Comfortable is not something I have ever been, in this life or the previous one.

My nearest brush with it was just after I was turned, Carlisle at the helm of my training and laying to rest each and every trauma-filled memory that fueled my so called daddy issues.

I detest the term.

I am far from knowledgeable or even matured, but I now realize that what he truly succeeded in doing was adding even more confusing layers of damage to my already troubled psyche.

As much as I love Bella, I am not under the impression that she can heal me of any lasting harm. I don't want to be fixed like one might fix a toaster or a car's transmission, and I can't imagine that she has ever had the desire to do so.

Wouldn't it be so simple if people could be fixed with a simple kiss or a kind word?

There are some days that I spend lounging on the sofa with her — work and school a non-issue, my head on her lap and a mindless, silly sitcom droning on my ancient television — that I feel like maybe, though some scars can't be healed, they can be soothed. Her fingers drifting through my hair and the in-out-in of our breaths in sync drive it home.

I feel like I'm in a dream when she touches me so softly and recites words so gentle that I wonder where she gets them from. They can't come from the same place mine do, that raw, savage place in the pit of my chest.

And I fall

Into your breathing

I inhale all you speak

When I'm sleeping

In my rise I'll be giving

All the things that I hide

When I'm feeling you

She speaks with a clarity of feelings I can only hope to ever have. Perhaps with her help I can someday understand what it all means.


I have the courage now to ask Bella.

It is a question that has been at the base of my throat since I first saw her, sitting demure and yet somehow untamed, her warm eyes flowing like hot chocolate onto the professor at the head of the classroom.

It is something I have never once imagined asking, the words normally crude and filthy in my mind, leaving a sense of wrong I have never quite been able to explain. But something about the slope of her shoulders and the smolder in her eyes, in the way her green fingernails tucked an errant box braid into the chaotic gathering at the top of her head, in the lingering, almost unimpressed glance she gave me as I walked into class seven minutes late…

Something about her had the question at the forefront of my mind and sitting heavily on the tip of my tongue.

After two months of dating I am confident in myself, in the way I can please her. Confident enough that, after she has used each and every cleanser, cream, and what-have-you she methodically applies every night, when she smiles brightly at me from the bathroom doorway, all shining teeth and dewy skin and hair wrapped in blue silk, I ask it.

When the words tumble from my lips, I hardly register what I've just said. The cavern in my chest feels emptier than ever — my heart has dropped to my feet. Bella looks at me with wide eyes and pink lips parted to a lazy "o." A beat of silence screams into my bedroom that has become ours and I pray to all of those far-fetched deities that I have not offended her.

A filthy, vulgar part of me hopes for the opposite.

The silence grows less deafening as she blinks rapidly, swallowing thickly, visibly.

"I've never done that." Her voice is steady, breathy. My entire body throbs and I feel like I may jump out of my skin.

I chew on my bottom lip for a small moment before sitting up in our bed. My hand reaches out to her and she comes to me, gliding like she's walking on water. I untie the sash of her flimsy robe and it drops to her feet with a sigh.

Bella's beauty is biblical.

Standing open and trusting, innocent to her own sensuality in this moment, I am reminded of Eve. Instead of being fashioned from a rib close to my heart, she is my heart. Her body undulates with the kind of confidence one may have if they aren't aware of their own beauty.

Her weight on my lap is warm and welcome but a tremor of nerves quivers up my spine. My heart is pounding, out of practice and painful. I have never done this, either. She knows it.

"Do you want to?" I murmur the words against her flawless throat. She is smooth all over, a contradiction to the hard, masculine coarseness of my skin, but here she is honey and milk. When I push my teeth against the skin there, an image, every time, blots my mind like a frenzied Rorschach — I am drowning in her, suffocating happily. Gorged on her. Shapely thighs against my ears and the sweetest taste on my tongue, my face messy with her, surrounded by her scent.

Pretty, pacifying, perfect Bella. I want to be owned by her. Words, intrusive and barely formed, whip into my head. "I wanted to be burned, stamped." I can't, for the life of me, remember who said them or what they meant, nor did I care to with Bella in my arms.

She is pliable and soft for me as I pull her closer, and fuck, but when she pushes me onto my back. The filthy groan starts in the center of my chest and like foam from the mouth of a rabid dog it froths from my lips, unhinged.

Something about the terrible sound brings a wave of clarity to my fog-addled mind. Bella's knees are spread wide, one hand gripping the headboard, the other in my hair, her cunt against my mouth and her ass in my hands.

Later I think about the comfortable weight of her on my face and the gentle grinding of her hips and I realize that not only have I seen God, but she's come in my mouth too.

Won't you sit on my face? What a way to receive the Eucharist.


I write as I walk. The street is not busy and I have a sudden thought, an intrusive jumble of words and emotions that have to come out somehow. The small notebook is always in my jacket pocket, especially since inspiration has become so commonplace.

This time it is a bouquet of wilted flowers in a garbage can a few blocks from my apartment. In a single moment I am reminded of every romantic disappointment before I met Bella.

Daphne in Paris who I admired, but in the same way one might admire a particularly striking sculpture. She was funny, had a dry humor I found refreshing in a woman in the 1920s, and brazenly, bravely flashed me a peak of her rouged knees. I wanted to want to kiss her back when she kissed me. But she knew I was empty inside, cold to everything and everyone.

"Ah, la douleur exquise."

Elke, who I met in Regensburg a year after I left the family, thought she could help me. She was domineering, older than me, and seemed to know so much about the world and about people. I wanted her to touch me, teach me, but even beautiful Elke knew there was something missing. Mutterseelenallein, she'd muttered as she walked away from me.

After my failure with Tanya, the disaster that was my relationship with Elke was an incredibly low blow. Years passed before I was able to recover emotionally.

That empty boy is leagues away from the fulfilled man I am on the way to becoming. It isn't Bella who has saved me, though her poetry, patience, and poise has contributed to my maturation. My experience at Brown, this place, and the people I have met have been instrumental in my awakening.

I write as I walk.

Lady, i will touch you with my mind.

I decide, as I sidestep a puddle from yesterday's rain, that I want to marry Bella. I want to belong to her, not because I can't live without her, not because I have no choice but to be with her, and not because I'd fall apart without her (though, if I were a more honest man I might find those reasons ring truer than I'd like). I want to belong to her because somewhere deep down I know I've always been hers. Something in my biology knows that in a time I can't remember, she was mine too.

Touch you and touch and touch…

The grocery store's doors automatically pull open and I've yet to look up from my notebook. I write as I walk and I do so because if I don't get this down on paper, I might explode. I don't even register the scent of bergamot, driftwood, and oakmoss or the overwhelming smell of grass and leather.

Or the tingling on my scalp and the back of my neck that says look-over-there-look-kill-them-they'll-take-her.

until you give me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene.

When I have the last word written, I come up from my daze and I can see, feel why my hands prickle and curl into fists without my conscious permission.

I don't realize Carlisle Cullen is in my town until I see him at the Whole Foods down the street from my apartment. If there has ever been a clearer sign that I am a ridiculous excuse for a vampire, I don't know of it.

Carlisle is here, standing next to a crate of healthily bright oranges and other colorful fruits, and his new, surly and scarred son flanks him, a charred glare to his golden eyes and an uncomfortable sneer at his lips.

I think of Bella at home, spread over a quilt I have had since 1987. When I left she was still fast asleep, her silk hair wrap firmly in place and her tawny skin glowing from the orange sun peaking out over the clouds and into our window. I think of her hands, the Pre-Raphaelite gentility of their placement on her stomach, and how I'd thought to myself that when I returned I would sketch them.

Something tells me, as I see the grim look my Sire gives me, that it will have to wait.

fin.


Ache - FKA twigs

The Encounter - Louise Glück

XVII - e.e. cummings