Chapter Twenty Three
Edward won’t stop smiling at me. It’s weird. Usually he looks tired and sick and as worn through as my oldest shirt, the one with the holes in the elbows and the hem all frayed. But tonight, he’s smiling.
“What’s up with your face?”
“My face?” He brings a hand to his cheek, like he’s checking for stray blood the same way someone thinks they might have traces of their dinner left on their chin.
“You’re all smiles tonight. It’s weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. Really weird.”
“You stood up for me today.” The smile just gets bigger, and if I didn’t know he was a hundred- year-old vampire, I’d think he was just another teen boy with a crush. On me. I blush hard enough to break out in a heat rash.
“You were spying on me?”
“I was keeping an eye on you.” His smile falters a bit. “Newton is bad news; you shouldn’t have gotten in that car.”
“Was it Alice? The woman in the grass? Was it Alice who did it?” I glance off toward the highway, my mind zooming down the asphalt until I was standing back in front of that cute little house with the flowers and the porch and the dead woman in the lawn. I knew they’d taken her away, carted her off to the morgue, but in my mind, she will always be there, sprawled in the grass like a broken doll.
Edward’s smile slips completely, and he glances away with a heavy sigh. “Yes.”
“I thought she was getting better.”
“I never said that.”
“She got away,” I ask without actually asking.
“She’s tricky like that. It’s easy to lose her.”
“Yeah, no shit. I know the feeling.”
“It’s your fault, in a way. The fact that she got away.”
“Mine?” I glare at him because keeping an eye on Alice has nothing to do with me these days. Even if I could be the one to watch over her, there’s no way I could stop her if she decided to off someone. Or me.
“Yes. You’ve been such a distraction lately. I had to get away. Clear my head. You smell so strong that I had to run clear to Calgary to do that. She took advantage of my absence.”
“You ran to Calgary?” That was a decent seven hundred miles away. “I stink that bad?”
“I never said you stink,” he chuckles. “In fact, you smell so good, there are times I have to keep myself from leaping on you.”
“Leaping on me, and then what?” I’m basically suspicious of everything now, and when a vampire tells you you smell good and he wants to leap on you, there’s a high probability you wouldn’t come out of that situation alive.
Edward leans in, too fast and too slow, not in human time at all. Just a blur and then a halt that happens before I can blink, and he’s holding me just half an inch off his lips. Just holding me, not breathing and not blinking and not moving any further, and god, he frustrates the hell out of me.
“Kiss you,” he exhales. “Leap on you and kiss the shit out of you.”
Holy.
Fuck.
“Do it then,” I whisper. “I bet I taste delicious.”
“I’m certain of it.” His voice is a waiver. An exhale. A falter. Then he gives in.
This time, it’s not my forehead.
He tastes like the best kind of wrong. Like a fatal sting of poison. Like the final sinful act that gets you permanently kicked out of church, or school, or heaven. He tastes like butterscotch and burnt sugar and the wrong end of a lit match.
The flame end.
We could kiss forever. For days. For hours. I never want to stop, never want him to stop, but he does. It’s not because of me. It’s not him or that maybe it’s wrong, or that maybe it’s so right it hurts. He pulls away because there’s a scream that rips through the still, heavy air around us like a hot knife through cold butter.
Alice.
Her little stone fingers wrap around my wrist and clamp down so hard that I feel the bones grate together before they crumble under the pressure, and I’m just about to cry out in splintered pain when her teeth find purchase. Deep in my shoulder, clear down through the muscle and the cartilage to the joint and everything goes numb and warm and lovely. She bites again, higher this time, and the numb just gets number, and the warm just gets warmer, and then she bites me again. So close to my neck. Again. So close to the end. She’s moaning like I taste even better than she imagined, better than any bunny ever could, and the numb is just pure bliss for two solid seconds before she’s being ripped away.
Her teeth leave ragged gashes across my shoulder blade, and her fingernails scrape five long trenches down the length of my arm.
Edward is right next to me, panting, his hands in fists and shoulders hunched as Alice lands in the grass an entire football field away from us. She’s on her feet immediately and racing back like a speeding bullet as the blood starts to well up and drip down my arm, splattering my shoes. Edward’s hand slams into Alice, square in her chest, stopping her cold not two feet away from me. Her eyes are clouded, and her mouth is in a snarl, and her hands are reaching for me, but she looks up with Edward with something like clarity in her eyes.
“Go,” he growls, his hand still planted firm on her chest.
Alice blinks, the blood lust ebbing as her eyes clear, and her mouth slackens.
“W-what?” she stutters, eyes gone wide, hands dropping to her sides.
“Go.” His voice is grit and grime. Anger and impatience and exhaustion. He sounds resigned, like the project he’s been working on for years is now a failure, and he’s finally throwing in the towel. Giving up. Calling it quits. Except the towel is my sister, and the project is her endless undead livelihood, and I think I look just as shocked as she does.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispers.
“I do. I can’t help you anymore. I’ve tried, Alice. You have to go.”
With one last look at me, Alice snarls, her eyes narrowed and her mouth full of poison, literal and figurative. “I hate you,” she hisses, and then she’s gone, the trees quivering and the fog boiling in her wake. Edward watches her go, eyes on the spot she disappeared into for a long, long time before he turns toward me. His gaze finds my face, my shoulder, my elbow, my fingers, and then the puddle of blood at my feet.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, gazing at the blood splashing my sneakers, his hands reaching out toward me. That numb feeling starts to ebb away, replaced by a pain that I can’t even begin to describe. A burn of ten thousand supernovas, of ten thousand acres of forest fire, of ten thousand eyes of god. All of it in my shoulder.
I wrench away, moaning as I shuffle backward.
“Not as much as when you fucking lied to me,” I hiss, tears stinging my eyes for the first time in three years. I can’t cry over Alice, but I can cry over Edward.
If that doesn’t say something really fucked up about me, I don’t know what does.
“I didn’t want to, Bella, but what choice did I have?”
“Three years. Three years, Edward! That’s over a thousand days. I know that probably means nothing to you by now, but that’s a thousand days, and I suffered for every single one of those.” My voice cracks at the end because even as I say it, I can barely believe it. I can barely believe how long Alice has been gone, how long I’ve been living in this suspended hell, how long I’ve been treading water while the answer was sitting in some abandoned house not three miles away.
“You think I haven’t suffered?” Edward’s face is tight in the middle, eyebrows pulled in and his mouth in a thin, hard line. He’s looking at me like I have no idea what suffering is. Like my weak human mind couldn’t possibly comprehend his kind of pain. Maybe I can’t, but he’s partially responsible for my version of this suffering thing, and I hate him for it. I hate him for making me want him. I hate him for making me think about him, and for making me think he was helping me. I hate him for keeping Alice away but also for knowing that it was the best thing to do.
I hate him, and I don’t hate him, and that makes me hate him even more.
“You made me suffer,” I gasp, the fire in my shoulder starting to spread. “You kept me from the truth, you kept her, and now look at me. Look at her.” I whip my good arm toward the silent forest where Alice disappeared. “What am I supposed to do with my life now? Just go on like this didn’t happen? Like she’s not out there somewhere eating animals, or god forbid, people? Am I just supposed to forget about her, about you? Go back to school like I’m not completely different from the person I was last month?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, his gaze slides slow and steady down my arm, down my fingers, down to my feet where the grass is drowning in a thick coating of my bright red blood. I watch his eyes go from gold to black in a split second. His skin shifts paler than ever, and he takes a mindless step toward me.
“Edward,” I say, but he doesn’t respond. He just takes another step.
“Edward, stop.”
Another step.
A tongue across his lips.
A twitch in his fingers.
“Stop,” I say, just a whisper.
“Bella, I‒” He licks his lips again and takes another step. Just one more and he’ll be right up on me with his chest to mine and his hips to mine and his mouth probably on my neck, and what the fuck is happening right now?
“Stop!” I scream, right in his face, and even that doesn’t snap him out of it. “Edward!”
My voice cracks and splits in my throat, and it’s painful, but it’s nothing compared to the venom in my arm or the break in my heart or Edward’s teeth buried in my neck.
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