The Other Way : Twenty Five

Food, Water, Sheter, Air, Warmth, Sex 

-

“Tell me about the day you sewed Alice’s foot up.”

I was perched on a luxury version of the bed in any standard doctor’s office, the room dark except for the spotlight over my foot and Edward leaning down over it, his hair glowing in the light and his face serious. He was swabbing industriously at the gash on my sole, picking sand from my flesh with his eyes pinched in concentration. He glanced over at me before going back to his work and I thought that he’d never been more intriguing.

“She was chasing after a giraffe.”

“A giraffe?” Good god, that girl was nuts.

“Yes. I don’t know why she ever thought she could run fast enough to catch up to it, but her blind enthusiasm never fails to surprise me.”

“Did she?”

“Of course not. She stepped on something sharp and showed up sobbing and bleeding all over my front step. Classic Alice.” He was threading a scary looking needle and I decided then and there to focus on his face for the remainder of this morbid craft project.

That determined curve of his jaw. The hair curling around his ears. The bouquet of dandelions on his neck.

“You used her earring,” I gasped as he prodded me one last time, gloved finger to my wound, and he looked hard at me, moving his hand to the top of my foot to grip it reassuringly.

“I promise that this won’t hurt you nearly as much as it did her. Are you ready?”

I nodded hastily, lest I change my mind, and he set to work before I could pass out, hunkered over my foot. He’d sunken enough anesthetic into my muscles to bring a rhino to its knees and I kept my eyes firmly on that pulse throbbing just below his jaw, steady as a metronome, until my stomach stopped flip-flopping and my heart resumed its normal plodding beat. The ocean was too far away for me to be feeding off of it and I was feeling woefully sober.

“Why didn’t you have a needle?” I asked, knowing that filling up the silence would help distract me from what was going on at the bottom of the table. Edward grimaced but kept his eyes on his hands.

“The people who need the most seem to wait the longest. We’d go months sometimes without getting resupplied.”

“We give money every year to those programs. Save the Children. I would hope it goes somewhere useful,” I practically grumbled, wincing out of blind instinct as I imagined the needle between his fingers piercing my flesh even though I couldn’t feel anything that felt remotely like my foot, much less pain.

“The people controlling that money rarely understand desperation. They’ve only witnessed it through their car windows or computer screens. Their cellphones.” He made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like disgust. “It isn’t a reality and that makes it all so much easier to pander around with. You’d think it would be simple but it’s all just a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit. Just like this place,” he huffed, insinuating at the vastly different circumstance he’d found himself in recently.

Third world country to five star resort. Dirt floors to cashmere carpeting.

“Is that what the scene between you and your brother was all about?”

Edward scowled at my foot, still working. “My parents cornered me today. They’ve offered to fund a sort of . . . non profit, in my name. I have the feeling they’re just trying to get rid of me. I should have just stayed in bed with you,” he grumbled under his breath.

I couldn’t understand why staying in bed with me would be the choice option over an offer like that, but he sounded so regretful that I was half inclined to believe he actually felt that way.

“Maybe you should accept,” I urged, trying to ignore as he pulled the thread tight and how funny my stomach suddenly felt. “You could do more good than most with resources like that, when you go back.”

“Who says I’m going back?” Edward tore his eyes from his work to peer at me.

“You have to,” I tried to sound final. “Alice is determined. She can’t go alone.”

He set his jaw as he snipped the black thread he’d used to put me back together and started peeling open a big bandage, unresponsive. I was amazed it was over so quickly and watched as he discarded the wrapper, chewing on his lip rings. He was obviously ignoring my plea for Alice, face imposing and hair in a furious mane around his face.

“She told me about the lion. The one who slept by your door,” I stuttered, dry-mouthed.

He smiled quickly, without meaning to before forcefully tempering it. “He was fascinating. Made me finally believe that nature can be forced aside.”

“You didn’t before?”

Edward shook his head. “Everyone is a slave to their instincts. Survival is dependent on a few basic things that every creature on this earth is trying to get, in one form or another. Just to stay alive, at any cost.”

“Food and water?” I asked the obvious, watching him line up the bandage over the sole of my foot.

“Shelter,” Edward continued. “Air and warmth and sex.” He glanced slyly at me again, pressing firmly against my foot.

“Sex isn’t required for survival.” I shook my head at him, pretty sure that I wasn’t meeting a quicker end simply due to my self imposed run of celibacy. Edward sucked on his lip rings some more as he finished pressing the bandage to the bottom of my foot and finally turned to look at me, his eyes hinting at far more as he tugged off his gloves.

“Maybe not. But it sure makes the whole messy ordeal a little more tolerable.”

---

He carried me across the island, my leg numb to the knee and my foot gone soft and molten, hot as a volcano and throbbing dully. The jungle was dark by the time we emerged from the main building, shadows whispering quietly to one another through the dense foliage. I clung to Edward’s neck, feeling light and heavy and strangely liquified, all at once.

“How many stitches did you give me?” I asked through the dark, absently admiring the shimmery silver edging the moon had set down against his profile.

“Three.”

“Three? That’s all?” I gasped. It felt more like thirty.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” he chuckled.

“How many did you give Alice?”

“Sixteen.”

Holy god, that must have hurt. “I bet she screamed,” I whispered haltingly, stomach suddenly rolling.

“Like a banshee,” Edward chuckled, shifting me in his arms to nudge open the door to his villa. He set me on the wine colored couch before turning on the lights, both of us blinking to adjust.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Please,” I sighed, head starting to reel again from my prolonged intoxication on all sorts of foreign substances and the fiery burn in my foot. Edward stepped into the kitchen and pressed his hips to the countertop with his back toward me as he poured a generous helping of bourbon into a squat tumbler. His hand remained wrapped around the neck of the bottle for a long time after setting it down.

“Why aren’t you going with Jasper?” He asked without looking at me and I thought about the two telephone poles that framed his back underneath his shirt. About the mere inch of space between the peeling wood and ivory piano keys that spanned the length of his torso. About the staggered crisscross of wires and the wide-eyed owl caught forever in limbo.

“He told you why,” I exhaled, voice just barely above a whisper.

“Was that the truth?” Edward glanced over his shoulder, hair in his eyes and tattooed knuckles still fisting the bottle. The sleeping light bulb that fell just shy of his ring finger and his jaw clamped tight above the life cycle of a single flower as he waited for my answer. I gulped down all my fear in one stinging swallow and nodded.

“Oh, Bella,” he sighed, finally releasing the bottle and walking hesitantly toward me. He offered the tumbler, already sweating around a glowing inch of sunshine. The liquor burned the inside of my mouth and dropped a capful of fire into my stomach, mercifully numbing my tongue and my head just enough that I took a second gulp for good measure before handing the glass back to him. He swirled the ice cubes around in the glass before neatly polishing off the rest of it and discarding the glass on the coffee table, standing before me with his hands in his pockets as he stared at the carpet between his feet. Lip rings sucked in and mouth tight around them.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” He was shaking his head and I knew I had to act, fuck my foot. I darted to my unsteady feet and wound my fingers around a palmful of his shirt, pulling him closer, lost in lavender and slow-cooked butter. An implausible mixture that had my head reeling wildly around in my skull. Battling with my heart and trying desperately to ignore my head. Fighting against all my wavering resolve and slowly crumbling conscience.

I bit his lip rings.

Pushed forward and set my teeth to the metal, his mouth warm and soft. Stumbled into him and let myself go pliable and needy as his arm wrapped my waist to steady me. His filigree tattoo burst to life the moment we touched, a fiery spark ripping down the invisible lines and permanently searing the pattern to my bones. Irrevocable and stubbornly permanent.

I fully understood his fear of not being able to let this go.

Edward wrenched abruptly away from me, stalking to the opposite side of the room and cornering himself like an animal, pacing on anxious feet. I struggled to remain upright on my uninjured foot, balanced precariously on the toes of my ripped open one, and sure more than ever before that he could somehow read my mind.

“I don’t understand you.” I spoke instead of biting my bottom lip, throbbing again.

Edward practically glared at me, huffing under his breath. “You’re one to talk.”

“You said so yourself that this was a fantasy. You said you were flexible.”

“I know,” he growled, still pacing.

“Now, all of a sudden, you’re not playing along.” I, on the other hand, was fully ready to play dirty. I basically poured fuel on an open fire, using the spark of his red hot tattoo to light the first flame. The dress I was wearing tied with a single delicate ribbon around my neck and one simple tug had the entire thing plummeting to the floor around my feet in a pillowy cloud.

Edward groaned and turned away.

“Bella, stop it.”

“I don’t want to stop.”

“It can’t go back, once it’s done,” he sighed, pushing his hands through his hair and making it stand on end. He seemed fretful and wrung out as though he’d been put through the spin cycle too many times.

“Can’t go back to what?”

“The other way. Your other life.”

This was one of those moments.

Those moments when the earth shifted. The winds changed. Poised on the razor-thin edge of a fork in the path, opportunity like an opiate, reality as crushingly sober as any comedown. From the top of my cliff, I had a really excellent view of all the potential misery that awaited me, far out there on the horizon. I deflated back onto the couch, naked and nearly heartbroken, sore and achy in places that hadn’t felt much of anything for a long time. My ribs turned to steel, lungs trapped and heart rattling up against the cage like an empty aluminum can. I was sure he could hear it, the sound was deafening.

“This can only end badly.” Edward spoke from across the room, gazing out the towering windows into the dark.

“I promise not to hurt you.” I tried to sound sure of myself, but probably failed.

“I don’t think you can keep that promise,” he shook his head. “What is it that you want, exactly?” He turned to eye me sternly, as though he expected a solid answer.

“You’re actually asking me that?”

“Is it so unbelievable?” His eyebrows furrowed.

“Sort of,” I grumbled, used to being led in this game and suddenly finding myself being forced to determine the steps. “I want this.”

“I gathered that,” he finally smiled at me. “You haven’t put your clothes back on.”

“What do you want?” I threw the question back at him, not admitting to myself how curious I was to know the answer.

“You want to know what I want?” He let out a ragged gasp of air and clenched his fists at his sides. “I want your mouth. I want your skin and your bones and your blood. I want your fingers, everywhere, and I want that secret sort of smile you make when I look at you too long.” He pointed at me, smile morphing into a smirk. “That one, right there.”

Fuck.

I straightened my mouth, unaware I was doing anything with it in the first place. Did I smile when he looked at me? I gulped down the traitorous curve in my lip, biting it instead, as Edward finally broke from his corner and stalked toward me. He fell to his knees and planted his hands deep in the couch cushions on either side of my hips.

“I want it all, Bella. I worry that I want it too much.” He leaned in and licked softly along my collarbone, clamping his hands to my sides and all of my skin boiled under his touch. Rubbed his face across my stomach, rough stubble and his hands gripping my sides, melting some of that steely metallic weight over my ribs. He used two fingers to spread me open and set his mouth down over my clit, metal rings pressed tight to my sensitive skin and I shivered. His hand ground down around my breast, full of force and twisting my nipple just as he snaked his tongue out in a torturously slow, wickedly fast circuit through all my folds, kissing me wetly at the end of it before pulling away.

I was a panting, incoherent mess. Heaving lungs and trembling veins.

“I want to be inside of you for this.” He rubbed his stubbled chin roughly against my pubic bone, kneading my ass with one hand and holding tightly to my side with another. I nodded frantically, willing to do just about anything if he’d only keep going and I let him pick me up, wrapping my legs around his waist as he shuffled blindly to the bed. His mouth to my neck and my fingernails to his skin. Edward set me on the rumpled sheets and I glanced down at myself to check on the status of my tattoo, sure by now that it must be showing, but much to my amazement I was still outwardly unadorned. The whisper of his clothing against the carpet echoed in time to a foil wrapper between his teeth and I got lost in the swirling ink on his abs as he rolled a condom down around himself, huffing harshly under his breath.

There was a barbell.

Embedded at the very apex of that v in his hips, right there at the base of his shaft where his mosaic tattoo ended.

Holy god.

I gaped up at him, not surprised at all to be met by a fully-formed smirk.

“It’s more for you than for me, but that will have to wait.” He leaned down to press his tongue between my lips, licking my teeth. “On your knees,” he whispered against my mouth.

I scrambled to my knees, threading my fingers through the sheets and putting my ass on display. Edward groaned and sunk two fingers into me, dotting my backside with wet prints of his mouth and almost pushed me right over again until I was whispering nothing but an unbroken string of pleasepleaseplease into my chest. He muttered something to himself and growled when he finally pushed into me. I exhaled as he pulled out, moaned when he pushed back in and held himself there, his hands massaging my ass. Completely unable to put words into coherent thought and letting my mouth run wild. Edward joined me, sounds from his chest rumbling up and out of his mouth with every movement. His hips pressed tight up against me, swirling in a steady circular motion with the vague hint of unyielding metal in the soft spot between my pussy and my ass and I wrapped my feet around his legs, pressed to the soft damp creases on the backs of his knees to urge him closer. Smashed myself forcefully back up against him, skin breaking out in a prickly wash of needles, searching blindly for that barbell with all my might.

“Jesusfuck,” Edward nearly choked. His hand met my ass with a crack.

Ow!

I groaned instead. From my belly and full of more longing than I thought I had reserves of. I was sure that I’d reached my limit and here he was proving me wrong again. I gripped the sheets and did it again, squirming against him in search of something I could barely feel.

“Shit, Bella. Fuck,” he growled, pushing and pulling and palming the red spot I’m sure had appeared from his slap. I bit into the sheets, moaning into the mattress, not entirely sure how much more of it I could take, tottering along the thin line that separated pleasure from pain. Edward slapped his palm firmly to my ass one last time, his other hand snaking around my front to fondle my clit, and I was tumbling off that cliff before I’d even picked myself up from my last fall.

He slammed into me one final time, releasing with a strangled groan, but I couldn’t get my teeth to loosen their death-grip on the sheets in time to look back over my shoulder to see it.

Next