In the weeks that follow, Carlisle takes to appearing after school hours have concluded, entering the one-room schoolhouse to find her erasing blackboards or preparing a reading lesson for the following day. Eventually, townspeople started to notice, women especially.
She has started receiving dirty looks quite regularly from a few of her students' mothers.
She can see a few nosey ones milling outside the windows now, whispering to each other as Carlisle strolls in.
"I think a portion of Washburn's female population is beginning to hate me," Esme chuckles, cleaning up the clutter spilled across her desk. She's substituting for Mrs. Anders throughout the next few days and has made herself at home a little too easily.
The confusion that claims his face amuses her.
"You really don't know how attractive you are, do you?" she grins, inclining her head towards the door. "You can't hear them?"
"If I concentrate, I can. But my senses are typically attuned to you, dulls everything else," he answers factually, stealing her bag for her and slinging it over his shoulder. "Besides, I'm not really interested in what they have to say."
"Likewise," she hums, accepting the hand he extends to her, letting him lead the way out of the classroom and into the town streets.
People have seen them together and it's equal parts thrilling and anxiety-inducing. Pride blooms in her chest to have Carlisle at her side, to be seen as his partner. But for over a year now, she has lived in constant fear, always looking over her shoulder in fear of finding Charles there. The attention unnerves her in that way, knowing that one of these random faces may somehow expose her to a fate that's been chasing her for four years.
Before she fell from the cliff, she reconciled that if she didn't kill herself, Charles eventually would.
That idea hasn't changed.
"What's the matter, love?" Carlisle inquires, squeezing the hand encased in his.
"Nothing," she lies, pointlessly.
"Your body is tense, your heart rate is up, and your lips are pursing in that way they do when you're concentrating a little too hard-"
"Okay," she sighs, shooting him a withering look, but she won't lie. She finds his attention to detail, to her, rather endearing. "Do you remember how I asked you the other night about leaving?" she recalls, lowering her head instinctively, letting the caramel curtain of her hair hide her face.
"Ah, yes, an eventful evening," he murmurs, stroking the bones of her metacarpal with his thumb. "I believe I answered you, though."
"You did, but I didn't follow up with my question of when you thought you would leave here," she clarifies, feeling his gaze on her.
"Do you want to leave here soon, Esme?"
She bites her bottom lip, trains her eyes ahead as they near the edge of the town square. They'll follow a gravel road for a little bit before they duck into the woods, disappear from view and deep into the forest where she resides like a modern day Snow White.
Except no seven dwarves to accompany her, just two vampires.
"I don't want to leave," she sighs. "But I'm afraid I've been here too long, left too many clues in my wake that Charles could follow."
When she steals a glance at him from the corner of her eye, she catches the steel of his jaw squaring, the predatory glint to his eye.
He would kill for her. He's never outright said it, but she is inherently aware that Carlisle Cullen would go against his every moral value of helping the human race if another ever put her in danger.
"Even if he does show up, he will not live long enough to lay a hand to you."
"No." Esme stops, tugging on his hand so he'll face her. She can see the quiet fury that brims in the depths of his eyes, the way they darken into a molten orange any time her husband is mentioned. "I don't want that, I don't want it to come to that."
"He doesn't deserve your mercy," Carlisle mutters, but Esme is already shaking her head, placing her hand to his chest. Where that wonderful heart should reside.
"It's not about mercy, not on him. Carlisle, I don't want you to have to live with what I know you'd do to him," she whispers, aware that they're beginning to garner more stares. She probably should have waited until they were in the privacy of the trees, the haven of her cottage in the woods, to have this conversation. "I don't want it to be because of me."
He covers the hand pressed to his sternum, drags it up to his lips for a kiss he presses to the tips of her fingers.
"I will always do my best to do right by you," he promises her, seeming to sense their surroundings. Annoyance flickers fleetingly across his features and she wonders if he's caught some of the words typically whispered about her, about him. "But I won't let any harm befall you either."
"If I could protect you the way you protect me," she sighs, using their tangled hands to pull him forward, resume their retreat from town "I'm sure I'd feel the same."
"I'll talk to Edward tonight, we can begin planning our next move," Carlisle assures her. "I think he's grown tired of the Northeast as it is."
They walk in silence for a few minutes, her heart heavy against her sternum.
"I'm sorry about this," she murmurs, the shame flushing in her chest. She doesn't want to leave, doesn't want to abandon the only place her son was ever able to exist, doesn't want to force Edward and Carlisle to prematurely uproot the lives they built here.
"Esme." They're nearing the treeline now and Carlisle checks behind them before he leads her into the embrace of the brush, the shade of the branches. He stalls once they are deep into the forest and then cups her face in his hands, looks at her as if she's the entire world to him. It makes her knees weak. "You are my life now. You're family, to Edward and me, but you are also… you're everything I've ever longed for in the last 250 years. I just want you, safe and happy and with me."
She arches on her toes to kiss him before he can see her cry.
He cradles her skull, skims gentle fingers through her hair.
"How long do you need?" he mumbles into her mouth. "To leave this place?"
"Not long," she breathes, dropping a kiss to his chin before she lowers back to the balls of her feet. "I'd like to finish out the week as a teacher. Otherwise, I have no commitments to adhere to."
Carlisle nods, stroking his thumbs along the delicate shells of her ears. "Wherever you would like to go, say the word."
"No, Carlisle," she huffs, pushing on his chest to send him walking backwards. She just wants to go home, to lay in her bed with his body beside hers. "I'm already forcing you to leave, I'm not going to choose where we go."
"Fine," he grins, dragging her along with him until he seems to tire of her human pace, sweeping her up in his arms. Her arms loop naturally around his neck, the smile cracking her lips open without her consent. "I'll just look through your geography books, find the marked pages."
She gasps. "That's cheating."
The air around them suddenly turns to a rush of wind, a blur of seconds, and then he's standing in her doorway, carrying her past the threshold.
"I'd like to think of it more as an incentive," he muses, heading straight for her bedroom, the small bookshelf in the corner.
"Incentive, huh?"
Esme cranes her neck to reach his jaw with her mouth, scraping her teeth along the bone. He stutters to a halt in the middle of her room, so she continues, trailing slow, open mouthed kisses along his throat.
"Esme," he groans, fingers tightening around her thigh, but she merely hums.
They've kissed, they've made out in her bed wrapped around each other, but there is always a limit, always a boundary that neither are willing to test. She knows he has personal values in place and he knows she has a history that has her involuntarily flinching if he touches the wrong spot.
But when Carlisle places her on the bed, lets her pull him down on top of her, she forgets why they ever had some unspoken boundary in the first place.
Her hands are in his hair, ruining any order to the perfect strands of blonde, tangling to tug him closer. Esme shifts, coils her leg at his thigh, arranging her body to be slotted perfectly into place underneath his. She's never wanted someone like this, wanted a man so much that her heart was searing in her chest, the blood in her veins running molten like lava.
He kisses her like every time is the last, with desperation and adoration all rolled into one work of art. Her spine arcs to be closer, to feel the breath of his chest solid and reassuring against hers.
His hips jerk into hers, bones colliding harshly.
"Esme," he murmurs, his hands roaming her sides with reverence, strumming along her ribcage as though her body is an instrument only he knows how to play. "We can't."
"Carlisle," she echoes, opening her eyes to see his intently staring down at her. His hair is tousled from her fingers, fingers she skims down his neck to toy with the collar of his shirt. He dips his forehead to rest against hers, his breath cool on her lips. "Please."
"I can't, love," he whispers, regret lacing the words as he kisses her, dusting his lips to the corner of her mouth, the bone of her cheek, the ridge of her brow. "I could break you, so easily."
"You wouldn't," she argues halfheartedly, palming his cheek.
He sighs down at her, brushing back the layers of her hair.
"Esme, your body is like porcelain compared to mine. If I lost control for even a moment, I could seriously injure you and I just… I won't."
"I make you feel out of control, Dr. Cullen?" she teases, her words thick with want she has yet to calm. "Edward keeps saying it's what you're notorious for."
Carlisle narrows his gaze on her, trails the hand at her side lower to grip her waist, drag the cradle of her body hard against his, letting her feel everything.
The gasp catches in her throat.
"Does it feel like I have control around you?" he husks, his breath as warm as she's ever felt when it caresses her ear.
He releases her hip, allowing her a little breathing space. She closes her eyes, tries to force her lungs into a steady rhythm.
"It makes me nervous when your heart beats this fast." He runs his knuckles along her sternum, between the swells of her breasts.
A laugh escapes her, breathless and light. "As long as it's beating, it'll always beat like that for you."
Carlisle quirks his brow at her. "Then I will learn to get used to it. Since it will be beating for a long while."
"I've thought about it, you know." Esme flattens the hand at her chest, letting his palm rest over her throbbing heart. "You've waited your entire life for me?"
"Esme," he chides, already predicting her next words. She simply arches an eyebrow in response, dares him to argue.
"I may not have the years you do, but the feeling is mutual. Why do you think I harbored a crush on my childhood doctor for ten years?"
He huffs, shakes his head at her. "It's - it isn't the same. I won't damn you like this."
"It isn't being damned if it means a lifetime with you."
Esme uses the leg still tangled in his to nudge him onto his side, her body following suit. They lie there, face to face on the same pillow.
"I love you," she whispers, trailing fingertips down his cheek, tracing the angles of his beautiful features. "I want eternity with you."
Carlisle bands his arms around her, holds her as tight as he'll ever allow. She holds him back, buries her face in his neck.
It is not her desire to become a vampire, to live forever - no, she just wants to stay where she belongs. She just wants to prevent the idea of growing old, growing apart in a way that love cannot stop, and leaving him to walk the earth alone all over again.
Esme rests her flushed cheek against shoulder, feels the chill of his skin soothe her heated flesh.
She won't press him about it further tonight, but she won't let it go either.
"One way or another," Carlisle murmurs into her ear with that soothing voice of his. "We'll have a lifetime, Esme."
She sighs, knowing they have different ideas on that front, but he's caressing her spine, cupping the nape of her neck in the way that always makes her feel anchored, and she lets her eyes fall closed.