Chapter 21

~Bella~

One camera, one dusky field, one haunted house.

One finger on the button.

Two lips.

Three hot, wet, bone-aching kisses to my neck.

I took four shots of the house, five, six, before his fingers found my sides again, a grip on me that pulled us closer, his hands roaming up my chest. He felt heavy and full of something urgent leaning over me, a weight that I'd be only too happy to drown under.

He took his sweet time doing me in.

His mouth moved slow, and his hands moved slower—a full body exploration of callused fingers against the skin of my legs, my arms, and my neck. Hitching the hem of my dress around his wrists, fumbling fingers, tongue tracing the curve of my shoulder. He slipped a firm, steady hand around my breast, breathing fast and fire-hot down my neck. He was all heavy exhales and groans, his mouth falling open against my neck and his gaze glazing over.

I gave in.

Let my hands roam, tracing shrapnel wounds like I was blind, and he was Braille. His scars and his suntan, the feel of him all over me, warping everything sideways. He pushed the last of the dress off my shoulders and collapsed back into the grass, looking me over with his eye squinted, and his mouth pulled up at one corner. He was flushed, maybe the sun, but probably me some too.

"Now that's a sight to see." The words came out sly, sexy, something soft and sweet that had been rubbed all over, raw as sandpaper. I glanced at the camera lying in the grass beside his head and I picked it up, shooting fast, catching him unaware. Taking aim and sight for a split moment before snapping a picture of him, all haloed in little white flowers and soft green grass.

"Take a picture of me."

"I—" His face dropped, that smile gone in a heartbeat, the light draining away.

"Please."

I swallowed down my stomach, feeling the ghost memory of his shaking hands resting over mine to touch the camera, teaching me how to use it. The faint trace of his soul caught up somewhere in the gears, tucked too deep inside to find, stuck too tight to pull free. The long, distant look he gave the camera, staring at the black box in my hands, suddenly so far away.

There was fear there, and something so sad it made my guts churn, but there was a also a flicker of starvation, a bloody, desperate sort of hunger.

I held the camera out, knowing full well I was asking him for something deeper than trust.

Faith, maybe.

He took the camera from me, wincing as though it burned, but he didn't touch it to his face. Barely held it up at all—just found the button and snapped, a shot taken level with my breasts, my open-mouthed shock probably captured at the top of the frame. He swapped hands and held the thing out at another angle, over to the right, and snapped again. I barely caught sight of the lens, now held high above my head, before he snapped once more and darted off again, getting me way off from the left.

I tried to grapple for the camera, but some battles are better lost. He pinned me to his chest and held the camera out with one of those long, long arms. As he grinned at me, it was obvious he was enjoying my struggle. I gave up when I was breathless, collapsing on top of him just to breathe for a minute. His hand found my thigh and squeezed it gently as his breathing slowed alongside mine.

When I'd found some air and lifted my face, his eye was closed. I hitched myself up an inch higher, his hands coming hard and fast to my backside, a groan stuck somewhere deep in his throat. His hips rolled beneath me, and he opened his eye, several thousand springtimes caught there in green and brown and gold. Dark lashes, heavy brows, a few tiny wrinkles there at the corner.

I traced a finger along the edge of the eyepatch, down the side of his nose, and out across his cheek, all smooth except for a lump of scar tissue perched high on his cheekbone.

He didn't flinch.

"A real picture," I whispered. "A good one."

"Those were real pictures."

"Not that way."

He stared at me for a long time, eyelids fluttering and his brows knitting together. He perched on an elbow beneath me, eye caught somewhere across the grass.

"Go get her."

The fawn came bounding across the grass, meeting me in a patch of clover a few feet away from Edward. The flower necklace I'd made her earlier was trailing on the ground, and her nose was covered in fine gold pollen, mouth stained with violets. I righted a few blooms in the chain and plopped it all on my head, snuggling the fawn close. She smelled a lot better after that bath, her fur shiny and smooth. I got a full face lick and an affectionate head butt to the chin, velvet ears tickling my neck, plush lips eating handfuls of clover from me.

A familiar burn danced its way up my arms.

Edward was watching us, still propped on that elbow, the camera held limp on his stomach, fingers still itching to get away from it. His face was solemn and thoughtful, eye wide, and jaw loose for once. He looked so far away. Looked like the last hazy glow of sunshine before the sky goes to sleep at night. Like a pool of water at the edge of a great rolling river, caught in a never-ending circle on itself.

Like a single cloud in a big empty sky.

The camera snapped.

I blinked in surprise. "You don't even look," I accused, glaring at the camera now propped on his chest. Edward shook his head, tilting it to the side to squint at me through the sunshine.

"Sometimes, it's better to just feel it." His eye dropped off my face, and his bottom lip snuck between his teeth. I glanced down, the limp shoulder of my dress hanging forgotten around my elbow, practically naked from the waist up. I reached for the sleeve, but a sound in Edward's throat stopped me.

"Don't." He shook his head at me and snapped another shot.

Edward parked the truck in front of the hardware store and handed me a paper bag, my film canisters rattling around inside.

I took fifteen rolls of film in one week. Edward just laughed and teased me about my obsessive trigger finger eating up film for fun, but I couldn't stop myself. It started small—the clover poking out of the dirt and close-ups of peeling paint. The tiny blue flowers that were starting to carpet the hills to the north, fields of blossoms no bigger than a penny turning the whole earth into sky. The way the fawn's eyelashes laid, thick and curling over its cheek.

We'd driven to Lake Scott to take pictures of the birds that peppered the shorelines, a white snowfall summer of feathers, and he kissed me in the sand. Drove up toward Oberlin, where the trees grew stunted and sideways from the relentless wind. We spent hours with the fawn at the stream, the sunlight kissing the grass through the trees, stealing a few of them ourselves. Photos of lily pads and tiny green frogs and the way the moss crawled over the rocks. Photos of the watercress that sprouted in the shallows. The sunlight and the stars and the fawn.

Photos of Edward.

Lots of Edward.

I went home every night, tiptoeing the edge of frustration and burning way too hot, ripping my clothes off the moment I hit the porch and prowling my house all night long in torment. I got myself off with the thought of his mouth, those lips, and the simple friction of my thighs pressed hard together enough to send me tumbling right through my mattress—a full body plummet that had me curling my toes and reaching out for something solid to hold on to. Coming up for air felt like crawling out of an asteroid crater, emerging from depths, blinking in some brilliant new sunlight. I did it again twice that night, using him in deviant ways, and then once more in the one way that I knew would be my undoing.

His face between my thighs, hands beneath my hips, all stubble and wet and sucking and—

I wanted him.

Wanted him badly enough to leap across the truck seat and plant myself in his lap, rub every aching bit of me over every aching inch of him.

The two old men parked chins to the concrete outside the hardware store were all that stopped me.

"I'll be in here." His head tilted toward the door and those busybodies gaping at us from their chessboard out front. I glared at them, so their gazes shifted awkwardly back to their game, then I looked back to Edward.

"Ignore everyone," I said.

He winked at me. "You got it." He loped out of the truck, nodding curtly to the men as he strode inside. I shuffled out of the truck and sped off toward Sparrow's, flinging myself inside and slamming the door behind me.

"Who's there?"

"It's me," I called.

She came around the corner like a lightning strike, arms around my waist, nearly catching me off my feet. Sparrow hugged me surprisingly hard for someone so small, and she nuzzled her wrinkly face into my chest a few times before smiling up at me with her deep obsidian eyes.

I tried to push Edward away. Tried to forget his face. The stretch of his skin, palms, lips. That meadow. The film in the paper bag. The bruise on my arm. The gash on my leg. The state of my hair. The way my heart was hammering and my mind kept flitting back to him, despite how hard I tried to push him aside. He was right there, a specter between me and Sparrow, in all his shattered glory.

She always said I had a "see-through" face.

"You're different," she accused. She grabbed me by the chin, trying to get a look at my eyes. I shrugged her off before she could really make contact, pulling out of her grip on my face.

"Get off, Auntie," I whined. "I need more soap."

She narrowed her eyes at me, only now wiping her hands on her dishtowel. I could feel her damp handprints soaked through the fabric of my shorts.

"Jasper tells me you have a fawn."

"Jasper talks too much." I wanted to scream, but I walked to the bookshelves instead, picking a book at random.

"Don't you go feeding that thing nothing but strawberries," she scolded, a finger wagging in my direction. My face flamed. That was exactly what I had been doing. That and clover.

I shrugged.

Sparrow sighed, shaking her head as she trudged away and started rummaging through drawers, clinking bottles, and grinding something pungent and spicy in a bowl. I sat in the squashy chair by the window and drank in a beautiful book about the Saharan grasslands: watery wet seasons and blistering heat, giraffes puncturing a clear blue sky, elephants trudging across a blood red sunset. A spangle of lions. A lone, stunted tree in the middle of a vast, empty nothing.

Sparrow tapped my shoulder. When I pulled myself back to reality, she handed me a bottle of something creamy white and smelling of juniper.

"What's this for?"

"Fleas."

I gaped at her. "I don't have fleas."

"Not you," she snorted. "The fawn."

"She doesn't have fleas either."

"She will." Sparrow nodded her head decisively.

"Ok, fine, and what's this?" I held up the tub of something that reeked of lemon and looked as though it had finely ground sand dumped into it, gritty and thick. Sparrow winked at me.

"My special scouring soap. Good for the bad kind of dirt. Takes off paint." She winked at me.

She knew. She knew about Edward. I scowled. "If you say the name 'Jasper,' I'm going to kick him in the mouth the next time I see him. Why can't he just mind his own business?"

"Jasper's own business is too sad for him to live with, so he uses everyone else's to distract himself."

"Mine especially. And Edward's, it seems."

"Mrs. Cope says he has a very 'nice' face." Sparrow made little air quotes around 'nice' as though nice actually meant handsome. Damn Mrs. Cope and her fat mouth, but she was right.

"He does." I blushed. "Have a nice face."

"He is the difference," she muttered, reaching out and put her palm flat against my forehead, whispering her customary blessing on my journey away from her, one that would always come back around again. As I turned to go, setting the book down on the chair, Sparrow stopped me.

"Take it. No one has looked at it in years. Enjoy it, Awentia."

"Thank you, Auntie." I kissed her forehead and waved at her from the sidewalk.

I stopped in at the post office down the street and almost mailed the film off to some place in Topeka, expedited overnight because I was so excited to see what I had done. Almost. But the thought of what was likely on those photos, the unbuttoned dress, the naked skin beneath it... I couldn't do it. I tucked the bag under my arm and took the back way to the hardware store, bypassing the gossipmongers out front, a bell tolling my entrance.

He was leaning against a counter, Sam propped on the other side, their heads tucked together over something that had them both grinning. Edward looked relaxed, his knees bent and his shoulders loose, the tension seeping out of him in a moment of distraction. I walked up and stood beside him, maybe too close, but I didn't care. Sam barely glanced at the inch of space between us, ignoring it as though it meant nothing, and nodded hello to me with an easy smile.

"Bella. You're a sight for sore eyes."

"Hi, Sam." I smiled.

Edward was eyeing the paper bag in my arms, the vise grip I still had on it. He took it from me, giving it an experimental shake, the telltale rattle giving me away. He set the bag on the counter, eyeing it for a moment before looking back at me. His eyebrows curled low in confusion.

"You didn't send it off?"

"I—couldn't," I stammered, suddenly incapable of explaining my reluctance after a week of pestering him to teach me more and more and more. I'd begged to come to town for this errand alone; I didn't even really need any soap. I was almost scared to see them, and I didn't want anyone else to see them before I did. Including the people at a mini-mart in Topeka.

Edward's hand touched my shoulder, and I looked up at him, shrugging because I didn't have words to describe the way you could want something so bad it ached, but at the same time, not want it at all. He looked at me hard for a long moment before his eye drifted back to Sam, sly and conspiratorial.

"You got any tarps back there?"

Sam glanced toward the back room door as though he was mentally scanning the shelves in his mind. "Yep." He nodded momentarily. "A couple, probably."

"Or better yet, got any velvet?"

"If you want velvet, gotta go see Claudine down at the dress shop." Sam narrowed his eyes at Edward. "What's all that for?"

Edward reached into the bag and held up one of my film canisters. A look of recognition dawned on Sam's face, then another nod and a smile. Sam went off and returned with a pile of thick black tarps, handing it all off to us with a chuckle, calling Edward "too ambitious".

"What are you doing?" I asked, trailing Edward out the door. He dropped his load into the bed of the truck and turned back to me, head cocked to see me better.

"We're gonna build a darkroom."

"A darkroom?"

"Don't you wanna see what's on those things?" He knocked the paper bag in my hand. I nodded, hesitant and slow, and he smiled at me, looking damn near excited. "Let's find out."

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

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB