Story notes: It has been brought to my attention that I've crossed wires a few times. While I've maintained the Anatolia family is of Romany descent, I've used Romanian language in some of their dialogue/thoughts. The two are separate: Romania is a country, the Romany are an ethnic gypsy minority of central and eastern Europe as well as the Americas and North Africa and the Middle East. The Anatolia family did come to North America from Romania... The Youth Without Age fairytale is not a Romany fairy tale, but a Romanian one. They knew of the fairy tale because it was indigenous to their country.
Romanys were a dark haired people; thus Eliza's coloring could be considered aberrant. Of course, rape and bastardy are common throughout history; who's to say there wasn't such an instance in the Anatolia's past, you know, redheaded stepchild and all that ;).
Heaps of appreciation to my lovely betas, Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae. Extra special love and hugs to Viola for helping me so much with content on everything I write, and specifically for finding the John Donne quote for me :).
Disclaimer: Not mine.
~~Many, many thanks for the reviews! They are truly inspiring~~
Song:
youtube(DOT)com/watch?v=HDi9PxwPOx0
The Man Who Played God, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse
Youth without Age and Life without Death
Chapter Ten: Divine
Carlisle Cullen
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
~Death Be Not Proud, John Donne
I'd sworn never to change another.
Change, I sneered. The word was too pleasant. What I'd done was annihilate in the vein of re-creation.
I'd taken a wrecking ball to both Edward and Esme.
After watching him limp and coil, howl and beat and become little more than savage, I'd decreed to never make another of our kind.
Because this life, with no one, was no kindness.
In the main, my patients, my colleagues revered me, far too much. They had no idea I was a brute monster with killer instincts. They had no understanding I was here, as a physician, to lay upon a bed of nails, to douse myself in the flames burning up the insides of my esophagus, to whip myself with my want and make atonement for all I had bred… in my likeness.
They idolized me… as if I were a god.
I was no more than Lucifer.
Lazarus may have risen, yet I was riddled with holes that grounded me, let wind whistle through me instead of lifting me.
My offspring were two.
My children were five.
My wife, my mate, my love…Esme. She was the one.
As Bella should be for Edward.
Certainly, Emmett, Rosalie, Alice, and Jasper didn't go out of their way to make themselves humble before me. Usually they jested about my… earnestness, erudition, my staunch dedication to education. My punctuality in all things.
I knew, behind my back, they even called me 'anal'.
If retentive impulseswere what it took to keep this ark safe, then it didn't much matter what they said.
A boom from downstairs said Emmett was home.
I grinned.
A scattering, lilting laughter… peels of a campanile and a low twang filtered from the second floor. And thus I knew my children Alice and Jasper would take up the night with their lovemaking.
Rosalie's footsteps were soft as deer pads, and her touch on the banister like butterscotch melting. Her heart was so heavy in its absence. Only the uncanny openness of her husband could make her forget, smile, be.
Edward came in.
A worrying frost of noise trying to be silent. He touched everything Isabella had ever run her fingertips over in these past weeks, up the steps. He stopped at the mirror on the landing.
I heard a scratch like chalk to blackboard, as if he was erasing himself, then a groan, and heavy—unnaturally so—footsteps up to the next level.
Almost everyone was here, inside our home.
I imagined warm braziers, and the kindling fires throughout the household lit in each bedroom.
This was a boon.
Now Bella was missing.
And Esme.
My woman.
I slipped to the door and peered to the hall, the glow of dotted sconces lighting the rich wallpaper.
I couldn't smell her inside.
Only Emse knew me. As I was, layered in the toxic paint of all I wanted—to be a model father and doctor, to know my family was secure, to ensure Edward and Bella's disparate species and paradoxical stories would not cause the untimely demise of one or the other.
With the relief of being what I was, instead of the philanthropic do-gooder of Forks that its citizens took me for, I soared back across the study as if wings beat out of my shoulders instead of walking at a curiously slow and gentle pace I'd never gotten used to, not even after nearly four hundred years.
With her usual flirtatious cadence, Esme would always soothe me back to our own semblance of normalcy after a day, two days, four days of non-stop work at the hospital where I was only one third of myself. She'd part her delicious pink lips in a wicked grin and look at me with teasing coyness as she rubbed my shoulders from the strain of my guise. The practitioner capable of partitioning off his other inglorious desires. And then she'd laugh so throatily I'd do nothing but groan and straighten under her touch as her hands swept in arcs down my back to land on my backside with a squeeze and a tug lower at my scrotum, "Welcome home, heartthrob."
How she would love to tease me about the admiring stares, the hypnotized awe that followed me, the matrons and young ladies alike—I never noticed, but she did. Thriving off the immutable fact I'd never looked to a woman as I did her.
She'd draw her full breasts against me and tug me down by the hair at my nape, a familiar sensual pain escaping me in a moan, "You need a break." She would reach around my front and dandle the flat of her palm over my stomach, onto my erection, "You need to let loose your beast."
With the advent of Bella, the atmosphere within our home had both blossomed with her hummingbird human heartbeat-winging joy and lustful repletion inside Edward—and curdled with an encroaching fear he didn't want to confront just yet. Too many conflicting emotions wafted like stormy air whirling up to topple over a cloudless, sunny day. Because his dainty lover, the woman he'd sought from one decade to the next, would surely die.
Or, as was prophesied, he would. At her touch.
Amongst this palpable longing and hope and two existences bound to be injured yet more, Esme had recently bade me, baited me, taunted me for three days until I could no longer see straight for the length of her curved calf, the side view of a half-bared breast, the lick of her lips over my nude torso, refusing me release until I'd been blind with my own sluggish, indecent lust.
Moaning, mirroring the motion of her hands curled around my shaft, I'd thrust my hips up and down, grabbed her brown and blond locks and made her mouth mesh against the long side of my cock.
She'd grinned up at me, her pointed tongue licking a slick line up to my tip that was apoplectic with imminent explosion… then sat aside, slapping my thigh and wiping her mouth, sexily sniffing at my scent all over her fingertips.
"Esme, bloody hell!" I'd twisted the already-tangled bedlinens until my hand meandered of its own volition toward my erection, "Are you trying to kill me? Why do you tease me so, woman?"
My voice had been nothing smooth or mesmeric, just one long guttural exclamation of need. I'd nearly called her 'wench'.
Smacking my hand away, she'd leapt over me with her breasts hovering over my mouth. She'd lowered one dusky, swollen nipple to my mouth. I'd opened and pushed her forward with my knees at her back. Dipping, she'd drizzled her peaked flesh to my lips then smashed her tit into my mouth so I'd sloppily sucked and wet and bit and licked.
Then she'd jumped off me again, "You need to get away, lover." She'd quirked her head, "And I'm absolutely fine with using my feminine wiles to get my way." She still found amusement over my old country turns of phrase.
Just as fresh as she'd been when I met her the first time; my scared young girl who'd been beaten by her father.
Even then, her light had been undimmed.
In the following years, that hurricane lamp housing her soul had cracked, but it'd never broken.
Could I deny her?
Had I ever been able to?
Wincing as I'd rolled over off the bed to the balls of my feet, I'd stopped in front her, stroking over my shaft, knowing I could get to her just as she did me, "You're saying you won't fuck me unless I get away from here?"
She'd gulped and nodded, staring well below my face.
"Did you really think it necessary to tempt me to the point of priapism to get me to agree?"
At that, Esme had thrown her head back with a flume of laughter, "No, sweetheart, I just like to provoke you."
Unmentionably tight with need for both blood and sex, I'd practically thrown Esme out the door, slamming it with an unlikely shout, "We'll be back tomorrow. And have no doubt, children, I will be calling into Forks High to make sure you were all in attendance."
Curses cut short their self-congratulations.
We kept a close rein on them all; there was no other way our subterfuge could work. As it was, we were nearing another move. We'd been here too long, lingering in hopes the second time we'd been drawn to this locale, we'd be shown the face of Edward's love.
And we had.
But what was to come of it all?
"Don't think about it now, Carlisle," Esme had stroked my thigh and urged me on to our seclusion.
Out on the hunt, in Southern California's Sespe Wilderness, I'd shrugged out to the top of a shelf of sandstone that rippled like waves over a seashell, spotting Esme yards away in the middle of the ochre and rust-colored mesa.
I had no recourse but to stop. Just stand still.
Esme's mannerisms had been flawless, seamless as she cooed to the leggy coyote clutched in her embrace. I'd found myself swelling in watching her marzipan-pink lips pull at the life vein in its taut, tan neck.
Bleak brush and even more naked trees with bark of windswept silver seemed to shudder at this show of primal majesty.
The dense atmosphere had crackled with tangible intensity, flashing from her feminine form. Even nature had been in awe of her; the quick, slate gray of low clouds racing across what had been a clear, blue sky. Made into Artemis, huntress, hunkered low and lethal atop the coyote's splayed open neck while she'd devoured, gluttonously, eviscerating capillaries, masticating pulp, noisily but precisely slurping. My shaft had shaken as a whippet of blood splashed across her cheek-in the same manner my cum was known to do when she allowed me to fuck her genteel mouth with her sex hovering over my head, making me splatter into her open lips and up on her body.
Electricity, flashes of Apollionic, orange-red hybrids had eroded time and place. Candlewick locks whipped a heathenish storm of famine relieved as Esme'd looked to me with her eyes, midnight domes only lit by the crescent of her pupils. The smack of her lips, the snap of hell-weather had transported me back to the time when I'd taken her life and given only my love in return.
It had hardly seemed a fair barter.
First fragile, delicate ache, aroused gratitude, patriarchal pleasantries… denial. Refutation I wore habitually about me like a horse-hair under-vest, hiding my passion, flogging myself for it. Wanting, waging, waiting. I'd disclosed only humility and a sire's presumptuous, perfectly appointed, puritanical amour.
Armor.
The second time I'd been with her, a nude paramour, she had come to me in our staunchly human abode. Edward had championed her connubial interest in me, making it clear I was being a jackass for continually denying her. Slaking off desperate need, I'd wrapped her in my smoking jacket; the exact shade of misty blue I remembered her mortal eyes to be, made a pleasing, teasing jacquard as I wore it over my bared flesh.
She'd taken the robe in two hands and pushed it back off behind her, over her shoulders so it sat for a mere moment upon her buttocks before simpering in a sumptuous satin fold to the floor at our feet.
I'd paced away. I wanted to run. To her, from her.
She'd advanced.
I'd held my hands up, because… because Esme didn't owe me this, and I'd make do with loving her from afar. With loving her in the only manner I knew how. With esteem, regard. Even though we'd already come together, I didn't believe I was owed her womanly love.
Bursting with ecstasy, a courtesan, she'd torn off my drawers and given no further opportunity for my withdrawal.
Offensively, I'd felt the ignoble reaction of my penis sliding in and out of her unpracticed fists. Ostensibly, I'd meant to push her away but ended with my chin to my hurdy-gurdy chest, tugging the carnation bud of her lips back and forth over my solid flesh where drips and drops of lacquered venom pearled.
Hungry, untutored, I'd lapped her breasts, crying from my gullet when I met the points with my tongue, a sharp rasp upon a work of art!
Though I was older in many ways, she had been more learned in fleshly knowledge. I'd lived chastely as a young human man, prudishly as a lone vampire. Esme had known sex, but never pleasantly in the villainous arms of Charles Evenson.
That she'd had the strength to fly from him gave merit to her Athena-like spirit.
Aliform creature from cretin.
And when she'd lost her newborn child, the River of Styx was all she'd wanted; her hope solidified into a channel of miasmic swamp infested with cruelty, death.
The stream of release, the path to Nirvana before her had been dammed, damned, and barren. I'd played God, Zeus. I'd interrupted her journey.
I owed her the hereafter.
And the resuscitation of my heart.
The resurgence of my soul.
When I'd loved her that next time, it was with spirit and flesh. With corporeal feeling jerking out of me in ropes and spindles… of cum, of love, of heart… of onus.
Forged, soldered, chained as if by the iron workings of Hephaestus himself in his warlock's cave, we were never to be parted. Never.
A primordial surge then slingshot me through the elastic dominion of ages. To mate again, to possess and be owned; equally, animally, specially.
The wide, gateless heavens had surrounded us on all sides. Inside the acres of Sespe's unbroken landscape, the sky's curse tumulted to a glowing-green and rose-colored, imperfect blessing crashing through with jags of platinum lightning. A climatic, cataclysmic orchestra with her clashing witchery, Mother Nature's haunting melody had punctured the feral Dance of Seven Veils as I'd gained on my quarry, my love, my equal in all things.
A whirling dervish of clay topsoil had spun up around us, shawling us in a tornadic helix upheaval of limbs twisting, clothing shredded like no more than cattail's fluff to the gale-like wind we'd created. Mouths plundered manically, and I'd sought out the last crimson drops of the hunt's blood inside Esme's wet cavern wherein her teeth nipped my tongue. Crossing the firmament of my lips to deep within, Esme's weighty, drenched muscle tangled with mine, wrestling lusciously for just one… more… drop of replenishment that fervored us into an even more frantic frenzy.
The zephyrs had dropped like languorous, carnelian silk scarves to the earth leeched of its desert color.
Sallying forth, Esme had toppled me over in one lithe motion of prowess, steel, and suppleness. Caramel cream from the top of her starlet hair, now a maddened fury of webs wefting over her face, to her round, womanly breasts tipped in plush, pink nickels, down her wrought-from-feather flesh, the sexual cage of her ribs robbing me of breath. Her navel was a divot that opened to the size of my pinky, the lance of my tongue.
Following a small swell, my eyes, my lips, my fingers had craved to the fine down of her pubic hair; toffee, sleek with dampness I'd gathered on the tip of my tongue, the pad of my thumb. The tight drum of her belly tilted like saucy windmills weeping water out down below and my own spout opened with infinitesimal liquidity. Lapping, lathing, completely bound and enslaved, I'd melted against her with my mouth to her labia, slipping into and around all her grooves. I'd collided my face with her inner thighs, just wishing I had a beard's growth to twitch and rasp and burn her skin. A mustache to find purchase with subtle stubble at the nose of her clitoris.
And her legs.
Never was I so glad for the changing of generations than when Esme could display those lengths of muscle and softness to my heated perusal. Not only at night, but out in the open, during the day. The turn of her limbs turned me inside out: the clamp of calf, the sinew of thigh, the tenderness behind her knee, the strap of her ankle winking at me.
I'd kissed every surface until she'd beseeched.
There, we'd embraced fear and deviant decadence birthed from decades of loneliness and supernatural carnality. There, in the dust bowl arena our pouncing, naked bodies had created, with rocky promontories topped by sparsely-needled pine sentinels overlooking us, we would rightfully terrify the voyeuristic human eye.
There in that coliseum, we'd wrestled and mated like a god to his goddess, snakes braiding, limbs like constrictors, my adder cock to her mamba sway; we were of earth, sky, and cosmos–sucking out the atmosphere, creating a guttural, groaning, heaving, bestial crash of sandstorm, a demonic tsunami of fucking that ended only when silence-utter stark silence-bashed us together in orgasm like the supersonic boom of the Black Hole imploding.
There we were vampire, hunters, primeval, uncivilized.
At home we were mother, father… husband, wife… lovers.
To each other, we were solace.
And for just a few moments, we'd let go the crushing sickness of how we had to act in order to blend in and maintain, the thick indigestion that was now settling over us at the razorback road Edward was walking, on his own, one more time.
In a final effort to keep the carefree feeling we'd remembered on our two day stint, I'd swatted and pinched Esme's bottom before opening the door to our home in Forks, announcing, "Hi, kids! We're home!"
Two weeks ago, that had been.
Since then, I'd both spoken to and met Chief Swan. I'd found his questions at once humorous… and hurtful.
I had swallowed my pride and pushed eavesdropping Edward away and answered everything I knew of our ability to procreate with human beings.
Renee had come to us as well. My heart, what was there, still residing (I believed) swelled with remembering her. Her uneasiness had given way to understanding, and then to anointment. And finally, to regaining her own love.
Her spirit would never be dampened.
She had that in common with her daughter.
In seeking answers to the motility of Edward's ejaculate to Bella's fertility, I'd also been quietly asked to investigate his venom to her blood. He hadn't wanted to know. He had to know.
Putting on specs I didn't need, out of habit alone, I'd gone over the results with Edward. He couldn't impregnate her, as a vampire. Neither was he capable of changing her. His dream Isabella had been a human girl; his mate Bella must remain so.
So it was done.
All those stories and legends and predictions turned to stone tablets.
I was no closer to the answer… how could Bella possibly end Edward's life. Unless she was a witch? I left off a dark chuckle at that thought.
Just two weeks, and Edward had become exponentially animated in Bella's company, increasingly inanimate without her. A switch had flipped, and it continuously blinkered on and off.
Emmett mocked.
Jasper gleaned, a frown creasing his brow and highlighting his scars, all he'd been through to get to Alice. Yet they'd made it.
Another bolt to Edward's medieval stocks.
Because he and Bella wouldn't.
Rosalie sighed loudly, often. She lashed out at the least little thing, at once perturbed by the young woman in our fold, jealous of her life's force, always tuned into what she'd been made to give up… unwilling to let another go the same route.
To Esme, I asked every day, "Has he approached you?"
The weight of her maternal fatigue made her head drop and her shoulders droop, "Not yet." Rolling back up and ready to fight, make right, she'd say, "He never really came to me about Bella, in all that time. You know this inside and out, Carlisle." I didn't. She would resume, ignoring my silent denial, "You were his touchstone in that moment, those memories, that last image he saw when he became your son." She always gave me more credit than I was owed. She'd shake her head and another tress of hair would come between us until I'd hold it away, loop it behind her ear, swoop in to kiss her cheek to her temple, "He and I are friends. Edward is my son, too. But it's you he looks to, darling."
The pain coming off him was only mitigated by the pleasure radiating from him.
Thus, he was going to come asunder.
"You don't have all the answers, you're not invincible," Esme would sit next to me and clutch us together as we rocked over the love and horror to come to our child.
But I was… invincible.
And I needed Edward to be, too.
Better yet, Bella.
A door shifted closed, the lock snipped. Esme was home. With each brush of her presence, I gathered breath, seeing her hips sway in my mind with each slow, silken step—even with her nature, she never hurried—stopping at every place Edward had touched on his way up.
I would look to Alice, but she held no answer in her riddles, "They won't be, but they will be, Carlisle." Her stillness like a compass pointed towards Edward and Bella's magnetic north every time she focused on them.
There was only so much I could do, and it wasn't enough.
Huddling over my books, I forested through pages at a rapid pace:
"In the Vile," says Dr. Krauss, "also known as Samovile, Samodivi, and Vilevrjaci, we have near relations to the forest and field spirits, or the 'wood-' and 'moss-folk' of Middle Germany, France, and Bavaria… while in certain respects they have affinity with the Teutonic Valkyries." Yet they differ on the whole from all of these, as from English fairies, in being more like divinities, who exert a constant and familiar influence for good or evil on human beings, and who are prayed to or exorcised on all occasions. They have, however, their exact parallel among the Red Indians of North America as among the Eskimo, and it is evident that they are originally derived from the old or primeval Shamanic faith, which once spread all over the earth."
"Incarnation of beauty and power. Implacable in their wrath to all who deceive them, or who break a promise. Hence the proverb applied to any man who suddenly fell ill: "Naiso je na vilinsko kolo" ("He stepped on a fairy-ring")."
My eyes faded, as if I was capable of exhaustion.
Having all a man could want, I was powerless. To give life or death made me not a savior but a devil. Granting this endlessness on one who might never find their match made me the grimmest of reapers.
In the Chicago infirmary, Edward had been so close to death, I'd smelled the musty air inside a coffin enfolding him in a shroud. He'd killed. The young man with cheeks as flushed as the skin of autumn's apples, with bronzed hair and fern eyes had been transformed to a murdered under my hand, my teeth.
There'd be no progeny from my family.
When we died—and I believed we all would eventually; our immortality was only as guaranteed as not having our bodies dismembered and our torn-off parts ignited—there'd be no remembrance. Not that I wanted history books written on me, or statues or paintings made in my likeness.
No, like Rosalie, I dreamed still about my lapsed humanity, my lack of begetting, of legacy. Of children who would be born of flesh from the womb, to grow and live and age and procreate their own lineage.
The one of us who'd lost so much, Esme, had already found her heaven in this strange and lovely and weird family…family. We all belonged to her. If only she could create our happiness; that was her wish.
Alice's desires began and ended with Jasper. Not in simplicity, but in completion.
Unable to forget the wrong he'd perpetrated, the thousands he'd massacred, Jasper himself would have liked forgiveness; and that was an ounce of humanity he'd never grant himself.
Emmet—I smiled—took every possible variation of life and death thrown at him and volleyed back with a force like nature. Unreserved in his enjoyment, his virility, his being. But what he wanted most of all was to make Rosalie at peace.
And without a child, he could never accomplish that.
Edward?
He wanted Isabella.
He didn't find her. Worse than that, he lost her when his ability to sleep had vanished into the thinnest, most forlorn air.
He'd absconded, in 1927.
How many days? How many months? How many calendars had I crossed off in my mind and in my desk blotter?
A snowy, parched-of-sun-day, had found him knocking at the door. Knocking, for Christ's sake, as if he hadn't been our son. Timid and unsure, with the most thirsting eyes, the most turned down lips, he'd been certain Esme and I would spurn him. He'd handed a volume to Esme as she'd reached out to him. Her fingers had glassed over his back, he was already on his way down the frosty steps toward the thoroughfare.
Believing himself aberrant.
"I'm so wrong," his voice had corroded.
His eyes, when he'd stomped away, looking back, were lit with red as if the Earth's core resided therein.
He'd broken down; I'd seen him sob like that before… with no tears, just an immortal punishment that would never be solaced, centuries of solitude unfolding before him.
Equally macabre and just, the first edition of The Pied Piperhe'd gifted to Esme held Edward's elegant script inside, notating the date of Charles Evanson's death at his hands. Inside though, where a clover was pressed, in the middle, there was a more dedicated verse to Esme's babe, Annaliese Carolla: In life she would have been fair and lovely, in her death, she brought me a mother. In mourning, I thank her.
Always his friend, Esme had soothed his brow of filigreed snowflakes turning to ice crystals beneath her touch and brought him inside.
Every misdeed begged retribution.
Now, Edward was nearing that breaking point again.
Most recently, he'd come to me as he used to, in those early decades. Amongst all those countless sleepless nights we'd survived by planning a way to find his watery vision of Isabella.
This time it was After Bella. A.B.
"She's anxious." He'd pulled up the club chair and tore across his face.
I'd been remiss. I'd allowed him to think I never thought of Isabella in all those doomed years between then and now. It had been a gross miscalculation on my part to believe he'd move on if I neglected to feed his reverie.
A wieldy hurt waved up my spine and spread around to my front to land exactly where my ventricles used to push out blood when in a living organ.
I rubbed my chest, observing Edward doing the same.
"And you?" I'd queried—although I loved the young woman and the way she brought life into Edward, my responsibility lay toward him.
Fetally, he'd circled in upon himself with hands below his knees, his chest to his thighs.
The murk of his timbre was darker than ever, "She cannot be mine, she cannot be mine, she cannot be mine."
Believing every word he uttered to be truth, I'd patted his head and maintained my stoicism to deliver, "Yes. Yes, she can. We will find a way."
I'd depart with the truth I knew, just to see hope shine like a lantern from his eyes.
He'd stood and swayed and swooped under the low Victorian doorway, "I'm going to see her now."
Pressing him away with my hands to air, I'd lingered over the subtle respiration left in his absence, his presence. As if my son had taken his lover's body inside him.
Bending forward, pressing away the too-human cotton wool inside my brain, remembering that Edward had gone to Bella that night, that Wednesday night, and they'd returned, and they'd both been at rights, I reached blindly and grasped a book, its fine leather and tooled gilt like Braille to my fingers.
I reached back to my shoulders where the pain spread like a virus I shouldn't know.
I needed to figure this out.
A ray of light from the long hall punctured my library and gave way to Esme's diaphanous form.
Her walk upstairs had been slow, guided as if by a wake. Her footsteps had taken her past my door and to our bedroom. The sigh of cloth coming away from her body had gained my attention.
As stunning as a goddess, always, we'd aged together. Though our flesh never showed it, our burdens did.
My coquettish lover, my wife, the mother of this clapped-together fairground, sideshow troupe, Esme raised her arm to the pilaster so the side of her robe slid off her shoulder, inviting me.
Deep of voice and deceptive of tone, she demanded, "Put your books away now, Carlisle."
I attempted to ignore the manner in which her short skirting layered lustily over the thighs that wrapped about me each night.
There was a solution… I just had to find it, for Edward. For Bella.
Her fingertips deft in my hair, caresses that made me cry for more, lean back, ball my hands to the armrests, so neglectful under her stroke I let the encyclopedia flitter back over the three hundred pages I'd memorized in the last twenty minutes.
"You need this," she opened the ribbon and let it loose from three hoops, a corkscrew of silk to the Oriental rug beneath her bare feet.
A low-hanging breast in bared ivory, a perfectly lifted nipple in rose and camellia. Bottom heavy and luscious, this was a mound meant for sex, made to make life, to suckle and nip and suck and… God, only she made me say it and think it…, "Fuck."
I moaned inside the sumptuous hill, biting my lips and frowning, she always made me feel so out of control, beyond my wits, in need, on fire, so full of desire I could eat her raw.
"Some way or other… he'll be fine… you think he came all this way just to lose her?" She cupped my jaw and rimmed my lips, teasing me with her tongue and silencing vision with her sloping bosom, "You think I don't know how you feel?" Esme pressed my palm to the niche I'd carved out of her. "He's my son, my brother… he's our firstborn." Fingers softly plaited my hair and then held hard, "He's going to live, like we couldn't."
Pleading with my breath, I howled.
We weren't going to make it to the bedroom.
Lifting Esme, I escaped through window; the splat of light rain made starlit ingresses over her nude body.
The river widened, burbled… the stream behind our house lived.
Bubbles tickled my ankles, calves and thighs while I waded in. Her hands unbuckled me furiously.
Knee deep in the creek, the river foamed like wild horses unharnessed with our depravity to have one another.
To forget.
To live.
Esme javelined away, to the misting waterfall drowning out my roar.
She smirked, licked her lips, placed her hands on her hips and widened her legs in invitation.
I sprang out of my clothes and towards her, beneath the neat and naughty cascade of water I feel to her.
Fathomed the leagues beneath her feet.
Her hair was golden brown and perfect like fragrant sunflowers.
The clap of water splashed, and I dashed lower and I wanted only to know her.
My wife, my mate, she who had given everything up and jumped.
The lump in my throat closed in and pounded, not for blood... for love.
For her love.
Her.
And love.
I ran. Always, in my head, without her touch on my arm, I ran.
Boiled.
Broiled.
I ran from the Lord and pleaded, and I was on my knees and the stream and the pool and the fall, and I fell and I fell and I prayed, like I used to.
Esme, nude, a beatitude, a constellation of nebulous nakedness called to me.
Power.
Howl and growl and she held me down and lifted me up, and I'd been nothing, just nothing without her.
Ever.
Rain, water, chords and songs and simplicity and minute looks and, "I need you."
"I need you so hard."
"I need you now."
"Don't run, we did this."
"I died, died again at your hands."
The rock blasted apart, and the cascading water bled and ran all over me, and her heart stopped and it murdered me.
Her heart had stopped at my hand, and it had killed me in its divinity.
My Lord, he gave me up.
Gave me up and stomped me down and I was part of the ground, and I was the mountain's glacial melt and I yelled and held and took, and gave; and my love, my woman, Esme...
She ringed down in her carillon voice and her toffee eyes, and her powerful hips slipped like a prow to me and I was in her and all...
Mizzen.
Muddled.
Clear and mast.
And mating.
And the strings of her legs and thighs were wide and then tight and nothing moved. But I moved, and Esme was imbued with that diamond, charcoal, dusty, glittery light.
And she was me.
And I was her.
And we were here.
And I was in.
And she was holding me.
And I was trying to yell, scream.
It boiled... her and me.
Hot, cold and dead and fire and gone.
Long gone.
And new.
Us.
I thrust and cried and held and begged and plied and lunged and fucked and tasted and took and gave and under and in and over and in and licked and cupped and ended... ended... we... we... we were ended.
And just beginning.
And she accepted all of me.
In the jerk of my hips and the solder of her scream, in the rough of my cumming inside her.
Wet, pleasantly bared, clothes left shredded on the riverbed to be tumbled like gems down to the ocean, we lagged against one another through the crunch of growing sleet.
"There's more. She'll save you. She'll save you again."
"What?"
Inside, I locked the doors. Just a human notion. If one of our breed wanted in, a turn of key wouldn't stop them.
"Hmmm?" Had I spoken?
Everyone else was awake, of course, at their own devices. I didn't listen too hard, just enough to know that three other couples were somewhere about the house.
"You said, 'She'll save you'.'"
I placed my forefinger to her mouth, the enunciation from her lips gave me to understand Eliza Masen's celestial annunciation, "Eliza had said that, when she'd died. I'd always though she was referring to Edward and Isabella." I took Esme to our room and turned down the lamps, wishing candles were still in style so I could watch the flame's shadow dance across her body.
Hunkering over her, stroking her face and readying to make love again, I knew, "She'd been talking to me. Of you… to me."
In bed with mounds of coverings on top of us, we didn't feign sleep, but rejoiced in the silence that begat only murmurs, muffled half-thoughts, limbs parting and sighing voices, endearments in the dead dark.
~~ll~~
I came to from a glorious respite with a start.
My son. My only son.
Knocking, pounding, pummeling, beating.
Edward!
He'd come to life with Bella.
But he'd never be able to have her as I did Esme.
My boy, he'd entered our family, finally, with her at his side.
Yet, inside, he was torn through, still and again, and I couldn't reassure him.
Pounding, shredding, tearing, knocking.
My heart?
Esme sat up, the sand-colored linen tucked under her breasts.
Like a man, I was helpless but to finger her budding nipples.
"Not now, Carlisle," Esme scorned.
This pounding wasn't my shaft, this beating-screaming-crying wasn't our pulses… it was footsteps running in an un-rhythmed key, it was a voice keening.
The door blew open and banged back on its spritely hinges.
Framing Isabella.
Wrapped in a sheet, just like Esme.
"He's fucked up," she announced, the blanched landscape of her face a pained montage.
I wheeled back from her curse until Esme pulled me back up, "Get used to it, lover."
Strong of body and intention, she stood.
She looked back, admonishing me.
I scurried into my pants, under the covers, "Where is he?"
"Bedroom." Bella was wild, worried, wide-eyed, frantically motioning us to follow her.
I raced ahead and was at the side of his bed before Bella even walked down the hall.
I called back to her, "He's not well."
Her tone both scared and confident, "I already told you that."
There were small heaps of black dust beneath his eyelashes, closed in repose. There was the mask of clammy sweat over his brow.
He jerked and tossed off the sheets, and Bella replaced them, pressing her palms to his chest and whispering, "Carlisle and Esme are here now."
In an unawake state, his forearm wound around Bella, and his color tainted back to normality, his seizures ceased.
His eyelids fluttered, his voice sounded drunken, "Mmmm, okay, love… Isabella."
Fright fought with ownership in her own glance to me.
I could only agree; this wasn't right. He looked too much like that young man carved inside out by the arching agony of influenza.
"I'll be in my study," I stated. A harsh decree that made Esme take my hand and place it into Edward's lax palm. I recoiled from his touch. She pulled me back, curling our fingers together around the clench his fist made as another perplexing convulsion shuddered through his formidable body. On the other side of the bed, Bella begged me with eyes so soft, knowing… weary and wise, and her whisper, "Not now, Carlisle. Not already. Not so soon." Her knees met the floor and she tenderly stroked his ratcheted shoulder through the seizing until he relaxed again with a groan, turning towards her.
To anyone who would listen, Bella chose her words, "Please. Not now."
Leaning over, I tapped her back, asking for her attention, "No. It won't be now, Bella. I promise."
Standing, I faltered. Bracing myself, I moved through something that was called life, reaching out to bat the ghosts and legacies and legions whose invisible gargoyle and ghoulish forms sat about the chamber in wait.
At the doorway, Emmett lowered his head and punched his knuckles to his eyes.
Rosalie was on her haunches just outside, a huddled mass of loss.
Alice paced up and down, giving no answers, but meeting my eyes and impelling me on.
Jasper sat at the bottom step of the staircase leading up to my den. The clarity of his wounds this night was as stunning as a meteor shower on skin. His lips held a divisive frown, but the amber of his eyes was brilliant with empathy. He shook as another cry came out from Edward's room, but he stood and clapped my back.
Esme had bested me upstairs.
Only she was half smiling.
I sank to the wall, "What?"
"This is just the beginning, my gentle man."
~Well, then. We're nearly there, ladies! Let me know what you think~
Excerpt from Dr. Krauss can be found here (with thanks to Rowan Moon who passed this on to me):
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I'm taking part in the Countdown to Halloween II: One Haunted Hallows Eve, creepy and sexy oneshots will be posted (one for each day in October) starting the 1st. So put it on alert! It's not a contest, just some fun, and posts will be anonymous so y'all are gonna have to see if you can guess my occultist offering ;) www(DOT)fanfiction(DOT)net/s/6326403/1/ link is also on my profile.
Several of my stories are up for Immortal Sin Awards at the Darkest Temptation blog. Voting ends 10-15. darksper(DOT)blogspot(DOT)com/2010/10/voting-is-now-open-for-immortal-sin(DOT)html Best Dark Fem (RWaC—Alice), Craziest MoFo (RWaC—Caius) & Tigresse, Best Darkward (Surrender, yay!), Creative Kill (Tigresse), Death Scene (Tigresses).