Skins
XxX
But it's not, "Just like this."
Bella runs – hair and arms tangled up in her coat – down two steps from his door, through the musky foyer of his building and slaps her hand against the heavy security door, pushing it wide open with her body weight into a funnel of snow and wind, swirling and freezing the tears in her eyes, the drip in her nostrils.
What the hell am I doing?
She'd have to bend at the knees to hike a path to the sidewalk that she can barely see for the thick assault of flakes piling on her lashes (and with a little gasp) in her mouth – choking her with white panic.
Her arm shoots out and fingers reach for the door before it locks her out, but it's wet and slips away. She strikes her foot out, lightning, and stops its momentum before she's shut out from his life for good.
That almost happened.
She squeezes back into the foyer, bent at the waist and panting, wiping at her face furiously, and coughing up a pathway to air. Her hair, loosened of its early morning ponytail, sags to the side. Her body does the shake and chatter dance, knocking knees and crossed-arm rubbing.
She claps her hands for friction, for heat.
Her blood sings from the adrenaline.
There is a wildness in her eyes, set off by the flimsy threat of suffocation and it is enough.
Enough to make her laugh at herself, to look up at the decaying ceiling through crazy tears and shake her head at this burst of life.
This kind of passion, intensity, and ecstasy of pain does not announce itself every day. She has never felt so alive.
Her anger, no longer hers to own, dissolves into a triumphant longing – a wicked pleasure she's never experienced. This is what it means to let go, to be at the top of the cliff and let her stomach fall before the rest of her body can catch up.
This is what it means to yearn enough to fight for someone.
She never held this ardor for anyone before. Not for her ex, her oldest best friend, that she had to give up in order to grow up. What love they contained for each other was absent of passion, like a glaringly empty jar.
She indulges one silent moment for the death of her marriage: she closes her eyes.
She tries for grief and misses. She tries for nostalgia and barely touches it. She tries for hatred and hears the wind outside.
The foyer is empty, but crowded with her snapping energy. One thing is for certain. She won't be pushed out that door.
Not like this.
She slumps down onto a chair left out for guests – a hunter green, wing-backed piece with broad armrests, stuffed and stitched for comfort. Its neighbor is an antique end table topped with a floral jar lamp, unlit. A weakened sunray filters its way past the wall of falling snow, through the floor-to-ceiling windows that flank the building's iron door.
Edward's apartment is the only one on the ground floor of a 19th century restored Victorian building, and to the left of it is a set of twisting stairs leading up one more flight.
She stares out the window where the wind is drifting top-snow from piles puffed around a fallen tree branch underneath Edward's window. She can make out the fresh wound on the tree, its stump of a bark stripped and gashing.
When did that happen?
"Oh, hello there," calls down a raspy, but pleasant, baritone from the winding juncture at the stairs.
There with a snow shovel in his hand and layered in warm winter darks – a weatherproof pair of Carhartt overalls, tan puffy coat, and a hunter's cap with the ear flaps unbuttoned – is a tall, brownstone of a man with kind, hazel eyes and a large smile under his grayed mustache.
Bella is self-conscious about loitering in the building's foyer of the man who just ended their affair. She finds herself blushing at the image of a half-naked Edward on the other side of his apartment door while she's been banished in front of this stranger.
She shivers, not from the cold. It is awkward.
"Hi," she lets out with a short breath, hoping he won't ask her what she's doing sitting in the drafty foyer.
"Sorry, miss, I didn't mean to startle you. I figured everyone would be holed up during this storm. I'm Arthur. I'm up in 2B." With the handle of his shovel, he points to the top of the stairs where she can't see.
He's standing in the same spot, uncertain whether or not his movement will disturb the young lady's meditation, but the foyer is a public place after all. She's looking at him like she needs to say something, so he nudges her with a softened voice. "And your name, young one?"
She's not wet behind the ears, but the simple endearment adds kindling to the spark in her system.
"I'm Bella," she starts cautiously, and at his earnest head-nod and smile, she repeats again with more life, "Bella Swan."
Feeling out her voice and liking how the lushness moves on her tongue, she continues, "Are you the one who's been shoveling the walk, Arthur?"
She gets up from her seat and he waves her back into it, understanding that he is intruding on her private musings. It does get stifling being cooped up, he knows. "Don't get up on my account. It looks to me like you've got a little cabin fever, yes?"
Her eyes, of their own accord, dart to Edward's door. "Uh, yes, you can say that. I wanted to go for a walk, but it's piled up and hard to see." The lie comes easy now that she's focused.
Arthur catches the flitter of her eyes, their ownership of apartment 1-A, and the subtle meaning behind them, but it's not his place. He's moved to the bottom step and puts his hand out. She shakes it, and his palm is warm and calloused into work-worn leather with white hair patched at the knuckles. She is a comforted child for the briefest of moments.
"And to answer your question," he says, stepping back, "I'll have the walk shoveled in no time. It's good exercise, you see."
She nods, not understanding why anyone would want to go out in that for two seconds.
Where the hell am I going to go?
"I better get out there or it'll be hard going in another hour. Enjoy your freedom, Bella," he says with a pat on her head and a twinkle in his eye.
She watches him wrap his neck, tightly, in a cable scarf until toffee eyes peek out and wink. This makes her smile. The groaning wind and flurry pushing through the foyer when he leaves, however, does not.
She bundles herself into her coat and walks up to the window, where she watches Arthur shovel around and push aside the fallen branch. It looks bulky and heavy but he doesn't have trouble casting it aside like a meddlesome splinter.
The sky, winged in fleecy velvet and looking fashionable for morning or late afternoon, keeps poker-faced in its time-telling, still and guarded from the short and long hands of the clock.
How long have I been out here?
She wishes she wore a watch.
Arthur guessed right, she is suffering from a terrible case of cabin fever. But in this foyer – a no man's land between her past and her future – she wants to recalibrate, reset, and return from the tangents she's become.
She's tired of wearing the wrong skin.
She looks to the dark space under the stairwell and can envision a mocking, rocking Bella spinning inside-out from this emotional circus. Or in the corner of the room, there's Bella, the cowering flower, crying and snotting into her sleeve. Or how about there, pressed up against his door, the Bella that pleads for release from the whispering madness.
She purses her lips and rolls her eyes, finishing with a melodramatic groan.
She's not those floundering girls.
This is her. The here-and-now-Bella. Her-father's-daughter-Bella.
"Bells." She can hear her father's silvery voice before he passed away in his chair.
She wishes he were here, but all she is left with are memories to clear the debris in her head:
A troop of foxes startled her one day during an old January ushered in by fresh snow. She wore her favorite boots, and jammies under ski pants, and the Christmas-gift flannel jacket that she asked for because her dad wore one. It came from the boy's department, but she loved it just fine. They were out ice fishing; she wanted to slide on the ice and tempt the shallow areas where the fish swam under foggy glass, but her dad set her to work on skimming the slush as it formed in the hole throughout the day and to pouring the hot chocolate, sometimes with, sometimes without, marshmallows.
She caught sight of a kit fox, auburn hair, full-white tail, sniffing at the edge of the lake and looking up; it regarded her. "What's wrong, kid?" She had latched on to her dad's arm as the rest of the troop ventured from beyond the snow-covered evergreens.
He followed her line of vision. "Come here," he said, scooping her up and onto his lap, the folding chair plenty sturdy for both of them. The line had been cast and the red flag on the tip-up bobbed in the drilled hole. Bella pointed a child's finger at the foxes, staring in wonder and worked-up fright.
"They're called a troop, Bells. See the big one? That's the dad and the grayer one must be the mom. She's called a vixen."
"I like the little one," she whispered into his neck, watching them under her lashes.
"Of course you do," his chest rumbled. He pointed to the smallest one, tucked behind his mother's tail. "That one's a kit."
"A kid?"
"No, a kit. They like to stay together and keep each other safe. They fight for each other. A family, like us."
"But we don't have a vixen." She reminded him with an exasperated puff.
Point taken, he hugged her tight (made her squirm, it almost hurt). "No, we don't," he said, turning his eyes to the red flag in the icy water, where it bobbed and teetered a bit drunkenly. "But we have each other, and we're a family. Don't forget that. You and me, kid."
"We stay together and keep each other safe," she mantra'd.
"Yup. That we do. C'mon now, you're getting heavy and you need to skim."
She jumped off and skidded around to the opposite side of the hole, poking the slivered ice. "Can we eat it?" she asked, scooping it into her small palm.
"No."
And she listened.
She remembers the girl she used to be, the one her dad loved so much, and smiles. The girl before grief and marriage dissolved her into a withering thing. But no more.
It's blunt, the little ache, but useful because she knows that if she walks out of that building, it will be the end to her story: righting other people's children, cooking too much pasta for one, hanging her days on coat racks, fumbling with groceries, keys, and a door with no extra-hands; wishing as hard as the next girl.
What happened?
She was set to tell Edward yesterday morning. She had called Rose from the coffee-shop and said, "I'm going to do it. I'm ready."
But then his face. His body. His whiskey. Their fear.
That's the distraction, Edward.
She practices the words in a hushed voice reserved for prayers (and his possible responses):
"Edward, I'm divorced."
"Bella, all I want is be with you."
She considers this with a little side-smile, but shakes it off. Maybe not that easy.
Again, with levity. He may like that:
"Edward, I've been divorced for three months, and we can have babies now."
"Have you seen my pants?"
She'd like to look for his pants, but no.
Again, simple and with her chest wide open:
"Edward, I'm no longer married and I want us to try and be together."
"I don't know, Bella, if I want to."
Her stomach turns because this is the scenario she fears the most.
She looks at Edward's door.
She looks out the window into the street, where the snow has abated. Arthur has cleared the path to the sidewalk.
She can't stay in this foyer forever and she fears the freeze in her life if she leaves without giving them both a chance.
I can't do this, live like this and wonder anymore.
She can hear muffled noises in Edward's apartment. Her throat swells dry at the thought of the risk she's going to take. Her head is cotton, her body lead.
To hell with it; she's going to lead with her thundering heart.
The truth, singular and pure as a promise, is the best she can offer him.
She's done pacing, she's done mulling. She wants to start over, rip the seam off and unravel it so she can mend it her way.
It's my turn.
Straightening her spine, stepping up to where she needs to be, she marches to his door and curls a fist.
A/N:
Credit to CM and WriteOnTime for patience and stealing my knife when I want to cut a fic.