Ben arose from bed with effortless lightness, relieved by last night's expurgation of the burdens that he had been bearing, a yoke around his neck, for far too long. The familiar pre-dawn haze beyond his window appeared to froth and boil under the rising sun, presaging its late morning dissipation to the bright powder blue that Alice had promised.
He clothed himself mechanically, with whatever his hands touched, layering himself by rote, preoccupied by fresh anxieties over what the day might bring. On his way downstairs he felt his trouser pockets for his iPhone and realized that he had consigned it to cold storage with a flood of intense relief. There would be no errant distractions today.
Charlie had already gone. This relieved him, too, for the call of the river had absolved Ben of the obligation to say goodbye.
He ate mechanically and cleaned up after himself as he chewed and swallowed. Was he being excessively fastidious, to think that since he was likely going to his death, he ought not to burden his survivors with a dirty sink? Yet, on that very same impulse, he bounded back up the stairs to set his bedroom in order. He made the bed and tidied his desk. Then he closed and latched the windows.
He considered leaving his wallet behind, since it held his identification, which he presumed his parents would need... if, well... and then he realized that the wallet also held, in the concealed slot stitched into its spine, the folded slip of paper on which were written his symbolic question to Edythe and her laconic reply. This crumpled, salvaged and refolded letter exchange was the only thing from Edythe that he possessed, his only objective evidence that she was real and had ever touched his life.
He stuffed the wallet into his front pocket. His good luck charm. He smiled and nodded with grim determination. Now he could face his fate head-on.
He took a deep breath and stood at the front door, to wait.
He felt himself as never before, every bit of himself, from toes to fingers to scalp, the endless interchange of calls and answers that said, I. Soon, those innumerable messengers might cease and disperse like dust. He knew this rationally, but he couldn't fear it, because he envisioned Edythe, and he could not find the capacity anywhere within himself to be afraid.
With no preamble whatsoever, neither footsteps on the porch nor the slightest whisper, a quiet knock sent infinitesimal tremors through the air.
He opened the door, and there she stood, looking up at him from inches away. Her face must have been pressed to the door when she had knocked.
She peered up at him, inexplicably, through garish designer sunglasses emblazoned with buttercups on their yellow rims. She studied him with pink lips pursed, button nose upturned, one auburn eyelash arched and visible from behind the giant fishbowl lenses.
Her waist-length auburn hair was drawn back from her forehead and neck, gathered into a white alice band. She wore a light tan sweater with a scoop neck, layered over what looked like a white t-shirt, and she wore baggy jeans with the hint of a khaki layer beneath.
"Hey, you," Edythe breathed, "you look sweet."
"As do you. Did you really walk here? Or did Alice drive you?" That could not have been possible; he'd been standing at the door for several minutes and would have heard an arriving and departing car.
Edythe ignored the question and remarked, "We're both wearing feng shui beige, today. Am I calming and soothing?"
"Hardly," he admitted, looking down at himself to realize that she was entirely correct; they had dressed like twins, entirely by coincidence, as he had thrown his clothes on blindly.
"You're going to burn up in all those layers, though," she advised him.
"Layers are designed for removal."
She grinned and told him, "I look forward to that."
"You're layered, too," he pointed out.
"True, but I don't sweat."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Like, even in Phoenix, you wouldn't perspire at all? That must be convenient."
She shrugged and said, "I don't tan, either, which is a bummer. But I pick up dew, though, if I'm out for the sunrise. Just like a gravestone. It tickles."
He had no idea what to say to that.
He reached out with his palm and gently held her cold cheek. She tilted her head gratefully into his warmth, eyes closed, breathing peacefully.
She reached up with her bare hand and whispered, "Please hold still." With utmost care, she placed three fingertips on his carotid artery, and she slowly breathed.
He whispered, "Are you still afraid?"
She nodded against his hand and looked up at him inquiringly.
"Me, too," he confirmed.
Then he spoke up. "Hell. Let's get this over with."
She chuckled, as they walked together to his truck, "That's the spirit. Let's whistle past the graveyard. I can't diminish or whitewash it, Ben. That wouldn't be fair to you. What we're doing is extraordinarily reckless. I don't know myself. Not anywhere near enough for this."
"That's another thing you'll explain, I hope."
She nodded noncommittally, as though to say, if we make it that far.
When she deftly hopped into the passenger side of his truck, the cab settled alarmingly, listing to starboard. He climbed in himself with a rueful expression, and his own weight provided some meager counterbalance.
"This poor decrepit truck has very old leaf springs," he lamented.
"Sorry," she said. "You trumpeted the abilities of this beast with high acclaim. Go slowly," she suggested. "Watch for bumps."
"Where is this place?"
"A'ways, but we're in no hurry," she said. "We have all day, don't we?"
"Indeed we do."
Ben turned the key, and the beast awoke with thunderous distemper, shaking the entire neighborhood with its din. Edythe remarked that the mere sound of this old red Bessy in centuries past would have routed battalions. He sullenly agreed with her and knew that it wouldn't settle into an idle, no matter how much time he gave the charred cylinders to warm up, so he threw it straight into reverse, daring the engine to seize.
"Jinx, lightning round," he muttered as he backed out, "if the engine dies before we get out of the driveway, we're off the hook, and the Seattle roadtrip's back on."
She scrunched her nose, puzzled. "What's that all about?"
"Inside joke."
She cracked up and said, "Well don't let me disturb you."
He laughed with her. He would have to explain his morbid little game of solitaire sometime. Fatalist, indeed.
He put his seatbelt on, a mechanical, automatic thing, as they rumbled forward. Edythe didn't bother, and he saw no point in making an issue of it. She obviously had greater mass density than the truck.
She directed him toward the village, from whence they would head northwest on one of the narrow, forested state routes, which would be sparsely utilized at this hour on a Saturday.
Ben's truck rumbled, wheezed and clattered through the sleepy village. Edythe didn't seem to mind the pace. When they cleared the last stop sign before the junction to their prescribed route, he shoved the transmission into third gear, where it would stay for awhile, and then he offered his hand, palm up, on the bench seat.
She took his hand gratefully, ever so careful, and whispered, "Let me know if I get too cold."
He didn't respond. He thrilled with her touch and wouldn't be the one to call an end to it. Edythe glowered out of the passenger window and silently resolved to give him frequent breaks from her Arctic touch.
"Your eyes are pretty today," he remarked. "I don't think I've ever seen them so light."
"I tanked up," she admitted. "I'm all bloated and sloshy."
"That makes this easier?"
She shrugged plaintively. She honestly didn't know. She'd lost her thirst after the first stag yesterday, but the bloodlust had come on again, as strong as before, on each kill, again and again and again. In her experience, she had an insatiable thirst. Where she put it all, she couldn't imagine. One of the lesser mysteries about her damnation.
She sullenly murmured out of her window, holding his hand, "I don't suppose you changed your mind about telling Charlie where you would be."
He exhaled and shook his head.
She sighed.
She didn't even bother to ask if he had told anyone else. She had overheard all of his conversations at school in the past two days. To the contrary, he had gone out of his way to cut the cord of every possible association between them today.
"Are you angry with me?" he asked.
"No. I wish you'd told someone. But this is your way of going all in. I understand it. I do. You're a very courageous and daring person. I knew that." She lapsed to a despondent silence and tried to imagine his death on her shoulders.
Soon enough, despite the truck's glacial pace in third gear, they crossed the town limits. Lawns and houses ceded to thick underbrush and dense forest.
They said nothing until she directed him north on a local route and instructed him to drive all the way to a dead end.
That sounded ominous to Ben. The end of the road.
There was a short trail past the rusty guardrail, she explained, but it led to nowhere special. "Rocks surrounded by moldy cardboard and beer cans."
He felt intensely relieved to hear that they would be taking another way. The best kept secrets on earth were tucked away beyond the last vestiges of human footsteps.
"We'll be hiking," she said, "but we have all morning to get there. More of a walk than a hike, really."
"Is there at least a picnic table at the end?"
She smiled and said, "Afraid not. Just nature. My favorite spot for sunny days. It ought to be warm once we get started. I really hope you'll remove a layer or two."
He winked and said, "Only if you do."
She smirked and murmured, "I just might."
She sighed and shifted from the window. She turned her body and sat on a hip, facing the central driveshaft column. She took her hand off his for the third time, when she felt his stolen heat coursing up her arm. She clenched her fist in her lap and looked at him with melancholic longing. Thief of heat, thief of blood, thief of life, parasite, leech.
"I really wish someone knew we were together today," she said again.
Ben stared ahead at the road, felt the minute declivities of the asphalt in his fingers, transmitted through the old iron steering column. Her penetrating golden eyes teased his peripheral vision. He forced his hands to stay still and not to tremble. He earnestly wished she would stop finding ways to tell him that he would die today.
Even now, he saw Edythe more as angel than vampire, when compelled by her unremitting warnings to identify her as anything at all.
He held his eyes to the road. He resolutely refused to make excuses for himself. He had vowed to Edythe, all the way back at the hospital, that he would not betray her secrets, and now of all times that promise felt like an imperative. He intended on seeing his way through this day of reckoning. He had more faith in Edythe than she had in herself, and he needed to show her that. Besides, he loved her unreservedly, and he definitely wasn't ready to admit that to her. Not when she was still at the stage of vacillating between being his best friend and having him for lunch.
She scowled and muttered, too fast and high for Ben to discern, a rant that spanned no more then fifty milliseconds. 'Alice is right; we're both doing everything we can to make this impossible. We are both going to die. And he knows it as well as I.' So he had chosen, as had she. So be it, she decided. She couldn't go on without him. All or nothing.
As Ben drove, his consternation transformed to resentment and then to anger, over having to listen to her soft muttering that sounded like fast-forward in falsetto. It didn't even sound like English. "Throw your hissy fit in silence, Edythe. I'm trying to drive."
She stared at him, freshly shocked. He could see, out of his peripheral vision, that her eyes were even wider open than her mouth. Good. That got a rise out of her. He hadn't thought it possible to surprise or shock her. Point to the visiting team. Pushy arrogant know-it-all vampire.
Her cheeks and mouth went through contortions, and he could just imagine the fury she wanted to unleash. But in the end she just threw herself around, crossed her arms, and stared out of her window.
They were silent for the rest of the drive. He could feel the waves of fury and disapproval rolling off her, and he couldn't force himself to recite words of apology when he didn't feel sorry. He most wanted to tell her to just kill him and put him out of his misery, if she refused to love him back. But he also resolved to take death silently, should it come, without betraying his hopeless love for her at the end, should she go for his neck, or else his declaration of love would become what? A plea for mercy? A last-ditch appeal for a stay of execution, solicited at her feet? Not a chance. Better to go down in a blaze by goading her into opening his throat.
Speak of the devil. End of the road.
The asphalt broke up into crumbled fragments for a stretch, the last hundred yards ruined over the years by frost heaves and no longer maintained, which then gave way to a few car lengths of muddy compacted gravel, and then nothing but soggy dirt. The grille of his truck kissed a small wooden marker at the head of an ancient and ineffectual guardrail. He could see the thin foot trail stretching away into the forest ahead of them. He parked on the narrow shoulder and stepped out, not sure what to do with himself, because she was still angry, and he no longer had driving as an excuse to not look at her.
Already the air felt much warmer now than it had been in Forks since the day he had arrived in Olympia, almost muggy under the thin, dissipating clouds.
She was still in the truck, fixing her clothes and hair. He left her there to stew and walked ten yards to the trail head, stepping carefully over tangled weeds, skittish as a hunted fawn. He stared off into the woods, down the path that he already knew they would not be taking, set his teeth, and returned to the truck, picking his way carefully over the muddy ruts. He stubbornly yanked the sweater over his head and tossed it into the cab, glad he'd worn the t-shirt, with five miles of hiking ahead of him.
He heard her door slam and looked over to see that she'd removed her sweater, too, and twisted her hair up into a messy bun adorned with brightly luminous free tendrils. His eyes always became transfixed by her lips and eyes, and it took him a second to realize that she'd taken off much more than her sweater.
Jesus Christ.
Her back was to him. All she had on was a thin white tank top, loosely fit and cut so high that her entire midriff was bare, high enough to reveal nearly half of her ribcage. The arm holes were deeply scooped down the sides of her torso, and as she fiddled with her hair he could plainly see the pale curves of her breasts. Her entire body seemed at times like animated stone, poised and unyielding, particularly in times of stress, and her chest was no different. She held her structure, solid as sculpture.
The trousers had come off, too. Now she wore just khaki shorts, tight around her lean bottom and cut high enough to reveal the sharp horizontal crease where her muscular buttocks joined the backs of her legs. He felt like a base, inveterate lecher, by dint of these crass observations, and damn his eyes, guilty as charged, since he could neither tear his eyes away nor unthink his impressions.
She faced away from him and stared off into the forest. He studied her delicate, avian shoulder blades, almost like furled wings concealed beneath her pale skin. Her arms were thin as chair spindles, seemingly fragile and wasted, dry skin on kindling, yet he had seen those arms perform miracles and perpetrate horrors.
She turned to face him and found him gawping, fairly paralyzed by her unannounced transformation. He had only ever seen her dressed for school, and he couldn't possibly have known that her preferred mode of attire, on her personal downtime, typically consisted of much less than this. Suddenly she felt a bit bashful. She bit her lip and said, "I can put stuff back on."
He blurted, "No— I mean— it's chilly but the day's supposed to warm up"—
He sounded like an idiot. What he wanted was to see even more of her.
She rushed, "I promised to show you what I look like in the sun... and we have privacy here—and boys—human boys—seem to like it when girls wear tank tops and sports bras in gym."
He clamped his mouth shut and hoped she hadn't caught him drooling. "Really Edythe, it's cool... you look great...."
"Really?" she asked shyly. She actually needed confirmation. The loose tank top revealed the undersides of her breasts. How would he ever survive this outing?
"Edythe, you look fantastic— unless you're cold"—
"No, I'm good."
He figuratively kicked himself and forced himself to shut up. He sounded ridiculous. She herself felt colder than the interior walls of Charlie's fish freezer; on a rational plane he doubted that the air temperature mattered to her at all.
"Well," she said, turning back to the woods, "this way then," glancing over her shoulder at him. She started walking into the dark forest directly to the west of the truck. She had told him that she had her own unmarked path through the big old growth trees stacked upon the rotten, moss-covered bones of forests long gone, and now she reassured him that they would go slowly and that she could literally find her way blind.
He followed her steps, off the rutted end of the road, into the low groundcover, and he struggled to wrench his eyes from her pronounced knobby spine, to watch his step. By his many glimpses of her thin, boney arms and calves, he should have known that she would look somehow wasted and emaciated all over, as though she had spent an age half-starved in a dark, solitary cell.
Under the tall dark sentinels, just off the road, she turned to stare up at him, once more, tormented by the question that she needed to ask him, here at the start of their trail through the labyrinth.
He wore a tortured expression, himself, and she became vexed by her awareness that she had led him on over these past two and a half months, perhaps not intentionally or maliciously, yet all the same, she wondered if now he merely labored under a misshapen infatuation, attracted by her physical lures. Then again, did his motivations matter all that much? He knows what I am, she silently mused, and he knows that I doubt my ability to control myself, yet here he stands.
She didn't know how to lead him through this labyrinth to her outstretched hand, so that they could thread a way through hidden paths and emerge together on the one safe crossing over the abyss that yawned before their feet. She knew only that she couldn't accomplish it alone. She felt inspired by his faith in her, and his courage engendered awe. Hopefully they would be able to reconcile their respective natures and emerge as one, together.
She had to empower him to make a fully informed choice. He had one mortal life. Just one. She would imperil his one life with every step toward that abominable meadow, and he had to walk that path freely.
She looked up at him, and she asked her question.
"Ben, I need to ask explicitly. One more time. Do you want to go home?" she asked quietly, tempered with shallowly concealed pain. "We'll go back. Right now. I will return you to your house, and I will disappear. It will be as though I never existed."
He closed the distance between them and took her little hands in his own. She looked down at their hands, briefly joined. She felt so cold that he had to repress a shiver. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her, but he couldn't do it, not here and now, not with the labyrinth sprawled ahead of them, the devilish obfuscation of their one possible emergence.
"If you were to disappear, I couldn't bear it," said he. "And you're taking too much on yourself. We have equal ownership of whatever happens today," he said to her searching eyes. "There is no escape and no absolution for either of us, if we fail."
She looked up at him, ground her teeth unhappily, and reluctantly nodded. She quietly acceded, "Let's go, then. Take your time, Ben. I'm an impatient sort. Don't let me rush you. I'll try to chatter inanely, to take our minds off the destination."
He laughed to himself and admitted, "I have not once ever heard you utter a single inanity."
Edythe thoughtfully said, "I think I can be trite and insipid. If I make an extraordinary effort."
"Well have at it, then," he said, agreeably enough.
She needed time, to begin. She truly did have to rehearse.
Ben's eyes rapidly adjusted to the perpetual twilight under the northern jungle's high canopy, and he had no difficulty picking his way among the overlapping roots, moss and ground plants. Edythe made good on her pledge to walk at his pace. For the most part she spotted him from behind and occasionally directed his trajectory. Twice early on he tripped over roots, but each time her hand shot out and steadied his elbow before he could fall. He suspected that she somehow knew he had a better chance of concentrating on the obstacle course at his feet if he couldn't be mesmerized by the rippling cords in her calves, the gentle sway of her hips, and above all her breasts, which were maddeningly visible in the loose arm holes of that beguiling tank top whenever he caught errant glimpses of her body in profile.
When she touched him to spot him on stumbles, his heart thudded and stuttered audibly through bone conduction. He caught her intrigued expression the second time that happened, and he was suddenly sure that she could hear each and every one of his minor heart attacks. His awkwardness was amplified significantly by the debilitating state of his arousal, the evidence of which strained almost painfully against the constriction of his jeans, constantly in the way, almost as if his body were actively conspiring with Edythe to trip him up and make him easy pickings. She had to be aware of that, too, given her deep and comprehensive awareness of his circulatory system, and he wondered if she found his state pathetic, given their physical incompatibilities.
He tried to prevent himself from looking at her, which should not have been too difficult a chore, seeing as she made a sympathetic effort to remain behind him; yet every time he caught a happenstance glimpse, her beauty filled him with hopelessness. This was all so futile. If he dared to betray the depth of his love for her, the contempt in her response would ruin him.
The forest spread out around them, a near-impenetrable maze of identical trees absent of cues to orientation, and he occasionally felt anxiety that they wouldn't be able to find their way out again. She put him at ease with her confidence, however, and never betrayed doubt as to their direction.
Mostly they walked in silence, despite her pledge to distract him with random flotsam. Trite and insipid took more work than she'd ever given those rare faculties credit for, but over the course of their walk along Ariadne's spool of silver thread, she gradually ordered her thoughts into an attitude of premeditated decoherence.
Sometimes, to dispel the pervading silence, she asked personal questions that occasionally verged on the salacious and couldn't have been easily broached in the high school corridors.
She asked him if, back home in Phoenix, he had ever displayed pictures of his crushes in his bedroom. He blushed with the poignancy of the question. Back home he'd stored his clippings of Zoey in the bottom drawer of his desk. Only in Forks had he taken the initiative to display some of them, a kind of shrine to the life he had left behind, but last night even those he had taken down.
"I've put some pictures on the shelves up here. Homesickness, I suppose. But back in Phoenix? No, never. I never really had crushes back home. Apart from the obvious, that is, and my crush on Zoey was a dim light at best, washed out by the glare of the friendship. So, no."
Edythe had no choice but to believe him, improbable as she found it, since she spent many nights in his bedroom, while he slept, with no one for company but the ten meticulously framed photographs of Zoey Martine. Not that she could tell him any of that.
She found herself momentarily flummoxed, absent of a means to persist in her questioning, but then she shifted her perspective and recalled that she had pledged at the outset to keep it light. "Well, what about flights of fancy, then? Did you hang any posters of starlets or influencers on your walls? Pop idols? Swimsuit models? Pin-up girls?"
"No. My bedroom back home had paneled acacia walls that pleased me in and of themselves. I hung nothing on them whatsoever. I suppose many would consider my quarters back home Spartan, but I didn't see it that way. My room was big and open, high ceilings, lots of glass, spacious air. I feel claustrophobic in my present encampment. You've seen Charlie's house. I suppose you can imagine."
She could do much more than imagine.
She glanced back at him with a grimace. She realized he was looking, and she instantly lightened, gloating, "Snaps to me. No crushes in your life, not even the dimmest candle. No hidden competition."
He snorted with derision, at the notion that any human girl could hold a candle to her.
She was grimacing again, so he turned away and kept walking. Luckily she didn't press deeper as to his past romantic aspirations. He had as much as told her that he had wasted the majority of his life waiting for what he couldn't have.
Silence at that point would have been welcome, but she parried and went straight to an even more uncomfortable topic.
Without hesitation or embarrassment, casually, without even looking at him, she came right out and asked, "So, do you masturbate?"
"Edythe!" He nearly fell flat on his face; she grabbed his arm from behind, and her hold raced up his spine electrically.
"I'm just asking," she said, still casually.
"Isn't that kind of private?"
"I'm asking the questions."
"Edythe, I"—
"It's just that most human boys—teen boys— aren't sexually active, so they become easily frustrated and pent up. Most do need that occasional release. If they don't have girlfriends to help them... most... well more than most actually... just about all... do it themselves. You know, with their hands. For relief. To clear the plumbing or whatever. And I'm just asking if you're the rare exception."
He countered, "Do you"—
"Oh, no, my turn!" she insisted, eyes dancing over the flower-adorned sunglasses that were now tipped down to the edge of her nose, dimples huge. She clearly enjoyed his discomfort with this topic, and he supposed he knew why: for once, he was the one who looked guilty as sin.
He turned to her and in a loud huff, neck burning, he accused, "And how do you know for sure that just about all do?"
She looked up at him innocently, eyes huge, and tapped her head.
His mouth fell open. "You can see that?"
"Boring," she said absently, and walked ahead of him. "Most humans are boring and tedious. I hardly pay attention to what all those pathetic naked apes are up to so long as I can help it. No offense."
He thanked his lucky stars that he was the one person on earth whose mind she couldn't read. It couldn't be lost on her that his arousal throughout this hike, up to now, had been tripping him up. Now of course she had deflated his ardor entirely with this mortifying line of questioning, but he knew she would have him revived in no time, now that she walked in front of him and hypnotized him with the gentle rise and fall of her slim round posterior in those skin tight khaki hotpants.
"I've embarrassed you," she said.
Duh. She didn't have to read minds to know that one. But she waited patiently with irrefusable doe eyes, and he knew he had to answer.
He sighed and confessed, "I do, okay? Sometimes."
She nodded without comment, as though ticking off a list. His reluctant affirmation troubled her not in the least. But then again girls just weren't offended or repulsed by that, he supposed, because they were right: most boys did it. Virtually all, the certainty of their inclusion being proportional to the stridency of their denials, the only exceptions being the poor unfortunates who due to whatever tragic defect were physically incapable. And girls somehow knew it. He suspected that the idiom, "thou dost protest too much," had origins related to interrogation over this universal pastime.
But she wasn't done. "Where, usually?"
She must have heard his jaw hit the ground. She waited silently, walking ahead of him, giving him a view of her shorts riding up her thighs, revealing a couple inches of cheek. Jesus. Pale white, smooth as porcelain, rippling with muscle. She couldn't possibly be cramming panties between herself and the strained sienna fabric. Maybe a thong? God.
She still waited for clarification on where he preferred to masturbate, as he stared at her backside, helplessly enthralled.
He gave in, blushing fiercely, and sighed, "In bed. Usually. Sometimes in the bathroom. That's harder. Dad and I share one bathroom."
She nodded, no commentary. She already knew it, given her amplified olfactory sense, but he didn't have to know that. Not until later. After the abyss. Instead, "Do you ever do it in school?"
"What? No! No, why? Really! Never! Not even in Phoenix!"
She giggled, "I believe you; it was just a question."
"Don't laugh, this is hard enough!"
She bit down on her lip, shaking with mirth, and explained, "It's just.... I'd have guessed you do it in school."
"Why?"
She shrugged without looking at him. "Well first because school is so boring, and masturbation seems like a pleasant break from the tedium. And also we see each other in school, and I happen to know you're often sexually frustrated there. It's kind of... obvious."
"I'm not sexually frustrated there all day," he said resentfully.
"No? What do you mean?"
What the hell, he thought. She was honestly puzzled.
"I mean," he hissed, "It's not something I can help around you."
She glanced back at him, grinning. "I do that to you? Really?"
"Edythe, please. You have to be putting me on. You have to know what you do to me."
"Just me? Not Micaela Newton in gym, with that red-hot Nike sports bra?"
He gasped. How did she know about what Micaela wore in gym? She sure as hell didn't see that through his eyes. Was she jealous? Did she know that sometimes he just couldn't help entrapping himself in the view of Micaela's blithely exhibited cleavage, being a depressingly typical human teenager? Was Edythe offended? He flushed scarlet and protested, "I have never jerked off to Micaela. Never. Period. Full stop."
"Her breasts are bigger than mine."
"Irrelevant," he said haughtily.
"Oh, please. Human boys love large breasts."
"There's a lot more to it than just size," he insisted.
"Such as?"
He flushed, stuttered, stammered. "Look—it's not—I'm not gonna— Jesus. If you were in my gym class... wearing that tank top... Coach Bruno would be dead by now of a heart attack. Yours are better. The best in the school. By a thousand miles, no contest. Jesus Christ. I didn't just say that."
She giggled again, and then she apologized for laughing, but she sounded oddly pleased rather than insulted by how much of a pig he revealed himself to be, with the blanket tossed aside. So he'd made a study of Edythe Cullen's bust and how her chest cast twin shadows on every horizontal surface. What of it? So had every other heterosexual male in town.
But he realized something else. "Hold on. Wait." She stopped and looked at him, with a serious expression, but he could tell she was struggling to hold it in place. He accused, "Are you telling me, you've dressed in that... that... outfit," he blurted, waving at her skin tight shorts and tank top, "because you thought you had to compete with Micaela Newton's sports bra?"
She lightly said, "I can't read your mind, so I can't be sure what you like. You're hard up at school. Micaela's breasts? Mine? Erica's?"
He snorted derisively at that.
"You're an impenetrable void, to my eternal chagrin, but I can read Micaela's mind, and I know she's very proud of her sports bra and what's underneath it."
He shook his head and stomped past her. He couldn't dignify any of that with a response.
She followed along behind him, chuckling. He trampled the underbrush, seething, felt something brush by him, and looked up to observe with irritation that she was somehow in front of him again, rolling her slim hips as she walked, her clefted flanks rippling with her stride, driving him absolutely crazy.
She said, "So anyway, you didn't answer why not."
"Why not what?" he asked, watching for side-view glimpses of her breasts under her bare arms and shoulders. He honestly hadn't the slightest clue where they had left off.
"Why you don't masturbate at school."
"I... um... like how do I even answer that?"
"You've never gone into the restroom... ready to? Wanting to?"
"Uh... sure, I guess... but thoughts aren't deeds"—
"True," she conceded easily enough.
"And doing that at school is like, so uncool, and even if I actually wanted to, there's all the people, all the traffic; you have just seconds of real privacy in there if you're lucky, anyone could walk in; there's not enough time."
"For most boys your age seconds are enough," she informed him. "And I don't know about the pastime being intrinsically uncool. Lots of boys do it at school. All day long. Self-manualization is much more popular than vaping in that den of iniquity. I must really be superhuman or I wouldn't hear a thing the teachers are saying, there's so much x-rated drama in the bathrooms all day. Some of the fantasies are so elaborate that they actually have a semblance of a plot."
He couldn't believe it.
"Who strokes off in the school bathroom?"
"All your friends at your old lunch table, for starters."
He stopped again, and she turned to laugh with glee at his look of utter revulsion.
"Or I should say, all of the boys. As for the girls, it's checkered. And not because they're saints. Most of them wish they had sufficient temerity. As you say, it's hard. Logistically. Harder for girls. Takes them longer for one thing, and they require more concentration."
"You said all the boys. Even Jeremy?"
She just giggled at that and shook her head with disbelief at his obtuseness. She chuckled, "You know, most of the male teachers do, too. Which given the subjects of their fantasies is definitely borderline illegal. If the little freshman girls in their training bras only knew how many billions of little white tadpoles have been flushed on their account, we'd see a nationwide scandal."
He exhaled loudly and refused to go down that road. On that road lay madness. He had bigger fish to fry. She was trying to divert him with this new tangent, but he was really irritated now, and he would not be derailed.
He stopped. "So, you've watched Jeremy jerk off. From down the hall, but still."
She turned to him grinning, unrepentant, and winked roguishly. "Believe me I try not to. But on the penultimate moment he's shouting his sickest imaginings so loudly in his head that I can't believe you humans can't hear him. The thing is," she added with a casual shrug, "Yeah, I could watch all this going on if I cared to. But it's just more noise. It's just not interesting to me. Nothing more than chimpanzees in a zoo."
Ben's face fell, and he struggled to recover and not let her know how much that remark deflated him. There she stood, maddeningly attractive, looking up at him with giant butterscotch eyes and a round, slightly open, eminently kissable mouth, puckered enticingly around an imagined cherry, and yet by her own admission she was an ice princess, discussing human sexual practices with clinical detachment and utter disinterest, as though amorous humans were nothing more than bugs copulating on a Petri dish. Was this a date or another afternoon in Bio Lab? He resentfully suspected the latter.
Yet all the same, he couldn't help the flare of jealousy. He knew that Jeremy had tried to make moves on Edythe in the past. Jeremy had come right out and said as much on Ben's first day. "Whose name does he shout out? In his head? On the, uhh, ultimate moment or whatnot?"
"Not just in his head. Sometimes he's so worked up that he goes on vox," she told him, "and loudly. He's been bagged a couple times."
"Really?"
She nodded. She fell behind him again and gently urged him forward, saying, "You know Benjamin Swan, this is still my turn for questions, and your constant derailments are beginning to peeve me."
"This isn't Q&A. This is a discussion."
"Okay," she consented, struggling against laughter.
"Whose name does he yell?"
She knew where he was going. "Mine sometimes."
Ben groaned and murderously hissed, "In the past. Right?"
She just looked at him.
"Recent?"
She tilted her head and hit him with her "Ben, you're dense" look.
"Now? Like, yesterday?"
Her grin turned wide. She was clearly enjoying this. "Your presumed progress around the bases with me has revived some of his innermost desires. If he could do half the things to my delicate person that he's imagined, he'd be locked up for twelve years. I am a minor after all— well, technically, and boys don't have a minimum age for statutory rape."
Ben's caustic invective rang off the trees.
She giggled again and said, "Not that he ever would. Or could, for that matter. Thoughts aren't deeds. And besides, it doesn't interest me. Not at all. Like I said. But your jealousy—it's cool. It's fun to watch. Flattering. I like it."
There it was again. She didn't care about the sex aspect of their topic, not at all. She was merely bemused by his mortification.
Then, out of the blue, but only after a satisfactory duration to let him cool down, "So Ben, do you masturbate with one hand or two?"
He stopped again, and blurted, "God"—
"I'm just asking." She'd stopped too, but she was facing away from him, tilting her pelvis fetchingly, hand on hip, waiting for an answer. Her slender legs were apart. She had an incredibly wide and fetching gap between her thighs, given her slim build. Her thighs were several inches apart at her crotch, and yet her knees just about touched. Her tight khaki shorts molded to every curve below her tiny waist. She stood on a slight rise, and he met her crotch at eye level, from behind. He looked straight up at the hollow carved out behind her thighs, the khaki shorts so tight at the crotch that they were wedged up into her sex.... and with the small remnant of his brain that remained functional, he realized that she had timed her question in order to freeze him in place, trapped with exactly this view.
"Edythe, are you... like... asking..."
"Most boys masturbate with one hand. On average. Preferential to one hand or the other. Typically the writing hand, though it varies. Not particularly a male thing, as girls seem to prefer one or the other hand as well. Yes, Ben, I'm asking if you need one hand or two."
She had said that males and the activities they got up to didn't interest her. So, he wondered if he should come out and ask her why she was curious. Asking that would be moronic. Her question was tantamount to asking him how big he was. Why would she have asked, were she not interested?
"Usually two hands. Until the end."
She nodded.
Just as she set off walking again, he blurted, "Because I need a hand free. At the end. To, you know, catch it."
She nodded more vigorously. "That's too bad," she said.
"What is?"
"It's supposed to feel very good at the end. When you climax. The endorphin rush. Euphoria for your kind. It's too bad you have to distract yourself. From the ecstasy and so forth. You know. To grab a towel or whatever and catch it."
He was mortified. Absolutely mortified. He couldn't believe she was drawing this stuff out of him with her hypnotic voice and dimpled cheeks. Not to mention the undulating seduction of her swaying bottom in those shorts as she walked. He was being hypnotized by a demoness and led to slaughter. He heard himself involuntarily grumbling, "Not with a towel; it would need to go in the wash. Usually toilet tissue. I tend to make a mess, and it's a small house."
She nodded. She definitely understood that.
His irritation by now was piled a mile high. "Do you masturbate?"
With instant detachment and candor she said, "No. Never."
"Never? Like never sleeping?"
"Not like that. The other women in my household achieve their happy place with fair regularity, so I'm sure I could too, if I cared enough to bother. Just not interested."
Well that effectively ended the discussion. He wondered if she even had a vagina. He tried to picture her vagina and imagined the solid plastic crotch of a toy doll.
How could such a depthlessly appealing Aphrodite have no interest in sex, none? How was that even possible? What was she? A perfectly formed animated mannequin? The ultimate torment and damnation for human males?
They walked for awhile in silence. He had a lot to think about. Irrationally, the possibility of his imminent death was the last thing on his mind. If romantic attachment and sex were of no interest to her whatsoever, apart from anthropological curiosity, what the hell was he doing out there, walking out into the woods thirty miles from a single witness, just to risk having his blood drained?
He inhaled deeply and loudly to communicate his frustration. It worked.
"You have a question?"
He ground his teeth. "You don't drink... right?"
She stopped and faced him with a skeptical expression, eyebrow raised. "Benjamin Swan, do you listen to me at all? Am I wasting my breath?"
He put up his hands, the universal signal for Calm, relax. "No... I know you drink... stuff."
"Blood. I drink blood, hot from the tap."
"Right. I mean, you don't ever drink normal stuff like water or ginger ale or orange juice. And I've never seen you go into the restroom at school or come out of it..."
"What are you asking?" She had that frustrated look. She was trying to read his mind and failing. She really didn't know.
"Do you... urinate?" He felt himself blushing.
She nodded briskly, understanding now. "Oh. You mean that. No. Never. Unnecessary. The blood we drink is almost entirely absorbed and consumed, and the water content rapidly diffuses into the air. One of the ancillary benefits of eternal damnation: near-perfect metabolic efficiency."
"And the other... the other way... number two..."
She rolled her eyes. "No, Ben, I don't defecate, either."
"Edythe," he said, exasperated, "I watched you eat a Saltine, and you compared it to dirt."
She nodded again, with understanding. "I see. Yes. Irrelevant. I didn't metabolize that swill at all. But it didn't go down my gastrointestinal tract, the way blood does. Anything non-digestible freezes in my stomach for expurgation at my leisure. I regurgitated it that night, at home. Just like I would have done if I'd ingested dirt. Or gasoline. Or drain cleaner. Or sulfuric acid."
"Sulfuric acid can't hurt you?"
"No."
He knew he was gaping at her again, just by her wry expression.
"What can?"
"Nothing I've ever found. I'm as impervious to poison as glass."
"Huh. So your gastrointestinal tract... how far does it go? Do you even have a... a..."
"An anus? a rectum? intestines? Yes. But blood is handled by my stomach and small intestine. All the rest is still there, but it doesn't do anything. Vestigial."
"Does it... does it... open?"
"Does what open?"
"Your... your anus... I mean, is there still an actual hole that opens?"
She tilted her head and pondered. She emerged from her reflection and admitted, "I honestly don't know." It had never dawned on her to check. Maybe Emelia could answer that one for her. Emmie and Rex had done every other damned thing over the years. Edythe doubted there was a hole anywhere in Emmie's vicinity that the despicable cad hadn't explored. What was it with boys and sphincter muscles? Jeremy Stanley was more fascinated with her back than her front. She wondered if that odd and counterproductive proclivity might be universal for human males. Maybe it was the same with Benjamin. How strange. She wondered if she should dare ask him, and given his trauma over the last conversation, she decided best not.
"And... number one? Do you have a..."
Ahhh. So that was what he really wanted to know. Urethral tract, whence its origin, and whither it emerged. So, perhaps that answered the other question? He preferred the front to the back?
"I have a vagina. Ben, you could have simply asked, without the needless tangent on waste removal."
He looked at her, and his expression must have been dubious, because she testily added, "And that does open. Somewhat. I'll be happy to prove it to you, if you truly insist."
"Uh, I believe you," he gulped, nodding vigorously. "Oh... okay... so that's all cleared up."
She looked at him strangely and chuckled, her only comment. Then she turned and started walking again.
He was left wondering if her vagina and its inner workings were vestigial, too. But he couldn't come out and ask. No way, no how.
After several hours, toward noon, the high impenetrably dim canopy lightened to soft warm butter that dripped through the branches and lazily descended to pool in the fronds of the tall ferns. Dew burned off in the spongy moss, diffusing into ankle-deep mist that scattered into pearl whorls with their footsteps. Ben spied hints of powder blue beyond the highest trees, and not a shred of cloud, a sky of pale, sun-washed sapphire, just as Alice had portended.
"We should climb a tree and sunbathe up there," he suggested excitedly, only half in jest.
Edythe smiled, pleased by his enthusiasm. "Intriguing thought," she agreed, "but unnecessary. The trees break ahead."
"Seriously?"
"A small clearing, but the sun will be directly overhead. A couple hundred yards. You can't miss it."
Her smile broadened as he bounded ahead. She watched him go, pleased and uplifted by the sight of him, a young strong colt finding his legs and discovering his potential. Edythe watched Benjamin recede into the branches and fronds, and she tried to imagine herself with merely human eyes; she watched him disappear, entirely gone, the last vestiges of him trailing to wispy aftereffects in the disturbed air, later to settle, departed, safe, free.
Free from herself, free from her world, free from peril.
She sometimes tried to imagine that there had been a time in their brief history when she could have set him free, but she couldn't see it. Benjamin had been everything, from the beginning, impossible to abandon, unthinkable to lose, unable to love.
Ben stopped for her at the overgrown forest edge, a curtain of parasitical vines hung thickly over the boughs of the hemlocks. He peered out through the thick wet veils, mouth open in wonder, and he wanted too much to burst forward into the sunlight, but he knew that they had to take their next steps together.
Edythe sidled up to him and pressed up to his warm bare arm, He took her cold hand in his fingers and held tightly.
She whispered, "Did I successfully divert you from the trial ahead of us?"
He silently stared ahead.
She asked, "Scared?"
"Yup. You?"
She nodded vigorously. "Our next step is where Alice sees me killing you."
He stared straight ahead and levelly said, "Alice, who's just about always right."
"More often than not. I didn't exactly tell you that, did I."
He shook his head. "You said we face an abyss."
She wrapped herself around his arm and confirmed, "Well, yes. An abyss in which we both die. Well, to be more precise, you do, and shortly thereafter, I do."
He grimaced and lifted her hand to study their intertwined fingers. "You'll explain, right? Why you're so sure of its likelihood, when I can't see it at all?"
Edythe shrugged and whispered, "Of course. After. If I have the opportunity."
He gasped and fell to quick, stressful breathing.
"Ben, please know, before our next step: I want more than best friends for us. I want to overcome myself. To be more than myself. I want us together."
He tightly squeezed her hand , bent his head, kissed each of her cold fingers. Edythe shook through aethereal tiers of bliss, with each kiss, and he said, "Then our next step should be easy as breathing. Shall we?"
Edythe whimpered with terror, his heart pounding in her ears, his heat setting her to flame, his delicious scent filling her mouth with thick coagulated venom.
Together, hand in hand, Benjamin Swan and Edythe Cullen stepped out of hiding, into the bright noon sun.
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Next: Cleopatra