Chapter 41
I told my parents I wasn't returning to college. It didn't go well. I stayed in my room, my mother outside my door like a stalker, and I could practically hear her hands wringing together in worry before she knocked.
"Bella? Are you hungry?"
Edward loomed over me from his spot on my ceiling. The Rolling Stone cover with the fedora. The one that fell on me one night in my sleep and scared the shit out of me.
"No." Not for food. I wanted whiskey and cigarettes and tattoos. Snide comments and whispered affection.
My finger traced the now forgotten cut under my eye. Barely a blush of a mark. How I willed for it to come back, to mar me forever so I'd have proof he'd been real.
"You cannot stay this way. Not going to school, sulking in your room. We have no idea what's going on with you," she said, the end fading into nothingness.
"Neither do I."
"What? What did you say? I didn't hear you." Muffled through the locked door. A hand on the knob, trying to turn.
I rolled over and tucked my hand under my head, my fingers shadowing the spot that still burned on my cheek. Closed my eyes. Dreamed of Edward.
His face. His touch. His beautiful anger when it wasn't directed towards me.
Smiling, playful Edward jumping into my bumper car and not caring as he kissed the fuck out of me.
Sad, introspective Edward playing some melody while staring out the bus window, lost in his tormented thoughts.
Simply Edward, teaching me guitar on a dirty picnic table. Patient and kind and approving.
He was so many things, so many good, kind things despite the nasty edge that laid thinly over everything. An edge that would slice through you like a deep, ghostly papercut you couldn't see at first until the blood seeped out slowly.
How I welcomed the sting just so I'd feel something.
"Your father will be home soon," my mother said. I'd forgotten she was out there.
Forgot anyone existed but the girl Edward Cullen destroyed.
