- TR -
Day 3
The day began with a start. A spasmodic, gasp-inducing kind of start, when Bella jolted up suddenly from her sleep and found herself trying to grasp something she immediately couldn't name. She took no heed of the weird feeling which followed her out of the bed and into the bathroom, her mind still fogged with the vagrant musings of slumber. She went through the motions of a casual day off of work, stepping into the shower, where she thoroughly tried to wash the night away from her body but in no way succeeded in scrubbing off the nerve-wracking, ominous feeling stuck to her skin, reminding something didn't feel right.
Fleeing from a coldness that insisted on lingering, Bella quickly dressed in yet another ensemble of yoga pants and a sweatshirt, blow-dried her long dark hair, brushed her teeth and applied some moisturizer on her face – all the while sensing an invisible cloud of dread hovering over her head. One which had nothing to do with the never-ending awareness of the constant watchfulness of another pair of eyes.
Cautious, naked footsteps padded across a room which now seemed to burst much louder that same feeling, putting validation on Bella's suspicions and raising her mental state to a new level of alertness. She didn't let her actions be guided by this, not wanting to outwardly express what she couldn't yet identify as out-of-place, as she casually moved around the bedroom and started to tidy up the sheets. But while her hands kept themselves busy, her eyes tried to surreptitiously glance at her surroundings, with an analytical intent that quickly noted the weird, box-shaped contraption posing as the meal slot blinked its green confirmation for her breakfast delivery.
She straightened her back and headed towards it, but after only three small steps she suddenly halted. How hadn't she noticed this sooner? How hadn't she sensed its immediate absence from the room? How, when the grating impact from the electric buzz left behind by its remnants was now deafening to her own ears?
Where did the background noise go?
Where were those recorded, muffled sounds from the city's traffic that had kept playing on a loop for two days straight? Where were those layered resonances of the exhaust pipes and rolling engines from passing cars, and the intermittent honks of their impatient drivers? Where had the screechy brakes from a neglected bus and its raucous engine gone? Or the distant, metallic rumbles of a suburban train as it sped away against the tracks? Where were the brief gusts of wind or the hubbub of multiple voices, too far and faint to be discernible? Where the fuck did it all go?
With her face wrinkled into a question and her hands starting to shake, Bella started to angrily pace around the room, a growing realization making itself present. For this surely had been the doings of the doctor. A sadistic tactic against the idleness and sense of ease she'd developed yesterday. A glaring fuck-you message to the almost affectionate approach she'd allowed herself to use with him. Without a doubt, this perverse manipulation on her environment and her comfort had been not only his twisted and deranged way to reinstate his control and dominance over her, but was also a simple act of showing that Dr. E, most definitely, would not be compromising this trial with her friendly notions.
When anger started to lose the battle against panic, and with the physical walls of this room seeming to close around her and press a breathtaking weight on her chest, Bella simply gave up on reason. Acting on instinct alone and anxious to replace the loudness of this silence with something even louder, she tripped her way toward the LCD's remote control. She held it with trembling hands and kept pressing down on various buttons, but, through the haze of her frenzied state, the only answer she got back – the only message she could read against the blackness of the flat screen - was a curt and inane 'NO SIGNAL.'
And that was when she lost it with a blood-curdling scream.
"YOU SON OF A BITCH!"
- TR -
Edward had almost pissed himself when her first murderous cry had reached him. Literally. He had been enjoying a toilet break, humming along with the initial feelings of morning's relief, when the sudden disruptive sound of Isabella's distressed voice had jolted the hand holding his dick, spraying urine away from its intended target. But he had never run as fast as he did in that moment as he scrambled to the control room, with the fly of his pants still undone and a clenched heart begging to protect her from a yet unseen evil. Although he could never had guessed the force of her fury had been aimed at him. And him alone.
He had watched, his mouth agape and with no small amount of fascination and fear, as Isabella fell apart in front of him. She had finally thrashed the last pieces of decorum, exposing the rawness of her wounds and the bitterness on her tongue as she wished him to the deepest pits of hell. His eyes had volleyed between monitors as every camera picked up on her angry pacing, showing the white-knuckled defiance of her fists and the jagged bite of cursing words that her lips kept spewing at him. On top of her mountain of violence – where her flesh pumped with fiery onslaughts turned her crimson lips into thorny roses; where the bouncing caramel tresses of her long hair now whipped imaginary punishing marks against his face; or where the fragile-looking limbs of her once delicate body had densified themselves with unthinkable levels of uncontainable rage – Isabella Swan was a goddess, a beautiful force of nature to be reckoned with.
At the sight of this wild tornado embodied by a beautiful brunette, Edward felt an unprecedented sense of thrill run through his veins. A hot kind of impression which left its trails along his body, swelling up the pride which filled his lungs for her revelation; swelling up the cock which had lusted after her for so long. It had probably been this antithetical aspect on Isabella's comportment which had thrown him into an awestruck, speechless stupor for a while. How, suddenly his brain had to reconcile this totally new manifestation of her with the demure and delicate image he had crystallized since the first moment he saw her not even four months ago.
Back then she'd been the perfect backside which had caught his attention a few patrons ahead in the line for coffee, who suddenly moved away to collect her drink and made an even better impression with her perfect front side. She'd been the chance encounter on his morning run in the park, passing him by along with a spirited friend, too fast to stop in his tracks yet too slow to forget the way her melodious laughs had sounded.
At the hands of fate, she'd walk through his life three more times without Edward finding the opportune way to approach her and introduce himself. Once on a Saturday night only two blocks away from his home when she stopped on the sidewalk then quickly disappeared as she rode off inside a cab, leaving behind only the image of her trench coat and fuck-me heels for him to later picture as he jacked off. The other two, once again at their mutual neighborhood's coffee shop, with an electrifying, unintentional brush of shoulders by its entrance as she sped her way out to a work day, and a surreptitious, hungry gaze as he watched her from a secluded table while she waited for her order.
But by then, Edward had already sent Fate to hell, and promptly had decided to take the matter in his own hands. Against his better judgement and everything he deemed as reasonable and sane, he had seen himself doing the unthinkable. He had followed her. Just long enough to gather the evidence of Isabella's life and prove she hadn't really been a figment of his imagination, yet short enough not to earn him the creepy profile of an obsessed stalker.
To assuage his own guilt of how frighteningly easy it had been to garner information, he had almost looked at the whole operation as something like a joint venture. Because it'd been thanks to the loud-voiced coffee shop's barista that he had gotten a name. Thanks to one of Isabella's neighbors, a nice old lady he had helped up the front stairs and who had happened to be an unintentional blabbermouth, Edward had gotten a full address, a books-related profession, and a swindler with too-nice-to-be-good eyes for an ex-boyfriend. Thanks in no small amount to Isabella herself, the epitome of his wet dreams and the girl who kept invading his thoughts through days on end, he had a concrete purpose. And thanks to Edward himself, he had slowly but surely elaborated a perfectly designed plan and the means to accomplish it, and finally got Isabella that much closer. But that had been while the girl was still a very alluring mystery, not the jaw-droppingly beautiful concretion of the woman who had finally allowed him entrance into her most vulnerable side.
It had been exactly when the raging overflow reached its peak, and Isabella started the real and vertiginous descent on her emotional meltdown, with her knees sinking to the carpet and heartbreaking sobs quaking her body, that Edward had finally realized how much she'd been bottling up her insecurities over the last few days. How much of it wasn't really related to her sudden deprivation of sound – a programmed part of the trial aimed to test individual reactions to adversity – but instead, her well-concealed fear of having so much silence to deal with the issues and shame she'd been harboring since this started.
This dramatic departure from her hissy fit had liquified Edward's initial hardness, opening the door to something he'd been cautiously trying to keep at bay for the duration of this experiment, afraid it could really compromise its results: his true feelings for Isabella. After all, there's only so much you can bear witness until your heart begins to crack. But when he had switched on the microphone, and through a soothing yet still worried tone, had started to make sure she was okay and if she needed anything, it had been too late. Isabella's walls were raised once again and with them any kind of receptiveness to his advances vanished.
With eyes much redder than brown and cheeks still shiny with tears, she had looked up at the sudden sound of his voice. But the only thing she had sent his way – besides a staggering, withering look – were the gritted words she'd spoken with a hoarse voice, "Get the hell out of my head!"
And then she'd climbed to her feet and promptly locked herself inside the bathroom. A place she had been hiding until now, several hours later, behind the only spot she wouldn't be completely exposed to the cameras that kept on filming – the shower stall.
Through the day and with his heart in an uncomfortable grip, Edward had heard the strangled self-deprecating cries, the breathless heaves of undeserved love, muffled words he couldn't always decipher and others painfully clear, filled with doubt, shame and regret, until they'd finally gave way to calming sniffles with intermittent sighs that marked an end to her long emotional discharge. And he was waiting, like he had been since the beginning when he only let fate dictate their meetings, for another chance to see her beautiful face again. And he might have imagined her whispered words – he probably would've ignored them – if they weren't immediately followed by something that wasn't quite his given name, but somehow felt much more intimate when it came from her.
"I'm sorry, E."
Something about those words seemed to blur the lines that had been drawn, and for an indeterminate moment, Edward felt himself succumb to a powerful kind of spell; one which made him mindlessly forget the roles they had been playing in this set. In its lingering effect, he felt compelled to make a choice. He could've blamed it on the tiredness in his bones or an insistent back pain, left by one too many hours sitting in that chair tensely and powerlessly witnessing Isabella's struggle. Or maybe it's just the end result of sleep deprivation itself, where an uncomfortable sleeping cot and a always-alert mind couldn't alleviate his weary brain. But while making this choice, something inside Edward started to give in.