Intox 36

My mood was subdued when I met Carlisle outside. I felt like crying but couldn't allow myself the luxury. I'm supposed to be getting better, after all. Tears are counterproductive.

I was silent during the car ride home, thinking how lucky I am to call this place home. It's not a trailer on the outskirts of Dallas or a crumbling loft in the bad side of town or the mildewing couch I slept on when I lived with Peter. It doesn't have the negativity or the beatings or the manipulative bitches that those other places have. What it does have is almost indefinable, but it something I'm not qualified to experience.

I was glad to see Alice, but we'd both had a trying day. She looked pale, subdued and withdrawn in a way that doesn't happen often. After a dinner (leftovers) that neither of us ate, she disappeared without a word – presumably into the trees; she enjoyed the tallest branches as her quiet place much like I did.

Edward and I cleaned the table, put away the still-edible bits of food. He washed the dishes; I dried them. I worked in a preoccupied silence until he noticed.

"Alice?"

I nodded. "She looks like a ghost." I hated that, in my self absorption, I hadn't noticed something was wrong.

"Don't beat yourself up over something you didn't do," Edward said. He placed a vice grip on my shoulders. "Okay?"

I shrugged him off and finished drying the dishes. Though my exterior was even, the cogs were turning in my head. Trying to figure out where this'd come from, what I'd done wrong or who had said something and where the fuck I'd been during it.

I picked out a movie to watch, one of our favorites, and went to my room to clean and wait. When she came back inside, she'd suggest a movie and we'd curl up and watch it like always.

I changed the sheets – they smelled like smoke and sweat – and cleaned all the ashes, paper shreds, coins, stray buttons off my floor. I opened the window because the room was stale, like three-day old cigarettes and filmy water. It made me realize just how filthy I lived. My room stunk.

I dropped to my belly and cleaned under my bed. It was such a travesty that I was enveloped by the garbage beneath my own bed: dirty socks, shoes, books that I'd long since paid the library for… I scooted deeper and found pills, masses of scattered pills without identity in the dim light. I gathered them up, over twenty of them, and stuffed them into my pocket for future analysis just as Alice ghosted into the room and peered under the bed skirt at me.

"Movie?"

"I was just cleaning. The movie's in the player," I said quickly and extracted myself from underneath the bed.

Alice started the movie and curled up with one of my blankets. She looked as if she'd been crying, but neither of us brought it up. This time was purely for recovery, for movies and being comforted by silent understanding. We never talked.

Both of us fell asleep mid-movie.

I dreamed an old dream, a recurring dream, a dream of memory that reminded me of the old days...

A shadow crossed before my eyes and settled in my peripheral vision. From a distance I heard the soft denim on denim; it hardly registered that I was feeling it as well. My lips tingled and danced as her lips breezed across them. I felt my shallow breath hesitate and tried to follow the sensation but was forced back. I followed the ghostly sensations as they trailed down my neck and chest, sending shivers ahead of them in little shockwaves. A moan crossed my lips when I recognized the rick brown hue of her hair; when she lifted her gaze I knew that we had made a mistake in coming here.

Maria's skin was paler than it had been when I was sixteen and she eighteen. Her lithe body had become fuller and harder; the control she exuded all those years ago has been magnified since. It was hidden behind her eyes, dark and sharp, and in the slow bat of her long lashes. She was not seductive – not by normal conventions – but I was never been able to resist once her eyes locked on mine.

My body stiffened at her touch. I reached across the gritty floor with my free arm, trying to feel for the form beside me. I had come here with her, pulled her along into this lair as we searched for our high together. Though I could not see her through my heavy eyelids, I knew she was there, just inside my reach and outside of my thoughts. It was a last ditch effort before I succumbed to Maria's power, and I lost sight of the past, the pain, the panic in the rush of her body straddling my hips.

Maria kissed my lips again and, without waiting for me to respond, pressed her body into mine.

My head spun, but I wondered briefly what was happening as she won my body over. We had come here to score, of course. She had wanted to see it and try it – to experience life like me – because some weeks ago the proverbial beans had been spilled. She knew about my past. There had been a fight in which many people had been cursed and many gods blasphemed; at the end of it, she had won the battle and come to this industrial hellhole where I had once lived. She had wanted in some way for me to do this. She knew that Maria stilled lived here.

Maria's hands skimmed the leather belt over my left arm as we kissed. I hissed and tried to sit as she cinched it, if only to move with her, but was pushed back lightly. Maria laughed, threw her head back, and swayed her hips over me just to push me on. We both knew where my blood was rushing.

My body flushed. She smiled and readied the syringe, stopping just before it pierced my skin. I groaned, wanting, needing, anticipating… sex and drugs and shallow breaths on the edge of temptation, but Maria controlled all of that and now she looked angry.

"Why? Why did you bring her here? This is my memory." The cigarette between her lips smoldered dangerously. The transformation was terrifying.

She turned my head and I looked into Bella's half-opened eyes. I recognized the glazed look, the quick sweat of an overdose, and stared, not really surprised. This was Maria's world, after all.

"Now you don't get anything." She was disgusted. Once this happened, there was no begging forgiveness. No chance of getting a hit. No reason for her to tease any longer.

She sighed, exhaling the smoke with a sorrowful shake of her head as if she had no choice. My body tensed, remembering and understanding the déjà vu with grim finality. She pressed the cigarette butt into my collarbone as she kissed me. I couldn't even scream.

I lurched upright in bed, grabbing my shoulder reflexively. By God, it had felt so real. She had been an image of junk thirst, but her mind was still terrifying. Maria was still the essence of terror in my heart.

I braced myself, fearing and screaming inside and wondering where Ali was. My fingers brushed her hair, damp, warm. In a second my dream had been forgotten. I felt her forehead. Feverish.

"Ali, wake up!"

Her nightmares raged through her body like a holy fire. I shook her slight frame before remembering the lights. My hands were clumsy, nearly knocking over the lamp before I could turn it on. Light would wake her sometimes – I'd learned that by experience over the years.

Her fear was palpable – or was it my fear of isolation? She was alone in her dream world, and I had her in person, at least, if not essence. I shouldn't complain, but she wouldn't wake and loneliness had never suited us.

"Alice," I whispered in a sing-song way. "Wake up, Alice, it's bright out!"

She moaned and tossed, her eyes fluttering. I pleaded again, going too far in holding her. Restraints. She would wake in a holy terror, but she would wake.

If my hand hadn't been covering her mouth, Ali's scream would have woken the house. She came alive in my arms, a writhing tigress with hysterical sobs choking her roars. I felt selfish to wake her in such a way, which I had learned not to do the very day we met, but when she bit me I recovered myself.

"Alice, it's me – Jasper." I released her and she stopped struggling. For several minutes she sat gasping for breath in my lap while I sat motionless and afraid to speak. It had been a bad dream.

"J-jasper?"

"I'm here," I whispered.

"… sorry I upset you."

"Nothing you could do would upset me. I just couldn't wake you. I panicked."

She curled up against me as her muscles began to allow movement. "You had a nightmare, too," she said.

I nodded. "Yeah, but it was a thing of the past."

It was a rare moment, an odd one. It was neither sad nor fearful. We simply sat together against the headboard of my bed in silence. Neither of us was able to sleep, the dream we'd just experienced still playing in the foreground of our minds.

I felt an inexplicable need to lighten the mood. Maybe I could sleep if she was happy. "I think," I said after that half hour, "that I'm hungry."

She stirred hopefully. "Really?"

"Yep!" I brushed her aside and hopped out of bed, barely groaning in the process. My body healed, in some aspects, too quickly for my own good.

"Ready?" I motioned for her to climb onto my back. "You'd better hold on tight, spider monkey!"

She giggled and hopped up for a free ride to the kitchen.

I set her down on the counter, flicked on the light switch and opened all the cupboards. I dug for jars and cans in the deep shelves and came away with a spread for the center island.

"What do you want to eat? Not hungry, eh? Well, we'll just start the recipe with peanut butter, then."

I stormed the refrigerator and pillaged the drawers, coming away with a smorgasbord that I laid out across the island. I tore open a loaf of bread and spread the slices across the countertop, unscrewed a jar of peanut butter, slathered it thick across the moist bread.

"Damn, I wish we had salami," I mused, holding out the peanut butter spoon to Alice.

"Jazz!"

"Wha- c'mon, Ali. I don't eat nothin' but rabbit food. This ain't so bad for me."

"Well, it "ain't" healthy… it looks like a sloppy mess to me," she said with a smirk.

I grinned and cracked open a jar of marshmallow fluff that Esme'd been saving for Emmett's birthday. It whipped up easily. I globbed it on top and tossed the jar to Alice, who caught it with a squeak.

"I'm going to make you eat one of these," I laughed.

She wrinkled her nose in distaste and watched as I drizzled honey and chocolate sauce over the fluff. "Ugh, at least put something that once grew on those."

I diced a banana and smooshed the bits into the mess. "Satisfied?"

"Hardly."

Ali wrapped her limbs around me, and I carried both her and my tray of finished delights to the corner table. I poured us two insanely large glasses of milk, set plates and sat down like a victorious king.

"How've you been?" I asked, taking my first bite with gusto and tossing her a sandwich. She complied reluctantly after I rolled my hand for her to continue.

"I've been okay… more or less," she said and began to explain before I could clear my mouth to badger her about it. As I devoured my tray of sandwiches, she updated me on her upcoming art exhibit in Port Angeles, which was still a month away, and the nightmares that still plagued her.

"Alice, maybe you should talk to someone about your dreams." God knows, it wouldn't be me.

"I talk to you-"

"-about them, but I still don't understand… you're so vague… and do you really want me to sort through your emotions? All I can pick up is fear."

She picked silently at her food. I'd ruined the situation, upset the precarious balance we'd been playing at, as soon as she took my words so harshly. Or had I said them harshly? I seethed internally.

Then I asked her about art, and she was off on a tangent about the virtues of unprimed canvas and techniques she used in charcoaling that added sensuality to a flat medium. I even got her to bring out some pieces (unfinished, she claimed).

We were still in the kitchen, sketching and laughing when Esme interrupted us two hours later.