I jumped in my skin. Yipes!
He lifted his eyes; his expression was wistful, pleading.
"Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don't we?"
"What are you asking? My permission?" My voice was sharper than I'd intended, and I felt embarrassed that I was trying to boss him into not eating me. I tried to make my tone honey—you catch more flies in that way. "I mean, so you don't want to eat me, do you?"
"No, no!" He was instantly contrite. "Of course not! I mean, of course I won't... " He left the sentence hanging. His eyes burned into mine. "It's different for us. Emmett... they were strangers he happened across. It was a long time ago-go,277 and he wasn't as... practiced, as careful as he is now."
He fell silent and watched me intently as I thought it through.
"So if we'd met... oh, in a dark alley or something... " I trailed off hopefully.
"It took everything I had not to jump up in the middle of that class full of children—those little bouncing babies—it took everything I had to not jump up and—" He stopped abruptly, looking away. "When you walked past me, I could have ruined everything Carlisle has built for us, right then and there. If I hadn't been denying my hunger for the last, well, too many years, I wouldn't have been able to stop myself." He paused, scowling at the trees for what they done.
He glanced at me grimly, both of us remembering. "You must have thought I was possessed."
"I thought that maybe I smelled!" I gave a tinkling little laugh.
"To me, it was like you were some kind of demon-fruit, summoned straight from the depths of my own personal hell to ruin me.
277. Reference to a popular British folk song, "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go," penned by Wham:
