Waxing Crescent (Alice Cullen x Bella Swan)

Chapter 4 - The Return

It was Monday.

The start of a new school week, and the start of a whole new set of anxieties.

The longer Alice and Edward stayed away the more my thoughts drifted of their own volition, and the more I spiraled into fantasy.

Would Alice still talk to me? Spend time with me? For some reason, things felt different now.

Perhaps she would sense my obsessive curiosity. My hesitance to believe that they were all what they said they were?

Perhaps, it would only serve to scare her away.

This last, and most horrifying thought, wouldn't surprise me, but it'd certainly hurt. I imagined I was spending far more time thinking about her than she was ever thinking about me.

Any normal person with a modicum of self-preservation, would run screaming for the hills if they were given a bird's eye view into my mind right now. It was a spiderweb. A detective's pinboard. Each tangled web - link in the chain - leading back to Alice.

I gritted my teeth, trying not to groan in frustration. Dammit!

I couldn't see any of the Cullens through the throng of students; I craned my neck, trying, and failing, to spy them out through the jostling waves of impatient bodies.

Another no show and another day without her. Great.

We were gearing up for a field trip today. Mr. Banner had booked out all periods just to show us some plants and, with much enthusiasm on his part, compost.

I couldn't say I was too excited to play with worms and moldy potato peels, but at least it was something different.

I hadn't been sleeping well since Alice disappeared off the face of the earth. I felt restless and uncomfortable. When she disappeared, she'd somehow taken a part of me with her.

I'd also dreamt odd dreams. Nightmares. Blood the one constant; The one thing linking each and every dream - each nightmare - together.

Whether it was Alice standing over my bed with sharpened fangs, or Edward, it would always end in pools of blood, and my sweaty tumbling body flying out of bed to meet worn carpet.

This morning's dream was the weirdest of them all.

All of them were there. Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper. And, of course, Alice.

Their eyes glowed a startling claret as they crept towards me from the dark. Edward stood in the lead, beckoning them all forward, his eyes the hungriest of them all. His teeth flecked with what I could only describe as... venom?

But it wasn't what had been in the dream that was strange, but what had come after.

I'd woken up in the early hours as if I'd been yanked awake by an invisible force.

The smell of lilac coated my pillow while his blood-red eyes still seared behind my eyelids. A part of me wanted to scream, but I was awake. The danger had passed. And, yet, it didn't feel that way. Not at all.

It felt like he was still there. Somewhere in the periphery. Just out of grasp.

I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched the whole morning.

When I'd gotten ready to leave for school, the scent of lilac remained thick in the air. I'd never dreamt of something so real before.

I figured my obsession was finally reaching its fullest conclusion; I had gone insane.

Oh well. There was nothing for it, really.

I swallowed hard and stumbled my way onto the bus, kicking my feet all the way.