Awake in the infinite cold.pdf

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5440286/1/

But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when

you eat of it, you will surely die.

Genesis 2:17

This was decidedly not Forks.

The cramped streets sliced often and irregularly through what once had been

green earth; the towers of steel and concrete rose to dominate the fog-veiled

sky; and cars, bikes, and pedestrians swarmed like industrious ants through the

city maze. There was so much to see, hear, and smell in the Emerald City that

Bella found herself turning in a slow semi-circle at an intersection near the

shoebox she now called home, her body a compass trying to find an elusive

north.

When her sights at last settled on a city corridor that seemed commercial enough

to harbor a grocery store, Bella stepped forward to join the ranks of faceless

commuters waiting for a signal to stem the tide of vehicles bisecting their walking

path.

She was a mere four hours from Forks, separated only by the Olympic National

Park and a couple of narrow bodies of water, but she might as well have been in

Switzerland. Bella had accompanied Charlie to Seattle once before, when he'd

had the opportunity to attend a law enforcement conference in the city. In his

down time between sessions, they'd played tourist by walking through Pike's

market, going up the Space Needle, and riding the ducks. She'd snapped pictures

of Charlie standing by a fish as long as his arm, of him outlined by the distinctive

city skyline, and of him standing uncomfortably by the queerly shaped vehicles

that later transported them seamlessly between land and sea.

But she now knew that spending a day in the sheltered tourist façade of Seattle

was a far cry from calling its back streets home.

After she had closed her rusty front door on Charlie's retreating back, she had

watched from her window as he climbed into his squad car and flicked the lights

once, the brief shrill of the siren a warning to everyone on the street that his little

girl lived here, and he'd be watching.

Then Charlie was gone, his face grim through the glass, and she was left standing

in the middle of four white walls, clutching the bottle of pepper spray that he had

pressed into her hand before giving her an awkward, one-armed hug.

With the departure of the marked vehicle, the foot traffic below her increased, the

street's denizens emerging from nearby alleys and apartments. She watched

from her window as an old lady pushed a rattling shopping cart full of crushed tin

cans. The cart and its lady had clearly both seen better days.

Two weeks ago, this had all been a dream.

Two weeks ago, Charlie had thrown her a party to celebrate her twenty-first

birthday. He stuck to the traditional guest list—Billy and Jacob—but purchased

two extra six-packs in honor of the occasion.

Most college students would probably have been horrified at the thought of

celebrating such an important milestone with authority figures nearby, but Bella

insisted on a low-key night at home rather than the popular alternative of bar-

hopping in Port Angeles. Charlie tossed Bella her first Rainier beer when the pizza

arrived, and he pretended to believe her when she pretended to be unfamiliar

with the taste of alcohol. Nobody mentioned the incident on Jacob's sixteenth

birthday when he'd filched some Jack Daniels and returned a decidedly tipsy Bella

to her father well after curfew.

They ate, drank, and talked into the wee hours of the morning, until Charlie gave

Jacob an informal sobriety test and deemed him sobered up enough to brave the

drive home.

As the Blacks lingered on the porch in an effort to prevent the evening from

slipping away, Jacob touched two fingers to her cheek in a gesture of farewell.

Although Bella saw him every day for the next two weeks, that night marked the

end of another era—her life in Forks.

The other members of the Swan-Black pseudo-family had been shocked when she

had announced that the University of Washington had accepted her into its

Psychology Master's program and that she would start at its Seattle campus in a

few short months. She hadn't told anyone—including Jacob—that she was

applying because she hadn't thought that a small-town girl with a degree from

Peninsula Community College would even be considered for a coveted UW

graduate position, much less a desirable research assistant position.

Bella also hadn't told anyone because she was secretly afraid of how Jacob would

react. After she had graduated from college with a nebulous degree in psychology

and no immediate job prospects, Jacob began increasingly hinting at his plans for

the future, which included opening a small garage and settling down with her in a

cozy cabin on his ancestral lands. She had known of his dreams since they were

little, but it took the possibility of actually having them become reality in the near

future for her to realize that she had never seen herself in the ideal world he had

created. She was too young to get married. She had never seen the world beyond

Forks. And, although she would scarce admit it to herself at the time, she wanted

to step out from under the life-long shadow of being nothing more than "Black's

girlfriend."

As she'd feared, Jacob did not approve. She had placed her acceptance letter on

the table along with a plate of his favorite dessert.

His initial response was denial. "But you're not going to go, right?" he'd scoffed

with an all-knowing look in his eye.

She'd responded by stomping up the stairs to her room and slamming the door.

Jacob responded to her anger in kind, following her upstairs and opening the door

immediately after she slammed it in his face.

"I didn't even know you were applying," he said. As his anger grew, so did the

volume of his voice. "I can't believe you're considering doing this to me—to us!

You were sneaking around behind my back…"

His little tirade continued until Charlie threw him out of the house. No one talked

to his little girl in that tone of voice.

"Come back after you've cooled off," Charlie had called out as a red-faced Jake

wrenched open the door of his truck so forcefully that the hinges squealed. "And

drive safe."

Jacob was back the next morning for breakfast, and he remained a step behind

Bella in the tiny kitchen as she prepared scrambled eggs and bacon for Charlie.

This time, his tactic was bargaining. He tried things like "The University of

Phoenix has a master's degree in psychology" and "Maybe I could look into

getting my undergraduate degree at UW."

When Charlie came in, decked out in his crisp uniform, he didn't comment on

Jake's unusually early presence. Instead, he sat and watched him constantly

angling himself in Bella's way as she put the finishing touches on breakfast.

Charlie listened silently to Jacob's pleas, never adding any of his own. When he

finished eating and set his fork down with an emphatic plink, he unfolded himself

from his chair and waited. His silent presence soon commanded their attention,

and Charlie took advantage of the resulting spotlight, pointing two stiff fingers

inward at his eyes and then rotating his wrist toward Jacob in the symbol for "I'll

be watching." Then he was off to work, whistling as he went, leaving Bella to fend

off a series of increasingly bizarre strategies that Jacob had apparently spent all

night dreaming up.

When Bella refused to delay her college plans for a couple of years until Jacob

had gotten his as-yet fictitious garage off the ground, he became depressed and

stopped dropping by. Days melted into weeks, and Billy consistently told her that

Jacob wasn't there each time she called. Each time, Billy said the words with a

sigh, and Bella could almost see Jacob poking his head out of his room and

frantically slashing at his throat with a grimace when he realized who was on the

phone. Bella had seen Jacob use the same tactic when Leah Clearwater had taken

to calling him all summer after their seventh grade year in a misguided yet

surprisingly persistent attempt to make him her boyfriend.

That was the summer Bella and Jacob made their relationship official, partly in an

attempt to get Leah off his back. Leah didn't speak to either of them again after

Jacob finally took one of her calls and told her that he already had a girlfriend.

Sometimes, Bella wondered if she and Jacob had fallen together out of nothing

more than convenience. She loved him, but she had known him for so long that

her love for him never made her heart race or her blood boil. Although his body

and mind had matured, she still remembered him as the short, skinny boy with

an odd fixation on bodily functions.

Bella was also painfully aware of his stubbornness. As her birthday party loomed,

she was worried that Jacob would not have gotten over his funk and would be

abandoning her to an evening on the couch in front of whatever sporting event

was currently in season. Therefore, she was overjoyed to see two silhouettes in

the front seat of Billy's truck as it pulled up. When Jacob eased Billy's wheel chair

from around the back of the car, she saw acceptance in his eyes.

"You came," she said quietly, and he flashed his high-beam grin at her for the

first time since she'd announced that she was going off to grad school.

"Of course I came," he said. "I wouldn't have missed your big day for the world.

You're always a step ahead of me; sometimes I don't think I can keep up. "

They both knew he wasn't just talking about her age.

Bella had felt his dark eyes on her as they talked and laughed the twilight of her

twentieth year away. She'd met his gaze firmly, her eyes continuously

communicating, I'm doing this, and his responding with a sad, I know.

As Bella had stood with her father on the porch of her childhood home and

watched her best friend drive away in his beat-up, two-toned Chevy, she felt an

incongruous mixture of sadness and hope, fear and excitement, bitter and sweet.

In two weeks, she would be starting a new life far from home.

In two weeks, she would be standing on a street corner, trying to act as

sophisticated and bored as the people around her even though she felt about two

inches tall. Leaving Charlie had been harder than she'd expected.

The sight of an antiquated electric bus rattling down the hill toward her

intersection provided a welcome distraction from the look in Charlie's eye when

he'd said goodbye. She remembered this public transportation option as yet

another oddity from her brief jaunt in the city. The bus rumbled along the ground

rail below it, the power lines above the street crackling with its passing.

As the bus slid closer, picking up speed coming down the hill that sloped toward

the Puget sound, someone jostled Bella in the shoulder, likely the hotshot

businessman talking animatedly to the air in front of him, a Bluetooth bug in his

ear.

Everything happened at once.

The force of the unexpected contact upset Bella's already fragile balance, and she

stumbled off the curb directly into the path of the oncoming vehicle. Brakes and

power lines screamed in protest, but the bus was moving too quickly, was too

heavy with passengers, and was too near.

In a moment of heightened clarity, Bella could see every pockmark and paint chip

on the bus' front bumper. She could see the female driver's horrified expression,

the tendons on her neck straining as she mashed on the foot brake. The instant

before impact, Bella thought for the first time that maybe Jacob had been right.

Maybe she never should have left Forks after all.

She'd never given much thought to how she would die, but this was not what she

would choose. She was going to die on some nameless corner in an impersonal

city surrounded by faceless strangers rather than her family, friends, and the

dark, damp forests of home.

She could only close her eyes and fall.

But impact never came.

Instead, her hair snagged on something, like when she was little and she and

Jacob were climbing recklessly through the trees in his backyard. The ground

behind her rose up, slapping the air out of her lungs. She looked up with eyes

stinging from the burning pinpricks in her scalp to see the bus wheeze to a stop

in the middle of the intersection, directly above the patch of ground that only

narrowly escaped being smeared with her guts.

The almost-accident ignited the little group of pedestrians who had been so

staunchly ignoring each other but a few moments before. Now, they were

comrades, shouting queries at each other and Bella and obscenities at the bus

driver, who was venting her fear toward the group in a very vocal and vulgar

fashion. They gathered around Bella, their necks craning to see if she were okay

and to catch a glimpse of her savior.

"Are you alright?" asked the businessman, his face red with shame and worry.

Before Bella could answer, he barked, "No, not you" to whomever he was talking

to on the phone, and then, for the person's benefit, started a lengthy explanation

of the incident. Bella cringed at the inadvertent excitement in the man's voice as

he recounted what had nearly happened. Because of the babble of voices, it was

a few moments before she became aware that she wasn't alone on the sidewalk.

Something—or, rather, someone—was cradling her head. As she shifted

awkwardly at the realization, gentle hands helped her sit up. She turned to stare

into the face of the person who had just saved her life.

It was a young man of indeterminable age. She didn't recognize him from the

brief glance she'd spared on the other people waiting to cross the street. Even

now, Bella registered little about his appearance except a white face and bronze

hair falling into deep eyes that stared over her shoulder at the bus. She watched

as his eyes shifted from a point behind her and focused on her face.

For a moment, Bella watched his lips tremble as though he were going to speak,

but then his forehead creased, and he abruptly scrambled up from the sidewalk.

The crowd scattered like bowling pins with the force of his departure, and he

slunk away with his hands shoved in coat pockets, shoulders stiff, head down. His

posture screamed shame and self-loathing, as though he regretted his actions.

As though he regretted saving her life.

She stared in his direction long after he disappeared around a corner. Then three

pairs of hands extended to help her back to her feet, and one lady was kind

enough to retrieve the tote that had slipped off her shoulder as she fell.

"I'm fine, thanks. Really, it's no big deal," she repeated in a monotone to

everyone who would listen, backing up until she felt a solid brick wall between

her shoulder blades.

Bella let the wall hold her up until the crowd dispersed, back to their routine, the

event nothing more than a bit of excitement in their day that would lend itself

well to water cooler discussions back at the office.

But Bella didn't have a routine to fall back on. She didn't know where she was

going; she didn't know where home was any more. She didn't even have anyone

to tell. Charlie would just worry about her even more. Jacob would say "I told you

so" and would probably drive out here and try to bring her back to Forks whether

she wanted to or not. So she stood alone on a street corner and tried to decide

whether her desire to get away from prying eyes outweighed her need for food.

Eventually, with the thought of the brown bag of miscellaneous items that she'd

scavenged from her kitchen at home—peanut butter, tuna fish, cans of soup—she

convinced herself that she had enough to live on until later in the week. She'd

Google the nearest grocery store rather than striking out on her own like a leaf in

the wind.

As she turned back toward her apartment, she kicked something at her feet and

looked down to see a small black wallet skittering across the concrete. It was

even more lost and alone than she was.

Somehow, Bella knew it was his.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: