Monday, December 16, 2013

The Other Way : Thirty Four

In The End, Even Pavlov Fell For It

-




I must have fallen asleep in the clover.

I could smell it everywhere when I woke up, the soft sharp bite of green melding with the mellow sweetness of half-gone flowers. My mouth tasted briney, as though I’d swallowed sea water, and the taste of it was painfully familiar but no amount of daydreaming was going to warp reality in my favor. I was in my room, the one at the end of the hallway. In my bed, the sheets speckled with patterned rose petals and the walls a dusty pink. Not at all where I was hoping I’d wake up.

An island on the other side of the world. Lavender breeze and mosquito netting. Pearly white sand and sapphire water.

I gulped down a stinging mouthful of regret, chest aching. Suddenly wallowing through things I’d thought I put away, memories rushing back like a tidal wave without Jasper there to deflect them. My go-to mask was gone and I was back at the beginning.

My mother killed three people. Maybe not on purpose, maybe without specific intent, but the fact of the matter would just never go away. They were dead, and because she took herself out with them, all that guilt had nowhere to turn to but me. The guy had two kids. The teenager had been accepted to Oxford one month before and the lady who was walking her dog had just finished her last round of chemo that morning.

The only survivor was the dog.

It went to a shelter and probably ended up somewhere shitty or not at all, put down because no one wanted an old dog with possible radiation exposure.

It was safe to say that I hadn’t spent single second of the next three years alone. Those people tagged along for everything. Every boring daily chore and superficial special occasion. Every lonely night in bed and every dreadful day at work, until Jasper showed up, almost three years to the day and I’d given up on fighting them off a long time before that. Let them just come at me and I was drowning under the weight of them, piled one on top of another like wet sacks of flour.

My mother, suspiciously absent. The dog, always there.

Jasper had been my drug of choice for years. He allowed me to play pretend so efficiently that I was able to practically become a different person altogether with him. Was able to let those people and that damn dog go, injecting a potent concoction of tender, numbing fantasy into my veins every time I hurt. A year into our marriage I started feeling incredibly guilty that I was using him in such a way, on an hourly basis, to soothe my pains and admitted it all to him in a stinking, drunken fit of tears. He offered himself up, blood and bones and heart, without hesitation.

And now he was gone.

My life, as I knew it, was over. A big fat black line had suddenly sprung up where it hadn’t been before, but it didn’t separate one part of me from another. Didn’t show where the old me died off and the new emerged from some sort of chrysalis like a damp butterfly. Didn’t mark the boundary between the past or the future. It ran right up through the middle.

It’s not possible to live with half a heart.

A bisected brain.

A single lung.

I rolled over in a fit of pain that felt sort of like death and came to bone-numbing contact with an octopus. Dandelion seeds and two black lip rings. Lavender eyelids and a tiled floor fluctuating restlessly over his breathing. A wild tempest of bronzed hair across the rose petal sheets and I pulled stealthily away. He must sleep on his back because his arms were thrown out to his sides just like the last time I’d found him like this, face turned into the pillow, pulse thumping steadily in his neck. His lips looked bitten raw, chapped and peeling, as though he’d been chewing on them a lot more lately. His shirt was discarded and there was a bandage taped to his side, sprawled errantly across several keys of his piano.

He was half naked and last night was a blur.

I wasn’t naked, only peeled from that stupid gold dress but left in my bra and underwear. The thigh highs I’d been sporting had spent all night digging indented bands around my legs that reminded me too much of Alice and I yanked them off, tossing them away from the bed and struggling out of my bra. There were more indentations sunken into my ribs and the undersides of my breasts. I was really starting to believe that my other life marked me just like tattoos did.

The fact that they eventually faded away didn’t make them any less permanent.

Edward woke with a start as I was rubbing the marks away, a ragged gasp of air and his fingers clenched into the sheets, bolting upright in mere microseconds, panting roughly. He glanced wildly around the room and I have to admit I cringed a little in response, clutching the sheet up around me. He looked ready to bolt, practically shimmering with nervous energy and for half a moment I fully believed in spontaneous human combustion. I think I saw the pale blue flicker of flames ripple across his skin. When he’d deemed the room empty of anyone but me, he collapsed back against the bed with a groan.

Jesuschrist. I didn’t know where I was for a minute.” He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, sinking his fingers into his hair and then back over his face. He looked so out of place, polychrome and painted over against the girlish cotton sheets and when he set his hand down on my leg, all the tension flooded out of me. I eased back against the headboard, his grip remaining firm as though he was using me to ground himself. “I saw you, when I was coming back,” he spoke through his fingers.

“Me?”

He nodded. “I woke up on the plane in the middle of the night, over the middle of the ocean, and I could have sworn you were sitting right there next to me. I don’t know if I was hallucinating or dreaming or . . . I hadn’t slept much, but . . .” He shook his head, eyelids fluttering closed and voice sounding almost painful. “You were so beautiful. And you didn’t say anything to me. I just sat there staring at you until the stewardess came along and asked me why I was crying.”

“And then?”

“I flipped out. I probably ranted incoherently and I definitely freaked her out, but I was trying to tell her that I didn’t give a fuck about Alice, that girl and her emotional baggage belong to someone else now. I wanted to tell her about you, that you’d been sitting there watching me for hours and you wouldn’t even talk to me, but I couldn’t get it out without completely losing my shit. I woke up in Chicago feeling like I drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. You were gone.” Edward swallowed and looked at me. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip, dampening the dry skin. “You might be more beautiful than I even remembered.”

“Thank you for taking my dress off.” I blushed like mad, not sure what to say and settling on something stupid, apparently. It was draped across the squishy grey chair near the closet, folded carefully, a golden edge spilling to the floor. All those sequins would have been terrible to sleep in.

“That was him.” Edward bit his lip, wanting to say more. He probably would have left it where it landed, which said a lot about where his priorities lay. “I can completely understand his infatuation with you, regardless of his preferences. I had to let him do it.”

“He’s not infatuated,” I shook my head and Edward nodded right back at me.

“I’m not the only dog,” he said, stoically.

“If he’s a dog, then he’s deaf.”

“Maybe, but in the end even Pavlov fell for it.”

I shook my head, wondering what the fuck he was talking about and his mouth curled into that perfect lopsided smirk, twisting around his lip rings. He shrugged.

“Eventually . . . every time he heard a bell, he must have had the uncontrollable urge to feed a dog.”

He was making jokes?

Now?

I slapped at him, managing to drag my fingers roughly right across that bandage taped to his side. Edward groaned and pulled away, his mouth curled in pain and a mumbled motherfucker into the mattress. It took him more than a few minutes to calm his breathing before he finally rolled onto his back again, looking a little ashen around the edges. I settled against his side, watching as he peeled away the edge of the bandage to look underneath and I only got a glimpse, but that was all I needed. There was a ragged gash slicing across the piano tattoo, through all the delicate skin that lay thin over his ribs. A neat line of stitches traipsing across the keys.  

“What happened?” I choked, pulling my eyes away as he grimaced and pressed the bandage back down.

“I got chased down by an elephant. Caught myself on a branch. The bastard almost got me.” He winced as he fingered the tape. It was obviously still painful.

“You got away though?”

Barely,” he huffed. “12 stitches doesn’t exactly qualify as Scott-free in my mind.”

“Who sewed you up?”

“Alice. She enjoyed it more than she should have.” He seemed hesitant to bring up her name but I gave him a lopsided smile, knowing that this wasn’t the last time we’d ever talk about her. Even though I didn’t want to think about her right now, I certainly wasn’t going to stop missing her. I’m sure he felt the same way, but a hundred times worse.  

“Your keys will be broken now.” I traced my finger gently along the edge of the bandage, five keys afflicted in varying degrees.

“It doesn’t actually work, you know. It’s just an illusion.” Edward grinned slyly down at me, hair in his eyes and mouth finally curling into something that vaguely resembled a smile.

“Will you teach me?”

“Of course I’ll teach you, although my mother has a real version we could use.”

“I like yours better,” I sighed, ignoring his attempt at logic and using my index finger to tap tap tap my way up the entire board, a wash of goosebumps flaring up behind my morse code message. He shivered before hissing in pain and trapping my hand against his ribs to stop me. That must have hurt.

“Take it easy on me, I’m wrecked in more ways than one,” he murmured. Not talking about his stitches. Not talking about his skin stretching as his muscles tensed, tugging on the thread. Talking instead about his body armor and his surly demeanor. I pulled myself to my hands and slipped my leg over his waist, careful to keep my knee away from his wounds. Edward watched me silently, hands rubbing my thighs and tracing his delicate white-ink tattoo as I tried to tame my hair. He gripped me tightly, fingers biting into my skin and I let my hair tumble down around me, distracted by the look on his face.

That hungry, hollow-cheeked stare. Painful eyes and tightened brow.

“Please don’t tell me to leave again,” he nearly stumbled, stuttering over his words. I put a hand to his chest to steady myself, his heartbeat beneath my fingerprints and clutched my other hand around my neck to help coax the words out. I could barely breathe and when I finally coughed them up, they weren’t exactly what I was expecting.

“The swan, why did you pick it?” I traced my fingers from one dandelion seed to the next, the sprawling wings of the bird across his shoulders.

He licked the inside of his mouth, eyeing me warily. “I don’t know. I just needed it.”

“It’s my maiden name. My name. Again,” I stuttered.

“Swan?” he questioned and I nodded hesitantly. “Who are you?” He sounded nearly mystified, as though I’d stepped into the sun and all my skin turned to diamonds. As though I was a deep dark hole in the ground and I was so fucking grateful that he’d stopped to search for gold in the mouth of a coal mine. Sure for a moment that he was my yellow bird, the one I was supposed to take into the abyss with me and I wanted to do nothing more than just fall in, feet first.

“I’ve been someone else for so long . . .” I shook my head.

“Who do you want to be?”

A daredevil.

An impulsive madcap. Wild and reckless and full to the brim with things I couldn’t decide if I only wanted, or desperately needed. In love with a boy who tested all of my limits and taught me to ask for more. Flying my kamikaze plane recklessly low, daring him to shoot me down. For once, I was sort of grateful for that giant-ass hole in my filter.

“Yours.” If you still want me.

I crash landed in an explosive inferno. Baptized by fire.

“Bella . . .” he exhaled, pulling me down and wasting all his words in my mouth.

There was something electrifying about the way he said my name.




Next



No comments:

Post a Comment

Tell me how you feel, what you thought, why you came.

XO
HBM