In the water, everything was quiet. 

With the others away hunting, I could lie here in the tub for as long as I wished – which, as it turned out, was six and a half hours. I only sat up every so often to drain the bathtub and to fill it again with scalding hot water, after which I would submerge myself once more. 

I could be very patient when I needed to be.

Earlier today I had noticed that the pressure of the water on my eardrums as I turned my head slightly from side to side offered the illusion of a rushing sound, almost like blood pumping through my veins.  I reveled in that for some time.

And I’d discovered, too, that when my eyes were closed and my body was still, I had the strange sensation of being lost.  Not weightless; I could never feel weightless.  My body rested heavily on the bottom of the porcelain tub like a dead weight, which, naturally, it was.  No, I lost the sensation of where my skin ended and the water began.  The molecules that formed a perfect microscopic sleeve around my hard flesh seemed somehow to become part of me, or the strange atoms of my flesh seemed to join the hydrogen and oxygen, blending one into the next, like I was expanding, becoming living water, or water becoming undead. 

It was odd.  I liked it.

When I opened my eyes and looked up at the lights in the ceiling through the water, everything seemed far away and impossibly close at the same time.  By the way the light was changing in the room I knew it was nearly dusk, our favorite time of day, the time of day when Bella looked positively magical, her skin blue-white in the waning light, her eyes dark and longing.  She would be here soon.

I closed my eyes again and waited.

I heard the truck rattling toward the house, the engine sputtering off, the rusty door slamming, her quick footsteps up the stairs to the porch, the knock on our front door.  Bella always knocked, even when I told her she could just come in.  She’d said she wanted to wait until she was official before barging in.  Official.  I wasn’t sure if she meant after the wedding, or –