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Chapter 29

~Bella~


The moment my feet touched the grass, I ran.

I felt like I was always running, always running away. From my house. From my mom. From my reality. From him.

For the first time in my entire life, I felt like I was running in the wrong direction.

I wanted to run back, wanted so badly to run back to him, but the knife and that devastated look on his face kept me going. I knew enough about that kind of wreckage to recognize that now wasn't the time for me to wish myself back into his good graces. He needed space. He needed to throw things. More things. He needed to rage, scream, or cry, and I didn't think he'd do any of that in front of me.

The shed felt darker than normal—stiff, as though we were all holding our breath together. A flash of Emmett's face in my head again and I clutched my chest, panting from my sprint across the yard. A mess—that's what they called people like him. A downright mess.

And here I was, a dirty smudge on pristine snow.

I mindlessly set up to develop, an act that had become comfortingly normal in the last few weeks. We'd run through most of my film, and I searched for an undeveloped roll, coming up empty. The box we had used to store all the film canisters was lightweight and empty. I scanned the workspace, stacks of photo paper, and bottles of stop bath before I spotted it.

A film canister, set high on a shelf, all by itself.

I didn't even bother to look at the shots. Just clipped the film and started dipping, my heart still aching something fierce, hands desperate for something to do.

I hung the first one up on the line, a messy smudge of nothing. Some might call it a waste, but I stood staring at it for a long while, thinking about that digital camera. The one that had become such a problem child. I should take it and bury it with the gun, for all it had brought me. Sure, I could delete photos that might be deemed wasted, but there was some strange sort of beauty in a mistaken shot. There were so many colors there, the fade of something moving too fast for the camera to keep up with.

The next shot caught my heart up in my throat.

It was him. Head in the flowers, hand on his chest, that smile on his face—the easy, beautiful one. Caught unaware and in the moment.

I'd forgotten. It felt like years ago—entire lifetimes—those photos I'd tried to snap of him in the grass back when this was new and he was harder, and I was still lingering along the line of curiosity and self-doubt. A few more moments, and I had a chaotic tumble of shots strung on a wire. They were mostly of my palm, snippets of my smile, dashes of my cheeks. An eye. Swatches of my hair. All through the maze of my blurry fingers, reaching out to stop him.

A bunch of fractured pieces of me, all in a row.

I couldn't fix him. I knew this. He was broken in places that stayed broken. In ways that couldn't be mended, and I couldn't even wish for enough wishes to set him free. His smile lines were really ruptured fault lines. His scars were just crippled bridges and damaged roads, and I had a minefield to make it across before I could reach him.

I didn't know what would happen then.

I knew what was coming, even as I snipped and dunked and hung the next strip of film. The photos he'd taken of me, camera perched gingerly on his stomach like he couldn't bear looking through it, a single finger balancing the button like he couldn't stand touching it.

Clarity ached like a heart attack, I thought.

A tight clench around my ribs that felt like how dying must feel. I'd never seen myself like this. The way he captured me. Even without looking. Even without touching, foregoing all the adjustments he'd taught me, skipping the slight fondle into perfection. Even without all that, he'd done something magical. Framed me, lit me, imprinted me onto the face of eternity like I was something much bigger than just some girl in some prairie wearing little more than flowers.

There was a shot of my face—all dusky profile—the fawn tugged close, the sky blazing sunset. Another of my hands, fingers threading through fur. The slow, sloping curve of my back, my dress pooled at my hips. The curl of my foot and the lace hem of the dress sprawling through the grass.

The curve of my breast.

The corner of my mouth.

My heart clenched tighter. I couldn't stand it anymore.

I tore the pictures off the line, clutching them to my chest, and flung us all out of the shed.

He was slouched on the porch, feet on the steps, head in his hands. A bottle sat beside him, something I'd watched him slowly nurse for weeks from the single cut crystal tumbler, forgotten in the back corner of a cabinet, etched in flowers. There had been a set of them, his whiskey and her gin, sweating on the porch railings every afternoon.

There was no crystal tumbler tonight. Just the bottle and him, barefoot and slumped.

I tiptoed two steps toward him, stopping at the bottom step with a clench in my gut like I was edging up to a lion—not sure if he'd purr into my neck or rip my face off.


Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB