The Other Way : Outtake

                                Outtake

Alice

“Miss Alice?” Esme’s housekeeper whispered haltingly into the phone.

The exotic slant to her words sent a wash of heartache through me that tasted so strongly of the desert that I was sure for a moment my mouth was full of sand. Even though her voice was full of static and sounded light years away, I could picture her standing in Esme’s kitchen, dishtowel in her hand. She was from the deserts of Mongolia and had a complicated mouthful of a name so they called her Millie and she’d been with the Cullens for so long that she was practically family. The first time I met her, fresh off a plane and freshly broken open, she took me by the face and told me not to let all my love leak out.

“A letter came for you today, amorcito. A special letter.”

Millie could barely read English and certainly couldn’t translate French so she ended up reading the letter to me word by word, letter by letter, four whole pages. For a while I got lost in the task of it, scribbling down each letter as she sounded off, but somewhere in there I started paying attention to what I was writing and by the time we reached the end, I was dropping splotchy tears onto the paper and messing it all up. My feathery handwriting, hesitant and at a half slant, miming Day’s words, fading into the paper of my notebook.

It didn’t matter.

I knew what it said.

I drug myself out of my villa, stumbling through Edward’s door a foggy blur of my former self. He was in his bed, in that ratty t-ball shirt I hated and the same look on his face he’d been sporting since before we even got here. Since our first night back, actually, and that first fundraiser dinner he’d gone to with his mom. He came home ranting about some girl in black who barely said a word to him and looked right into his soul.

I collapsed onto the bed beside him, trying my best not to cry and shoved the letter at him, tucking the photograph that was never that far away from me underneath the pillow so that he wouldn’t tease me about it. He read the letter twice, his eyebrows smashed together and his lip between his teeth. Ever since he’d gotten that bell tattooed on the inside of his mouth, he chewed on it more often than usual. I knew he thought about Bella every time he did it.

“Do you think they’ll even take you back? After everything?” He sounded wary and I knew it was mostly for my benefit, even if it made me hate him just a little for saying it out loud.

“You read it. He said that the Elders have agreed. The gods have pardoned me.”

“The gods,” Edward snorted. He rolled something around in his mouth that looked as though it tasted rotten. “What I saw out there, Alice . . . The gods don’t give a fuck about those people.”

He was right.

All I could see were the same images flashing before his eyes,

Jubilee’s little face, the moment the life drained out of her.

The starved and shrunken bodies topped with enormous, alien heads. The famine and war and straight up fucking genocide. Slaughter as a survival measure. Rape as a war tactic. Mother nature has come up with all sort of nasty afflictions for the human race, but the worst of them are trapped in the motherland, diseases that ate skin and bones and blood, humanity and civility, faster than any human could possibly run. It was a race that no one would win and I’d watched Edward lse patient after patient.

Hope after hope that he could ever fight a war like this. I could see the defeat in him, months before we left.

“If they’ve married him off?” He glowered at me.

I hadn’t thought of that. The sobering fact was that Dayo came from a culture still sunken chin deep in strong-steeped tradition. Perched at the top of a pyramid with very little room to move, much less leap. I hated Edward again for being so blunt, but I knew that he was the only person who could ever remind me that it was useless to fight the Elders, even if I had won a small victory.

Jubilee.

I shrugged, more than most of my bravado gone.

“I stay. Deliver babies. When I’m old, I’ll go out into the savannah and let a lion get me.”

“If you make it that long,” he huffed, sounding resigned. “I’ll call tonight. Get us to Paris in a couple of days, maybe we can get some more supplies out of that mission by the river . . . .”

“You can’t go with me.” I shook my head at him.

“You’re going to stop me?” He squared his shoulders, always ready for a fight.

“You should stay. You know you should.”

Edward narrowed his eyes at me, accusing and suspicious, stuttering around her name. “This isn’t about - her,” he ended lamely.

“I think that you love her, Edward. You just can’t see it.” I tapped my finger to his temple, wishing that I could will it into his mind. I’d watched him chew the shit out of his lip for the last two weeks and was worried he was gonna stretch out those holes to the point of no return if he didn’t stop.

“I can’t do that. Don’t you see? She’s not available for me to love. So I’m not loving her.”

“You’re such a terrible liar, I don’t understand why you keep doing it.”

“Lying?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s doing a lot of that lately,” I grumbled and Edward exploded.

“Fuck, Alice! I don’t know!” He bellowed, hands to his hair which he did when he was really frustrated. “I feel so fucked up lately, I don’t even know which way is up anymore. I fantasize about things I never wanted before and it’s all because of her. And then there’s you, there’s always been you, and now you’re trying to leave.”

Jubilee’s face.

“I’m not leaving you, Edward.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” He hissed.

“Giving you the space to go for something better. Someone better.”

“You don’t know that, Alice. You couldn’t know. What if she’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me? Have you ever thought of that?”

“Have you?” He didn’t answer. “Edward,” I snapped and when he finally lifted his eyes to mine, they were burning emeralds hot enough to explode.

“Yes, fuck. Every fucking day. Every time she looks at me.”

“I can’t give you everything you need. You know that.”

He nodded, thank god, which meant that he remembered the millions of times we’d hashed out the weirdness of our relationship and its unexplainable need. The mystifying way it was so easy to be together and the side-long glances we got from others who couldn’t understand how we could draw a line up between ourselves and then do everything except step over it.

Rubbing right up against it until we nearly ruptured our skin, and then stopping.

Breaking every rule.

Sometimes, even I didn’t understand it.

“Why can’t you just let me go?”

Edward’s face did something I’d only seen twice before; the first time was the moment before the malaria took him in that deathly-cold faint, the second just after Jubilee died in my arms and he trashed the inside of our medical tent. All of the life draining out of him.

Her little face . . .

“Fuck you, Alice,” he spat. “You fucking used me to try to fix yourself. And I’m just as much of an asshole as you are because I didn’t stop you and now look at where we are. I can’t let you go, but I can’t wait to be fucking rid of you.”

“You don’t mean that,” I stuttered.

“I do fucking mean it!” He yowled, sounding nearly pained. “You’re like the goddamn ocean,” he spat at me. “Just drowning everything out.”

“And what does that make you?”

“I’m the fucking stone. And before you go thinking all that cliched fuzzy bullshit of yours, that the ocean is somehow gonna polish that rough rock smooth, let me set the record straight because it isn’t like that at all. You’re just gonna motor right out to middle of the fucking sea and dump me off the side of your boat in the middle of all that endless water and no one is ever going to see me again.”

He tore himself away and bolted out the door.

Edward

You know what?

Fuck Alice.

Fuck her for this elaborate charade we’re playing at. Fuck her for the crying and screaming and the three times she tried to use me like a mouthful of multicolored painkillers. Fuck her for flinging herself at Bella like a broken doll and for being so fucking needy all the goddamn time. Fuck her for carving such a sweet, soft word into her arm and fuck her for that dead baby.

Fuck her and fuck me.

For all this false advertisement. For the purposeful pullback, sidelining myself and just letting it all roll over me. For the bitterness and the blame and the fucking breakdowns I just couldn’t have. Fuck my mouth for everything I said and more importantly, everything I didn’t.

Fuck my face.

Fuck my name.

I stormed out of the villa and right into the water, skin gone brittle and blood curdling to a sloshy halt in my veins. I was the tiny pinprick in a great big water balloon and the slow leak was threatening to drown me, knee deep in the ocean. I dropped two cigarettes into the water before I finally managed to get one in my mouth and lit, fingers shaking too badly to get a firm grip on it.

Or myself.

I barely remembered to smoke it anyway, smashed right up between a rock and a hard place.

Alice was a fucking mountain. Epic and ancient and imposing. Her shadow inescapable and her growth torturously slow. To call her the hurricane, a tsunami or a tornado, would not do the girl justice. She was flat out fucking genocide. Utter fucking destruction. I was a country and she was the dictator. She was the light bulb and I was the star-struck moth.

I fucking hated her.

I hated her smile and the way her eyes watered over whenever she thought about Jubilee, which was all the fucking time. I hated the way she watched me chew on her lip, all secretive and smiley like she knew what I was really doing, and I hated even more that she even knew there was a bell in there. I hated that she’d seen my dick, hated that she’d had it in her mouth and really fucking hated to admit that I’d enjoyed getting it into her. I hated that I was standing on some fucking island, knee deep in the water, thinking about her at all. I wanted to put my fist through something and wanted even more to go in there and take back everything I said to her.

Even if I meant it. Even if it was true.

I wanted to eat all of those words, every last fucking letter.

Calling Bella a ‘hard place’ would be a goddamn lie.

That girl was straight up fucking forbidden. With eyes that just wrecked me every time she dropped them to her feet, which was way too fucking often. An endless expanse of smooth, pale skin and her teeth always fucking buried in her lip. Tits to fucking die for and this hesitant air around her that just hadn’t made any sense in the beginning. I could practically see it all over her, a full body mark of all her impoverished lust. It was flowery and delicate and sprawled all up and down that beautiful clean skin in a white-ink tattoo.

Hindsight was a motherfucker.

I was past the point of wanting her. Traveling faster than the speed of sound but not really moving at fucking all. Stalking her from a safe distance just like one of those invisible lions that prowled the savannah. I wasn’t sure if I was hunting her, or she was hunting me but I was fully prepared to let her gut me open.

Split me right up the middle and take whatever came spilling out.

I should tell her this shit now.

Now, while it was burning a hole through my throat, blindly swallowing a super nova. But I couldn’t fucking do that. She kept telling me I was leaving, that I was supposed to go with Alice and every time it came out of her mouth she looked as though she was only saying it to convince us both of it. There was no map for this. No floor plan. It wasn’t elaborate. Wasn’t fucking complicated. Instead, it was one of those unnervingly simple things. Something that should have a complex explanation, but didn’t. Like magnets. I just fucking needed her.

I couldn’t tell her this.

Everything was fucked up enough as it was and love was not a fucking option. If I let myself do it, she would do it back.

I don’t believe in willing things to life, but fuck me if I didn’t do it.

I thought about those two girls and the impossible situation they’d put me into. The target of all their unresolved issues, and there were a fuck ton of issues between the two. Thought about them hard enough that when I finally decided to abandon my post in the ocean, hoping Alice had given up on me, there they were. Curled up in my bed like a couple of fucking cats; a mottled, multicolored tabby and a sleek white persian with their claws already into one another. Both of them were practically fucking naked and Alice clambered to her knees with her eyes all over me, her tats and her metal and those big tired eyes. Her arms outstretched like she was searching for the light switch at the end of a long, dark hallway.

No matter how many times she’d bruised my heart before, nothing compared to the moment it finally fucking shattered under her touch. I hugged her back, trying not to look at Bella and the stark contrast between her pearly skin and Alice’s. Trying not to feel so

I fucked it out of both of us. All of us. Distracted the girls with each other so that I wouldn’t have to take on the brute force of either of their attentions all to myself. Spent the entire time they straddled me practicing the moment I’d have to tell them both goodbye.

Two girls.

Two very different amputations.

Two very different scars.

---

It took three fucking days to get back across the damn desert.

Fuck the desert. Fuck camels. Rotten, miserable creatures. Fuck the heat because my lip rings turned to molten metal and my tats felt like they were catching on fire in the sun. Fuck the way the wind whines across the sand and fuck the gigantic, empty nothing of a sky.

It had nothing on the freshly blown hole in my chest.

It took three days to get across the desert and four for me to flip out on Alice. Another messy display, my another spitting fight with a girl I was so tired of fighting with.

“I have to get the fuck out of here.”

“No. Fucking. Shit.” Alice practically growled at me. She’d just had her face scarred, a mask of bloody scabs around her eyes that made her five times as beautiful and twice as ugly. “Thank you for bringing me here Edward, but seriously, you need to go home.”

“I don’t have a fucking home,” I snapped. “I’ve been doing the nomad thing with you for so long that I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“You could go back to her.”

I had never wanted to punch a girl so bad in my life. “This isn’t up for fucking debate, Alice. She’s never given even a vague hint that her choices are going to change.”

“They’re going to have to give it up at some point. It can’t go on like that forever.”

“How long do you expect me to wait for her? A lifetime? Two?”

“I don’t think its going to take that long at all.”

---

I had to hear her say it.

Just once, out loud.

She wasn’t mine.

But she didn’t. And I let her walk into that ballroom knowing that the axe was about to drop but willing to let it fall if it meant that she might finally give me a solid answer.

Because I’m a selfish, cowardly fuck who wanted her too badly to admit it first.

---

I woke up beside her, half expecting to be in a grass hut.

Under the stars. In a hotel or on a grass mat.

Anywhere.

Instead, I was in a soft bed in a pink room, under crisp white sheets and my head was full of something flowery and tormentingly sweet. And there she fucking was, just unbearably beautiful and looking a little scared of me, clutching the sheets up around herself. I barely trusted my eyes any more and wrapped a hand around her leg just to convince myself she was real and not another one of those airplane hallucinations.

A desert deity dancing with the heat waves.

I’d seen her twice out there and now I was in her bed, letting her slink into my lap and tell me that she wanted to be mine. Mine. She whispered the word, fumbling over it like a fresh piece of clay, soft and sticky and moldable. Ready to become anything she wanted it to be, right there between her palms. Chock fucking full of possibility.

“Oh, Bella . . .”

I choked. Throat constricted and lungs flashed rock solid. I had so much to say, a spewing rant of pent up want and rage and lust right fucking there behind my teeth but I just couldn’t force out. She deserved every word, but I gave her the only four that really counted for anything.

Wrapping my arms around her was like trying to hold onto the sun.

“I fucking love you.”

She set her hands to my chest and I groaned, fisting her underwear, pulling at the fabric until she got the hint and shimmied out of them, settling her warm, damp pussy right onto my aching dick. Achingly slow, so fucking tight and jesus fucking christ, I was so gone on this girl. She sat back, giving me a fucking awesome view of her body as she traced my tattoos the same way she had the first night we touched each other.

My hands to her knees and her fingers to on my ink.

“I want to get a tattoo,” she mused, fingers tripping over my skin, grinding slowly against me. I basically fucking moaned and shook my head halfheartedly. I was partial to the invisible flowery design that I knew only I could see, even if I caught her staring at her arms a lot.

“I like you this way. You’re so - ” She flexed her hips and might as well have hit me over the head with a fucking sledgehammer. Goodbye brain.

“So . . . ?” She mimed, her eyebrows wrinkled and she looked a little worried but not enough to stop her assault on me long enough to give me time to think. I couldn’t make up my mind. There were a hundred words trapped on my tongue, a million of them, and none of them were good enough.

“So . . .” I stumbled for a second time when she rolled against me again, trying to coerce an answer out of me.

“Boring?” She offered and my jaw dropped open in shock.

How in the fuck could she even think that?

“Fuck no,” I growled. I flipped her over, pinning her to the bed and digging around with that barbell until I was sure I’d found her clit just from the delicious clamp around my dick. She dug her nails into my arms and writhed against me as I licked my lips and pressed them to her neck.

“Pristine,” I whispered before I bit.

Sucking on her skin like it might break.

“Flawless.”

Like it might bring me back to life.

“Pure.”

A fountain of youth.

The doctor in me wanted to tell her that she was way too fucking anemic but the asshole in me really enjoyed the bruises that bloomed down her neck. Blood boiling to the surface. A traipsing line of red splotches that cascaded over her collarbone and right down to her nipple, the tell-tale twin marks from my snake bites chaining them all together like a necklace.

I licked that pretty puckered nub for good measure, but kept my teeth in check.

“That doesn’t count,” she panted, curling her hips into mine because she knew I would agree to just about anything when she did shit like that. “I want flowers, all over me.”

“I’m fixing that,” I chuckled against her skin, tracing a curling tendril with my tongue that wound around the underside of her breast and ended in a soft spiral right between her tits. Adding another blotchy bruise, petals of purple and blue. Leaves of yellow and green.

“You can see it too,” she exhaled, fingers worming through my hair and I nodded, licking each bloom of a flower down her rib cage after I sucked them to the surface and all along the leafy vines that curled around her shoulders. She squirmed underneath me, which only aided my mission and everywhere I hadn’t touched burst into that pretty pink blush of hers.

I kind of agreed with her, even if I was reluctant to tell her. It would be fucking hot, in the flesh. But I didn’t want anyone else to see it.

It was mine.

Her hands planted themselves against my chest, pushing me to my knees and she scrambled along and into my lap. Wrapping her legs around me and letting me rub my hands all over her, tracing her invisible tattoo like it was braille and I was blind. Pushing myself into her and pulling her hard against me. Losing myself in the way her bones shifted under her skin and her breath rasped through her lungs as she gasped. The way her heart was thumping just as manically as mine and her skin started to melt right into my own.

“Are you ready?” She clutched me close, tugging hard at my hair and sending a ripping flash of heat down my back that almost made me shiver.

“For what?”

“I’m there.” She shuddered, clutching me close, sighing as she came, sucking an orgasm from me that felt impossibly strong. Enough to indent a pattern all over me, on top of my ink, like the morning tattoos of wrinkled sheets.

I bit my lip rings to keep from fucking screaming her name.

She stilled almost immediately, thank god, going statuesque in my lap as I panted against her chest, trembling from the very middles of my bones. Pressing her lips to my face, covering my cheeks and eyes before landing on my mouth. I sucked in a final deep breath of air and lunged at her, pulling her lips between my own and shoving my tongue into her mouth while my dick softened inside of her. I didn’t want to her to pull off just yet, struggling to extend the moment as long as possible.

“You gotta give that lip of yours a rest,” she whispered against me, probably tasting the metallic bite of blood in my mouth.

“Fuck, that’s your fault.”

“The bell . . .” She kissed me back, just as hard, tugging at my lip rings. “Why did you do it?”

Again, millions of words, but none at all. “I don’t know.”

“And the swan?”

I just shook my head. I really didn’t have any explanation for that either. It was one of the few constellations that wouldn’t have gotten lost in all the ink I already had and the only one of the remainder that hadn’t been too obscure or unrealistic.

Really, out of the millions of possible combinations of stars, it had been the perfect fit.

Improbable odds.

Her mouth quirked to the side. “You knew I was coming.”

“I think I did.”

The End