EPOV
"Edward and Bella, sittin' in a tree," Alice sang, swinging her legs back and forth as she slouched on the bar stool.
"Grow the fuck up, Alice," I spat, stirring my Easy Mac and popping it back in the microwave. Carlisle was at the doctor's office with Esme, and Alice and I were alone in the house while Emmett went on a play date with Rose. The week had literally crawled by, speeding up only during the good parts. The good parts were the only moments I wanted to go slower, but naturally they zipped by until another monotonous and glacial night came upon me. The moments were the ones spent with Bella.
It was completely unexplainable. But now I felt a connection to her, like a steel chord, and the thought of leaving her alone and going back to ignoring her like I used to made a sharp pain shoot through my spine. It was Saturday now, but I could still see Alice's face as I ducked out of the parking lot Monday afternoon, cringing and holding my breath as my fingers grasped my clutch like it was a live grenade. Bella tried to bow her head down a bit—we both knew how melodramatic our little hangout could be made as far as Alice was concerned. But she saw, and I almost pissed myself. I waited for the glare, the look of utter confusion and betrayal as she realized that I'd lied to her. There was something going on between Bella and I, and I had sworn that there was absolutely nothing there, not even friendship. But I could practically hear Alice adding it all up in her head as she stared, holding onto Jasper's hand tightly.
Several emotions flashed across her features in that moment. Shock. Confusion. Frustration. And then, right when I expected her brow to furrow and her eyes to ignite with the fury at my evasion of the truth, a look of utter and complete joy took over her face. Alice was elated. As the Volvo turned onto the main road from the parking lot, the last thing I saw was Alice squeal with happiness, clapping her hands together like a child. I smirked as Bella looked to me for my reaction. Happiness was somewhat better than rage in this case, and I supposed that it was better to have my sister pester me with curious interrogations rather than put super glue on the toilet seat.
"Do you think she'll keep her mouth shut?" Bella's first words since she'd sunk into the passenger seat of my car were worried, and it made me laugh.
"Probably not," I smiled, her fingers hesitating slightly before intertwining with mine on the center console. "But I don't really care." She bit her lip thoughtfully as she stared out the windshield, grinning slightly when I ran my thumb over her knuckles.
"It's raining again," she murmured. I rolled my eyes. Fucking duh, it was raining. It had been for three weeks now, only ceasing for about an hour the week before only to pick right back up again. I wondered where it all came from.
"I thought we talked about the whole thing about no conversation concerning the state of the weather," I commented pointedly, raising an eyebrow at her.
"You're right. Sorry." She sighed, burying her chin and neck in her absolutely huge tan coat.
"And no apologizing either. That was Old Bella. I'm determined to make you into New Bella," I promised, switching up my turn signal as I steered into the drive that led to my house.
"What, do you not like me how I am?" Her voice trembled as she squealed out her words, a terrible blush spreading over her cheeks and to the tips of her ears. It was adorable. God, Cullen, could you be any more of a queer?
"On the contrary, I'm beginning to quite love the way you are. I'm just going to help you stop being so damned freaked all the time. It's like a sort of new-and-improved version of you." Her lips twitched, and I figured that her feelings weren't too terribly hurt after all. "But please," I added, "never stop fucking blushing. I can't even see straight when you do that shit."
And, like I hoped she would, she blushed after I spoke.
*
Alice giggled again, breaking me from my recollection of Bella and her perfect fucking cheekbones. I sneered at her, extracting the cheap and stale-tasting noodles from the microwave and stirring it around with a plastic spoon.
"You love her, Edward. I know it." Her grin was so irritating that I wanted to smack her. But she was a girl, as well as my sister, and I had to fight it.
"I don't love her, Alice. I'm just…getting to know her." My voice was thick with obvious irritation, and Alice continued to drive me deeper and deeper into a rage-induced blow up.
"You just wait. I guarantee you, you guys will, like, fall in love and get married or something. I can see it now! You'll realize, five years from now that I am a complete psychic. You'll thank me and apologize for never believing in me and shower me with expensive gifts."
"I doubt that," I spat, tossing a spoonful of boiling hot macaroni into my mouth.
"Never say never," she taunted as she danced out of the kitchen. I rolled my eyes, leaning against the counter to enjoy my microwavable delicacy.
"By the way, Edward, I wear a size 24 in Seven jeans!" Alice's voice bounced off the walls as she ascended the stairs, the pride and sureness in her tone nearly sending me off the edge.
Goddamn, she was annoying.
That Monday, Bella had frowned when I slid the straps of her backpack from her shoulders as she headed towards my front door, tossing it under the shelter of the front porch and leading her around the back of the house towards the trees that stood guard behind it.
"Where are you taking me, mountain trekking?" She sounded slightly whiny, but strangely, it didn't annoy me. "You know I can't even walk across a leveled surface without putting both myself and others in harm's way."
"Oh, relax, Swan. I'm not asking you to jump off a cliff or anything." She snapped her jaw shut, linking my pinky as we started through the trees.
The air was heavy with humidity, the canopy of leaves dropping a nice sprinkling of cool rain down the back of my neck. The earth had a heavy scent, the forest floor alive with dark soil and roots that sprawled sharply like spider's legs. Bella kept silent, moving her lips slightly as if she were singing something in her head. I asked her what song was playing, and she shook her head with embarrassment.
I liked this Bella. Away from Rose and Alice, away from Jessica, away from Forks High School. I wanted to know her so badly, to crawl inside of her brain and to memorize every cell and notion and idea because she was so fucking reserved. As she shook her head, embarrassed to even tell me what song she had stuck in her head, a yearning pulled in the pit of my stomach. It made me anxious, and I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not. I wanted to ask her every question I could think of, and I mentally cursed myself for not taking advantage of that Thursday night in the hallway like I should have. I had asked her shallow questions, lacking any general depth, because that was before my chest had started to ache whenever she was away. For four days now, her eyes stared hollowly at me in the back of my head, lacking the intensity and familiarity that I wanted. I stared at her as we padded through the forest, trying to memorize that exact way that her pupils merged into her irises, the exact color of the ring of startling hazel that outlined them before fading into a stark and devastating white. But when I closed my eyes, they were still those same hollow, emotionless caverns, and I hated it. I was going fucking crazy. I was so glad that no one could hear what I was thinking, but Bella Swan was so fucking unpredictable that it wouldn't surprise me if she'd drilled a fucking hole in the side of my skull so she could take a peek for herself. I ran my fingers through my hair nervously, searching for her little peeping hole.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked suddenly, licking her lips, her eyes still settled on the packed mud beneath the soles of her worn sneakers.
"Deep within the woods, my beauty, to steal all of your virtue." I shot her a fiendish smirk, and she jabbed my thigh with the pinky that was still locked with mine.
"Be serious, Edward," she chastised, an amused look lighting up her face.
"You'll have to wait and see. It's honestly not a big deal, I guess, but it's kind of…um, I guess it's important to me? Or whatever? Yeah.." I was embarrassed, in all honesty. Only three people that I knew of had ever been to this place, and I hadn't been there for a while. I just thought of it as Bella sat beside me at lunch today, and I knew that she would love for me to take her there. It was kind of stupid, and I wasn't positive that she wouldn't think it was stupid, because I still didn't really know her well.
The trees broke after a few miles of twigs cracking beneath our feet, and I held my breath as Bella entered the clearing and peered up at the structure that stood in front of us.
"What…what is this?" she asked quietly, her eyes gaping.
It was a house. Found accidentally, when I was younger. I had been eight when Em and I decided to run away after Esme had demanded that we do our homework and we continually refused. She'd tried to punish us then, and we did what any mature, respectable human being would do. We packed a suitcase with He-Man action figures and a box of markers, and ran away.
We wandered for miles through the brightness of the woods, the trees rattling with life as animals crawled along their trunks and sunlight filtered in through the skeletons of the leaves. Forks had been much sunnier that year, and I had no idea when it had all gone downhill into such a stormy wasteland. I had gotten so scared, not knowing where I was, but Emmett just sucker-punched me and assured me that he knew exactly where we were going because he was a boy scout. The suitcase was getting heavy, and since I was the youngest, it was my job to carry it. My little eight-year-old arm was stiff and sore by the time we found it.
"Holy shit," Emmett had muttered as he gaped at the three-story structure, inching closer and closer to it.
"Emmett, I'm telling Mom that you cursed," I sang, dropping the suitcase to the long, unkempt grass with a thud.
"Do it and see what happens," he threatened, not taking his wide brown eyes from the dilapidated shingles that leaned against the roof of the weathered, white house. I wasn't sure who lived in it, or if anyone lived in it at all. From the look of the peeling white paint and the missing wooden planks from the sweeping wrap-around porch, it was abandoned. A home sat in the middle of a forest, sitting alone in the center of a positively huge, round meadow, and we had never known about it. Apparently, neither did anyone else.
"I dare you to go inside," Emmett said excitedly, finally turning to me with an expectant grin.
"No, Emmett," I whined. "Mom will be mad if I go."
"Aw, don't be a pussy," he laughed, skipping towards the porch of the house.
"Emmett!" I called. "What if someone lives here?" He laughed at me, trudging his way through the waist-high ferns the spread across the lawn, growing against the weathered foundation of the giant white creature.
"Then we can make friends with him. We are homeless, after all."
I eventually gave up on my fears, deciding that Emmett was big enough to fight off any ghosts or animals or strangers that hid within the walls of the house, and entered the towering white door. The stained glass on its face was punched out, the molding around it pealed from the wall and leaving exposed, rotting wood.
I gasped as I looked around me. The home, absolutely disgusting on the outside, was almost perfectly preserved within. An austere, spiraling staircase rose from the slightly stained white carpet, stretching to a second floor. A few steps were missing, but the chandeliers hung perfectly from the ceiling, good as new with the exception of a few cobwebs.
"Ew," Emmett snarled from another room. As I searched for him, my eyes darting nervously in search of another life form, a stench so putrid that it made my eyes tear wafted relentlessly up my nostrils. Long, white couches sat heavily across the pale floors, a sleek, white grand piano sitting beautifully on a low platform by the staircase. Finally I found him in the large kitchen that stretched off of the den, holding his nose and peering into a darkened refrigerator. "There's still food in here," he grimaced, closing the door with a smack and tearing out of the room. Food? If there was food in the refrigerator, the former owner obviously hadn't just abandoned the home. I tried not to let my mind wander too far in the fear that I would scare myself with the possibilities of what happened to whoever had lived there. The power was out completely, the clocks on the out-of-date stove and microwave blackened. Expensive-looking furniture still stood with tragic loneliness around the house, and although Emmett wanted more than anything to search the top floors for something to indicate who had lived here, the broken staircase prevented him from finding anything. I hoped that there wasn't some dead body decomposing up here, but the more I looked around, the more plausible that assumption seemed. I shivered with fear.
I never wanted to go back there again.
But Emmett did. And since he was bigger than me and I didn't really have any other friends other than my sister and Jasper Hale, I went with him. Eventually, after that day, we returned home and begged Esme to let us live with her again. She frowned with feigned intolerance, and made us sign declarations of obedience that she made with green construction paper and Sharpie. Whenever we went back, we always told Esme we were going to play baseball or to the library, or something else completely untrue. We wanted to keep the place a secret, somewhere that no one could ever find us. We'd go through the forest to the old white house, sitting in the rocking chairs that still sat on the porch and making up stories about what happened to it. We wondered what it had looked like before it practically fell to pieces, and dreamt about coming back when we were old and out of elementary school to fix it up and live in it together with our wives and our dogs. Emmett would have two golden retrievers, but I was allowed to have only one German shepherd because I was younger. Sometimes we'd bring our gloves and a baseball and play catch in the ferns, the white house watching over us with ancient wisdom. I grew to love the place, liking how Emmett wanted me to come with him there and liking all of the stupid shit we came up with and the games we played. I think that we continued to be close in our teens because of the house, and we came to find it every once in a while. This was only the second time I'd been without him, and this time, I had a very different companion.
"This is a house, Bella," I answered her, staring at the familiar shingles and the peeling of the wooden siding.
"Well, Edward, that's honestly quite obvious." She rolled her eyes as she broke away from me, her pinky pulling out of my grasp. "What is this doing here? In the middle of the woods like this? Who lives here?"
"No one," I said as I sauntered towards the sweeping porch, dragging my feet against the softness of the overgrown ferns. Their leaves brushed against my thighs, and I was glad I'd worn jeans.
"So it's abandoned?"
"Yeah, I guess. Em and I have been coming here for almost ten years and it's been empty all the while."
"It's beautiful," she remarked softly, following close behind me and sitting next to me on the windswept porch swing. "Is this even stable?" she asked, patting the armrest hesitantly.
"Let's just say Emmett can sit in it and it doesn't even give, not the slightest bit." She laughed quietly as she leaned her head against my shoulder. Fucking strawberries.
She sat there in silence, much like our walk on the way there, rocking us gently back and forth with the toe of her shoe.
"Why did you bring me here, Edward?" she asked suddenly, rubbing the softness of her hair against my neck. I thought carefully before I spoke, and she repeated her question softly under the impression that I hadn't heard her.
"Because, I don't know. I guess…I guess I thought that this is the place I kind of grew in. Emmett and I came here because our house was never that great. We were alone a lot, and I sort of came here to pretend that this had always been my home." She was quiet then, and I guessed that she wanted me to continue. "The first day we came here, the place was filled with rotting food and roaches. It was disgusting, but Emmett thought that it was the coolest thing. I used to think he was so funny and interesting and smart." I laughed, and so did she.
"But we kept bringing all this shit with us when we came, like blankets and action figures and Scrabble and stuff and we sort of…moved in. We came everyday until Esme started to get suspicious—obviously we weren't really going to the library to study everyday like we said we were. But here, we would sit out here or on some stranger's couch and plan our lives. This house was whatever I wanted it to be. I could pretend anything that I wanted when I was here and forget about what I would go home to that night. I was here with Emmett, stretched out in the ferns underneath the sun, and at home, I was underneath a cover of trees in an empty house, trapped in a bedroom that didn't feel like it belonged to me." Bella smiled, lifting her legs and folding them into my lap.
"I want to know about your house. With Carlisle and Esme, I mean. Why do you hate it so much?" I swallowed. This was getting too personal. I liked Bella, but she couldn't know. She couldn't know the sadness and the heaviness that hung heavy on my shoulders beneath the roof of Carlise's home. She couldn't know the sickness that ate away at his body; she couldn't know the darkness of the nighttime that lingered over me. I wanted to know her, but I didn't want her to know me. It wasn't fair. But it was sort of necessary. I wanted to keep this new, sunny Bella safe, and away from the guilt and sorrow of my family that would surely send her back into that uncomfortable, secluded hole that she had only recently emerged from.
"I just hate it, I guess. Carlisle works too much. Alice and Emmett are irritating, same old, same old," I sighed dismissively. I needed to change the subject, and fast. "Tell me about Phoenix. I want to know about your mother." She eyes me carefully, judging my expression carefully before speaking. I prayed that she couldn't see the hollowness in my expression. She simply smirked at me, rolling her eyes before giving me the answers to the questions I so desperately wanted to ask.
Bella gave me the abridged version of her life in Phoenix, even summarizing the divorce of her parents and her mother's recent marriage to her stepfather, Phil. She told me about his gut-wrenching ego trips and his mediocre ball-playing skills, laughing every now and then at his utter tendency of failure and even tearing up as she described her mother's face to me. She described how it felt the first time she was pricked by a cactus, and the feeling of the hot sun on her pale skin. She used her hands to describe the depth of the Arizonan canyons and the size of the sun in the middle of the day. My cheeks flamed with anger as she sadly remembered how the kids at her old school used to look at her, the anger turning to chagrin when I realized that that was, in a nutshell, how I used to look at her. But now she was new, and I was new, and I'd make sure that no one ever looked at her like that again.
She talked and talked, only pausing every now and then to suck in huge breaths between witty stories and fond memories. Eventually, her plump lips formed a pink little "O," a yawn resonating from the back of her throat as her eyes fluttered closed, her head still resting on the shoulder of my jacket. I let out a deep breath, realizing that not once had the conversation turned back to my home or my parents.
Bella slept for a long ass time. She breathed heavily, murmuring softly every once in a while, as the breeze stirred the cascading ferns into rolling waves before us.
I was troubled.
Bella had asked, and I had lied. I lied about my family and my relationship with my father, and I knew that I could never tell her. The thought alone made my chest ache. But telling her would almost be slimy, and I knew I couldn't put something that heavy on her tiny shoulders. Hey, Bella, I know we're barely even a couple, but my dad's dying of cancer. Want to fuck?
Even entertaining the notion made me laugh bitterly at myself. Bella stirred at the vibration of my empty chuckles, and I immediately silenced myself as she drifted back to sleep. Everything within me screamed at her shut eyelids, begging her to wake up and listen to what was going on in my head. But she couldn't, and I would never tell her. My limbs were aching with dire need, and I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming and shaking her frame beneath my fingers. My dad is sick, Bella. My dad is sick and I'm fucking scared and I need somebody. I screamed the words in my brain but my lips remained mashed together. I'd only known her just over a week, and I was scared shitless. But I kept telling myself that nothing was holding me back, even though I knew all the while that I was lying to myself. Everything was holding me back. Carlisle, loneliness, everything.
Bella slept for a while longer before climbing into my lap, sliding her knees beneath my hands and kissing me lazily with little enthusiasm. She was obviously exhausted for reasons unknown, so we hiked back to the house so I could take her home.
She stared at me thoughtfully the entire way to the cul-de-sac off Maple where she lived, not speaking over the quiet music that lingered in the humid air of my car. She occasionally brushed her lips across my knuckles, but she never spoke. She still didn't speak as she left the car, only turning to flash the most devastatingly perfect smile I'd ever seen. She wiggled her fingers, her eyes tired and sad as she pushed open the storm door to her house. She was probably wondering what the hell was wrong with me, not bothering to ask because she seemed to understand me so fucking perfectly and knew that I didn't want to talk about it.
I missed her as I drove home. The car was still as silent as it had been when she was driving with me, but her presence sort of hummed with life that was completely and inexplicably audible to me. Without her, an empty space lingered in the passenger seat, the once-comfortable silence now painfully lonely as I recollected the events of the afternoon and the thoughts that had been repeatedly stabbing at my internal organs.
I took the both sets of stairs leading to the third floor two steps at a time, anxious to crawl beneath my sheets and endure another night of Bella's eyes staring back at me from behind my eyelids. I sighed as I pushed my door open, sliding off my filthy white canvas tennis shoes that were stained brown from the little afternoon nature expedition. A deep voice startled me from across the room, an uncharacteristic yelp squeezing out from between my clenched teeth.
"Edward," Carlisle acknowledged, his ankle resting on his knee as he leaned into the black leather of my sofa.
"Jesus, Carlisle," I swore, running a hand nervously through my unkempt mane of hair. "You scared the shit out of me." Carlisle cocked an eyebrow in disapproval, undoubtedly from my near-constant use of expletives. I threw myself onto my golden duvet dismissively, glad that Carlisle had decided to come up tonight even though I'd missed out on dinner.
"So your mother told me you took that Bella girl out today," he remarked quietly as I began doodling on the edge of an old AP test. "Where did you take her?"
"Around," I answered half-heartedly, digging my pen into my paper as it gave beneath the pressure of the ballpoint. Carlisle chuckled, propping an arm along the back of the couch.
"You take her to Port Angeles or something? Olympia?"
"No," I shook my head, not looking up from the stark lines that ripped across the white page I drew on.
"You took her there, didn't you?" We both knew what he was referring to, and he was right. Carlisle knew the big, white house was a place for me, a sort of refuge.
"Yeah," I nodded, flipping the test over to a fresh side to draw on. "I did, actually."
"And did she like it there?" The design I doodled grew darker and darker as I traced over it several times.
"Yeah. She loved it, actually. Maybe I'll take her back there." My voice was injected with venom, and my father recoiled. I wanted to change the subject, so badly that I itched with anxiousness. Carlisle chewed on the inside of his cheek, his sallow cheekbones sinking like canyons between the bones of his face.
"Edward, are you still mad at me over that?"
I was. I knew I shouldn't be, but I was.
*
Carlisle was given a two-week vacation from the hospital for the summer holiday. It was around five or six years ago, and I think I was about twelve, eleven at the youngest. Emmett and I had tugged on his shirtsleeves and poked at his shoulders, begging for attention as he sat in the leather chair of his study, staring at his computer screen. "What do you want, boys?" he'd hissed, his blue eyes barely shifting from the illuminated screen.
"Come outside with us, Dad," Emmett had whined, his 'S's whistling between the gap in his teeth that hadn't yet been closed by braces. "Edward and I want to show you our place."
"I have work to do, Emmett," my father said, his voice thick with irritation. Emmett eyed me carefully, willing me to join in on the argument. Naturally, I complied.
"You have two weeks, Dad," I argued, my eyes still locked with Emmett's. "We've been wanting to show you this forever." Carlisle drew in a deep breath.
"Forever? Well, in that case, I can make an exception," Carlisle relented, laughing as he pushed away from his desk. "But make it fast, I have work to do."
Needless to say, Carlisle had been furious as the three of us tripped through the woods behind the house we all lived in together, making snide comments and remarks the entire way. "I should be at home, working," he'd snarled as the toe of his shoe caught beneath a tree root. "This is foolish and childish and stupid. Just wait until your mother hears what you've gotten us into."
Emmett offered to turn back, but Carlisle insisted that we'd already forced him too far now to turn back. It was sort of like the time I'd accidentally taken the last of Jasper's mom's favorite cereal as she glared at me with distaste. But then she just smiled at me with a feigned pleasance that didn't touch her resentful eyes, insisting that I could just go ahead and eat it. I knew she was mad I'd gotten the last of it, and rather than taking it from me, her punishment was to make me feel as badly as possible as I shoveled it into my mouth, guilt hitting me harder and harder with each bite. Then, in the woods with my only brother and my angry father, was exactly like Jasper's mom and her fucking cereal.
The clearing met the tips of our toes suddenly, and my eyes finally left the ground to take in all three stories of the beautifully rundown house. The three of us stood in a line along the clearing, staring through the dusty and cracked windowpanes in stillness. Carlisle was the first to break it.
"This?" was all he asked, his mouth hanging open and his brow furrowed in apparent vehemence. A substantial amount of time passed before he finished his thought. "This…this is what you brought me all this way for? An old, dirty house?" His tone had turned from disbelief to the thickness of unadulterated anger.
"It's our favorite place to be," I explained in stutters, confusion spreading over my features. "We thought you'd like it. We thought you'd want to come with us here from now on." Emmett nodded in concurrence as we stared up at the face of our father. Carlisle chuckled resentfully, shaking his head sharply. His eyes fluttered closed, and when he opened them, he held me beneath his gaze like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. His eyes were full of almost hatred, glaring back at mine as my chin quivered.
"I have things to do, Edward. I have a life. I was busy, and you interrupted me to find this…this…this thing."
"But--,"
"Let me finish, Edward," he hissed, holding me in place beneath his penetrating stare. "I want you to take me back home, the fastest way you know how, and I want you to stop coming here. You don't know who this house belongs to, and it's not yours."
"But it's abandoned, Dad," Emmett argued. "No one's been here for a long time. Ed and I have been coming for years and nothing bad's ever happened, I promise."
"YEARS?" Carlisle gasped, his eyes widening. "Years? What have you been doing, just lying to your mother and I about all this?" He was towering over me as Emmett shifted nervously on the other side of him, my teeth chattering in fear of the man that I loved as he hung over me with rage. "Take me back," he ordered. "Take me back right now. And when we get there, go to your rooms and stay there before I can decide what to do with you."
Carlisle had closed himself back in that fucking study for the rest of his two weeks at home. He hid away from me as I wallowed in shame, calling myself every name I could think of as I wished that I had never brought my father to my special place. Em and I could never go back there, and all of the plans I'd made while we decided what breeds of dogs we'd own and how we'd ever get to the top two stories crashed into rubble. Some of those plans included my father, and Em and I had decided that when Carlisle got old we'd let him live with us in that big white house in the middle of the woods. Esme could visit occasionally, and maybe Alice, too. But it would be my brother, Carlisle, and me, and we'd be happy there until our dogs died and we died, too. As I sat alone in my bedroom on the top floor, I cringed at my foolish ideas, hiding them away in the back of my mind as the idea of ever being friends with my father slipped away as if it had never been there.
*
Carlisle didn't mean it. As I looked at him now, his blue eyes were no longer hard and terrifying as they had been that day. I remembered how they used to be so clearly, a still frame in my mind of his old eyes, full of horror and coldness and blue. But now, they were soft, and almost apologetic. I looked up from the sharp strokes of my pen, meeting the new eyes that didn't exist three weeks before that very moment.
"I'm sorry, son," he whispered, his head drooping. "I don't know if you remember that day as well as I do." Before now, we'd never spoken of it. But I thought of it often, just like I thought of the study door and the unsigned birthday card.
"I remember." My throat was dry suddenly as I looked to my lap.
"I wish I could take it back," Carlisle breathed. "I wish I had pulled on some tennis shoes and I wish I had sat on that porch with the two of you and let you tell me all about that place." I shook my head, scraping in a breath.
"I do, too, Dad," I confessed, attempting to find his eyes. They stubbornly remained against my gold carpet, so I simply stared at his down-turned face. "I wish you had loved it. That's all we hoped."
"I know. I knew that as I saw your head hung with shame when I sent you to your bedroom. It must have been lonely up here, all alone." He attempted a smile, but it was a wasted effort.
"Kind of," I admitted. "But it's fine now. That was, like, five years ago. It's fine now."
"I often think about what would be if I had stayed. I wonder if things would be different if I hadn't been so consumed within myself. I wonder what the relationship between you and I would be like if I had sat with you in those ferns or on that porch, if only for a little while." He inhaled heavily, his eyes clouding slightly before returning back to normal.
"It is what it is, Carlisle," I answered him. My tone was not one of bitterness or frustration. It was just…heavy. Heavy with truth and regret and an undertone of sadness. His decisions were irrevocable, but none of it mattered anymore. Not with his circumstance, and not with my strong desire to be less angry with him for years and years of neglect that were now unalterable. He nodded without speaking, one eye spilling over just enough to send a silent trail of wetness down his wasted cheek.
"I want you to take me there again, Edward." I thought I had heard him wrong, before he repeated himself.
"But…why?" I asked incredulously. "You don't need to seek atonement for anything, Dad. It's not your fault."
"It's not yours, either, Edward. You need to stop living your life taking the blame for everything."
"It was my fault. I shouldn't have taken you with us, you were busy…" At my words, Carlisle was out of his seat, his palm smacking the leather cushioning with a piercing smack.
"ENOUGH!" he ordered, his shoulders shaking. "Enough! Enough, Edward! Stop it! Stop it now, or you will never be able to."
"W-what?" I uttered, my body tense and unmoving as he shook before me.
"Enough!" he repeated. "None of this is your fault. I'm not sick because of you, our home isn't a concentration camp because of you, Esme doesn't cry herself to sleep every night because of you. I wasn't a terrible father because of you, and it's not your damn fault." My mouth popped open, my fingers grasping the edges of my cluttered test paper.
"Please, Edward. Please stop. I can't bear it. I know that you don't owe me anything. You owe me absolutely nothing, and I shouldn't dream of asking anything of you. But I have to ask you to stop blaming yourself. You waste away up here as your life slips by, and I can't leave you like this. I can't leave you here to pass life up like I did mine." I cringed at his casual talk of his impending death, and his tone softened as he registered the unease of my face. "I need you to stop. Please. For me, for Esme, for everyone."
"Okay," was all I answered. It was all I could say. His words hit me like a fresh slap in the face, and I was in a state of shock. Carlisle hastily attempted to rearrange his face, carefully piecing his eyes and mouth back to a state of calmness. He turned to exit the room as I continued to sit there with wide eyes and an open mouth, turning to face me again as he pulled open my door.
"And I want you to take me back, Edward. Take me back. I promise it will be different."
