Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,163

all. The wood shrieked and protested, the bark and splinters exploded from the site of the injury. I weighed the bough for a moment in my hand. Roughly eight hundred sixty three pounds. Not enough to win in a fight with the hemlock across the clearing to my right, but enough to do some damage.

I flicked the branch at the hemlock tree, aiming for a knot about thirty feet from the ground. My projectile hit dead center, the thickest end of the bough smashing with a booming crunch and disintegrating into shards of shattered wood that rained down on the ferns below with a faint hissing. A fissure split through the center of the knot and snaked its way a few feet in either direction. The hemlock tree trembled once, the shock radiating through the roots and into the ground. I wondered if I’d killed it. I’d have to wait a few months to know. Hopefully it would recover; the meadow was perfect as it was.

So little effort on my part. I’d not needed to use more than a tiny fraction of my available strength. And still, so much violence. So much harm.

In two strides I was standing over her, just an arm’s length way.

“As if you could fight me off.”

The bitterness disappeared from my voice. My little tantrum had cost me no energy, but it had drained some of my ire.

Throughout it all, she’d never moved. She remained paralyzed now, her eyes frozen open. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. I was still so angry at myself, but there was no fire left in it. It all seemed pointless. I was what I was.

She moved first. Just a little bit. Her hands had fallen limp in her lap after I’d wrenched away from her, but now one of them twitched open. Her fingers stretched up slightly in my direction. It was probably an unconscious movement, but it was eerily similar to when she’d pleaded “Come back” in her sleep and reached for something. I’d wished then that she could be dreaming of me.

That was the night before Port Angeles, the night before I learned that she already knew what I was. If I’d been aware of what Jacob Black had told her, I never would have believed she could dream of me except in a nightmare. But none of it had mattered to her.

There was still terror in her eyes. Of course there was. But there seemed to be a plea in them, too. Was there any chance she wanted me to come back to her now? Even if she did, should I?

Her pain, my greatest weakness—as Alice had shown me it would be. I hated to see her frightened. It broke me to know how much I deserved that fear, but more than either of those burdens, I could not bear to see her grief. It stripped me of my ability to make anything close to a good decision.

“Don’t be afraid,” I begged in a whisper. “I promise—” No, that had become too casual a word. “I swear not to hurt you. Don’t be afraid.”

I moved closer to her slowly, making no movement that she would not have time to anticipate. I sat gradually, in deliberate stages, so that I was once again where we’d begun. I slouched down a bit so that my face was level with hers.

The pace of her heart eased. Her lids relaxed back into their usual place. It was as if my proximity calmed her.

“Please forgive me,” I pleaded. “I can control myself. You caught me off guard, but I’m on my best behavior now.” What a pathetic apology. Still, it brought a hint of a smile to the corner of her lips. And like a fool, I fell back into my immature efforts to be amusing. “I’m not thirsty today, honestly.”

I actually winked at her. One would think I was thirteen instead of a hundred and four.

But she laughed. A little out of breath, a little wobbly, but still a real laugh, with real mirth and relief. Her eyes warmed, her shoulders loosened, and her hands opened again.

It felt so right to gently place my hand back inside hers. It shouldn’t, but it did.

“Are you all right?”

She stared at our hands, then glanced up to meet my gaze for a moment, and finally looked down again. She started to trace the lines across my palm with the tip of her finger, just as she had been