disclaimer: i make no money from this...
but speaking of money....
a/n: i am participating in the Fandom Gives Back auction! www . thefandomgivesback . com - i've agreed to write a short story/novella/outtake up to 20k or so (PoP n' S&I are roughly that amount) for the sake of fighting childhood cancer - it's for Alex's Lemonade Stand, a registered charity. Bidding starts 11/15 and lasts through 11/20.
what i'm reading: an Alice fic, Mary Full of Grace by EliseMontgomery, which is haunting and gorgeous, and er, then i've been reading slash. of note, beautifulfigment's stuff: it is all good. also, AG and i are running the SlashBackslash contest (see profile). some of them are so coo-worthy, giggle-worthy, swoon-worthy, so check 'em out.
i'll be updating PoP on Saturdays and Wednesdays from here on out. I'll be posting teasers on adifferentforest . com in "my author cabin."
finally, a special thanks to ElleCC (whose PERFECT Peter/Jasper one-shot should also be read and savored) for beta'ing, and then to AG for pre-reading and lastly, to gallantcorkscrews, who saves me from being boring—by making me rewrite crap—but eh, whatever... Heh.
"You won't help shoots grow by pulling them up higher."
- Chinese Proverb
They like to tell to think "big, happy thoughts" when you're a kid.
"Choose your own adventure."
"You can be anything you want to be."
"Live the dream."
"Reach for the stars."
All that crap.
What they don't tell you is that happy thoughts really mean a nine-to-five.
It means that you study Plato so you can call yourself qualified to fill-in a spreadsheet.
You do what they say, though. You get the diploma. You "enrich" yourself.
You do it because you want to fit the bill, the brand, the shiny label.
But labels are meaningless.
Dreams are, too.
"I'm not forcing you to take the job. I'm asking you to consider it," Dad says, his arms crossed as he leans forward over his desk.
Edward scoffs. "Give the position to someone who wants it."
His dad slumps back in his chair. "You're not even considering it." He shakes his head sadly and then turns to frown at the family picture at the corner of his desk. "But then you haven't been considerate of much of anything for a while now..."
Edward snaps forward in his chair. "Come on, Dad. Give me the lecture, and let's get it over with."
Dad crosses his arms again and leans back. "You know I'm selling the company. You've known this for years. Once the company goes public—I can't exactly hire my children. Right now, it's pretty much expected—you've been groomed for the job, and it's been a family business for—"
"Emmett and you work there. That's it."
"And Rosalie," he points out.
Edward makes no reply.
"Who, by the way, has waited patiently on you to set a date for five years, Edward. She's been nothing but devoted to this family—she's a great addition to the company. She helps Em with Del. Your mother loves her—"
"Dad, I—"
"No. I need to be frank, Edward. You're not eighteen. You are twenty-eight. You need to shit or get off the pot. You can't pretend to be a little boy forever. You need to be honest with yourself and the rest of us. Now, if you want to live like a wayward hippie, that's fine. Go live like a hippie—but I am not paying for it. Yes, I understand that that you want all play and no work—but that's not the way life works. I left medicine to build this business—even though it wasn't what I originally set out to do, but now I can say I've provided my family with every material opportunity for success, and I can focus on doing what I care about—but that's because I earned it. What have you earned, Edward?"
Edward closes his eyes, and for a second, he thinks about arguing the merits of the situation. He's never asked for the money—it'd been automatically deposited into his bank account, but then he stops himself from arguing. Money isn't the point. When Edward opens his eyes again, he looks at the ceiling. "I think it's great you're finally doing Doctors Without Borders. It means a lot."
Dad nods and sighs. "Edward, I wish I could give you more time. I wish I could give you everything, but sometimes you have to take responsibility for burdens that aren't completely yours. Sometimes to be true to yourself, you have to be fair to other people—even when it's not easy on you."
"It's just that I..." Edward opens his mouth to speak but then falls short of saying anything. All of his excuses seem half-assed. So what if he and Rose can only talk about cars and sports and Del? So what if working at a medical supply company isn't as enlivening as playing the piano and tutoring in music for next to nothing? So what if he has this feeling that he is missing out on something?
His father, across the table, is watching Edward with anxious speculation. Dad really does want what's best for him—and it's true: his dad worked his ass off over the years to grow the company, put in long hours, and sacrificed his own dreams for his family. Now, it's like Edward is turning his back on all that his parents have given him—at the exact time his father finally lets go to pursue his own dreams.
"I'll consider it," Edward agrees.
He is lead to the poetry alcove by an older woman (whom he presumes to be the owner) with frizzy hair and a sparkling, New Age dress. She strides ahead of him with an awkward shift in her gait, as she keeps jerking back to smile at him.
He tries to smile back, but there's a part of him that's unnerved by her blue-purple tooth.
Then, when they finally emerge from the maze of shelves, she smiles and gestures with her arm as if to introduce this area of the store, but her open mouth stays open, and her eyes blink rapidly. He's half-worried she's going to faint, but when he holds out his hand to offer help, she squeaks—and then rushes away.
He doesn't think his mood is that off-putting, but really, his mood is so sufficiently dower that he cannot bring himself to care about his impact on much of anything. Even so, Edward feels the need to connect somehow—to shape this melancholy in his chest into something beyond sad stupor. He wants to define it, and then let it go in intangible flight.
That's why he's here.
He finds the books he wants quite easily. They're on the second to bottom shelf, so he has to kneel. He pulls them out one at a time, carefully examining them. There's the typical volume of Tang era poetry, which he almost begins to read—until he discovers the thin pamphlet at its side. He pinches the binding and pulls it out. The Poems of Li Po.
The title and memories it dredges up are enough to make him smile. He runs his fingers down the cover, feeling the bumps in the used and battered copy. He likes this somehow—the fact that someone has read these words before. It feels appropriate. He plunks himself down on the chipped and checkered floor and begins to flip through the pages. He finds the famous poem quite easily:
A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the spring is spent.
To the songs I sing, the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave, my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes their way.
May we long share our eternal friendship,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.
-Li Po, Drinking Alone in the Moonlight
He tries remembering the pronunciation in Chinese. As with any poem, the native version sounds far superior to the translation. In Chinese, it's about the perfect symmetry of characters and sound. Edward only gets as far as the first three lines before his memory begins to trip... It's been so long. Yao-Yao would shake her head at him if she knew.
Yao-Yao...
Those memories threaten to suffocate, so he tries to focus on anything else to rationalize away his sentiments. He's here because he finally said, "yes," because he agreed to take the job. Because he's finally taking responsibility. Because Rosalie laughed and said, "it's about time." Because Emmett clapped him on the shoulder and said, "jail mates now," with a half-sarcastic, half-serious sigh.
As his head begins to clench, he realizes that these thoughts are not helping. He focuses down on the small book again. He's flipped away from the poem, but now a thin cardstock picture is jutting out, and Edward sees that it's a landscape inked and painted by Wang Wei.
Yao-Yao had explained to him in her "teach-the-tourist" tone of voice, which always involved far more words than necessary to make simple points. "China has many famous landscapes. This is because in dynasty times Confucian scholars and officials like to see them." She glanced up at him to make sure he was listening. When she saw that he was, she continued, "They think they are very beautiful, because in Beijing, they are very busy. They do not have time because they are always in library or at desk. They are always reading books. They don't have time to see the beautiful mountains and clear rivers and trees in the countryside. This is why they like landscape pictures and poetry. They like to dream—" she held her hands up in the air as she could see a vision he could not "—about beautiful landscapes."
"Weren't there beautiful places in the city?" Edward had asked.
Yao-Yao had sat for a moment, studying both his face and the unfurled landscape scroll. "The city is never as beautiful as this," she began, but then she paused again. "This." She pointed at the scroll. "It is like a dream—but is not."
"I don't understand," he told her.
"This dream is permanent."
"All paintings are permanent."
She shook her head with a smirk. "But all paintings... They are not real dreams. Only real dreams have meaning. Some are like water—they flow down the river. They say goodbye, and we forget them, but others," and here she smiled mysteriously, "are like the water's flow. We do not watch them. We move together with them. They are permanent."
He is lost in this memory when the noise recalls him to his surroundings. He sees the odd bookstore lady scampering down the hall.
Then he notices the girl—or woman, really. He notices first the pale contrast of her skin to her dark hair and eyes. She's standing in a stiff pose, which she relaxes out of at his glance, and he almost catches her expression—but she moves too quickly—and he only glimpses a hint of a blush as she unfreezes and strides into his once-solitary alcove.
She's ignoring him, but she's not. He can tell. He wonders if she can feel his eyes on her back.
He realizes after a minute that he's been staring, and so he forces himself back to his small pamphlet.
He's rereading then, but it's not helping, and he's only wishing that he wasn't here. Yao-Yao's words are repeating like a chorus line in his head, and he's wondering how anyone can feel that the world isn't a dream, because no matter what his father or anyone says to him, it only seems a farce—an awful construct, a set of rules designed to pass the days. A trudge up the hill and down. None of it seems real, and those who would tell him otherwise are becoming dust in the earth or are too busy with their own version of the mundane to snap him out of this...
Whatever this is.
A dream?
No. He could only wish.
He's lost in his own twist of emotion, memory, and thought, when there's the invasion of a foreign presence. It's only with the sweep of the wet across his cheek that he realizes he must have been crying, and it's only with the lingering brush of soft, feminine fingers that he recognizes that he is not alone.
"Are you all right?" she whispers.
At first, he half-wonders if she's a ghost, though in a different part of his brain, he recognizes her as the girl on the other side of the alcove.
Dream or not? He wants to know if she's real.
She is. She's pale and slight. Fragile, he thinks, and with her wide-eyed expression, she looks especially doe-like. She's looking at him with some combination of apprehension and compassion, like she doesn't know whether to run or climb closer. His emotions are controlling him at any rate, and it's as if his hand moves before he can stop it. He reaches up and brushes his hand along her cheekbone.
"You're not sad, but you're lost." He says the words as much to comfort her in this act as to give himself justification for his own action.
But when his hand brushes her cheek, his nerves alight with some tingling current. He shivers. It's a strange combination of tingle and numbness.
When he opens his eyes, hers are still closed, but then her lips part. Her eyes flutter. She looks like she's going to fall backwards, and she sets down her pile of books on the floor before putting both hands down to brace herself. She's still confused when she looks at him and asks, "Why are you crying?"
I'm no longer crying. I am looking at you.
But that's not what she meant. She'd asked, "Why are you crying?"
She wants to understand, he realizes, and yet, he can't help but find a certain amount of comedy in her question, because she's quoting Disney's Peter Pan word-for-word, and so that's how he chooses to answer her. With a smile, he explains, "Well, Wendy, darling, I seemed to have lost my shadow."
She obviously gets the reference because she snorts loudly before slapping her hand over her mouth, looking embarrassed at the odd little noise she's made, but the embarrassment last only a second before she takes a deep breath and says, "Well, I'll have to sew it back on, young Peter. In fact…" She trails off, and he can tell she's doing it for effect. "I'm quite skilled with a needle and thread. But I say," her eyes joke with him, "it seems I'm missing my thimble."
The way she says it, he wonders what else she's skilled at, but then he mentally kicks himself, because he's thinking about sex, and she's playing along with his silly game. He smiles and replies, "Be careful, there are fairies that steal away thimbles," with a face he knows must be perfectly straight.
With a face just as straight, she argues with a hand on her hip, "But they bring fairy dust."
"And one needs the fairy dust to go to Never-Never-Land," he finishes, but then he's back to thinking about death again—back to where he started. He snaps his gaze away, and he knows whatever this moment with this girl was supposed to be—he's gone and ruined it.
Except that she's still there. Her face is compassionate. No longer playful. "Is that why you're sad? You never want to grow up?" she asks.
There's a half a second where his father's words from earlier that day seem to bounce off the moment he's in now. The irony of it all brings a torrent of laughter. He can barely see straight because he's suddenly laughing so hard—and while he knows that bookstores aren't libraries, he knows he's being too loud, so it's with long, deep breaths that he manages to calm himself. When he looks up, he sees he's completely baffled her again. "I'm afraid I grew up too fast," he explains.
"Ah, I see." She nods.
"Do you?" he asks. He wonders what it is she sees.
"Well, my mother always told me I was born thirty-five, and just grew older every year."
It makes him smile. She believes she's never even been a child, and yet he somehow doubts that. Boring adults do not make up Peter Pan dialog with teary-eyed saps in poetry alcoves. She is something else entirely, he decides, and he wants to figure out what that is. "Would you tell me your name?" he asks.
"Bella."
He has his answer. Her name is Italian, though she is obviously not. "Beautiful," he murmurs. "It fits."
She blushes. It makes her pallor disappear, and the height of her cheekbones comes into view. It dawns on him that she is not merely pretty or cute. "And that flush of pink is even more breathtaking," he whispers.
He realizes he's hitting on her, but for some reason can't be bothered to stop.
"What's your name?" she asks, a small smile on her lips.
He smiles. He's seen her book pile, Sense and Sensibility at the top, and he's suddenly repenting the groans he'd given his eleventh grade English teacher. "I'll let you figure it out."
"That's not fair. I told you mine." Her bottom lip is jutting out.
He's enjoying this too much—the odd relief of being free from his so-called life. Of being in her presence. He can't help it. He teases her. "My name is one of the main characters in that stack that you're holding."
"Which book?"
"The top one."
"Well, certainly not Willoughby," she mutters, looking rather frustrated. "And you don't seem like a Brandon…" She suddenly smiles at him. "You're not Edward, are you?"
"Edward, I am," he confesses with a laugh.
Her brow furrows then. She looks contemplative as she speaks her thoughts aloud. "You know, Edward in the book is a bit boring."
"Do you think I am boring?" he asks incredulously.
She flushes again. "No, I think you're anything but boring." And then she's staring down at her hands, looking embarrassed again, but this time it's for complimenting him.
She thinks she's said too much, revealed too much.
Edward wants to say something, but words fail him, so he reaches out for her instead. He pulls her against him, her entire body, fragile and soft and dream-like, pressed against his. "Is this okay?" he whispers. It has to be.
"It feels right," she answers.
The surreality of the situation is getting to him. Nothing is supposed to be this easy. People aren't supposed to respond to each other this way. He's only ever known polite friendships that grew over time and romance that happened through satisfying sex and lots of dates at nice restaurants. He doesn't know this. Whatever this is. But he knows that it's not ordinary. That it means something. "Tell me," he insists. "Do you feel this?" He runs his hand along her cheek and then brings her fingers to touch his own face.
Her eyes grow wide, and she nods.
Touching her is addictive. Her fast breaths are drawing him in, and he has this sense that if he keeps up the contact, the surrounding world will fade away. Wanting whatever she will give him, he leans forward and lets his head rest ever so gently on hers. His lips are at the corner of her brow, and when she moves slightly, his lips brush her skin for the briefest of touches.
She gasps, and he feels her tighten in his arms.
They sit like that for a moment with the tingling numbness overwhelming every other sensation.
After a moment, it's too much, and he pulls back, so that he can look into her eyes. They're soft and warm—intelligent but the opposite of judgmental. Then there are her lips... Their lips are so close. They're both breathing hard, and there's the additional echo—he can almost feel his own breath hitting her mouth and bouncing back into his own.
His lips move to meet hers—but then—the image—
Rosalie. His father. His family.
He jerks away with an "I can't" falling from his lips.
The walls fall down. The room is cold.
He's fucked up. Bella tries to pull away, but he won't let her. He won't. He needs to make her understand. "Bella," he breathes her name urgently. "It's just that I have an obligation."
Her own face freezes and then unfreezes. She nods.
She understands. It's okay. He needs it to be okay, so he explains in a rush, "I want to see you again. It's just—I don't want us to be burdened by anything." He has to reorient his life.
She nods again, her fingers touch his face, and then she asks, "When?"
"Tomorrow morning. Can I see you here tomorrow morning?" His voice goes a little high, and it's like he's pleading.
"I want that," she affirms in a breath of words.
She wants him. Even if he's a little lost boy.
It shouldn't mean anything, but it means everything.
He pulls her against him, wishing he could tell her all, wishing he were free of every chain. He wishes he could be hers and that she could be his, and that the world around them couldn't say anything about it. He wishes she were the future and not just the ephemeral present. He's being sappy at the same time that he's thinking with his dick again, but he starts seeing images of brown-haired children and her legs hanging from a country tire swing and midnight love-making on front porch benches and amid sweaty sheets. He only half-knows that he's doing it when he gently lifts up the bottom of her shirt and presses his hand into the soft skin of her abdomen, holding it there while his lips are planting affectionate brushes on her nose, her cheeks, and her eyes.
He realizes he's going too far, but he still needs to—show—her. He leans down so that his lips are at her forehead, and then presses his lips firmly, intensely, and passionately against her, as if kisses above the eyebrows can say, I think I just fell for you.
Then he knows he has to leave—he doesn't know what he'll do if he stays.
"This should be permanent," he whispers, and then he makes himself stand up. "Tomorrow," he promises. He lets his finger brush her lips a final time, and then he walks away.
He exits the store with the sensation of only air beneath his feet.
He could fucking fly.