Thaw
XxX
"He is so nice. I can't believe you've never met Arthur before."
They're ambling down the stairs with full bellies, Bella following. The draft in the foyer is a welcome change from the heat in Arthur's apartment.
After promises of stopping in more often, he sent them on their way, and thanked them for the company. He gave Bella a too-long kiss on the cheek. Edward was inclined to cough.
"I've seen him around but," Edward shrugs, "I'm hardly ever here. I'll probably stop in and ask him about his boxing days, though."
Bella pauses at the juncture of the stairs. He's reached the bottom step and her body heat cools behind him.
She's nervous now, her stomach turning at the thought of what it means to have him gone – maybe for a short while, or worst – for good. "Will you be traveling again soon?"
He hears it in her tone and he knows. It's time to settle accounts and sort out what part of this crazy mess belongs to whom, and what the hell to do with it.
He looks up and reaches a hand out for her. She walks down a few steps and takes it.
She is eye level.
"You're really not married?"
"I've told you. It's all out, all of it. I'm not married." She gets closer, willing him to make the next move, one way or another.
"You're sweating," he says softly, touching a damp tendril on her neck.
"It was stuffy up there. Hot. And you're avoiding this," she says impatiently. Her story has been spilled forth in front of him and she's going nuts wondering what he's going to do about it.
But he is still smarting about the time she's taken away from them. From the slow and natural progression of a courtship and into the declaration he's just now allowing into his heart. The door is open, he sees where he wants them to be, but the irritation is as bad as the heat upstairs.
He turns his head, and she thinks he's going to let her down, but he's looking outside. It's stopped snowing and the sky is milky – still.
He tugs her hand. "Let's go outside."
She snatches it back. "What? No! It's freezing out." She looks down at her clothes. "We don't have our coats."
"C'mon," he says, walking across the foyer, backwards. "We have time to talk, right?"
"Yes, but…"
His back is to the door, ready to push. "No 'buts'. C'mon, wuss."
He looks like a boy, a suddenly playful boy. It's a side she's witnessed in bed, but not when he's fully clothed. Up until now, their moments have been wrapped up in each other's bodies. She gives in to this Edward because he's a sight to see with that taunting smile.
It suits him.
Plus, if she's honest, she hates being called a wuss.
She pulls the sleeves of her thermal down, fisting into them, and bracing herself. "Fine." Her gait is cavalier. He raises an eyebrow, impressed. "Let's get this over with."
"After you," he says, swinging his arm out with a flourish, eyes twinkling. She moves past him, narrowing her eyes.
His street is quiet and white. Neighborhood noise – muffled – presses into the soft snow piled beside the road. The shape of houses and trees, blunted under drifts, judge passively. Vehicles, lumpy versions of themselves, have been abandoned to the storm.
The streetlamps – off – line his street like unplugged boom mics.
"Oh my God!" Bella dances in place while her blood seizes up.
A strong pair of arms surround her from behind, and Edward presses her into him, snugly. "Shh."
The building's walk has been cleared, thanks to Arthur. He's shoveled the excess to either side of the lawn, creating waist-high mounds.
Bella leans back, trying to melt in to him, bone-chilled. Yet regardless of the temperature, her heart races at the contact.
He whispers in her ear. "Bella?"
"Hmm?"
And his response is to send her heart flying (body and limbs along with it) into the air – a moving picture of hair and flailing arms – into a three-foot pile of snow.
He's been dying to do that for the last hour.
She shrieks, and no one but Edward can hear her. He's chucked her deep into shoveled snow as she sputters and yells in shock.
"What the fuck, Edward!" It's not a question. She clears snow from her eyes. "What is your problem? Get me out of here."
"Three months, Bella? All this time, divorced? You have any idea the shit I've gone through? I've been worked up for nothing. What else don't I know about you? Kids, maybe?"
"That's it! Shit. That's it, nothing else. Get me…ugh, I can't believe you just did that. Jerk!"
Every attempt at tunneling out sends her flat on her ass. Her palm slips on ice as she pushes up. Her squirming digs her deeper into the icy pit. She looks like a pissed snow angel and it makes him laugh.
Loudly.
She wants to strangle him, standing in front of her, akimbo, with his stupid face.
He's delirious.
"You're maddening, woman, you know that?"
"Are you kidding me? You came back! Fuck you! You had a choice, same as me," she screams dully at him, and her irritation turns to real anger. "I wasn't ready, dammit! And you always let me in."
Her shouting recedes into a broken ache. "And this morning you shut me out."
She feels small.
It eats at him how defeated she looks. "How do you think it felt knowing you were someone else's? And yet, every chance I had, I went straight to you. Forget my family. Forget my dignity. You called. I came. I've had nothing but you on my mind since I've met you." And nothing but shame. The residual guilt, a phantom kernel, sits like a stone, but reason (and her return) tells him it's time to let go and let live.
He gives her his hand and she hauls herself up. Her hair is crusted in snow and the rest of her is in the same, furious shape. She looks at him abominably. She is livid.
He barely contains the urge to laugh.
She pushes him in the chest.
"You!" And she's not gentle. "You make it sound as if it's easy," she shoves again, forcing him to step back, "to tell you anything, mister-fucking-gregarious. How am I supposed to know what you felt? You don't speak! What am I? Maybe I was just another lay."
She shoves one more time, powerfully. "For all I know you don't want commitment and…"
"What do you mean?"
"You kicked me out this morning, dammit! You left me out and…and you fucking cleaned your place?" She gathers slush from her hair and whips it at him. When the ice stings his cheek, he flinches. "Why did I come back? I've got nothing, Edward. Nothing. No one. It's just me now. And here I thought that maybe I could tell you and maybe you'd be happy about it!"
"Bella, wait -"
She's too frantic, and too wet and cold, to care about the walls around her heart.
"Don't 'Bella, wait', me! I didn't leave, Edward. I was in that lobby." She points to the iron door. "And I thought you were worth it. That maybe, just maybe, I could do this for myself just once."
One more shove with all her might; she wants to kill him and break her own heart all at once.
One more shove and his heel slips on ice, but not before he gasps and reaches out for her, clutching her arm and sending them both into another pile.
She lands on top of him. "Oof!"
When his eyes clear, iridescent puffs of powder swirl around her face, behind her head, and settles over them in their own private snow-fort.
They blink away the flurries in shock.
They're panting raggedly, sending smoke signals from within their crushed-in cave and into the benign day.
She struggles to get up, but he holds her down. She's done with his hot and cold, tired of their self-imposed limbo. She needs to know, or go and begin her life.
With or without him.
Bella rises on her elbows and speaks in strangled hurt. "You. You've got to tell me. Tell me I'm not the only one who wants this, dammit. I'll leave, but you have to tell me to leave."
Her lashes glimmer and he reaches up to touch them. He has a case of déjà-vu, but this is real.
She is real, on top of him, and he's not deaf or dumb at this moment.
He's buried in Bella, shoved down into the snow with her body weight, cocooned and safe. His chest moves harshly from the adrenaline.
He's never breathed easier.
"No, you're not going anywhere. Don't." He holds her tighter. "I can't take it. Not again."
She tilts her head in uncertainty, so he makes it certain. "I want you. I want you. I do. I've never wanted anyone more."
He can feel the hair on his face move; she's so close. He rubs his scruff on her wet cheek. He licks his lips and swallows. "You're not just another lay. You're not just someone I pass the time with. No."
"Then what am I?"
When she speaks, the sound reverberates to his heart and it answers for him.
Wonderment thickens his voice. "A possibility."
She wants to apologize, and kick him, and give in to the weariness of their fight. She wants to let him take over now and keep her safe.
"That's good?"
He tangles her thighs in his own, wrapping her up for himself.
He wants to laugh and jump like he's coming down from a runner's high, he's bursting with wild exuberance.
"Yeah. Real good. Too good." He can't believe his luck and he's not mad enough to question it.
48 hours with her, and his insides have gone solid to jelly, repeatedly. Yet there's one thing he's been denying himself since she returned yesterday morning.
There is only one thing left for him to do.
He cranes up for his kiss.
She helps him, turning her head sideways, and responding in kind. "How good?"
He smiles against her lips in a game of Simon-says. "This."
They kiss, fragile. Their skins are numb – cheeks, toes, fingers – but they melt in relief at the contact. She whimpers soft joy in his mouth, her brows furrowed by it. He can't keep his mouth closed, he wants to smile so wide like open arms waiting for her after a long day. Wide as the sky filled with her cinnamon scent, and his veneration catches in his throat.
No, nothing is cold that can't be chipped away with an instance of sharp truths.
No, it is not cold. It is warm where they speak, where they kiss, roaming and testing, saying what they've wanted to say. Each breathing life into the one they love.
He tastes her frosty lips; she's so sweet, he can't get his fill of her. She's on top and his hands move to the back of her head, but she's got him beat. She kisses back with a grip on his shoulder, a shudder in his mouth.
She licks his lip. He sucks on her tongue.
His lips move along the side of her nose. "Your nose is cold." Her hair is icy-wet along his neck.
"Shut up. It's your fault."
He laughs, his chest bouncing her body. It's like she's on her own private ride, she's giggling so hard.
"I can't believe you did that. You threw me!" She slaps his chest half-heartedly. The fight has fizzled.
He captures her renegade hands. "Hey, hey. You deserved it." And before she can get it out, he concedes, "and I deserved it too."
There's so much more he needs to tell her, and after a show like that, how can he not?
He wants her where it's warm, warmer, warmest.
"Let's go inside."
XxX
She walks out of the bathroom – pink and poofy – after indulging in a scalding hot shower. She wears his clothes again – a fresh white t-shirt and his boxers.
She is drying her hair when she spots him in the kitchen guzzling down a tall glass of water. He turns around and sees her, forgetting to dry the sheen of water on his upper lip with the back of his hand.
He licks it, instead.
His first thought, 'I should get more towels' evaporates with his next thought: 'She looks fresh and young and beautiful'.
He's seen her body dozens of times in all its forms – bent, twisted, pin-wheeled, bared open, grunting, huffing into the dark.
He's seen it asleep.
But when she sets her damp feet on his floor, all he can think about are the ligaments connecting her - between her toes, the tender and taut flesh behind her knees, the webbed, pouchy skin between thumb and forefinger – spaces between her spaces.
His desire, blended with water, smoothes out his nerves so all he is left with is a spreading heat and a flush on his cheeks.
"Hey." She points at him. "Do you have a problem with clothes?"
He's stripped down to his longjohns, and barefoot. He leans his backside against the kitchen sink, bracing his hands on either side of himself.
"Not if I can help it."
It's confession time and he's nowhere near ready, but he owes her. Tit for tat, she started it.
He smiles.
Bella shakes her head and twists her hair into the towel. She's conscious of his stare and everything is so new, it makes her nervous and anxious. She can't help but laugh inside, in relief and disbelief.
How far they've come.
A tiny smirk, of a girl having won her heart's desire, plays on her lips.
"I don't know you," he begins.
The smirk dissolves.
"Up until a few hours ago, I never entertained this." He waves between them. "Us."
He looks at her face as it worries itself into doubt; she wrings the ends of her hair in the towel tightly.
He tries not to stare at the puckered nipple creasing his shirt and the tempting body that's coming toward him. He pauses her with a finger. "Wait. You come any closer and we won't be talking."
"Is that a problem?"
He guffaws out of his beating chest. "Yeah, it's a problem. I need to concentrate and you're making it difficult. Can you be still?"
She meant if there was a problem with his newfound knowledge, but can't explain herself, having been caught off guard by the power she has over him and his acknowledgment of it.
"I'll be good."
"Good."
He keeps rubbing one foot with the heel of the other, and his vulnerable mouth opens and closes as if he's trying out his first word. She wonders if he practiced while she was showering. She stops her fidgeting.
He clears his throat.
"You used to come over at night, and leave in the morning. Today, I learned you never had to go."
"I needed the space to think for myself," she starts to argue.
He nods at the ceiling and sighs harshly.
"Maybe you did. Sure. But, for me, it was never enough. Maybe I should have said something. Maybe. Fucking maybe. I didn't think past our first night, or the second, or the one after that. It was a cakewalk at first. Until I stopped liking good-byes."
She bites her lip, contrite. "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
"Stop with the 'sorry'. I don't know what purpose it serves us. I was pissed that you kept me hanging like that. I…I worried Emmett, my parents with my behavior. I've never, hear me, never been so taken."
She shifts her weight into a retort, but he cuts her off. "And before you tell me that it's my choice. Yeah, I get that. We can weigh who's culpable here, but who will that help? I think we both want the same thing."
He reaches out and takes the towel out of her iron grip, the wheels in her head creaking, and he doesn't want her to second-guess him.
"But what the hell do I know? I don't know much, but I know that I won't shoot myself in the foot twice. You're no longer with your ex and what we have…well, I don't know. We're not starting from scratch here, but it feels like we are. I don't know you. I don't know about your past, except for the little you've told me. I don't know anyone outside of you, and I don't know how to talk to you. At least not like this, heart on sleeve. I don't know how or when I'm going to say everything you need to hear."
"It's okay," she says, frowning and straining to accept less than her heart's desire.
"Bella, look here."
She hadn't noticed his silent approach. He's stealthy even when he shadows over her. The waistline of his loungewear appears in her peripheral, followed by his fingers lifting her chin up.
It's time to try the one thing he's only dreamt about or entertained while drunk.
He kisses one damp eye. "But I want to," he says.
He kisses her other eye, closed; her lashes feather across his lip. He speaks into them in a reverent voice.
"I want to be that guy for you. You want declarations; you want to know what I'm thinking or how I feel about you."
His hands are on her face. "I'll tell you. I will. Ask, I'll tell you. I'm done denying you and I'm sure as hell done denying myself. I'm sorry about last night." His eyes squeeze shut and his face scrunches like it bit on a sour recollection. She palms his cheek. "I'm sorry about this morning. But I'm done being sorry about you."
Her fingers swipe his eyes open and his gentle, green gaze is exposed as a still ocean.
She tells him how it is, how she wants it to be. "It's okay."
Their gazes alternate between lips, and cheeks, and eyes, but the pull remains in the space between them, gravitational and true.
He needs her to know this much. "I never regretted that. I've never regretted any minute I've spent with you."
He searches her face for anything, but it's frozen in place. If he has to give her more at this moment, he will. "And, Bella, yeah, you. You're what I want."
Her face melts into the tenderest expression of gratitude and affection. "I'll take it," she whispers.
He grabs her with one arm and pulls her in for a hug, exhaling loudly. "Fucking hell. Good."
After a time of rocking and cradling each other, she looks up at him. His eyes are clear and his face, relaxed.
"Thank you for saying that." She knows, now, how difficult it was for him to show his hand.
He doesn't know how to reinforce his claims and wonders if he'll ever succeed. But he'll try.
"I mean it." The three words come out lame, but they're walking to new meaning and, for now, it's all he has.
"I know."
A long while ago (it seems like forever) before the madness set in, he disclosed the singular weight he puts on his heart and the language it speaks.
She recalls the memory for the first time, like finding the musty pages of a wet book, heavy, but no less filled with all the answers.
"How hard was it?" she asks, accepting that it will take time for more.
His eyes narrow at the light teasing. "Easy, after I got it out. And after you hushed."
She taps her forehead on his chest, smiling.
"I'm glad you have it in you," she says cautiously.
He chuckles. "Yeah, me too."
His heartbeat is at her temple. His chest hair tickles her ear. He's such a boy, and up until now, it dawns on her how uncertain she's left him, how confused.
She can't help the verbal tic, "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He won't let her continue this when she's opened the door for them, fought, and set a course he's curious to take on. She needs to laugh. "It's in your nature."
"What?"
"You're a she-devil. Causing me distress and driving me crazy. I should lock you up, the things you do to me. I should get you a straightjacket."
"Or two," she responds, thinking how discombobulated she's made him, too.
He squeezes her hard as if it will make her shut up about it. She squeaks.
"Now what?"
He brings her face up and gives her his own wicked grin, bending down and planting it on her neck. "Now you make it up to me."
XxX
They spend the night talking.
That is after they make out in his kitchen like teenagers – alive on the thrill of revelation – up against the refrigerator. He pins her with his hips and when she needs to breathe, he comes up like a synchronized swimmer and dives back in, relentless, and reveling in the sensation of his lungs burning for her. When she trails her hand down his chest, he traps it right at the elastic of his thermals and rubs it across East to West, silently begging her to rediscover him.
That part, the kissing, is easy. Getting her to bed, and sucking on her lip like a boy with a Gummi worm is easy.
Turning her mind off, however, is not.
It starts with a simple question during tender nibbling, "What are you doing tomorrow?"
And between curious licks around a scar at the base of her scalp and ear, he ignores her for one of his own, "What happened here?" He runs a finger across the scar and he remembers wanting to ask her months ago, but was afraid the tale would include an intruder.
Her arm is crushed under his weight and she maneuvers it free. "Cliff-diving." She lifts her hair, offering a better view. "I slipped on the edge as I was going in and I faltered. A loose rock nicked me."
"Then what?"
And she tells him. It is a who-are-you type of night, lit by the glow of newfound discovery. Like explorers, they take stock of the other, readying the lay of the land.
Their bodies have spoken for months, and he's aware of her leg smoothing over his while she speaks of her dad and small-town shenanigans. He's impatient to know all of her.
She asks about his brother as he sets to work on her inside-elbow, and she's talking so much, he can't help but laugh at her. So he indulges her and breaks into a story about shattering his mother's china, and Emmett's love of scissors and sheets, and the ghost stories they made up when they were grounded and sent to their room.
Darkness pops with speech bubbles linking a makeshift love story with string, chance, and genuine curiosity.
They spend the night filling in the blanks with favorite Christmas gifts, favorite colors, pet names, best family holidays, dates, people, and other things reserved for gift-giving and platonic conversation.
They spend the night, secretly, watching the other sleep.
When he wakes before her, as he's trained himself to do, he does what he's always done. He hits the head. But this morning he does not dally. He goes back to bed to welcome her from dreaming.
This is not enough, he figures.
He wants his more.
He watches the rise and fall of her shoulders. She has stolen the covers again, and his back rests against the wrought-iron headboard.
Morning light, misty yellow, squeaks through and lands on her face. He doesn't bother to shade her.
The back of her eyelids are a burnt orange. She squints with her eyes closed.
"I hate your coat," he blurts by way of good morning.
She's eaten a tadpole. "What?"
"I mean I want to get you a new coat. Something different."
Bella rolls on her back and shields her eyes with her arm. "Okay." She clears her throat. "Just make sure it's the same one."
"Different."
"No, the same." She leans up on her elbow. "Think of it as new, not different, okay? Just new. From you."
He fits his head in his hand, watching her roll onto her stomach, and narrowing her eyes to glimpse outside. The window is across the room and it's too bright to make out the furniture.
The collar of her shirt hangs low enough for him to peep at her cleavage.
"You're gonna fight this."
"Yes," she tells him without looking up. She can't believe how different the light looks in his loft. "When did it get so bright?"
"About an hour ago."
"Thank God. I have to go home and catch up on work."
"It's Saturday."
"And tomorrow's Sunday," she sighs, "and I still have papers to grade. And I'd like to wear my own clothes." She shoves his thigh.
When it flexes, she gulps.
"Do you now?"
He's got nothing on under the sheets. They didn't have sex last night and he was wearing his thermal underwear the last time she looked.
Does this man ever wear clothes?
Now she's distracted. From the looks of it, he's getting distracted, too.
She's shy of this man who stares intently into her eyes. "What?"
"Do you want your own clothes? Mine aren't good enough?"
He shifts so he his hovering over her. She twists at the spine to get a look at him.
There. That look. That look attached to that torso, linking the high and low of him, and she's flustered enough to sweat between her firm thighs.
There's nothing new about that look. She learned it a long time ago.
He continues, gruff. "Since you have such low regard for my clothes…Miss." He grins. "Then perhaps you should give them back."
She can smell his wakened skin, sticky from sleep, and she wants to know because he never answered. "What are you doing today?"
"You."
"And the day after that?"
"You," he says, playing. "You on Monday, You on Tuesday, on Wednesday and on Thursday."
"You forgot the rest of the week."
"No. You're doing me the rest of the week."
She beams at him, ready for this, whatever it is. However it is.
She thinks wickedly that she wants him messy and wild.
He wants her grinding and burning.
It is morning-sex – a first of firsts.
With her earlobe in his mouth, he tells her dirty things and accuses her of snatching the covers in her sleep. She hums into his shoulder and bites.
His body's posture is at its worst when he's above and inside her. His spine curves into her. The edges of him (shoulders, knees, ankles) fold themselves into her.
For Bella, this is what it means to be buried and buried willingly.
His strokes, languid and reaching are slow, for he has all the time in the world.
He takes her hands, weaves his fingers in, and brings them up to the headboard where they grip together.
He shows her what he has not yet earned the right to tell her. She finds no fear here.
But while his hips kiss her hips, and his lips graze her lips, she feels him tense and stall. "What's wrong?"
Her legs, wrapped around him, tighten into a hug and he stutters out a ragged apology "about last night" because he can't shake it off and she needs him to.
"Shh. I wasn't unwilling," she assures him with a squeeze. "But take me with you next time."
"Next time." She repeats in kisses along his shoulder, broad and silken.
"Bella." He rocks back into rhythm, grateful for her bravery.
She thrusts up into him in reassurance.
"Shh. Don't go crazy, Edward. My poor, poor man. I'm right here."
He laughs, in danger of coming loose from her, because it's not something you hear when you're inside your lover. He has no shame and acceptance is freeing. "Oh, sweetheart, I've come and gone. There's no hope for me now."
His tongue finds hers and makes her mouth sloppy for him.
He peeks when he kisses and finds that she does, too. They smirk, watching the other. At her parted lips, he goes in for deep.
The lovemaking is sensual and hot, fucking and loving, depending on the placement of a thumb (in his mouth) or knees (bucking against the mattress) or their mouths (anywhere it is slick).
She arches. Her blood rushes. Her belly pumps in anticipation.
And more becomes the filthiest four-letter word for the insanity she knows is coming, with another pass of his teeth on her collar, the hard brush of his heavy thighs between her quaking ones, the grunt of promise passing from his chest to hers.
He is fucking making love to her, and she tips over the line into that velvet place where love and lust are one and the same because she trusts them to be.
She gives him the green light. "Flip me over."
He smiles steam on her nipples and says no. He's here, too, and can do one better.
They have a long way to go, and where to start overwhelms him, but not now.
Not here.
He needs to start somewhere. He has to start with what he knows.
He pulls up on his knees, twisting her torso high, and her tummy skin pulls like taffy. One hand on her ass and the other palming the base of them, he watches her eyes roll back.
"Edward," she groans, arching into place like a good girl.
Fuck, she loves this.
"Bella."
He licks his lips and slides in sweetly. Her foot presses against his shoulder.
She answers him, guttural. "This is my favorite."
Yes, this much, this much he knows.
A/N:
WriteOnTime and Cesca Marie took time out of their busy holiday schedules to beta this chapter. I'd thank them under the mistletoe, if I could.