Bodies

Early Fall, 1922
Ashland, WI

A wide band of sunshine bathed the entire bed in light. It picked up every aspect of her husband's perfection: his high cheekbones and sharp jaw, the broad shoulder blades which gave way to a strong chest and an intricately defined abdomen. It glinted off the wiry, dark blond hair which smattered across his pectoral muscles and snaked its way down his stomach to the thick curls between his legs, where her hand had been a moment before.

Even now, nearly a year into their marriage, Esme still had the sense that she did not deserve this. Did not deserve this beautiful man, did not deserve his gentle smile, did not deserve the sensuous way his body moved under her fingers.

She certainly did not deserve to stand here, gazing at him naked.

The sun made her skin shine, too. She'd clutched part of the sheet to her body when she'd risen after their coupling, pulling it from Carlisle and draping it over her midsection. It didn't hide much, and she was again struck by the fact that strictly, it didn't need to—Carlisle lay regarding her with the same placid contentment with which she regarded him.

Esme stepped more fully into the sunbeam, allowing the sheet to slide from her hands and puddle at her feet. She heard a tiny intake of breath behind her and let a smile grace her lips. Her hands fell to their most natural resting position: over her abdomen, just as they had in her final months as a human. When she could feel her son moving; sometimes the faintest flutter against her palm and other times a kick with such force it would cause her breath to catch.

Her hand remembered. Her body remembered. Her mind, however, did not. It had been Carlisle who had broken into the county registrar's office and looked up the certificate of live birth, filled out at the hospital at the same time as the certificate of death because she'd given birth at the boardinghouse and so almost no one had known her child even existed until he was hours away from not existing any longer. It had been Carlisle who had told her his name. She mouthed it now, stroking a hand across where he once had been, when she once had been human. The stretch marks were gone; the purpled veins in her legs utterly invisible once more.

When she turned back to the bed, her husband's languid expression had tensed into a furrowed brow. She picked up the sheet and padded back across the short distance from the window and took her place beside him. He put an arm around her and pulled her to his body, his hand running to the same place her hand had just been. She shivered but didn't flinch away. She had done so, months ago, when they had been still teaching each other the language of lovemaking: before he learned that his lips at the shell of her ear took her straight to bliss, before she learned that for him, it was hers on his clavicle. When she'd learned to be careful of his hand and his arm and the marks left there by the brutal attack that had ripped him from the world of the living; when he'd learned to touch her abdomen with reverence for the boy who'd once been nurtured there.

As assuredly as if he were Edward, able to read her thoughts, he bent his head and kissed their hands. "I would give him back to you, if I could," he whispered.

She nodded.

"I know."

He was quiet for a long moment, and his hands moved from her abdomen to the small of her back and back again. He didn't tire of touching her any more than she could ever tire of touching him. But the next question he asked was unexpected.

"Do you regret this?"

Her brow furrowed. "Regret…?"

"This." He moved his hand back to her abdomen, sliding down to rest on her hip. The stroke was soft and firm at once, as gentle as it was deliberate. "I turned you so close to when you gave birth. And venom fixes trauma. But this isn't trauma, it's where your body was. If you'd been turned later, your body would've had time to change its shape again."

She put her hand over his, and he flipped his palm upward, their fingers interlacing.

"Does it bother you?" she asked.

But even as she said it she knew this was absurd. If there was one thing true about her husband it was that his praise was genuine. She feared at first, that all men were deep down like Charles, even the kind, blond doctor about whom she'd fantasized for ten years. That they only said the good things in precursor to the bad; that every ounce of praise was only a setup to later violence. It took her a long time to accept that it was possible for a man to be as gentle as her husband was, for a man to praise as genuinely as he did, to be as sincere in his lust as he was in his love.

The smile was boyish. "I find every inch of your body exhilarating, Mrs. Cullen. Shall I demonstrate again?"

She giggled. "No, not yet." She unlaced her fingers from his, bringing them back to the top of her belly. "And no, Carlisle. I don't regret this. This is…my proof."

He cocked his eyebrow.

"My proof that he existed. That even though I can't see him, or hold him, and that I can't even smell him any longer on his blanket…he was. And I—my body—will forever bear witness to that."

Her husband was taller than her by a head and shoulders, but here, in the bed, he had moved so that he is below her, so that he could kiss the place where her hands lay. And so it was the top of his head that she kissed.

"You left me with our son," she whispered into his hair.

She felt more than saw his expression, the way his face wrenched in confusion.

"Our?"

Her smile was soft. "You taught me there was a man who was nothing like Charles. I knew there was a man with so much goodness, so much love, who would be such a fine father. I left because I knew that if that man couldn't raise my child then no man would."

She took Carlisle's hand, placing it on the side of her belly and closed her eyes, imagining with all her might the feeling of her baby's kick, the way it would have felt under his inhumanly sensitive fingers. The look of awe that she could imagine sliding across his face.

"Charles may have fathered him," she continued gently, "but Carlisle, you have always been his father."

Vampires don't cry, which was one of the most startling aspects of her new existence. But her husband gulped deeply now. "Our son…" he whispered, and she nodded.

"Our son."

He didn't say anything else. They lay together for a long time, neither of them saying anything, just letting their hands lie together on her body. On the places where she wasn't perfectly svelte, where her hips had widened and her breasts had become heavy, and where just that bit of extra build had accumulated in preparation of nourishing another life that had been cut short. Her husband's hands moved over these parts, reverently, carefully, as he stayed silent. He pressed his lips to her abdomen, which sent unexpected shivers down her spine.

"Dr. Cullen?" she said at last.

His reply wasn't actually English. "Mmmr?"

"You asked a few minutes ago if you needed to demonstrate how exhilarating you find my body?"

He smirked. "So I did."

She ran her hand through his hair. "That would be welcome now."

His laughter was clear. And in an instant, Esme found herself swept under a cool sheet and the broad rays of a sunbeam.

~||x||~

for needahugfromesme, who has great ideas