Grim and Darling

CHAPTER eighteen

A few things about Edward.

One.

He doesn’t eat people. Unless you’re a murdering asshole from Seattle.

Two.

He actually eats animals. He likes bunnies. They taste like clover and sweet green grass and flowers. He likes mountain lions because their blood is rich and thick and tastes like the top of the food chain. He likes bears for the same reason. He likes foxes, the little red ones, because they make him feel slick and sly and somehow invisible.

He hates deer. They taste like dirt.

Three.

The image of him wrestling a bear is simultaneously the scariest and the sexiest thing I’ve ever imagined.

Four.

When he met that guy in the woods that night, in the dark, he hadn’t eaten in sixty-seven days.

Five.

He was starving. Literally.

Six.

There’s this thing called bloodlust. It’s like sex. Like the thrill of skydiving or delivering a baby or injecting yourself with speed. It’s blinding and wicked and completely incredible. It’s unstoppable, and you wouldn’t want to stop it anyway. Bloodlust is what made Edward attack that guy out there. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have much of a choice. He was hungry and smelled blood - pure, clean, bright blood - and he just couldn’t help it.

Seven.

The blood Edward smelled wasn’t the guy’s blood at all.

It was Alice’s.

---

“How do you think it all began?” I ask him, leaning up against the shitty car. The dark is creeping in, and the shadows are melting together, and the evening birdsong is starting to slowly fade away. I’m trying to comb through my knotted hair with my fingers because if I don’t do something with my hands, I’m gonna go crazy. I’m pulling out more hair than I am untangling, dropping tufts of curls all around me.

“How did what all begin?”

“Everything. The earth. The sky and the sun.”

“Why?” Edward peers at me through the gloom like he doesn’t trust where I’m heading with this.

“Because I feel really fucking small right now,” I grumble.

“You’re not small. No one is small.” Edward sounds sad when he says it, staring off into the dark again, but I know he’s not seeing the forest, or the trees or the moonlight. He’s seeing a couple lifetimes worth of people and places and moments. “No matter how insignificant a life might seem, every person touches someone. Changes someone. For better or worse.”

“Am I changing you?” I ask.

“I can’t be changed.”

“So you’re changing me, then?”

“Yes.” He sighs before he nods.

“For better? Or worse?”

“I think that’s still up for debate.”

---

By the time I get home, it’s pitch black and nearly dawn. I stayed out in the woods by that car for a long, long time, Edward staring at me silently while I sat in the rotting leaves wishing that things could be different. Wishing that I could be normal, and he could just be some regular guy instead of this undead version of a person who drank blood to stay alive. Wishing that we didn’t spend what could have easily been considered a first date leaning up against the shitty old car of the guy who probably murdered my sister.

Edward walked me home. Actually, it’s more like he led me through the pitch black forest because I probably would have gotten lost on my own. Before he left, he started to reach for me, and I flinched. I didn’t mean it. It just happened. Like my body wasn’t prepared for anyone to cozy up to it. If I was a forest, I was cold and dark and full of animals with sharp teeth. If I was an ocean, I was the deepest, coldest part, full of icebergs and prehistoric monsters. If I was a castle, I was surrounded by moats, brambles, and dragons that breathed fire.

If I was a girl, I sure didn’t fucking act like it.

He left with his hands in his pockets and his chin on his chest.

I stand on the sidewalk, staring at my humble little home, and even though I know it’s ok, even though I know it’s nearly impossible it could ever happen again, even though I know that Alice is gone and can’t be murdered twice, I don’t want to go in. Everything feels the same. The air. The ground. The sky and stars and universe squashing me into the dirt. Everything feels just like it did that night, and I’m having a hard time separating the two. Then from now. Here from there. That version of me and this version.

This is the moment I decide that maybe I didn’t want to find Alice.

Mostly because I don’t know what I might find.

---

Dear Self,

The last thing you should be doing right now, the very last thing in the whole entire world you should be doing right now, is falling for a vampire. You probably shouldn’t be falling for anyone, while we’re at it, but a vampire is definitely one of the worst choices you could make.

Who even does that?

You.

You do things like that. Stupid things. Things that could probably get you killed. Or sucked dry. Or worse. I mean, what is eternal damnation, after all? Whatever it is, it’s gotta be kind of miserable and neverending and probably really fucking lonely. What happened when everyone you knew died, leaving you? When the whole world changed, and you either had to keep up or go crazy?

Edward is 107 years old. He’s been through two world wars. There weren’t even cars when he was born. Smallpox was still a thing. Prohibition and the Depression and Revolutions. Electricity and phones and televisions. His family has been dead for a century, so there’s a small part of you that feels bad for him and the empty existence he’s been shuffling through for longer than you’ve even been alive.  

Another part, a bigger part, is full to the very brim with curiosity.

How the fuck could this ever even work out? How could a vampire, all stone and teeth and ancient, brittle feelings, ever fall for a human? Is that what is happening here? The way he looks at you, the way he reaches for you and then touches you like you’re the most fragile, breakable, on-the-verge-of-sudden-death thing in his whole existence. It’s sort of sweet and scary and a whole lot of fucking weird. Weird, like you want more, even when you want it to stop. Weird, like you’d eat yourself to death on something you hate the taste of. Like you’d sleep your life away, despite nightmares that will never let up.

Like you’re willing to scrap it all on the very thing that could quite possibly be the worst for you.

And how is a human supposed to love a vampire, anyway? He’s a million times older and probably a thousand times wiser and definitely a hundred times better-looking than you could ever hope to be. He’s the diamond, and you’re just cut plastic. He’s the Rembrandt, and you’re the crummy painting they bolt to the hotel wall. It’s the most uneven situation you could possibly put yourself in. You might never be enough. You might never be even. You’ll always be struggling just to feel equal.

The only way to ever be equal would be to let him turn you into a vampire too.

Which is scary as shit to your feeble human brain.

So what the fuck are you doing? Why are you encouraging this? Why are you lying in your bed at night imagining him wrestling a bear with your hand buried beneath your underwear and your breath all caught up in your lungs? Why are you wondering what it would feel like to be kissed by him? Bitten by him? Absolutely and utterly devoured by him? Pushed up to the point of orgasm or death or maybe even eternal life by whatever was hiding behind his lips?

Why?

Because you’re you, that’s why.

And even you can fantasize about something other than soap.

Sincerely, 

You

Next

AN:

HH and I are slowly but surely plowing through a shit ton of work together, here and in various other documents. Sorry for the delay - we're still here!

On that note, have I mentioned lately that I love her? 

Have I mentioned there's no one else above her?

I have?

Well, let me say it again. 

I love her. There's no one else. She is my favorite.

Thank you for reading along.

XO

HBM

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER seventeen

We’re halfway through dinner, spaghetti again, when the doorbell rings.

Dad looks up at me, and I look up at him because no one has ever rung our doorbell at seven o’clock at night. It sends me into an immediate panic, and I can see the same in him but probably for different reasons. We both stand at the same time, chairs scraping in unison, and I follow him to the front door. I wait for him to reach for his gun, but he doesn’t. He just opens the door wide, and a wave of cold air hits me before I have a chance to peek around him.

Edward is standing there in all his pale, perfect, undead glory.

“What are you doing here?” I gape from behind Dad, and Edward’s eyebrows furrow in the center. He ignores me completely and sticks his hand out into the air between him and my dad, clearing his throat.

“My name is Edward Cullen, sir. You must be Chief Swan.”

Dad wipes his hand on the napkin still in his fist and returns Edward’s handshake. I’m not sure if he notices how cold Edward is because I can’t see his face. It must not have struck him as that odd because the next thing I know he’s inviting Edward inside, and the three of us are in the kitchen, and I’m sitting in front of my half-eaten spaghetti, totally grossed out because all of a sudden it looks like someone’s bloody insides instead of tomato-dredged pasta.

Dad is asking Edward if he’s hungry.

Jesus.

“No, but thank you. I ate before I came over.” Edward’s eyes skirt to me, and I resist the urge to laugh because I don’t even want to know what he means by that. “It looks delicious, however.”

That time, I do laugh. Just once before I clamp my hand over my traitorous mouth. Both Dad and Edward are looking at me like I’m crazy. A vampire calling my bloody linguini delicious is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long, long time.

Dad shrugs and goes back to his dinner, talking to his pasta. “So, Edward, haven’t seen you around these parts before. Where are you from?”

“Originally from here,” Edward says. “But we moved away when I was quite young. I’ve only recently returned.”

“And your parents? What do they do?” Dad is fishing for info but making it seem innocent by not staring Edward down, or giving him the full-blown hands-on-the-table, mustache-twitching, good cop interrogation.

“They’ve both passed, unfortunately.” Edward actually looks sad. It’s the first bit of vague emotion I’ve ever really seen on him, and he actually looks human all of a sudden. Not so hard or cold or heartless, but soft and weary and remorseful.

“Sorry to hear that, son.” Dad sounds sympathetic. He understands. Both his parents are dead too, and he knows what that kind of hole feels like. Edward looks away, toward the kitchen window, speaking to neither of us.

“It’s better this way. They were very sick.” He looks back at Dad, who is still just staring at his dinner, and then at me. “I’ve inherited their house,” he says, his eyes locked with mine. “I do believe I plan to stay.”

“Well, what exactly brings you to my kitchen tonight?” Dad slurps up more spaghetti and gets some in his mustache and all over his lips. His table manners suck, but it’s only been me all these years, and the sudden company has obviously caught him off guard.

“I came to ask you for something.” Edward’s eyes dart to me again, and oh, my god, he’s going to ask my dad if he can marry me. That’s what olden time guys did, right? Go ask the girl’s dad for permission to marry them? I shake my head at him, and he’s shaking his back at me, and I’m not ready to get married because I haven’t even kissed this guy. I haven’t even kissed any guy. That’s like buying a car before you even test drive it. That’s like buying a house when you’ve only seen a photo of the outside, and you don’t know if there’s mold in the walls or birds in the chimney or a body buried in the basement.

“I was hoping Bella might accompany me tonight. I have an errand to run, and I need another pair of hands.”

Well, that sounds suspicious.

“Help with what, exactly?” Dad’s eyebrows are hung low, and his cop ‘stache is twitching, and I am obviously his daughter because he’s just as suspicious as I am.

“I have a car stuck, just a few miles out of town.” Edward tilts his head toward the east side of the room.

“I’m not sure Bella’s the best kind of help for that sort of thing. She doesn’t even know how to double pump a clutch. Why don’t I come help you?” Dad starts to stand, and Edward throws a hand out into the air to stop him.

“Oh, sir, no. I only need her to sit in the front seat and steer while I tow it home. Easy enough, I figured.” He looks over at me, and he has no idea how limited my driving experience is. Dad does, though. He throws me right under the bus.

“She can barely drive a stick.”

“Not to worry. It’s a manual.” Edward’s grin is big and wide and can mean nothing but trouble.

---

Fifteen minutes later, we’re walking through the woods, the leaves crunchy and the fog thick and the sound of my breath whistling by my ears. For some reason, Edward decided to get his car stuck at the top of a friggin’ mountain. I am so out of shape. He’s walking along like it’s nothing, and I’m not sure I can feel my knees. I’m about to scramble over a fallen tree when his hand appears in front of me, and before I can even think about it, I’m taking it, letting him hoist me over. His other hand brushes my back, and I’m in knots as my feet touch back down on solid ground.

What happens next is awkward.

And epic.

And weird and wonderful and terrible.

It’s like we’re having a staring contest, or maybe we’re checking each other out because our eyes meet, and our mouths close. We’re just standing there in the woods looking hard at each other like we’re only just seeing ourselves for the first time ever. He’s all tucked in and tamed, his eyes solemn and his suit pressed, while I’m… I’m a mess, as ever. Untied shoes and hair in tangles. Ratty cut-off jeans and an old black T-shirt that’s been through the laundry so many times it’s basically grey. I can’t even remember if I washed my face this morning.

I swear to god, my heart is burning.

“I don’t understand you.” I pull away, feeling hot and flustered and like I need twelve times more air than I’m actually getting.

“I’m pretty straight forward, Bella. What you see is what you get.” He shrugs, seemingly untouched by my statement.

“Why do you keep coming around?” I ask. “I thought you would have gotten sick of me by now.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.” Edward shakes his head. “I like you.”

“What could you possibly like about me?” I want to laugh out loud. I want to hit him or blush or maybe try to kiss him and then run far, far away. I don’t even understand myself anymore.

“Your face,” he says, simply.

“Funny, that’s the part of me that I hate the most,” I grumble, definitely going red.

“That’s exactly why I like it.”

That was either really sweet, or maybe sort of romantic even. He looks completely sincere, and his tongue is on his bottom lip again. I am starting to understand that he only does that when he’s feeling something especially true.

“What are we doing? I thought we were here to rescue a car.” I change the subject. It’s the only thing I can do to save face. To break the awkward tension. To take the focus off my face because it’s just full of freckles and black bags under my eyes and chapped lips, and who would even like it? Certainly not me. And if I don’t like my face, how could anyone else?

Edward blinks and swallows something before he turns and starts pulling branches from the giant pile of shrubbery beside us. Big branches, tree-sized ones, and he just tosses them aside like they’re matchsticks. Like it’s nothing to pick up a friggin’ tree. I watch him dig through the pile, dismantling it to show me what is buried underneath.

It’s a car.

Slumped on flat tires with peeling paint and a busted out windshield. It was probably blue once, but it’s so dirty and rusted over, it’s practically brown. I can’t even see through the windows. The antenna is snapped in half, and the door handle on the passenger’s side is hanging by a single skinny cord. The silver hub caps are speckled in red rust and the rubber tires are so brittle they’re cracked through. Something is skittering around inside, a masked raccoon face peering through the dirty windows.

“This is your car?” Why the fuck we’re here to save this piece of junk, I do not know.

“Not exactly.” Edward shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn’t look at me. It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that we’re not here to pull the car home.

“Then whose is it?”

“It belonged to the guy who took your sister.”

The bottom falls out. Or maybe it’s the whole earth that shivers. Maybe gravity suddenly upended, and I’m really hanging off the ground, rather than standing on it. I sink to my knees so  I don’t fall face first into the dirt. My heart races around, banging up against the cage of my ribs, while my stomach does flip flops, and my guts twist up in double knots.

I’m not sure if I need to puke, scream, or pass out.

“How do you know that?” I ask, everything spinning wildly. I dig my fingers through the dirt and the leaves just to feel something solid, hoping it will hold me upright.  

“Because I was there.”

“Where?”

Edward just blinks.

I gasp. “That night?”

He nods, his eyes steady and black, and I remember him telling me that I stabbed him. Remember the night he showed up looking like a vacuum salesman or a Mormon missionary, and instead of scamming my credit card or selling off my soul, he helped me unearth a bloody knife in the pitch black dark of the forest.

“It was your blood on my kitchen floor?”

“No.” He shakes his head as he kneels beside me and takes my hand, rubbing his fingertips along the throbbing veins on the soft underside of my wrist like he’s checking my pulse. My blood feels like it’s boiling, bubbling through me like a flash flood of water rushing through a skinny canyon. Not the way blood is supposed to move, soft and slow. Edward looks worried.

“But I stabbed you?” I’m fumbling for more than air here, my lungs and my brain working at the same laboriously slow pace.

“I have no blood to bleed, Bella.”

“Then whose was it?”

“A man from Seattle.” He looks away toward the car like there’s a lot more to say.

“Who was he?”

“A nobody. A smoker. A drinker. An abusive bastard with a beaten-up wife at home.”

“How’d he - ”

“I killed him,” Edward snaps. “Fed. When you stabbed me, I was full of him.”

“Oh. Oh, I see,” I stammer, even though I don’t see at all. I don’t see anything.

I think he just told me that he ate someone.

NEXT

AN:

Hadley Hemingway makes me a better writer.

There's a difference between a beta and a BETA. The first one fixes your commas and periods and capitalizations problems. The second one does that too, but they also ask you questions, make you clarify the muddy bits, help you to think about plot holes or character motivations or even just basic sentence structure and how moving one tiny word can make all the difference.

Hadley is THAT kind of beta. 

The amazing kind.

I cannot thank her enough.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Sixteen

Dear self,

Edward is a vampire.

Holy.

Fuck.

Edward is a vampire.

Sincerely,Yourself

---

When I wake up, I’m in the park.

It’s the one down on Mill Street with the dogwoods that don’t flower, the fountain that never runs, and the infestation of mourning doves. The playground equipment is super outdated, wood and metal, and falling over. It’s on the south side of town, and no one ever plays here because a herd of elk like to sleep here, which means the grass is forever littered with poop. I’m lying underneath the swing set, wood chips under my knees and elbows, the swings creaking above my head.

I take a mental inventory before I try to move.

I have my blue sweats on. The legs are hiked up around my knees. I have no shirt on, but I’m wearing one of my fancy lace bras. The underwire on the right side is popped out, stabbing me in the rib. I have gloves on, Dad’s old stinky wool ones, but I’m only wearing one sock. If I had a mirror, I’d know for certain I had a black eye. At the moment, without a mirror and judging just by the pain, I’m 98% certain I have a black eye. I press my fingers gently all around the socket, and it smarts fire across my forehead.

“Hey.”

“What the fuck?” I scream, scrabbling away from the disembodied voice of Edward somewhere to my right. Pain darts through my hand and up my arm and lodges at the base of my skull, setting off flashes behind my eyes and making the whole world tilt oddly to the side. My eye throbs; my left foot is numb, and my head is full of buzzing like there’s an angry swarm of bees trapped between my ears.

“Are you ok?” he asks, and I roll my eyes. What a fucking stupid question. I wrap my arms around my chest, suddenly freezing.

“No. Do I look ok?” I grumble, trying not to cry.

“No. You don’t.” He shakes his head and shrugs out of his jacket. I expect to be enveloped in warmth, but I’m not. It’s just cold. Cold like he left the jacket in his car all night long. I push my arms through the sleeves anyway, still struggling not to cry. Everything is terrible. I’m cold, sore, and barely dressed. Edward is in that same fucking suit and looks just as beautiful as ever.

I am like a whale that intentionally beached itself for no good reason.

“Why are you here?” I ask glumly, inspecting my feet. They’re covered in mud and blood, and I don’t even want to know which route I took to get here.

“I followed you.”

“You followed me?”

Great.

Edward nods but doesn’t elaborate. I don’t know what I just did or how long I did it for, but I am missing suspicious pieces of clothing, and I’m at least a mile and half from home. Nothing about the last few hours could have been that innocent.

“What happened?” I ask, curious. The walking is like a big, empty, black hole I can’t see the bottom or even the top, and I want to know. Sort of. Mostly. Maybe not. But I can’t help the curiosity: it’s like a leech you only realize is sucked to your leg when you’re out of the water and walking home. It’s like the sewing needle you lost two months ago that suddenly stabs you, even though you’ve sat in the same spot on the couch a million times since then. It’s like that yowling alley cat you wished death upon for months and then, one night, it’s gone, and you kind of miss it.

“You left your house. Took off some clothes. Walked here. Fell off that slide.” He looks up at the old rickety slide that is way too high and steep to be safe for children. No wonder my foot is numb. No wonder my underwire is poking out, and my eye is black, and my head is full of bees.

“What are you looking for when you walk?” he asks me.

“How should I know?” I snap, my voice hard as rock. My face feels even harder, like I was cut from limestone a billion centuries old. I want to tell him to shut up. Want to tell him to keep talking. To leave me alone, but don’t go too far. To walk me home, but stay a safe distance away. I want to tell him to fuck off and never talk to me again, but I also really want to kiss him. I feel bad about being a giant ball of contradiction and huff out a bunch of air, picking dried bits of mud off my feet. “Alice, probably,” I admit.

“Why do you want to find her so badly?”

“You mean besides the fact that she’s my little sister?” I glare at him. Duh.

I stare off at the playground equipment, the gentle sway of a swing and the moonlight reflection on the old metal slide, and I hate this place. Hate it because it was always Alice’s favorite. She never wanted to go to the newer, fancier park on the other side of town: the one with the new plastic slides, swings shaped like armchairs, and cushy rubber matting beneath the equipment. No, she liked this park with the damn doves, the elk poop, and the wood that gave you splinters when you rubbed up against it too hard. I think about Rose. Not about her dead and face down in my living room but about her frizzy red hair and double-colored eyes and twisted front tooth and that Alice was the only other kid I ever saw her with.

“She was a good kid, you know? I mean, annoying as fuck, but a good kid. She liked to play dress up, pretend she was a princess or a doctor or an alien.  She gave me shit if I picked flowers. She ate whatever gross dinner my mother made and didn’t complain about it like I did.             She was always hanging out with the weird kids. She was sweet to everyone. She was just... good, you know?”

“And what if you don’t like what you find?” he asks, which is the shittiest question because it’s the only one I haven’t asked myself yet and for good reason. I imagine Alice with mummy skin. As a pile of bones. Buried, or maybe not buried. There’s still some slim possibility that she’s not actually dead, but even I’m beginning to accept that this possibility is fading rapidly. She’s probably dead. And probably a sudsy pile of soap. But I still have to look.

“I don’t know,” I sigh. “But I have to find her.”

I look over at Edward, and he’s watching me. Hard. Eyes on my mouth like he could understand me better if he saw the words leaving my lips. He’s licking his own lips like he’s hungry, and it’s that exact moment that I remember he’s a vampire.

“Don’t get any funny ideas,” I snap, my hands clamping around my neck to hide my thumping pulse, and Edward blinks, his eyes returning to mine and his eyebrows high in his forehead.

“I wasn’t - I wasn’t getting funny ideas,” he stutters, which I thought he was too cool and collected to do. “I can feel your heart,” he finally says.

“What the fuck do you mean, you can feel it?” I’m looking at him like he’s crazy because who says stuff like that? Guys in knockoff Lifetime movies, that’s who. Vampires who are like a hundred years old and don’t know how fucking creepy they sound when they say stuff like that, that’s who.

“I can feel it beating. It’s going too fast. You should take some deep breaths, calm down.” He sounds like he’s giving me instructions on how to install a car battery.

“You say the creepiest shit sometimes.”

NEXT

AN:

I'm with Hadley - as in, within arm's reach - so this post is super super special.

Next chapter is being tidied up as we speak and will upload soon. 

<3