O' LADY MOON, rosalie hale

CHAPTER TWELVE

Perhaps life was meant to go like that all the time. Perhaps it had been written that way before, from the moment she spoke to the moon in more than mumbles and a barely audible hiss to when her hand met her childhood friend's, shaking and paralyzed by the sun shining too bright even late at night between concrete walls. It was intentional to be left alone, growing up and falling asleep in the car as a kid after mom made it clear she didn't like her halloween costume or the skirt she wore before blacking out drunk at a party and thanking her half present for carrying her back home; there were hidden intentions in the soup dad cooked for her and the tears she had seen her mother shed for the first time, tears so sacred Genevieve couldn't dare to touch nor look at for too long, fearing their sadness could be contagious, like a virus without a name, like the ghost that haunted her whether in dreams or wide awake.

Genevieve felt no longer at war with the world the night the storage room's door shivered and the reason behind the knob turning had golden brown eyes and a soft look that invited her closer, that told she wouldn't burn the same Icarus had done. But even though Genevieve didn't know if she should've truly believed in it and the enchantment it held behind her lashes, she did, deeply inside an unconscious realm, she pushed herself up, put on her shoes and walked out the replacement of something close to a home yet never big enough, and followed her through bushes and trees and the mist.

The woods were lovely, dark and infinite. It had promises to keep that began as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, of lovesickness, of something lost in each of its corners, highest levels and removed earth. Rosalie Hale didn't save herself from it neither; Genevieve noticed the leaves bounced back towards her when she moved them out of the way, her fingers left marks where they laid, as if an incentive for the moss to remember her presence rather than only absorbing her smell and the sound of her voice hurrying Genevieve to not slow down. And because Forks felt it too, she just had to wait for her to look over her shoulder again to get it right that time, to finally understand Rosalie's past life was still holding onto her, like a limp on her leg or a twist on her ankle, like a prayer muttered by bloodied gums and a numb tongue too tired from screaming and the pain that didn't abandon her even after she had simply stopped working sounds up and out her mouth.

More often than not, Genevieve had thought Rosalie Hale was a dog that bit as it hadn't had any other option not to; that warned if a hand came close and didn't keep its fingers out of the bars, they were going to get them torn off, with ears turned back and teeth bared and pupils blown wide, chest heaving, pulse jumping erratically. Always backed into the corner of a kennel by the world at large, by love and night and the equivalent of the two. But even if she had found the way to not look like it, Rosalie was a spectrum, a type of wanting and fear of desire as warm as the jacket she had slided down her arms and up Genevieve's own.

"It's cold." Was all she said, careful of only taking a step forward so their bodies were at a safe distance, where it could've been easy for any of them to be the most courageous and graze each other's flesh. Instead they let their gazes meet. Rosalie's traveled far from the dirty spots covering her work overalls and the gloves peeking out of one of her pockets, Genevieve's was stuck on the straight pieces of hair that had fallen off her ponytail and swayed ethereally along the wind at the sides of her face.

"Why Forks?" Genevieve couldn't help asking, "Out of all places, why did you move here?" She hugged the leather tightly, hiding herself inside of it, protecting her soul to crawl outside her body and towards the girl in front of her.

Rosalie didn't seem bothered by her. She had never been, if Genevieve could recall correctly, not the day she decided she was going to ignore her so she wouldn't want to get close to her and certainly not the night she almost shot her with the rubber bullet her dad used to shoo animals away from their house when they crossed the fence and tried to find a warm place to spend the freezing temperatures where the forest's embrace wasn't as good as the radiator working on inside her home.

"There's a saying that the younger you start out in a new place, the longer you can stay there." Rosalie watched her attentively, "You've never left this town, you're grounded to it, I can sense it just by standing here. We wanted that too, at some point."

Genevieve knew what she meant. It wasn't a bad thing, but still, she hoped she didn't. She hoped she changed her mind, quickly, faster than understanding if what she was feeling was right or wrong or something in between those lines that fluctuated from one to the other when she wasn't looking.

"I had no interest in anything when my family first came here." There were so many things Rosalie felt she had hanging on the tip of her tongue, ready to say them all, spill them onto the ground, but didn't know how to, so she said in a whisper only looking at her eyes: "I guess that has changed awhile ago."

And it was fair, because Genevieve had thought the same, even if she hadn't consciously reach that realization by herself. It was fair, because Rosalie didn't push her for any answer; instead, she led the way back home, making room for Genevieve to walk first as she held curtains of flowered branches and avoided to glance a second time at the kitchen's light turning on a couple meters away, uncovering them from the shadows and thicket, where neither of the two said a word for what was worth.

When Genevieve took the jacket off, Rosalie could only mourn the loss.