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I stepped out to the edge,
keeping my eyes on the empty space in front of me.
My toes felt ahead blindly,
caressing the edge of the rock when they encountered it. I drew a deep
breath and held it . . . waiting.
“Bella.”
I smiled and exhaled.
Yes? I didn’t answer out loud,
for the fear that the sound of my voice would shatter the beautiful
elusion. He sounded so real, so close. It was only when he was
disapproving like this that I could hear the true memory of his voice,
the velvet texture and the musical intonation that made up the most
perfect of all voices.
“Don’t do this,” he pleaded.
But you wanted me to be human, I
reminded him. Well watch me.
“Please. For me.”
But you won’t stay with me any
other way.
“Please.” It was just a whisper
in the blowing rain that tossed my hair and drenched my clothes, making
me as wet as if it were my second jump of the day.
I rolled up onto the balls of my
feet.
“No, Bella!” He was angry now,
and the anger was so lovely.
I smiled and raised my arms
straight out, as if I were going to dive, lifting my face into the rain.
But it was too ingrained from years of swimming at the public pool, feet
first, first time. I leaned forward, crouching to get more spring . . .
And I flung myself off the cliff.
I screamed as I dropped through
the open air like a meteor, but it was a scream of exhilaration and not
fear. The wind resisted, trying vainly to fight the unconquerable
gravity, pushing against me and twirling me in spirals like a rocket
crashing to the earth.
Yes! The word echoed through my
head as I sliced through the surface of the water. It was icy, colder
than I ’d feared, and yet the chill only added to the high.
I was proud of myself as I
plunged deeper into the freezing black water. I hadn’t had one moment of
terror, just pure adrenaline. Really, the fall wasn’t scary at all.
Where was the challenge?
That was when the current caught
me.
I’d been so preoccupied by the
size of the cliffs, by the obvious danger of their high, sheer faces,
that I hadn’t worried at all about the dark water waiting. I never
dreamed that the true menace was lurking far below me, under the heaving
surf.
It felt like the waves were
fighting over me, jerking me back and forth between them as if
determined to share me by pulling me into halves. I knew the right way
to avoid a riptide: swim parallel to the beach rather than struggling
for the shore. But the knowledge did me little good when I didn’t know
which way the shore was.
I couldn’t even tell which way
the surface was.
The angry water was black in
every direction; there was no brightness to direct me upward. Gravity
was all powerful when it competed with the air, but it had nothing on
the waves, I couldn’t feel a downward pull, a sinking in any direction.
Just the battering of the current that flung me round and round like a
ragdoll.
I fought to keep my breath in, to
keep my lips locked around my last store of oxygen.
It didn’t surprise me that my delusion of Edward was there. He owed me
that much, considering I was dying. I was surprised by how sure that
knowledge was. I was going to drown. I was drowning. |
