Grim and Darling

Chapter Twenty Six

“I have to go see Charlie.”

Edward is shaking his head before I even finish my statement.

“No, Bella.”

“I can’t just leave him hanging.”

“He’s a tough guy. He’ll get over it.”

This time, I’m shaking my head before he finishes. “He’s already lost Alice. He’s basically lost me, but he doesn’t even know it yet. He’s all alone. I have to tell him.”

“Tell him what, exactly?” Edward’s eyebrow is raised, his voice pure skepticism, and he’s looking at me like I have zero clue as to what I’m talking about. But I’ve thought this through, all night long. When nighttime lasts a million years, that’s a lot of time to think it over. A whole lot of time to feel bad, then worse, then plan a million plans before I finally realize the one and only way to throw that man off my trail forever.

I’m going to go home and flip out.

Teenage girl style.

I’m going to scream and cry and blame school and boys and teachers. I’m going to throw some stuff around and kick something, and I’m going to tell him that I’m leaving. Right now. Tonight. This instant. I can’t take this town. I can’t take this life. I can’t take any of it anymore, and I’m leaving. And then, the kicker: I’m going to go live with Mom. I’d rather live in her yurt in some field with the naked neighbors and the quinoa and the bearded guy who thought he was the second coming of Jesus. I’d rather be there with her than here with him. I’m going to fly up the stairs in tears and pack a bag and then push by all of his pleading and his excuses and his promises to make it better. I’m going to get into my truck and gun the engine and leave him heartbroken forever.

I’m going to devastate him.

Maybe, if I do it well enough, he won’t come looking for me. He’s a hard guy to lose, just ask the dead guy he’s been tracking through Seattle for the last three years, still searching for the fading traces despite the fact that he will never, ever find the man. He’s persistent in the worst kind of way, the little flame of hope that never fully dies out, always burning deep and strong despite every indication that it should have gone out. Three years in and he was still looking for Alice, still looking for answers, still on the hunt for a trail that went cold long before he even got that phone call from me.

I have to ruin myself to him, otherwise he’ll never give up on me the way he’s never given up on them.

The house is dark. No lights, even though the cruiser is parked out front, and it’s only seven o’clock. The sun has just set, and it’s not like he sleeps easy, not like he’d be in bed this early. A small part of me starts to worry he’s resurrected that yearly alcohol addiction of his again, and he’s finally managed to kill himself, lounging on the bottom of an entire bottle of whiskey.

I walk up the stairs, trying to move slower than I should, trying not to stand so straight or look so alert, trying to look like the old me rather than this new version because if there’s anyone in the world who will spot the difference, it’ll be him. He’ll take one look at me and know something wasn’t right, so I slouch. I drag my feet. I pull my mouth down and rumple my hair and reach for the doorknob at what seems to be a snail’s pace. The door creaks, and I call out his name.

For the second time in my life, I come home to a horror show.

My father, my dad, the guy who changed my diapers and taught me how to ride a bike and cooked me nothing but spaghetti for the last three years, is face down in a ravaged puddle of blood. His eyes are open, and his mouth is gaping, and the wound on his neck still pumping warm and wet into the carpet. He’s still blinking. Still breathing out of the hole in his neck, and his eyes are on me. I can taste his fear. His sadness. His soul, as it escapes him. I can taste the last metallic remnants of his heartbeat and the remorse ripping through every last dying cell in his body. He gurgles, something unsaid caught in his mouth, and I’m on my knees in his blood, my hand on his cheek as his eyes slip closed.

“No,” I whisper.

This is a dream. This is a nightmare. This is a movie or a book or a play about someone else’s life, someone else’s really shitty life. This isn’t my life; it can’t be.

This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.

A sound breaks the silence, roars through the echo of death like a freight train through a tunnel. A sob that I think might be from me, except I can’t get a breath. I can’t catch my heartbeat. I can’t feel my hands or my face or my brain. I want to react, want to scream or cry or rage around the house until it’s just flattened, but I can’t. And yet, there’s someone sobbing, and even though I leave my hand on his face, still warm and soft, my eyes pull up toward the sound.

Alice.

Standing at the top of the stairs. She’s staring down at us, still in that nightgown, now wet and sticking to her skin, stained pink and rose and red. Her arms are splattered, and her hair is damp, and her face is smeared with blood. Her fangs are out full force, and her eyes are red, and her mouth is twisted up in a smirk as though she thinks this is funny.  

“Alice. No.”

“I couldn’t stop.” She smirks

“You killed him.”

“So what?” Alice bellows from the top of the stairs, loud enough to rattle the picture frames on the walls, and I cover my ears, the high pitch of her scream nearly breaking my ear drums.

When I pull my hands away and glance back up at the stairs, she’s gone. I don’t know how much time I spend sitting there in a puddle of my dad’s blood. I don’t know how long I hold his hand, wishing he’d twitch or blink or groan. I don’t know how long I wallow in the second bloodbath this house has seen in less than five years, but Edward shows up just after the sun sets, which means I’ve been here for hours. My knees are stiff, and my feet are numb, and my heart aches like something run over by a semi, several times. My eyes are sore, and my mouth is dry, and my fingers are tingly, and when Edward pulls me to my feet, I collapse against him and cry all over over again.

He helps me put the place back together.

I can’t leave it a disaster. Our lives were a disaster, and I just can’t let it all end that way. We deserved better. He deserved better. The last moments between them, the struggle at the end, it must have been terrible. The curtains are ripped away from the windows, and the couch is overturned. The television is screen down on the carpet, and the front door is off its hinges.

His beer is freshly opened, the carbonation still bubbling, next to his chair.

Edward rights the furniture while I mop the floors. He fixes the front door while I do the last of the dishes. He vacuums the living room while I wipe the fine layer of dust from all the shiny surfaces in the house, the windowsills and the stove and the coffee table. We haul my dad out to the backyard and lay him in the grass by the woodshed, right there at the edge of the forest. With that hole ripped in his neck, the only plausible answer is an animal attack—the same magical, maniacal creature he’s been chasing for years, the one taking down hikers and truckers and kids walking home from school.

He spent my whole life being big, but now, he just looks limp and flat and empty, staring up at the sky.

“I can’t believe this is my life now,” I mutter, staring down at him in the dewdrop grass. “I didn’t even get to tell him goodbye.”

Edward doesn’t say anything. He’s staring off into the tree, his eyes narrowed and his jaw tight, and his whole body leaning forward just the tiniest bit, like he’s prepared to pounce.

“What? What do you hear?” I ask.

Edward sighs, deep and heavy, and slumps at the shoulders. “Nothing,” he says, looking back at me. His eyes have fallen, and the tensed stance is gone.

“What were you listening for?” I try hard, strain myself, but the world is just wind and water and atoms bouncing against each other. Just trucks on highways and waves on rocks and sunlight on sand.

“Alice. I keep thinking I hear her, but…”

“Why?” I can’t help but gasp, feeling breathless even though I haven’t even taken a breath in hours. “Why would you even do that?”

As far as I’m concerned, Alice can fuck right off. She’s not Alice anymore. She’s a little monster, a demon in miniature, who just murdered my father after a three year rampage, taking out innocent people like they were just candy, and she was sugar-starved. I don’t even know for certain how many she’s killed but this, him, lying here at my feet… this is too far.

There’s no coming back from this.

There’s no forgiveness left in me.

Edward looks hard at me, his face angry. “It’s my fault she’s out there.”

“It’s her fault, actually.” I know I sound like a petulant kid, but shit. Look around, dude. Pull your head out of your ass for three solid seconds and get some perspective.

“This is my punishment,” he says, “I deserve this.”

“You are oddly self-effacing at the weirdest times. I don’t understand what you’re saying at all.”

Edward groans heavily and clenches his fists. His voice is tense and tight, his words wobbly and uncertain. “This is happening to me again because of my sister.”

“You have a sister?” My mind skitters all the way back to the old haunted house and that room full of little girl clothing and dolls and blonde hair and something in my brain just clicks together.

“Had,” he says sharply. “Had.”

“What happened to her?” I wonder if she looked like him. Wonder if she sounded like him or if she hooked her ankles together every time she sat, just like he did. I wonder if her laugh sounded like his or if she was as sad as he seemed to be all the time. If she had that wild hair and tight mouth. Edward just shakes his head at me, eyes pinched like he can hear all the questions tumbling between my ears. He doesn’t say anything.

“I’d probably understand, you know. I lost my sister, too,” I grumble.

Edward moves so quickly that I startle. He’s by my side so fast I gasp, and he grabs me by the arm so tight that my eyes well up water. His eyes go pitch black night, and his face twists into something rock solid and eight million years old.

“You couldn’t even begin to understand,” he hisses in my face before he flings me away and runs headlong into the trees.

Next

AN:

Hadley Hemingway is my forever-love, star-girl, soul-shine, soft-cloud rockstar.

She also tells me when I haven't finished a sentence, or I let one run along for an entire paragraph.

Thank you for reading.

xo

HBM

Grim and Darling

Chapter Twenty Five

2:30 a.m. doesn’t feel like the middle of the night anymore.

I can feel the sun on the opposite side of the earth, the faint burn of daylight in China, the sunrise over the wasteland deserts of Russia. I can feel the cool creep of night settling over New York City. I can smell someone’s armpits, four miles away. I can taste stale cigarettes and dried-up beer and the rancid food forgotten in the back of someone’s refrigerator. I can smell motor oil and antifreeze and salt off the highways. I can smell the stink of the high school locker rooms and the molded damp stench of the library and the bleach they use to clean the floor at the police station.

The reek of the garbage dump on the far side of town? Unbearable.

The smoke from the logging mills way out by the county line? Suffocating.

I’m on the porch, tasting the air, when Edward reappears.

He comes through the trees at the far end of the clearing, dragging a body of something large and hairy and antlered. I can’t even swallow the thought of it, even as my stomach is gnawing into itself but I’m so hungry I could drain that thing, drain a couple of those things, maybe even twenty of them, and then I’m there with my fingers to fur and my nose to hide and my mouth latched onto a warm, wet hole in the side of an elk.

I come up with a gasp.

“Woah. Hungry?” Edward is standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, grin on his face like he just watched a monkey in a vest do an amusing trick, instead of some girl going to town on the local wildlife.

“Yes. Don’t laugh at me.” I stand, feeling suddenly unsteady, the slosh of blood in my stomach louder than the roar of the ocean. I wipe my face, certain I’m just making it worse, wishing I was smoother or cuter or at least better at covering all my awkwardness up with a cool new vampire veneer. Instead, I’m faster and stronger and sleeker but somehow just as odd as I’ve ever been.

“I’m not laughing. I just did the same thing to three of those.” He waves his hand absently at the elk, now looking a little more limp than it was at first sight. Of course there’s not a drop of blood on him.

Asshole.

“Your appetite will start to increase, the older you get. It will take more and more to sustain you.”

“I thought I wouldn’t age?” I kick at the side of the elk, now cool and starting to harden. I can’t help but think about all the dead body research I did for Alice and how it was just natural, the shift from soft and warm to hard and cold.

“Not technically. But you’ll still find yourself marking the time that passes.” Edward’s voice drops at the end, as though the thought alone is sad enough.

“How old are you, then?”

“Too old for you,” he laughs. “If you knew, you’d think I was disgusting.”

Probably not. I shake my head. “You don’t look a day over seventeen.”

“Illusion. And good genes.”

---

Edward needs to run off some steam. At least that’s how he puts it. I think maybe he needs some time alone but doesn’t know how to tell me. He’s looked even more drawn and pensive ever since the whole Alice fiasco. Worried and tortured ever since the whole biting me thing went down. He tells me he’ll be back in two hours, and I wonder how far he can run in that time. Probably clear up to Alaska and back.

When he’s gone, I look for Alice’s room.

I know it’s close by. I can smell it, the timid taste of her in the air. She lived with him for three years, and it smells like violets. Brown sugar. Baby angel tears with a healthy dose of demonic possession. It’s so strong, I’m either hallucinating the faint purple cloud wafting down the long dark hallway, or it’s actually there; I’m not sure which option to be more intrigued by.

I try every door, but only the one at the far end of the hall straight across from Edward’s own bedroom isn’t. I open that door to the set of a horror movie.

In this dank old house, all molded grey and shadowed black, there is a room of little girl carnage.              

Like Alice’s room at home but so much worse.

The wallpaper is still pink, despite sun-faded age, printed with gold foil filigree and velveteen flowers, all mauve and rose and pastel peach. There’s lace draped over the windows and canopying the bed and shading the lamps, all of it brittle and yellowing. There’s a musty white bedspread and a rag rug sewn with roses. There’s a pale pink vanity, with tarnished handles and a webbed mirror, spider-veined by a fist or old age. A trio of creepy plastic dolls sits slumped on the window seat with tangled hair, empty eyes, and frozen smiles.

Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. I shuffle into the room, a feeling of dread rising in  my throat. Alice’s stuffed leopard, the one that is more grey than pink, is lying abandoned on the bed. It’s smiling, despite the fact that it’s been left behind, and I wonder if she even cared that I brought it to her. I pick up the leopard, hold it close as I examine the top of the dresser nearby, littered with hair trinkets and a creaky old jewelry box that doesn’t play music anymore. A hair brush with long blonde hair wrapped up in it and a brittle bouquet of cornflowers so old, they disintegrate when I touch them.

The closet is full of clothing. Dresses. High necks and long sleeves and knee-length hemlines. Sashes and pinafores and petticoats. Horizontal lace and vertical chambray and built-in whalebone. All of them child-sized.

This isn’t just Alice’s room.

Nothing here is new enough to belong only to her.

Next

AN:

Hadley Hemingway is the prettiest flower in my meadow and I am the most annoying bumblebee.

Thank you for reading!

xo

HBM

Grim and Darling

Chapter Twenty Four

“You bit me.”

Edward is seated beside the bed, elbows on his knees, gaze between his feet and furrow in his brow, looking guilty enough to have just murdered a schoolhouse of children. Remorseful and        angry with himself. I feel like I’ve been asleep for an achy million years, a thousand painful decades, and I miss him so bad it’s all I can do not to fling myself into his arms.

Still, the first thing out of my mouth is an accusation.

Edward looks sheepish and glances away, mumbling under his breath. “Yeah. In a way.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? In a way?” My ears are ringing because every single bumblebee and double decker airplane and falling star that has ever existed in the history of time are all flying by at this very moment. My vision is warping so far I can see dust floating in a courtyard in Paris. My hands feel as hot as the seventh circle of hell. I’m freezing and dizzy, and I’m pretty sure my lungs are carved out of stone. They’re not working at all.

This must be what shock feels like.

“I didn’t just bite you.”

“Sure feels like you did.” I put a hand to my neck, and even though it’s not raw or open or even bleeding, it’s still painful in a strangely numb way. It’s cold and suspiciously still, no thump below the skin, no swish beneath the surface. I smash my fingers against place where I should have a hole at least the size of that blood-red mouth of his, where I should feel warm and sticky.

Where I should have a pulse.

“You would have died anyway, regardless of what I did.”

“I died?” I screech.

“Not exactly,” he mutters glumly.

“I died,” I say again, my voice sounding oddly monotone. I can’t pry my fingers away from my neck, and I can’t get air into my lungs. I feel dizzy-sick, like I just stepped off a roller coaster I wasn’t strapped into tightly enough.  

“No, you didn’t.” Edward is shaking his head, but he’s still not looking directly at me.

“But I’m not alive. I have no pulse,” I wheeze.

“True. But this isn’t death.”

“You’re sugarcoating something.”

“Yes.” He nods deliberately.

“For me? Or for you?” I ask. I still feel sick. Still feel like I could burst out of my skin or suddenly shrink down too small to see with the bare eye. I still feel like the sun is too strong and the moon is too far away and like the ground is softer than it had ever been before.

“For us both. Though, probably more for myself. I gave you the worst gift I could have ever given you.” His eyes fall to my mouth, and the tip of his tongue finds the tip of his fang. He pokes at it thoughtfully at it as he stares off at the trees.

Oh.

It’s not shock, this thing that I’m feeling. It’s not the creep of death or the panicked struggle to live.

It’s being a vampire.

“Fuck!” I scream. “Edward!” I’m on my feet before I even think of doing it, trembling and seasick on hard, dry land. “You turned me into a vampire!”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you!” My voice rips through my throat in a way that’s almost painful.

“Well, fuck you too!” He yells back, and that nasty word sounds so wrong in his prim and proper mouth, even he seems to recoil at the sound. He closes his eyes and lets out a ragged growl before he’s right up in my face. Finger to my chest. Nose brushing the very tip of my own. Eyes blazing like a million fires of the molten lava hell just below my feet.

“Fuck you too, Bella,” he hisses. “What was that shit? Kiss me; I taste delicious?” He spits another curse word, and I’m half-stuck on how sexy he sounds when he’s mad before I realize he’s mad at me. “That kiss had you—I had you all up in my head. Your scent. Your taste. And then, Alice… and you were bleeding and… I mean…” He pauses and seems to deflate, shoulders slumping and his chin landing on his chest. “What was supposed to happen there?”

“You weren’t supposed to bite me.”

“What was I supposed to do, then?”

“Kiss me. Like a normal, boring kiss.”

“Kissing should never be boring,” he grumbles.

Next

AN:

Hadley is the shit.

I fucking love her.

We all have her to thank for this little story being grammatically correct and also coherent.

Grim and Darling

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.

Next

AN:

EEPEEP!

*runs to Hadley's arms*