Author's Note: Hello! The trip to Vancouver was great, however I'm recovering from jet lag and haven't replied to many reviews. I've noticed a trend lately with people inquiring when the story will be over. I estimate within eight to ten more chapters. Please stop asking me the ending. My nerves can't take it and I've had a mean temper this week. I get a lot of difficult reviews and a couple of flames per chapter. According to my poll on twitter, this is more than the average ff author gets. Not sure why! Big inappropriate love wordslinger (Sonja) and Katinki (author of Renfield & Chiclets) for pre-reading, and of course, the bestest beta jkane180. All three ladies can be found in my fave authors because I love them.
When you've been in the dark for a long time, eventually, your eyes adjust.
How long had I been here exactly? Temporal reality existed outside of my capacity for reason. Yeah, I fucking recognized my thoughts were irrational and my memories were no longer linear, which lead me to a paradox of sorts: crazy people don't recognize that they're crazy. Shouldn't my crazy cancel itself out then?
It wasn't that simple. I mean, for one thing, I had no idea where I was or why I felt such acute desperation when I couldn't even identify what it was that I craved.
My lids trembled under the strain of my clenched muscles. It took me several minutes to understand that the darkness was due, in part, to my closed eyes. I emerged from the black, terrified of what I would be faced with.
"Welcome back to the world of the living, Ms. Swan. If you eat your dinner, we'll be able to remove the feeding tube." A faceless coat was punching buttons on a machine. Automatically, I raised my hand to rub the sleep out of my eyes, but it was too heavy to lift.
"Welcome back? Where did I go?"
"Can you sit up?"
"No."
"Did you try?"
"There's really no point."
Eventually, she disappeared but the solitude felt no different. Nothing felt real, not even the catheter in my arm, which I yanked at every now and again to see if I could register pain.
Nothing.
The shadows that flew past me on the wall with every rising sun and subsequent waning moon should have marked the rise and fall of entire empires.
I was stuck on pause but my surroundings flew by on fast-forward. The silence was maddening; worse still were the sounds that I could not discern. One minute, everything was silent but for the buzzing of the overhead light, and the next, the quiet was breached by speech, voices that I weren't sure really existed outside of my own head.
"Please, Bells, talk to me?" a mustached man begged. I blinked at him several times and his words became garbled, completely lacking meaning.
"How much time has passed?" I managed, trying to make sense of the numbers on the clock.
He spoke again, but I could only watch the shadows on the walls.
The Sumerians, the Greeks, the Normans, the bloody Goths; with every rise and fall of my chest as my body forced air through my lungs, entire empires were destroyed in my head. Slash and burn. Clearly I lacked focus and context. I was certain that I'd finally gone over the deep end. I was drowning in my own need.
It took me several minutes to register that I had found my life preserver, or rather, that he had found me.
"Bella? Please, love, look at me?"
Even in the moonlight, he was glowing like a constellation of diamonds.
"Edward?"
He smiled in response, and I smiled back at him even though he wasn't real.
"So perfect," I muttered, tracing his skin like gold dust under the fluorescence. This hallucination was the kind of crazy that a girl could get used to.
"I'm not supposed to be here." He swallowed as if it was painful for him, and I nodded politely. He was a very perceptive figment of my imagination, to acknowledge that he simply should not be. "Carlisle made me promise, but, Bella, I can't stay away from you..." He bowed his head into his palm, rubbing at his forehead. His voice sounded strained. "It hurts...to be away from you, and it makes me insane to think of you in pain without me there to comfort you. Maybe it's wrong, love, but I need to be with you; I'm not strong enough to stay away."
Even still, he didn't try to touch me. I wondered if he could.
"What are you thinking? I'm sick with worry trying to figure out your thoughts."
"My arm hurts," I blurted because it was the first thought that sprung to mind after his question. "I don't want this thing in my vein. I don't want to be tethered to this machine."
"If you agree to eat, I'll remove it for a while."
"You can't," I explained. "You're not real."
"Yes, Bella, I am." He pulled my hand into his, touching me as if I was made of glass. I watched the tendons in his forearm shudder as he traced patterns on my palm. His hand was shaking, and vampires don't get cold or nervous or trembly.
"Nah-ah, you're shaking." My hand found its way to his chest, and I rubbed the muscles over his non-beating heart. "If you were real, you wouldn't be."
"I'm aroused."
"Um...what?"
"Can't help it. I want you, Bella," he almost sobbed. "It's not right with you being sick like this, but I need to make love to you." He bowed his head into my hair and blew cold air beneath my earlobe as he spoke. "I need to touch you."
"Awesome. Help me out of this gown."
"We don't have to do this...we can wait," he said, but he was already undressing me. "God, I can't help it," he repeated, his hands finding my breasts. "I need to be close to you."
"Take it out of me," I pleaded.
"That's not something a guy wants to hear..."
"The IV. Please take it out of me?" I winced at the bruising on my arm at the puncture site. "It's sore...make it better?"
Edward's face knitted with concern. "Of course, baby. Don't look, okay?" He didn't have to tell me twice. The thought of watching him pull the tube out of my vein churned my stomach. Instead, I looked at his eyes, watching the colour of his irises change from copper to rust to brown-black all within a matter of moments.
"Tell me when you're going to do it?"
"It's done, Bella." His eyes were onyx now, as a single drop of blood slid down my arm.
"Is this okay? You're not tempted are you?"
"Always. I'm always tempted."
"I was referring to my blood."
"So was I," he sighed almost mournfully and kissed the spot of blood. That was kind of gross.
"Ew."
"I want to consume every part of you."
"Ew, again."
"Every inch of you, Bella, I want to imbibe you like-"
"Oh my God, stop!" I pushed his face away from me, but he didn't move.
"Please, Bella?"
"You can't drink me."
"I want to make love to you."
I sighed and wrapped my arms around him. "I'll do whatever you want, Edward. Please just make me feel something? Nothing feels real." I was asking a vampire to help ground me in reality. Again, the situation was perverse enough to make me question my sanity again.
My hands were weak, but I wanted to undress him. I loved removing his clothes. He made himself pliable under my touch, anticipating how I needed him to move to unburden him of his sweater. Slowly, I lifted the hem of his shirt up his torso, exposing his stomach and ribs and chest, all hard muscles and nearly hairless unblemished skin. I cried out in pain when I got to his shoulders, and he caught my hand in his.
"You're in pain." He gave me his best brooding-vampire grimace. "I'm taking advantage of you."
"Shut the fuck up, Edward. Torture yourself later; right now I need you inside of me." I needed to act more like Flanagan. This depressive catatonic shtick had become old. I grabbed the discarded IV and said, "If you're a good boy, I'll let you lick the spoon."
"Don't joke about that."
"I thought you wanted my blood?" I taunted.
"Bella..." He undid the buckle of his belt and pulled his khaki pants down over his hips, his cock bouncing out all hard and ready. "Shut the fuck up so that I may fuck you senseless."
"Too late." I started salivating, aching to put his dick anywhere he would let me.
"If you're a good girl, I'll let you lick my knob."
"You're channelling Emmett."
"Can't help it. You're naked..." he explained, hooking a cool, wicked finger into my pussy and making me squeal. "I've lost the ability to articulate beyond my carnal need."
"Is that fancy-talk for 'you're thinking with your dick?'" I gasped, arching my back and baring down on his hand. Edward smiled at my response to his ministrations and drew his face down between my legs, kissing my inner thighs.
"Your femoral artery is so hot."
"That's just weird, Edward."
He licked a path towards my pussy while I squirmed under his cold tongue. "Need to taste..." His tongue, holy fuck, it flicked and teased me, darting along my slit. He pulled my swollen clit between his lips in a gentle suck and groaned when my legs wrapped around his neck, pulling him tighter against me. The sensations that swirled deep within my cunt awoke the dormant woman inside of me.
"Edward, please? Please kiss and fuck me. I need to be close to you."
He released my clit, producing a popping as the seal his lips created opened, breaking suction. The sound made me whimper, and I used my heel to push his face back into me. "A little more," I moaned.
I wanted to come. I wanted to come on his face.
"I want to come on your face," I said sweetly, and Edward went back to licking at my nugget. My eyes wanted to close so that I could block out everything, save the sensation of the Klondike Bar that was his tongue on my, um, nerve bundle.
But I had only just emerged from the dark. If I closed my eyes again, I might lose myself.
"Faster! Harder! I want to feel more."
His tongue started doing that vibrating thing, the sensation causing me to buck wildly, lifting my body off the bed in an arch, Linda Blair style.
"More!"
Still vibrating, his fingers caressed the spot inside of me that always made my body sing. I let out a long moan, stopping only to breathe. The sounds of my pleasure seemed to make him even more enthusiastic. His hands made fists in the sheets, tearing the thin cotton, and his hips rotated forward, driving his cock towards me like a flower seeking the sun.
My moans turned into whimpers. I lifted my leg for no reason that I could think of, and Edward grabbed my foot and placed it on his shoulder so that my knee bent. I did the same thing with my other foot, and he let out a fierce growl as my pussy opened, again like a flower unfolding in a Springtime bloom.
Yeah, sorry, the blood had left my brain and settled in my clit. All I had to offer were flower similes.
"Christ, I need to fuck you," Edward said against my skin, looking at me in the eye before disappearing again below my public bone. He nipped and licked and sucked at my ridge, pumping one, two, fuck me, three fingers inside of me and humping the side of the bed in rhythm with his skilled fingering.
Both of us cried out when my muscles shuddered and gripped his fingers. With each pulse of my orgasm, he stroked and strummed and licked me; each one of my cries were echoed with a feral growl of his own.
Before I even had a chance to recover, he was on me, entering me in a swift, accurate motion.
"Fuck me, Isabella Swan, that pussy was made just for my cock."
"Edward," I grunted out and pressed my hands into his ass. "You feel so good inside of me. I wish that we could just fuck forever."
"Your wish..." He lifted my leg so that it was perpendicular with the bed and held my foot to his chest "...my command." He pumped into me and my brain turned into mush; I surrendered my consciousness to him.
-({})-
"Snap out of it!"
"What?"
Don't make me wake up, I'm in a better place. I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, trying to makes sense of the what I was seeing: the IV was still in my arm and I was dressed again in that terrible hospital gown.
"You're a fucking psycho, Swan. What did they do to you in Washington? You were screaming half the night and you haven't said two fucking words to me since your return." Flanagan was eyeing me cautiously, sitting on the edge of my bed.
"What are you doing in my room?" I demanded.
She jumped off the bed and drew the curtain beside me, revealing another single bed, without all of the medical paraphernalia that adorned my cubicle. "This is my fucking room too, bitch."
The sheets were torn where I had imagined Edward's fists had clutched the bed.
"Fuck."
Author's Note: I'm hosting the readalong on twitter Saturday at 9:00 EST. The story is Revenge Cake by restlessxpen. Hope you'll read along!
Pimping: Have you checked out the Twific Pimps blog? There's a link on my profile. This week, Twicharmed, AltheaJams and wordslinger chatted about Hide and Drink by Savage. This is a must read!
Press my button: Reviews make my girly bits happy. I giggle every time I read "Buzz" or something akin to it. Let me know that you're out there and reading please?
PS - I post flames on twitter, just so you know!