Between the Perennial Blooms || Paul Lahote

Thirty Six | Yarrow

"V.
I went for a walk where I've never been and found myself where I always was. I have found that this, too, is progress."
—mvrdvrous | SEARCHING FOR MYSELF AROUND STREET CORNERS

• • •

The next few days passed by in a blur. Bored from the prosaic routine of it all, Bailey opted for busying herself with menial tasks in the hopes to pass the time. As seemed to be her go-to coping mechanism when plagued by monotony, she cleaned the house from top to bottom starting in one room before moving on to the next, and though she had been repeatedly told not to worry, all the while she constantly looked over her shoulder. 

Many a time someone had called to check up on her. Whether it was Alice during her lunch break at school, Jasper on his way home with Emmett and Rosalie beside him, or Jacob and Paul as soon as they caught a lull in patrols, Bailey felt as if she were constantly glued to her cell phone. She understood their concern; truly she did. But as the excessive 'is everything okay's' and the repetitive 'call me if anything seems off's' echoed down the phone line, an increased tendency to worry easily followed alongside it. Because knowing that someone had been inside her home — more so something if one was being technical — when Charlie had been only rooms away and oblivious to it all only augmented the fact that whoever it was had a greater plan at large, and the endless possibilities of their motives simply terrified Bailey to no end. Anything could have happened — perhaps even would have had she and Bella not returned from the Reservation at the exact moment they did — and just the thought of an intruder violating her family's most personable space had her knees trembling where she stood. She hated the idea of it, hated the fact that she now couldn't sleep unless she first checked that her window was locked at least twice and her bedroom door effectively barricaded by the small desk that usually sat in the corner of her room. However, rather than speak her fears aloud or allow the newly developed waver in her tone be detected, Bailey opted for instead simply grinning and baring it. It'll be okay, she took to reassuring herself in the midnight hours or when she found herself in a room without light and that crippling anxiety and fear crept up on her once more like a thief in the night. It'll be okay, it'll be okay, it'll be okay. And though she didn't quite believe it yet, she convinced herself that even if it wasn't okay right there and then, someday soon, eventually, it would be.

So later that night after she had changed into her pajamas following the moving of her desk in front of her door as had become habit, Bailey coached herself through several sets of deep breathing. You're fine, she reminded herself. You're good. And she would have been any other night if she weren't such a luckless girl, but because Bailey Swan was renowned for her less than pleasant relationship with good fortune, a sudden rustling of leaves beneath her bedroom window had her freezing where she stood. What was that? she wondered with dread, eyes wide and chest heaving as fear pulsed through her like a straight-shock of electricity to the system. Her hands paused their fiddling on the top button of her sleep-shirt and she swallowed the thick lump of panic that swelled in her throat as every scenario under the sun ran rampant through her mind. Vampire, Volturi, Victoria. Her heart skipped a beat at the last thought and with slow, unsteady steps, Bailey crossed the distance to her window. Morbid curiosity plagued her in that moment and without even a thought to what she might do if the source of the noise turned out to be any one of those options, Bailey peeled back the curtain covering her window with quivering fingers and bated breath. She looked out into the night and scanned the backyard and the surrounding forest until her eyes stopped on a rustling of trees just a few yards away. Vampire, she almost immediately confirmed. Yet as a shadowed shape came into view, Bailey breathed a sigh of relief. Wolf, she corrected herself.