Chapter Ten: Slash and Burn

As January turned into February, a sense of ease settled on things. With Silversmith having removed himself from my classes, I could get on with the business of getting my remaining twelfth grade students through to graduation. The tensions between the Quileutes and the other students eased and I relaxed too, knowing that within the four walls of my room I could think what the heck I liked. I spent as much time as I could in there, even eating lunch. Every moment that I wasn't imparting knowledge to the next generation, I was thinking about Daniel. So much for telling him to go, I was beginning to realise that I could be addicted to him.

Even there, Daniel and I had settled into a routine. Every Thursday was Astronomy and every Tuesday and Sunday night he'd stop by my apartment on his way to work. Sometimes he only stayed a few minutes, sometimes an hour or two. The last couple of nights he'd help me to pack my life away in boxes. The paperwork was nearly complete and I had my moving date. He said he'd help me move my stuff and I was grateful of that; the way he made light work of my heavy boxes of books would come in useful.

But I should've known better than to think that everything had sorted itself out. While the shield thing appeared to be working and there were no more notes, all was still not well at school. It was the clack of heels on tiles that alerted me to the problem.

"Oh Stephanie, I'm sorry, but your car tyres have been slashed." Angie appeared red-faced and out of breath at my door. I ran out into the parking lot where a tow truck was arriving. Bill Greene was standing guard over my car with a face like thunder.

"Did you see who it was?" I asked.

"No, as soon as I have your car safely on its way down to Blacks, I'm going to check the security tape. You go with the tow truck; I'll get cover for your classes."

I rode in the cab down to Black's Auto Repair and had a second shock as the truck swung onto the forecourt and I saw the very familiar licence plate of Daniel's Jaguar XF parked over one of the pits. Well, even angels have to get their cars serviced, right? Jacob Black came to meet me. I knew him by sight, you couldn't miss him; he was the tallest man I'd ever seen and next to him, I felt tiny.

"Hi, Jake Black. I won't shake your hand." He held his hands up; they were covered in grease and oil. "I'll get this fixed in no time and check your car over too while you're here. Take a seat." He indicated to some chairs at the side of the workshop. The revving of Daniel's engine turned his head. "That sounds off, what does he do to that thing?" It sounded fine to me. A head popped up from under the hood of the Jaguar.

"What does he do with this, off-road in it?" The loud exclamation shocked me all the more because it was from a woman. Under the baseball cap, tendrils of blonde hair cascaded out. She stalked off across the workshop and from a rack on the wall grabbed some tools. "I fixed this for him three weeks ago and it's as bad as it ever was. I'm going to have to give him driving lessons." I couldn't take my eyes off her; she was absolutely stunning, even in grease-smeared cover-alls. As she walked back, she came over and looked to be getting the measure of me. "So you're the teacher who got her tyres slashed?" I nodded. He face softened. "I'm sorry. You shouldn't have to put up with things like this. Time was when we respected our teachers. Jake'll have it fixed in no time." Jake was already starting on undoing the wheel nuts on my car. "I won't shake your hand, mine are greasy, but I'm Rose McCarty. I help Jake out when he has high performance cars in. It's my specialism."

"I'm Stephanie Chambers." I replied. "I teach History." It sounded lame compared to being a specialist on high performance cars. She picked up on it. "There's nothing wrong with that, teaching is a valuable profession."

I sighed. "I used to love it, but this year's proving to be a challenge."

"Stick with it." She said. "It's for the greater good. Meanwhile, I need to go sort out the mess this guy's made of his engine."

"Sounds fine to me."

"Trust me; it's not supposed to make that racket."

She went off to busy herself with Daniel's car. I watched as Jake fitted four new tyres to my car and then started under the hood, checking things over. Chief Swan walked in and came over to me.

"Afternoon. Wish I could say this was a social visit, but I'm meeting Bill Greene."

Just then Bill arrived carrying a videotape. "Here it is Chief, like I said. In broad daylight and in full view of all the security cameras, he even looked at them." Bill handed the tape to the Chief.

"Jake?" The Chief called and Jake walked over to us. Rose too stopped work and came over to investigate. "We appear to have some kind of vendetta against Miss Chambers. This tape apparently shows Korvin Silversmith slashing her tyres. Now I haven't seen it yet, but Bill here has seen it and says it's him. Obviously, I'm going to need your assistance with this matter."

"Of course."

"The school will pick up the bill for all this, don't worry about it." Bill reassured me. I'll get Silversmith's parents in as soon as I can.

"They won't come." Said Jake. "You'd better let me deal with it."

"It's a school matter."

"It's a Quileute matter Mr Greene, and as the head of Quileute tribe, I will deal with it." Jake's face was serious.

"He's caused damage to a teacher's car on school property, it is a school matter."

"Well you can press charges through Chief Swan, but the Silversmith's won't come to the school, I can guarantee that."

"Why?"

"This isn't about school; this is about what's happening on the reservation. It's a Quileute matter."

"Then why's he singling Stephanie out? She's the hardest-working teacher I've known in nearly twenty years as Principal, why go for her?"

"I can't give you an answer to that."

"Well find one." Bill stalked off. I heard his car door slam and the engine start.

"Jake, could I use your office?" Jake nodded. "Stephanie?" Chief Swan indicated that I go into the office. He shut the door behind him.

"When are you moving to Forks?"

"Ten days time."

"Can you bring it forward?"

"I don't think so. Do you think this is to do with the other thing?"

"He shrugged. " I don't know; but having you here means that I'm better able to keep an eye on things. You're a teacher; stuff like this doesn't happen to teachers here. I would like you in my jurisdiction as soon as possible. Do you have any colleagues with a guest room?"

Two days later I was in the guest room at the Newton's house, Mike having offered their room instantly. It was absolutely gorgeous and I couldn't have asked for anything more luxurious. I'd put the greatly disgusted Lyra into cat boarding for the week; as Lyra and dogs got on about as well as Lyra and Daniel did.

Mike was almost giddy as the two of us sat down to dinner with his parents. I could see that this was going to be a long week. It was also going to be a very Daniel-free week, as last night's astronomy session had been the last time I'd see him for seven whole days. There would be no opportunity for him to casually drop by on Tuesday or Sunday, but thank goodness for text messages. As I lay in bed that night, having fended off the bedroom advances of Mike and escaped a manicure from his mother; Daniel was keeping me entertained with a constant stream of funny messages that I had to bite my lip not to laugh out loud at. And then he hit me with a zinger.

I wish I could be with you right now.

Me too. Come save me from Karen Newton's manicure tips!

Don't tempt me.

Please come.

Where are you?

Oh my goodness he was going to come here! I texted the address

21480 Forest Road, Forks

Front of the house or back?

Back

There in ten.

I looked at the clock, it was approaching eleven. Thankfully, the Newton's house was quiet. My heart started to pound, I may not want to be lured into Mike's bed, but there was someone who I would very much like to lure into mine. I flitted to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth again, applied a generous squirt of perfume between my breasts and shook my hair until it resembled something sexily tousled. It was February and all my strappy nightgowns were packed away, so I had to the best I could in flannel and jersey. I opened a couple more buttons on my top and then realised that there really wasn't anything down there for him to get excited about. I rummaged in my case, dug out some underwear and put it on, giving thanks for whoever invented plunge bras. I tousled my hair some more and checked myself in the mirror. That was as good as it was getting.

I paced the floor, looking out of the window periodically. The Newton's house bordered the forest, just as my new house in Forks would. As I saw Daniel appear by a tree beyond the fence, I suddenly gained a whole new appreciation for how useful forests could be.

As silently as I could, I opened the window. He hopped the rear fence and jogged across the grass to the drain pipe. He was up that in no time and onto the roof of the first floor which jutted out below the bedroom window. He walked up the tiles and edged along the sill to the open window.

"Stand back." He whispered and pulled himself up and in through the window.

Daniel closed the window and we looked at each other for a moment, both breathing hard. Oh my God, I wanted him so much!

"What now?" He breathed. His eyes were bright with excitement.

I was way beyond being subtle. I stepped forward and ran my hands lightly over his chest, feeling the taut muscles beneath. He felt ripped to perfection. He also felt cold from being out in the night air. I'd soon have him warmed up.

I took a step even closer to him, inhaling his seductive scent and chilling through my thin pyjamas at the cold coming off him. I hoped I was leaving him in no doubt of what I wanted. But there wasn't much of a response from him. May be I needed to be more explicit?

"I want you." I breathed. I was almost on fire for him, burning up inside.

"I want you too." He whispered back.

"You can have me."

"I can't do this." He said through gritted teeth.

"You can, everyone's asleep." I went to kiss him and he pulled away.

"I can't kiss you." He started to wipe his mouth with his hand, standing back from me and swallowing.

"Why not?"

"Because if you do, you'll know too much about me."

"What?" That didn't make sense. He continued to wipe his mouth and swallow, he looked anxious, embarrassed, almost as if he was going to vomit. "Are you OK?"I asked. "The bathroom's there if you want to use it."

"I'm sorry. I can't do this. I want to but I physically can't."

I thought of the very strong perfume I'd squirted on myself before he arrived and realised that he might be one of those people who got nauseous around it. "Is it my perfume?"

He nodded sadly. "Yes."

"I'm sorry." I raged at my stupidity in the silence of my head.

"Don't be, you weren't to know." He hung his head almost in shame. I reached up to place my hand on his cheek but stepped back. He shook his head.

"I can't touch you and I can't kiss you? Are you really that allergic to perfume?"

"I can't explain, I wish I could. There isn't a second goes by where I don't wish that I could explain everything to you."

"Why don't you?"

"Because I can't and even if I did, I would lose you and that's a price I don't want to pay."

"The truth is that bad?" He nodded. I thought for a moment about what this horrific thing might be. From everything he'd told me about himself, what was the worst thing he could tell me? What would it hurt me the most to know that Daniel was? A killer. "Are you an assassin?"

He looked at me and I knew it was the truth. "Yes."

"But you're not one at the moment? You said you work on computers."

"I do work on computers, but that's not all I do." I couldn't respond for a moment. I really was going to have to think very seriously about him. "Am I losing you?" He said softly.

"I need to think about it."

"I understand. I'll arrange for someone else to help you with the house move and you needn't come to the Astronomy sessions. There are only a couple more and with Will and Jane already out perhaps I should finish them early." Jane had gone off to some school on the east coast and Will was tied up with work and couldn't get to the sessions. But I needed help with the house move; that I couldn't easily do without.

"I'll skip astronomy, but come and help me with the move. It'll give me some time to think."

"OK. Thank you."

"For what?"

"For thinking about it. I know that when you make your decision, that it will have been well considered."

Tonight had not gone at all as I'd hoped. I watched him as he climbed out of the window and made his way lightly over the roof tiles, lowered himself down and dropped silently to the ground. So much more made sense now. Why he was so secretive, why he'd had to virtually abandon his daughter and why he was so very fearful of getting involved with me.

Surprisingly, considering his disclosure, I slept well. Maybe that had something to do with a lot more of the picture being in place; such as why he looked like an avenging angel, why he unsettled me and the very good reason why I was being warned off him. Staying away wasn't a bad thing to do under the circumstances.

I thought about it through the week. Being so close, Mike had started to annoy me with his constant insinuation about moving things on in our relationship. It amused me that I'd passed up the bed of a very nice warm-hearted man for the chance of illicit sex with a cold-blooded killer. And what had he meant by saying that if I kissed him I'd know too much about him? That was just baffling. Kissing wasn't that intimate, although maybe for him it was because he had to keep everyone at arms length. Maybe that didn't seem so weird after all. To be able to go off and kill someone probably meant that you needed to keep a lot of yourself closed off to people and possibly found it hard to open up.

I alternated between two viewpoints: I couldn't bear it and didn't want to know and then at other times I couldn't bear to part with him and I started rationalising what he did. Then on Sunday afternoon, Mike and I watched a recent James Bond film, which didn't help matters. James Bond was a Secret Agent and an assassin, so my head decided that Daniel was one too - which made total sense as he was so good looking. The thought of him in a tuxedo almost left me breathless and Mike thought his luck was in. Then I started thinking about all the women Daniel would need to sleep with as part of that job. I guessed that none of them would be so stupid as to wear perfume that repelled him. Daniel as a Secret Agent would not go from my mind and kept on and on until I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and felt wetness on my cheeks from the tears I'd unknowingly cried. I knew then that I cared for him. I didn't know if I could class it as love, but I cared for Daniel Mitchell and if he got hurt or killed on a job, then I would be very sad.

So the question went from could I be with him, to could I be without him? Could I cope with knowing what he was going off to do if he went on a business trip? Did I have the strength to be the one waiting for the call to say the job was done and he was on the next flight home? Because of the dangerous nature of what he did, time with Daniel could be in short supply. Did I want that? Or should I go for a man with a regular job, who was home at a reasonable time each evening and whose life held no surprises of which to speak?

Dan Taylor walked into one of my lunchtime deliberations. He wasn't in any way back to himself, but you could get a few words out of him now and again. "Do you mind if I come and sit in here?" He said. "I'm having a tough day."

"Not at all."

"I wasn't interrupting anything was I? You look deep in thought."

"I was thinking about something, but you're not interrupting."

Dan sat on a desk in front of me. "Can I help? Sometimes it helps to sort the knots in your head if you talk about it. Ness has been letting me moan on at her and it helps me."

I looked at this young man. Only eighteen years old, but yet there was something about him that made him seem wise beyond his years. I guess that's what happens when something tragic happens to you. It forces you to grow up. I tried to phrase it non-specifically. "Would you rather have a short time of wonderful or a lifetime of nothing special?" I didn't want to admit that this was about a guy.

"If you'd have asked me a year ago I would've said definitely go for the lifetime of nothing special. Solid and dependable has much to recommend it and there's no substitute for knowing what's coming. That was a year ago, before I found the wonderful." He played with the silver plaited ring on his left hand. "I had fifteen minutes of wonderful and I absolutely wouldn't change a thing. I'm suffering because of it now, but I would do every nanosecond of it again. Look, I know this is making a stab in the dark about what it is you're wrestling with, but go with the scary thing. Don't settle for nothing special, give the scary a chance. It may make you so frightened that you… wet yourself – no offence." He smiled with embarrassment. "But when it pays off, you'll look down from the top of the tallest mountain and see the insignificant speck on the ground that was your life before it. That's what going with the scary feels like."

"Thank you."

"Of course, when they leave and take half of you with them, you're left wandering around like a zombie. So there's that to bear in mind."

"So this isn't about Jess for you?"

He shook his head. "I'm only telling you this because it's you and…" He paused for a second, gathering his thoughts. "I know that if I tell you, you won't blab it all round the school."

"No I won't."

"Please don't breathe a word of this to anyone and certainly not my parents, because they don't know. It doesn't concern them anymore anyway."

He tapped the ring on his finger. "I got married. I can't tell you to whom, it's complicated. Besides, she's not here anymore. Something happened over Christmas; she got scared and went back to her old life. She sent over the divorce papers a few weeks ago; which I sort-of signed, sent back and my marriage was ten weeks long from start to finish. But I'm getting her back. To do it I need to go into the proverbial lion's den, so I'm going to need a Daniel. Do you know any Daniels?" I smiled and shook my head. "No? Well, I'll find one. I love her. It doesn't matter where she goes or what she does I'll always love her. She lit up my dreary life like the sun and every second with her was like standing on that mountain. When you've had the wonderful you can't ever go back to nothing special. Regardless of how badly I'm hurting now, I'd still do every bit of it again. Although, if you do meet her in the future, please don't tell her I wet myself, she thinks I was totally cool about her."

I smiled at his turn of phrase; it was good to have him talking again, even if he had just confided something deeply personal. I'd first noticed the ring last November and then remembered his dishevelled and slightly drunken appearance back then. He'd been drunk on wonderful.

"Thanks Dan, I promise I won't say a word."

Before I knew it, it was Saturday and the intercom on the external door of my apartment building went for the last time. It was shortly after six thirty and we had a long day ahead of us. But I couldn't go the day without letting him know my decision.

"You're not losing me." I said.

"Thank you." In his eyes there was almost tangible relief.

"I'm going to struggle with it, but no more than I would, if you were a Marine, a member of the CIA or a Police Officer."

"You do appreciate that I kill on purpose? There's nothing accidental when I do it."

"You're a ruthless, trained killer. Yes, I got that."

"And you still want to be with me?" His brown eyes were steady and serious. "I don't want you to have any romantic ideas that I'm some kind of James Bond." I swallowed and bowed my head as I felt the giveaway heat of blood in my cheeks. He walked over to a window and pulled it up to let some air in. "For one thing, I can't make love to that many women." A bubble of laughter burst through my lips and I looked up to see a grin and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "But seriously, I want to clear something up from the last time we met. I don't want you to get the impression that I don't find you attractive, I do. There's nobody I want to be with more than you. In your pyjamas and with bed hair, you are hands down the sexist thing on this planet and I wanted you so badly the other night. But I haven't been intimate with a woman for a very long time and a lot of stuff has happened since that's gotten in the way. So please, don't take the fact that I won't kiss or hold you as indifference to you." He came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. "This may be as much as I can manage or as close as I can get for now." He let out a long sigh.

"My pyjamas are sexy?"

"Yes."

"You mean the maroon ones with the plaid pants?"

"Yeah." That came out slightly in a slightly strangled voice.

"They're ancient." I laughed.

"I really don't care."

I narrowed my eyes and held a finger up, indicating that he should wait there. I darted into my room, threw one of the suitcases on the bed, unzipped it and rummaged around until I found what I thought I looked sexy in. I yanked off my clothes, pulled the black negligee over my head, mussed up my hair and walked back out into the living room.

"So this isn't sexy?"

Daniel literally froze, not a single atom of him moved. Finally his mouth did. "Holy hell."

"So that's a no then?" I walked back into the bedroom, pulled off the negligee, repacked it and got dressed. I walked back out to find Daniel still rooted to the spot. "Come on," I said in my bossiest teacher voice. "We have boxes to move."