Between the Perennial Blooms || Paul Lahote

Twenty Three | Buttercup

"wine, blood — before those offerings came the soul; delicately plucked from inside, some prefer it drawn out by teeth with the jagged edges, the melancholy giving it a sweet aftertaste."
—Eliot C. | excerpt from a hunt

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W A R N I N G (Graphic Content)
(of the violent variety)
18+

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Something's changed in me,

Bailey wrote unblinkingly, unable to stop the mindless scribble of her hand across the blank page laid out on the desk before her.

Something bad.

I'm not sure I even remember what I was afraid of before this. Maybe my mother — the things she could do. Part of me must've been scared of my Gran too, though not in the way you might think. More so it was terror of the idea that she would one day leave me — just up and disappear without any form of explanation or goodbye. Seems that fear wasn't so far-fetched after all.

But I've come to fear something anew now.

When they say his name, my hands tremble. I try to hide it — clasp them together underneath the table, tuck them tightly beneath my thighs, curl them firmly into fists against my stomach. And when I think back on that fateful afternoon, my entire body floods with horror. He had only ever been so sweet. Yet when I close my eyes and picture his face, all I see is the snarl of something that belongs to the hauntings of shadows and the terrors of nightmares.

I wish I wasn't afraid. I wish I was stronger, braver, not so easily daunted. I wish I wasn't so weak. But I'm only human, and in league with boys who turn into wolves and women with skin as cold as ice, I worry I might never regain that sense of security I once felt here in La Push. The homes are still the same, the pleasant warmth is still there, and the red dirt roads all still remind me of home in Acoma back before all of this began, but the little house on the hill where my blood once stained the floor overshadows everything I used to find comforting in this place. It haunts me throughout the day, haunts me even more so at night, and sometimes when I look down at the bandages on my thigh that I still have yet to glimpse of underneath, all I can see is the flesh of it ripped and pulled apart like strips of membrane off the underside of a slab of ribs. 'It'll scar', Paul had said to me in the hospital just over a week ago. But now, as I sit here with a sickness in my gut that hasn't gone away nor lessened since, I'm starting to realize that maybe he wasn't only talking about my skin. Because that afternoon Quil ripped apart a piece of my psyche too, and though I'll never have the courage to ask it aloud, how long does a wound like that take to heal?

Maybe never, I think.

Because sometimes when Paul touches my skin, all I see are Quil's claws in their place.

---

"Bay?" Bella's voice sounded throughout the quiet of the downstairs living room, disrupting the stolid atmosphere of the home she had so many days ago left behind. "Charlie?"

It was nine o'clock on a Wednesday evening as the eldest Swan sister closed the front door softly behind her. She had her bag in one hand and her newly reunited boyfriend's fingers threaded gently through the digits of her other, and her eyes wandered over the empty room with furrowed brows and a tightness in her chest. The home appeared desolate, empty as far as she could tell, and the only other sound apart from her shallow breathing and quiet footsteps was the muffled murmurs of voices on the TV sounding from somewhere inside the living room. Surely they were here, she thought to herself absentmindedly. Surely they were home. Where else would they be so late? After all, it was nine o'clock on a Wednesday evening, and Charlie had to be up early for work come the morn.