"Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer, Chapter 11–The Epilogue

“Thanks so much,” I said, my voice acerbic.

I took a step back toward him, my eyes alight with curiosity.

“Okay, then,” I said flippantly, trying to alleviate the suddenly tense atmosphere.

His voice was aloof.

I sighed in relief again when Mr. Banner turned the lights on, finally glancing at Edward; he was looking at me, his eyes ambivalent.

“I should have let you drive yourself today,” he announced, apropos of nothing, while I chewed.

I opened the door, and the arctic draft that burst into the car helped clear my head.

Face ashen, eyes wide, I sat like a bird locked in the eyes of a snake.

Edward’s voice was low and bleak.

When I woke to the pearl gray morning, my mood was blissful.

“Excuse me,” she said brusquely to Edward.

I asked, tentative, not wanting to upset his buoyant humor.

Mercifully, some vestiges of Mike’s chivalry still survived; he came to stand beside me.

I wasn’t used to having to go to such circuitous measures, listening to your words in Jessica’s mind . . . her mind isn’t very original, and it was annoying to have to stoop to that.

“Well,” I clarified, “I was mostly wondering about your reaction.”

They gathered together, block¬ing me from view as they converged.

These days I had rules that hadn’t existed before: curfews . . . visiting hours.

She deftly rolled the hems a few times so I could stand.

He smiled, holding my glance, trying to lift me out of my sudden, unexplained dejection.

We sat in front of Charlie’s house for hours, as the sky darkened and rain plummeted around us in a sudden deluge.

I’ve told you, on the one hand, the hunger — the thirst — that, deplorable creature that I am, I feel for you.

My brain had worked slowly through the fog of sleep deprivation.

“She’s diabolical,” Emmett chuckled.

There, on the whiteboard, was a ten-digit number written in a small, neat hand.

The forest encroached on both sides, leaving the road ahead only discernible for a few meters as it twisted, serpentlike, around the ancient trees.

Realizing what I wished, he flipped his palm up in one of those blindingly fast, disconcerting movements of his.

While I shook my head to dispel the direction my thoughts had taken, I thought of something else.

“I wasn’t being nice,” I confessed, ignoring his attempt at diversion, looking down at my knees.

“Yeah, it’s an off day when I don’t get somebody telling me how edible I smell.”

Though” — he half-smiled — “as you are not addicted to any illegal substances, you probably can’t empathize completely.

Something about her heart-shaped face, her billows of soft, caramel-colored hair, reminded me of the ingenues of the silent-movie era.

It didn’t matter that my body was rigid as a plank, my hands balled into fists, my breathing erratic .

He was smiling, relaxed — and, as usual, perfect and beautiful to an excruciating degree.

The sense of exhilaration that usually seemed to possess Edward as he ran was completely absent, replaced by a fury that consumed him and drove him still faster.

I’d never seen him so completely freed of that carefully cultivated facade.

James feinted slightly to the side, and Edward shifted in response.

Her posture was distinctly feline.

Edward bared his teeth, crouching in defense, a feral snarl ripping from his throat.

I could see a few of the other kids in class eye¬ing me furtively.

I struggled violently, with total futility.

I lay with my arm across my eyes, groggy and dazed.

Phoenix — the palm trees, the scrubby creosote, the haphazard lines of the intersect¬ing freeways, the green swaths of golf courses and tur¬quoise splotches of swimming pools, all submerged in a thin smog and embraced by the short, rocky ridges that weren’t really big enough to be called mountains.

His eyes burned with sincerity for a protracted moment — playing havoc with the rhythm of my heart — and then turned playful.

I choked back the hysteria that threatened to explode, but a small giggle managed to get out despite my efforts.

“Listen, Charlie’s not an imbecile,” I protested.

Immortality must grant endless patience.

Now he is all but immune to the scent of human blood, and he is able to do the work he loves without agony.

From the cheerful topic of my impending demise, we were suddenly declaring ourselves.

As I fidgeted and paced, they simply grew more still, two statues whose eyes followed me imperceptibly as I moved.

“But honestly,” I teased, “for that to bother you, after I have to hear that Rosalie — Rosalie, the incarnation of pure beauty, Rosalie — was meant for you.

“It is sort of ironic.”

The forest spread out around us in a boundless labyrinth of ancient trees, and I began to be nervous that we would never find our way out again.

The latter instinct proved correct — my truck sat in the same space he’d parked his Volvo in this morning.

Occasionally I would permit myself a quick glance in his direction, but he never seemed to re¬lax, either.

No one else seemed to know quite what to say, and then Jasper was there — tall and leonine.

He’s absolutely lethal.

Now he is able to manipulate the emo¬tions of those around him — calm down a room of angry people, for example, or excite a lethargic crowd, conversely.

He was on his feet in one of his lithe, almost invisibly quick movements.

She stared back at him with livid disbelief.

I’d dealt with temptation before, not of this magnitude, not even close, but I was strong.

But his long hands formed manacles around my wrists as he spoke.

She must be attributing the change in her vision to some maneuver of the tracker’s rather than a betrayal by me.

Sometimes they live separately from us, as a mar¬ried couple.

He waited by the passenger door with a martyred expression that was easy to understand.

I marveled again at the perfect texture, satin smooth, cool as stone.

“What a sick, masochistic lion.”

“Do you want me to bolt the doors so you can massacre the unsuspecting townsfolk?”

He touched a comparatively sedate quartet of figures painted on the highest balcony, looking down calmly on the mayhem below them.

We lay silently, wrapped in our individual meditations.

The song he was still playing, my song, drifted to an end, the final chords shifting to a more melancholy key.

But his mercurial mood shifted on me.

Hesitantly, always afraid, even now, that he would dis¬appear like a mirage, too beautiful to be real . . . hesitantly, I reached out one finger and stroked the back of his shim¬mering hand, where it lay within my reach.

His smile turned mocking.

They brought her straight to the hospital morgue, though, somehow, her heart was still beating.”

I searched for some logic, some binding motif the collection had in common, but I found nothing in my hasty examination.

“You are mythical, after all.”

“Nomads, for the most part.

I nodded noncommittally, keeping my eyes down as I flipped sandwiches.

“It’s twilight,” Edward murmured, looking at the western horizon, obscured as it was with clouds.

The trees held their protecting shadow right up to the walls of the house that rose among them, making obsolete the deep porch that wrapped around the first story.

“Time to visit the optometrist,” I muttered.

“Ostentatious,” he muttered.

The man in front was easily the most beautiful, his skin olive-toned beneath the typical pallor, his hair a glossy black.

My hand raised automatically, one fin¬ger extended as if to touch the large wooden cross, its dark patina contrasting with the lighter tone of the wall.

By night he studied music, science, medicine — and found his calling, his penance, in that, in saving human lives.”

“I’ll do the laun¬dry tonight — that ought to be fraught with peril.”

She was happy, absorbed — she seemed like a new, mysterious being to me then, someone outside the “mom” persona I took for granted.

Following the same instinct that had prompted me to lie to Mike, I called Jessica on the pretense of wishing her luck at the dance.

The gloom of the forest didn’t re¬lent, though, for there were six primordial cedars that shaded an entire acre with their vast sweep of branches.

I normally wouldn’t condone that type of behavior in myself, but tomorrow would be com¬plicated enough without me being loopy from sleep de¬privation on top of everything else.

His quiet, probing questions kept me talking freely, forgetting, in the dim light of the storm, to be embar¬rassed for monopolizing the conversation.

Edward was growling something too fast for me to un¬derstand, but it sounded a lot like a string of profanities.

The respect in his voice was profound whenever he spoke of his father figure.

Perhaps he would hesitate to prolong the moment, that ideal moment of anticipation, sometimes better than the kiss itself.

His eyes burned with sincerity for a protracted moment — playing havoc with the rhythm of my heart — and then turned playful.

He reached across to open my door for me, and his sudden proximity sent my heart into frenzied palpitations.

It hung on the wall above the pulpit in the vicarage where he preached.”

The cabbie’s question punctured my fantasy, letting all the colors run out of my lovely delusions.

He ran through the streets, and Carlisle — he was twenty-three and very fast — was in the lead of the pursuit.

I was careful not to over-emphasize the word boys in my quest to be truthful with Charlie.

I realized now that I was ravenous.

Carlisle’s firm rebuff was directed toward James.

The two desires are impossible to reconcile.

Reflexively, his eyes flickered to another picture — the most colorful of them all, the most ornately framed, and the largest; it was twice as wide as the door it hung next to.

Mr. Banner shoved the tape into the reluctant VCR and walked to the wall to turn off the lights.

Jacob scowled and ducked his head while I fought back a surge of remorse.

I stared at the precise rendering of my mother’s family room.

Most humans instinctively shy away from us, are repelled by our alienness.

There was no escape, no reprieve.

I recognized Billy’s resonant voice easily, despite the years.

“This truck is old enough to be your car’s grandfather — have some respect,” I retorted.

His expression became awed, almost reverent.

It was clearly a rhetorical question.

A swift rigidity fell on all of them as James lurched one step forward into a crouch.

“And you’ll make it look like that’s a ruse, obviously.

There was no time to look back at my house, and I didn’t want to see it as it was now — empty, a symbol of fear instead of sanctuary.

“Do you want to go home?” he said quietly, a different pain than mine saturating his voice.

Could he really believe the impossible legends his son had scoffed at?

Jacob scowled and ducked his head while I fought back a surge of remorse.

I kept my face composed, aware of his scrutiny as I lis¬tened.

He touched a comparatively sedate quartet of figures painted on the highest balcony, looking down calmly on the mayhem below them.

That must have been what alerted Jasper, why a fresh wave of serenity filled the car.

“Bring on the shackles — I’m your prisoner.”

She left without another word; her walk was so fluid, so sinuous that I felt a sharp pang of jealousy.

As soon as I was done she handed me her slacks.

The only solace, the only hope I had left, was knowing that I would see Edward soon.

The hardest thing to explain was why it was so beautiful to me — to justify a beauty that didn’t depend on the sparse, spiny vegetation that often looked half dead, a beauty that had more to do with the exposed shape of the land, with the shallow bowls of valleys between the craggy hills, and the way they held on to the sun.

I hurried through my cereal, speculating.

He sulked again.

“Superstitious old man,” Jacob muttered under his breath.

I’d never seen him dress in black before, and, with the contrast against his pale skin, his beauty was absolutely surreal.

A movie day — the lift in the class atmosphere was almost tangible.

His eyes appraised me, taking in the damp hair, the tattered shirt.

Emmett brought his strength, Rosalie her . . . tenacity.

Edward’s plane was landing in termi¬nal four, the largest terminal, where most flights landed — so it wasn’t surprising that his was.

Jacob asked as he pushed his father over the lip of the threshold.

He’s not used to being thwarted, no matter how insignificant the object.

I felt a tranquil atmosphere settle around me.

Five miles of treacherous roots and loose stones, trying to twist my ankles or otherwise in¬capacitate me.

“I have to, because I’m going to be a little . . . over¬bearingly protective over the next few days — or weeks — and I wouldn’t want you to think I’m naturally a tyrant.”

As many years of unfathomable experience as he had, this was hard for him, too.

Their sharp eyes carefully took in the more polished, urbane stance of Carlisle, who, flanked by Emmett and Jasper, stepped guardedly forward to meet them.

I doubted there were any etiquette books detailing how to dress when your vampire sweetheart takes you home to meet his vampire family.

Had he not eaten venison in his former life?

I flinched back from the venom in her voice.

Whenever I fidgeted or complained, she re¬minded me that she didn’t have any memories of be¬ing human, and asked me not to ruin her vicarious fun.

They were much more civilized and educated than the wraiths of the London sewers.”

The canvas overflowed with bright figures in swirling robes, writhing around long pillars and off marbled balconies.

“Alice, Bella — Bella, Alice,” he introduced us, ges¬turing casually with his hand, a wry smile on his face.

His anguish was plain; I yearned to comfort him, but I was at a loss to know how.