"So I'm guessing washing machines were invented after you decided to go into hiding," Edward said. He was standing on the bank of a river north of the cabin holding a basket full of their clothes.
Isabella was knee deep, sitting in the current with a washboard – a washboard for God's sake – and a bar of soap. He'd asked her why they couldn't just do this in the bathroom sink, and she'd said that the rushing water got the clothes cleaner. At least she hadn't left him behind. She still spent a few hours a day focusing solely on her breath or the breeze against her skin, and it still made him want to pull the legs off of something, but since Bat's visit a few weeks ago, she had stopped sending him away when the situation was tense.
"I'm not hiding." She looked up at him and smiled. "Are you going to stand there, or do you think you're up to handing me something?"
She had started to tease him once in a while. He knew from her thoughts that she'd decided he could handle it. Sometimes she was right and sometimes, not so much.
He tossed her a dress, and she scrubbed lightly, careful not to use her strength to rip the fabric. He watched her hair fall in her face and the water splash up. Though it was a little cloudy, when the sunlight would shine through, it was almost blindingly bright as it reflected off her and onto the water. Her mind shifted, and she remembered kneeling on a sandy bank to wash white linens beside a train of camels jostling past one another for a drink. A hot wind blew sand across her feet.
She kept remembering her past in random bursts lately, and he had no idea why. But when she remembered, her mind worked in a way he understood, and in those moments, he felt like he could know her. Almost since the evening Carlisle had brought him here, knowing her had become a ridiculous obsession, another want to trigger his newborn mood swings.
"Give me something to do," he said.
"You could rinse this out while I wash something else." She handed him the dress – the green one that she'd worn the first day he was here. He felt stupidly sentimental about it, which was particularly ridiculous, since he'd thrown her against a wall that day.
His sat down in the water, and Isabella shifted so that the washboard was pressed against him, and the back of her hand pushed against his thigh. Though she didn't look up from her work, he could tell she knew exactly where her hand came in contact with his jeans. He closed his eyes, and really focused on her mind. Water rushing and the soap slipping away with the current. The four points of contact where her knuckles ran across the top of his thigh and her hand gripped the washboard. Would he notice if I moved my hand across again?
He turned to look at her, but she focused studiously on the clothes.
It was the first time he'd been able to tell that she'd touched him on purpose.
But did he affect her, or was she just lonely?
If she'd really bothered others as much as Bat said, she'd probably gone a hell of a long time between men… or had she ever? It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps no one had been willing to stay close enough to her to have sex, at least not since she was turned, although it was possible that there were others, like him, who were alright around her as long as she wasn't actively upset. He wondered if Isabella, aroused, would be at all like Isabella, upset. Would she start to make him uneasy, or even terrified? The kiss they'd shared had been inextricably wrapped up in fear.
"…to the next one. I think that's rinsed enough." Isabella had been talking to him for who knows how long.
He was still swirling her pale green dress through the water. He wrung it out and set it in the empty basket she'd brought with them. She passed him a thin white shirt with leaves embroidered around the neck. It looked like something from the seventies. Her hand brushed across his, and though she didn't think anything of it this time, he had been counting, and she was definitely touching him a lot more than she used to.
He wrung out the shirt, careful not to shred the cotton, and leaned back to toss it in the basket. The washboard slipped from his leg, and when she righted it, she left her soapy, wet hand flat against his thigh. He waited for her to move it, but she didn't. In her mind there was just the sound and scent of rushing water. He continued to wait, suspended, but her thoughts didn't turn toward him, and her hand didn't move away. The forest could have come down while he was fixated on the slight weight of her palm pressed against him, and it occurred to him that he was just as bad as Carlisle was with Esme.
There's nothing else to do but watch her. That's all it is. He repeated it to himself, but the excuse wasn't doing any good. For a moment, he actually wanted to shove her away, and yet he hated himself for the impulse, because perhaps all his thoughts centered around her because she was his… no he wasn't going to use the m word in relation to her. For one thing, Isabella would think it was ridiculous. If they were supposed to be a pair, she would have been thinking of him as well. Wasn't it always mutual when vampires found 'the one'? Or was that just the fairy tale version of it, the equivalent of the happily ever after in human stories?
He continued to rinse her clothes and breathe in the scent of verbena soap that was now inextricably linked to her in his mind. When she turned to find her blouse pressed to his nose he said, "The clothes smell good," not wanting to admit that, in fact, she smelled good.
"It's sort of a joke, really," she said. "Verbena was used to ward off vampires, but I've always been drawn to the scent." She pulled her damp hair behind her. She was wearing cutoffs with a tank top and an oversized men's flannel shirt. Maybe the mismatched assortment was the last of her clean clothes. It shouldn't have looked good on her, but the shirt was longer than the shorts, and it had made him want to groan when he'd walked here behind her.
"What?" she asked. She was confused by the look on his face and by his dark eyes. Maybe he needs to hunt, she thought, but he hunted yesterday. She wondered if he'd had trouble finding game close enough to the cabin.
"I'm fine." He didn't mean for the words to sound defensive, but as usual, they did. She was still managing him, like he was something to tend to, a sapling in her garden. He took his shirt off and dropped it on the bank before walking farther into the water. "I'm going for a swim."
He had to walk out to the middle before the river was deep enough. The current was strong, and if he'd still been human, the bracing water would have been enough to distract him, but as it was he swam upstream in an impossible attempt to tire himself. After a few miles, he surfaced and pushed his hair back off his face. His jeans were weighted down, pulling at his hips, but he didn't think she'd appreciate it if he came back naked. Or actually, given the way he'd reacted to her lately, he was the one who probably couldn't handle that. Though he was just as connected to her mind at this distance, not being able to see her helped to clear his head a little. He climbed onto a large rock, and for a moment he thought he caught the scent of someone, but when he reached out, the only thoughts he could read were Isabella's.
She was remembering a piece by Chopin, a nocturne he'd played just the other day. It had been in the new batch of sheet music that Bat brought. She was sitting on the floor and she looked up and watched the back of him as he leaned forward, his fingers rippling over the keys as he played the piece a little faster than it should have been played.
Because she was thinking of him, he decided to start back, letting the current pull him forward as he slipped between the rocks.
The laundry was done. She'd removed her flannel shirt and was relaxing in the sun in just the pale blue tank top and jeans, her face turned upward and her long hair in waves as it dried. She was leaning on her elbows, and when he broke through the water, she pulled her head up to look at him.
For a moment he saw himself as she saw him. Soaking wet with his hair over his eyes as he watched her on the bank. He knew he looked good, but only because all of their kind were striking. Even with the white skin and the shadows beneath their eyes, they could attract their natural prey with little effort. There was an almost generic quality to their uniform good looks. When Carlisle had taken him to meet the Denali coven, the Russian sisters were each equally attractive. It did nothing for him, even when Tanya had preferred him above others of their kind. He had known right away that he wasn't Tanya's mate. Her vivid imaginings, though left unspoken, had made him uneasy. Now he stood in the current looking across the way at Isabella, wondering if he were like Tanya in this scenario – obsessing over every inch of Isabella's body while she felt nothing.
He willed her towards him, wishing for a moment that she could read his mind.
"Edward?" she asked.
Yet again he was confusing her. Through her eyes, he looked so intent and focused, as though he were hunting, but then she compared him to a wolf cub. He liked to think he was more menacing than that. To any human in this world, he was instant death, and as a newborn he was stronger than she was, but none of that mattered in her eyes; he chased prey when he shouldn't, wandered off, got into things, and then inexplicably wanted more of her time.
Edward was thankful for the mostly articulated form her thoughts were taking. If he was a puzzle to her, then at least she cared enough to want him solved.
"Edward?" she asked again. The way he was staring at her was unsettling. "What are you doing?" She got up and brushed herself off. He watched her mind balance between staying on the bank and coming out to him. After a moment, it tilted in his favor.
He should have been nervous as she got closer. Hell, everything made him edgy, and it was entirely possible that she was about to laugh in his face, or worse – let him down easy. Part of him would rather not risk anything, but she was all he could think about, and he was going to have to deal with it one way or another. And anyway, the fact that she didn't ever seem to wear a bra, and that she was chest deep in the water by the time she got to him, in that thin tank top, pretty much precluded any chance that he was going to chicken out. As soon as she was within reach, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. She didn't back away or start to make him afraid, so he guessed that she didn't feel threatened, but he couldn't tell what she thought – or, to be precise, she wasn't thinking in words. She was paying careful attention to the feel of the water pushing against them on its way downstream and to the pressure of his hand where his long fingers splayed at the small of her back.
For some reason, when he pulled her even closer, he only leaned down to press his mouth to her forehead. It was a startlingly chaste gesture, not at all what he had originally intended. Her hands were still at her side, he realized, but there were words in her mind as she wondered what he would do and what she should do about it. It was her uncertainty that let him know he was giving her too much time to think this through.
He brought his other hand to the side of her face and tilted her face up so he could brush his lips against hers. He felt her tense, but he pressed his tongue to her lip, and when she opened her mouth, he leaned forward so that her back arched against his arm as he deepened the kiss. The dread he'd felt the last time she had kissed him was nowhere to be found now. It was his first real kiss with his heightened senses, and it left every human memory behind as he let himself get lost in the scent and feel of her.
Isabella brought her hands up to the back of his neck. Her fingers pushed into his hair, and she opened her mouth a little more as he ran his tongue across hers. In the midst of her uncanny ability to lose herself in touch and scent, he caught the passing thought that it had been a very long time since she'd felt anything like this. He wondered how long 'a very long time' was.
As he brought his other arm to her shoulder, she let out a soft moan against his lips.
Close, she's close. But not in the cabin.
He pulled back abruptly and looked into her eyes. She kept darting her glance back to his mouth, but then she realized something was wrong.
"I…" she started.
He shook his head, and whispered, "There's someone here."
"Here?"
"About 5 miles away. Close to the cabin."
"Don't breathe," she said.
"Not a human. Someone who's been tracking you. Are you expecting anyone?"
She shook her head.
"I'll check it out," he said.
"Don't be ridiculous." She started back toward the cabin, but stopped after a few feet. "Stay here. You get… upset. I'll let you know when to come home."
And just like that, she saw him as the erratic newborn, a favor for Carlisle. Honestly he had the urge to rip a tree out by the roots, but it would just make her think she was right, and he didn't want to see that look she got when she was being patient with him.
He let her disappear into the trees, and then he followed.
All the usual characters, settings, etc. are the property of S. Meyer. Original characters and plot are mine. No copyright infringement is intended. May not be reprinted without express written permission.