Penultimate
PRIMARY ONE
Indigo
I stumbled inside and went through my night-time routine, and once in bed just lay there, sleepless.
Right before my eyes Edward had gone from confident and assured to a walking, talking wreck. There had never, ever been any doubt in my entire life that both my mother and my father had loved and wanted me, and there had never been any doubt in his that his mother hadn't - and who knew what his father thought? The man who had sired him may not have even been aware of his existence. Fuck, it was even possible that his mother hadn't known who his father was. My heart was breaking for him.
And I wondered how and why it was that his adoptive parents hadn't been able to assuage his sense of disconnection. Surely they'd tried, though? It's quite a process to adopt a child, unlike simply having one. There's a rigmarole to go through - forms, and interviews and home visits and all sorts. You have to really want it, to be approved. And yet he seemingly felt no affinity with the family who'd brought him up, he considered himself a cuckoo in their nest, an interloper wearing the wrong-colored feathers and speaking with the wrong-sounding voice.
I gave up trying to sleep and got onto the internet, to find out what I could about how adopted people can trace their biological families. His anguish at what he saw as his mother's rejection was the obstacle to him looking into any of it, but I was clueless as to how to go about giving him any help with the pain. You get nine months or so to make your mind up about whether you're keeping your baby or not, so it's not a spur of the moment decision. She mustn't have made her choice lightly. Edward would have thought about this over and over, and surely there was nothing I could add to what must have been a life-long inner monologue.
He wasn't at school the next day, which was Friday. When I asked his sister where he was, she looked at me sharply.
"He's got a headache," she said. "I'll tell him you were asking after him."
The day was interminable, what with all that was going on in my brain. I just wanted to get the fuck out of school and talk some more to Edward. I'd bleated to him about teen pregnancy - which was preventable - and being stuck in a dead-end job in a small town, which was snobbish and narrow-minded. If I just fucking studied, and set a direction for myself, I had a really good shot at making it. And there I was, whining to him with my stupid bad attitude when what I wanted was in the future and ahead of me and achievable. What Edward wanted so desperately was to rewrite his past, which was impossible. Or to open the door one day to a woman and man who would say "We're your parents, we love you, we've been looking for you all this time and we never meant for any of us to be apart. We've come to take you home." While not impossible, that scenario was highly unlikely. And he knew it - it lay like a leaden weight in his heart. Even though my having anything to do with him at all was so recent, I felt a responsibility. He wasn't just Edward Cullen, dweeb, any more, he was a lost soul. I wanted to get to him and hold him like I'd held him last night, comfort him, sooth him, promise to be his friend forever so that he'd never again have cause to feel lonely or rejected. Of course, I probably wouldn't take it that far at first. I'd just let him know he wasn't a pariah, and ease in to the rest of it.
At home I did chores and homework and made dinner, leaving a serving for Charlie in the warming drawer, since he wouldn't be home until 11 or so. Then I called Edward.
"Yes?" he answered, sounding guarded.
"Ah - you weren't at school today. I'm ringing to see if you're okay."
"I'm fine. Thank you."
He hesitated and I hesitated, but I had an agenda.
"What're you up to?"
"The usual, Bella," he said drily. "Not much."
"Well, I'm not either, so do you want to come over?"
He still hesitated. "Another non-date? People will talk."
"Shut up. Not a non-date - a visit. It's a common form of social interaction."
"Okay, I'm aware of the concept. And yes, I'd like that. But why don't you come here?"
"There? Your place?"
"Yes, but not the front gate." He gave me directions to get to some other gate - they probably had about fifty of them, all under surveillance no doubt, opening onto manicured driveways with peacocks and fountains and rose gardens. No fucking wonder he wanted to disown the whole fucking bad taste circus.
He was waiting for me when I drove up - a lone figure hovering with faux-nonchalance that actually came off as anxiety. After some beserk semaphore to guide me to one side, he opened my door for me as I switched the engine off.
"You're a space cadet," I said, by way of a greeting.
"It takes one to know one," he responded.
"So, are your parents - uh, are Carlisle and Esme expecting me?" I said, self-correcting.
"No. They're home, but we're not going to the house. I want to take you somewhere," he said.
The Cullen Empire HQ had floodlights, they had searchlights, they had arena lights. You could have staged fucking Olympic whatever-night-sports-you-wanted in there, and it was like the sun was full beam overhead. How embarrassing for Edward. He held my hand, leading me away from the glare, down a pathway behind the house and the swimming pool and tennis court and croquet lawn and golf course and the safari park and the city limits and the dark side of the fucking moon to a small private forest, miles from the house.
"Here," he said, indicating with the beam of his flashlight to where one of the trees had a rope ladder. I can climb about as well as I can bowl, but I clambered up and found a little trapdoor to squeeze through. Edward came up behind me after I'd lumbered on to the flat surface there like a walrus, and the light he was carrying revealed a treehouse like something out of the Swiss Family Robinson Hilton. There was a level area built into gaps between branches that was about three yards square, and it had walls and a roof. It had a tiny table and bookshelf. It had a fucking mattress.
"Justin?" I said incredulously, turning to him. "Justin Case?"
"Don't get too excited," he said. "We've had that conversation, remember? Or one covering similar ground, anyway. You're all no-dating, no-sex, no-nothing but schoolwork. That's fine. I've brought you up here to go over some calculus."
"Calculus, yeah, right. Why have you really brought me here?"
"Oh, Jesus, Bella. Just to have somewhere private to hang out. If I took you through the front door my parents would quiz you, and ask for your credentials. They'd think any girl I brought home was a gold-digger - they'd be awful. I don't want to make small talk with you in the living room with everyone else listening in. Please - don't freak out, because this isn't meant to be weird or anything - but can we be friends without it being a big deal? A public deal? If my parents even know I'm talking to a girl they'll commission a police check and an iq test and a fucking gyno examination. That's how they are. I couldn't put you through that."
My father would ask for the equivalent, to be honest. Edward is not alone in his embarrassment there, but he thinks he is, so I don't set him straight. He shrugs out of his backpack and plonks it down.
"I didn't know what you'd like, so I grabbed beer and ojay," he says. "And cornchips and salsa."
"Party on, dude. Although I don't really drink. Being underage and all, and my Dad being in law enforcement."
"You can have juice then. I've got backgammon, too. Do you play?"
"Well enough to kick your ass."
We set the board up and started a game, playing in silence while we settled in to our environment and each other's presence.
"Well, damn, hit me up with one of your beers then," I asked after a while, figuring the alcohol would loosen my tongue a little. It did.
"You know, life's a bit like backgammon, isn't it? We can't influence the fall of the dice but to an extent, we can choose our moves."
He snorted. "Such a philosopher."
"But I'm right, aren't I?"
I'd lost interest in the stupid game by then. Although I can be competitive, tonight I just wasn't in the mood. There was a glass panel in the roof, and if you looked up you could see part of the milky way - all indigo and sparkles. Infinity and nebulae had a lot more appeal than counters and dice and elongated triangles.
"I give up," I said to Edward.
"You give up what?" he asked.
"Oh, God, everything," I murmured, because in that moment I did. I was more sorry than words could express about his situation, and after a bottle of beer, which I wasn't used to at all, it seemed like a pretty damn good idea to be hidden away in the dark with an intense and handsome boy somewhere where nobody knew about us, regardless of my state of mind or his. Beer and starlight and isolation and Edward sure made for a nice combination.
I was gazing at him, trying to analyze the look he was giving me, when the flashlight went out, plunging us into pitch black.
"Shit!" he exclaimed. "There are spare batteries here somewhere," and I heard him scrabbling around in the vicinity of the bookcase.
"It's okay. Don't panic. It's not as if we can fall out," I told him, as he cursed more.
"You're not scared?"
I've never been afraid of the dark. As a child I welcomed it, finding it a warm reassuring blanket after the unwelcome unforgiving radiance of waking hours when the world was so much more prosaic and commonplace than I wanted it to be. In the dark all things were possible.
"No," I reassured him. "It's cool."
"Okay. Well, I've found batteries so I'll have us illuminated again in a second."
"Could you not? Could we stay like this for a while?"
"Uh - sure. If that's what you want. Where are you?"
I heard a soft rustling which must have been him shuffling across the boards towards me, then I felt his hands. One of them got me in the face, and I felt the other go past the side of my head before it dropped to my shoulder.
"I hit you! Fuck! Sorry. Can't see a fucking thing," he mumbled. "Are you going to have a black eye, or any bruises? Shit - that really was not supposed to happen. Are you alive?"
"Yes, but my Dad will be able to get your fingerprints from my cheek. Even if I refuse to give your name he'll have you identified in hours. You'll be in jail for a long time."
"Shit! Bella, have I hurt you?" he said worriedly, not in the least amused.
"Obviously not. I would have yelped and then I would have hit you back."
His hands dropped to my knees, leaning heavily on them, and I could hear that he was shifting around, so I guessed he was trying to get comfortable. A moment later I reached out too, and discovered he was facing me, in the same posture I was in. We were knee to knee, cross-legged, surrounded by the dense quiet.
It seemed as good a time as any to introduce a subject he may or may not want to avoid.
"What we were talking about yesterday..." I said. "Can we go back there?"
There was the tiniest, quietest intake of breath.
"You and me humping?" he asked. He sounded like he was trying not to sound hopeful.
"No. NO. I mean the other stuff. Your stuff."
His next inhalation was louder, and the exhalation following it louder still, but he didn't say no.
"I know you've already thought of all possible scenarios regarding your birth and your adoption. I know tracing your birth parents would be the scariest thing you've ever done. But Edward, the not-knowing is just eating you. Now that you've told me I can see it. You've worked out who you're not and you're really, really clear on that - but what about who you are?"
"Bella - " I could tell he was frowning in that perfect movie-idol way he had, and I hoped he wasn't getting pissed at me, because I was going to keep going anyway.
"What do Carlisle and Esme say about it all? It sounds as though they haven't told you much."
"They haven't told me anything. When I was quite young they explained that I was adopted, and when I asked a couple of times if I had another mummy and daddy somewhere they'd say we could talk about when I was bigger. But gradually things between them and me became so strained and difficult that it just wasn't a topic I felt able to broach."
"You get on badly?"
"Very badly. Carlisle was trying to steer me into medicine without letting me find a direction for myself. He had my future mapped out - Edward Cullen, son of the famous Carlisle Cullen. It's all about me reflecting his glory and living up to him and being worthy. When other kids my age were reading bedtime stories he got me books on anatomical studies and a child's introduction to medicine. At first I wanted to please him and I found it all quite easy anyway, so I pursued the course he wanted for me until I started to really wonder about where I came from and why I felt so different, and then I baulked. He was disappointed, and our relationship has been steadily going downhill for years. And Esme always seemed a little distant - she's just become more so, the older I get."
"But Edward, surely it must upset them both to see you unsettled and unhappy. They must want the best for you, mustn't they? Isn't that what all parents want?"
"If that's been your experience, maybe you're just lucky, Bella," Edward responded.
Fuck. I'd felt so fucking unlucky. I'm a victim. I'm doomed. The refrain of the self-absorbed. I was a fucking idiot who couldn't pull her head out of her ass long enough to notice that there were other people around who were worse off. Who had actual problems, not just Oh, a boy likes me, my life is ruined.
"Look, you've got no reason to trust me. I was a bitch to you. But, what I want to say is, you can talk to me. I'll support you. If you decide to take the plunge and make inquiries, I'll be right here. That's it. I don't know what I can do to reassure you or help you or anything like that - but I'll be here."
Edward's hand reached for mine and held it lightly. "Why would you? Do you feel sorry for me now?"
"Yeah, I do. I'm sorry for you because you're a ginger. That's gotta come from at least one of your parents. Actually, both, because it's recessive, isn't it?"
"This is your idea of support? Making fun of me?"
"Well, yeah."
"And you think I'm the space cadet."
His hand and my hand sat idly, on the top of my knee. I sort of wished I could see him, but at the same time I was glad I couldn't.
"Seriously, though. I mean it. Not the hair thing. The talking thing and the friend thing and the support thing."
I heard him wriggle some more.
"Thanks," he said finally, quietly, and then his other hand touched me. My shoulder. My neck. My brow. He traced my cheek delicately and lightly with one finger, so gently that even when he went straight over my eye it was soft as being tread on by a butterfly. I wondered what the fuck he was doing and why, but I wasn't going to interrupt, because it felt beautiful. He was giving me goosebumps as the exploration continued on to my collarbone.
"Your pulse is racing," he said in a wondering tone, and then his hand dropped away. "I'm making you uncomfortable."
I shook my head, forgetting that he wouldn't be able to see, and then I answered, "No."
"Yes, I am," he spoke quickly. "I shouldn't touch you like that, or at all. I'm sorry. It was overstepping the mark. You've made your feelings very clear."
This not being able to read his expression was suddenly proving very difficult.
"Edward, honestly, it's okay. It felt - nice," I mumbled, heat coming to my cheeks.
"You're saying that because after last night you know what a fuckup I am. You don't want to make me feel bad."
"No, it's not that all. All that stuff you said was a complete surprise, but you've been surprising me for weeks now. Before you and I ever spoke I thought you were conceited. I thought you just waltzed around with this huge sense of entitlement and superiority, and I'm seeing how wrong I was. You're not like that at all. You're - thoughtful. I don't mean as in considerate. I mean as in, you think. There's no evidence anywhere that guys of our age think. Studies have proved it."
He didn't respond and I just wanted to squirm because I didn't know what was going on his head.
"I like talking to you," I added. "I like being around you. I like - " I gestured, waving between him and me, because I meant that I liked this being so alone together. Knowing he couldn't see me made me feel exposed, because I had to clarify myself. "I like being like this with you."
More silence - stretching and expanding, bigger than the dark.
"I don't know why you're telling me this. You don't want to date," he said at last.
"Uh - no," I admitted, although I was thinking that dating Edward didn't seem such a bad option, as long as I was careful. As long as I didn't get carried away and let him distract me from studying. As long as I stayed on track.
"I didn't want to date - " I began...
And then all hell broke loose.
My father's voice was shouting urgently, "Bella? Bella? Are you out here?"
A voice I didn't know but guessed was the Surgeon General, Carlisle Cullen, was shouting too. "Edward?"
Oh fuck. I'd been drinking alcohol. I was with a boy, unchaperoned in any way, and no doubt pregnant. The fact that the only place Edward and I had had skin-to-skin contact was north of my neckline would mean diddly-squat to an angry and extremely protective father, who was going to kill the only boy I'd ever remotely liked, or at the very least imprison him for the kidnapping, reckless endangerment and carnal knowledge of a minor. And I would be grounded until my sixtieth birthday, or my father's death, whichever came first.
Fuck knows how they'd even suspected we were out there, although the cctv and sniffer dogs and privately-owned Hubble telescope on moon-base Cullen probably had something to do with it.
"Don't answer," I whispered to Edward, "Maybe they'll go away."
"Nah. Better face them. We're in big trouble, Bella, I guess. Well, I am. This was my idea," Edward said.
"One in, all in," I replied, and he and I clambered down the ladder with Carlisle and Charlie both shining deathray whitelight beams on us and looking ready to launch Bad Cop, Badder Cop. But we'd appeared immediately, and neither of us had any buttons unfastened, nor had we had time to fasten any.
"What's going on?" Charlie growled, and Edward faced him squarely.
"Bella and I were playing backgammon, sir."
"Have you been drinking?" Carlisle demanded.
"Yes," I spoke up. "One bottle of beer each."
We weren't drunk, we weren't mussed up, we had no obvious hickeys. They ushered us back to the house and took turns telling us not to disappear without notifying anybody. Each father seemed as non-plussed as the other by the whole event, though they maintained the sternness. I managed a hasty goodbye to Edward as Charlie insisted on driving me home, which was when I found out he'd come a different way than usual tonight and had seen my truck parked outside the Cullens'. As it was a never-seen-before occurrence he'd decided to investigate.
He huffed a bit more back at our house, but he wasn't too mad.
"Next time, send me a message," he told me, heading to the kitchen for his dinner.
I nodded, "Sure, Dad. Sorry," before making my way upstairs.
It was still a lovely, clear night. Indigo and sparkles shone through my window pane, making me smile. I knew they were shining on Edward, too.
.
.
.
