Chapter 27

~Bella~

When I was eleven, I read a story about a girl lost at sea.

I'd never seen the ocean, but I could imagine it. The prairie had been underwater once, and the ghost of it was still trapped here. Sometimes, if you squinted your eyes in just the right light, at the right time of day, the grass rolled like waves under the hot breath of the wind, and the air smelled like salt. It was easy enough to wander out into the fields, where the horizon was flat and the sky was the only thing for miles, to imagine I was floating somewhere too far from land to see the shoreline.

It was the photo of her that stuck with me the most, the details of her story lost over time. A shot snapped from the bow of a boat that happened to stumble across her, a tiny blonde needle in a big endless blue haystack. I couldn't even remember what had gotten her into that tiny life raft, or what tragedy had forced her into the open water. I couldn't remember her name or where exactly her ship was sunk. I do remember she was followed by dolphins and had her legs bitten by parrot fish, and she thought the boat that eventually rescued her was a whale, floating up above the water. There she was, a blip of color on a blank background of blue, her legs hoisted out of the water, and the raft half sunk beneath her.

She didn't even look happy to be rescued.

I supposed at that point, after a week in the water with nothing but fear holding you to life, it was hard to be happy about anything.

I lay in Edward's bed, a tiny life raft in the middle of my endless ocean, adrift in the way only a shipwreck can cause. I could hear him outside, a steady swish swish swish of his brush against the house and a hum in his throat that I almost recognized, some old, lamenting rock ballad about love and loss. He was surely getting sunburned, the afternoon hot and humid, another storm descending. I was sticky and feverish and fumbling toward some kind of ecstasy, the memory of his skin, his breath, his tongue in places I'd never even imagined. The push of his nose and the tug of his fingers. The groan in his chest like a reverberation through my bones. The lap and suck and kisses he placed between my legs as though I was a temple, and he was on his knees, worshipping something unseen but fully felt.

The light in his eye, the wet on his face, the new place we'd stumbled into together, as though we'd found a trail after years of wandering lost in a million mile wilderness.

He wasn't letting go. Neither was I.

I hadn't been home since that day, that afternoon, the one Edward jokingly referred to as "the remodel," with an uptick at the edge of his mouth and a wink. Letting it feel so light was better than allowing it to become a hole in the bottom of my life raft, so I'd just shake my head and fake scowl at him.

He called me "Bella." Called me "babe." Called me "beautiful." I wasn't entirely convinced he was right, but I let him think it all anyway.

We'd found a rhythm that was oddly domestic, almost comfortable. Coffee in the mornings over silence and early sunshine. Dishes and showers and cleaning out the upstairs bathroom. He hung more of his photographs on the walls: pictures of children playing in the dirt or of trees being blown sideways by the wind, of skyscrapers and sunrises. Between the paint and the photos, between the coffee and the crumpled bed sheets, his house was slowly coming alive again. He was slowly coming alive again.

Judging by the faint spark of contentment blossoming in my chest, maybe I was too.

I had the digital camera on my stomach, breathing under the heavy weight. It was a beast. Heavy and cumbersome and beautiful. Edward had given me a brief tutorial, barely even looking at the camera, finishing up by telling me my natural talent would help me figure it out.

This was the camera. The camera that had turned him into a snake flower. The one that had sent him into a rage and sent me running through the fields. I was scared to awaken it, sure that the black beast was a dragon left slumbering for too long, hungry and confused when it woke, breathing fire and brimstone.

I turned the camera on, a soft purr against my insides as it sprung to life. Left it resting on my stomach and took a photo without sight, just feeling. The bare wall punched through with the open window, the sunshine through the open panes gobbling up the shadows. Took another of my feet, twisted up in his sheets. One of the wall with the sad, yawning mouth of the doorway, dark hall just beyond. One of the faint bruise on my thigh, puckered just like his mouth, as though he'd been biting down to hold on while his hand was busy exploring my neck, my breasts, and my mouth, the other hand buried between my legs.

He told me that the best part about this camera was the screen. The big, black flat of glass on the back that showed you the photo you had just taken. That they could be kept, or deleted, just like that. That nothing was wasted on shots that didn't look right.

I pressed the back arrow, deleting everything but the bruise, delighted by the new form of control. My finger slipped against a knob, and the screen guttered, the image shifting. I blinked, staring at the camera in confusion, at an image there I hadn't shot.

A helicopter.

Blades to the sky, squatting territorially over a group of men in army fatigues. They wore backpacks. Carried giant guns. Plastered with smiles that looked forced and sweat that wasn't, stone-faced and cold-eyed.

Another flick of that knob.

A face I recognized, wide smile and brown eyes and buzzed dark hair. Emmett. The brother from the anniversary photo, looking so much like Edward, there was no mistaking him. Firm jaw and dimples and creases at the corners of his eyes.

Emmett, stepping into the helicopter.

Emmett, helmet on, gun in his lap, looking through the open side of the helicopter at a barren landscape far below.

Emmett, coming through a cloud of dust, crouching as he ducked out of the helicopter's spinning blades.

A tent. A table cluttered with the remains of a group dinner.

A desert. Could be here, could be there, could be anywhere kind of desert, except for the man in a turban and his scraggly goats scrounging the bare bushes.

Edward.

My heart hammered.

His whole face. Smiling behind an outstretched hand, as though someone had picked up his camera and turned it on him. Just like he did to me, his one-sided love for the camera caught all up behind it, ever the taker and never the subject.

No helmet. No stoic mask. No eyepatch.

I studied his face for a long time, the square set of his jaw, and the teeth he showed behind that grin. The dimples that appeared as his mouth pulled wide. The hair that flopped across his forehead.

His eyes.

Both of them.

Deep and green and far less haunted than those of the Edward I knew.

I flicked the knob again, and my heart ground to a skidding dust, dirt, and skinned-knees stop. I'd been hurtling down a hill on a bicycle not made for me, on flattened tires and rusted brakes, and I crash-landed at the bottom in a crumpled pile of bone, blood, and empty-stomach regret.

Emmett's face again.

Cheek to a dirty, crumpled American flag. Eyes open to the sky, empty and staring. Skin splattered with blood. His helmet blown open: a sickening, empty hole where the side of his neck should have been. His bottom lip limp against his teeth, and I could all but feel the last breath as it rushed through the camera and hit me square in the heart.

I trembled, wanting so badly to throw that camera away, far away from me, but I was unable to let go of my death grip. Emmett's empty stare had me riveted, terribly transfixed, and my heart pounded in my ears as I studied the picture. He had a freckle by his eye, lost amid a spray of blood. There was a few days worth of stubble on his face. Tired, grey smudges beneath his eyes. Blood dripping from his nose.

A tear tracking a clean line across his dusty cheek.

The last moment his soul was there in his body.

"Hey."

I choked back a scream as Edward's face appeared in the open window, hands wrapped around the ledge and a beautiful smile on his face. He'd been doing more and more of that lately. Smiling. It made something behind my ribs ache fiercely.

"You okay?" he asked, the smile faltering. I was sure I looked like I was about to be sick. Like I was having trouble breathing. Like I had seen a ghost. I nodded, but the lump in my throat was so big, I couldn't breathe around it, a burning meteor trapped in my windpipe.

"Yeah," I said, the word sounding more like a question than it should have.

"I'm done for the day. Hamburgers for dinner?"

I blinked at him. Such an unassuming thing to say—he had no idea I felt like I was holding a supernova to my chest. I set the camera beside me in the sheets, gently, and nodded.

Edward tucked a leg over the window and slipped gracefully inside, making it look too easy. Shirtless and paint-flecked and sunbaked, smiling at me something fierce. He pulled me up from the mattress, all hands clutching me up close.

"You're pretty when you're thinking." He rubbed his nose along my neck, mumbling words into my skin. "Tell me. Tell me what's going on up there, pretty girl."

"You've got heat stroke." I laughed, hands to his red cheeks, the tips of my fingers looping through the strap of his eyepatch. The urge to tug, to pull it down, was so strong. Some kind of panicked curiosity welled up in my throat. I could smell his sweat and the paint and that eternal, hungry heartache he carried around with him.

He let me slide all the way down him as he set me back on the floor. With a press of his lips to mine, he walked out the door.

I followed him down the stairs and stood in front of the anniversary photo for a long time, studying the brother I knew Edward loved so deeply that it was etched into his face. Everyone was so happy. Edward's mother, small and slim, smiling back at the grin her husband was giving her, a tall, blonde man with deep-set eyes and that strong jaw I liked so much on Edward. The brother smiling over his shoulder as he mooned the camera. So carefree, if it was taken out of context.

I would never be able to look at this photo the same way ever again.

The fawn danced in through the open door, clicking across the hardwood to press her face to my leg. My fingers found her ears in a thoughtless caress as I listened to Edward's footsteps in the kitchen, the water from the tap. The paint swirling down the drain, his hands folded together beneath the water with soap bubbles and the tiny canyons in his skin. The soft, dark places he had pulled away inside of himself. The anger that he'd slapped over it like a Band-Aid holding all of his guts in.

The air felt too heavy to breathe.

I was going to burst out of my skin.

"Bella?"

"I'm here," I croaked, padding into the kitchen, headed for the sink. I washed my hands while he bustled around the kitchen, pulling out food to feed me, even though I had no appetite. Emmett's face kept flashing in my head, the blood and the tear and the dust and that helpless, forlorn look in his eyes. I scrubbed harder.

"About have the whole wall done," Edward told me, chopping away with a big butcher knife at the counter, blissfully unaware that I was about to ruin everything. I sat at the kitchen table and pulled my knees up to my chin, something in my gut burning sulfur guilt. I couldn't let it go. Couldn't let it slide away, the image forever burned on me, and I could practically see it burned on him too.

So what if I was falling in love? This was what people did. People without holes in them that were the exact shape of a bullet. The exact shape of a land mine. People without walls, without moats, without barbed wire or border patrols. I supposed I had it in me, the capacity, only because I could feel it, a fire in my gut and a burning behind my eyes and a throbbing beneath my ribs. But love never came easy—it always had a price, and I was starting to wonder how much he would cost, how much Edward might cost me, if I closed my eyes and jumped into the water.

Puncturing my life raft on the way down.

"Were you in the army?"

Edward stopped chopping, his mouth pulling down as he glanced at me, a quick look before his gaze skittered away again. He let out a long, slow breath.

"No."

I didn't know anything about war. Didn't know the rules. Didn't know the names or the ranks or what anyone really did, but it was obvious. The camo jacket in his attic and the old worn boots by the door and the camera full of death. I tried again.

"The military?"

"Why?"

He knew. I could tell he already knew, even without me saying it out loud. His voice was sharp and steel-edged, his shoulders stiff and his hands gone still. I traced the wood pattern of the tabletop with one finger, my heart beating hard enough to kill me, palms clammy and skin too tight.

"The camera. The digital. There were pictures on it. From…" I faltered. I didn't know where those photos had been taken. Didn't know why or how or when. All I knew was that looking at them had punched a hole right through me. Even though I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to actually take such images myself, I was staring down the aftermath.

Edward inhaled shaky and uneven. His face went slack and ashen, and his grip on the knife clamped down hard before he turned and launched the blade, fast as a snake, with a roar in his throat.

I yelped, ducking, even though I was nowhere in the line of fire. The fawn, dozing under the table, leapt to her feet with a frightened squeal, scrambling for me and shoving her head beneath my knee. The knife stuck hard and fast into the plaster by the door, quivering in the wall. Edward was staring at it, wide-eyed and panting.

"I didn't..." he choked, "I didn't know those were still on there."

I licked my lips and opened my mouth.

"You should go," he said, talking to the knife.

"I don't want to." My voice wobbled, even as my body turned itself into a ten thousand pound weight. I wouldn't be moved. Wouldn't be forced away. Not when he looked like that. Not when the sunlight was fading so fast. I didn't flinch or blink or even breathe, waiting for him to say something, do something, anything.

"I'm not…" he huffed, shaking his head. "I'm not… good, Bella. Not for you."

"Will you ever be?"

He laughed hard and mean, his whole body shaking. "Probably not."

"Then it doesn't matter. None of it matters. Not to me." I tried desperately to patch the wound I'd just blown open and staunch the bleeding—pressure, tourniquet, prayers.

Everything felt so useless.

"It does matter," he spit. "And it's none of your fucking business."

"I'm sorry, but I'm staying." I pressed down harder, gripping the edge of the chair.

"I'm just going to hurt you."

"Maybe."

He cut his eyes at me, rough and broken and mean. When he scowled, it looked like warfare. Like a battlefield, strung through with landmines and barbed wire, and I wasn't sure I could survive him. He seemed to wither and grow, all at the same time, an inward shrink even as he straightened, his jaw clenching.

"I don't want you! I don't want you here." He bared his teeth at me, cornered and feral and hissing. "Just go and take that fucking deer with you."

Blood splattered across my face. Gore in my mouth. Guts in my eyes.

I stood, the soles of my feet barely registering the floor. I felt like I was going to float away. Like he was going to float away. Only moments ago I had been upstairs in his bed, remembering the sounds of his legs rustling through the sheets and the way he breathed when he slept, and now he was telling me to leave.

I took four silent steps toward the door and stopped, staring at the knife buried in the wall, thinking about the bullet burning a hole in my pocket. My palm wrapped the handle, and I tugged the knife free, setting it down on the counter.

With one last look at him, I stepped out the door and into the sunlight.

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

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB