Chapter 25

~Bella~

I was terrible at dancing.

So was he.

I was all nervous tension, and he was full of indecision. I could feel it thrumming through both of us, a high anxiety wire strung tight between us that locked up our spines, cramped up our hands, and tripped up his feet, then mine. I laid my head on his chest—the thump, thump, thump of his heart beneath his ribs as he exhaled.

It was easier then. His uncertain shuffles gone smooth and sure-footed, our hands finally finding places to hold onto, our breathing coming soft and slow. I clung to his shoulders, and he wrapped his arms around my ribs, and we danced. Still shuffling, nothing like the elaborate twirling and dipping and double-time steps Jack and Millie used to do every evening. I'd sit on the porch and watch them, her house dress and his dusty boots circling slow and then fast and then slow again through the damp, dusky evenings as the sun kissed the horizon.

Millie told me once that dancing wasn't a thing you learned—it was a thing that came to you. When two pieces came together, cut for one another out of the same cloth. When your souls lined up just right—a blinding light brushing up against a bottomless dark—that's when it happened. The magic.

In the right moment with the right partner, anyone can dance, she said.

It wasn't practice, or talent.

It was a feeling.

"I—" I hesitated, cheek to his chest, not sure how to say any of that. Of this. How could I put such big feelings into such small words and speak them out loud like they didn't weigh ten thousand pounds? How could I wrap up this boiling tsunami in me and present it to him in a way that made sense, much less hold it back from destroying everything in its path? A single swipe takedown if I didn't tread carefully through the churning ocean around us.

"Thank you," I said.

Simple. True.

"For what, exactly?" His voice rumbled in his chest, rough and low beneath my ear.

"For being here. With me." I swallowed. "For me."

I pulled back to look up at him, and he smiled down at me, feet still shuffling, fingers still dug through the fabric of the t-shirt he'd made me change into. He looked tired, his eye wrinkled at the edges and dark just beneath, eyelid heavy and hooded. He looked wary and skittish. Worn out, distracted, broken. But I was broken too, and maybe that was what Millie was talking about when she said dancing came easy to two pieces that fit together.

Here we were in her living room, rubbing all of our busted bits up against each other like there might be some salvation somewhere underneath the grind of jagged edges.

Edward shrugged lightly, his eye glinting. "I like your face. And your weird pet." He chewed on his lip once before saying "I like your smile, even though I don't see it very often."

It was the second compliment he'd given me in so many hours, and my heart flip-flopped like a fish out of water. He had told me I had a beautiful eye, and he may have only been talking about taking pictures, but God, I felt the exact same way about him. About his beautiful eye. That pretty green, the same shade that appears through the last bite of snow, fresh and soft, pushing up through all the winter dead. The deeper green of ancient pine trees haloing his iris. The dark lashes and the darker swipe of eyebrow. The way his whole face shifted with his emotions, that one eye carrying the burden of his joy and pain and sadness and curiosity.

The eyepatch was taunting me now, no longer a minefield mystery or an unanswered question hovering over us like a raincloud. Now, it was a lesson in patience. An exercise in tempered curiosity. The forceful swallow of all the things I wanted, shoving them back down beneath my rib cage where they were safe and secret and unspoken.

I wanted to see his face.

His whole face.

So badly.

But I didn't know what to expect underneath there. Didn't know if the patch was a forever kind of thing and if I should let go of the deep biting intrigue if only to save myself the disappointment later. I didn't know if one day, when it came off, if it came off, I'd have to swallow what I saw underneath as cold, hard truth. I didn't know if he'd be blind, or scarred, or perfectly fine. I didn't know if I'd ever get that glimpse of him, the entirety, if the eyepatch was meant for him forever.

I was too afraid to ask.

I kissed him instead

Stood my toes on his toes and licked his bottom lip, asking him to let me without any words. Just hands and lips and breath. He let out a rush of air, arms tightening around me, picking me clear up off his feet to kiss me back. His face was scratchy and his skin was hot and I was lost between his teeth, climbing him just to get closer.

I wanted him laid out underneath me. Wanted to sprawl out underneath him. Wanted to capture it all on film and then do it all over again. I wanted more than I thought I deserved, but I had no shame in letting my plea, my order, fall out of my mouth.

"Let's go upstairs," I panted, his teeth down my neck, my legs around his waist, his fingers tangled painfully in my hair. Edward didn't even hesitate, held me tighter as he turned, as ready as I was to make this whole messy thing into something coherent... to give it a name. To finally do something about the ball of heat constantly burning beneath our tongues and behind our fingerprints

"Wait," I gasped. He stopped, one foot on the stairs. "I have to get something."

I wiggled out of his grip and ran headlong out the door, sliding into the darkroom and grabbing the camera I'd been using the most lately. When I tumbled back into the house he was still standing there with his foot on the step. His eye fell to the camera, and the brow over it arched high with surprise, maybe delight, but definitely a spark of excitement there in the green.

"You got a plan for that thing?"

I shook my head. "No plans. Sometimes it's better to just feel it, right?"

With a grin, he grabbed my hand and tugged me up the stairs.

Crisp white bedroom walls, smooth hardwood floors, and enormous open windows with the breeze rushing through and the sunshine pouring in—the prairie rolling away like we were on a ship, floating somewhere far out to sea. There was a dresser with a few boxes of clothes stacked beside it. A full length mirror leaning up against the wall, a leftover from Millie. A mattress was sprawled right on the floor, with blue sheets and a few crumpled pillows. His floppy boots slouched by the doorway. A book was squashed open-faced on the floor.

I turned to him, framed in the doorway, and felt a sudden rush of wild freedom. He was flushed and bright-eyed and beautiful. I held the camera up to my face and took a photo of the palm of his hand when he held it up in front of him.

"Cut it out," he grumbled. "You're wasting film."

"It's not a waste."

He didn't say anything. Just stared at me for a moment that felt like eternity before stepping closer, hot hands and sober face and the mattress buckling underneath us as we fell onto it.

He navigated me slowly. Sure and brave and undaunted, like the best kind of explorer. This was no race to the gold, no rush against the clock. It was a leisurely search. A treasure hunt that was as much about the end goal as it was about the scenery along the way. He licked and kissed and tasted and sucked his way across every inch of me, telling me that the trio of freckles on my thigh looked like a pyramid and that the runnels of blue veins behind my knees reminded him of the Ganges when it flooded its banks. I took a photo of his lips against my stomach, of his head bowed low over the waistband of my underwear. He pulled the shirt up over my head, pushed his fingers between my legs, his breathing going deep and ragged. I gasped, the light doing something funny, blinding, as my skin went up in fire, hands grappling for something, anything, to hold on to. I felt like I was being tossed headlong off a cliff, off a mountain, off the edge of the world into a bottomless, star-speckled universe, weightless even as I fell right through the floor.

I crash-landed face down on his bed, my cheek to the cool cotton sheet and my breath racing to catch up with me. Edward's lips pressed once, twice, to the base of my spine, his hand caressing my backside, kneading my ass and rubbing my thighs as I panted into the sheets. His breath blew hot and wanting up my spine, lips dragging, chest and hips and that pressing, persistent hard searching hungry and headlong. I couldn't help the instinctual shove of my hips, lifting off the bed to rub up against him. Edward's breath hissed through his teeth, and he sat up on me, his hips rocking as his hands gripped my ass. He slid against me in an infuriatingly slow pendulum of push of and pull.

I tangled my fingers up in the sheet, arching to meet him higher, harder, longer.

"Fuck," he muttered, thrusting slow and smooth against me. I ground my face into the sheets, the feel of him almost unbearable, and caught a glimpse of us in that mirror, my tangled hair and arched back. His hands splayed over my hips as he watched himself rub all along the length of me, staring down between us. My stomach twisted itself into a double knot.

Edward pulled away, sitting on his heels, his fingers tugging me off the mattress, pulling me flush to sit in his lap. All of him pressed up against me, inside of me, roaming all over me, hands and lips and cock, and I writhed against him.

"Look," he rasped, a finger against my chin to turn my head. The image of us caught there, reflected in the mirror, glowing in the last damp light before the sun set. My fingers grappled for the camera strap, the cool metal against my face, as I pointed the lens at the mirror.

Snap.

His head bowed low over my neck, lips to my collarbone, and the deep russet of his hair flopping across my skin. My face hidden behind the big round lens. The sheets in a landslide pile around us.

Snap.

His hand cupping my breast, nipple rolling between his calluses. The way his toes curled tight and his scar-marred tattoo languished angry and black across his arm. The strap of the eyepatch digging into his forehead.

Snap.

Fingers slipping between my thighs, exploring where all of his hard disappeared into all of my soft.

Snap.

My head thrown back over his shoulder, an orgasm barreling through me like a big, angry bull in a very small china shop, the camera hovering in trembling hands, the photograph sure to be blurred and sun-spotted.

Snap.

"Put that away," he growled, prying the camera from my hands and tossing it carelessly onto the floor, his hand finding firm grip on me again. One more thrust, two, and he clutched me against him, panting against my back.

I woke to thunder.

A slow rolling wave that crept its way across the flatlands, soft and far away, blurry booming and shadow flashes against the walls.

I lay pinned beneath Edward. He felt like sunshine. Like the first warm wind at the end of a very long winter. Like the great, wide, gaping mouth of the sky studded in stars and the dew-wet grass under the sumacs on fall mornings. He felt like the rain, tapping on the roof. Tapping on my head. Tap tap tapping paint-flecked calluses and scar tissue up against the soft, tender places beneath my bones.

I knew he was awake because his breathing changed. The slow, steady rise and fall of his back, his ear to my chest. I stroked my fingernails across his scalp, along the shell of his ear, down his spine.

"You awake?" His voice was rough, guttural and low, words slipping through the slow tango dance of raindrops.

"I'm sorry about today." I wondered what he had thought, coming back from the house to find the darkroom empty and me gone, what a mess I'd made of my house. What a mess I'd made of myself. Having to remind me how to do basic things like breathe.

"Yeah, you busted up that door I worked so hard on." He pinched the skin of my thigh and chuckled at my squeal. "Gonna have to make you work that one off. No more handyman shit for free."

"It felt good," I admitted, remembering the zing of pure, rippling fury that had washed over me and the epic wave that released itself the moment my foot when through the mesh of that shitty screen door. "I think she's there. In the house."

I wasn't sure of that at all, actually. I'd spent days waiting for her to arrive, a specter at the kitchen table telling me that my hair was a mess and that the kitchen faucet was still dripping and that she could hear him, my brother, crying out there in the grass somewhere. But she never showed, and maybe it was just my buried guilt that was imagining her back into the land of the living.

"Your mom… she…" he trailed off, looking uncomfortable, the word heavy in his mouth. "She died." Not a question.

I nodded.

"The hallway," he said, distant and knowing, despite everything I'd worked so hard not to tell him. I stared up at the ceiling, the wooden boards gone rough and warped. The rain was falling heavier now, a steady thrum against the roof but nothing compared to the flood of water behind my eyes. My teeth pressed so hard into my lip I should have been bleeding, and my ears throbbed the melody of my heavy heartbeat. Edward stroked a hand down my side, his breath on my face.

"My imagination is running wild over here… and it's not good."

I sighed, picking through my piles of rubble for the right words, the right place to start, the right way to say anything.

"I had a brother. He died before I was born."

Edward's stroking hand stilled on my thigh, fingertips pressing in for a breath before he spoke. "That's—" he choked then cleared his throat. "I'm sorry."

I sighed, my gut wrenching and my head gone unbidden to that baby doll lying in the grass under the cold night sky. "I think she wanted me to be a boy, to be him. It disappointed her every single day that I wasn't. She would get so, so angry and then so sad... and I never knew which mother I was going to get." Edward gripped me tighter, and I grappled for words. "I tried to love her. I tried really, really hard to love her, but I'm not sure she ever loved me. She was too lost to love anyone."

"Losing a child is a special sort of hell." I could hear the sadness in his voice, dripping down his throat, catching up the words, and wringing them dry before they were set free.

"The thing is, I—" My throat clamped down. There was no way to explain this without incriminating my mother, staining her character, tainting his otherwise mild vision of her. There was no way to sugarcoat her often awful flavor. It couldn't be helped. "I was told so many versions of the story—she told me so many things I can hardly believe, things I don't want to believe. About him. About how he died."

"You doubt her story?"

"Stories," I corrected. "I'm not sure if she killed him or if it was an accident. She said he got out. Middle of the night, middle of winter. He crawled outside. They didn't find him for a week."

Edward sighed, something heavy in his chest.

"It broke her. Slowly. She just started crumbling. At first, it was just bits and pieces, but toward the end, she was… doomed. I was doomed," I stammered.

I stayed silent for a while, just breathing—just remembering to breathe—before I could speak again. "She was in another one of her moods. And I figured out a long time ago to steer clear of her when she got that deep. But she started breaking things and screaming something awful, and when I went downstairs to try to calm her, she had a gun."

The gaping chest wound I had been nursing all month suddenly burst open, fresh and new and raw as ever, full of rot and malice. Maggots and mold. I shook my head angrily, letting the tears fall finally, tainted with a healthy coat of rage instead of pure, heartrending sadness.

"I knew it would end terribly between us," I choked. "I always knew it."

He folded me against him, arms sturdy around my shoulders, and let me shudder my way through the whirlpool, black and rank and bottomless.

"Where's the gun?"

"Buried." I choked on that gun as surely as it if the barrel were pressed between my teeth. "Somewhere," I finished, lamely.

His raised his eyebrow, but he didn't prod for more information. Instead, he brushed my hair off my cheeks and over my shoulder, wiping my tears off my face with a big, calloused thumb. He didn't say anything—just looked—like he was searching beneath my skin for all the fractures, the scars, the ragged bits that had turned me into an unsalvageable version of myself.

"I'm just this lonely, floating planet now. There's no one left. I have nothing to hold me down except a stupid deer and a stupid house and a town full of stupid people who believe in gossip over gospel. I'm starting to think that I don't mean anything, that I won't be anyone. Everything I have ever loved has either rotted, died, or tried to kill me."

Edward was silent for a long while.

"I want you to have it," he said. "The box… with the cameras."

The box. That box. The one that was still on the kitchen table. The one that had bitten back like a box of snakes when I touched it. The box that had turned his face into stone and his words into poison. He looked back at me hard, his eye crinkling and his mouth set narrow and straight. "I meant it—you've got a good eye. It seems a shame to let those things rot."

"You want me to use them?"

"I want you to have them."

"But…" I swallowed hard, my stomach bottoming out. "What if you want to… do it again, maybe… someday?" I was stumbling over my tongue and my flip-flop insides, holding tightly to his neck. Fear and excitement and joy and such extreme, heavy sadness all rolling across his face in tidal waves.

I waited, wishing for a spark, a pinprick of light, at the end of his long, dark tunnel, but it didn't happen. I was hoping for a sign, a whisper of promise, wanting a phoenix to rise up out of his ashes. He shook his head at me, mouth pulling to one side, his eye gone tight.

"I'd rather watch you do it," he said.

He wasn't a phoenix.

He was a firestorm.

And his ashes were still falling.

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

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB