Hello, dear readers, and welcome to a new journey!
It's been so long since I last posted a story here, but behind the scenes, my creative wheels never stopped spinning.
This story has been in the works for the past year and a half or so. However, an awful case of professional burnout caused my writing to take a massive hit. For many months in a row, my energy to write or to enjoy life in general was nowhere in sight. However, this story demanded to be written, in all its angsty glory, so I refused to give it up. Today I am in a much healthier place professionally, after changing my job in 2023, and I am beyond excited to finally share "In Kismet's Grace" with the world.
This story is written from Edward's POV and it explores some key "what if" questions that have been haunting me for years. What if the whole Volterra thing in "New Moon" never happened? And what if, in the infamous love triangle situation, Edward was the friend? How messy and morally questionable would the situation get?
Well, all of those questions—and more—will be answered throughout this story. I hope you are ready for an intensely emotional and deeply sinful slow burn, where every line will be blurred, because this is precisely what you will get. With a generous side of seriously steamy times and bloody vampy goodness, of course.
A fair disclaimer to Jacob fans though: this is probably not a story that you will enjoy, so it's maybe for the best if you skip it.
Before proceeding further, I'd like to thank my dear CoppertopJ for being a wonderful beta and helping me with her amazing editing skills yet again. She's been by my side for every story I've written and posted here, and for that I cannot thank her enough!
Now, without further ado, it's time to dive in!
I hope you enjoy :).
"But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah, my love, ah, my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten."
Pablo Neruda
2007
The worst part was knowing that the longer I waited, the more painful it was going to get for me. The waiting was too big of a distraction from the usual numbness. I didn't need any reminders that any of this was real.
And yet… the reminders were always there, lurking in the shadows. Mere mutts waiting for the easiest prey, slobbering with greed. Fighting them was a losing battle.
The reminders took on many shapes and forms. Such as a rat trying to chew on the sole of my shoe, mistaking me for a statue. Or an earthquake so small, so inconsequential, but just enough to make the air vibrate ominously, making me wonder if she felt it too. Or the stray whiff of a flower reaching me by accident, reminding me of her, but not quite. And the thirst.
Goddamn, always the thirst.
Almost a month had passed since my last hunt—a lifetime ago, it would have been impossible to last this long without accidentally committing a small massacre. But these days, I only hunted when the flames got so overwhelmingly ardent that they threatened to shatter my desensitized state.
And now that the fire had grown to dangerous levels, engulfing my very core with its red tendrils, I was getting more and more aware of how the world around me still moved, even when I was an inert disaster. How the Spanish-speaking family whose attic I had been haunting for the past month was getting ready to sleep. How a spider was wrapping a hopeless fly in its sensual silk, right above my head.
How in another life, this was precisely the hour I started singing Bella her favourite lullaby.
My entire body ached as soon as I dared to think of her name. It was the first rule I had set for myself—don't think of her name. For any reason whatsoever.
It was also the rule I was breaking on an hourly basis.
I had other rules too. Such as to not become overly obsessed about monitoring what she was doing. At the end of the day, I had no right to know. I comforted myself with the thought that I was only doing it to make sure she was still safe, still in one piece. It made me feel better—less like a failure, less like a stalker—when I called Alice every three months, to ask her about what I had been missing.
Even after one year, nine months, and four days, doing so didn't feel any less unnatural. I was supposed to make sure that Bella was safe, not anyone else. Getting rid of Victoria meant nothing in the grand scheme of things when it came to Bella's safety. Sure, she no longer had a revenge-hungry vampire following her every move, but she still was a victim of her own clumsiness. It broke me each time I found out, via my sister, about all the little accidents she had been having. The broken arm, the fractured rib, the crushed clavicle… most of them after riding her motorcycle or cliff diving, hobbies she only discovered she enjoyed after I left.
I tried to feel some type of joy whenever I thought about her new hobbies—because her entertaining such activities was yet another symptom of her moving on—but it was a challenge to feel anything other than dread, considering how the universe seemed so set on making sure that my Bella got hurt at every step of the way, even when she was doing what she loved.
No, another broken rule.
Thinking about her as if she was my own was very, very dangerous territory. Not only because it was a sure-fire way of bringing me out of my numbness, but also because she truly didn't belong to me. In fact, she belonged to someone else entirely.
When she started to spend her time with Jacob Black, I hoped, deep down, that it would lead to more someday; I might have been under the curse of never being able to move on, but that didn't mean she had to be as well. I remembered clearly how she had incited so many feelings in him, back when it was still me who held her close when she slept. I also remembered how much sense the idea of him and her made. Not on an emotional level, but on a practical, pragmatic one. Because unlike me, he could offer her what she truly deserved: warmth and safety and, above all, a promise of a normal life, untouched by the perils of my world.
She didn't want any of it, at least not at first. In Alice's visions, she seemed content with having him as a friend, nothing more, nothing less. I could not blame her—after all, losing both of her parents, after Victoria got to them before I got to her, made her sink deeper into the catatonic state she had fallen into after my leaving, to a place where not even love could reach. But Jacob never relinquished. He stood by her side when they fixed motorcycles together and he stood by her side when she cried herself to sleep, never afraid of the ghosts haunting her mind. And when she decided to postpone the idea of college indefinitely, he didn't make her feel inadequate, unlike most of her other friends. And when she went cliff diving for the first time and hit her head against a rock, it was him who drove a bleeding, unconscious Bella to the hospital, saving her from what would have been a sure death, had she been alone.
I could not help but feel grateful to him. He was, unbeknownst to him, continuing my mission of keeping her safe, and he was good at it.
It wasn't until the second day after her nineteenth birthday that she finally let him kiss her. It didn't take much longer for him to leave La Push behind and move in with her, in that house whose walls I knew all too well. He found a decent job as a traveling mechanic. A job that took him out of town every once in a while. But most assuredly, he always returned to Bella. I had never been strong enough to ask Alice for specifics about their relationship. My imagination was doing a decent job of filling in the gaps on its own. I could easily picture his hands on her. His mouth moving on the velvet miracle of her skin. Her asking for more of his heat. Him surrendering to her pleas, because—unlike me—he could.
But I tried not to let my imagination wander too far—another rule, of course. One that was made specifically to keep my sanity in check, nothing more.
As long as she was happy, I could keep on existing. Jacob Black seemed to make her happy enough, which was precisely what I had been hoping would happen eventually. There were times when the weaker part of me reared its head, boiling in a jealous fever that made me feel ashamed of myself. That very same part was also the one urging me to return. Not to interfere, but just to watch. To see if Bella's blush was just as enticing as I remembered it to be, even if I was no longer the cause behind it. But I could quench the absurd longing, as long as I didn't have any distractions ruining my willpower.
When the phone in my pocket started vibrating, I didn't feel inclined to answer. The last time I contacted my family was precisely one month ago. They understood my need for solitude—for the most part anyway. They certainly tried to. For instance, they allowed me enough space to be the one who called, instead of being the one who answered. It was a small thing, but I needed it badly. This way, I could mentally prepare myself to converse with them without sounding like an absolute wreck every time.
I might have never taken the phone out of my pocket if Maria—the matriarch of the family living underneath me—hadn't asked her husband if he could hear buzzing coming from the attic as well. And then, I saw Rosalie's name flashing on the screen, and something inside me stirred. Out of everyone in the family, she was the last person I expected to bother to call me. Even if she never said it out loud, I knew she was holding a grudge against me, for the way I uprooted her from Forks against her will.
The phone kept vibrating, and uneasiness shot through me as I stared at the screen.
My voice was nothing but a whisper when I answered. "What?"
"Hi." Rosalie seemed to hesitate, and for a second, I considered hanging up altogether, but then she talked again. "Before you hang up, please let me finish, it's important."
I didn't say anything. I felt inclined to tell her to fuck off, if only for the fact that I was dominated by a profound lack of desire to talk to anyone, and she was stepping all over my boundaries.
"You've got one minute," I warned.
"I think this has been going on for far too long." Her voice clearly indicated that she didn't care one bit about what I had just said, so I mentally reduced the timer to forty-five seconds. "Carlisle hardly ever smiles. Esme won't even let me play the piano because it reminds her of you. And it's been like this for almost two years. It's not fair to them, or the rest of us."
I sighed. The effects of my decision were not precisely a secret. But what nobody understood was the fact that if I came home to them—although I could hardly call Juneau home, considering how my love's heart was beating two thousand miles away from it—things would not have been better. For them or for me. I would have been an awful burden. Living separately was for the best, at least for now. Maybe for the rest of my existing days.
"I don't need to be lectured," I snapped eventually. "And you've got thirty seconds left, so make them count."
"You could certainly use some manners."
She was dragging this. I didn't like it. But I pushed through, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"What is it, Rosalie?"
Silence followed, and it was sheer torture that my gift didn't extend to work during phone calls as well. If it had, I wouldn't have been forced to be a part of this useless conversation for longer than needed.
"Well, it's happening. Alice saw it coming a few weeks ago, and she warned us not to tell you just yet, but it's only right for you to know." Another pause, followed by the worst sequence of words in history. "Your precious human is getting married." Everything fell down: the sky, my hopes, reality. I watched it all crumble. "Which means that she officially moved on for good, so you should too." True. Sensible. Logical. But also impossible. "You've got an actual reason to return to us, so that we can be a family again."
Out of all the emotions I should have felt, sadness was not supposed to be on the list, not even at the very end. Gratitude was at the very top of that list, no doubt about it, because when I looked back, Bella getting married one day was one of the many things I had been hoping would happen eventually. I had never really thought about when it would happen—nor about whether Jacob Black was the one who would eventually end up being her extremely lucky husband—but I knew, in the back of my head, that it was the way things were supposed to go. Anything that could serve as a means for her to savour all that life had to offer had to be good.
And yet, I couldn't find a pause button for the sudden flow of desolation inundating me. A way to stop the damned faucet, so that I could find it in me to be happy for her. Really happy, because she deserved nothing less. Liquified pain poured from everywhere, filling me to the brim. The more I thought about how wrong it was to feel this way, the deeper the feeling sank, making it harder and harder to get rid of it.
"Edward?" Rosalie's voice startled me. I had almost forgotten she was still on the line. "Are you… oh, for God's sake, I can't believe I'm saying this, but are you okay?"
"Yes," I lied with impertinence. "It was bound to happen."
"I know, so the sooner the better, right? It may not exactly be pleasant right now, I understand this much, but—"
"You don't understand a single thing," I interrupted.
The truth was that not a fucking soul in the world could understand how much it hurt. The magnitude of this new pain, whose tendrils were only starting to unravel, was far too great, simply immeasurable. It was one thing to be aware that my only love was destined to never be mine, but another thing entirely to finally witness it myself, albeit from afar.
It felt definite, permanent, in a way I found myself unprepared for.
"Anyway, thank you for telling me."
"So are you coming home?"
"Goodbye, Rosalie."
The smell of ether enveloped me progressively, as I crushed the phone to pieces in my hand, making me long for a different type of smell. I looked at the broken pieces in my palm, willing myself to wake up. Selfishly, I wanted to close my eyes, so that when I would open them again, I would be dripping with sweat, coughing my lungs out, slowly withering away at the mercy of Spanish influenza. I wished for my favourite pair of eyes in the world to be nothing but another image in a string of unfortunate fever dreams, one that I could peacefully forget before resting in a grave.
Seventeen and dead. For good.
More than anything, I wished to never have known the taste of losing everything that ever mattered to me. Then I wouldn't have to live under the shadow of what if.
The idea of oblivion was as sweet as it was untouchable. It died quickly, once I came to terms with its impracticality, only to be replaced by something a million times worse—the yearning to check on Bella, at long last, to see her happiness with my own eyes. Maybe then I would be able to keep moving. Maybe then I would understand that whatever hole I had left when I disappeared from her life, had been filled and it was overflowing.
She wouldn't even have to see me. I could keep myself in the shadows, like a banished guardian angel.
I had been suppressing this need for too long, and now it was coming back with a bitter vengeance.
And for the first time in forever, the strength to fight it was nowhere in sight.
And so it starts... :)
Do you think Edward is ready to face reality, in the state that he's in? Does he even know what he's getting into?
I'd love to hear your thoughts! I absolutely LOVE reading and responding to reviews, it truly is the most fulfilling reward that a writer can get.
See you next Sunday with a new chapter. Just as a FYI—all future chapters will be much longer; the prologue was just a small taste of what is to come.
Until then, stay safe and happy!