Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,155

response to no more than my skin in the shade…

Her face fell. It was as if my former despondency had transferred to her, had landed with the weight of all my hundred years. Perhaps this was all that was needed. Maybe she’d seen enough.

“Do you want to go home?”

If she wanted to leave me, if she wanted to walk away now, I would let her go. I would watch her disappear, and endure it. I wasn’t quite sure how, but I would find a way.

Her eyes flashed with some unfathomable reaction, and she said, “No!” so quickly, it was almost a retort. She hurried to my side, coming so close that I would only have had to lean a few inches to brush my arm against hers.

What did it mean?

“What’s wrong?” I asked. There was still pain in her eyes, pain that made no sense combined with her actions. Did she want to leave me or not?

Her voice was low and nearly inflectionless as she answered. “I’m not a good hiker. You’ll have to be very patient.”

I didn’t believe her entirely, but it was a kind lie. Obviously she was concerned about the lack of a conventional trail to follow, but that was hardly enough to create the grief in her expression. I leaned closer and smiled as gently as I could, trying to coax a smile in return. I hated the shadow of misery lingering around the edges of her lips, her eyes.

“I can be patient,” I assured her, lightening my tone. “If I make a great effort.”

She half smiled at my words, but one side of her mouth refused to turn up.

“I’ll take you home,” I promised. Perhaps she felt she had no choice but to face this trial by fire, that she owed it to me in some way. She owed me nothing. She was free to walk away whenever she wished.

I was taken aback by her response. Rather than accept the out I was offering with relief, she quite distinctly scowled at me. When she spoke, her tone was caustic.

“If you want me to hack five miles through the jungle before sundown, you’d better start leading the way.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded, waiting for more—for something that would make it clear how I’d offended her—but she just lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes as if in challenge.

Not knowing what else to do, I held my arm out to usher her forward, lifting a protruding branch higher with my other hand. She stomped underneath it, then swatted a smaller limb out of her way.

It was easier in the forest. Or maybe I had just needed a moment to process her first reaction. I led the way, holding the foliage to clear her path. Mostly she kept her eyes down, not as if she were avoiding looking at me, but as if she didn’t trust the ground. I saw her glare at a few roots as she stepped over them and made the connection then—surely a clumsy person would be nervous about the uneven terrain. However, that still didn’t explain her earlier gloom or her following anger.

Many things were easier in the forest than I expected them to be. Here we were, totally alone, no witnesses, and yet it didn’t feel dangerous. Even the few times that we reached an obstacle—a fallen log across the way, an outcropping of rock too high to step over—and I instinctively reached out to help her, it was no more difficult to touch her than it had been at school. Not difficult was hardly the correct description. It was thrilling, pleasurable, just as it had been before. When I lifted her gently, I heard her heart drum in double time. I imagined my heart would sound just the same if it could also beat.

It probably felt safe, or safe enough, because I knew this wasn’t the place. Alice had never seen me killing Bella in the middle of the forest. If only I didn’t have to hold Alice’s vision inside my head.… Of course, not knowing that possible future, not preparing for it, might have been the very ignorance that would lead to Bella’s death. It was all so circular and impossible.

Not for the first time in my life, I wished that I could make my brain slow down. Force it to move at human speed, if only just for a day, an hour, so that I wouldn’t have time to obsess over and over again about the same solutionless problems.

“Which