Chapter 15

~Bella~

He almost kissed me, and then he left.

Or maybe I almost kissed him. And then he left.

He'd been all action, nails in the porch and tools in the box, and then I rendered him flustered and speechless, his eye stuck on me and his hands twitching toward my thighs. His teeth had been set so hard into his lip it turned his mouth white. He grabbed me fast and rough, clutching me up close, and we'd been right there, right there, before his whole face changed. He came so close, but then he turned and fled, his silhouette getting smaller and smaller as he disappeared into the grass.

I was stuck in the doorway, hovering and indecisive. His hand around my neck, pulling me closer, pulling me deeper, pulling like a black hole sucks in a stray comet. Pulling like the flame entices a moth. I could feel him between my legs, between my ribs, between the cells of my skin and my brain and my rumbling, heavy heart.

I ran right out the door after him, stark naked.

The sun hit my skin, and I stumbled to a halt on the edge of that stupid, caving-in porch, scanning the distance between our houses for him. He was already out of sight. I plodded back up the stairs, stopping for a moment in the hallway to contemplate the nightdress still lying crumpled on the bathroom floor: grey as a raincloud, broken as a windowpane bird. I tore my eyes away from it, a sick feeling in my stomach.

My room was a disaster. The bed rumpled and the hardwood littered with piles of my life, hoarded into the lone square of space I still liked in this godforsaken house. I picked my way to the closet, throwing it open, pulling out the first thing I touched. Slipped something short and yellow over my head, the color too cheerful and the hem too high. The sun was edging toward the grasslands, throwing columns of light through the windows. Everything had gone still, the floors and the fridge and even the front door, sighing instead of groaning. Even the bugs had gone silent, and the birds, as though the earth was settling down to wait, eager to know what the heck I was even doing.

I left the house, slipping through the grass and up to his house, the fawn trailing my footprints.

Tottering along the lip of something cavernous.

He wasn't there.

I circled the house once, the fawn poking along behind me. The house was quiet. The flag drifted lazily in the breeze, the shed looking hollow and empty: its insides spilled out onto the grass as though he'd spent most of the day gutting the contents. I called his name from the edge of the back porch but was answered in nothing but laboring bees and the whispering wind. I knocked once, twice, three times before I tried the door, surprised when it edged open without resistance. He didn't strike me as the type to leave the place so unsecured.

The kitchen was silent.

"Edward?"

The old couple still lingered in the air. Jack and Millie. They had been more like grandparents than not. He had been imposingly tall, despite his warped spine, hunched beneath the weight of age and hard labor. She had been small, all bones and energy, feeding fifty farmhands a night for most of her life—a true ranch girl. I spent more afternoons than I could even remember in this kitchen, set to snapping peas or picking through dried beans, while Millie schooled me on the finer points of childhood, then girlhood.

She had been too far gone to tell me what to expect about this whole womanhood thing.

Their home was a sad, empty shell of what it had once been. Bare remnants left of a lifetime, the house devoid of its clutter and kitsch. The carpets were left on the floors, woven blue wool that was worn smooth in trails around invisible furniture, gone threadbare all around the edges. The sagging velvet couch slouched solitary in the front room. The dark spots left on the sun-bleached wallpaper where their picture frames had hung. Most of what I remembered as a kid—the glass flowers in the cut crystal vase in the living room, the embroidered towels in the bathroom— were gone.

New things were in their place.

There was a jacket hanging on a peg by the door and a pair of worn, floppy boots on the floor below, the color of dirt. A stack of envelopes on the table and a mess of painting supplies in the kitchen sink. Wrinkled sheets on the lone mattress on the floor in the upstairs bedroom, and a pile of clothing crumpled on the bathroom floor. Other than that, there was no sign of him here. Barely a smudge of his existence marring the history inside the walls of a house that had seen so much.

"Edward?" I called.

The fawn went zooming by me, a clatter of hooves and ears too big for her body. She skipped clear to the end of the hallway and bounded up the steps to the attic. Six of them, halfway up. She stopped to look back at me, eyes wide and ears waggling.

"Get down here," I hissed, stomping and pointing at my foot, like I could will her to me. I still hadn't named the deer and had nothing to call her by. The Cherokee had a name for fawn, Awenita, but I was constantly reminded of the name the town librarian used to call me when I talked too much, too loud, too often. She would shush at me from across the room with a finger to her lips.

Little Thunder, she called me.

"I'm gonna start calling you Wakiya if you don't straighten up," I grumbled.

The fawn ignored me. It took another couple of steps and looked impishly at me again, teasing. I leapt for her, banging my toes on the bottom step and hitting my kneecap hard enough to make me gasp. Her tail twitched, hooves clambering, and she kept ahead of me until we were clear into the walk-up attic, all the way up beneath the roof. The room was covered in a fine layer of dust, recently disturbed, and the windows at either end, splattered and dirty, hadn't been washed in ages.

There were boxes everywhere. Big and small, stacked in piles clear to the ceiling. Labeled in handwriting that was slanted heavily to the right. A halo of faded footprints in the dust circled the piles of boxes. The rooms downstairs were so empty, stark and barren, compared to the mess hidden up here. Hoarded away. Packed up tight and stashed somewhere out of sight.

I stood fidgeting in the dust, the curiosity crawling up and down my skin until it was unbearable. He was a dime store mystery, a once-in-a-lifetime treasure map. A lucky penny. A Pandora's box. I was torn in a thousand different directions, flayed open right there in the dust, over the conflict of wanting to know more, wanting to know it all, but not entirely sure that I wanted the truth.

Wracked with guilt but dying to know.

If I was a cat, I was using up the last of my nine lives.

A box of books. A box of winter gear, gloves, and hats. A box of socks, crew cut and pristine, nothing paired up in the jumbled mess. The fourth box took all my effort to open. It was taped over so many times, I half-wondered if the contents were something best left alone.

A box full of cameras.

There was a heavy-duty, black case with a big zipper sitting right on top. I didn't dare touch the camera with my tape-sticky fingers, something big and expensive looking, nestled in that black padded bag. Heavy and complicated, buttons and knobs everywhere, with a big lens tucked in beside it.

The next box opened easily. A jacket. Camo. Sun-faded and gigantic, limp without a body inside of it. I put it on. It smelled like him. Like him in a desert. Sand and heat and sweat. Hanging clear to my knees, falling beyond my fingertips. I shoved my hands into the giant pockets and pulled out a Zippo. Silver and shiny, the flame still strong.

I spun in the dust, scanning the far wall of the attic: stacks of thin wood, clusters of frames piled up against the eaves. I left a necklace of footprints in the dust as I wandered through them, pulling them apart to peek at the images. Photographs. Hundreds of them. Snapshots of places I could only dream of, daydream vacations I'd only ever seen in books, the world through his eye. Beaches where the sand was pink. Mountain tops carpeted with lush yellow flowers. Cows wallowing through a thousand acres of prairie grass. Ancient pine trees piercing a cloud bank. A harbor pebbled with peeling boats—the tide gone out and flocks of birds come in.

Everything was beautiful. Everything was peaceful and paradise, sunshine, and flowers.

Until it wasn't.

When it started to slip, it went downhill hard and fast into the parts of the world that were too ugly to even comprehend. A boy, young and dark-skinned, scowling—a giant gun in his hand and the background eaten up by smoke and fire. A building collapsed in the middle and a man sobbing on his knees in the dirt before it, hunched in the rubble over some sort of invisible ache. A woman, half-naked, blood running down her arms and legs, standing in the middle of a flattened city block. A bridge crumpled into the water, a bloated cow and a sunken vehicle lingering near a shoreline.

An open desert sky. Pockmarked by a flock of fighter jets.

I gulped and let the frames fall back. Suddenly, the jacket didn't smell so good. Instead of dust and sweat—it was fear and blood. It was scars: the ones that covered his skin and the ones buried too deep beneath it for me to even see. It was broken vision and head wounds and comatose hearts.

I trailed back to the camera, the box singing to me. I wiped my fingers on my dress and pulled it out of its bag, hefting it to my face, peering through the screen. Nothing. Just black. Maybe it was broken. Maybe it had never worked at all. Maybe it had gotten hurt along with him, and he didn't want it nearby because they were both too injured to work properly. I squinted harder and fumbled blindly around the end of the lens, my fingers connecting with the cap, prying it loose just in time to see Edward pound up into the attic through the camera.

He cleared the final step, and his eye fell on me, his face giving way as he glared up and down the entire mess of me. The camera around my neck and the jacket slipping off my shoulders, the nightdress replaced by sunshine yellow, so much of me just laid out there instead of closeted away. The wild hair and the wild eyes.

His mouth twisted. Brows crumbled. The soft parts of his face that I had been dreaming about for the last two hours warped into sharpened fangs and a forked tongue.

The Hopi had a name for him.

Chu'si.

Snake flower.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB