Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer.
This is up for fic of the week at The Lemonade Stand, thanks to Nic, Dolly Reader and Twific Crackmum! There's a link on my profile page, or go to tehlemonadestand net.
Thanks to Camilla10, Mr. Price, and those of you who've nominated or voted for this story and "Getting Warmer."
Some of you asked about the stories Jacob tells in the last chapter. They're all "real" – an anthropologist from Brigham Young University collected them in the 1930s.
Recap: In the last chapter, Jacob gives a presentation to Bella's class on Quileute legends, and she invites him to dinner. Alice offers Bella a ride to Seattle after her car goes out of commission, and Edward comes along. Bella meets Riley and Bree at the art show and discovers that Raquel is displaying a picture of her. When the Cullens and Bella meet up again at Elliott Bay Books, Raquel learns that a mysterious collector has bought the painting. Raquel gets freaked out by being in a car with the Cullens.
Chapter 6: Correr es mi destino
Something seemed to change in Edward Cullen after that weekend. He stopped staring at his desk and started looking where he was supposed to. At me.
At his teacher, I reminded myself.
And as a teacher, I had to approve. As someone who was trying to keep her wits about her – well, thinking Edward Cullen hated me was depressing, but thinking that he didn't was … dangerous.
Self-control, Swan.
In AP English we were in the extra-long (courtesy of Val Berty) Shakespeare unit, and I was taking a break on the homework by having my students memorize speeches from the plays and recite them in class.
Although I had encouraged them to work on bits that had famous lines that could prove useful on the AP test – Jaques's "All the world's a stage" monologue, Shylock's "Do we not bleed?," Macbeth's "Out, out brief candle" - the Cullens, of course, chose their own path.
Alice did a comic interp version of the Pyramus and Thisbe "play" about forbidden love in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" (O dainty duck! O dear!) !that had every one laughing … except her own brother, which made me wonder about his sense of humor. He followed Alice's charming performance by stepping to the front of the room to deliver Othello's speech as he watches Desdemona sleep:
Yet I'll not shed her blood;
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Othello muses that if he snuffs a candle, he can relight it, but he can't do that with Desdemona's life -
When I have pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree.
Edward Cullen paused. "Kissing her," said the stage direction in my Shakespeare anthology. I tried to keep my eyes on the book and away from my student, but his silence continued. Had he forgotten the next lines?
I broke and looked at him. He was still, only his jaw working, his hands fisted at his sides. He inhaled, finally, and went on:
I must weep,
But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly;
It strikes where it doth love.
He finished with a glance at me and then promptly returned to his desk, not acknowledging the sincere applause that followed.
As I biked home after school on the wet road, wishing I had fenders, I pondered his choice of those lines. An unusual choice – they didn't qualify as obscure, but who would decide to memorize them unless they held some special meaning? And a few moments after Othello says them, he kills the woman he loves, convinced that, because of his nature, she can't have truly loved him back. Cheerful stuff.
Or maybe, Bella, the boy just flipped through the Shakespeare anthology and randomly picked out enough lines to fulfill the assignment. He is a 17-year-old, after all. It's like Rimbaud's line 100 years ago: On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans. No one is serious at 17. You have to remember that.
I really had to.
At lunch the next day, Bruce Clapp was ranting about the management of the Teachers' Pension and Annuity Fund. I bit into my last apple from the farmers' market in Raquel's neighborhood, trying to keep my gaze from wandering over to the table where I knew the Cullens were sitting. On one side of me Angela was shaking her head and on the other Natalie Marshall was stabbing her fork into her pasta salad.
"Give us a break, Bruce," Natalie said in irritation. "There's no way that pension fund will still be in existence when I retire."
"Yah! Social Security won't even be around when Bella and I retire," Angela said.
"Is that how you feel too, Bella?" the Clapp said, affronted.
I shrugged. "I am absolutely certain that I will never draw a pension."
"It's exactly that kind of attitude that guarantees you'll be eating cat food when you're 70," Bruce thundered, slamming his hand down on the lunch table. The force was strong enough to spill Barbara Goff's soup and jostle my elbow so my apple went flying.
It fell to the floor just in time for it to be kicked toward the trash cans by Andy Marks, too engrossed in flirting with Shelby Wells walking next to him to notice what his feet were doing. I sighed and went to retrieve it. It was no longer edible, and I shoved it into my lunch bag to compost at home.
"Bella, do you want my apple?" Bruce rolled his across the table toward me. It was dark red and waxed. A Red Delicious from Thriftway. I already knew it would be mealy and bland. "My wife always packs one for me, but I never eat them."
"Thanks, that's very kind," I said, and placed it on top of my lunch bag, hoping he wouldn't notice that I hadn't bitten.
That afternoon on my run, my thoughts were again consumed by, duh, Edward Cullen. In class we'd started "Romeo and Juliet," a story of teenagers being silly and overdramatic and horny (though of course I had to ignore all the "prick" puns), but saying some gorgeous lines in the process. We'd just discussed the meaning of the Prince's comment about "purple fountains issuing from your veins," and I asked if anyone knew what Shakespeare was saying by naming Romeo's friends Mercutio and Benvolio.
Silence. I turned to the whiteboard to write down the names so we could dissect them together, and in my peripheral vision noticed a hand up in the Cullen quadrant of the room. "Ms. Cullen," I said reflexively.
More silence, and then a couple of titters. I turned around to see that it wasn't Alice volunteering an answer.
"Excuse me, Mr. Cullen," I said, trying to mask my surprise.
"Uh, yeah, I think he's trying to tell the reader that, you know, Mercutio is mercurial, 'cause his mood swings a lot. It's from the planet Mercury, I guess?" Edward Cullen said as I stared. His leg jiggled as if he were nervous, while his classmates took notes, apparently finding the situation not at all strange. "And Benvolio is, like, benevolent, since he stops the fight between the servants?"
I had to open and close my mouth once before I could manage, "Yes, thank you, Mr. Cullen."
My feet struck the damp dirt of the trail snaking before me as I thought about this exchange. That Edward Cullen had the right answer didn't astonish me. That he expressed himself like such a teenager did.
I heard a sudden noise that made me jerk my gaze up from the path. Blocking my way was something golden-eyed, growling and lethal. I stopped short, lost my balance and took a digger into the dirt.
Ouch! And shit! I knew that moving deliberately and making yourself look bigger were the rules when you encountered a mountain lion, and I had broken them both. Should I stay down to protect my most vulnerable parts or should I get up and face the predator? There was no more growling, and I couldn't tell if the cat had decided to back away or come closer.
Up, I thought frantically. I had to get up. There was a rock near my hand and I clawed it out of the soft ground as I tried to find my feet.
Then my breath left me in a loud, relieved gasp, for where the mountain lion had been seconds before was another golden-eyed, but much more welcome, creature.
"Miss Swan? Are you hurt? Are you bleeding?" Edward Cullen asked, but remained where he was. Oh, I still had the rock clutched in my muddy hand, ready to throw.
"No – no, I'm okay. I saw a cougar … a mountain lion … whatever there is here," I wheezed, letting the stone fall as I sank back onto my heels and tried to calm my breathing. "And now it's gone."
"Cats can be very volatile, especially ones incautious enough to venture close to a populated area." He moved to my side, then crouched down slowly as if I myself were some volatile wild animal. "Are you hurt?" he asked again. "Did you hit your head?"
"No. Did you see the lion?"
"I could see the paw prints on the trail," he answered, nodding to where the cat had confronted me.
"Maybe you spooked it off?"
"Hmm. It might have felt trapped, being between us. Can you walk?" He rose and offered me his hand. I grabbed it with my cold, dirty one, but he didn't flinch.
I had smears of mud all along my running tights, and my ankle protested as I took a step. Edward steadied me under my elbows as I faltered. Damn, it was going to be a shivering, unpleasant walk home.
"I can carry you," Edward said behind me.
"What? No, it's too far."
"I'll put you down if it's too much for me, I promise. Here, it'll be easier for me if you wear my jacket." He draped his peacoat over my shoulders and I slid my hands into the sleeves. The next second, he had swung me up, my legs draped over one arm, my own arms crossed over my chest. His gait was smooth, though his posture was curious, with my body not nestled against his, but resting on his arms. It was like being carried on a forklift.
It had to be really difficult and uncomfortable for him, but he wasn't even breathing hard.
"Thank you for coming to my rescue again," I said cautiously after a while, remembering how he reacted the last time I thanked him.
"You seem to make a habit of attracting danger and needing rescue," Edward said. This time he sounded not contemptuous but a little … smug?
"Twice is not a habit," I said, nettled. "And don't blame the victim."
"How do you know you haven't attracted danger from the first day of school? That would be three, and three's a trend. But -" he added, his tone suddenly losing all hint of smugness "- believe me, I don't blame the victim. It's certainly not your fault."
"That's more like it." I watched the firs and naked alders pass us for a while, then asked, "Do you think the cougar will come back? Or is it scared off for good?"
"I can't imagine that that cat will ever bother you again." I raised my eyebrows, because, really, how would he know? But his tone was so confident that I was reassured. And with that my mind turned to another question.
"I'm really glad you were there, but why were you there?" I asked.
"I was on my way to your house, because I keep forgetting that copy of 'Bel-Ami' that I promised you. It's in the left pocket of my jacket." I patted the pocket, and yes, I could feel the corners of a book. Edward went on, "And it's not far from my house to yours through the woods."
"How do you know where my house is?"
He barked a short laugh. "Everybody knows, because Justin Stanley keeps telling everyone in hearing distance about Ms. Swan living across the street. He says he can see into your windows."
"What? I have curtains!" That jerk.
"Intelligent people know that just because Justin Stanley says something doesn't mean that it's true."
As I fumed, the trail branched off toward my place, and a few steps later we were in my back yard. With the change to daylight savings, dusk was now descending when I finished my run, and my house was gray in the dimming light.
Edward deposited me on the top step of my back porch and stepped away. He looked flustered. Huh. I had seen him look agonized, angry, annoyed, but this expression was new.
"Do you have a compress in your icebox?" he asked. I looked at him blankly. "For your ankle," he added, perhaps reckoning that I was still dazed by my encounter with the cougar.
Well, I was certainly dazed.
"Um, yes, there's a cold wrap in the freezer," I said finally, and he went inside. He came back a few seconds later and handed me the wrap before moving away to lean against the porch railing.
"Where are you from, Edward?" I asked, strapping the compress around my ankle.
"We were in Alaska before we moved here, but I was born in Chicago."
"You know, I don't think I've ever heard anyone outside an F. Scott Fitzgerald story use the word 'icebox.'"
He looked flustered again for a second, then his face smoothed over. "Oh, my father, Carlisle, has some linguistic oddities from growing up in England," he said. "Some of them are contagious. Don't forget this," he added, pushing away from the railing and plucking "Bel-Ami" from the pocket of the jacket I was still wearing. He laid the book on my lap.
Even in the twilight I could see that the volume was old, with a red leather cover crisscrossed with gold lines. "Thanks so much," I said. "And thanks again for helping me earlier."
"You're welcome. Can you make it inside?" he asked.
I nodded yes, standing up to prove it, the cold wrap velcro'd around my ankle, his book in my hand. "I think I didn't do any permanent damage," I said. I slipped his jacket off – a little reluctantly, because damn, it did smell good – and handed it over.
"Good night, Miss Swan," Edward said, shrugging on his coat, but he didn't leave.
"Good night," I answered, realizing that he was waiting for me. I limped to my door and went inside, resolutely not looking back.
After I scrubbed my hands to get the mud out from under my fingernails, I flipped open my computer for some music. I pulled up Garbage, loud guitars and tough-girl lyrics:
"I've got a fever of 110," I sang over Shirley Manson's better voice. "Come on, baby, be my bad boyfriend."
Edward Cullen did not have a fever of 110, but he would definitely be a bad boyfriend.
During my prep period the next day I went to do some etymological research on the Forks High library's surprisingly fast computers. So, let's see – for the Oxford English Dictionary, "icebox" was an Americanism. I then ran a Google Ngram query, and yep, "icebox" reached its peak usage in the 1940s, not long after Fitzgerald, and then dropped precipitously, what with people tossing their iceboxes out in favor of refrigerators and freezers.
Edward Cullen's grasp of linguistics was not nearly as impressive as his ability to show up in time to rescue me.
When I got back to my classroom, there was something new on my desk. A beautiful apple, with unblemished, unwaxed, mottled skin. I didn't recognize the variety, but I knew that it had never been near the Forks Thriftway. I touched it – and I knew if I bit into the flesh, it would be just how I liked it, firm, so firm that it was on the verge of under-ripe.
Perhaps I should have thought of gravity or temptation or even beautiful immortals warring over the apple of discord, but all I could wonder was: Could I eat it? If I washed it really carefully?
So I took it to the teachers' lounge and did just that. It was delicious, the flesh hard and bright white under the smooth skin. And as I ate it, I considered where it came from. Surely, if Bruce Clapp wanted to make amends for causing me to lose my apple, he would have given it to me in person, or left it with a note. The anonymity of the gift suggested a certain flirtatiousness, which was troubling. Someone had been watching me in the cafeteria. Maybe a student.
Maybe that student.
Dream on, Swan. Or better yet, don't dream at all.
I sighed, and walked back to my classroom.
My SAT prep sessions were over, so for dinner that night, I had invited Angela, Tyler and Mike over, to give us a break from the diner.
Mike arrived first, and I smirked at his red Beemer as it pulled up. Second overpriced car in my driveway in a week.
"What's with that smile?" he asked as we hugged at the door.
"I always expect you to be driving a Jeep or something."
"Hey, just because I own a sporting-goods store doesn't mean I have to look like an outdoorsman all the time."
Over Mike's shoulder, I dutifully waved to my landlady, Sharon Stanley, who was staring at us from her front yard. She waved back. Why were the Stanleys always watching me? My life was humdrum - work, sleep, run … and, okay, getting confronted by cougars. Still, it wasn't as if I were getting nightly visits from my stable of attractive, age-appropriate lovers.
Pushing that thought away, I ushered Mike inside. "Speaking of the outdoors," I said, "I know there are cougars around here, but how often do they get close to town?"
"Never. Even the guides on our expeditions say they're rare. You worried about running into one?"
"Nah," I said, even though I was. "Come on, you can help me chop stuff for dinner."
On Thursday afternoon, my ankle felt fine, I'd had my rest day, and there was no reason not to run. Still, I lingered on my back porch, contemplating the gap in the trees that marked the opening to the trail. On Tuesday, I hadn't been frightened while Edward Cullen was with me. But now, forcefully aware of the presence of deadly creatures in these woods, I was nervous.
Deal with it, I lectured myself, you've run for years without being bothered by anything. That cougar was just an aberration. Mike told you that mountain lions stayed away from town, and he should know.
Besides, as deaths go, being torn apart by a wild beast had its good side: it would be, if not painless, very quick.
I walked to the forest's edge, then hesitated again, closing my eyes and steeling myself to go in. When I opened them, what I saw made my breath rush out in relief.
"Miss Swan?"
Once again, Edward Cullen was there, waiting, a few feet away. Instead of the jeans and wool jacket he was wearing last time, he was now dressed as a runner, in a gray T-shirt, track pants and a pair of spanking new Brookses.
"Edward!" I said, walking onto the trail. "What are you –"
"I thought you'd feel more comfortable if you had company today."
I didn't think about propriety and morality clauses. "I would," I said instantly.
I began to move past him, figuring that I'd be the rabbit and set the pace, but he stepped in front of me. "I'll lead the way," he said, and started off.
And so I followed. I had seen that he was an amazing sprinter, but I doubted that the sports-avoiding Edward Cullen had the experience to run at a steady clip. He proved me wrong, keeping precisely three strides ahead of me on the single track trail, his footsteps a metronome in the silent woods.
In fact, I started to wonder if this untrained boy was going to run rings around me, former Arizona Wildcat and fastest girl at Consolidated High.
"Edward," I called out at the halfway mark of my run, panting a bit. "Let's turn back at the next logging road."
"Of course." He wasn't breathing hard at all.
If I were a cross-country coach, I would so want him on my squad.
Once we reached the fork to my house, we jogged side by side, cooling down. I pulled off my ponytail elastic and shook out my hair to take advantage of the rising breeze. Edward dropped back suddenly, and I turned to see him bent over, his hands on his knees.
"Are you cramping? Do you want some water?" I asked, my hand going to one of the little bottles on my belt.
He raised his hand to signal me to wait a moment, and I stopped. I wondered if he had been acting like a typical guy, trying to show off by pushing himself too hard, and now it was catching up with him. He wasn't sweating, though, unlike me. I pulled at the fabric of my shirt to get some air on my back.
Finally, Edward straightened up. "I'm fine, thank you," he said. We started walking across the yard, skirting my DIY composter.
"Thank you for keeping me company," I said. "I have to admit, I was a little uneasy. But—" I paused, struck by a realization "—were you here yesterday, when I didn't run?"
"Ah," he said slowly, "remember how I said that everyone knows where you live? Everyone also knows that you have dinner on Wednesday with Justin Stanley's cousin's former boyfriend."
I groaned. Oh, for Chrissakes, why did I live across the street from the worst possible student?
"So," Edward went on, in what I took as an attempt to distract me, "Where are you from, Miss Swan?" It was an echo of my question to him two days earlier.
"A little town called Laconia, in southwestern Arizona." We stopped at my porch.
"Laconia. How fitting," he said with a half-smile.
"Why? Because the Forks High mascot is the Spartan?" We were Sidewinders at Con High, completely ignoring the ancient-Greek origin of our town's name.
"Because you're … laconic. You don't give much away."
Thank God for that. "I'm a teacher – I'm not supposed to give much away," I said. I looked up at the darkening sky. "Are you going to be okay getting home?" I asked.
"Yes. It really is a quick trip through the woods. Good night, Miss Swan."
The next day, Edward answered another question in class, giving me a mumbled run-on sentence full of "likes" and "uhs." And a couple of hours later, he was waiting for me just at the edge of the forest. Once more he took the lead on our run.
On Fridays I often did intervals, and I was curious to see how this naturally gifted runner would react. I sped up for a spell, then slowed down to recover, and Edward Cullen just kept staying three strides ahead, no matter my pace. He didn't double over at the end this time.
But he did have another question. "Have you looked at 'Bel-Ami' yet?" he asked after turning down my offer of water.
"I haven't had a chance. You might know 'Romeo and Juliet' by heart, but I don't - " really, some students seemed to feel that their teachers had committed all of Shakespeare to memory – "so I have to read that, and the books for my other classes. Maybe this weekend."
I didn't tell him that I might have sniffed the book a time or two to see if it had picked up his scent.
He raised his hands in apology. "Of course. I'm just curious to hear your reaction. Georges Duroy is such an unpleasant man, inconstant and manipulative…"
I narrowed my eyes at him, and shook my head, not caring, for the moment, about Maupassant's protagonist.
"You know, your code switching could give someone whiplash," I said. I had studied linguistics enough to know that everybody code-switched, even if they didn't know what that meant: Jessica Stanley and Lakshmi Mallory naturally talked differently to each other than to, say, their real-estate clients or yoga students; I automatically spoke to my friends and neighbors in Laconia in English or Spanish or a mix of the two depending on the topic or which language worked best for us.
But what Edward Cullen was doing seemed so studied, so deliberate, that my curiosity was piqued.
"Ah, you're one of the few who know my secret," he said.
"Your secret?"
"Your best students, are they girls or boys?" he asked.
"Girls. The guys seem to delight in being dumb jocks here," I said ruefully. Though to be fair, they did back in Laconia too.
"Exactly. A girl can be as articulate as she likes without drawing particular attention, but if I spoke that way in class, it would be noticed."
I nodded, thinking about Bruce Clapp's animus toward him and his brothers. It would be worse if the Clapp felt Edward Cullen was being a smartass know-it-all when he talked. And I suppose Edward wasn't always so tall, didn't always give off such an impression of coiled power. Maybe he got harassed by the jocks when he moved here from Alaska?
"I guess," I agreed. "But it's a shame. It used to be that girls had to hide how smart they were, and here it's boys." I shrugged. "Well, that should be a less of a problem for you in college."
"I'm certain of that," he said, smiling briefly. We were silent for a moment, and I reluctantly concluded that I should send him on his way. And I wouldn't see him the next day, I realized. I tried to ignore the pang of disappointment I felt.
"Um, I don't run on Saturdays," I said. "I go to Port Angeles instead."
"I'll see you on Sunday, then. Good night, Miss Swan."
It was only after he was gone that I realized that he had shown more knowledge of linguistic vocabulary than I would have given him credit for.
Lakshmi had a mischievous gleam in her eye when she described what we were going to chant in yoga class this week.
"I'm looking for a man," she said frankly as we all sat cross-legged on our mats in sukhasana, hands resting on our knees. "I know some of you are, too. So we'll chant together 'sat patim dehi parameshwara,' which in Sanskrit means, 'Please give to me a man of truth who embodies the perfect masculine attributes.' Inhale…"
As we chanted, I thought, I do need a man with the perfect masculine attributes. Attributes that men had. Adult men. Men who could vote and buy a drink without a fake ID.
Well, at least one who fit the bill was having dinner with me that night. Jacob Black showed up wearing the same white dress shirt he had on when he spoke to my class, a few new creases added.
"You don't have a TV?" he asked after he looked around my living room, and as all my visitors did, admired Raquel's paintings.
"Nope. I can't afford cable," I said, grabbing a beer from the refrigerator for him.
"Don't you want to watch UA football games?"
"No. And how did you know I went to Arizona?"
"The Spartan Spokesman."
"Gah! You saw that too?" I handed Jacob the bottle. You'd never know in Forks that the newspaper industry was dying.
"Yeah," he said, taking a swallow. "And I saw that –"
"If you say 'nice picture,' I will punch you in the face." I wasn't entirely joking, because that photograph of me in running briefs was still a sore point for me.
He laughed a little, and then had to wipe his mouth. "I was going to ask if you got shit for that picture," he said. "That's gotta be tough, having your students see that."
"Yes, I did!" I said, eyeing Jacob with a new appreciation. "And I think you're the first man who's realized that."
"That's 'cause I know the feeling. The ladieeeez are always objectifying me," he said, playfully striking a bodybuilder's pose, and making me giggle. "Also, I'm taking a class at Peninsula right now called Gender Roles in the Media, so I know all about the male gaze, babe."
We talked easily as I made dinner, roasted chicken and vegetables, and I saw that he utterly lacked pretension and was comfortable in his own skin – such a contrast to the artists I'd met last weekend in Seattle. Some of the vegetables he didn't recognize, and he was unembarrassed about asking me what kale was and what it would taste like.
I also found out that in addition to being a part-time student at the community college, he moonlighted as a car mechanic and worked for the tribal center, which was why he had given the folktale presentation. I asked him if he could speak Quileute, and he confessed that though he had studied it at school, only the oldest residents of the reservation spoke it with any degree of fluency.
As the main caretaker for his dad, he hadn't traveled much, but in the summer he had been able to go on a trip in a traditional cedar canoe with friends, traveling 40 miles a day to meet up with members from other tribes at the Swinomish reservation on the Salish Sea. It helped explain his callused hands and those biceps he showed off.
"Have you been taking care of your father for a long time?" I asked as I watched him take another helping of roasted chicken. The guy sure had an appetite.
"A while," he said, talking between bites. "My mom died in a car crash when I was 9, but my dad could still walk then – he was a fisherman. Then his diabetes got real bad when my twin sisters were still living with us. But they wanted to leave LaPush. Rebecca got married, Rachel went to school at Washington State. So it's been just me and my dad for a while. He's got real good friends who'll help out, though."
"My mom died when I was 9, too," I said.
He nodded. "It's rough, isn't it? What happened to her?"
"Cancer. She was sick for a while before."
"Oh." He looked puzzled, his eyes going to the equipment lined up on my kitchen counters. "So did your dad teach you how to cook?"
I snorted at the idea. "No, I mostly learned from neighbors. They were good teachers."
"Could you teach me?" He finally put his knife and fork down. His plate was a graveyard of chicken bones. "It's just that you look like you really know how to cook, and I'm don't know anything except how to put something in the microwave. And that's bad for my dad, what with his diabetes and all. And you're a teacher so you know how to … teach."
I cocked my head, considering. This could work out well for me. "How about this?" I said. "I'll show you some stuff, and you introduce me to someone who can speak Quileute and who'd be willing to talk to me."
"Why are you so interested?"
I fiddled with my own fork and knife a moment, then looked up at him. "Quileute is an isolate and so it hasn't been studied all that well, and maybe I could find out something interesting about it. And then I could write a paper and be a more desirable applicant for grad school."
"Huh. So you want to exploit my ancient culture for your own gain?"
"Um, not entirely for that, but yeah, to a certain extent?" I said hesitantly, not knowing him well enough to figure out if he was being serious.
He reached over to pat my hand. "Hey, I'm just messing with you. Actually, I think it's good for us to be studied – our language is almost extinct, I guess you know, the last remnants of the old ways are disappearing. The only way they'll survive in some form is if somebody records them." He took a sip of beer before going on. "There is also a lot of secrecy on the reservation, though. Before they let me talk to your class, I was told that there were some stories I couldn't tell, weird stories I'd heard around the fire when I was growing up."
"Weirder than –" I thought back to the tales he told in his presentation "– than a woman falling in love with a dog and giving birth to a litter of puppies that could shed their pelts?"
"Yeah, much weirder."
I was wildly curious, but I wouldn't have much luck as a field linguist if I couldn't demonstrate that I could respect a tribe's taboos, so I remained silent.
Jacob looked pensive for a moment, then said, "Tell you what, you teach me how to cook, and I'll ask some of the tribal council members about what you want to do. One of them is my dad, so I got an in." He gave me a wink.
I broke into a smile. "You've got a deal."
After dinner I said goodbye to Jacob at the door, pleased at how the evening had turned out. Jacob leaned down and kissed my cheek. It was warm, and soft, and sweet … and nothing. Like a kiss from my brother, if I had a brother.
Damn Edward Cullen.
I started stomping back to my kitchen to clean up but had to stop in the middle of the living room, in front of my mom's portrait, struck by my hypocrisy.
I had accused Edward of blaming the victim, and here I was doing just that. While I was cursing him for the drought in my sex life, he was the victim in this situation. I was the older person, the person in a position of authority, and I was allowing Edward to be alone with me when I was infatuated with him. He had obviously come to trust me, and I was unforgivably exploiting that trust. And that of his parents, busy people who probably didn't know what their son was doing with his afternoons.
So damn me.
Once I'd started the dishwasher, I finally allowed myself to open Edward's copy of "Bel-Ami." I guessed that he had found it at a garage sale, for the copyright was 1898 and the inside front cover had a bookplate that looked to be of the same vintage. It showed a Muse – Clio, I thought, with her scroll and books – and an "Ex Libris Elizabeth Anthony." I took a moment to consider this Elizabeth Anthony, maybe a privileged young woman smuggling racy French novels home from her Grand Tour of Europe, and never thinking that the day would come when nobody remembered her except as a name on a bookplate.
Dismissing the long-gone Miss Anthony, I plunged into the world of 19th-century Paris, filled with politics and mistresses and dinner parties, with people living beyond their means so they could climb the social ladder. As Edward had said, the hero was indeed inconstant and manipulative, but he was also young and handsome and easily manipulated himself – a boy toy for older Parisian society women.
After a few chapters I closed the book and pushed it away from me, its themes hitting too close to home. It was shameful: I kept worrying about how my crush on Edward Cullen was dangerous for me, but what I needed to think more about was how it was wrong for him. He should be spending time with a girl his own age, a smart, kind girl with a bright, long future ahead of her. He might have to wait to find her until college, but in the meantime he shouldn't be squandering his afternoons escorting me through the woods.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would tell him to stop coming to meet me.
Chapter title: "Running is my destiny," from "Clandestino" by Manu Chao.
So, one of the things that irritated me about the first "Twilight" movie was how Bella says that Edward speaks as if he's from another time, yet during the whole movie he's AdolescentMumbles McSqueakypants - even when they are alone. What's up with that?
And what do you guys think of Amazon's fanfic venture? I gotta say, that company sure knows how to screw over writers. John Scalzi's blog, Whatever, has some thoughts about Kindle Worlds, if you want to get some background.
I haven't seen the movie - I guess it got pretty bad reviews? -but "Bel-Ami" is a terrific novel, a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Paris. I recommend it.
Thanks for reading and reviewing!