HEy guys! another! I love love love this chapter!!! Hope you all llike it too! Thanks KenoshaChick!
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My driveway seemed impossibly long - much longer than I remembered. The landscape before me was nearly identical to the watercolor Esme gave me on my last birthday in Forks. I didn't know why I expected anything to be different. I supposed it was because it felt like great deal of time had passed, and depending on one's point of view, a great deal of time had passed. For me, one year was over ten percent of my lifetime; for Sasha, it was minuscule drop in the bucket. So much had changed for Sasha and I within the last year. Somehow, time seemed to have stood still in Forks.
A cab dropped us off at the turn-off to my family's estate. Sasha paid him and then hauled my huge trunk out of the back. It would have looked very suspicious if someone as small and thin as me were to try to lift the heavy trunk, even though I was more than capable. Sasha was happy to carry it, being the polite gentleman he was. I decided it would be best if we didn't have a human drive us up to the home of a family of vampires. It wasn't that my family couldn't handle themselves around a human, I just had enough to worry about.
Fortunately for my stress level, Sasha had done magnificently so far. Given that his eyes were blue, he moved like a human, and he didn't sparkle, he didn't stand out as being something otherworldly, but that didn't mean he blended in either. One reason being that he was foreign and spoke with an unusual accent, and secondly, he was just too beautiful. As we walked through the crowded airport, he got more than a few open-mouth stares, similar to the look I had the first time I met him. I couldn't help smirking each time I saw it on various women, only because Sasha didn't seem to notice their gawking. He just kept looking at me and tried his best to smile and hide his many apprehensions. Surprisingly, he hadn't fought with me about coming to Forks since we left. He didn't fool me one bit. I could see in the darkened shade of his blue eyes that he was still worried about everything on his extensive list: losing control, hurting me, hurting my family, satiating his thirst. Then there was the other list of apprehensions that had nothing to do with being a vampire: leaving Romania for the first time, leaving Ántonia, meeting a large group of new people while being a little socially awkward.
I internally questioned my decision to bring him with me a few times on the flight over. I was asking quite a lot of him. He had to leave his home against his better judgment, to go somewhere he'd never been while also walking into a complicated situation that had nothing to do with him. Why had he agreed to come?
At the same time, I recognized how incredibly pleased I was to have him with me. Each time I would sigh or groan with impatience, he would gently take my hand, sometimes without even talking, sometimes without even lifting his eyes from a magazine he was reading, as if it was suddenly the most natural thing in the world. The first time he did it, I was so elated he had taken the initiative to touch me that all I could concentrate on was the wild thrumming in my chest. After all that obsessing over getting him to touch me, now all it took was a sigh or some restless fidgeting. After it happened a few more times, the preliminary novelty wore off, and I found not only did I appreciate the generosity of his comfort, I was beginning to expect it. This concept was completely backwards when it came to Sasha and I, and possibly a little risky for more than one reason. Besides the obvious possibility of losing my memories, it was wrong of me to expect him to touch me freely when it gave him anxiety, and I knew I was just setting myself up for disappointment if he decided it was too dangerous and stopped entirely. But ever since he saw that brief image of the two of us, smiling and free of worry, his fears seemed to have quieted. Maybe it was that vision that finally convinced him that he wasn't the monster he thought he was.
