“Charlie!” She exclaimed, and then sighed, as if sad. She’d apparently lost track of time as much as I had—so much for her put-out sham. “How late is it?” She asked unnecessarily as she looked at the clock on my dashboard and then back up at me, apprehension in her eyes.
A few more minutes. I leaned my head back against the headrest and made an effort to absorb this last moment with her. I looked her in the eyes and felt that hollow empty flip, the human taking over. The want of something other than blood… it was the time of night. Every night, for as long as I’ve been changed, I have a very brief amount of time… just as the sun begins to set… that I feel like I imagine I once felt, before I became a monster. How I longed for a world where I could be this way forever, where I could hold her—no interruptions, no danger, no hindrances.
“It’s twilight,” I said, almost reverently. With my heightened vision I could peer through the clouds in the west to discern that burning globe, so far away, almost fully over the horizon. I wondered if there were other suns setting on other worlds where it was possible for someone like me and such a fragile human to be together.
My thoughts wandered, maybe to places it shouldn’t… It was almost easy to think of being something other than vampire at this time, when the melancholy slipping of the day seemed to take with it all the uncomfortable appetites, the hunger, the pain… and replaced it with new ones.
I could feel her eyes on me. Intense, probing. I turned my eyes to meet hers.
“It’s the safest time of day for us,” I explained. “The easiest time. But also the saddest, in a way… the end of another day, the return of the night.” Just another tally mark on the slate of non-existent time. “Darkness is so predictable, don’t you think?” I smiled at the thought of some inconceivable change in the pattern.
And yet it happened to me. Bella came into my world, and it was truly as if, one night, the sun didn’t set.
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