Edward is staring out the window and I am right next to his side, staring out there, too.
"I saw that girl today, Bella," he whispers up to the sky, and if he'd just look at me instead of up there it'd be like we're having a conversation.
"She isn't crazy after all," I reply. "She isn't particularly helpful, either."
"She was yelling in a restaurant. Maybe you were right. If you were here, you'd tell me you were right," he sighs.
"No. You were right," I say flatly.
"I wonder… how many times were you right when I was so sure I was?" Edward says.
And I don't like that at all.
Edward is sure and confident, always— and even when I was positive that he was wrong, I still found some kind of steady comfort in the fact that he was so sure.
He rubs the back of his neck and then he rubs his eyes. His knuckles tap three times on the window. He sucks in the corner of his mouth then quickly lets it go.
"I hate that you're gone. I hate that you were always the selfish one. And I hate that I drank out of a Dixie cup on a street corner with you. I hate that even though you always said it wouldn't work, I loved you so much anyway. Never once did I have some kind of doubt or fear it would end. I mean… the actual love was the high, but this fall might kill me. Maybe you were right all those times. I thought you were being dumb when you'd say it wouldn't last. I should've listened to you," he says, then pulls the cord of the blinds, so they drop on the dark sky.
And I'm pretty sure I have my answer.
And never, ever had I felt so hopeless until I thought I saw the hope fade out of Edward's eyes.
I crumple underneath the window and he walks right past me and I want him to tell me I'm stupid and wrong. I want him to tell me he was right and this time, I promised myself I'd believe him, but he just sits on the foot of the bed and starts unbuttoning his left cuff.
This time, this one feels different. This feels like the permanent break up we never really got around to having and I feel dead. For the first time ever, I actually feel lifeless.
I look to him and he's just sitting there, working on the right cuff now, staring at the wall.
I crawl over to the bed and I curl myself up at his feet. He flops back on the bed and lights a cigarette and we both watch the smoke swirl up to the ceiling in empty, hollow silence.
Time passes.
A little over two days, I think. He doesn't answer the phone or his messages and he doesn't go in to work. Carlisle leaves two messages and his mother leaves one. Jane pounds on the door and says she's going to call the police because everyone is worried, but Edward calls her phone, when she's right outside of the door, and tells her he's fine, that he just needs a couple days.
I sit by the window the entire time.
Emmett hasn't been in once.
I wonder if he's left without me.
I mostly hope he did, because then I could stay here forever, unbothered, and I can make me and Edward work, even in this fucked up, strange capacity.
I'll never leave him and even though he won't know it, I'll have kept us together.
After two days of chain smoking and staring at the glowing television, Edward gets up with what seems like a kind of determination.
Not like one of his trips to the bathroom or the kitchen… he gets up like he's got some kind of plan.
Abrupt.
He rummages around the kitchen and finds his cell phone on top of the microwave after pulling open drawers and slamming cupboard doors in a mad kind of haste.
He glances at the screen, and then he drops the phone on the counter. I look down to see a text or missed call that could've upset him, but all I see is the date and the time.
It's 4:18 a.m. on June 18th, 2005.
It's been one year.
He goes for the bedroom and I go with him.
I watch curiously as he opens the closet and reaches for a plastic bag on the top shelf, the shelf I could never reach.
His eyes are squeezed tightly shut and he turns to the bed and dumps the contents of the bag on the wrinkled, sweat-stained sheets.
Then both of us suck in huge, painful gulps of breath.
There on the bed is a black velvet box, a pair of gray sweatpants and a white collared shirt, all dotted and streaked with deep brown blood stains.
June 18th, 2004
"What should we eat for dinner? Frozen pizza or a half-stale bag of chocolate chips?" I asked Edward with my face in the freezer.
"The oven always burns the bottom of the pizza," Edward said. "Let's go out."
"But then I'll have to get dressed and brush my hair," I say, and poke at a bag of frozen peas and try to inconspicuously sniff my armpit.
"Because you're always so worried about your appearance in public."
"We can order in—"
"I want to go out."
"But if we stay in, we can just not shower and wear our underwear and eat on the couch," I say, looking over my shoulder at him.
"I'm already showered and you eat in your underwear on the couch every day, so compromise with me and get dressed. And put deodorant on, because yes, you do need some," he said, raising his eyebrows.
I shut the freezer door and raised my arms up in the air.
"Don't you love my woman-like musk?" I asked, reaching out to hug him.
He dodged my advance and took off for the living room. I ran after him and we came to a face off on either side of the coffee table.
"You're so gross," he laughed and I curled a finger at him.
"You like it," I said.
He reached out and flicked my forehead then snatched his hand away before I could slap it.
"I'm starving," I whined.
"You stink," he said.
"As is," I replied, gesturing down to myself.
"Yeah, I grasped that," he said, smirking at me.
I let out an incredulous shriek and he flicked my forehead again.
"You gotta be faster than that," he said when I missed his hand again. I darted around the side of the table to pounce on him and he caught my wrist and held it up triumphantly.
"Who's fastest?" he laughed.
"Ow! My hand!" I shrieked out in pain and he immediately let go, looking mortified.
I ran like a bat out of hell and laughed.
"Who's smarter?" I taunted from the other side of the room.
"That was really low," he said.
"Still. I win. Pizza or Chinese?"
"Bella?"
"What?"
"Think fast."
Before I could barely blink, something square and black was flying at my face. Instinctively, I caught the velvet box in one fist.
I unfurled my fingers and stared at the soft, pristine box on my palm, then looked at his smiling, pretty face.
"Edward. Edward? Edward, is there a ring in this box?" I asked slowly, while it felt like my head started floating slowly above my body.
"Yes," he answered and he put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, relaxed and watching me.
"It isn't a friendship ring, is it?"
"No."
"It isn't a mood ring either, is it?"
"No."
I nodded and licked my lips and stared some more at the box.
"Are you going to open it?"
"I can't."
"Why?"
"Because! Because… my armpits stink and my hair isn't even brushed—"
"As is," he repeated my words. "I want you as is."
"You want to marry me?"
"Well, I figure once we're married you'll never actually do all the paperwork it would involve to break up."
"You are, then, going to ask me to marry you?" I squeaked.
"I'm doing that right now," he laughed.
"No! I want to be… pretty when this happens! And, oh my God— we don't even have any Bombay—"
"Are you going to say yes?" he asked.
"Yes I'm going to say yes!" I cried and he came to me and I came to him and these fast little kisses passed back and forth between us.
I put my arms around his neck and pulled myself up, winding my legs around his waist.
"We can eat dinner in our underwear until we're seventy five," I said, breathless when his kisses found my throat.
"I'll let you kick my ass with the boxing gloves until we're eighty," he said, when I took over the kissing on his face.
"I'll bring you lunch every day at work until we're ninety, because you'll never really retire," I said into his eye.
"I'll strap on your tap shoes even when you're ninety-five and in a wheelchair," he said.
"And I love you," I said.
"And I love you."
I braced both of my hands on the side of his face and kissed him, long and perfect on his smiling lips.
"Now put me down, we need a drink!" I said, and when my feet hit the floor, my hands clapped over my mouth and I actually hopped twice. "I'm so excited I might pee my pants!"
"Don't," Edward said, flashing me his best disgusted-but-not face.
I picked up my house key from the coffee table and turned to go.
"Where are you going?" he asked and I tossed the unopened black box at him.
"To get the Bombay! We have to have Bombay here for this, don't you think?"
"Uh… sure?"
"You stay, change into your underwear and when I get back, you ask me and I'll say yes and we can spend all night doing it all over every flat surface of the house… or more realistically, we'll give it a really good go on the couch—"
"Thanks," he remarked dryly and I laughed and laughed and I was high all the way out the door.
I walked on that hot night with my arms up in the air and swinging at my sides. I walked with the most truthful, genuine smile any person has ever had.
I skipped when I should've walked and floated on the proverbial clouds under my feet. I giggled and sighed up at the black night and wrapped my arms around myself and I felt like no person has ever really been in love like this.
Surely, no one else had ever known this kind of excitement or potential or love— the world simply couldn't handle this kind of happy.
And half a block before the corner at the end of my street… I crossed. Or I tried to, anyway.
And of course, that's when I saw Emmett for the first time.
In the middle of all of that noise, grinding metal and an awful ringing pulse in my ears, I felt my chest go warm and I tasted warm something in my mouth.
That noise was very loud, I can guess now. At the time I didn't feel much of anything. It didn't hurt. It actually felt like I was flying— I had flown through the air, but I didn't realize why.
See, at first I thought to myself, I was so damn high and happy that I'd actually take flight. Which is ridiculous, but it was the only thing that made sense.
And when I was finally still, I found I couldn't move very much of anything, but Edward was there. He was out of breath and it looked as if I was looking at him from underwater.
He didn't touch me, which I thought was odd, especially because I really, really wanted him to move me, but he was very careful not to.
He did say something, though.
"Always," he had said to me. "Bella, hang on," he'd said and he sounded like I'd never heard him sound before.
I'd never heard or seen Edward cry, but it sounded like he was. His voice was deeper than usual and it kept breaking.
He swore a lot.
And he promised me something, too, right before I slipped away.
Always he'd find a way.
And now, we're both staring at an unopened ring box and some bloody clothes and all of it was for nothing.
Dear Bella-
I need to let it go. I need to.
I- I didn't know. A year. It's been a fucking year.
One-fourth of our time together.
An eternity.
Or a week. That's what it feels like.
What have I been doing? Let's make a list, shall we?
-Seattle
-I learned how to make soufflé (sorry. Mother's misguided attempt to cheer me up.)
-lunch date
-moped
-drank
-?
I'm pathetic. Fucking pathetic.
I'm also nowhere near letting you go.
I took down the ring box. I think I should've left it there, but I don't know anymore.
It took me two hours to scrub your blood off my hands that night. There was this one spot under my left ring fingernail that no toothpick or pocket knife could reach, and I kept seeing it as a sign that you weren't really gone, or that it was a sign of something meaningful. And you know me, I'm not the superstitious type. But I don't know, Bella- when my heart broke- I think other stuff broke, too.
I just- I'm lost without you.
-Edward