I felt saturated – not by the rain, but by him. Suddenly just looking into his eyes was more intense, somehow more primitive than my urges to press my skin to his skin, to sink my very essence into him. His gaze was like my own personal nirvana and in that moment I wanted desperately to live through it all over again, live through every awful, desperate day, just so I could come again to this one perfect moment, this moment where I had lost him but had found him once more.
Even if this time it really would be the last.
Insanity – this was what it was like to be truly insane, I thought to myself with sudden clarity. To be in the arms of a vampire, a vampire who had broken your heart, and to be happier than you've ever been, even knowing that he was about to break it all over again.
But then as suddenly as I was in his arms I was out of them. This time it was his turn to jerk away, to skitter backwards across the muddy earth, horror, fear and something else, something akin to panic, infecting his perfect features.
Something - a shudder, I thought dimly - passed through me and instantly I knew it was the precursor to something bigger, like the minor tremors that precede a massive earthquake.
And I was right.
I felt another shudder, deep in my chest. I tried to swallow; my tongue a thick, dry presence in my mouth.
His mouth, I noted to myself with the sluggishness of someone swimming out of a deep anaesthetic, was partly open, dragged to the sides as though by invisible fingers, lips skinned half back from white teeth.
Like he's in agony, I slurred to myself, dumbly glancing down at my hands as though to somehow find his blood on them.
"Oh god, Bella…"
I looked back up, my head a massive, clumsy bulb on the stalk of my neck. The infection, I noted dimly, seemed to have spread. His eyes burned with it, their golden depths made up of layer upon layer of horror, fear and that indefinable emotion.
Hatred? Does he hate me now? I wondered, my mind stumbling thickly over the thought. Is that better or worse?
I giggled, suddenly, helplessly. The sound clogged and smattering like an ancient lawnmower jerked to life.
But then as suddenly as it started it cut off, silenced by the massive rumble that started in my chest and then literally tore through the rest of me. My fingers moved to my abdomen, to my chest, to my face, searching for the deep fissure that would surely be there. Because I could feel it. It was more than being cut in half, more than being broken. Part of me was just…
Gone.
"Bella – oh god please – Bella I need you to forgive me." His voice was tortured beyond question and yet still so beautiful it defied reason.
I realised my head had slumped and struggled to lift it.
He was on his knees, leaning towards me, his hands splayed in the dark earth like large white spiders.
And suddenly I knew what had happened to me, could see it without any sort of emotional filter, everything from the last few months until now.
I'd been wrong, I mused, to think my heart had been broken before. All the pain had just been a warning – like a bridge that creaks just before it crashes into the river. The pain had meant it was still intact, that it had a chance to stay whole. It was why I had run, I realised suddenly. Subconsciously I'd known – I wasn't scared of loving him more, of embarrassing myself with hysterical pleas. I was scared of this. Of what would happen when I reached my limit.
Of feeling nothing.
I couldn't speak. The broken thing in me seemed tied irrevocable to my mind. My thoughts came in fits and starts, thoughts about his hands, his wet hair, the way the moonlight filtered a jagged slash across his salt-white cheek.
I have to test it, I thought distantly. If I look him in the eyes I'll know. If I feel pain, I'll know.
"Will you let me take you inside? I won't… " his eyes crackled with something and his voice seemed to fail, finishing on a near whisper "…touch you."
I didn't answer, couldn't answer, just looked at him. In his eyes was everything I'd been dying to see – everything, I thought with strange calm, that had probably been there all along, maybe even that day in the forest.
It was all over him, painted bright like subway graffiti.
He loved me. Desperately.
The hate, the disgust I'd seen before, it had all been for him, I realised. He'd been horrified by his behaviour – by all of it: the leaving and, now, the returning. My reaction, my anger had brought out his worst fears, fears he was convinced he deserved.
His face convulsed tearlessly and in that moment I knew why he had left me. He couldn't stand to be the one who would ultimately kill me – whether through changing me, as I had so deeply desired, or through an accident like my meeting James or the incident with Jasper.
At that moment it was like I was the mind reader, able to strip his brain of every thought that had ever come his way in relation to me.
He couldn't live without me, but loving me was like being buried alive.
All of this I realised the same way I would realise that the sky was blue, or that there were more white cars on the road than black.
It meant nothing to me.
Getting to my feet was strangely easy. I didn't think about it – couldn't think about it – just stood, the only thought that stuck was that my once-white socks were now the same brown as my eyes.
I turned to walk back to the house, my eyes focused on the glow from the kitchen window – a glow that, despite its warm lemon colour, seemed colder than the crypt.
"Bella?"
He stayed behind me as I walked, and my thoughts twitching uncertainly over his presence, his proximity, but never staying long enough to make any measure on what it all meant.
The little voice, the one who had screamed his names for months on end, the one who had made all sorts of promises to me as I lay clenched in a ball and wide awake, the one who had no doubt alerted Alice and brought this whole mess back down on me, was silent.
It was her, I thought. The broken thing, the missing thing – her.
I reached the edge of the woods and the back fence of the house. His hand on my shoulder stopped me before I could climb.
He wants to help me. The thought fizzed briefly in my mind and then vanished. I shook him off easily and pulled myself up and over, dropping to the ground on the other side.
I didn't look back.
The warmth inside the house shocked me and I shivered against my wet clothes. I half turned to Edward, knowing he had come inside.
"I'm going to change."
I didn't wait for a response, didn't even consider that there would be one, just walked to the stairs and started to climb, briefly bemoaning the stains my filthy socks made on the beige carpet.
Upstairs I walked into my room and pulled clothes from my wardrobe, not caring what they were only that they were dry. My mind seemed to be focused on basic needs. The fact that Edward–
She's not just broken, she's dead…
- was downstairs seemed completely unimportant compared to dry clothes and a towel to squeeze the worst of the water from my hair.
When I was done I headed straight back down. To not do so didn't even occur to me. The memory of standing behind the front door, exploding with fear and gutted by longing seemed as hazy as the menu from a long-closed restaurant.
When I entered the kitchen I moved straight to the kettle and turned it on, keeping my back to where I'd seen his figure in my periphery as I'd entered the room.
"You can sit down if you want." Now it was my turn to be formal, though there was no premeditation. I simply spoke the words that came to mind.
"Bella…"
How many times has he said my name tonight? Three? Five?
On impulse, in the privacy of my mind, I spoke his name.
Edward.
I waited. The thought - the name - felt empty, like that of a character in a TV show I'd rarely watched, not the name of the person I couldn't live without. I tried it again.
Edward.
Inside me, nothing moved.
Not even a mouse.
I grinned wryly to the kitchen wall.
My thoughts switched back to the kettle, to the warm mug I would soon hold between my frigid palms, to the way my hoodie felt soft and scratchy at the same time.
The kettle boiled and I reached for a mug, filling it with water and then dangling a tea bag in it.
You got it backwards, kid. Charlie would have said.
Charlie… The thought of him left me neither warm nor cold. The only thought associated with him was the fishing trip. That he would be gone for two days. That he would be back on Monday.
What day is it again?
I nestled the mug in my hands. It felt good. I turned towards the table.
He was still standing, his gray coat dripping twin puddles onto the tiled floor. I sat down without speaking, keeping my hands twined around my tea. Still he didn't move so I took a sip and carefully let my eyes wash over him.
"Alice didn't see anything, did she…" It was a statement more than a question.
His eyes, surrounded by thick, drenched lashes, seemed to widen and narrow at the same time.
"What do you mean…?"
I shook my head, taking a sip.
"Alice – I thought that's why you were back – because she saw something." My words sounded tired, expressionless. From the corner of my eye I saw him flinch.
"No, I…" He broke off, seemingly unable to finish. I tried not to look at him, to do so when I felt so… so nothing, was uncomfortable. I focused on my tea.
I shrugged, my shoulders feeling strangely light.
"You don't need to…explain, that is."
I heard rather than saw him sit. Though he had no need for it a heavy breath whistled through his lips.
"Are you…ok?" I sensed that he was unhappy with the question, as though there was something he wanted to ask, but didn't quite know how and so settled in the end for inferior words with a meaning that could well be lost.
I looked at him, waiting, expecting the rage to swell up inside of me; for the little voice to start screeching that I was not ok, that I would never be ok - unless he was with me.
The break seemed permanent.
"That depends on your definition." I smiled a little at my own wit – or lack of it.
"Bella…" He trailed off. I looked at his face. My name on his lips seemed to cut him and heal him at the same time.
I stared into my tea.
He sighed.
"What is it you thought Alice would have seen?"
I shook my head.
"Maybe something about me screwing things up for you guys – trying to find you and telling the wrong person."
"You were coming to find me?"
I shrugged again. "I don't know. I thought about it – but then I thought about a lot of things…"
His hand came up, resting lightly on the table, as though he wanted to reach over and take mine but didn't quite dare.
I moved my hands from my mug to my lap. I knew what was coming.
"Bella…" his voice cracked for real this time. "Bella I'm so sorry. So sorry I - I should never have left you – never wanted to leave you – god – I thought I could…" His hands clenched into bright white fists and he shook his head with sudden violence.
"But I couldn't. I can't. I love you! I can't exist without you. I don't know how – I just – I have to be with you. I have to be with you!"
"Edward…" I paused, deliberately. Maybe it was hope that made me do it, hope that speaking his name out loud would do what looking at him and listening to him couldn't.
"Bella…?" His voice: hopeful, agonised, coated in self-hatred, regret and pain.
I swallowed and cleared my throat. My love for him felt so…abstract, like it had belonged to someone else. If it was still there it was buried so far beneath I couldn't feel it; frozen solid in some deep, dark cave like a remnant from the ice age. Somewhere I might never find it.
And maybe there was a reason for that, I thought suddenly. Maybe this was the only way I would survive. Because regardless of whether he loved me, I could see the self-loathing screaming from every tortured bend in his beautiful frame. He hated himself for leaving me but he hated himself just as much – perhaps even more – for coming back, for being so weak as to put his needs ahead of my own. To break his own promise.
To know that sooner or later, he'd be the death of me.
It was only a matter of time before he left me again, I realised. It was more than his honour or his integrity or his selflessness – his love for me demanded it. I didn't know if my break could be fixed, I didn't know if there was some way to bring it back, but what I did know was that he would leave me, and if I let him, it would happen again and again and again.
And eventually, it would be the death of him.
I stared at my hands. Maybe it wasn't about breaking, but about protecting, shielding myself from what I knew he would do to me – from what he would do to himself. Perhaps it was like his inability to get into my mind, or more to the point, my ability to keep him out. Maybe this was the same sort of thing, my mind's way of blocking not only his access to my thoughts, but to my heart.
Protecting both of us in the process.
"I'm sorry." I looked up slightly, my eyes touching the sharp white angle of his jaw, before jerking back down to my tea.
If nothing else, I thought, I had learned a lesson from him: Do it quickly, leave no room for argument.
He looked at me, his need carving deep hollows in his cheeks, his eyes reflecting a man poised on a precipice, waiting for the gust of wind that would either blow him to safety, or straight into hell.
Whether I could be fixed or not, I had no choice. Whether there was anything to fix, or whether my love for him had gasped its last breath, I had no choice. The certainty of the thought stunned me. It made me think of a movie I'd watched with Renee once, The Bridges of Madison County.
This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime...
I had no choice.
"I'm sorry Edward…" I looked at my hands, my thighs in their blue sweatpants, at the little poc-marks in Charlies' pine kitchen table – anywhere but at him.
"It's too late."
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