Chalk

20

Alice’s house was dark the next morning. Usually it was her at my back door telling me that I was late, but this morning it was me in her place. On her porch with my coffee cup wondering why the fuck she wasn’t answering the door.

Edward was still passed out on my bed, on his mouth open slightly and his limbs sprawled long and lean across the baby blue blanket. I’d woken with my cheek plastered to his chest, having fallen asleep on top of him last night, my leg was throbbing dully. I’d picked myself off him and made coffee as quietly as possible even though it barely mattered because I dropped a mug on the floor anyway, shattering it into a million pieces.

He didn’t even twitch.

I doctored my coffee and went in search of Alice, needing to unload about last night’s epic yet sexually frustrating awesomeness. We tried to make out some more, but every attempt ended in painful failure. Edward pressed his toes down on my leg hard enough to make my eyes tear up and I wedged my knee against his hip somehow when I abandoned my peas and tried to climb on top of him. He’d tossed me off and rolled against the mattress, groaning in pain into the covers and staying there for a long time after his breathing had calmed.

I hoped my sheets smelled ok.

Alice wasn’t home and I sat in her cushioned patio furniture to call her from my cell phone, clutching my coffee cup and watching everything lighten around me. If my yard was the quiet forest glade, Alice’s belonged to the slightly schizophrenic, distracted neighbor. There were plants in every shape, size, color and height. Strange sculptures and weaving stone pathways set in intricate twisting circles around her yard.

“Where are you?” I nagged when she answered, sounding like a mom and hating every second of it.

“Jasper’s.”

“Jasper’s?” I asked, feeling confused even though it made sense. “Why?”

“Well, I don’t know Bella,” Alice huffed into my ear.” Apparently you and Edward almost died yesterday and he seems a little freaked out about it. He says that rock came within inches of Edward’s head.”

“It did?” I let the panic well up in me again, choking me.

“I guess so. Are you ok?” From the way she asked, I knew that she thought I was much worse off than I was. I wondered how far the backlash had warped Jasper’s vision of the moment, sending us hurtling in entirely new directions, violent and raw with every recalled memory.

“My leg is sore. Edward’s bruised up, but we’re fine.”

“He’s there.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course she knew. “Yes.”

“We’ll be over soon. We need to talk.”

---

Alice took one look at my leg and gasped in horror. Edward’s bruised shoulder got an entire slap out of her, inflicted on his uninjured side out of mercy. She slapped Jasper for good measure and then glared at me.

“What would happen if you were out there, god knows fucking where, and you got pinned under a rock?” she hissed.

“That wouldn’t happen,” Edward growled and all three of us turned to look at him. He’d shrugged back into his shirt and still looked deliciously sleep rumpled. He was scowling at Alice.

“You don’t know that,” she retorted stubbornly.

“We’d move the rock. She’s never out there alone.”

“There are rocks even you can’t move, Edward.”

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