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.
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