Chapter One – The Lost Boys

I arrived early and that bothered me. One, I didn’t want to be there. Two, I had four papers due, and three, I wasn’t sure I had fed the rats.

Now, why the thought of lab rats should pop into my head when I entered the subterranean college bar that Friday evening was no small leap, really. Everyone looked like rats down there, huddled together under the anemic smoky lights, pawing the kibble of pretzels and peanuts. Just hook up the beer bottles to the wall and everything would be set.

Lord, I was losing my mind. The psychology lab I volunteered at this semester had begun to color all my thoughts.

Well, almost all of them.

I, subject number one, Bella Swan, one standard brown lab rat. Brown eyes, good teeth and non-descript brown fur – well hair. And currently crazier than a rat in a tin can, as my mother so aptly, however bizarrely, used to put it.

End of semester insanity. That’s what it must be. The only reason I’d agreed to meet my roommates here at the Skellar, a punk/jazz/grunge/goth/whatever the heck you want it to be bar, deep in the heart of the Haight. I needed a diversion for a few hours and I could never say no to decent live music.

Evidently, most of the campus felt the same way. A crowd of students were here to see this new band that had just been written up in Rolling Stone or some other magazine of repute (or so the bodies pushing in around me at the door had screamed to each other.) Inside, it was standing room only so I was glad I’d snagged one of the few remaining tables even if it was in the far back corner.

Inside the outside San Francisco fog hadn’t crept in on little cat’s feet, more like poured over the crowd. Or was that smoke? Wasn’t smoking verboten in this city, though? I suddenly felt nostalgic, yearning to be back in London, in my favorite pub that I had haunted religiously during my last semester abroad. To say I missed it was an understatement. I missed the laughter, the accents, the way people spoke with their bodies, words almost ripping from their hands, the difference of it all.

To say I missed him would be an understatement beyond words.

And that was saying something since one of my majors, a quagmire of poetry, literature and creative writing, offered me a universe of nothing but words. Words that I devoured because I thought they made me sound witty and clever even though I knew the mastery of them would never pay the rent or purchase a decent pair of shoes, and would, no doubt, leave me dressed forever in my bohemian (cheap) vintage (Goodwill) boots, peasant skirt and cashmere sweater hiding my oh, so fitting, oh so sexy, Mighty Mouse t-shirt . . .

Yet the fact remained: I missed him.

But how could you miss someone you have never spoken a word to? Never so much as opened your mouth but sat in the back of a crowded club like some besotted, fish-mouthed, “I’ve tried to dress like a European but I still look like a stalkerish American despite this really expensive scarf I haven’t learned to tie right”, twenty-one year old, frozen in state by the very essence of you.

Yeah, it was that bad.

I had, I did, I could and I would forever aspire to be one of those literary characters who had, did, could and would view everyone with a healthy dose of detachment. That’s why my roommates loved me. Well, that and I always paid the rent on time, I cooked a wicked vegetable curry, and my other major, psychology, provided the insight and the patience to deal with their plethora of guy related issues. Either that, or my ability to mix the perfect Pims and soda (my secret weapon, and sure to absolve anyone from any sins committed within the last twenty-four hours, including sins of omission and commission – god bless you, Ogden Nash.)

Still, I missed him.

How to sum him up, this man I missed yet never opened my mouth to except in hand-over-mouth moans? Where to start? The line of his right arm muscle when he strummed his guitar. Strummed, no, that’s not right. Attacked it, controlled it? All brilliant, sharp lyrics, playful eyes, and that voice. The wild bronze hair. Every woman within the four walls he inhabited every Saturday night would perform acts illegal in Alabama just to be near him. Inhale the air he breathed, listen to him speak.

Or, it could have been just me.

So here I was, back home from London, still longing for a fantasy man, who, for all I knew, had never met me, never even seen me, while I flagged down my newly arrived roommates.

Rose was visible first. Actually Rose was visible everywhere she went – like some Greek goddess – Venus and well, more Venus. Or in her case, Venus squared. Her graduate degree in advanced partial mathematics or physics (I couldn’t remember, maybe she had both) only boggled the mind. Whatever genetic dance occurred in that body left no room for any recessive genes, whatsoever. Everything was dominant in that girl.

I remembered attending one of her classes (as a grad student she taught three dimensional Calculus (three? I was lost at one). She stood with her back to the crowd, her long blonde hair cascading down to the start of her leather skirt, her blouse inching its way up her tanned stomach as she wrote some Greek gibberish on the board. Suddenly, she swung around to face the class and announced, “Remember, math is a perfect science.” A lecture hall full of hypnotized, drooling young men sighed in response, and thirty legs crossed in unison.

Behind Rose, Alice bounced in her wake like some unearthly pixie you’d see on the cover of a “Faeries” book. Some Arthur Rackman illustration gone mad. Ever the fashion plate – a living testimony to the financial success of interior design as a major (she graduated last semester and was already doing well, thank you very much) – she sported a “little black number” complete with gargantuan chandelier earrings and so many bracelets I swore her dainty wrists might just snap off under the strain. She screamed her way into existence from across the room.

“Bellllaaaa!” Like Stanley Kowalski. For one so small, her lungs had to have taken up the space of most major organs.

“Bellllllaaaaa!” Her waving arms macheted the crowd and she boomeranged around Rose and launched herself at the table.

In seconds, a waiter I never knew existed materialized at our table, his eyes glued to Rose while Alice hugged me a hello.

As I tried to keep myself from falling off my chair, Rose reached across and placed her hand on the waiter’s arm and purred, “Three margaritas, please. With a sigh,” and here she actually sighed into said waiter’s face causing the poor guy to stagger backwards, “and I mean a sigh of salt. And please,” again the hand/sigh/stumble, “keep them coming.” The way Rose’s mouth formed the word, “coming,” broke the man’s resistance and I actually heard him groan.

“Thanks!” Alice chirped, shooing him off like some errant terrier, then fastened her eyes on mine. “You’ll never believe it. We found a house.”

Silence.

“I didn’t know we were looking for a house,” I retorted as I leaned over to receive a Rose half smack kiss on the cheek.

“Wipe, Bella, I marked you with ‘Roll in the Hay red’.” Rose mimicked a sweep of her gorgeous cheekbones.

Wiping, I asked again. “So is someone going to tell me about this house? What’s wrong with our apartment, by the way?”

Alice looked stern, her little face scrunched up like a baby ferret and she held up her #24 Pagoda pink fingers. I only knew this because she had assaulted me the other Friday during “toenails and a movie night,” a moniker I thought too gruesome to say out loud.

“One, the toddler in the apartment above doing wind sprints down the hall at two am. Two, the chain smokers in 2B, lighting up at six am. Three, the drag queen doing the nasty at, well, you name it. I refuse to live in a place where I cannot sleep or breathe.”

I glanced at Rose to get some sort of reality check. “Don’t look at me,” was all she said.

“Come on, what’s wrong with our apartment? I thought you liked the location, close to the MUNI, the park, school?”

“Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” offered Rose finally, scanning the bar for our errant waiter. “Although I do have a fundamental problem with a drag queen getting more mumgambo than I am these days. But resistance is futile, Bella, you have to know that. Once this pixie gets her mind in motion.” Here she held up her hands as though offering them up to God.

“But a house? Where is it? How much is it? We barely make enough between us to afford our current place.”

“It’s cheaper than our place,” said Alice, “That’s the wonder of it. And it’s a Victorian. And it’s a flat, not the whole house so don’t go worrying your pretty little head about cleaning and all that because--”

“Oh, you’re going to love this part,” Rose interjected devilishly as she popped a pretzel into her mouth.

“Because it’s getting some work done to it,” Alice concluded, her hands folded politely in her lap.

Rose barked a laugh. “Sounds like it’s getting botox.”

“Ladies.” I frowned at both of them, channeling my best Ricky Ricardo. “You got some ‘xplainin’ to do. Work? What do you mean exactly when you say ‘work’?”

“Nothing that we can’t live in,” answered Alice a bit too quickly, “Wait till you see her: the wainscoting, the fireplaces; there’s this little garden and we share a conservatory in the attic.” She went on in an orgasmic Architectural Digest fashion about the vintage Wedgwood stove and the window seats, but all I could hear was one word: share.

“Whoa, whoa, share? You mean to tell me we’ll be living in a flat with God knows traipsing through it everyday to make sure it doesn’t collapse on our heads, plus we have to live with other people?”

“Not live with us, silly. There are two flats and we have the top one, and both are non-smoking. Just think, no more midnight track and field, no more opening the windows to breath. According to the real estate agent, the owner just came back to the states and is having the house fixed up while he’s here. Our lease would be for a year, and the good news is that the flats are remaining flats so it’s not like he’s going to convert the thing to one unit or anything like that. That’s why the rent’s so cheap – we put up with a little, itty, bitty inconvenience here and there and voila – the place of our dreams. Trust me, it’s just some cosmetic stuff that they can do in a heartbeat.”

I pondered Alice’s words as our drinks arrived. It was leaving the devil we knew to cohabitate with devils we knew not. But I had to agree with the thought of escaping the smoke and things that went bump in the night. How bad could it be? I mean what could be worse than hearing Queen Marbelita sing “Sledgehammer,” while his/her bed bashed against the wall. Maybe I would give it a look.

Before I could respond, the lights dimmed and an inordinately pierced woman came onto the stage to announce the evening’s act. Alice squirmed a bit in her chair and clapped her hands together using only the tips of her fingers earning her a questionable glance from Rose.

“Wet nails,” I mouthed to her, and she snorted as she took a swig of her margarita. Rose was the only woman I had ever met who could make a snort sound sexy. With me, it just came out, well, porcine.

The metal enhanced goth girl exited the stage and nodded to two men as they strode past her towards the microphones. One had a guitar slung across his shoulder. The sight of it tightened my throat and I fought the ridiculous need to put a hand over my heart.

It isn’t him. My breathing returned to normal. It isn’t him, I repeated to myself. Stop this now. This is bordering on -- what’s the term -- delusional. First, he is thousands of miles away; second, you will probably never see him again. Learn to live with it. Move on.

But it could have been him. The height wasn’t far off. Although, the young man on the stage was blond and well muscled; I could tell as much through the black t-shirt and low cut jeans; still, his arms weren’t the lanky, contained energy I remembered. He mumbled a greeting in a southern accent as he adjusted his microphone.

A wall of a man joined him a few feet away on the other side of the stage. Dark curly hair sprung out from under the confines of his Giants baseball cap which he was in the process of swirling around to face backwards.

A noise sprung from Rose, a suppressed cough, as this mountain man strummed a chord to check his tuning. I turned to look at her but my eyes fell first to Alice who held her margarita half way up to her lips as though she had forgotten the mechanics of drinking. Her grey eyes, focused on the blond, were wide and mimicked the little “O” shape of her mouth. She was mesmerized.

“Excuse us, folks,” the blond man announced bashfully to the audience. “We’re new in town, this being our first time in San Francisco, so we felt that we couldn’t go wrong with a little grass.”

The crowd erupted in hoots and catcalls. The blond went instantaneously scarlet as though he had been boiled alive. At that exact moment, Alice’s’ glass hit the table with a thud, proof positive she had lost all motor function.

The wall/mountain/Michelin man cracked up as he turned to his partner. “Um, Jasper, I think you mean bluegrass, man. Although, whatever makes you guys happy is fine with me.” He then shot a grin to the crowd so dazzling I thought I heard Rose’s stiletto repeatedly tap the floor. Odd, Rose was usually extremely selective about her men. It took a lot to get under her flawless skin. “I’m Emmett by the way. And we are,” he pointed his finger like a gun between himself and the still blushing Jasper, “anything you want us to be.”

The table of woman next to us shrieked and clutched each other’s hands to keep from falling off their chairs like some rabid fangirls.

“Seriously,” this Emmett said huskily, “we’re the Lost Boys, and thanks for coming out tonight.”

“Hmmmm,” Rose whispered before her tongue swirled the edge of her glass like a hungry lioness on the savannah. “Look at his--”

“Yeah,” Alice answered, “Look at his--”

Whatever my girlfriends were looking at became a mystery because at that moment the tiny club erupted in music so wild, so blistering, so – well, there was no other way to say it, so fucking cool, that by the third song even the most jaded, dour, urbanite students were slamming their hands on the tables, lost in the clear joy of these two.

Despite the incredible music, despite their sexy rapport, despite the insane brilliance of their lyrics, something was missing.

They weren’t him. And he, ladies and gentlemen, was better.

I tossed back the last of my margarita wondering how my “play hard to get,” friends were going to handle the supersonic wave of testosterone that was slamming them from the stage.

Laughing, I knew that God had a wicked sense of humor. A few short months ago I looked just like them. Slack-jawed and dazed, sitting in the back of a club, feeling the world tilt on its axis. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little envy course through me right now. I bit down on my lip, a habit I had tried hard to break since it made my face even more of an open book.

Still, I was happy for them. After all the losers they had suffered through, it was great to think that the times might be ‘a changin’. Oh, and I did love me some Dylan.

But for the record, ladies and gentlemen, he was better than Bobby, even.

Maybe I needed professional help? I hadn’t talked to a soul about my ‘obsession,’ too afraid that even my closest friends would think I had lost it for sure. “You’re in love with a guy you stalked for weeks? Only saw for two hours every Saturday night from the back of a bar? Who you only heard speak in the breaks between songs? Holy, hell, girl, do you have his poster on your wall, too?”

When I came back from London, I agreed to go out on the countless dates Rose and Alice lined up for me as a form of my own therapy. In the end it turned into aversion therapy. “He’s really sweet,” Alice would promise me. “A sensitive soul, you’ll love him.” Or Rose, “Just get yourself some, Bella; it’s been like, what a year? Things may have closed up shop down there. Some guy’s gonna need a pith helmet and a machete when the time comes.”

Despite my desire to keep my shop opened and my body a machete-free zone, within minutes of the start of all these dates, I knew these guys couldn’t compare. You see, I’d rather spend time with the memory of him, than the reality of them.

Yeah, it was that bad.

Midway through the next song, I noticed Emmett glance over to the bar, his smile even more radioactive than before. I could hear Rose’s nails rat-a-tat-tat against the table top and prayed that whomever he was smiling at carried decent insurance. Emmett nodded his head to the side as if to say, “come on up,” which I thought was odd, but hey, maybe they were into audience participation. If so, wild horses couldn’t keep Rose and Alice in their seats tonight.

The music toned down to background strumming and Emmett spoke into the microphone. “I love San Francisco.” The crowd cheered in return and he laughed. “But your airport sucks and so do your taxis.” More cheers and a few good natured boos. “Sorry, don’t mean to piss anybody off, but you know what I’m saying. How the hell do you people get anywhere?”

Jasper rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath, like, ‘move on, ladies,’ to which Emmett chuckled and stuck his tongue out at him. Rose inhaled sharply.

“I don’t know if any of you have noticed but we’ve been one short all night.” A wild cheer came from the tables. I glanced at Rose and Alice who seemed just as surprised as me at this information. We always assumed these two were the group. “And I can tell you ladies out there that I’m not used to faking it.”

More hysterical catcalls and clapping. Just then a bra shot onto the stage and hit Emmett on the shoulder. He was caught off guard for a split second then began to howl in laughter once he recognized what he was holding in his hands. He made a big show of draping it around the microphone stand. Jasper was nearly bent over in hysterics.

“Hey, man, it’s black lace,” Emmett smirked at Jasper. “My favorite and damn sexy.” Then he returned his attention to the crowd, “But I told you, I don’t like faking it,” and he fingered the lace affectionately.

Rose’s hands were now twined together and nervously thumping the table.

“Anyhow, we’ve been one short. But I don’t think we’ve been that bad.” Alice whistled through her fingers in appreciation like she was hailing a cab. “And what do you know; he’s finally here. Get your boney ass up here, dude.”

I swung around to the direction of the bar where Emmett had been addressing, but I couldn’t see anyone. The whole audience was going crazy, shouting and clapping louder and louder.

The lights dimmed a little bit more and a man laconically climbed up the stage, his head slightly ducked, a small, almost embarrassed smile on his face, half apology, half mischief.

Everything disappeared at that moment, the crowded table, the smoke, the music, even my hyperventilating friends. And one thing remained. His face. His intense green eyes, buzzing and alive.

He sided up to the microphone as he slipped on his guitar and plugged it in. He spoke in a clipped accent. A voice I would remember anywhere.

“Hello, all. I’m Edward. Edward Cullen. Terribly sorry for being late.”