous when Rosalie had cornered her just a few yards from this very spot and asked what she was going to do when she found him. And when the time had arrived, just as she'd defended, Bella knew the answer was not to ambush him, but instead to hold out an invitation. Provide him with a choice.
And he had chosen. And now, after seeing him up on that stage and feeling the familiar fierceness of his presence as he'd sung that song...guh, that song. His words still bounced around breezily inside her head as she remembered the way his voice had...oh, his voice! So unique, so...rugged, like old leather - yet somehow at the same time smooth like the black beach stones that lay scattered across the shorelines of the Pacific Northwest. Like home.
Meet me there, he had said. Could he have been talking to her? Were they there?
She looked up at his agonized expression and then at the buzzing room around them. No, this did not feel like what there should feel like.
Bella knew she had to say something. "Thanks for coming," she forced out without much thought, relieved as she felt the pressure gauge between them trip instantaneously with her words - sure she might even have heard a tiny hiss of air from its release. And God, how she hoped that sound was just her imagination.
He nodded numbly in response, staring intently at the ancient scar of a cigarette burn on the little table, black and round, the charred memento of another time. His head bobbed gently from the momentum of his initial motion - either agreeing with her or soothing himself, or both. He kinda looked like one of those perpetual motion dippy birds. Bella watched him with concern. He was uncomfortable.
How on earth could a man climb up on a stage and perform such beautiful, poignant, personal music in front of a room full of total strangers, tossing out raw pieces of himself to the crowd like beads from a Mardi Gras parade float, and then in the next instant be utterly unable to carry out a simple conversation with another person?
She smiled inside. That was the mystery of Edward.
Even with the mystery alive, she felt a pang of unwarranted sadness at the realization. It wasn't as if this kind of discomfort was at all outside his normal behavior, as far as she had witnessed - in fact, it was dead on par with his M.O., but still, his obvious discomfort brought the curtain down on her mood. Neither the hair bow, nor the glasses, nor the perfect positioning of beer bottles alone was going to make this right. This was going to take work.
It suddenly became a very distinct possibility that finding Edward was going to be the easy part of this little adventure.
After a few seconds of his trademark tension, Edward turned his eyes slowly upward to meet Bella's with intense resignation. Her smile reflex triggered, and his face, arms and shoulders softened in response. Her smile grew wider.
He was disarmed. Egads, and he was beautiful.
With a deep breath, he swept the bottle from its careful pose and drank until it was empty, placing it gently back afterward, a monument to this moment, whatever it was. He gazed at her a moment before clearing his throat to speak. And, like everything else with him aside from performing, the process was long and drawn out and with an amount of effort so concentrated it made her ache just watching him try. His lips twitched as he searched for words. Or summoned the courage to say them.
"Can I ask you a question?" he finally managed, his voice raw.
"Definitely," she said, her smile easing.
Edward paused a moment, his vacant eyes focusing somewhere beyond her shoulder. "Why....?" he asked before drifting off, making a broad gesture with his arm that spanned the room, eventually coming to a stop within the space that lay between them, his eyes teeming with vulnerability.
Bella gripped the edge of her seat tightly, denying tiny Nancy her indecent urge to reach to the table and take his hand.
Why, he wanted to know. And truly, had a more fair question ever been uttered in all the vast history of the incalculable universe? It was a question she had asked herself thousands of times, beginning the moment her mind learned to form the thought. And to be completely honest, probably a few times before that.
It was then that she did something she never dreamed she'd do in Edward's presence - ever - much less in the midst of the first moments of her first actual conversation with him; she summoned the ageless wisdom of her father, the chief. The single, once seemingly meaningless word had been his response to this very same question more times than she could remember:
"Daddy, why is the ocean salty?"
"Why did Noodles have to die?"
"Why do you have hair coming out of your ears?"
"Why are we having pizza for dinner again?"
"Why did Mommy leave us?"
She looked him square in the eye before answering, to be sure she had his attention.
"Because."
In turn, Edward did something unexpected as well; he laughed - loud and free enough for him to feel the need to throw his hands over his mouth in recoil. He released them slowly, shaking his head and nodding in amused understanding. Bella forced off a sudden twinge of insult. She was being completely serious, not to mention remarkably insightful, and he was sitting there laughing at her?
Wait a minute... Had she actually made him laugh? The mysterious stone cold facade of Edward Masen was showing signs of weakness and he was having a chuckle at her expense? Well, alrighty then! Disgraced or not, this felt like progress.
He took a deep breath and grabbed his empty bottle, still shaking off whatever it was that had entertained him.
"If only anything were actually that simple," he said sadly, rising from his chair. Was he leaving? Her heart began to race, and she promised herself right then and there that she would never again use a Charlie-ism on a first date, no matter how appropriate it seemed at the time.
"Another?" he asked. Oh. He was heading for a refill. She blushed, doubting he'd notice in the dimly lit room.
She looked up at him, admiring, wondering. "I believe it is that simple sometimes. And God, yes, please."
Edward awkwardly reached across the table, clearly concerned with invading her territory, grabbed her empty bottle with a shaky hand and walked back to the bar.
She glanced down at her hand in her lap, lifting it up a few inches to check. Yes, she was still shaking too. The fact made her feel angry somehow, that two people couldn't simply sit across from one another and talk without practically going into heart attack. She wanted to be there and sensed that he did too. So why all the anxiety, uncertainty, tension?
She realized with embarrassment that she had been the one to invite him here and, in doing so, had truly believed she was prepared to carry him through what was likely to be a difficult risk for him - yet so far she had done absolutely nothing to quell the boundaries of his comfort zone. The second he'd started singing that song - that sacred, beautiful song that felt so vitally...important...to this time and place (and perhaps person?) - she'd felt her heart swell. And with it, apparently, also her brain.
It didn't bypass her notice that they had actually communicated better from across the room, while using no words at all.
Centering her head, she promised herself that the moment he returned, she would regain control of the evening and from this point forward would do everything she could to create a cozy little environment, perfectly perfect for building trust and friendship. 'Cause seriously, if this went sour, what the hell was she going to think and doodle about while tending to those awful phone calls at Vitamin Direct? Everyone in the office had their own coping mechanisms, and over the course of weeks, Edward had become hers.
She snuck a glance toward the bar, where the keep was grinning and talking easily to Edward, who responded with clumsy smiles and half-nods. The bartender's name was Dimitri, as she'd learned in her few brief interactions with him, and he seemed oddly in tune to the little waltz they'd been dancing together in this room over the last week. It was he who had recommended sending a drink with the note the week before (a good idea), and then later informed her of Edward's early table reservation as she arrived that evening (which had thrilled her). He'd actually seemed sort of excited to tell her about it, as if he were catching up on his favorite soap opera.
She daydreamed for a moment about becoming a bartender herself - feeling the God-like glory of playing a tiny yet pivotal role in the after-hours goings on in strangers' lives. The drama and heartache. The matchmaking. It was all starting to sound very exciting, until she allowed a vision of herself contained inside a small space with all of those bottles. The thought quickly fast forwarded to a flash of broken glass and the ghastly odor of a hundred unique alcohols pooling and mixing on the floor beneath her feet, her ankles bleeding through tall knee socks, and her front teeth indenting deeply into her bottom lip as her wide eyes repentantly announced "Oops."
It was a true miracle that no one had yet been stabbed in the eye by her beloved pencil, the mighty Dos. Bella was reminded suddenly of the time Charlie had tried to convince her to switch to pastels. Connection?
The mild grit of a polite throat clearing startled her from her thoughts and she looked up, surprised to see Edward standing beside the table, shuffling between his feet with two bottles occupying his hands.
"Oh! Hi!" she blurted, staring at him dumbly and already breaking her promise to take control and make the evening right.
"Um...I'm back," he muttered, again seeming to struggle with personal boundaries, afraid to lean across her to place her bottle before her. She saved him the stress by reaching out for it, still marveling at her near supernatural ability to transport time and space - and apparently also hearing, vision and basic spacial awareness - during one of her little "when i grow up..." fantasies. Funny how they always seemed to take a strangely violent turn in the end, leading to the conclusion that perhaps growing up was a dangerous activity indeed, and must be avoided at all costs.
As she watched him settle back down in his seat in an unsettledish way, Bella refused to sit across from him gawking for another second. She flung her elbows up onto the table and rested her chin on top of her crossed hands. This time when she spoke, she felt solid, confident. It was time to end the nonsense, no matter how good they were at it.
"You left work," she said.
He seemed confused by her sudden change of tone. "Wait, what?"
"You left work. That's 'why'."
Edward lifted his eyebrows and looked directly at her, tensing. "And?"
"And I felt…bad…Like I was somehow responsible. And I just wanted to make sure that you were…okay," she said, lacing her fingers together and switching them back and forth between the crevices in her hands. "And I think it might also be possible that I was..."
He sat tapping his foot incessantly under the table while he waited for the rest, watching her carefully.
"Curious," she finished with a whoosh of breath.
His brows knitted in confusion. "Curious?"
She finally looked up, met his stare and spit it out. "About you."
Edward chuckled darkly and shook his head no, in reference to what, she wasn't exactly sure. He placed his forearms on the table, clamping his hands together and leaned forward, nearly breaking the plane of the table's center, without breaking eye contact. "So," he said, almost amused. "Are you more or less curious now that you've found me?"
Encouraged by his lighthearted question, Bella laughed. A big, sudden bark of a laugh that might scare a small animal or child, or a very sensitive former coworker, if they were close enough.
"You know what I feel like right now?" she began, leaning forward with her hand on her beer. "You know the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote nabbed the Road Runner after all that time chasing, and all those many, many plummets down off cliffs and into crevices of the canyon?"
He watched her, incredulous. Where was she going with this? Surely her search hadn't involved high speed chases and mail order explosives?
She continued. "And when he finally caught him, he held up a sign that said NOW WHAT DO I DO?"
He nodded once, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
"Well that's me right now," she said proudly, holding her arm up to her side as if she had brought the sign along for display purposes.
Edward's careful eyes moved purposefully to the vacant piece of air where the invisible sign glared at him, and then back to her, as she slowly lowered her hand back to her lap.
"Granted," she continued with less volume. "Wile E. searched for the Road Runner for, like, decades, and it only took me a couple of weeks to find you, but…yeah..." She trailed off, ceasing her ramblings and reaching for her beer, taking a long draw from it. The bottle landed back onto the table with a loud clank. It was nowhere near its allotted spot.
She leaned forward and searched his eyes.
"Edward," she hissed, "I hated the thought that you left because we saw you at the Blue Mango. I couldn't live with it! It was...amazing, seeing you there. Everyone thought so. Everyone was so damned impressed by it. By you! I wanted you to get the chance to know that. You deserve to know that." Her face and tone softened, but retained its insistence. "You didn't need to leave, Edward."
Edward squeezed his eyes closed; the rest of his body stiffened in alliance.
"I did."
"You were actually really good at that stupid, crappy job...you know that?"
"I know."
"So obviously this is something that you're sensitive about. I get that, Edward. But to quit? Was it really your only option?"
"It was."
"I don't understand."
"I never meant for you to."
"But you decided to meet me here tonight."
"I did."
"Why?"
He grabbed two fistfuls of hair and dragged them upward as he leaned back into his seat. Miraculously, it stayed in place like meringue as he drew his hands away. He looked utterly exhausted as he stared into her with a depth so potent she felt swallowed.
"Because."
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A/N This chapter was initially going to have two parts, but I bailed after the first half, badly wanting to get something out to you guys...I think it may work better like this anyway. I'm in a better balanced place in finding time to mom, work and write - and I know exactly what's going to happen next, so I'm putting a two-week deadline on the next chapter. That is a promise! Thanks for hanging in there with this story - it means more to me than you know. xoxo.