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The Falling

Summary:
In the action itself, she is weightless and free. The flight is not to be feared, only the impact. A story on the life of Esme Cullen. Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Banner By incredible Iris!

Notes:
I may submit this to the official site. What do you think?

69. Chapter 69

Rating 5/5   Word Count 529   Review this Chapter

A forever in which

“Carlisle,” I whisper, and I smile. It is a strange sensation, my own mouth totally unfamiliar to me, the muscles around my lips too strong so that I can feel as it ricochets into a grin inappropriately broad for the occasion.

“You remember me?”

“Yes.” Of course! How could I forget him, the man I adore, the man I still love?

He seems genuinely surprised. “I am… glad… to hear that.”

“What’s going on?” I ask suddenly, reminded abruptly of my bewildering situation.

Carlisle sighs heavily. With my new eyes, I can see even more perfectly the way his lips tremble as he does so… he is more exquisite than I had previously been able to even comprehend.

My nose is the strongest, perhaps, of my strange strong senses, and it can smell, from him, some incomprehensible combination of warmth, something akin to sunshine and spices, and cold, like ice and apples.

“Will you allow me to explain this to you? All of it? It might be a bit bewildering. I apologize for that… for so many other things, as well.”

I wave it off. “Tell me why I live, Carlisle. Please.”

“You intended to die? Let me be certain of that, first.”

“Yes. I did not wish to live one more instant.” I find myself using the past tense, and not inaccurately. For some reason, with him here, I am much more inclined to go on breathing.

Perhaps because my impossible dreams of being with him signify that which I lost, that which killed me—hope. I hoped so much, and so completely centered on him, that his simple presence makes those dreams renew themselves.

I quiet my imagination. I am old at twenty-six—and though he was once older than me, he does not appear to have aged a day. I’m married, with a child borne and lost, and besides my youthful happiness, which I presume was what pulled him to me in the first place, is so far gone I can scarcely remember it ever was.

He doesn’t want me now, clearly, but that doesn’t much matter. I can want him, and that alone, that pointless desire, will let me find the strength to live.

“Esme, I found you in the morgue. You were still breathing.”

I nod. “All right. Why am I not dead now?”

He’s stalling. That much is obvious. I know, and yet I don’t really care, because the sound of his voice is like music and the dance of his eyes as he speaks is perfect.

Those eyes have a reddish tinge to them now, inexplicably. Well, maybe it is part of the mystery.

“I saved you. Even I don’t know why.”

“I think at this point the more important question is how.”

He smiles, no, shows his teeth, each one glistening, and I smell sweetness as he opens his mouth. “I bit you. I changed you. You’re like me now.”

“Meaning…”

“You are an immortal… a vampire.”

You have no further to fall,