The Dreamtime
On the waters of oblivion, she drifts in darkness. A mote in the ocean. A planet that has slipped its moorings. Spins slowly through emptiness, to the materialization of a form under the quilts.
She lies still, awareness sharpening. Scent, touch, silence. The motionless weight on the mattress beside her. Through their clothing, she can feel that his body has almost equalized its temperature with hers.
She wonders how long he has lain with her, that she has warmed him. And aren't ghosts supposed to be cold no matter what? Always making drafts and chills in the rooms they pass through?
"What time is it?" she whispers.
"There is no time here, Bella."
"The in-between?"
He just sighs, and his breath is cool on her face. She files that away. His breath stays cool, no matter what else.
She feels fragile — a shakiness inside that has seemed to grow with the cloth — made sharp as her father's fish knife tonight, by Uncle Billy and Jacob's visit. The meal. The checkers. The floor. Her dad. I can't do this, she thinks, heart gone weak and scared and small. But she burrows against Edward's body. He remains as always, hard and still as a stone, but he doesn't stop her either. Doesn't take his arm from around her.
The meadow rises up, overpowering her from memory. In the dark here, to her human eyes, even with the nightlight, he is a being of shadow. But she remembers what her startled self took for flames in the sunlight, until it resolved into rainbows, halos, scintillating from his skin. She holds one of his hands, traces the hollow of his palm with her fingers. His breath sighs across her face. Perhaps he is remembering, too. How she marveled at the rainbows she found, even in his palms.
She whispers his name. "Edward." Feels his smile against her hairline. "Yes, that's my name." Is he reliving it too? Her recognition. That he is the boy from the journal.
Her free hand is inside his jacket, running up and down his flank. The flu had not been merciful to him. She can feel ribs, above the taut and slender muscles of his waist. Hard, now, dense and solid, not yielding to her touch. How unlike he is to her touch, to how she is to his. She thinks of the he that he had been, and what he had become.
She still hardly knows him. And he hardly knows her. There was supposed to be time. All the months between that day and this night. And months running into the future as well. A thousand and one nights … To learn each other's stories, ask questions, find out every little thing about each other. All ripped away, in terror and drowning and fire.
How many nights are left to them now, between this night and the anniversary of that conflagration? Head against his chest, she adds and counts on her fingers. Seventy nine nights. Only seventy nine. To be Scheherezade to each other. A weaving of spirit to echo the cloth. So that, when the time comes, she and the cloth and the magic and their stories, truly will catch him, and hold him, back to the earth.
That is what the rainbow means. An arc of covenants.
Lift the shed, pass the thread, beat, repeat.
She inhales his scent and thinks of the boy. Of the journal. Of ceremonies, and retrievals.
Stay.
Stay.
Stay.
"Tell me your story," she whispers. "Doctor Cullen … changed you? How does that work? And what about the rest of your family …?"