crooked smile. He reached across the table to touch my face, lightly brushing along the cheekbone again. Then he turned and ran away faster than ever. I stared after him until he was gone.
I was sorely tempted to ditch the rest of the day, at the very least Jim on Gym, but a queer warning instinct stopped me. I knew that if I disappeared now, Mike and his homies would assume I was with Fredward, and Fredward was worried about the time we spent together publicly, worried... if things went wrong. What would he think if I were making people think we were together even more often than we actually were? I refused to dwell on the thought of him killing me and sucking out all my blood until I was as hollow as a pirate leg. I concentrated instead on making things safer for him. After all that's what he would do for me. In fact, that's what he did do for me, every day...
I intuitively knew—and intuitively sensed he did, too—that tomorrow would be pivotal. Our relationship couldn't continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other. We would slide down the non-blade side like it were a playground slide, waving at our friends on the way down as they played volleyball in an adjacent sector of the knife. Or, and I wasn't sure I even understood what this option would mean for me, or for my future husband, we would tumble down the serrated side of the knife, hitting each swell and crest like bad surfing waves—if oceans were made out of sharpened metal, that is.
My decision was made, made before I'd even made it, and I had made a commitment to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. Even the thought of plummeting down the side of a vertical ocean with waves like knife blades would be better than living without the constant intrigue and attention of my vampire boyfriend.
I went to class, feeling dutiful. I couldn't honestly say what happened in Biology IV; it was really beyond words. In Gym, Mike was speaking to me again; he wished me a good time in Seattle. For some reason, I carefully blurted out that I'd canceled my trip, and was worried about The Growler.
"What's The Growler?" Mike asked, with a pathetic attempt at making me laugh by making a growling-esque noise. "Are you going to the dance with Cullen?" he asked, suddenly sulky.
"No, I'm not going to the dance with anyone."
"What're you doing, then?" he asked, tooooooo interested.

249

Chapter 12

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