Chapter 2: Tuesday Afternoon

Chapter 2- Tuesday Afternoon

“Thank you.” I’m the one to break the silence that follows my frank and honest admission. I don’t know if it was a comfortable silence or an awkward one. I can’t tell. All I know is that neither of us are speaking, and Edward looks a bit upset about something. Weirdly I want to change that, want to make him happy again.

Now looks at me in question. “For what?”

I shuffle my feet, my cheeks flaming. “F...for...for giving me my seat.” It’s working. Edward’s smiling. But he needs to stop doing that. I can’t think think when he looks a he like that. My brain goes fuzzy.

“You’re welcome. I was happy to do it.” I nod again. It seems that when I don’t know what to say in a conversation I nod. Interesting.

It’s 11.52.

I close my notebook, carefully lodging my pen in the page I’m on, and stand. Edward stands as well. I don’t know why.

“Did I do something wrong?” He looks sad. Like he doesn’t want me to go. No ones wanted me to stay before. But I can’t stay. I have to go. It’s 11.52.  

“It’s 11.52.” He looks confused.

“And?”

“And I have to go home.”

“But I want to spend more time with you.” This one makes me stop.

He wants to spend more time with me? I can’t even fathom that. People don’t want to spend time with me, they want to run away from me. He looks like he means it too. Does he mean it? I don’t know. Nothing’s making sense right now. And I’m behind schedule. I have to explain somehow. I don’t know what to say. So I go for... everything.

“I can’t stay. I have to go home. Everyday I come here from 10.19am to 11.52am. Then I go home. 529 steps. I have to go.”

I start towards the door. He follows me. I can see Angela waving to me out of the corner of my eye. I like Angela. This is the first time I’ve noticed that she does that, probably because I’m hyper aware of my surroundings with Edward around. I wave back at her hesitantly. Maybe I should make sure I wave to her in the future. I log that in mind, adding it to my mental schedule. It fits nicely without disturbing anything else. I think I’ll leave it there.

I’m out the door and the counting starts. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7...

“Can I see you again?”

His hand is on my arm. I freeze. On step seven. I’m on step seven. I have to remember. I want to answer him, but my mind is too occupied. Half of it is trying to remember my steps. What if I somehow forget? It’ll screw up my entire counting routine, and I’d have to come back and start again. And that’ll delay my entire schedule for the day. And I’ll get less writing done. And I don’t even want to think about what Mother will say...

And the other half of my brain is overshadowing it. All I can seem to focus on, all my brain keeps going back to, is the feeling of his hand on my arm. I can feel the warm, heavy weight of it, but its not oppressive or constricting. It’s gentle, comforting, searching for an answer.

“Seven.”

Now Edward really looks confused. I don’t want to confuse him, but he has to know how important it I that I’m on step seven. I’ve never been interrupted in the step counting before. I have to tell him. I have to explain, but all I can focus on is his hand. It’s a pretty hand, all long fingers and smooth skin. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been touched by someone. I tend to shy away from it, but also, physical contact just isn’t readily available in my life.

Who am I kidding, it’s not available in my life at all.

However, I’m finding that with Edward I want it, crazy hair and all. I don’t want him to take it away. The softness, the heat that seeps into my skin, the feeling consumes me, distracts me from everything. Including Edward. I realise Edward is talking again, and I want to listen to him, but to do that I have to drag myself away from these new, delicious feelings I am experiencing. I think he’s panicking, but I can’t be certain. Finally what he’s saying begins to sink in.

“Seven? Bella, can you tell me what seven means?” He looks so concerned. I want to try to explain. It tumbles out. I hope he can understand me. I know I can ramble sometimes.

“Seven. I’m on step seven. Seven of 529. have to remember I’m on step seven.”

“Ok, I can help you remember. Now do you reckon you could think about what I said before?” I calm myself again, which is a lot easier with his hand on my arm. I glance up at him, because I can’t for the life of me remember what he asked me. He seems to know what's stopping me, and puts me out of my misery by repeating the question.

“Can I see you again?”

I don’t know what I should say. I want to see him again as well. For the first time in my life, I feel comfortable around another person. It makes me feel...good. And that’s an emotion that I have always wanted to feel. I get glimpses of it every now and then, like when everything goes precisely to plan in my day, but this feeling even trumps that.

“I come to this coffee shop at the same time every day. From 10.19 to 11.52.” I can’t help the blush that comes over my face as I continue to stare intently at his pretty hand. It’s still there, he hasn’t moved it. It’s nice.

“Every day?” he asks, and I can hear the smile in his voice. I nod enthusiastically, a strand of hair coming loose from my ponytail and fluttering over my eyes. His other, unoccupied hand comes up and gently shifts the strands behind my ear, before drifting down to cup my cheek. It’s just an warm and gentle as the other, and sends a shock wave of feeling along my jawline. I gasp quietly as he pulls my face up until I am looking into his eyes. This is the second time I’ve looked into his eyes since meeting him, and it’s a new experience for me. Normally I can’t make eye contact with people, but with Edward I like it. He’s smiling, and I can feel myself drifting again.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then.” This causes me to burst into a grin, which Edward gladly matches. He releases me gently, to my disappointment. But he keep talking to me in a calm, level voice.

“Ok Bella, you’re on step seven, remember?” I had forgotten. “And if you take another step, you’ll be on step eight. Then you can keep going until you get home.”

And its as easy as that. I take the next step, and my counting resumes, exactly where I had left off. It isn’t till I’m walking up the stairs to the front door that I remember I never said goodbye to Edward.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edward has pretty hair. That's the conclusion I have come to. I like the color and strangely I like the fact that it's not symmetrical. I don’t think there's ever been a time when I've liked something that was asymmetrical. Tolerated maybe. I know there are times when I can't change or rearrange things, so I try and put them out of my mind. I wouldn't change Edwards hair for the world. I've found that I can't stop thinking about him, no matter what I do. Normally I come home from the coffee shop and continue writing, at least until Mother gets home. It makes me nervous that she never gets home at a set time. Instead her arrival is dependent on what she is doing that day, but I can manage it. I write until she gets home, then I clean the house at her insistence and then I cook dinner. After dinner I clean my room from top to bottom, then I write again.

But I haven't been writing this afternoon, instead I’ve been thinking, daydreaming. I normally try to not leave much time for myself to think, I get myself too worked up and it usually ends badly, with a panic attack or just a regular Bella freak out. But thinking about Edward is different. Its relaxing, fun, calming. It’s all I've been able to do all afternoon.

I hear the door downstairs. Mother is home. I can usually tell what mood she’s in by how she shuts the front door. She slams it. Hard. That's not good. I stand reluctantly from my seat at my desk and grab up my notebook, which only has one additional page added from when I was writing at the coffee shop. I hope Mother won't notice.

I can see her in the doorway as I come down the stairs. My socked feet are silent on the polish, smooth, shiny wooden floor of the staircase, my hand clutching the cold metal railing that's attached to the glass wall that edges the stair on the open side. Everything in the downstairs in shiny and new looking, in different shades of black and white, or made of glass. The furniture was very boxy, all square edges and sharp corners. I don't like it, can barely tolerate it. Luckily I've decorated my room to how I like it. When we moved in two years ago, Mother told me it was 'hip' and 'trendy'. All I knew was it was going to take me an age to get back into my routines in this new environment. I've only just gotten into the swing of it. Only in the last few months have I been able to get through a day without a freak out.

When I reach the base of the stairs Mother is still in the process of dropping her handbag on the small table by the door and slipping off her high wedge shoes. Her naturally brown, but now dyed blonde hair is perfectly straightened and flowing down her back. Her skin is a dark tanned, hedging on orange and she has a pair of large dark glasses hiding her blue eyes. They say Mother and I have the same face, except for our eyes. And the obviously fake skin color. My skin stays pale no matter what. Mothers dress in colorful and floaty, emphasizing her slim figure and perfectly matched to the desert heat.

As Mother settles her shoes down, she wobbles a bit on her feet. She's been drinking again. I've never really thought about what she does during the day, but more often than not she come back like this. She's meaner when she's like this.

Before I can even think about it more, her gaze swings round and settles on me, and my brain locks down. Mother has that effect on me.

"What are you looking at." Her voice is sharp and cold, it pierces me down to the bone. I realize I'm studying her movements more closely today than usual, so I drop my gaze quickly to the floor. There's an uneven pattern in the wooden floor. It's bothering me. " Well?!" she wants an answer. That's new.

"N...n...noth...nothing."

She snorts at my stutter and I can feel myself blush. She's always been right about me. I can't even say a sentence without my constant nervousness making a physical appearance. She stumbles forward and throws her hand out at me. "Well, pass it over, let me see it." I hand over me notebook slowly, reluctantly. This is my least favorite part of the day. The time when my notebook is out of my hands, out of my reach. As soon as she snatches it from me my palms start sweating and my breathing starts to accelerate. I can hear Mother flicking through a the pages almost violently. Then silence.

Slowly I look up and see that she's staring right at me with a look so angry it hikes up my anxiety tenfold.

"Ten pages.... You only wrote TEN PAGES!!" I don’t like her yelling. I don't like it. I don't like it. "What the hell is this shit you useless girl. You usually write three times this." she flips the page again with such ferocity that my worst nightmare happened.

I hear the page rip.

That’s the last straw. I sink to the floor at the base of the stairs, pulling my knees to my chest as my hands work their way into my hair and pull. And pull. And pull. Mother is still standing over me, looking down at me. I can feel her. And I can hear her. "You useless freak." The venom in her voice sinks into me as I hear her foots disappear into the kitchen. I now switch my focus to the uneven pattern in the floorboard. The mismatch swirl on grains in the wood. I don't know how I haven't noticed it before. Maybe I have, and I just continue to wipe it from my memory each time so it doesn't bug me. There's only one thing I can do to get past it. ‘Not everything is perfect...I cannot change it...I cannot control it...just let it be....’ I struggle hard to calm down, to stop tugging, to get up. It works eventually. After an hour on the floor I'm tired and stiff, but I know I can't rest, can't go back to writing, unless I tidy and reorder everything that Mother has obliterated on her re-entry.

I start at the front door, placing her shoes in the closet, upright and in line with her numerous other pairs. I stand her handbag up, making it even and tidy. I then move to the kitchen. Mothers gone up to her room at some point. She would have had to step over me. That doesn't surprise me. She's left a trail on dirty dishes and sandwich ingredients behind her. I rinse the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher before putting the different foods in their right place in the fridge. The lounge reveals no damage. The hurricane force that is my Mother didn't touch down there. The ugly, uncomfortable black leather couches are still at perfect right angles to each other, in line with the ridiculously enormous television. Breathing a sigh of relief I turn back towards the stairs.

I see my notebook. I think I might have been ignoring it up till now, but there it is. I rush over to it and scoop it up, hoping that my mind had imagined the bone chilling sound of tearing paper. The  book falls open to my last page to show it lying slightly askew, a long jagged rip going up from the bottom near the spine. It stops just over half way up, causing the entire page to shift, poking out the side from all the others. I carefully shift the page back in line and close the notebook again.

Sometimes I don't understand how she can do these things. Everything I've learnt as I've grown up indicates that parents are supposed to love their children. But Mother has never loved me. And I know that her love the thing I want most in the world. Her love, her kindness, or even just her acceptance. But I never get it. It's times like these when I know she's right.

No one could ever love me.

Emotions swirl in me. Emotions I can't understand, have never learnt or been taught how to decipher. I was always told that I didn't have emotions, I don’t possess the capability. So in times like these I block them out, bury them. Under the blocks and shields I've built up my entire life.

I bring up these blocks one by one as a make my way up the 14 stairs to the second floor, but not before a single tear falls down my cheek.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the time for me to write. My room is tidy. I've cooked, served and cleaned up dinner. I've gone through my nightly hygiene routines. Now is when I usually pull out my notebook and continue to spew my precious words onto the clean, blank pages. However, there is a big problem.

The page is ripped.

I can't do it. I can't get passed the fact that it's broken. My notebook is broken. But it's also not complete, so I can't move onto a new one till I've finished this one. I’m stuck in an infinite loop, I can’t move forward or back. All I seem to be able to do is sit here and stare at my notebook until it’s my bedtime. And then I crawl into bed, my brain shuts off and I finally get a rest from all the swirling turmoil inside me.

My night was so hectic, that I fall asleep without even sparing a thought for the mysterious stranger with crazy hair and green eyes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~