Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,162

tear trees out by their roots. If I couldn’t feel the edge, couldn’t see the trigger, how could I ever protect her from myself?

I could imagine Alice’s encouragement. I had protected Bella. Nothing had happened. But though Alice might have seen that much, watching when my break was still the future and not the past, she couldn’t know how it had felt. To lose control of myself, to be weaker than my worst impulse. Not to be able to stop.

But you did stop. That’s what she would say. She couldn’t know how not enough that was.

Bella never looked away from me. Her heart was racing twice as fast as normal. Too fast. It couldn’t be healthy. I wanted to take her hand and tell her everything was fine, she was fine, she was safe, there was nothing to worry about—but these would be such obvious lies.

I still felt… normal—what normal had become in these last months, at least. In control. Just exactly the same as before, when my confidence had nearly killed her.

I walked back slowly, wondering if I should keep my distance. But it didn’t seem right to shout my apology across the meadow at her. I didn’t trust myself to be as close to her as before. I stopped a few paces away, at a conversational distance, and sat on the ground.

I tried to put everything I felt into the words. “I am so very sorry.”

Bella blinked and then her eyes were too wide again; her heart hammered too fast. Her expression was stuck in place. The words didn’t seem to mean anything to her, to register in any way.

In what I immediately knew was a bad idea, I fell back on my usual pattern of trying to keep things casual. I was desperate to remove the frozen shock from her face.

“Would you understand what I meant if I said I was only human?”

A second too late, she nodded—just once. She tried to smile at my tasteless attempt to make light of the situation, but that effort just marred her expression further. She looked pained, and then, finally, afraid.

I’d seen fear on her face before, but I’d always been quickly reassured. Every time I’d half hoped that she’d realized I wasn’t worth the immense risk, she’d disproved my assumption. The fear in her eyes had never been fear of me.

Until now.

The scent of her fear saturated the air, tangy and metallic.

This was exactly what I’d been waiting for. What I’d always told myself I wanted. For her to turn away. For her to save herself and leave me burning and alone.

Her heart hammered on, and I wanted to laugh and cry. I was getting what I wanted.

And all because she’d leaned in just one inch too close. She’d gotten near enough to smell my scent, and she’d found it pleasant, just as she found my face attractive and all of my other snares compelling. Everything about me made her want to move closer to me, just exactly as it was designed to.

“I’m the world’s best predator, aren’t I?” I made no attempt to hide the bitterness in my voice now. “Everything about me invites you in—my voice, my face, even my smell.” It was all so much overkill. What was the point of my charms and lures? I was no rooted flytrap, waiting for prey to land inside my mouth. Why couldn’t I have been as repulsive on the outside as I was on the inside? “As if I need any of that!”

Now I felt out of control, but not in the same way. All my love and yearning and hope were crumbling to dust, a thousand centuries of grief stretched out in front of me, and I didn’t want to pretend anymore. If I could have no happiness because I was a monster, then let me be that monster.

I was on my feet, racing like her heart, in two tight circles around the edge of the clearing, wondering if she could even see what I was showing her.

I jerked to a stop where I’d stood before. This was why I didn’t need a pretty voice.

“As if you could outrun me.” I laughed at the thought, the grotesque comedy of the image in my head. The sound of my laugh bounced in harsh echoes off the trees.

And after the chase, there would be the capture.

The lowest branch of the ancient spruce beside me was in easy reach. I ripped the limb from the body without any effort at