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NEW YORK CITY, 1962
The storms that had plagued the city all day had finally come to an end. Edward couldn’t decide if he was happy about it. The scent of dirty puddles and wet bricks, mingled with the alleyway’s trash-and-urine stench, made him sick to his stomach. But the break in the rain meant he could smoke outside, alone, and that was more valuable to him at the moment.
Inside the cafe, some yuppie was on, performing an overwrought rendition of a folk classic. He had a backing band too big for the stage. Edward could hear them through the walls. It sounded awful.
But who was he to say what’s good? No one wanted his thoughts on good music.
His boots scrapped the concrete as he walked into the orange circle of the alley light. Horns blared and tires squealed on the streets beyond, but under the light the only sound was the futile flicking of his lighter. He could see the sparks the flint created, and he kept trying beyond a regular person’s point of rationality.
Flick, flick, flick.
The cafe’s steel back door opened and closed. Edward heard soft footsteps approaching him, but he kept his eyes on the unlit cigarette hanging from his lips and those goddamn useless sparks.
“Need a light?” a low, quiet voice asked. He knew that voice. His eyes snapped up, surprise marking his expression.
And there was Isabella Swan, standing before him, smiling her sweet smile and holding a matchbook out to him. As she looked up at him, the incandescent light put golden halos in her dark brown eyes. It was all he could focus on.
He stared at her for a long moment, then pocketed his lighter.
“Yeah. Thanks,” he murmured. Their fingers brushed as he took the matchbook from her.
Edward has seen Isabella here plenty of times over the years. Back when the stage was filled with more beat poets than musicians. She performed with a blond man named Michael who smiled too much. He strummed his guitar with zeal and sang classic country songs, songs full of sorrow and mourning, with all the look of a family dog who found a stick in the yard. When Edward watched their set, he always thought the man would be better suited for a Sunday morning church service.
Isabella saved their sets every time. Her voice could weave around Michael’s in a way that mystified Edward every time. She could go low and burrow under his verses like a rabbit hiding in its den, or soar high above him like a songbird. She played a guitar as well, but she also wore a harmonica around her neck and occasionally pulled out a box drum.
Her talent far surpassed her partner’s. She made even be more talented than Edward. He certainly found her impressive — a rare occurrence when it came to other musicians in his circles — and if he didn’t think the duet were married, he would have approached her a long time ago to discuss her work more in depth. Then again, based on his observations of her, she might have been too shy to allow him to pick her brain for too long. She often turned red and ran off stage when the applause got too loud after their sets.
Besides, there was no way a woman like Isabella Swan would give him the time of day. Not looking like he did, dressing like he did, being was he was. Not when he always wore a “frumpy frown,” an off-the-wall accusation he once received from a former lover. (In the beginning, Tanya said she found it cute. When she broke things off, she told him it became dull to look at.)
Edward plucked a match and struck it. He lit his cigarette and shook the match out, dropping it in a puddle. He took a drag and let it go. As he handed the book back to Bella, he spotted the name of the hotel it came from: Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem, PA.
“Can I bum one?” she asked, turning the book over and over in her hand.
Again, his brows shot up in shock as he took another drag.
“Last one. Sorry,” he said, smoke rolling out of his mouth.
She nodded, then after a beat, held her hand out, her index and middle finger extended.
He handed the cigarette off to her. She provided the light after all. It was only right.
The sight of her in this alleyway, in her flowery shift dress and Mary Jane’s, made Edward unease. As she stepped to lean against the opposite wall, the shadows swallowed her, save for a cherry burning red near her lips. An angel lost in a pit of sin. How did she remained untarnished?
She exhaled. The sweet smell of tobacco — much better than the rancid New York alleyway.
“I loved that last song you sang tonight,” she said. She handed the cigarette back to him. “Is it new?”
He flicked some ashes away. “Yes.”
Here I am, where I've been
I've walked a hundred miles in tobacco skin
And my clothes are worn and gritty
“Did you write it?”
“I write all of my music,” he replied. He took another drag. “Except for the classics.”
“Of course.”
She held her hand out again. Already, the cigarette was more than halfway gone. He handed it to her, and he watched as she filled her head with smoke and blew it out again. In his thirty years, he has watched plenty of women smoke, in diners over pancakes, in bars and venues between sets, in recording booths, in his bed after they’d done what they did. There was an elegance, a sensuality to the action that he knew he didn’t possess himself. It captivated him, turned him on. Concealed in the dark as Isabella was, he could hardly make her out as she finished the cigarette and dropped it to the ground. He felt a touch of disappointment.
But then, he had to remember: he wasn’t destined to receive good things. Never again.
And I know ugliness
Now show me something pretty
“Is this how you make your living?” Isabella asked. She pushed off of the wall and took a couple steps closer, just on the edge of his circle of light. “Playing music?”
Edward scoffed. “If you can call it a living.” When she tilted her head, he added, “No. I don’t make money from it.”
Something in his tone must have betrayed his sensitivity to the subject, because Isabella only responded with a faint: “Oh. Okay.”
Playing music for a living. That had been the dream.
I was a dumb punk kid with nothing to lose
And too much weight for walking shoes
He left home at seventeen on a bus to Chicago and never looked back — though there were plenty of times he should have. He trolled around that city for years with too little money and even fewer auditions. The only things he wasn’t short on were passion and tenacity, two things any teenager had in spades. He also had talent, but technical skill will only get you so far.
“I’ll be honest with you, kid,” one producer told him four years in, his larger, hair-covered hand on Edward’s shoulder.
I could have died from being boring
“You got no personality.” The man was chomping on a Cuban cigar as he said it. “No one’s gonna wanna listen to your melancholy crap. What do you have to be sad about, anyway? You’ve barely been alive!”
“I think you could make it your living,” Isabella said.
Edward blinked, the vision of the producer fading as he refocused on her. In his abstraction, she had stepped closer to him, back into the light that put rings of gold in her eyes. Her dark hair fell in shiny curtains around her face. He wanted to feel it between his fingertips.
“You could, too,” he replied. In his head, he cursed himself for funneling all of his admiration, all of his appreciation for her craft, the craft they both excelled at, into such simple, childish words. “You’re incredible.”
Isabella smiled, her front teeth biting gently into her full bottom lip.
As for loneliness…
“You should come back to my apartment,” she murmured, her voice low and full of mischief. “We can talk about music there.”
For what felt like the hundredth time that night, his brows snapped up his forehead
“How will your husband feel about that?”
Isabella frowned. “Who?”
“That blond guy,” Edward replied, nodding toward the cafe’s back door. “Your partner.”
Her jaw dropped, seemingly in shock, but then she laughed quite a bit, covering her mouth and shaking her head. It was so painfully pretty it made his chest hurt to watch her.
“Mike is not my husband,” she replied, giggling through it. “He’s just a good buddy.”
Edward thought back to the way Mike would turn his body toward her to watch her during her solos, his whole face glowing brighter than the sun.
He tilted his head toward her and made a show of whispering, “Does he know that?”
Her nose scrunched up as she swatted his arm, and the playful violence startled a laugh out of him. Edward didn’t have many reasons to laugh these days, so the noise was foreign to his ears.
Isabella’s eyes glittered. “Come home with me.”
She greets me every morning
What else could he do? He would never defy an order from such a beautiful woman.
She led him back inside the cafe by his hand, so small and soft within his own calloused grip. After fifteen minutes, they were in a taxi, their instruments packed in the trunk, and the rain started to speckle the sidewalk once again.
She preferred to be called Bella. Edward discovered this once they got back to her place, when he sighed her name in a break between kisses. She grumbled and corrected him, then pulled him back down to her mouth. She bit his lip hard, and he let her.
Every woman had her quirks, and he learned how to navigate those over time. He had never been accused of being the most tactful man, but he’d never been kicked out of bed for insulting a lover. If anything, he became part of the decor, a thing in a woman’s bedroom that could be tossed just as well as it could be kept, a bobble, a souvenir from some fun time gone by. And that didn’t bother him. He knew what his place should be in the lives of others: useful, inoffensive, impermanent.
For Bella tonight, he would be a source of pleasure, generous and self-assured. He kissed her skin and removed her clothes, making sure to linger when he heard her moan or sigh. Ever considerate, he removed his own clothes, thankful for the cover of night so that she couldn’t notice how threadbare they were.
An ugly voice in his ear reminded him that he was stealing something. He was touching a happiness that was shut off to him, straining toward a life that could never be his. He held Bella’s waist and pressed his body against hers, and though the sensations were there, he didn’t feel anything. She was lovelier than any other woman he’d known, and when he expected her to demure or shy away from him, she continued to surprise him with her brazen touch. And yet, he was untouchable. He was stealing something — and he was stealing it from such a remarkable woman, whose face shined with a purity he hadn’t known in so long, whose voice soared over melodies and his own inelegant moans. It was the most unforgivable thing he could do.
She fell asleep before him, her dark hair spread out on her pillowcases. He wrapped a lock of it around his fingers — it was as soft as he’d imagined.
How did she remain untarnished?
Bella woke up as he was pulling on his pants.
“You do this a lot, huh,” she teased. She was sitting up, her sheets resting in her lap, revealing so much of her lovely pale skin. Her hair was so perfectly mussed, glowing in the morning sunlight that hit her back. Last night, he hadn’t taken the time to appreciate how nice her apartment was, how quiet the streets were. He was used to hotels with brick wall-facing windows or basement level rooms with four roommates and no natural light.
He zipped the fly, did up the button. “Not that often.”
How had his hands not left ugly marks on her skin after he touched her?
He looked around for his shirt.
“Will you do something for me, before you go?”
He stopped, looking up to find a shy look on her face.
“Of course,” he replied, his voice rumbling with morning raspiness.
She nodded to his guitar case in the corner. “Will you play your new song again for me?”
For a moment, he was stunned. No one had asked that of him before. His lovers all knew he was a musician — that was usually how he met them — but that aspect of him was incidental. Whether they were musicians in their own right, or artists or actresses or models, or none of those, his music was only romantic and interesting in the abstract. If he talked too long about composition or chord progressions or the industry’s devaluation of real art, they stopped listening. Asking him to play a song must've seemed like a gateway for those conversations to sneak in.
No one ever asked him to play his songs.
She smiled her sweet smile. He realized his heart was racing a bit, running past all the measured refusals he was trying to come up with.
“Sure.”
At the most I'm a glare
I'm the hopeless son who's hardly there
He’d started playing before he was ready. His voice was throaty and imperfect. His fingers slipped on the strings, and he dropped a note or two as his tired brain and body worked to catch up with the song.
She watched him all the same, her face a picture of concentration — she wasn’t only listening, she was paying attention.
I'm the open sign that's always busted
I'm the friend you need, but can't be trusted
From his perch on the bottom corner of her bed, he finished his song. Before he could set his guitar aside, she asked him to play it one more time. And so he did.
He played it again, better this time. She pushed the sheets aside, glorious in her nudity, and crawled to him, focused all the while on his hands as they played. Her fingertips trailed along his spine, down his arm, and then as he started the song’s chorus for the final time, she laid her head on his shoulder.
At the most I'm a glare
I'm the hopeless son who's hardly there
When he finished, the words rang out in the silence of the room.
I'm the open sign that's always busted
Edward sat the instrument down before she could ask him to play it again.
I'm the friend you need, but can't be trusted
Eventually, the sounds from the streets several stories below faded back in.
“That’s a really vulnerable song for you, isn’t it?” Bella whispered. Before he could confirm or deny it, she continued, “Will you really give up so much of your soul just for people to hear your music?”
Edward chuckled, turning his head a bit to glance down at her. “My soul? I don’t have one of those.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true,” she replied with a frown. She looked hurt that he would say something like that about himself, but she didn’t know. Couldn’t know. If she did, she wouldn’t allow him to be this close to her.
Ever since he left home, he has built a hollow life. First, one of desperation. Then of pain and brutality, so much that he had to leave Chicago in the dead of night with nothing but the money in his pockets and his guitar. Then, all the adrenaline and fear dissolved into a heavy grief, one that he may never come to accept. There’s no way Bella could look at him and see the miles he’s traveled, the things he’s seen, the things he’s done. She would never allow it…
“Please stay for a little while longer,” she pleaded. “Lay back down. It’s still early.”
And so it was.
Once he was properly removed of his clothes, Edward got back into her bed, his arms curling around her waist automatically. She tucked her head underneath his chin with a contented hum.
“I’ve wanted to know you for so long,” she breathed, planting a gentle kiss on his chest. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
Still untarnished. If even his ugliness couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t imagine what would. He didn’t want to imagine it.
Instead, he replied, “I’m happy I’m here, too,” and as he said it, he found in his heart that, for once in all of his nights in random beds — for sex, for rest, for anything — he really meant it.