Chapter 31

~Bella~

Never again.

We sat side by side under the stars and the trees, silent together for a long while. He passed the bottle to me, and I passed it back, and we didn't touch or talk or move until the fawn came loping through the dark. She trotted up the steps straight to Edward. I watched him loop his arm around the animal, her soft cheek pressed up into his chest as she blinked dreamily at me. His hand found her neck and swept gentle strokes down her side as she sighed in contentment and flopped her ears like another creature might have wagged a tail. He rested his chin on the top of her head, glum and sullen.

He'd fallen for her, whether he wanted to or not.

I chewed on my lips and knitted my fingers and traced the wood patterns with my toes while I thought, trying my hardest not to look at him. Despite his conviction, the fawn told me that he was capable of changing his mind.

Never, ever again.

"Never," I finally said, hoping it sounded like a question.

Edward just stared at his feet and rubbed the fawn and didn't say anything. I took a deep breath and stepped into his territory.

"Here's the thing… nature doesn't need a witness." I flipped my hand toward the dark, the world just beyond it so heavy we could have been anywhere, if you pretended hard enough. "The mountains, the trees, the ocean. It just does its thing regardless of whether anyone would even notice. And it's been doing it forever."

I glanced at him.

Nothing.

"But we're different as humans," I plowed on, not even sure where I was going with this, fumbling blindly down his long, dark hallway in search of a light switch. "We're so… brief. And breakable. And we do such terrible, beautiful things to each other. To nature. We need a witness. We need to be held accountable for the bad things and reminded of the good ones." I looked at him again. "We need you."

He exploded.

"I'm a gore monger," he spat, face twisting feral and raw. "Spreading filth and violence and—"

"Stop!" I yelled over him, startling the fawn. She bolted, scampering back into the dark. He panted, eyes blazing, but clamped his mouth shut. "I understand. I do. You had a selfish moment. You regret it. We all have them." I fished the bullet out of my pocket, never not there anymore, constantly tapping at my thighs. I held it up, a white flag SOS bridge across the improbable, impossible canyon between us. "Sometimes we make selfish decisions for ourselves that we regret."

"It's not the same," he grumbled. "You didn't stop to take a photograph of your dying mother."

I arched an eyebrow at him, willing my face straight, tears back. Pushing away my mother and that last awful moment and what I really wanted to say to him in retort. I was halfway through his minefield, but I still had so far to go. I couldn't afford to falter now.

He huffed a sardonic laugh.

"You have taken a photo. Since then."

Edward glanced at me then, finally. He shook his head, and I nodded back at him, trying my best not to let the insistent tug of a smile win out over my willpower. "A beautiful photo."

He took the stack from me and looked hard at the first one, me in that dress in that field with that deer and those flowers strung through my hair like I was playing dress up instead of just living my rotten, lonely life. Suddenly, I wasn't some girl with some problems and some mother and some house, somewhere in middle America. I was a soul or a spirit, something ethereal pinching the fabric of magic together against the boring human world, clothed in flowers and lace, clutching my fawn.

I didn't look real at all.

"This is—" he choked.

"That's me. Taken by you."

He swallowed, flipping to the next shot, the next, through the ones of me and into the succession of shots he'd taken of my palm, the fractions of my face. The shaking in his hands steadied with each shuffle of paper, a whisper of images brushing up against each other. It was the other aspect of the digital I didn't like. Unless we started spending money on computers and printers instead of chemical baths, they were stuck in there. No more stacks of photos on the kitchen table, no more piles around the mattress, no more collages on the living room floor.

"About the digital..." I said.

"That goddamned camera," he muttered, still shuffling.

"The thing is—I don't like it. I know it's better in some ways, probably in a lot of ways I don't even understand yet, and I know I can delete shots that don't go right to save room, but…" I trailed off, trying to gather up my quickly scattering thoughts. I took a deep breath and tried again. "I like film. Developing. The darkroom. And I like the messed up shots—I don't want to just delete them. Sometimes, I like them more than the good ones."

Edward's face didn't move at all for ten seconds, his eye boring deep down into me before I saw it start. The edge of his mouth, first one side and then the other, slowly picking up into a smile—his eye flaming back to life in a slow-blown dance of embers and wind, sparking brighter and brighter until he threw his head back and laughed.

"That," he chuckled, pointing at me, "that right there is precisely what I love about you."

I dipped my chin to my chest, so he couldn't see my face. My smile. It was a slip, one everyone made, a word plopped in there that didn't mean anything more than easy familiarity. The thing blooming in my chest wasn't necessarily sprouting in his, even though visions of ghost flowers blossomed in my eyes every time I saw him look at me.

Edward dropped the photos in a whisper against wood and reached for me, pulling me into his lap with a shaky exhale in his chest and his bourbon tongue trailing a string of nonsense against my skin. Kisses punctuating his words up my throat.

"You look at things all backwards, completely upside down, and you think it's wonderful… but everyone else is around the front thinking the same thing. And it's obvious—you're right."

"You're making no sense…. "

A slow, lazy ellipsis of his teeth to my lips, one-two-three.

"It's in your landscapes. That's where I see you best. Because you're never doing it like everyone else, the pretty shit. With you, there's always that crooked tree or the old rotten house or the busted fence line, and I keep thinking it's not going to work… but then you surprise the shit outta me."

Commas licking my earlobes, apostrophes littered along my hairline.

"You're always surprising me," he whispered.

Period. Dot. Fini.

I was so done for over him, I could hardly stand myself. I folded against him, over him, getting splinters in my knees, but I didn't care. Rubbing shameless and loose all over him, but I didn't care. Moaning his name into his mouth and I really didn't care because that earned me a grunt and a thrust and a pull from his fingers that told me he didn't care anymore either.

Stepping over the final roll of wire, around the final buried explosive, and taking him by the hand.

"Film only, from now on," I hummed, touching everything I could reach. Breathing too hard and too fast because my chest was aching and my limbs were trembling.

"Honestly, I couldn't care less if I never saw that camera again."

I nodded. I knew that feeling. "Yeah, well, I know of a safe place. If you want to bury the camera, I'll do it with you." I didn't want to imply that I believed the camera was tainted, like there was a ghost stuck in it, but that's exactly what it felt like.

He stopped kissing me. Pulled back to look at me with his eyebrow arching. "Do I wanna know what that means?"

"The gun. It's buried under your flagpole."

Edward's gaze drifted across the yard, a squint through the dark, and he shook his head as he spoke.

"That's a stupid place for something like that. Bound to be dug up someday."

"Why do you think I couldn't leave you alone at first?"

"Had you nervous, huh?" He grinned at me.

"About a lot of things," I admitted. "I never expected any of this."

He rubbed his hands up and down my thighs, going thoughtful and silent for a moment, before peering at me through the porch light.

"I'm sorry about earlier. In the kitchen. I'm sorry you had to see that side of me."

"I'm not."

It was the second time, in less than two months, someone had missed me. Whether it was intentional or not, that made two times something had come cutting a path toward me that could have left me dead. It was the feeling that was different, the fear from the bullet completely absent in the face of the knife.

I'd known she would do it if she could, but I knew, with even deeper certainty, that he wouldn't.

"I've told you already—you don't scare me."

"Even when I throw knives? You should be scared."

"Not of you. You're my favorite… my pictures of you are my favorite."

"There you go again, finding beauty in the grotesque. In the mistakes. You keep doing that."

"I like mistakes, remember?" I whispered, my voice too wobbly to speak out loud. "And you." I ran my fingers across the black cap of the patch, down the strap, over the shell of his ear. "Tell me about this."

"Shrapnel. Damaged my cornea." His other eye fluttered closed, his head tilting back, as I tucked a single finger beneath the strap

"Are you blind?"

He shook his head. "No, but there are scars."

"Do you have to wear it forever?"

His gaze dropped to my neck, his fingers digging tight into my thighs as though he was holding onto something solid. "I could have taken it off weeks ago."

I didn't ask him why—I knew why. I knew that fear is what kept him there, the terror of ripping a Band-Aid off. It wasn't the wound that would hurt. It was everything around it, all the padding and protection suddenly gone. It was the exposure to air, water, and sunlight, and the sharp, rough edges of life that would hurt.

I kissed him again—my hand on his neck, the thrum of his pulse in my palm—his breath in my mouth, between my teeth, and under my tongue. Pulling away because this felt like falling out of a twenty-story building. Like falling out of an airplane. Like falling off the face of the moon. The thrilling fear of looking at someone and knowing that you'd risk splattering yourself wide open for them.

"Let me do it," I whispered. "Let me take it off."

He stiffened, face going rigid for a moment, before he nodded. I kept my eyes on his as I slipped my fingers into the strap of his eyepatch and slowly pulled it down his face.

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

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB