Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Chalk


8




Alice forced me to the salon and bought me a manicure, even though I insisted that it was a waste of my time and her money. The ladies at the salon all cooed and clucked over my broken, scraped up hands, half of them wondering what the fuck would possess me to do such a thing to myself. None of them saw the allure that I did but, then again, they hadn’t seen Edward live and in the flesh.


And shirtless.

I forced Alice to the garden nursery once the salon women finally let us go and even though she played like she didn’t want to go, she went bonkers once we arrived. Grabbed a cart and was off like a rocket, which left me to wander around alone and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I had a green thumb, one that I didn’t quite understand most of the time, but I seemed to have a knack for keeping things alive and flourishing. I was trying to decide between something called chocolate mint and something else called orange mint, wondering when they had started fucking with mint like this, when he startled me.

“Hey there, Sparkles. It’s about time we met in the real world.”

I dropped both plants.

Oh god.

I turned to find Edward with a bag of fertilizer under one arm like it weighed nothing, even though I probably wouldn’t have been able to lift it off the ground.

“Hi,” I stuttered, blushing I’m sure.

“What did you do to your hands?” He asked, his voice tinged in awe and he picked up my palm to examine my fingers, now scrubbed and trimmed and painted within an inch of their lives. They didn’t even look like mine, except for the scratches across the back of them and that ugly scab on my knuckle. I had been getting distracted by them all afternoon and it was probably why it was so hard to pick between chocolate and orange.

“I was threatened with death and dismemberment,” I justified, watching him bend his head low over my hand to examine it. I’d never seen his own hands clean of chalk and I was amazed at how normal they looked, how unassuming they seemed, even if they were a little worse for wear. Why the fuck was I feeling so breathless? It was like the third time he’d held my hand or some reason or another. I should be used to it by now.

“That would have made climbing hard, yes, but these might make it harder.” He pressed the pad of his thumb over my newly painted nail, the coating making it feel unnaturally hard and unforgiving, definitely not something I’d want to scrape against bare rock. I told Alice this stupid manicure wouldn’t last long.

The devil herself bounded around the corner in time to catch us with our hands clasped.

“Hey Bell- . . . Well, hi there.” She morphed from excited school kid to kittenish sex-pot in less than a millisecond, I swear, which was some kind of record for her. Edward really must be hot, it wasn’t just a figment of my sun-addled brain. I had better keep my eye on her.

“Alice,” I sighed and snatched my hand from Edward.

This is Alice? I’ve heard so much about you.” Edward stared down at Alice as though she was a unicorn and not some girl dressed in what could have easily passed as a child’s fairy costume from the Halloween section.

“You have not. You’ve just heard me complain about her,” I grumbled and remembered Jasper asking him nearly the same thing about me. Calling me his Gabby.

“What’s a Gabby, anyway?” I asked him, jutting out my chin, trying to make myself look demanding.

“I thought you were a Gumby? Green and floppy?” Alice sounded even more confused than me and I watched Edward’s face redden as he realized we’d been talking about him. Fair exchange, I thought.

“It was,” I told her, staring him down. “Now it’s Gabby. Whatever that means.”

“It only means that you have potential.” Edward did more of that shrugging thing that told  me it probably meant far more than just that.

“And?” I pressed.

And?” he stalled. Tried to stare me down, but I won. “And you’re a girl. So what? I didn’t think that part was important, but you made me say it out loud.” He leveled me a look that made me knock-kneed, even though I wasn’t even near a rock. Weird.

“And I’m yours, huh?”

Edward gulped before he nodded his head deliberately.

I did more of my fancy escaping act to get us out of there, wishing Edward well with his fertilizer and dragging Alice away. We left him standing in a long row of ripening tomatoes and made our way to the checkout counter.

Thats the guy you met climbing rocks?” Alice hissed in disbelief.

“Yeah,” I nodded, still sort of dumbstruck and loopy off him. I was trying hard to tell myself that he only meant that he was mentoring me. Teaching and I was his pupil, even though the look in his eye when he nodded was far more territorial than that.

“Take me with you next time. This whole rock thing is getting more interesting by the day,” she laughed.









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3 comments:

  1. Alice climbing rocks all sparkly is going to catch something on fire. ..like Jasper. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alice is gonna go climbing... unbelievable lol

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'd be Edward's Gabby anyday. Except for the rock climbing part.

    I really can't see Alice rock climbing, but I can totally see her staying on the ground and flirting with Jasper.

    ReplyDelete

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