Author’s notes:
Loving the chatter on twitter and on the twilighted forum! You guys come up with a bunch of awesome ideas and theories! It keeps me on my toes!
For those who wondered - no, I did not draw the hands - just found the pic on google. I never could draw hands - LOL
“Forget about me.”
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Chapter 94:
I tried not to look at Irina’s face as she read the letters Bella sent to me. I didn’t know what she would think, or what she would say, and the whole damn thing made me nervous as hell.
“Edward, our session is almost up,” she finally said. I still didn’t look up. “May I hold on to these?”
“No!” I looked up at her then, nearly jumped out of my chair and grabbed for the ones sitting on her desk. She held one hand up in surrender mode, and the other held out Bella’s letter. I grabbed it away from her, and sat back down, holding them tightly in my hands.
The door slammed open behind me, and the guard who monitors the cameras put his hand on my shoulder, held me against the back of the chair, and asked if there was a problem. Irina just shook her head no, and told him everything was fine. He looked down at me.
“You gonna behave yourself, Cullen?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I responded.
He left after getting more reassurance from Irina, and she took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
“They must be pretty important to you,” she commented.
I didn’t see any reason to respond, so I didn’t. Our session ended, and I went back to my normal routine. Smoke, eat a little, try to sleep, wake, smoke, do it all again.
…
“Do you want to talk about the letters?”
It was the first thing she said after hello.
“What’s to say?” I asked.
“You said you didn’t receive the first one until you had been here for some time,” she said. “What were you thinking about Bella before you saw it?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what?”
“Thinking.”
“How about after you received it?” she pressed.
I scratched the back of my neck and fiddled with my hair.
“I guess I was glad she was okay,” I said. Irina didn’t respond, which usually meant she was going to just sit there until I said something else. I sighed and took a breath. “I was relieved, at first. Then I was just…I don’t know…I guess I thought she had forgotten about me.”
“Do you think Bella could forget about you? You both went through a lot together.”
“Yeah.” More silence from the other side of the desk. “I wish she could.”
“Could what?”
“Forget about me.”
“Why do you want that?”
“Because if she did, she’d forget all the other shit, too. She said she was in therapy or whatever, and I didn’t want her to have to…live through all of that again and again. If she forgot me, she’d be…better off.”
“The letters you have received from her are obviously very important to you, considering your reaction to parting with them last week. It is your connection not only to Bella, but to the outside world as a whole. You’re holding on to them like some kind of lifeline.”
“She is my life,” I said quietly.
“She is thousands of miles away without the financial means to see you,” Irina pointed out. “I don’t know what the detail of her therapy contains, but I’m not surprised she has been advised not to contact you.”
“Why not?”
“Because at some point, you both need to heal,” she said. “What have you said in letters back to her?”
I shrugged, and I felt a chill go up my spine.
“Edward, you don’t have to tell me, but I think it might help.”
“I haven’t sent her any,” I admitted.
“You haven’t responded to her at all? In a year and a half?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know what to say to her.”
The silence led to pen tapping this time.
“Have you received any other letters or visitors since you arrived?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to count the visit from Alice.
“Would you like to?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there are a lot of programs available here where people from the outside – usually church groups – write to inmates. It’s kind of a pen-pal program, if you will. You could be signed up to receive letters from these kids of groups. It can help to have that kind of contact with others.”
“No,” I said without really thinking about it.
“Edward, a large part of your problem has to do with connecting to people,” she said. Yeah, yeah, I’d heard this since I first talked about my childhood. “You don’t have any relationships with other inmates except for Seth, who will be out in six months. You don’t have any one contacting you outside of your victim. You need to learn how to deal with people if you are ever going to get to the point where you want to be.”
I didn’t respond this time – I didn’t know what to say. After a minute, Irina opened up one of her desk drawers and placed a green, cellophane wrapped something on the desk in front of me.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a veggie wrap,” she responded. “I brought it for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry enough to eat it. Would you like it?”
Damn if my stomach didn’t growl right about then. Lunch had been non-existent. I looked over to see Irina smiling a little, like she was trying to hold it in. I closed my eyes and shook my head, then reached over and opened the damn thing up. It was actually really good.
“Fine,” I told her when I was done with it. “I’ll be a fucking pen-pal.”
…
“Have you thought anymore about getting your GED?” Irina asked.
We had talked about it a few times, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to or not. She kept asking me about it, though, and I finally asked what the point of it would be.
“Part of being able to lead a normal life includes getting a job,” she said. “Without a GED, and with your background, how are you going to do that?”
I sighed and sat back.
“I did run a legitimate company,” I finally said.
“Which has since dissolved,” she reminded me.
“I still ran it – that’s kind of a resume, isn’t it?”
She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows.
“Fine,” I relented. “I’ll do it.”
I passed on the first try.
…
Sessions with Irina were the only thing I actually looked forward to in the entire week. It both made the other six days go slower and faster at the same time. I swear to God, that woman had talked me into doing a hundred things I never would have considered, including petitioning for vegetarian options on the prison menu. I had yet to be successful, but she hadn’t let me give up yet. There was only one thing she hadn’t talked me into, and that was writing any letters.
“Did you get a letter this week?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I responded.
“From?”
“Pastor Lee,” I told her.
“That’s the third one from him, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you written back yet?”
“I started to,” I told her.
“It’s not a pen-pal program if you don’t write back,” she reminded me…again.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“This all goes back to connecting with people, Edward,” she said. “You don’t have to have some kind of phenomenal insight to share in order to just respond to someone. Just try writing what you did all day, or what you might like to do when you get out.”
“Yeah, that would be all kind of interesting,” I snorted. Set sarcasm to kill.
“It doesn’t have to be interesting,” she said…again. “Talk about the weather. Talk about the food. Talk about Seth, current events – anything.”
“Every time I say something it’s wrong,” I told her. “If…if I piss him off…I mean, I’m not religious or anything. If I piss him off with something I say…he might…”
I trailed off.
“He might what?” she prompted.
“Stop writing to me.”
I glanced up at her, feeling the tightness in my chest now that I had admitted the reason. My hands were starting the shake, and I placed one of them over my pocket – trying to get some contact with Bella’s letters that lived there. The same six had been in there for two months now.
“You haven’t received any more letters from Bella, have you?”
“Not since that last one.” I swallowed hard, trying to keep my voice in check.
Since the first one I had received, I had gotten at least one from her every month. The last one I received had been over two months ago, and the tone of it had changed drastically. I still kept it in my pocket, but I never read it again.
“You still haven’t written to her.”
“No.” I put my hands back on my thighs and stared at them. “I still don’t know what to say.”
Pen tapping. There was a lot of that going on recently.
“Do you want me to help you write it?”
I swallowed again – hard. My hands clenched and unclenched, and I cleared my throat before speaking again.
“Would you?”
“I would be happy to.”
It couldn’t be that hard, right?
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Chapter end notes:
Bella’s letter will be in the next chapter – promise.
A work about timeline – yes, we have jumped ahead a bit. Edward is approaching the second anniversary of his incarceration. He is making a bit of progress, don’t cha think?
There may be another update tonight – we’ll see.
