(no subject)
It's maddening to sit next to her.
One foot away for fifty minutes, making his shoulders move briefly up and down in a continual pattern to assume the act of breathing, or actually breathing, sheerly as little and infrequently as possible, since every time he does the longing scalds through his entire body. The gut wrenching promise of true satisfaction only inches away.
One foot away for fifty minutes, trying to translate the smallest idocincries of the first mind he can't read. Why she sighs into her shoulder or twirls her hair around her finger. Why she taps her foot or drums her pencil or picks at her sleeve. Why she slams her books down or comes in late or mutters half sentences to herself. What it all means.
Whether she hates him or doesn't even care, since she hasn't said a word in the whole month either.
The epiphany, when it comes, isn't the hard part.
It is madness -- the madness that only Isabella Swan can evoke in him -- that has him paying attention to high schoolers for the first time in half a dozen decades. It's the only way to see her, to try to answer of the hundred questions she has him asking. Through their eyes, through their own personal translations and opinions of their Bella. The way her face scrunches or what her tone means, what she speaks when she will and their assumptions of her silences.
Some of them, like Angela, were calming. Even comforting.
Others, like the child approaching their desk now, caused his blood to boil.
Mike Newton. The boy wonder who spent far too much of class studying Bella as though she were a bug under glass he was figuring out the best way to catch. That was, when he wasn't just vulgarly envisioning what he could do with her once he got, his inevitable, way. He was stumbling after her -- bumbling was a better word for the badly planned job of asking Bella to ask him to the dance by means of showing her someone else had already asked but that he was keeping them on hold until she would.
Apparently he hadn't the vaguest clue what Ladies Choice meant.
But he watches the whole thing through the filter of Newton, trying to figure her out. Her thoughts and reactions and opinion of him, until he's side tracked. She isn't going to say yes to Mike. The part is obvious. But someday, somewhere, to someone, she is going to yes. And suddenly the future he's envisioned saving her from death for
graduation career love marriage children grandchildren life growing old dying
causes only an explosive, violent pain.
Leaves him wanting to snap Newton's head just for looking at her. Not because he's the smallest threat, but because he could be a message for that inevitable person. Yet he can't move, can't shift, can't do anything but watch her (Bella Bella Bella) as she set her pale cheeks in her hands, her long brown hair swallowing her face, shoulders curving inward, head shaking, and sighs.
A remote and maddening island he can't reach or read or understand.
But then she looks at him and he can't even remember he's supposed to look away.
And when he answers the teacher, stealing the answer, he doesn't want to.
The epiphany, the sheer size of it, isn't the hard part.
"Bella?"
"What? Are you speaking to me again?"
"No, not really."
"Then what do you want, Edward?"
"I'm sorry. I'm being very rude, I know. But it's better this way, really."
"I don't know what you mean."
"It's better if we're not friends. Trust me."
"It's too bad you didn't figure that out earlier. You could have saved yourself all this regret."
"Regret? Regret for what?"
"For not just letting the stupid van squish me!"
"You think I regret saving your life?"
"I know you do."
"You don't know anything."