take it."
"Some trust, please, Bella."
My hand was in my pocket, curled tightly around the key. I pursed my
lips, deliberated, then shook my head with a tight grin.
"Nope. Not a chance."
He raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
I started to step around him, heading for the driver's side. He might
have let me pass if I hadn't wobbled slightly. Then again, he might not
have. His arm created an inescapable snare around my waist.
"Bella, I've already expended a great deal of personal effort at this
point to keep you alive. I'm not about to let you behind the wheel of a
vehicle when you can't even walk straight. Besides, friends don't let
friends drive drunk," he quoted with a chuckle. I could smell the
unbearably sweet fragrance coming off his chest.
"Drunk?" I objected.
"You're intoxicated by my very presence." He was grinning that playful
smirk again.
"I can't argue with that," I sighed. There was no way around it; I
couldn't resist him in anything. I held the key high and dropped it,
watching his hand flash like lightning to catch it soundlessly. "Take it
easy — my truck is a senior citizen."
"Very sensible," he approved.
"And are you not affected at all?" I asked, irked. "By my presence?"
Again his mobile features transformed, his expression became soft, warm.
He didn't answer at first; he simply bent his face to mine, and brushed
his lips slowly along my jaw, from my ear to my chin, back and forth. I
trembled.
"Regardless," he finally murmured, "I have better reflexes."
===========================================================================
14. MIND OVER MATTER
He could drive well, when he kept the speed reasonable, I had to admit.
Like so many things, it seemed to be effortless to him. He barely looked
at the road, yet the tires never deviated so much as a centimeter from
the center of the lane. He drove one-handed, holding my hand on the seat.
Sometimes he gazed into the setting sun, sometimes he glanced at me — my
face, my hair blowing out the open window, our hands twined together.
He had turned the radio to an oldies station, and he sang along with a
song I'd never heard. He knew every line.
"You like fifties music?" I asked.
"Music in the fifties was good. Much better than the sixties, or the
seventies, ugh!" He shuddered. "The eighties were bearable."
"Are you ever going to tell me how old you are?" I asked, tentative, not
wanting to upset his buoyant humor.
"Does it matter much?" His smile, to my relief, remained unclouded.
"No, but I still wonder…" I grimaced. "There's nothing like an unsolved
mystery to keep you up at night."
"I wonder if it will upset you," he reflected to himself. He gazed into
the sun; the minutes passed.
"Try me," I finally said.
He sighed, and then looked into my eyes, seeming to forget the road
completely for a time. Whatever he saw there must have encouraged him. He
looked into the sun — the light of the setting orb glittered off his skin
in ruby-tinged sparkles — and spoke.
"I was born in Chicago in 1901." He paused and glanced at me from the
corner of his eyes. My face was carefully unsurprised, patient for the
rest. He smiled a tiny smile and continued. "Carlisle found me in a
hospital in the summer of 1918. I was seventeen, and dying of the Spanish
influenza."
He heard my intake of breath, though it was barely audible to my own
ears. He looked down into my eyes again.
"I don't remember it well — it was a very long time ago, and human
memories fade." He was lost in his thoughts for a short time before he
went on. "I do remember how it felt, when Carlisle saved me. It's not an
easy thing, not something you could forget."
"Your parents?"
"They had already died from the disease. I was alone. That was why he
chose me. In all the chaos of the epidemic, no one would ever realize I
was gone."
"How did he… save you?"
A few seconds passed before he answered. He seemed to choose his words
carefully.
"It was difficult. Not many of us have the restraint necessary to
accomplish it. But Carlisle has always been the most humane, the most
compassionate of us… I don't think you could find his equal throughout
all of history." He paused. "For me, it was merely very, very painful."
I could tell from the set of his lips, he would say no more on this
subject. I suppressed my curiosity, though it was far from idle. There
were many things I needed to think through on this particular issue,
things that were only beginning to occur to me. No doubt his quick mind
had already comprehended every aspect that eluded me.
His soft voice interrupted my thoughts. "He acted from loneliness. That's
usually the reason behind the choice. I was the first in Carlisle's
family, though he found Esme soon after. She fell from a cliff. They
brought her straight to the hospital morgue, though, somehow, her heart
was still beating."
"So you must be dying, then, to become…" We never said the word, and I
couldn't frame it now.
"No, that's just Carlisle. He would never do that to someone who had
another choice." The respect in his voice was profound whenever he spoke
of his father figure. "It is easier he says, though," he continued, "if
the blood is weak." He looked at the now-dark road, and I could feel the
subject closing again.
"And Emmett and Rosalie?"
"Carlisle brought Rosalie to our family next. I didn't realize till much
later that he was hoping she would be to me what Esme was to him — he was
careful with his thoughts around me." He rolled his eyes. "But she was
never more than a sister. It was only two years later that she found
Emmett. She was hunting — we were in Appalachia at the time — and found a
bear about to finish him off. She carried him back to Carlisle, more than
a hundred miles, afraid she wouldn't be able to do it herself. I'm only
beginning to guess how difficult that journey was for her." He threw a
pointed glance in my direction, and raised our hands, still folded
together, to brush my cheek with the back of his hand.
"But she made it," I encouraged, looking away from the unbearable beauty
of his eyes.
"Yes," he murmured. "She saw something in his face that made her strong
enough. And they've been together ever since. Sometimes they live
separately from us, as a married couple. But the younger we pretend to
be, the longer we can stay in any given place. Forks seemed perfect, so
we all enrolled in high school." He laughed. "I suppose we'll have to go
to their wedding in a few years, again."
"Alice and Jasper?"
"Alice and Jasper are two very rare creatures. They both developed a
conscience, as we refer to it, with no outside guidance. Jasper belonged
to another… family, a very different kind of family. He became depressed,
and he wandered on his own. Alice found him. Like me, she has certain
gifts above and beyond the norm for our kind."
"Really?" I interrupted, fascinated. "But you said you were the only one
who could hear people's thoughts."
"That's true. She knows other things. She sees things — things that might
happen, things that are coming. But it's very subjective. The future
isn't set in stone. Things change."
His jaw set when he said that, and his eyes darted to my face and away so
quickly that I wasn't sure if I only imagined it.
"What kinds of things does she see?"
"She saw Jasper and knew that he was looking for her before he knew it
himself. She saw Carlisle and our family, and they came together to find
us. She's most sensitive to non-humans. She always sees, for example,
when another group of our kind is coming near. And any threat they may
pose."
"Are there a lot of… your kind?" I was surprised. How many of them could
walk among us undetected?
"No, not many. But most won't settle in any one place. Only those like
us, who've given up hunting you people" — a sly glance in my direction —
"can live together with humans for any length of time. We've only found
one other family like ours, in a small village in Alaska. We lived
together for a time, but there were so many of us that we became too
noticeable. Those of us who live… differently tend to band together."
"And the others?"
"Nomads, for the most part. We've all lived that way at times. It gets
tedious, like anything else. But we run across the others now and then,
because most of us prefer the North."
"Why is that?"
We were parked in front of my house now, and he'd turned off the truck.
It was very quiet and dark; there was no moon. The porch light was off so
I knew my father wasn't home yet.
"Did you have your eyes open this afternoon?" he teased. "Do you think I
could walk down the street in the sunlight without causing traffic
accidents? There's a reason why we chose the Olympic Peninsula, one of
the most sunless places in the world. It's nice to be able to go outside
in the day. You wouldn't believe how tired you can get of nighttime in
eighty-odd years."
"So that's where the legends came from?"
"Probably."
"And Alice came from another family, like Jasper?"
"No, and that is a mystery. Alice doesn't remember her human life at all.
And she doesn't know who created her. She awoke alone. Whoever made her
walked away, and none of us understand why, or how, he could. If she
hadn't had that other sense, if she hadn't seen Jasper and Carlisle and
known that she would someday become one of us, she probably would have
turned into a total savage."
There was so much to think through, so much I still wanted to ask. But,
to my great embarrassment, my stomach growled. I'd been so intrigued, I
hadn't even noticed I was hungry. I realized now that I was ravenous.
"I'm sorry, I'm keeping you from dinner."
"I'm fine, really."
"I've never spent much time around anyone who eats food. I forget."
"I want to stay with you." It was easier to say in the darkness, knowing
as I spoke how my voice would betray me, my hopeless addiction to him.
"Can't I come in?" he asked.
"Would you like to?" I couldn't picture it, this godlike creature sitting
in my father's shabby kitchen chair.
"Yes, if it's all right." I heard the door close quietly, and almost
simultaneously he was outside my door, opening it for me.
"Very human," I complimented him.
"It's definitely resurfacing."
He walked beside me in the night, so quietly I had to peek at him
constantly to be sure he was still there. In the darkness he looked much
more normal. Still pale, still dreamlike in his beauty, but no longer the
fantastic sparkling creature of our sunlit afternoon.
He reached the door ahead of me and opened it for me. I paused halfway
through the frame.
"The door was unlocked?"
"No, I used the key from under the eave."
I stepped inside, flicked on the porch light, and turned to look at him
with my eyebrows raised. I was sure I'd never used that key in front of
him.
"I was curious about you."
"You spied on me?" But somehow I couldn't infuse my voice with the proper
outrage. I was flattered.
He was unrepentant. "What else is there to do at night?"
I let it go for the moment and went down the hall to the kitchen. He was
there before me, needing no guide. He sat in the very chair I'd tried to
picture him in. His beauty lit up the kitchen. It was a moment before I
could look away.
I concentrated on getting my dinner, taking last night's lasagna from the
fridge, placing a square on a plate, heating it in the microwave. It
revolved, filling the kitchen with the smell of tomatoes and oregano. I
didn't take my eyes from the plate of food as I spoke.
"How often?" I asked casually.
"Hmmm?" He sounded as if I had pulled him from some other train of
thought.
I still didn't turn around. "How often did you come here?"
"I come here almost every night."
I whirled, stunned. "Why?"
"You're interesting when you sleep." He spoke matter-of-factly. "You
talk."
"No!" I gasped, heat flooding my face all the way to my hairline. I
gripped the kitchen counter for support. I knew I talked in my sleep, of
course; my mother teased me about it. I hadn't thought it was something I
needed to worry about here, though.
His expression shifted instantly to chagrin. "Are you very angry with me?"
"That depends!" I felt and sounded like I'd had the breath knocked out of
me.
He waited.
"On?" he urged.
"What you heard!" I wailed.
Instantly, silently, he was at my side, taking my hands carefully in his.
"Don't be upset!" he pleaded. He dropped his face to the level of my
eyes, holding my gaze. I was embarrassed. I tried to look away.
"You miss your mother," he whispered. "You worry about her. And when it
rains, the sound makes you restless. You used to talk about home a lot,
but it's less often now. Once you said, 'It's too green.'" He laughed
