The Other Way : Fourteen

Better Than Any Drug 

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I made out with Alice in the mermaid lagoon again.

Esme, much to her mortification, had gotten sunburned yesterday. Probably because she spent more time berating me about it than applying it herself. She was cocooned in her cool white sheets when we arrived and refused to leave the relative safety of her bed, hiding from the sun. The guys were all making a trip to the mainland to file building permits and haggle with contractors, which meant that Alice and I were on our own.

We were back in the water, stripped nearly bare with our mouths on each other in a rushing wave of déjà vu; memory steeped in seawater like a tea bag, leaking salty sweetness. I’d dreamt about her with a mermaid tail all night long and could barely separate the two versions in my head the moment her lips touched mine.

Everything went blank.

I didn’t remember waking up. Didn’t remember haggling with Esme or even our walk here. Didn’t remember tossing off my top or trailing Alice into water and certainly didn’t remember asking her to kiss me again.

But here we were. Back at it. Head in a spin.

Better than any drug.

Was it possible to forget this feeling? I was pretty sure that I had. The overwhelming urge to crawl inside her mouth. Bone-numbing desire that felt like half-melted ice cream. Enough electricity in my hair to make it stand on end and there were sounds coming out of me that I didn’t even know I could make.

“How do you do it?” Alice pulled her mouth off mine with a gasp.

“Do what?” I sounded breathless, even to myself, skimming my fingers along her dandelions and waiting for her to kiss me again. Every time I opened my eyes the diamonds set there at the corners of hers winked at me and I was having trouble formulating words, much less coherent thought.

“Play his wife.” She licked the corner of my mouth and put her cheek to mine. “Don’t you get lonely?”

“Sometimes,” my voice wavered, her lips sucking the spot below my ear. “But I’m not unhappy.”

“He does love you.” She pulled away again, nodding at me so resolutely that I wondered just how good Jasper and I had gotten at pulling off our ruse. It was probably all due to his public displays of affection. Effective and completely sincere. “It’s sweet, really. The boy thinks you shit gold.”

“I know.” I couldn’t help but smile a little, because it was true. “He really does.”

“But he doesn’t take you to bed?” she asked with her nose back in my hair and her mouth on my ear.

“No,” I exhaled, even though I was thinking about what he’d told me last night. I’d spent so long being irresponsibly in love with him that it was unnerving to find it hadn’t all been in my head. I tried to squash the image of him tearing at my clothes, but it clung stubbornly to the bottom of my brain.

“Edward was positively livid when I told him about this.” Alice pulled her mouth off my neck with a wet sound.

“You told him?” I stuttered, stomach gone rock solid and heart hammering to a complete stand still.

“I tell him everything.” She shrugged, nonchalant, as though it meant nothing all while she licked up the side of my neck.

“Did you tell him about  . . . me?”

“Only enough to confirm his suspicions.” She grinned impishly and kissed me again, wetting her lips before pressing them to mine and pulling away too soon. “He wants you,” she spoke softly into my skin, trailing watery fingers down my arm.

“I know. But I’m sort of terrified that I’ve forgotten how to do this.” My heart was hammering loud enough to deafen me and Alice’s face brightened, even in the overwhelming sunlight.

“He’s good, you know? Really good. He got me off twice before I even started paying attention.” She was teasing me on purpose, planting a dirty seed right down into the middle of the innocent garden I was trying to keep Edward confined to these days. Sprouting sex/weeds right there between the Forget-Me-Nots and the Bleeding Hearts.

“You two have slept together?” I asked, fingering the word etched into the crook of her elbow, too blurry to read through the water. She did say that he’d have to beg to be let back into her bed, after all.

Alice shrugged. “The circumstances were . . . special.”

I arched my eyebrows at her until she rolled her eyes and continued.

“It was that night,” she said pointedly, not needing to explain further. “I was desperate for . . . something other than what I was feeling and I think Edward would have done anything I asked.”

“I believe I drew the line at gagging you, though some days I really regret that decision.” Edward spoke from a perch on the pile of rocks just behind us and Alice scowled up at him, red with fury while I blanched white enough to match the sand.

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An hour later Alice was knee deep in the lagoon, searching the bottom for shells. Every so often she’d kneel into the water and pick something up to examine it, either keeping it clutched in her fist or discarding it over her shoulder. Her hair was on end and everything was on display, bikini bottoms hiding very little. I’d knotted my sarong up underneath my arms as Edward hopped down off the rocks and now he was lying beside me, watching Alice with a bemused look on his face. Hair like a rooster and a two-day shadow on his jaw.

“I thought you were going to the mainland to figure out this dock fiasco with the boys?”

In other words, what the fuck are you doing here?

Edward glanced over at me with his mouth twisted into a sly smirk. He was sporting black sunglasses and I was thankful that I couldn’t see his eyes. At least he couldn’t strike me dumb with them. “If anyone asks, I didn’t sleep very well last night. Woke up with a headache.”

“That’s your excuse?”

“It’s the truth. After Alice came prancing in my door to inform me that she’d kissed you, sleep was the last thing I was going to get.” He just stared at me. Jaw clamped tight and his cheeks hollowed out like when he smoked. Which he wasn’t doing, and he definitely wasn’t trying to hold back that classic smirk either, which meant that this was new.

“And the headache?” I hedged, willing my skin not to flame up out of reflex. As usual, it paid no attention to me.

“A bottle of bourbon. Shared with Alice, of course, but the better part of it belonged to me.”

He was oddly bound to her, for all everyone tried to convince me that there was nothing going on. Every move he made around her was purposeful, even the way he watched her crouched out there in the water; chewing on his lip rings with his eyebrows furrowed together in concentration.

“Esme said you followed her.”

Edward eyed me furtively for a moment before glancing back out at Alice, shrugging. “She was gone for two months and I worried about her every damn day.”

“Enough to go to Africa?”

“Well, it wasn’t like she was at some five star beach resort,” he snapped, rolling his eyes. “She sent me a picture of the first set of nomads who let her deliver a baby. She looked so happy and everyone was smiling, but the guys were all standing around with machine guns strapped to their backs.”

“Guns?!” I squeaked.

“Big ones. I bought a plane ticket that night.”

“And stayed for five years?”

Edward sighed heavily, nodding. “Everything is so much simpler there. The perspective is different. Every possession a family owns, they can carry on their backs and for all their apparent poverty they are the happiest people on earth. It was nice to escape to that side of life for a while.”

“And now that you’re back on this side?”

“I’m finding it far more enticing than I remembered.” He pulled his gaze off Alice and turned it on me, his sunglasses doing little to hide what he was doing behind them. “I’d really like to see that bikini again.” He arched an eyebrow delicately, eyeing the knot of my sarong.

“You can’t ask for that,” I challenged him, forgetting how badly it had ended up for me the last time I did this.

“Can’t I?” He purred at me, viciously sure of himself.

“I owe you nothing.”

“You kissed Alice,” he shot back with lightning precision, singing all of my surface area in one easy sweep.

“You kissed Jasper,” I accused, voice wobbling with confusion. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“Neither do I.” He shook his head, eyes locked on me, biting his lip rings. The skin went white around his mouth and his eyes fell. He fingered the fringed edge of my sarong, a brief glimpse of skin and the silvery bikini bottom coming into view before I snatched the fabric away.

“You’re asking too much.” I tried to be the slingshot but he lobbed it right back at me, giving me no time to prepare.

“And you’re thinking about this too hard.”

“Why did you do it?” I stammered.

“Kiss him?” Edward arched an eyebrow as though he couldn’t understand why I’d even ask such an obvious question. “To see if he would kiss me back.”

“Did he?”

“Yes.” Edward nodded and I tried not to let my stomach drop. “I just want to look, Bella,” he pushed again, fingering the fringe once more, mere centimeters away from touching me.

“No. You don’t.” You want far more than that. “What if I want something from you in return?”

Edward’s mouth broke into the first smile I’d ever seen grace his face, blindingly bright in the blistering sunlight, lip rings pressed up tight against his teeth. He sat up and pulled his t shirt over his head, tossing it into the sand and falling back to his elbows beside me with the waistband of his boxers peeking from his shorts and a faint trail of hair disappearing beneath the them both. He gazed out over the water, smile still intact and laughed when he spoke.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

He was absolutely covered.

Murals of color up his arms, endless lines of ornamental monochrome across his abs, a feather of familiar dandelions gone to seed on his neck. His shoulder chest was taken up by a beautiful deep blue octopus, trailing limbs sprawled across his back and circling down his elbow, spiraling to an end near his wrist. Another tendril draped across his collar bones and his entire side, from armpit to hip, was a gigantic geometric replica of a piano, black keys interspersing the squares left un-inked. There was so much everywhere I looked that I didn’t know where to even begin, so I treated us to some more of that mindless speaking thing.

“Where is your bell?”

“My bell?” He scrunched his eyebrows together as though I was speaking a foreign language.

“Alice said you have a tattoo of a bell. Where is it?”

Edward smirked devilishly. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Just tell me,” I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Petulant,” he teased. “I might make you find it yourself.”

I glanced down at him, a riot of colors and shapes and images blending into one another, and huffed. I waved my hand blindly at the waistband of his shorts and tried to act like I didn’t care that much. “I know it’s somewhere down there.”

“Do you now?” He retorted with a tip of his head, tongue sweeping along his teeth and my heart skittering around like a top at the end of its twirl.

“Alice told me.”

“She seems to tell you a lot of things. What exactly did she say about this bell of mine?”

“She said that it was next to something of yours you’d like me to be better friends with.”

“Well, she’s right about that,” he chuckled, glancing back out at her just as she tossed another useless find over her shoulder. “But she wasn’t talking about my dick.”

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