Dumb Barter
It's too ornate. And I spent way too much time on it. I guess I got … a little bit carried away. I was supposed to be finishing my history paper, which was due on Monday. That did get done, but … later. So I looked like a raccoon on my first day back at school, and the … thing … has now been burning a hole through my training bra for three whole days.
All because I have no stones. I am not afraid of Edward Cullen. But, me, walking up to him and saying, "Edward, thank you for the medicine – it really helped," … … when elephants fly. Maybe.
So, instead, I am stalking him. Or rather, I am stalking his absence – the golden, opportune moment when he is nowhere near his locker. And no one else is anywhere within eyeshot of it either.
It's Wednesday already. If that moment is not now, it is never. I have finally resorted to excusing myself from class to go to the bathroom. The hallway is empty. The 'thing' is leaving my fingers and passing through one of the vent slots in Edward Cullen's locker. I am such a dork. And now, Edward will know it, too.
The last bell has rung, and Jasper is accompanying me as I make my way through the hallways. Subjecting him to my constant craving for Bella's blood while we are caught in this press of heated young bodies rushing about – even running – in front of us, seems dangerous to me. I wonder that Alice allows it. Both of us are gritting our teeth, and, through the humans' eyes, I see that we look positively menacing. Not entirely unconsciously, they avert their gazes, and part before us like Moses' Red Sea.
I try to change the subject.
"She talks in her sleep."
The wave of Jasper's shock hits me hard before he can temper it with lethargy. Serenity is beyond us both today. It is all he can do to dissipate the under-current of anger that he feels at my confessed activities.
This has got to stop, he thinks. Boy's a loose cannon!
All the ways that everything could go to hell in an instant start running through Jasper's mind, and he leaves them all un-edited for my benefit.
Aloud, he asks mildly, "What does she say?"
"I don't know. She mumbles."
He can't help laughing at this – a short, staccato sputter through his nose; which could be quite disgusting if we were human; but in this moment is the most welcome relief. We both cling to it for a pace or two, just to cleanse ourselves of our dire thoughts.
"Sometimes she calls for her mother," I add.
And sometimes for her father, too, even though he is in the very same house with her. Her sleeping voice is soft, even to my hearing. Once, I smelled tears.
"I have no idea what is in her mind. It's driving me to distraction."
I hear reinforcements on the way. Alice and Rosalie and Emmett are converging on my and Jasper's destination.
"Edward, what's in her mind makes no matter to us. Except if she should start to suspect anything about you …"
I never speak to her. What could she possibly suspect about me, except that I am a 'dumb-ass'? Or possibly a queer-ass. The thought gives me a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Jasper snaps me back to the present. "What are you going to do if one of these nights she wakes up, Edward?"
"SHIT!" The expletive leaves both our mouths at the same time. Bella's scent!
"Is she there?" Jasper hisses.
I cast forward, through the eyes of the rapidly thinning groups of teenagers in the hallway.
Nothing.
The rest of us have smelt her, too. I open my mind as widely as I can.
"I can't find her." We are quickspeaking, undetectable to human senses. "She's not anywhere."
We all meet at my locker, and Emmett is practically dancing with ill-contained laughter. He runs his nose down the seam of my locker door. What would he do if it were on the bottom row, I wonder?
"Oh, Ed-boy!" he laughs. "She done went and marked your locker!"
Of all the preposterous …
But Emmett is already running a full-color video in his mind of a female mountain lion rubbing her side sinuously up against my locker. He is wrong. I am the lion. All of my senses flood with memory of doe after doe in my arms. My kills are efficient. Their struggles are all too brief. No good can come of this train of thought. I don't want the deer. I want Bella.
"Emmett!" Jasper explodes, "For the love of God!"
We ask too much of Jasper. My sudden savage thirst has overwhelmed him, crashing his barriers, washing wholesale back through all of us.
"Hey, I can't help it if he keeps takin' it all the wrong way!"
For a sickening few seconds, with her scent in our nostrils, we ALL want nothing more than to find Bella and drink her dry. Five vampires gulp hard, as Jasper blankets himself and us with the only thing he can reach at this moment – the deep well of wounds that he carries with him from his years in the South. It is not the least bit pleasant.
More than any of the others, I am acutely aware that beneath the pain and grief that Jasper is projecting, other things lurk as well. Doubt has haunted him since that first walk across the parking lot into the school on my return. But now it has congealed into fear. Jasper is afraid. What if he can't do this? What if my lust for Bella's blood truly overpowers him one day, and through him, all of us? Collateral damage.
He has agonized about Alice, and her dogged persistence in 'facilitating' my dance with the dreadful temptation before me. An accident waiting to happen … Like watching a train wreck in slow motion … has run through his mind almost constantly as he has stood guard over me, from near or far. Still, he wants to do what Alice asks of him, even against all his better judgment. He had done such fell deeds before, for so long, for one whom he did not even love. His wish and need to do good at Alice's bidding blazes and pierces, too deeply to be hidden, whether from himself or any other.
And he has felt things from her. Alice loves Bella. Loves her. How can this be possible? They don't even know each other.
Yet.
And yet, Alice loves Bella now. Because in a vision she has experienced that she will. Although there must be an infinity of world lines in which that never comes to pass, there must also be one in which it does. And so he willingly suffers, in order to vouchsafe that misty future for her.
How can I stay? Just as I had in '27, I should leave. I would not wish my lust and frustration on any one. But it has fallen onto Jasper. And our family is so much larger now, than it had been back then. There is so much more to lose. No good can come of this. Perhaps if I leave, Bella will live long enough for Alice and she to become friends. Even if it can only last for a brief moment in time.
"Don't you DARE!" Alice cries. A new future has risen in her mind. I see that if I leave now, I will likely never return. The paths spiraling and branching outward behind her eyes are very dark, fraying into violence and blood with every step that I take.
"Come on," she says to the others. "Edward needs some alone time with his locker."
Alice herds our little flock of vampires away toward the doors, and the parking lot outside. All except for me.
They bicker like six-year-olds as they go. All because of me.
"This is getting completely out of hand, Alice."
"I'm telling Carlisle."
I sure hope Alice knows what she's doing …
As they pile into Emmett's jeep and Rosalie's BMW, I suddenly realize why Alice had suggested, out of the blue this morning, that Rose might want to drive it today, "just to run the engine a bit." She must have had a vision of our little convocation here, with Bella's scent wafting out at me from inside my locker (surely they all had smelled that THAT was where the scent was coming from, not the surface of the door … ) And in her vision I suppose I had needed 'alone time', to presumably drive home on my own afterward. She had seen all of this, and perhaps more beside, yet been able to hide it from me. All day. Even now.
For a moment, I hate her. Instantly, Jasper's protective emotion flares out at me.
Don't you dare even THINK of hating her, boy! She walks the line for you!
The utter freakishness of our family, and these silent exchanges across distance, hammers me suddenly. We are the X-men among vampires.
I have been standing stock still beside my locker, and now I slump against it, and slide down to sit on the floor, my head in my hands. It is an uncharacteristically human posture, and catches the attention of a passing student.
Whoa, a Cullen not being perfect!
The boy smirks to himself.
The ol' gaydar is beeping again! Bip bip bip, beeep beeep beeep, bip bip bip …
He doesn't recognize the cadence – S.O.S. The message his subconscious is sending is not what he thinks.
I don't care. I have been noticed, which is never good. It's time for me to find out what the hell is in my locker, and then leave. I promise myself that I will do a border check on my way home – something that I have been neglecting of late, much to Rosalie's ire.
"You have DUTIES Edward. We all do."
"The Quileutes – "
"Are NOT our ALLIES. They only patrol their own land. They couldn't care less what happens to us."
I stand and face my locker door. I know it's not Bella in there. There is no heartbeat. And yet, here is her scent, quite literally stalking me. Ensconcing itself in my personal space. I wonder if, like the fisherman with his shadow, she has somehow severed her scent from herself – with dancing and incantations and a silver sickle knife at the dark of the moon – to set it abroad to walk on its own. And now it hides in wait for me, among my books and papers and scribbled music.
There is nothing for it but to open the door.
Nothing.
I rifle through my belongings, letting my nose guide my hand.
There.
Slid down and wedged in the front corner.
A folded paper coin.
Jessica's machinations flash through my mind. Ever since last Thursday, she has indeed been industriously dropping little comments here and there among her peers at school. Comments designed to create the impression that Bella might be interested in me … might be receptive if I were to 'ask her out'. And all the while, I have been subjected to her ongoing and vivid imaginings of the moment when I should actually invite Bella on a date – she seems to like the Prom scenario the best – and the ensuing debacle. As if I (or any other young man for that matter) would ever pose such a question to a girl in front of a cafeteria full of other students.
But this paper is not Jessica's doing. It smells of Bella, and Bella alone. Well, and cinnamon … and myself, faintly, for my hands did touch it when I wrapped the medicine in it.
My hand shakes, just a little, as I pick up the paper coin. It's because of Bella's scent, overwhelming me at close quarters. It's not because she has (has she?) chosen this paper on purpose. Not because she has made of it a message to me, is speaking to me.
The folding is quite well done, and I wonder if she is an enthusiast of origami. Some young girls are, even though it is a foreign culture's art. Or did she spend hours studying how I had folded the herb formula sheet? One thing is certain; she has succeeded in reproducing it.
I am NOT going to open this here. I slip the folded paper into my breast pocket and get to my car. Alice was right. I need to be ALONE. Completely alone. Away from the ghosts of other people's thoughts, no matter how distant and irrelevant.
I drive somewhat aimlessly. Away. I want to get away. Away from … everything. I end up at a headland, overlooking the sea. The only sounds are the crashing of the surf on the rocks far below, and the wind in the tops of the pines behind me. There is not a soul for miles in any direction. For a moment, the peace of it makes me happy.
I leave my car behind, and look out to sea. There is a stormy chop, although it is not raining just now. It's too cold for that, and I smell the snow that has been teasing the weather forecasters over the past few days. Here, it will be a salty, driving sleet when it comes.
I fish the paper coin out of my pocket, and open it carefully. It smells of her. Of her flesh, not her blood. The two are subtly different.
The inside of the paper is completely covered with a floral motif, drawn in colored pencil. It looks like a briar patch, with an occasional rose tucked here and there among the twining stems and green, green leaves. In the center, dead in the middle, are two words, written in a careful hand.
~ Thank You ~
The letters are neat, though perhaps labored over with some anxiety, for I can detect tiny deviations of the pen's path over the paper. Perhaps she had been intimidated by my penmanship? That had not been my intent. Or perhaps I am simply spinning some sort of fantastic story out of imagined clues; since the truth is that I have no idea whatsoever of what thoughts might really pass through Bella Swan's head.
I stare at the paper, and a memory comes unbidden to my mind. In '23, Carlisle and I had visited England. He had wanted to show me his own birthplace. That quarter of London, had, sadly, become a slum since he had last seen it. To divert him, I had suggested that we travel to Buscot Park, in nearby Oxfordshire, where Burne-Jones' four-panel rendition of "The Legend of Briar Rose" had been open to public viewing.
As with everything else, my memory of the paintings is photographically precise. In the place on the paper where Bella has written "Thank You", I see the beauty on the bier, the thorny stems and leaves arching and enclosing her in a bower of green, red blooms scattered like small splashes of blood in their midst. It is the scene from the fourth panel, whose inscription reads:
"Here lies the hoarded love the key
To All the treasure that shall be
Come fated heart the gift to take
And smite the sleeping world awake."
Of course that has nothing to do with this extravagant doodle that Bella has made around her simple message. Edward Burne-Jones, and Buscot Park, and the salon room where these paintings hang, are nothing that a girl her age would have any inkling of. It is only in my own mind's eye that her sleeping form, which I have watched over each night for but a day short of a week, comes now to superimpose itself over the painting, and her two little words.
Numbly, I bring the paper up to my face, to bury my nose in its opened folds. The residual odors of the colored pencil and the herbs are distracting and annoying. I turn it over, to the outside, where Bella's scent is purer, and stronger. This thing has lain against her skin. There is no other way that it could smell so of her. Instinctively I know exactly where. That stolen place, seen so profanely through another's eyes. Creature that I am, I inhale deeply.
Bella is delicate and elusive. I breathe for many minutes with the paper on my face. Whatever bath products she uses smell like sage. Not real sage, but a chemist's imitation, too sharp, too alloyed with other ingredients. Annoying again. Yet, under that, is her native fragrance. I have not dared to breathe while in her room, but now I do so with impunity. Without her blood scent pouring through her pores, without her pulse beating through every chamber in my body, at last I can identify the subtle essence of her flesh. It is not rose, but mimosa: a flowering pea whose leaves fold instantly shut when disturbed by even the slightest touch. Of course. What else could she be, she whose interior is folded so tightly shut to me. The bashful leaf.
I have stood with my face in the paper for a very long time. Long enough that the outside, too, now, has begun to smell like me. I have ruined it.
A hoarse scream – mine – echoes down the coast, and my throat burns without mercy. Nothing could be further from the fated heart than I.
Somewhere beyond the banks of slate-colored clouds, the sun is sinking below the horizon out at sea. The dimness of the light makes the lines of Bella's drawing seem to glow to my unnatural vision. Her hand is untrained, the design naïve and pure. My chest hurts fiercely. Abominably. I tear the paper to shreds, and throw the pieces over the cliff with all my strength.
As if that could keep her safe from me.
I have to hunt. I know perfectly well where I will be going tonight, even though there is not even the pretense of an excuse any more. She is completely recovered. I am an imbecile, and a beast. I will, of course, scan wherever I go, but a full circuit of our perimeter will have to wait for another night. The wind swirls behind me, and carries the remains of Bella's drawing like confetti, far out over the black-clawed waves.
A/N:
Dumb barter ~ a form of trade practiced among some peoples, in which the goods for exchange are left at and taken from a pre-selected spot without the exchanging parties ever coming face-to-face. Most frequently used when the two parties do not share a common language, or when there is uncertainty regarding each other's intentions. Also used as a method of offering by mortals in hope for omens or blessings from deities.
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"I wonder if, like the fisherman with his shadow, she has somehow severed her scent from herself – with dancing and incantations and a silver sickle knife at the dark of the moon – to set it abroad to walk on its own."
This is a reference to the fairy tale by Oscar Wilde, The Fisherman and His Soul, first published in the 1891 collection, A House of Pomegranates. It tells the tale of a young fisherman who, for love of a mermaid, cuts off his soul (the shadow at his feet) and sends it out alone into the world, while he and his heart join with the beloved mermaid under the sea. Full text of the haunting and tragic story may be found here:
http:(double slash)www(dot)artpassions(dot)net/wilde/fisherman(dot)html
It is highly likely that Edward would have read this story as a boy, (a new, illustrated edition was published in 1915), and perhaps again as a vampire ...
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The Legend of Briar Rose is the title of a series of paintings about the story of Sleeping Beauty, done by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. The four original paintings - The Briar Wood, The Council Chamber, The Garden Court and The Rose Bower - and an additional ten adjoining panels, were completed between 1885 and 1890. Running beneath each of the major panels are the stanzas from a poem written expressly for the paintings by Burne-Jones' friend, William Morris. In the time that Edward is remembering, they were (and are still today) located at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, which would have been about a 4 hour journey from London by horse-drawn carriage, somewhat less if by the motor cars of the day.
The complete article, including pictures of each of the four original paintings, and the full text of the accompanying poem, may be found here:
http:(double slash)wikipedia(dot)org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Briar_Rose