Ars Moriendi by vanilladoubleshot

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5121169/1/

Detailed Background: This is neither AU/AH nor vamp!AU; Edward lived a human
life until the age of seventeen – current to the start of the story – when, upon his
sudden death, he became an incubus. In the lore of this story, incubi are ghostly
creatures who feed via performing sexual acts on their sleeping victims, slowly
leeching them of their life essence (to the point of death, if repeated feedings
occur from the same individual with no regard to their failing health). He has no
memories of his human life at the onset of his "life" as an incubus.

Ars Moriendi

You're cold, and sense that you should be able to see your breath in the chill dew
air of the early morning, sun not yet rising pink in a haze of chromium over the
lush wet trees of the Hum, but it seems that you're not breathing.

You don't mind.

Breath would be detrimental; alert the girl in the bed to your task, to your want,
to the heady dark need between your legs that you don't care might hurt her.

You're hovering outside her window, weightless and flightless, incorporeal, a
spectre of shame and shadow and wet mouth and stiff skin and you're not skin at
all, you're a cloud like glass after a bullet pierces and shatters it into the night.
You're staring at her. You're hungry.

Her sleep is not peaceful, and neither are you; your need is all-consuming, hard
and lascivious and painful and you want the warmth at the apex of her thighs to
give you the life, the sustenance, the salvation you crave, and the want is a need.

She's moving. Her curly cinnamon-brown hair splays against the pink pillows.

Her legs work like an eggbeater beneath the sheets, and the dully aching hunger
you've known since birth – the only life you remember, though you're not
newborn, not really; you're not a child, with these urges – blossoms into a fiery
need.

You can feel the dark venom pulsing through you; collecting on your fingertips,
coating your tongue, ready to burst from your private places… everywhere that
will touch the girl with a birthmark behind one tan knee.

You want to trace its Rorschach inkblot shape with your tongue and show her its
true meaning.

I sank, comatose but unable to sleep, into my mattress. It felt cold without his
welcome heat beside me. He had been here only last night.

He had been alive only last night.

He had been warm and young and beautiful when he held me, smelling saline and
earthy from his clandestine climb up to my window for our nightly secret
rendezvous. His affections were a movie playing across the ocean of his eyes: the
seventeen-year-cicada's song, the bugs themselves older than he and their song
ancient as love itself, was the soundtrack. In his green eyes it was clear that the
scene was grand, swelling strings and fireworks and his leading lady done up in
burgundy velvet and filmy petticoats.

I rolled half-heartedly onto my side and clutched close the pillow on which his
head had last lain. His smell, like honey and sunlight and beautiful manliness,
filled my nose.

Edward was gone.

You melt through the frost-tipped glass of her window –

Surprise: a new emotion. You were not able to do that before, you don't think;
but of course not, you didn't exist before tonight…

window.

Your hunger inflames, rising and roiling in a dark thrush of what should have
been blood, should have made you blush, but you have no shame and no fear
and no affection for this morsel of warmth in the nondescript pink bed, set in a
sea of nondescript pink carpeting.

She is sound asleep but stirring, rocking herself to the dream your presence puts
into her head, her hands with small stub fingers like snouts rubbing circles into
her flat breasts, churning legs open and the pink fabric between dark and wet
through.

Your cold lips turn up into a smile as you glide towards the dreary pink bed and
satisfactory warm flesh, feet never touching the floor.

Edward was lithe as a mountain lion when he pounced from the wide-open
windowsill to the floor. He landed softly on the balls of his feet, as he did every
night; he kicked off his shoes and tumbled into Bella's bed.

"You're early!" She laughed delightedly. His legs tangled with hers beneath the
sheets as he pulled her closer to press every line of their bodies together.

"Mmm," he groaned softly into the crook of her neck. "I wanted to have more
time with you tonight."

Bella rolled over, slid her arms around his lean waist and felt his heartbeat
thrumming life through him. She had no idea that life would only spark inside him
for another few hours. Had she known, she would have been paralyzed with
heartbreak.

"I'm glad," she whispered.

Edward touched his forehead to Bella's gently. "Someday, we'll be together all
through the night." His voice was velvet in her ears. "We'll fall asleep together in
a big white bed and I'll wake up with you in my arms."

And he kissed her, slow and sweet, like honey pouring from a spoon. When
Edward kissed Bella, he wasn't doing anything else. She was his whole universe,
and the moment was eternal because he didn't have any plans. Neither of them
thought he was going anywhere. Just kissing Edward… it was overwhelming.

He left her when the sky outside was pink.

I glanced out my open window – a habit that I never wanted to break, because it
felt like all I had left of Edward – at the purple-gray dawn sky, the color of
twilight, like I was living in eternal night. He was my moonlight, pulling at my
tides and directing my gravity, the point around which I faithfully circled, and had
been for as long as I had been alive.

alive.

It was an aneurism, Esme said, her voice so flat I knew it had to be true, on the
phone this morning when Edward's silver Volvo didn't roll into its spot in my
driveway. The medical examiner surmised it had been dormant for years, silently
threatening the beautiful boy like the point of a knife, provoked to striking by
some innocuous startling – a sneeze, a hacking cough, a knock on the head.

His pretty twin sister found him broken beneath his half-open window, a bruise
on his brow like he'd hit it sneaking back inside.

"Mmm," Bella moaned softly, writhing beneath him, his air-chilled hands beneath
the t-shirt she wore as a nightgown, teasing at her small, pointed breasts.
"Edward… please…"

He shuddered and kissed the hollow beneath her ear, all breath and life and pulse
meeting pulse. "Not here," he whispered, one hand trailing down to ghost over
her white panties. "Not with your dad sleeping in the next room. And not when I
have to leave you after."

"But I'm ok with that!" Bella insisted, her hand mirroring his trail, slipping under
the waistband of his crinkly new jeans, resting over burgundy briefs hiding the

skin she'd only recently first seen. "Edward, you know that I understand that your
leaving doesn't mean you don't love me. I need you. I want you. Right now."

Edward exhaled through his nose sharply when her small hand squeezed, and
Bella heard him swallow: a hopeful sound. His fingers tapped softly over the
sensitive curve only he had ever seen – that they were both certain only he would
ever see – like she was the cream ivory keys of his piano, and he could draw the
lullaby from her with the smallest effort.

"No," he whispered softly, finally, honestly. "I do love you. And I do need you.
And I do so, so want you." He kissed her face then – softly – finally – honestly. "I
will only treat you the way you deserve. I can't take this experience from you and
disappear into the night. I could never live with myself."

You groan richly in half-sated, half-wet, all-carnal, half-satanic satisfaction at the
first stiff sinking into the curly-haired girl's bare red center. She is flora like
rosehips and sour like grapefruit and fauna like all prey: game and lurch and
flight.

You drink deeply, aware that your mouth is not doing the sucking and it
instinctively unnerves you, though you're unsure whose instincts would go
against your own in your mind, but you busy your mouth against her breast – too
hard, too big, too burnt from a UV lamp – but find it almost as satisfying as the
nectar you're stealing below; when you suckle here, you can taste the metallic
tang of blood, but you don't mind it.

You raise your head to lick your lips clean, catch sight of yourself in the mirror of
her frosted window: bronze hair, white skin – not skin, you remind yourself,
seeing through your own reflection – empty eyes glowing green like cursed jade.

You frown, and you're not sure why.

The body beneath you tightens and arches, taking pleasure from your tangible
darkness, not knowing what you're taking from her – life and energy and soul; if
you feed from her again, she'll grow weaker still, but the sour pungent odor of
her tainted identity is overwhelming the aroma that called only because you were
starving and frail, and you know you won't want from her again –

But she's good enough this once, and your hips roll harder, taking in her essence
and enjoying the ride, and just before you come in a great implosion of frenzied
drink taking in a great gulp from between her tan legs, you glance in the
window's reflection again and see through your eyes to the sign on the door
behind you:

jessica's room.

da mihi basia mille

Carlisle Cullen knocked on the pale green-painted door softly, careful not to
startle the two sleeping soft bundles cuddled in his wife's arms, as the young
couple stood side-by-side beneath his black umbrella, hiding from the rain.

The door opened to soft loving light, a wide grin, and a bushy mustache.

"Charlie!" breathed Esme, trying to convey her excitement over the all-too-briefly
silent heads of her infant twins, sounding almost winded as the two men clasped
their arms around each other. "Congratulations! How is Renee? And Bella?"

At the sound of his new daughter's name, the mustached Charlie's grin grew
wider still, looking like it was almost capable of breaking free of his handsome
face and filling the entire room; he ushered his tired friends and their waking new
lives into the small, clean home.

"They're beautiful," he answered.

One of the blankets in Esme's arms mewled, and she chicked her tongue down at
the little face, sympathetic and concerned and born to be a mother. "Mary Alice,"
she cooed, letting her husband scoop the second, still-sleeping, baby from the
crook of her arm. "Mary Alice, Mary Alice, what is wrong?"

The tiny face screwed up tight and let loose a banshee wail, and Esme looked up
frantically, hoping not to have surprised Renee or startled the little stranger Bella.
Only Charlie, Carlisle, and little Edward looked on; she was surprised to see
Edward's green eyes open and staring at her face instead of his loud twin, but
then Edward was such a curiously serious baby.

Across from the crosswalk twenty feet to my right where everyone in town was
darting from the rain, high schoolers were playing hooky from their fast-food jobs
with chipped nail polish clutching surreptitious hip-flasks and jobless Maytag Men
wandering together with wrinkled Newport cigarettes glowing red beneath salt-
and-pepper beards.

Mary Alice had dyed her hair black since the summer before sixth grade; not to
be a "rebel" or anything so ordinary, but because with a halo of firebright bronze,
she was so much "Edward's twin sister," and with an inky shock of black, she had
come into her own as Alice.

I wondered if she would let her hair grow back in now.

She was inconsolable.

We sat on the cement block wall outside the Weber Funeral Home, the granite
and seashell and putty crumbling and uncomfortable beneath our black tights,
snagging them and making them run, but for once, Alice was as uncaring as I.

In our black dresses we could have been the sisters we would now never be; her
head rested in my lap.

I combed her soft hair with my fingers absently as I had done to her twin so
many times before… Edward and I had been in love for as long as I could
remember; Edward always swore it was longer even than that, a silly fable his
mother Esme perpetuated with retellings of the first time we met as tiny babies.

The service had been lovely: the perfect funeral for a popular, good, loved young
man, but so unlike what I always thought of as being 'Edward'. The whole of
Forks High turned out to say goodbye, maybe all of Forks – there wasn't much
difference – and while the warm arms of the village that helped to raise this lost
child held Alice and Esme and Carlisle and me now, Edward had never needed
that bolstering, preferring the intimate embrace of the few.

Girls he persistently rejected were crying for him in the bathroom stalls (again, as
always, but now for the last time). I had vomited nothing and held myself above
the wooden toilet seat, listening to their chattering sniffles and feeling as empty
as the porcelain bowl…

"God, Jess." Only Lauren Mallory would take the lord's name in vein at a funeral
in a Presbyterian house of the dead – "You look awful. You look worse than
Bella… and she looks worse than usual."

"Really, Lau? You can't give her a break today?"

Jessica was shallow and callous but never mean; her voice sounded groggy as
though she'd been crying more than warranted or suffered a bad headcold. I
lifted my head and listened to her voice creak through her teeth and thought of
old phonographs churning rustily away in a haunted attic somewhere, all ghost
stories and transient lovers and slow death from consumption.

"Alright, fine, Jesus." Lauren sounded the same as always, too much blonde
sunshine for a black day shrouded in rain. "But seriously, bebe, you look like cow
pie."

"I feel like it," commiserated Jess, and I believed it from her ancient tone. "I
don't know why. I slept really well. But I just feel, like, groggy? And sore." She
sighed wetly. "Maybe it's karma."

"That bitch? Why?"

"I dreamt of Edward last night." She sounded puzzled. "But I can't quite
remember his face." She laughed once, sadly, through her rhinoplasty nose. "He's
been dead for a day and I can't remember his face. Is that weird?"

Lauren laughed richly and I hated her. "I dunno, but it's a pity. It was such a
fuckworthy face."

Not caring now if they were alerted to my presence, I turned back to the
rainforest wood in front of me and retched up the image of beautiful alive Edward
in the bed or arms or legs or dreams of another woman.

The sunlight hurts you as it streams in small patches through the leafy overgrown
canopy dripping dew into your hair – was it really hair? – and onto your shoulders
as you race through the forest, skimming over the ground and skirting around
trunks and terrifying animals in your wake as you try fruitlessly to evade the
burning afternoon light.

When it hits your skin you shatter and it looks to your eyes like the facets of a
diamond but feels like a bomb's gone off inside where your bones used to be and
the first time the sunshine burnt you it broke your heart for reasons you don't
know, and you retreated further into the darkness.

The aching hunger is already returning and you can smell delicious female smells
all over the forest – doe and sow and lioness; red berries and birthing blood and
sinewy confidence – but you can't find an appetite for them, they frighten you
still as much as you frighten them; you cringe past a doe to find shade and she
leaps away from you in startled tripping grace, casting you a wide-eyed innocent
glance with big brown eyes and you stop.

Just for a moment.

big brown eyes

But the sun is a fiend and finds you again and the scream rips from your throat
without rustling a leaf – the tree in the forest falling without a sound – and you're
off again, escaping the light and seeking the darkness, craving and craving and

craving and you need to feed and there's no one to be had and your hands find
yourself, desperately stroking, like trying to swallow air for sustenance –

And you see it.

There, just beyond the edge of the forest, three houses lined up in a row; you
can hear from the trees that they're vacant and devoid of heartbeat but the
delicious aromas lingering around them makes you release uncomfortably,
sucking greedily on emptiness.

There are four lingering female scents; two comforting and similar and you want
to roll around in them and savor the aroma but they don't spark your hunger and
for some reason you're glad; but the other two…

You wish you had better control of yourself and your senses and the world and
that you could follow the trails and track down the pink that you want right now
because they're both delicious but one is sweeter and it sings to you like it's your
very own private own lullaby and you're being lured to your execution with milk
and honey and freesia and it's dappled over all three houses and you're so
frustrated that the scream feels good as you brave the brightsparkle burn of the
wretched sunlight to dash across the dying green lawn, taking refuge beneath the
white weathered porch of the largest house, drowning in the teasing pussy scent
and finding strange solace in the shelter.

Esme offered Mary Alice the soft end of a pacifier, but the little girl only cried
around it, her pink face growing sweaty with misery.

Edward's brow furrowed, eyes still trained on his mother's face. Waiting.

Esme looked to Carlisle. He smiled and held out his arms. "Little girl just wants
her daddy," he chuckled, and took the pink bundle into his arms, quieting her
immediately. The round little face pressed into his chest at the sound of daddy's
laugh and Carlisle's eyes twinkled. "Right, Charlie?"

Charlie flushed and nodded, looking more excited than a mustached man in
uniform had right to be. "Yes, sir, Doc Cullen," he said jovially, winding an arm
around the shoulders of his tired-looking wife, who had just padded down the
stairs, bundle of her own in her arms stirring its blankets into a froth of white
eyelet lace around her tiny face like a bridal veil.

"Oh," sighed Esme, shifting her stoic son in her arms to approach Renee and her
baby. "Renee, you look wonderful."

I spoke the final eulogy, even after Alice and Carlisle and Esme. I didn't know
what to say; Edward left me behind as his forever-betrothed virgin bride, because
I could feel in the dark tar settling of my bones that there would never be anyone
else for me, and a part of me resented him for it; I hated being the center of
attention and I hated him for that, too. I kept searching the faces of the silent
crowd for his beautiful grin, forgetting that he would never smile at me again.

I couldn't distill my love for him into a speech I was willing to let Jessica and
Lauren and the lunch ladies and librarians hear, so I summed it up in the tale of
our first kiss; I knew they would laugh and I would be relieved their pitying
stares, because small towns are so shallow to fall for such a tack.

The first real memory I had of Edward, we were playing at the heel of his white
wraparound porch – Edward and Alice and Jasper and me all tumbling around
together in the bright sunshine with some kittens Carlisle had found two weeks
before living under the porch in the dark cool safety net of the Cullen home.

I think Edward and Alice and I were three, making Jasper four years old and
superior; he was the big blond boy who lived on the Cullens' other side with his
big blonde Amazonian mother Rosalie just turning twenty and already I knew to
be jealous that Jasper still had a mother but to notice the difference between
Rosalie's youth and Esme's age.

The Cullens kept the kittens until they were old enough to be weaned, no longer
needing to suckle their mother's milk beneath the porch.

Then, for about a week, the Cullen kids and Jasper and me were the most
popular preschoolers in Forks as those tiny calico cats became a commodity.

I still had never cried so much as I did the first day I showed up to the Cullen
house and those kittens were gone.

I still had yet to cry for Edward.

But when the kittens were still there and needy and living under their porch,
Edward first kissed me.

Mary Alice still had bright red hair and she refused to wear anything but dresses
and tutus; that day she'd strung a long necklace of costume pearls around her
neck and clomped outside in her mother's high heels and a red tartan slip; she
was already infatuated with Jasper and Esme pulled her aside twice to chastise
her gently, declaring that good girls didn't show little boys their underpants.

Jasper was somewhat traumatized as he always was by Mary Alice's intense
attention, and he sat on Emmett's knee looking forlorn and drinking lemonade as
Rosalie kissed his little blond head and promised that someday he wouldn't be so
scared of girls.

I remember that Emmett laughed, "I dunno, he might do well to be always scared
of Mary Alice," and Rosalie slapped him on the back of the head.

I was thrilled that Edward and I had the kittens to ourselves for a few minutes
and I sat still as a stone as they crawled all over me, all life and softness and
tickly fur and tiny claws and small mewling sounds that made me giggle and then
Edward was kneeling in front of me, little ginger-haired cat in his hands that
matched his head, and he surveyed me with such seriousness as I'd never before
seen in my short life.

And he set the little ginger kitten in my lap.

And he put his grubby hands on my cheeks.

And he kissed me.

I knew kisses from The Little Mermaid and from seeing Rosalie and Emmett once
in the kitchen as they watched us all while Charlie worked and the Cullens got
away from the world for a while; Rosalie stirred up some macaroni'n'franks and
her hands were covered in orange cheese powder and her hair was a mess
around her face and Emmett came up behind her, a burly nineteen-year-old
mechanic, and spun her around with his meaty hands on her hips, and he kissed
her.

Then the kittens were clawing and crawling again and Edward was grinning with
his green eyes twinkling and I set the gray runt of the litter on his shoulder and
watched it scrabble its way across his frame.

Alice was wailing up on the porch as Esme dragged her inside to put on a romper
suit and Jasper was wailing that he hated girls' underpants and Emmett's roar of
a laugh scared the kittens into shooting out their tiny claws and pricking me all
over.

Edward just grinned at me, and didn't kiss me on the mouth again for a decade.

Renee smiled, carefully rearranging the white receiving blanket away from Bella's
little nose and mouth. "Thank you. I feel exhausted," she joked, and both women
laughed softly. Bella snuffled once, a small whimpering sound, and Edward
wriggled in Esme's arms.

"Oh, Edward," cooed Esme. "Do you want to meet Bella, too?"

You cower beneath the whitewashed wood of the large house's porch, starving
and shaking and desperate, watching the light fail outside as twilight falls and the
bugs all start chirping, fireflies skipping stones over blades of grass that poke
through you in patches in the deadlands away from the light, the slight dry
rotting smell of sweet wet wood and black mud beneath the home above you not
nearly strong enough to dissipate that smell that makes you burn burn burn.

Your excitement swells and stiffens and your fingertips and tongue grow sticky
with venom and want as heartbeats begin to fill the space above your head –

Whoever lives in the three houses have returned home, and all of the scents are
stronger than ever, and she is somewhere above you, and you curse yourself
with spitting red vitriol that you don't know how to track that scent when it
covers everything in this godforsaken corner of the woods because

you

want

her.

Her aroma is more than pink and red; she's yellow and blue and white and cozy
and warm and wine and sex and spice and sting and exotica and comfort and
unbearable sadness and unspeakable enticement and

you

want

her.

But you know you can't find her

right

now

and it would make you cry if you could feel anything besides blinding need and
you're invisible harsh hardness and you'd die if you could from the pain of it all
and finally it's dark and you glide out from beneath the porch and slip up to the
windows; her outrageous flavor isn't coming from these windows and you're
disgusted, peeping in at the female with caramel-colored hair who smells ancient
and heavy, and you feel a small tug to her but it's nothing and you push it away
–

There are more urgent needs –

And there's a more promising tidbit fitfully asleep in a froth of canary yellow, but
on your second deep drag of her fragrance, just as you're slipping through her
windowpane because that girl's smell is covering the surface of the room, you
almost vomit because somehow the thing in the bed smells like –

you.

You're so puzzled that you accidentally overshoot as you zoom out of the fetid
room and have to find your way back to the trio of houses through the cursed
tangled woods, and your heart would skip a beat if you had one because suddenly
you're quite able to track the scent you want and your float feels like flight as you
speed towards the morsel you absolutely need; you're at her window and staring
inside and there she is in the bed: boring and brunette and you're almost
disappointed because you'd have expected beautiful… but you can't even be
bothered to look at her because the burning in your throat must surely be visible
in a ring of white fire and you can already feel the heat between her thighs and
your hand is through the glass –

And something is wrong.

You recoil. Blackened. Burnt.

She's awake.

You spit venom to the ground and watch the grass die, and languish, guided by
the now-blinding need to feed on the next available body and bitter that you have
to wait another night for her, to the last remaining window.

Edward's mouth burbled silently, a tiny movement like a guppy, his green eyes
wide and aware. Bella's eyes were still closed, her hands covered with white
mittens to keep her from scratching the body that she didn't yet understand to be
her own. Esme and Renee tilted their arms, letting Edward study the other baby.
Renee thought she could almost see the little cogs turning in Edward's head as he
placidly appraised Bella, figuring out what she was, what she was all about,
thinking she was very lovely.

She's so tiny, marveled Esme, looking at the miraculous difference between
week-old Bella and month-old Edward, already unbelieving that her tiny babies
could have been so small. "They grow up so fast."

The second time Edward kissed me, we were both so sunburnt that we left
peeling scads of translucent skin all over Esme's velvet couches for weeks
afterward – but the sun came so seldomly in Forks, under the sparkling gray
orographic lift of Mount Baker and the condensation trapped trees of the woods
that bordered town, and she couldn't blame us too much for overdosing on light
while we could.

Eighth grade was almost upon us and everyone we knew had already paired off
into what would inevitably become the rest of their lives, because that was just
the way Forks worked.

Jasper no longer hated Alice's underpants.

It was why Edward and I were alone out in the sun all day; Rosalie and Emmett
both worked long hours at the garage and when Jasper had the house to himself,
he and Alice tumbled all over each other like the kittens, clawing long scratches
and mewling their sounds and Alice always told me about it later as we hid under
her blankets, and her eyes would shine and I was jealous because no one wanted
me that way.

I was jealous that Alice had Jasper, and I was jealous that Jessica had Mike and
Lauren had Colin and Angela had Ben and Charlotte had Peter and Esme had
Carlisle and —

The Swans were alone.

Renee Higginbotham-Dwyer had Phil.

Charlie Swan had no one.

And Bella Swan wanted Edward Cullen, but had him not, and I felt terrible to be
so envious and wanting because it hurt to look at Edward beside me so beautiful
and oblivious in his bathing suit, lying flat on the slats of the white lattice porch.

He hummed Moon River under his breath, green eyes closed, soaking in the light
he had always exuded for me – my own personal sun, my air – and I rolled onto
my side to stare at him while I could, before his eyes would inevitably open and
I'd have to point out an interesting cloud.

He had an angelic face, still soft with retained boyhood then, but the sharp
chiseled lines every woman with a pulse would grow to love were beginning to
make an appearance. His skin was bright red already from the burn but he was
still sweet, and his buffalo penny copper hair curled around his face just a little
too long, out of teenage stubborn refusal to let Esme cut it.

I knew Edward as well as I knew myself – which is to say not much, really, as we
were only thirteen – but I knew the constellation of six freckles on his sternum
and I knew the funny jut of his belly-button and I bit my lip at the way the part of
him I didn't know was jutting up, a new sensation, beneath the dark blue of his
trunks. He didn't hide it from me. We were Bella and Edward.

Still, I blushed darker crimson as I finally asked: Aren't you curious about the
things they do?

Who?

Everyone else. Alice and Jasper. Emmett and Rosalie. Everyone. Your parents.

Edward's eyes opened and slid over to look at me, and he propped himself up on
his elbow, scooting closer to me, and the end of the jut brushed accidentally
against my bikini-bare belly and it was scary and exciting.

Not really. We'll do those things when we're supposed to, like when we're
married.

My stomach clenched at the idea of Edward married to some pretty girl and doing
all those things and the jealousy gnawed at me until I thought my kneecaps
might break.

I don't think I'll ever get to do them, then, I admitted sadly, biting my lip,
shaking a curtain of hair between us.

Edward chuckled and scooted closer still, and he was suddenly pressed against
me, electric and wooden and weird.

Silly Bella, he cooed then; my favorite phrase in the pit of my stomach, We'll do
everything once we're married.

And his long-fingered pianist's hands were brushing my tangled hair back from
my face.

His lips were soft but chapped in the middle, and he tasted like peanut butter
sandwich and grape soda we'd shared for lunch, and I had no idea how to kiss
and probably moved my mouth too much, but maybe I didn't move it enough,
and all of a sudden bathing suits seemed to leave bare far too much skin and I
was intimidated by Edward for the first time in my life.

Alice wants our wedding to be peach, he said with a smirk as I stared at him,
breathless. But I told her I like you in blue.

You're sucking her in with greedy gasps and hard thrusts, but it's OK because
she's bigger than yesterday's curly-haired girl, and her essence is sweeter, too,
more blueberry than grapefruit, but she's nothing special. She's not freesia, not
her.

You looked at this one before sliding into her; she is beautiful – much more
beautiful than the alluringly disappointing brunette – and blonde and older than
the last night's sip, too.

She's almost as tall as you think you'd be if you could stand on the ground to
judge, but her pale feet are long and narrow, with weirdly knobby toes – the
second are longer than the first; her toenails were filed short and rectangular and
painted pearlescent pink. She has a mole on her right ankle, just between the ball
of bone and the bowstring of protuberant tendon stretched at the back.

The mole is small, unobtrusive, and bean-shaped.

Tattooed around it is a symmetrical, curved shape that a small part of your brain
insists is a heart, but it's not and you know it, because her heart is lopsided and
ugly and murmuring between beats with a worrying swishing sound, but that
doesn't affect you.

Once you can get a taste of the brunette, you won't bother with this blonde
anymore; you had to flush semen from her before you could feed and that was
unpleasant, and the smell of the huge man sleeping beside her is strong and
unappetizing, and this feeding altogether unsatisfactory even as you gain the
sustenance you need.

The man grunts once in his sleep and rolls over, stirring up his ursine scent and
you gag a little, burying your face in the cleave of her neck to mask the man's
smell as you pump harder, just wanting to be finished –

And then she is, convulsing around you and coating you in the sweet slickness
you gratefully suck up, and this one talks to her dream as she comes beneath
you –

"Emmett…"

Your nostrils flare in disapproval as you find your own release and flee quickly,
not wanting to linger in case the man wakes, and as soon as you're outside the
couple's window, the smell of the brunette assaults you and you're dizzy, floating
outside her window, watching her sit awake in the dark.

Bella whimpered again and her arms roiled, the storm in her face a warning to
her impending bawl. Edward's brow furrowed again, lips pouting out like little
pink shells, and his own small arm shot out of his blankets.

Esme, Renee, Carlisle, and Charlie all winced as his wrinkly pink hand set course
to collide with Bella's cheek –

But the gentle pat he dropped against her face, petting her like something
precious, spoke volumes to every breathing being in the room – even Mary Alice,
who stopped stirring and accepted the pacifier from between Carlisle's fingers,
staring in awe at her brother and the baby.

Bella quieted, sighing in a hiccuppy little sound. Edward sang two soft notes that
would never know words; baby-language.

Bella's doe-brown eyes opened for the first time, staring straight into Edward's
green gaze.

id ego eximius

Shelves of knickknack porcelain statues: little white milkmaids with blue pinafores
and tulip hats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding hands, great gray majestic
ibises.

Lemon curd simmering on the stove, rich with yellow egg yolks and smelling like
somewhere far-off and exotic, where maybe Nana Elizabeth danced with Grandpa
Poppie when they were young and beautiful, and maybe she wore a brown grass
skirt over her gingham sunsuit and he wore a tropical print shirt.

Trains pass through even more often on Fridays, flowing down the thirty-eight
railroad crossings, the whistles singing to each other in a strange tribal language
that I don't speak. I like the freighters with wheezing long whistles best.

"How are you holding up, Bella?"

I jumped, startled from the reverie I didn't deserve as I stirred lemon curd, too
sunshine yellow, in Esme's pastel kitchen, trying to busy my hands and calm my
mind and provide what little I could for the family that would never be mine,
trying to prolong the day they would forget about me without Edward there to
remind them.

Rosalie sidled up beside me, putting her arm around my shoulders, and I was
surprised. After we had all turned thirteen and Edward almost broke Jasper's
nose when it transpired he'd seen what Alice (barely) hid beneath her skirts, and
Edward made it abundantly clear that his ideas about propriety and responsibility
did not extend towards the lifestyle of Jasper's unmarried mother – neigh the
inception of his existence at all, though after their apologies he again tolerated
the blond boy – Rosalie had shied from us both, assuming as so many did that
my thoughts mirrored Edward's like a smaller magnet.

I allowed myself the maternal comfort of her arm. And I was honest.

"Not well."

Rosalie sighed sadly and brushed some mousy hair back from my face. I had
always liked her, despite what she thought, though she intimidated me – being a
girl in Forks, I had been raised with that Rosalie Hale as my cautionary tale
against beauty and brazenness and boys. But I was young, not like that biddy
Mrs. Cope or, to be fair, quick-tempered Edward, and I didn't think what
happened to Rosalie to be her fault.

She couldn't help being beautiful any more than I could help being plain.

"I am sorry, Bella," she said, pulling back to study my face. "Edward and I had
our differences, but I know he sure as shit loved you."

At sixteen, Edward very nearly gave Bella a heart attack.

A mere four months before the blood clot in his brain unexpectedly burst and
claimed his life, the pair received the surprise of their lives one bluegreen
Saturday evening when Edward burst unexpectedly into Bella's room.

"Bella!" he cried, all boyish excitement, as her white door flew so far inside that
the knob reverberated off the wall. "Why didn't you answer your – "

And he stopped stock-still.

Bella scrunched beneath her blankets, brown eyes as wide as saucers and staring
at Edward, her mouth a perfectly round ring of regret.

A brightly crimson blush crept in red vines down from Bella's widow's peak over
her forehead, apple-cheeks, and chin; past her neck and down into her shoulders,
which peeked out from above the lacy hem of her comforter.

Her shoulders…

Edward swallowed, his jeans straining.

"Bella…" he asked hoarsely, voice ratting bones, "Are you bare beneath your
sheets?"

Bella's eyes filled with tears.

You're hiding in your half-blown sanctuary beneath the creaky porch of the
largest house and your hands are moving fast out of necessity, sucking in her
diluted essence in unsatisfying slurps as she moves and lives and just won't
fucking go to sleep above you, her delicious drastic scent mingling with last
night's blonde blueberry tart and her heart pounding sad and slow and lush every
time either female voice utters the same unimportant inconsequential sound, two
mirror syllables that sully the tongue you wish to be sucking the venom from your
stealthily sticky fingertips –

"Ed-werd" is a noise you meticulously try to learn, rolling the ugly sound against
your lips, so you can make her heart pound more sweet constriction into her pink
places because she has to sleep sometime.

Edward's legs unglued and he flew to her bedside. He perched birdlike on its
edge, daring to look upon her. "Bella?" he asked, his hand creeping above the
comforter towards the curve of her thigh. "Are you bare?"

Bella buried herself further beneath the baby blue blanket, tears brimming over
and nose bubbling. "Please don't break up with me!" she begged, desperate.
"Please, Edward, I'm so sorry; please, please don't break up with me!"

Edward's brow knit in confusion as his hand settled against the warmth of Bella's
leg. "Wh – " he stuttered. "Wh-why would… I – Bella, I – what?"

Bella's face disappeared behind her hands. Her voice came out as a whisper. "You
think it's wrong."

Edward's eyes flashed. "How could you think I find anything about your body to
be wrong?"

Bella pulled the comforter over her head.

"Come out," Edward said, shaking her thigh, voice stronger than his resolve.

The blanket shook its head.

"Bella, come out," Edward repeated, taking his hand away.

The comforter scrunched further in on itself.

Edward huffed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, with hands he hoped
she would never know were shaking, he slowly pulled the comforter down.

I talked to Rosalie all afternoon as the sunshine yellow curd thickened and I
pounded out cold-pastry crusts and baked unnecessary pies, thank-you gifts for
the pitying acquaintances who showered the Cullens in casseroles (the image
made Rosalie laugh) that none of us had any interest in eating.

Edward was gone – and all the tuna-pea crisp in the world wouldn't change that.

Rosalie sat at the table, watching me work and get covered in white flour like a
little kitchen ghost, a curious look in her long-lashed eyes.

"Bella?" she asked finally, when all chit-chat had been had and six pies had been
baked and I thought I'd successfully hid my tears for a third time, "Can I ask you
a tough question?"

I wasn't ready for tough questions. I wasn't ready to think about the way
Edward's face looked empty and waxen in his coffin the afternoon before in the
fading light and I couldn't yet face the fact that he would never have hit his head
had he not been sneaking back inside his own empty bedroom after a tryst in
mine the night he died; I wasn't ready to wash his last orgasm from my sheets,
all I had left of him.

"Yes."

Rosalie's voice was smaller than I could have imagined coming from the brash
Aphrodite. "Why did Edward hate me?"

Just to her chin.

Then he gently slid one hand over the soft swell of her cheek, patting her as
though she were something precious.

One red-rimmed brown eye opened.

"Please come out," Edward cooed, three words of song that would never again
share their melody.

Outside Bella's whitewashed windowframe, the poseidon sky bent in on itself and
collapsed in wet rain, rumbling with the vibration of thunder as white lightning
split the air into equal pushing halves of hot and cold.

Bella whimpered once as the other eye opened. She clutched the comforter to her
neck as she sat up, and Edward swallowed at the sight of her pale naked arms
and shoulders and one wingéd side of her fragile clavicle. "I'm sorry, Edward,"
she whispered. "I know you don't think – I mean, I'll under – " she swallowed,
her voice wet and heavy. "I'll understand if you're ashamed of me. I was just…
so… curious, Edward, and I want you so badly, and I'm so sorry…"

"Bella." Edward's voice cut like a knife as his pale hands found hers at the top of
the comforter. "Please don't be sorry. I'm not ashamed of you, I could never be
ashamed of you." His tone lowered and smoothed like oil, greasing the words to

slide together sinfully. "I wish you'd come out, Bella, and let me see you. I'm
curious, too, you know."

I paused, neither quite unable nor unwilling to answer, but knowing my own
weakness: admitting Edward's imperfection.

Especially now.

I looked through the weeping pane of glass into the Cullens' lush green backyard,
over the porch that was twice the sight of my first kiss; the air held a strange
frozen shimmer despite the late May heat, like the clouds just decided they were
sick of floating in the sky and wanted to succumb to gravity with the rest of us.

"Edward didn't hate you," I said, uncomfortable but truthful. "He loved you,
Rosalie. He just…" I paused. "Edward had really strong ideas about… about the
right way to do things. Y-your life didn't… didn't mesh well. With his ideas, I
mean. I – "

Rosalie stood up fast from her seat and crossed the room in two long supermodel
strides, suddenly hugging me close.

I still couldn't cry, even as I whispered the words I thought I would never say: "I
disagreed with him."

Rosalie kissed my forehead then, and my heart panged because the last person
to kiss my brow had been Edward, just before he left, his lips pressing against
the tip of my hairline – just where the morticians had covered his bruise for the
coffin.

Bella's brow furrowed. "But you always say no! And you won't touch me, ever,
Edward, and it makes me feel so bad… and Rosalie – "

"I never realized that made you feel bad, Bella," Edward apologized softly,
squeezing her hands and guiding her to lower the coverlet an inch. "I can't touch
you, Bella. It's not that I won't. I just can't."

"Why not?"

Lightning lit the tiny bedroom and shadows played across Edward's tortured face
as he stared at their joined hands, just above Bella's small tight breasts, and he
guided the comforter and her fingers an inch lower again. "If I start, I won't stop,
Bella, I know I won't, I'm not strong enough to treat you the way you deserve
unless it's this way... but that doesn't mean I don't want you, Bella… I do; I want
you so badly it hurts me."

I lay in my bed later that night, spent but unable to sob or to sleep, face buried
deep in my messy sheets, running through the complication that had always been
Edward's attitudes and being strangely certain that

he

was

gone.

I knew of course that he was dead; I didn't suffer that delusion I'd read about of
feeling that the lost beloved was only hiding or sleeping or would be returning
soon –

If my Edward had seen me so desolate, he would have given up the world to be
at my side, he always had. He missed school on days that I felt sick, gave up
vacations to stay with me when I'd broken my ankle or my ribs, jumped in front
of a van to shield me from harm, crushing his femur and giving up his own cross-
country career – his ticket out of Forks – what had seemed, at the time, to be his
best shot at a future.

At his funeral, I had looked into the crowd for his reassuring grin twice when my
fear of crowds got the better of me and I swayed on my sleep-deprived feet –

And that grin was not there.

Because

Edward

was

gone.

Tonight more than ever, though, I could feel his absence, the lack of his light. I
knew he was imperfect in the eyes of others – today's talk with Rosalie only
served to further impress his faults: stubbornness, righteousness, spontaneous
bouts of vanity – but he was perfect in my eyes because he was the center of my
world; he had made it so since the first moment I opened my eyes.

His voice was my buoy and his eyes my anchor; I always ran in the pull of his
tides and crashed like a wave into his arms. I never bothered to think so much
about what I would be as Bella Swan because that girl would end and I could
become Bella Cullen: I would be Edward's wife and the mother Edward's children.

I suddenly had to find a self outside of him, and that terrified me. Rosalie had
assured me that it got easier and easier as time passed and that I had my whole
life ahead of me, that Edward was not all I had to be, but when I asked her if she
remembered the look on his face the night of our last Homecoming, when he
gave me his ring, she only looked puzzled.

Jasper gave Alice his ring that night, too; the photograph in a silver frame on my
nightstand was taken by his mother. That Rosalie could have already forgotten
that night when I never would; late that night after the town was asleep, we'd
lain on the cold morningdew grass and I had gotten to touch Edward for the first
time, his ring heavy on my hand making me weightless…

Now, he was gone and the world felt colder; I shivered and pulled the blankets
tighter around myself.

When She finally left the big white house and descended down the rickety porch
steps, the sun was covered in year-old newspapers, smudged with grease from
being used as draining papers for doughnuts. Light hung iridescent through the
transparencies, hitting the spaghetti clouds' backsides, everything lit in half-tone:
john paul george ringo, everything stuck in another timeless time, the smell of
the rain thick and heavy like fog with the scent of glaciers melting and falling into
the sea with a crash and minerals and smoke turning white moths black.

Even though She was awake and you knew it would hurt you couldn't help it, you
darted out for just a moment, licking the bone of ankle, instantly drunk on her
and falling back into the darkness with a gasp, barely registering her movement
as she stumbled and fell down the last two steps.

She lay dazed on the sweating green grass for a moment and you rumbled with
hope that she had broken –

If she were dead, you could steal her, and never have to give her back.

But she rose, tripsy but upright on her narrow white feet, and staggered off to
the little blue house you knew to be her own, and you desperately wanted to
follow, but the burn of the sun and the burn of her awareness had scorched you
black already and you retreated beneath the mouldering wood, licking your
wounds.

But now the sky is jet black and tumbling with hot and cold air; thunder and rain
and you're soaked and hard and ready and outside her window, watching her,
knowing her sweet brandywine taste from just the smallest taste against
unknowing pornographic skin, waiting for her to sleep so you can take her.

"But you don't have to stop!" Bella cried, scooting forward to stare into Edward's
eyes. "Edward, it would be okay! We love each other. It would be wonderful to be
able to – express it, in those ways." She scooted closer still, and the comforter
fell forgotten to her waist. Edward's eyes locked on hers; Bella had not yet
noticed anything amiss. "Please, Edward," Bella begged. "Please show me how
you love me."

A v-shape creased between Edward's eyebrows. "Bella…" his eyes fluttered shut
and Bella watched his Adam's apple bob. "I am trying to show you how much I
love you in the best way I can imagine. I'm not going to let you end up like
Rosalie."

Bella's eyes flashed. "Us making love would not be anything like what happened
to her."

The cupid mouth pursed. "So you say. Whatever really happened that night, she
was dating Royce King, and she ended up alone and pregnant and has to be a
mechanic in Forks, Washington, for the rest of her life. I'm not going to risk that
happening to you."

Bella stroked Edward's smooth cheek gently with the backs of two fingers. "I
wouldn't be alone, even if all the rest happened. We would just be starting our
family early. Besides, it worked out for the best; she loves Jasper, and she has
Emmett now." She smiled decadently. "Though I could never replace you."

Edward smiled sadly. "You can't know that it'd be okay, Bella. Anything could
happen."

Bella's hand curled into a fist. "Don't even say that, Edward." Her swollen eyes
filled with panicked tears. "How could you even joke about leaving me? You can't
leave me. Not ever."

Edward gathered Bella close and she pressed her face into the crook of his neck,
inhaling his sweet grass stain smell and breathing in rhythm to his slow-thudding
heartbeat, pushing gently in soft tides against her skin.

Edward swallowed and rubbed his hand slowly down the bare expanse of Bella's
white back, fingertips tracing the angelwings of her scapulae, counting her
vertebrae in fearful reverence. Bella had forgotten her nudity, but Edward
thought he never would.

"Bella." His voice came out as an embarrassingly boyish croak; he cleared his
throat once and tried again. "Bella… m-m-may I look at you?"

Your face is pressed against the glass as rain pelts your back in long wet lashes
that sting with wind and charcoal tanned leather.

She's moving silently around her room, touching the frames of small square
photographs, face impassive, top half bare and bottom half hidden by a gray
garment that makes you growl with dislike. You want to see it. You want to see it
and you're not sure why, because she's not pretty, but she belongs to you and
she's acting like she doesn't know it.

Your hand acts of its own accord and it's through the glass, still as stone and
waiting, burnishing black and you're roiling in pain and you want to withdraw
your hand but you just can't, her scent so close against the suction of your
fingertips is delicious and tipsy and the longer you wait and endure the burn the
more bearable it becomes.

You squirm in excitement at the idea of acclimation, of taking her awake and
aware. She's a garish thing but your mouth is watering anyway and that's not
something you could dare to pass up.

She crosses her room to the closet and runs a hand over the line of soft pale drab
fabrics; you're jealous of their strands and imagine her hands stroking you, down
your torso and across a hip to the part of you that hungers most, her fingers
swirling over the end and dancing across the length, up and down and up.

Her arms stretch above her head and it's obvious naked that despite her small
size she has a little bitty potbelly, a small bulge of white tummy just above the
wild triangle of hair; she has the navel of a woman with a toned stomach, but
below the threefold button her stomach swells, a smooth puffiness that would not
be noticed when not casting an ooid shadow on the rusted bryophytes that grew
shyly beneath, the helixes tangled, pressing against her skin, hiding revealing
white wrinkles, silhouetted ridges, the flush pink bulb and crest.

you

want

her.

You want this one without her clothes, her alabaster upturned breasts small and
set high, unsullied iridescent opals in the strange filtered light of the corn tassel
moon.

You want her spread open like an orchid, and curled tight around your wispy body
with legs twined around your waist and arms pushing you closer deeper

hunger.

You want her rolled over so you don't have to look at her face and your hands
can find her little pink nipples and suck their sustenance; you want to snatch her
from her bed and sling her around your neck and run with her across the treetops
of the hum and take her hard against the trees in the clearing where you can
keep her away from the world for hours and hours and days…

You want her in your mouth and under your hips and running her hands over
your every inch and

you

want

her.

You swallow in half-deluded need and your other hand slips through the
windowpane.

Bella turned magenta from her tresses to her toes, the evening flashing before
her eyes like the storm outside.

"Please, Bella?" Edward whispered, keeping his eyes carefully trained on her
flushed face. "You can see me, too. I just need – please, Bella. Please."

Bella swallowed. Edward's eyes were wild and timid and so green they burned.

"I can see you, too?"

Edward nodded fast. "Yes," he breathed, voice shaky – uncharacteristic of the
confident and charming young man, now confronted full in the face with his
girlfriend's womanhood – and hands on Bella's palms again. "What do you want,
Bella? What do you need?"

Bella's pink tongue poked out from between her lips to wet them nervously
before her small white teeth found purchase on her upper lip, awkward and
scraping. Slowly, she moved back against the pillows and languished like
Cleopatra, an Egyptian queen, flaws forgotten under Edward's gaze and
nonexistent in his eyes.

She pushed the comforter down to free her skinny white legs.

"You."

Edward's breath caught in his chest, heart hammering hard and fast. Bella was
the most beautiful girl he had ever seen – where she looked in the mirror and
saw awkward pudge, Edward saw the soft curve of the stomach that would one
day swell with his baby, and it was amazing; where Bella saw two-cup-sizes-too-
small, Edward saw the perfect size to fit beneath his palms and dark cherry
nipples that almost made him cry; where Bella was terribly embarrassed by the
tangled mess of dark curls at the apex of her thighs, Edward thought the dark
froth made her real and womanly and mysterious, like a wood nymph, magical
and seductive.

Because he loved her, Edward thought Bella was beautiful.

"Show me," Edward whispered. "Bella, show me what you were doing under your
blankets."

The blush returned. "Why?"

For the first time in Bella's memory, Edward's cheeks flushed with embarrassed
color and he looked away. "I imagine it all the time," he whispered. "I'm sorry,
Bella, I just can't help it, you're so – and I want you so – "

"You do?" Bella asked, all gentle innocence, even as her wanton hands slid
purposefully over the cage of her ribs.

Edward nodded, transfixed. He ran a hand through his auburnbronze hair making
it stand erect like a mane.

Edward held his breath as Bella gentle teased small circles on her pointed nipples
with four fingertips. "What do you imagine me doing, Edward?"

Her voice was a low purr, she now the lioness and Edward the lamb quaking in
her wake.

"I thi – I think – " he stuttered, and Bella ran one dainty foot along his shin.

"Take off your clothes while you tell me, Edward," she sighed. One hand had fled
her breasts and rested lightly over her navel, and Edward craved more.

You're crippled with pain and your limbs only bent boughs in your broken glass
figurine self, crushed in the corner of Her bedroom, drowning in the sea of her
exotic pepperberry freesia sweet sex perfume and it's worth the pain as your
invisible organs wrench and turn outside-in inside-out and you're retching in pain
at the same moment that her fragrance makes you cum and it's the most
awkward sensation you've ever known.

She's lying in her bed, tauntingly still, but awake, her cherry nipples hidden
beneath a dark blue tee-shirt, but you can see their outlines clearly and they're
calling to you and you want so badly to go to her but it hurts and you can't and
your shuddering pain sends out wave after wave of cold air rippling through the
room; she shivers softly and pulls the blankets more tightly around herself,
movement stirring up more of her breathtaking scent and you double over again,
watching her intently from the corner of her bedroom…

A tortoiseshell button fell free from Edward's shirt in his haste to obey.

Bella owned his soul.

He was finally as naked as she by the time her thin fingers combed through the
wirebrush seaweed curls and his pink head wept three opal tears in joy.

Feminine fingertips found fresh female flesh and Bella mewled softly, a tiny
private noise: "Now, tell me, Edward, please, please tell me what you imagine."

Edward had been a beautiful teenage boy, all unblemished milk skin and
peekaboo manly muscles and not quite yet grown into his long bones; his hands
were pianists' hands and his legs runners' legs and his cock a Casanova
implement and all three played together, quadriceps twitching on either side of
the hand running strokes over sensitive skin.

"I imagine you sprawled across my sheets while I lick every inch of you," Edward
whispered, embarrassed, and Bella moaned, one finger sliding softly inside and
Edward was so mesmerized he forgot how to live for a moment as he stared at
the point of disappearance.

"What else?"

"I want to be inside you, Bella, fuck, I want to be inside you," Edward panted,
hand moving fast and too idiosyncratically to be effective for anyone else,
scrambling to regain the momentum he'd lost in watching Bella's shining finger,
"God, you're beautiful; you're all I think about, Bella, but I love you and I can't –
you're too good for me, you're too good for me to think about how I do…"

He was rambling and wild, hands jerking and pulling and slapping hard, eyes
vacant and brimming and wet and green and his cheeks flushed pink and he was
gone, lost in his id and the pleasure he always denied and his sight was too short
to reach past his own shimmering space –

"Edward, look at me," Bella whimpered, hooking her finger inside her.

He looked at her, chest rising and falling and fingers lost beneath the veil of
crinkled curls and lids heavy over her innocent brown eyes, and he spilled white
over his hand and ricochet on his chest and her leg and baby blue sheets.

Bella smiled sweetly and sighed short through her nose. Edward collapsed with
his head tickling her knee, face close to watch her finish, seeping sweet scent
onto her fingers.

She held them out for him and he got shy, blushing and shaking his head; Bella
gently traced his bottom lip with her wet.

"I love you," she said softly. "There is nothing you could think that would make
you bad for me."

Edward just turned his face into her knee and nuzzled, hiding his embarrassed
tears. His tongue tremulously tasted her gift on his lip, and he struggled to keep
from growing hard again, from burying his face between Bella's legs – so close,
so close – to keep his thoughts of his angel as pure as he felt she deserved.

"I love you, too."

I rolled over, turning the pillow and holding it against me, cuddling it close.

I hadn't slept in days.

I had never felt so alone.

I glanced to the window as lightning struck, blinding me with gold, and then, in
the rollicking aftershock of thunder, noticing the bright fuchsia sky of sunrise, the
red round soleil burned bright into my retinas and making my eyes shut…

In the light of day, I drifted off to unwelcome sleep.

You're back under the porch and it smells like rotting wood and the sharp tang of
grass and the overpowering absence of sun and your insides are all cattywampus
and you're rocking on your heels and your head's in your hands and if you could
cry, tears would course streaming down your face but you can't cry, and anyway,
the tears are for your own sorry self.

baby blue sheets

"Congratulations, Edward!"

Bella bristled as the blonde ran her hand down Edward's bicep, lingering just a
little too long and smiling at him with straight white teeth.

Edward, ever-chivalrous, smiled dutifully back and nodded. "Thanks, Lauren."

Bella scowled as the manicured hand didn't leave Edward's arm, but instead gave
it a briskly flirtatious squeeze.

Lauren's pinhead-thin eyebrows rose and were smothered behind white-blonde
bangs. She looked through Bella like she was transparent, staring seduction into
Edward's eyes. "Are you coming to the team party at the DiNalis' house?" She
asked, and bit her lower lip in a way that Bella found distastefully pornographic
for a fellow fourteen-year-old.

Edward tightened his arm around Bella's waist and shook his head. "I don't think
so. I was planning to take Bella out for dinner with my parents."

Lauren's hand dropped from Edward's arm as though scorched and she rolled her
eyes far enough that Bella hoped she'd be stuck for eternity with them backwards
looking at the empty space where her brain ought to be.

"Suit yourself," the blonde sighed, a soporific sneer in her saccharine falseness.

She turned back to the bulk of sandy blond-haired muscle and sweat wrapped
around her waist. "Good job, baby," she cooed at Colin, and they set off across
the ice-covered parking lot of Forks High School.

Bella turned her face into Edward's flushed neck, taking in the tang of his drying
perspiration, cold against his overwarmed skin, feeling insignificant in light of
Lauren's insouciance. She was older than Lauren but smaller, more loved but less
lovable, all angles and bones where Lauren had curves and softness. Bella at
fourteen was gangly legs with kneecaps too big, and moonpie eyes with
frightened lashes, always half-hiding behind her scraggled brown hair.

But she'd had Edward for a year and eight months, and slowly, with butterfly
kisses to the bridge of her nose and soft wet sucking kisses against her lips that
made her toes curl, he made her feel almost important.

Lips pressed like a shadow against the crown of her head, and Bella snuggled
closer.

"Congratulations, Edward," she said softly, hugging him tight. "I'm really proud of
you."

She looked up to find Edward looking right back, pleased grin on his boyish face.
He had finally let Esme cut his hair, and Bella thought he looked more handsome
than ever. "Thank you, Bella." He cupped her cheek with one warm hand. "Did
you want to come to dinner with us tonight? You don't have to if you don't want…
I know Jasper and Alice were going to go to the twins' party; if you want to go,
I'm sure they'd take you and I can come after, I just had promised Mom a dinner
if I won…"

Bella shook her head and rested her ear against his bony shoulder. "I want to
come to dinner with you. I'm afraid of the twins, and Lauren's always mean to
me."

Edward exhaled, a white cloud of warm in the cold air. "She's only mean to you
because you let her be. You're superior to her in every way, Bella."

He wanted to say 'my Bella,' but she was just so shy, he was never sure how she
would respond. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he'd loved her since
she was born, practically, but Jasper said that it probably wasn't a good idea.

Alice was clear that Bella didn't even always believe yet that Edward could like
her as a girl, much less love her.

But he did.

The sun shone bright, drenched and warm after a night of rain, colors splashing
across Esme's manicured lawn in Water Lilies and Haystacks, jade and hyacinth
and amber, bluebrushed from the unusually clear sky.

"Bella," sighed Rosalie, opening their door, house-sitting for a full house but
empty home yet again. "We didn't think you were coming today. It's later than

your usual. Sun's been up for hours," she joked. Rosalie eyed the casserole dish
in my hand. "Lunch?"

I nodded and stepped over the worn threshold. "It's the least I could do, since I
never made it over with breakfast," I mumbled, balancing the hot pan in one
hand while using the other to remove my shoes. It was warm outside for May,
and I didn't wear socks; somehow, without Edward, it felt wrong to be barefoot in
the Cullens' house, but there was nothing I could do.

Rosalie stepped forward and took the dish from my hands, but her eyes never left
my face. "You look like you slept," she said cautiously.

No one knew how to treat me now. I slept, but in daylight, like a vampire;
Edward was gone and I was undead.

I nodded again, hair falling in my face. Edward hated that. I compulsively pushed
it back behind my ears, missing his hands on my skin. "A little," I acquiesced,
"Early this morning. It's why I missed breakfast time. Did the family – the
Cullens; did the Cullens – eat?"

Rosalie's eyes softened, her smile sad; she looked like a girl in Degas painting,
blurred around the edges with some unknown sorrow outside herself, projecting
inwards. "They're your family, Bella. Even without him."

I swallowed around the lump that had been in my throat for days. "Did they eat?"

Rosalie laughed. "I fed them, Bella. Don't worry, after sixteen years of living with
Emmett McCarty, I know how to make breakfast. Man wakes up in the morning
fixin' to eat a damn bear."

I stared at Rosalie, with her perfectly flowing blonde hair and kohl-lined blue
eyes, grease slicks inked deep into the maternally premature wrinkles in her
cheeks, tender smile on her lips…

She got to wake up every morning with Emmett and fix him breakfast. She woke
up and drank coffee with him, he had helped her to raise Jasper when no one else
would, even though he was another man's child and Emmett was only seventeen
when he moved to Forks from Anchorage – where he probably had actually eaten
bear for breakfast – and started dating Rosalie…

I started to laugh at the image of Rosalie wrangling a bear into a frying pan on
the small Harvest Gold stove in her house next door; I imagined Jasper and
Emmett charging down the stairs in dungarees and ten-gallon hats for no real
reason, grabbing up their silverwear to dig in –

And then Edward was in my head, jogging down a mirage of a blue staircase with
a little brunette baby on his hip, two pairs of bright summergreen eyes gazing
happily at me as I set out filled plates on a round little table, morning sunlight
streaming in through a window beside the stove; and Edward was in my head
drinking coffee beside me, naked in a rumpled bed, toes tangled together and
hair a rumpus mess; Edward was in my head, idyllic.

And I would never fix Edward breakfast in the morning.

I would never know if he woke up hungry enough to eat wild game.

And there, finally, bent double in hysterical laughter –

With a casserole dish of cheese manicotti in my hands, in the Cullens' foyer, at
nearly noon, three days after he had died –

I broke down and cried for Edward.

You're angry at Her.

You're angry that She didn't sleep until the sun tainted her walls with pink, with
life and light and just as you were finally gliding across her floor towards Her,
towards salvation, towards her flavor and her warmth, a shaft of light sliced at
you through her window like a spear and you had to hold in your scream and for
one moment you'd held in your hands the prospect of taking Her, but instead She
bested you, the ugly pink twit, she bested you and you're hungry and needy and
upset in ways you can't explain, hiding beneath that mouldering porch, smelling
her above you.

Her scent has something different to it today, another chiffon shrouded layer, and
you bristle; salt and seawater and rotten rose petals –

You don't like whatever it is that's changed her smell. She's yours to change.

She's with a familiar blueberry smell again that you vaguely remember taking but
she fades pales diminishes with each murmuring heartbeat in the wake of That
girl, Her breathing uneven as the saline smell seeps from Her, coating Her
indecently delicious spicy mouthwatering scent in cigarette-inducing macabre;
She's vocalizing over and over the noise you practiced for Her all yesterday (ed-
werd ed-werd ed-werd) and suddenly your stomach clenches in fear –

That noise: She likes that noise; you don't like the smell on Her now –

Is She with a male?

Your sorrow and fear wrench together and you're furious and glowing and
bristling and a coldfire ball of rage and an emotion that you don't know a name
for but feels like churning bile in your empty dead stomach, strong enough to
overpower your insatiable hunger for Her; you're twisting and roiling in the shade
of the porch as you wait for the sun to set because She slept once, She fooled
you, but you're getting used to Her presence and the harsh burn of Her
wakefulness and She will not get away from you again.

you

want

her

and she is yours.

"Hey, you two!" Alice's small sweet voice called as Jasper's diecast Dodge
Charger pulled up alongside Edward and Bella in a sweeping arc. She proudly
wore Jasper's bronze medal around her neck, face painted in Forks High navy and
gold, black hair spiked in a devil's crown around her head as she leaned half-out
the window, held inside the car mostly by Jasper's steady hand on her waist.
"Why aren't you coming to the party?"

"We're going to dinner with Mom and Dad," Edward said complacently. "Are you
going to wash your face before you go to the DiNalis'?"

Jasper's boat of a car idled in neutral in front of the pair, Alice hanging out the
passenger window, arguing with Edward, and Jasper, triumphant glow still
plastered on his cross-country team face, leaned out his own window, yelling
from car to car with Tyler Crowley, a junior on their team.

Edward was the only freshman to make the Varsity squad, and the gold medal
around his neck proved that it was neither favoritism nor in vain.

The sky overhead was crystalline gray, a frozen mesh of ice cubes that settled on
Bella's skin with a brisk, rejuvenating chill; the skinny black fingers of the naked
trees poked holes in the white clouds and made black crows fall out, swooping
and cawing.

"God, Edward, you are so stubborn!" whined Alice, furrowing her brow. "You are
so going to wish that you just got in this damned car and came to the party, you
mark my words." She frowned and turned to tug at Jasper's sleeve. "They're not
coming," she reported with a long-suffering sigh. "We can go."

Jasper leaned across her lap to twang out the open window: "You sure?"

Edward nodded and Bella echoed, her face still half-buried in Edward's chest, shy
around even her closest childhood friends today in the face of the whole town's
adoration for her Edward.

"Suit yourselves and see you tomorrow," Jasper said breezily, and inched his
heavy car forward across the crunching field of ice on the asphalt.

Tyler turned the steering wheel of his van to edge into the exit lane behind his
friend, but the turn was too tight and the ice too slick and he hadn't had his
license quite long enough not to panic and his hands flew away from the wheel in
vain to block his face with his forearms as his back tires squealed a whine.

"Bella," Esme urged me gently, her warm powdersoft hands supporting my back
where I had collapsed on her entry hall linoleum. "Bella, sweetest heart, it's
okay… dear heart, it's okay…"

I clung to her forearms, dwarfed by her grace and ashamed of my melodramatic
misery in front of her; he was her son, her oldest child – if only by eleven
minutes – and her sorest joy… I was just the girl next door, just the childhood
love of Edward… that was all he would ever be able to be for me, now.

Despite his promises. Damn his confidence.

He would never be anything other than my high school sweetheart. My first love.
Sad eyes would follow me wherever I went in Forks for the rest of my life, the
way accusing glances clung to Rosalie like a second skin and hushed whispers
trailed Alice for taking up with the Hale boy, the way widows sent my father
spiced peaches and pickled watermelon at canning season for the last fifteen
years and how no one would ever say my mother's name.

I was just another small-town porch story.

Esme was his mother.

"Esme – " I gasped, trying so hard to stop the sudden onslaught of tears, "Please,
don't worry about me, I should be – I should be taking care of you."

Esme smiled sadly and the perennial row of pearls around her stately neck caught
the sweet sunlight, glowing warm against her skin. "Bella, you have been a
daughter to Carlisle and me and a sister to Alice for as long as you've been alive.
That hasn't changed."

Her soft hand found my chin and gently urged my face up to look at her. I was
humbled by the quiet tear-stained strength in her hazelgold eyes and Edward's
nose, but with a light spray of freckles like Alice.

I bit my lip as my breath caught in my chest, daring for the first time to take a
leap without Edward's open arms to catch me, and I believed her, even though
being proven wrong would hurt like Edward died a second time.

I hugged Esme, wishing for the ten-millionth time that she could be my mother,
and together we rose from the floor, the two women who loved Edward best.

She took the tray of pasta I had brought them from the balustrade she'd
precariously balanced it on and carried it one-handed with ease to the kitchen,
her other arm around my shoulders still, not trusting that I was strong enough to
stand on my own, to hold myself up; disbelieving that I could exist in space
without a Cullen at my side to get me through.

Alice and Jasper and Rosalie joined us for lunch around the glowing yew kitchen
table; Emmett had to work to support Rosalie and Jasper and Carlisle had to work
to sustain himself for Esme and Alice.

I spent the afternoon holed up in Alice's bedroom, curled up atop her bed with
her looking at old photo albums and scrapbooks full of silver glitter, photos of
Alice and me and Jasper and Edward. Her hands looked dainty as she turned the
pages, smooth black nail polish and Jasper's gold ring with a pear-shaped topaz
stone looking light and homey on her left pinkie.

I looked down at my own pale hand beside hers, fingers absently tracing
Edward's features in a photo from that homecoming dance, watching the steely
glint of silver from the thin braided band and the dancing light echoing from the
small round diamond. I wore my ring on my wedding finger. Edward insisted.

"D'you think I should take off my ring?"

The light is fading and you're squirming in excitement, drawing dirty pictures in
the ground with an outstretched finger and drowning in deluges of delicious
debauchery starring Her scent, imagining the sweet taste of her honey on your
tongue and her warmth as she writhes beneath you –

warmth

is a foreign sensation for you, with the sun scorchsplintering burning painful and
the ground damp and cool and you have no blood no veins no strength and
you're weak in your coldness but there's something else there that you can't
shake:

The darkness is cold, and you're consumed in it, lost somewhere in the shadows
where the light never touches, and it chills you to the bone though it's the only
home you've ever known. You are a child of darkness, a creature of the night,
shrouded in mystery and cloaked in some terrible ambiguous loss, unresolved
grief, business unfinished that binds you in no uncertain terms to the dark edges
of velvet dimmed anathema.

she

is light.

She is nothing, you curse; she's a shy pale face and small breasts and dark
nipples and a stomach with a little paunch you don't understand because her
thighs are so thin. She's nothing; a perfume without a bottle, an aroma lingering
long after the fresh-baked bread has cooled and left the kitchen, a floral
fragrance in winter's dead bouquet.

She's nothing. But she is light. You don't know why you've drawn her smiling in
your grand delusion in the dirt, one hand sketching out her curves and the other
on yourself, again, craving and shameful, but as the crickets begin to chirp and
call out for mates with rubbing legs and wanton song beneath the comfortcover
of night, you know that she is sunlight that won't blister and cipher to your
cryptich and warmth to cover you and

you

want

her.

The huge blue sport utility vehicle rocked and swerved and its tail-end came
sliding like a hydroplane around the boot of Jasper's stalled and panicked
Charger, aimed straight at Edward in his gold medal and Bella in her great gray
jacket, cowering against his side –

"Bella!"

With a quicktwisting thrust that left her ribs bruised, Bella found herself falling
ankle-over-foot to the icy asphalt, pant leg catching on the Charger's exhaust
pipe and burning her skin, scarring a line of angry red against her white ankle,
her head hitting down on pavement and making her see stars.

There was a sickening crunch in the next nanosecond and Bella tried hard to sit
up, but there was no room –

Edward was trapped between the front bumper of Tyler's mammoth van and the
crushed-in trunk of the Charger, pinned at the legs just above his knees, face grit
down and drained as he tried to stay calm.

Alice was screaming as she tumbled out of Jasper's passenger seat and fell beside
Bella to help her sit up, the back of her brunette head bleeding; Jasper fought
hard against the white balloon that puffed from his steering wheel and scarred his
pretty face, trying to uncatch his seatbelt to reach a phone or an adult; Tyler lay
slumped back against his seat, blood dripping from a temple.

Alice wiped Bella's head clean with her lime green scarf.

Jasper sobbed apologies in Rosalie's arms while Emmett assessed the damage to
both cars, speaking soothing words to Edward, who hung suspended in steel,
stock-still in shock, eyes unwavering from where his twin cradled his girlfriend on
the ground.

Charlie arrived with lights flashing and sirens blazing, escorting the ambulance;
once Edward was extricated, they tried hard to force an oxygen mask onto his
face as he lay broken, but he kept batting their helpful hands away.

"Bella," he insisted, over and over: "Bella! She hit her head when she fell, you
need to take care of Bella! I'm sorry; I didn't mean to hurt her! Bella!"

I dressed for bed slowly, turning the ring on my finger around and around.

Do you think you should take it off?

No.

Then don't.

The world was so simple for Alice, the answers just clear when it came to her
brother, to Jasper, to love. Alice had always believed in everything; faith
overwhelmed her frame even now, even when Edward had been taken from her,
even though she had been the one to find his lifeless body and cradled his cold
head in her lap and called for Esme and wouldn't let him go for the paramedics.

She'd held me this afternoon just as I'd held her at his funeral, one flying hand
smoothing over my arm to soothe me, encouragement to believe in her prophesy
that I would be alright.

I settled into bed, curling my knees to my chest and gently rubbing the long scar
on my ankle, remembering how Edward put himself in harm's way to try to
protect me, allowed himself to be hospitalized, future taken from him and life
threatened, out of some overwrought sense of obligation to my safety, my well-
being.

Well, my welfare suffered now, but he had freed from any obligation towards me.
I wouldn't put that burden on his family in his stead.

With determination burning bright in the pit of my stomach and the soles of my
feet, I settled back against the pillows and closed my eyes against the darkness,
determined to sleep and find the sunlight when I rose.

I would be alright.

You are so excited and so needful and so single-minded in your intensity that
your lusty haze becomes fear as you slip through Her window, the soft mournful
sob of her sleep calling to you, beckoning you forward, allying you with her baby
blue sheets.

A patch of thin blanket near Her face is splotched with the remnants of fluid from
a male, his scent faded and familiar like denim, and Her hand clutches him close,
and the reeling anger comes back biting at your legs and gnawing at your knees
and you want to tear him away from Her, out of Her; She is yours, not his, yours,
and She's here and asleep and soft and open barely hidden beneath the sheets
and you're harder than you've ever been, all glassy hard bulge and sweetsticky
venom dripping like sweat and saliva and semen building to be taken by Her in
exchange for a gift.

But she's so small curled up in that bed.

And her face is so innocent as it smoothes out in sleep, your presence near her
window beginning to shade her dreams…

And her scent is so sweet as She rolls to her back, writhing arms-up and legs-out
with tiny nipples poking through the thin fabric of Her dark blue shirt, mumbling
softly to the rhythm of the erotica you've projected into Her mind – ed-werd ed-
werd; palethin thighs falling open and hips moving tiny circuits like a wave, the
tattered white fabric wrapping her intimate places slick with the sustenance you
need and your decision is made for you.

you

want

her

and you creep closer, reach out to touch Her skin – finally, finally! – and you're
shaking with need and anticipation and your fingers are ghosting over the white

panties and unlike with the cinnamoncurl sip and the blueberry tart, you want
them gone, you don't want to sink through their flimsy obstruction, you want to
see Her ethereal pinkness, you want Her outrageous flavor for yours and yours
alone, and with light hands, you shred the fabric from her body before Her heart
takes another beat.

She has soft brown curls there, dew from Her dirty dreams glistening in tiny
tangled drops.

The others had no hair there.

She is special.

ed-werd her pink lips pout; you watch them in fascination. Her back stretches
and Her bottom grinds against the mattress and you're so close and She's open
and wanting and She likes that word, it's a bittersweet happy noise, you can see
it and smell it and taste it on the air surrounding her and she's finally right there,
waiting to be yours –

And you're scared.

Your body is crying with need and your mouth is full of the venom wrapping your
tongue and begging to be dragged across Her skin and your fingers are clenched
tight in sucking fists and the private drinking part of you is twitching against Her
leg, supping her warm skin and not getting nearly enough and She's inches away
and ripe berry pink and it would be so easy, finally, wonderfully, mercifully easy…

But you're scared.

Tentatively, testing, crying with need and hunger and insatiable desire, you
outstretch two fingers and glide gently up and down the soft pink secret. She is
delicious. Colors explode behind your eyes and bloom like gigantic tropical flowers
unfurling red white and yellow petals that wrap and warm and warn your fingers
and hand and wrist and arm and slide tendrils of tentacles into your chest and
grip tight, and you keep stroking Her, sucking in sweetness, taking Her into your
skin and feeling stronger every moment.

She's murmuring quietly, dancing against you, her tiny fingers curling and
crawling and she touches a puckered nipple fleetingly through the fabric of her
shirt and you inhale a gasp of her pepperspicy vanillasweet scent and release
against her sheets and feel vindicated: the male is no longer the only one to have
claimed her; your essence is fresh in her bed and

she

is

yours.

Suddenly your skeleton inflames and you cry out long and loud in pain now
instead of pleasure; chilled as you look up from the place where your fingertips
are sinking over and over into delicious warmth and She has big brown eyes
staring at you like you're the lighthouse in Her storm, jaw dropped lightly and you
can see her pinksoft mouth and the dark wetness of her throat and the pain of
her awareness is worth it when She's looking at you that way because you know
She's under your spell and will let you have anything you want.

Ed-werd? Her lips move, the sound coming out as a longing whisper of butterfly
wing breath, and Her hands reach for you so you wish you could ask Her to keep

still; every time She moves hurts you more, but you like the way it looks when
She rolls her hips into your hand, giving you more nectar through the softly
sucking pores of your plasticine fingertips.

She's looking at you expectantly, murmuring ed-werd, ed-werd, ohmyegod ed-
werd, and you don't know what to say as the pads of your glass fingertips find
the softest place inside her, so you repeat her sound with a lascivious hiss:

Ed-werd, you nod, and she sobs, tightening around your fingers, and you like it,
so you smile and repeat again, louder –

Ed-werd.

You slurp at the soft spot inside Her, gently then harder, and She moans low in
your throat and you release, taking more of Her in, taking Her essence heavy
with red berries in through your every inch, and it's so lovely you hardly feel the
constant burning ache of Her wakefulness now as She reaches for your face and
you're frightened, pulling back so She can't reach you.

Oh, She ripples softly from the top of Her lungs, oh Iwishyoowerreel… Her voice
slurs, and you don't make any noise back, because you don't know Her words
and She didn't go "ed-werd," so you just slide your fingers more luxuriously in
the wet warmth and She tightens and spills and you suck it up selfishly, but as
soon as you stop touching Her the burning pain is back and Her big brown eyes
are milky wide and She's pleading at you with language you don't speak and Her
lips are so pretty and pouty and you can't help it –

Just before you slip out her window, you bend down to put your mouth to Hers
and suck out just a little more of her soul.

Bell-La.

She is called Bell-La, and that's all you know; She is called Bell-La and her heart
is bleeding. You take shelter beneath the weathered white wood come morning,
after you've taken not nearly your fill from Her soft pink skin through your
fingertips, and listen to Her heart beating next door:

Bell-La. Bell-La.

bella.

"So, um, Bella, are you – are you going to the – you know, the sock hop?"

Bella's head jerked upright and her cheeks flushed dark crimson at the surprising
sight of Mike Newton standing in front of her cubby. Four spaces down, half-
hidden by Mike's pudgy shoulder, she saw Edward's green eyes glaring and she
shrunk back.

"I wasn't going to go," she mumbled, shaking out her hair to hide from Edward's
inexplicable anger and Mike's overeager buckteeth.

Mike looked put out but determined and leaned in conspiratorially; behind him,
Edward took a menacing step towards the pair – as menacing as a twelve-year-
old could be wearing Garanimals and parted hair plastered down by a zealot twin
sister.

"But Bella," Mike whispered, whining, twelve freckles and six pimples dotting
across his nose, "If you don't go, then how can I save you a dance?"

Bella wanted to die.

"Um," she stuttered as she chewed desperately on a lock of hair, "I, actually, I
think Jessica wanted to dance with you?"

She couldn't even look up, couldn't check to see the expression on Mike's face, or
Edward's behind him, and closed her eyes further against the sensation of having
someone – two someones – staring at her. She wanted to crawl into her cubby
and hide away amongst her fleece-lined parka and mouldering paperbacks and
the lone pack of crayons that Mrs. Cross made everyone in the class buy though
they never seemed to be used.

"I know that," Mike chuffed, all bravado and puffed up peacock show. "But I don't
wanna dance with Jess; I can dance with her any time I want. I wanna dance
with you."

Bella crouched in on herself, hiding further, trying her best to melt through the
floor and failing miserably. "Well, I – I just don't think I'm going…"

"C'mon, Bella," Mike wheedled. "Just come. Promise me one dance. Just one."

He put his hand on Bella's arm.

Edward suddenly yanked Bella away from Mike in a whirl of bronze hair and beige
corduroy, seething behind his silver retainer.

"Bella isn't going to dance with you, Mike!" Edward snapped; fierce shining teeth
and venomous tongue. "Give it up!"

Mike straightened up, not reaching Edward's gangly five-feet-and-six-inches, but
blustering great pompous blond machismo taking over his babyfat frame until
Bella felt the tension pulse between the two sixth-graders. "You're not her
master, Edward. Bella can do whatever she wants."

"She doesn't want to go to the dance!"

Edward's angry eyes caught Bella's through the curtain of her hair. He looked at
her with blazing eyes that she would, years later, learn to be passionate, but in
this moment, Edward was only a vision of schoolyard fury and the glare that
marred his cherubic face looked mean, despite its base in secret pleading.

Bella boiled.

She stuck her chin out defiantly, breaking through the mask of meekness and
emerging from her hiding place, a snapping turtle; for the first time she could
remember, she disagreed with Edward and – more than that, stronger, absolutely
unprecedented in her mind… Edward was wrong.

Edward was wrong to bully Mike and he was wrong to make decisions for her. He
hadn't asked her to dance, and she'd overheard awful Lauren telling Jessica at
the water fountains the day before that she not only planned to dance with
Edward, but to kiss him, too.

If Edward could go to the dance and maybe get kissed by someone as horrible as
Lauren Mallory, Bella could say this:

"I do want to go to the dance, after all. But I'll dance with who I want, when I
want. I don't have to promise either of you anything."

The wounded look in Edward's eye broke her heart, but he still didn't ask her to
dance, so she turned on her heel and marched off to find Alice.

She needed a poodle skirt.

I yawned and stretched my arms above my head, feeling every joint in my agéd
young body crack and pop, hurting, feeling like my hips and ribs should be dark
black-and-blue but not knowing why.

I flushed, feeling the stickiness in my pink underpants and blushing at the
realization that I had touched myself in my sleep as I dreamt of Edward, but he
had seemed so real… A beautiful angelic Edward made of frosted glass, hair
tipped in flame and cheeks devoid of living rose, but fingertips so smooth and
cool they soothed as they ignited; legs disappearing into a wisp at his knees like
the trailing comet tail of a ghost and I looked through him as he touched me…

But the dream was – not quite a nightmare – but far from perfect, far from right,
and I knew, even as he'd made me shudder and come around his fingers, that
this Edward was not real.

His eyes glowed like cursed jade, endlessly passionate, but empty, insatiable… his
eyes didn't know me.

He didn't love me.

Edward had always loved me, even when I couldn't see it. It shone from his eyes
unwaveringly, not my candle on the water or my lighthouse in the storm, but the
stars that shone through darkness and cradled all around the earth in
unfathomable certain fire that made me feel small and embraced by something
larger, greater, good.

I rolled out of bed and put my head in my hands, feeling nausea well up against
my cottonmouth.

This dream Edward had not been good. His eyes were hungry, seductive, burning
green with intensity, finally devoid of the despairing guilt that colored them when
Edward was real and whole and touching between my legs, the beautiful cold
embodiment of everything that once had been beautiful come back and buzzing
inside my brain, twisting and reeling in something terrible and glorious and I
hoped he would come back because Edward made me whole.

I shrugged into my robe half-heartedly, still feeling the ache in my muscles and
the bile in my throat matching the break in my heart beat for beat.

Dream Edward had kissed me, and I felt like something was gone.

"Just talk to him!" Alice urged, rolling her eyes at her scowling best friend as she
sat tearing a cheese string to greasy bits in the cafeteria. Bella looked up darkly
from beneath her brows, her glare stopping even exuberant Alice in her chewing
of chicken salad sandwich.

Four days had passed and Bella continued to refuse every sympathetic advance
made by Edward and every hopeful approach of Mike. It was the longest she had
ever gone without speaking to Edward, and she missed him somatically, her heart

tugging with every step she took that wasn't in his direction… and she still saw
him nearly all day every day, Forks being too small to avoid overlap in its school
scheduling. She tried to avoid even looking at him, because every time her eyes
slid his way, there he was, looking right back at her, pleading wordlessly.

Alice sighed and ruffled her newly-black shorn hair. "Bella, he misses you. He's
just a moron. You know he didn't mean anything bad."

"Yeah, and um, Bella?" butted in Jessica, pointing none too subtly towards a table
in the back corner where Edward sat brooding, not touching the identical lunch
Esme packed for him. "Edward won't stop staring at you."

Bella looked up out of habit and met Edward's green gaze. His eyes screamed
apology though his face remained blank. He reached into his lunch bag and
removed a red Macintosh apple where Alice had brought a pear; he held out it,
proffering the red apple, her favorite fruit, to Bella between his pale cupped
hands.

Bella clenched her teeth and resolutely removed a green Granny Smith from her
bag, allowing herself one small smirk before snapping a crisp bite.

The world disappeared in a thickhazy smog of white, so thick and cool that you
can't see beyond the lattice slats of whitewashed wood, and your own hands look
like mirage. The air smells sweet and smoky and wet like overgrown leaves and
sulfur hot springs and wetclean babbling brooks, and you know it's day because
you just left her, but you can't help but to need to feel the breeze, and quick as a
wink, you dart out from beneath the large house's porch and zip across the lush
green lawn, meandering towards the pull of the forest and tilting your face up in
the white foggy sky to feel its wet caress.

Thinking round thoughts about Bell-La, you take no notice of the sharpcrackle
sandalwood smell of the girl standing on the porch, staring through the
mountainous mist at you with her mouth dropped disbelieving and her heart
thumping painfully wrecked, her short black hair a mess atop her head, unable to
move until the white fog swallows you whole and she puts her hand over her
heart.

As soon as you're gone from her view, zooming in happy circuits around the
forest floor, the black-haired pixie looks fruitlessly through the cloudcover
towards the small house where She sleeps and breathes.

"What are you still doing home?" I asked Charlie, stopping in shock at the foot of
the stairs and staring into the kitchen, where outside the window, the world was
a white mess, like the ghostly sheen that covered Dream Edward and made me
shiver.

Fogged in.

Even more surprising than his presence was the plate of pancakes, scrambled
eggs, and bacon sitting out for me at my place on our small square kitchen table,
right where I had once daringly sat with my sleep-shorts to my knees and Edward
touched inside of me. We'd very nearly been caught by big Emmett, who stopped
by to deliver Charlie some of Harry Clearwater's Fish Fry, a well-loved benefit
from working at the garage near the Quileute rez.

"I been stayin' home for days now, Bells," Charlie said solemnly, drinking his
coffee, salt-and-pepper mustache peeking out over the rim of the cup because
my father was getting old. "I wanted to be here for you."

Guilt flushed me like a fever. "I'm sorry I haven't been home," I said softly. I
took my seat and picked up my fork, idling at the edge of the plate. "Where did
this come from?"

Charlie took another sip of his coffee and wiped his mustache with the web of his
hand before answering me, gruff voice still level and quiet and calm – not sad.
"Alice. She brought it by about ten minutes ago. You might want to microwave
the pancakes."

"Alice shouldn't be worrying about me." I furrowed my brow and studied the
scrambled eggs, taking in the black flecks of pepper and the orange sheen around
the edges where syrup touched the fluffy yolks.

"Bells, you've brought the Cullens almost every meal since Edward passed,"
Charlie said sagely. "Let someone take care of you, now. You need it. Prob'ly
more than they do."

"Dad… they're – they were," I corrected, trying to ignore the sudden aching pain
in the back of my throat at my words, "his family."

Charlie nodded, paternal and slow. "Yup. And he made sure that he and you were
each others' whole lives. I woulda worried more about how much you were
wrapped up in each other, honestly, 'cause you were too damn young to be so
serious, and don't argue with me about it 'cause it's true of Alice and that Hale
boy, too, but… I always trusted Edward to do right by you. And Bella? You
deserve to grieve more than anyone, and I don't see you doin' it. That worries
me."

I sat in stunned silence, to shamed and humbled to speak, wanting to cry again
but refusing, unable, and not quite sure why. That was the most Charlie had ever
spoken to me at once in my entire life. I picked at the bacon, watching small red
tangles of flesh fan out across my plate as I broke it into pieces.

Charlie was right to have believed that Edward would only ever do the right thing
for me, but he was so wrong that I had the right to grieve the way Alice or
Carlisle or Esme did. I turned the ring around my wedding finger three times
without realizing it, thinking of his last night alive.

i need you.

i want you.

right

now.

I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night. I could never
live with myself, he had said, and both kept and broken both promises.

"Bells?"

I looked up startled and felt guilty for Charlie's concerned brown eyes. I
swallowed and looked down into my plate again, needing desperately to avoid the
torture of his quiet devotion.

"I'm sorry, Dad," I said softly, sincerely. "I – just – I don't… know…"

Bella shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, fiddling with the cats' eye rhinestone
glasses Alice had perched across her nose. They had no frames, and her pink
poodle skirt was two inches too long and made of felt, a simple Cut'N'Sew Pattern

from Forks Needle – Alice had one to match but in red, Angela Weber one in
Fiesta blue – and Alice had insisted point-blank on tying Bella's long hair back in a
ponytail held with pink chiffon.

Without her dark veil of hair, Bella felt naked.

It didn't help that He was staring at her from the corner, his hair all slicked back
in a bouffant to rival Elvis Presley and a leather jacket like James Dean and a
scowl as grotesquely handsome as Marlon Brando. Angela had pointed the last
one out and giggled that if his intensity burned any hotter, Edward would be
dropping to his knees at any moment shouting "BELLAAA!" and Alice snorted and
quickly covered her nose, embarrassed, and Bella pretended to understand the
joke and managed a meager giggle.

Bella looked down at her feet in their white kid socks against the scuffed wooden
dance floor of the Forks D.A.R., wishing Alice hadn't disappeared to a dark corner
with Jasper and that Angela weren't lurking around the concession stand because
Ben Cheney was selling cotton candy and popcorn and Coke. Without them to
hover behind or distract her, and without the protection of her brunette armor,
Bella could only focus on Edward and the way his pegged jeans made his legs
look less scrawny and how nice his hair looked tonight and the raw, scrubbed-
clean hurt look in his green eyes.

But the music was crooning that he ain't nuthin' but a hound dog, cryin' all the
time, and Bella stuck out her chin and refused to buckle and crawl back to him.
He didn't even like-like her; she couldn't understand why he bossed her around in
front of Mike in the first place.

It wasn't like Edward cared.

Was it?

"Hey, Bell," said a voice just behind her shoulder, and Bella jumped, her bony
shoulder knocking Mike Newton hard in the soft lower palate of his chin.

Across the dance floor, Edward smirked.

For hours you feel free and warm and it's so nice to be out in the daytime and
able to stretch your legs that you run and run and run, up the craggy side of
Mount Baker and down into the brook, splashing and laughing and you roll
around in the wet dewy green grass and purple thistles and deadly blackeyed
Queen Anne's Lace in a clearing devoid of trees and teasing human scents and
you're so happy that you could burst and you start to sing under your breath a
melody that tastes like Her.

Bell-La… as the white fog fades and rises and spreads into the dark inky
velveteen blackness of night, your burning hunger for Her reawakens and you
find with some surprise that don't mind the idea of her soft voice caressing your
ears again and you're almost looking forward to that blurred look in her boring
brown eyes and of only three things you're certain: first and foremost, Bell-La
has the sweetest floralsoft delicious nectar you've ever tasted; second, she no
longer seems quite so ugly as before your fingertips had supped inside her –
plain, diminutive, yes, but ugly no longer; and third, most irrevocably and
completely and all-consuming…

you

want

her.

With singleminded determination and a freeflying liberty groomed from the white
fog of morning, you sail back on devil's wings to the little blue house and at the
first steadied sleeping beat of Her heart, you slip through the glass of her window
with as much ease as you floated in the glacial water of the brook by the
meadow.

Bella blushed. "Mike, I'm so sorry!" She buried her face in her hands.

Mike laughed, even as he held his throat and fleeting thoughts of a crushed
larynx raced through his mind. "The only apology I'll accept is a dance."

Bella's shoulders sagged beneath the weight of fairness and justice and middle
school manipulation and burgeoning men.

"OK."

Mike reached for her hand and Bella proffered her elbow; their socks slipped
against the varnish of the age-old Brazilian wood floor. "Hound Dog" twanged to
a rollicking close and Ella Fitzgerald's voice washed over the room, crooning
about the blue moon seeing her standing alone, and even as Mike put his hands
on Bella's hips with palms so sweaty and hot she felt them through the felt of her
pink poodle skirt, Bella's eyes flickered to Edward, knowing just what he was
there for, admitting to herself deep down where he couldn't see that she wished it
were him she was dancing with, he was the one she said prayer for.

Old Mrs. Cope of the D.A.R. strictly enforced that the Forks middle schoolers kept
their dance partners a forearm's length away, so Bella relaxed minutely as she
and Mike swayed on the spot, her own clammy hands on his shoulders.

Suddenly a warrior arm wrapped in black leather curved into the space between
Bella's twiggy body and Mike's triangular frame and socked Mike square in his
soft gut, sending him reeling backwards three steps and a surprisingly graceful
turn.

And then there suddenly appeared before Bella the only one her arms would ever
hold, cradling his sore hand and glaring at Mike in icy fire. Bella made to put her
hands on her hips petulantly, intent to show Edward that she was her very own
little woman, but Edward's arms were around her and his face was buried in the
top of her head and he sang "Please adore me" along with Ella into the pink
chiffon of the scarf Alice tied into Bella's long pretty hair.

"You can't tell me what to do," Bella whispered into Edward's neck.

"I just don't want to share you," he murmured back, and Old Mrs. Cope buzzed
over and swatted the back of Edward's coiffed head with a ruler, muttering darkly
about inappropriate personal touching.

Charlie actually deigned to set his cup down, the knock of ceramic on wood a
decisive drop of a gavel. "And you won't know, Bells, for a long time. But you are
not alone. I lost your mom. I know it's not quite the same thing, but might as
well be, and I will not look you in the eye and lie to you. There's some days I'm
still not sure I really know."

I swallowed and couldn't meet Charlie's gaze and I felt somehow that I was even
emptier than I had been moments before, my brain suddenly aching.

I had no idea what Charlie meant when he said he'd lost my mother.

The doorbell sounded loudly once, then almost immediately again.

Esme blew hair out of her face as she scooped Mary Alice into her arms, fighting
against being hit with enraged little fists all the way to the door.

The twins had only just begun walking, and Mary Alice spent nearly all of her time
toddling at top speed after a terrified Jasper, who had grown quite complacent
with being able to simply walk away from Mary Alice when she crawled on him
too much, and no longer had that luxury.

He was not adjusting well.

Edward was different; he walked only with a purpose, and seemed uncommonly
steady on his feet for an eighteen-month old, as though he'd been practicing in
secret until he felt he was sufficiently accomplished in his gait to show the world.

Charlie stood on the other side of the heavy door, dressed in full uniform but hair
and eyes disheveled, holding Bella at arms' length like a bomb as she raged,
pound-for-pound a Force Five Gale to match Mary Alice.

"Charlie," said Esme in surprise, well aware that Renee took nearly sole care of
little Bella while Charlie worked long hours as the town's deputy, trying hard to
earn his brass and provide better. "What's wrong?"

"Can you take Bella?" he asked simply, dark eyes apologetic. "I'm sorry to drop a
fourth baby in your lap, but… just for a little while…"

Esme had never seen the calm cop look quite so disconnected, and poor Bella
was a sorry sight: her fine, downy baby hair in a thick knot at the back of her
head, romper suit straps tangled around her shoulders, one little frilly sock
missing and face screwed up and red. Her bottom looked heavy and it didn't take
Esme long to deduce the poor girl's diaper was wet.

"Where's Renee?" She asked, although she already knew.

All day I thought of Edward as I had known him, soft and warm, and compared
him against the Dream Edward that visited me in the night and touched me with
fingers made of glass. It was so different than the way he'd felt the last night of
his life, and I wondered why my subconscious had to remind me, even in the
respite of sleep, that he was dead.

It wasn't bad. It wasn't uncomfortably cold, though I had a tingling chill in the pit
of my stomach as I slept, and his plasticine fingers didn't feel hard and
unyielding, just smoother and less receptive than his calloused beautiful boyish
hands…

Edward had always seemed to derive as much of his own pleasure from touching
me as I got in receiving his loving touch. He almost never let me touch him – the
first time had been the Homecoming dance, the night he gave me his ring, and I
think the sight of his ring sparkling on my hand as I moved it over his smooth
skin did him in more than my actions – but for all of his reluctance he grew to
love touching me, usually finding his own orgasm in watching me reach mine.

It seemed the same last night in Dream Edward. When Edward was alive it was a
slow climb and steady burn, as much in my heart as anywhere else, but last
night… he shattered me, and I fell against the bed in a million pieces in a way I

never thought possible outside of the pages of tattered Harlequin novels, and his
new smoothcool fingers felt so good, so confident, inside me…

I lay back against the pillows and closed my hands against the empty darkness,
imagining Edward, a beautiful amalgam of him as I had loved and he who had
beautifully broken me last night, all warm soft hands and flame-tipped hair with
loving eyes and legs like a comet's trail streaking across my sky, brilliancy and
beauty, and now he's faded below the horizon leaving me alone and blind in
blackness.

But I couldn't think of that now, as my fingers pretended to be him, and I could
hold him close for just a few minutes and feel as though his light still gave me
love, life, meaning.

I thought about his eyes the first time Edward learned what I felt like inside, and
the smell of him on my sheets. I tried to find the soft sponged place inside that
Dream Edward found so perfectly, insistently, deliciously…

I sighed and felt myself tightening around my fingers and imagined Edward's
enamored sigh of my name –

"Bell-La," you murmur, moving towards where She writhes on the bed, ignoring
the flames licking your bones in favor of the frighteningly sweet possibility of
licking Her. Her unmistakable scent has wrapped its arms around you in a
cloyingly luscious embrace, pulling you with flavorful tentacles towards the
juncture between Her legs where Her small sweet fingers are playing, sliding back
and forth and shining and your tongue wets your lips to ready them to steal that
softness from her because it's yours and you need it and you slowly sink onto her
bed and crawl over her thinpale legs:

A predator stalking his prey.

"Oh, Miss Bella," Esme sighed, fastening Bella's romper suit back on properly
after cleaning up the now-smiling baby. "You are such a pretty girl. Don't break
hearts like your mommy, okay? Because I have a feeling it'll be my little boy's if
you do."

"Eddur?" Bella asked as if she'd understood, eagerly looking around for her
friend.

Esme laughed and picked up Charlie's little girl, balancing her against a hip. "Let's
go find him."

Nary two steps out of the room, Jasper came sailing down the hall, shouting for
help, as Mary Alice ran full tilt behind him, hands outstretched and grabbing at
his shoulders and whiteblond hair.

"No, Marialice!" he yelled, pushing her pinching hands away. "No touch! Please?"
Then he looked up at Esme and baby Bella, eyes round. He pointed at Bella, who
had never interested him much, as she was just so small, and besides, if he got
too close to the brunette little thing, Edward got angry and scratched at him.
Bella wasn't worth the trouble. "Why she here?"

"Mary Alice, you stop touching Jasper," Esme chided gently, patting a restraining
hand against the soft back of her bright yellow coveralls. "Bella is here to play
with us for a while," she explained gently.

"Play?" Bella chirped, tugging on Esme's long hair with her chubby fist. "Play
Eddur?"

"Yes, yes, yes. Let's go find Edward."

Esme found Edward in the family room, just where she'd left him this morning,
sitting quietly on the floor with his ganglypale legs tucked under him, blithely
flipping through the pages of a Goldenbook as though he knew the words. Esme
wondered sometimes just how much Edward did know. His bright green eyes
seemed to hold an ancient soul.

"Eddur!" cried Bella, squirming in Esme's arms.

Edward looked up and a beatific smile broke across his cherubic face, framed in
tendrils of titian hair. "Bullah," he sighed.

Esme stifled a giggle. Her eighteen-month-old was swooning.

She set Bella down carefully on the carpet before the pale little monster wriggled
her way right out of Esme's arms, and Bella crawled quickly her where Edward
sat and crowed at him, almost knocking him down as she used him as an anchor
to pull herself to a seated position.

Bella garbled something soft at Edward, earning a smile and another sigh of
'Bullah' just as a loud crash and the harmonic wails of Mary Alice and Jasper rang
out from the little redhead's bedroom and Esme turned her back on the quieter
pair to rush down the hall.

She is so soft and tender below you, still moving to Her own song, not noticing
the shiver of cold on Her skin that is your breath for being too caught up in the
shudders of Her muscles as your presence pervades Her conscious subconscious
and unconscious mind, filling Her with your scent and taste and touch topped off
with her lover's face, opening Her wider to you in want.

"Ed-werd," she mewls, a soft pricking cry like a kitten, and it hits you like a
lightning bolt in the center of your insatiable stomach –

Ed-werd is what she calls her lover, the man who spilled against her sheets and
whose face she sees in her mind as She feeds her fingers your nourishment, your
sustenance, yours yours Yours.

Anger wells up in the base of your roiling need even as you settle Just So over
Her body so She can feel you and not Ed-werd, she can feel how

you

want

her

and through the electric current of your shimmer passes the heavy thick
syrupsweet never-ending want for Her body to meet with yours into Her soft
white skin and Her

big brown eyes

open wide and her pupils are blown so dark and wide and wet and bright with
darkness and black and pleasure and pain and want and need and nighttime that
you fall into them and tangle against her helixes and synapses firing shoot
through your mind until you can almost think and you murmur her name against
her neck – Bell-La, Bella – as your tongue slides lavishly down her long white
neck, your shining pearlescent venom leaving a trail that shines in the moonlight
pouring in like cream through her window.

You watch purring in delight as your venom sinks sweetly into her skin and her
blood rises to the white surface in a long pinkpurplebrown bruise, soft and
wounded and slow to heal.

You can see your reflection in the dark of her eyes, brightwhite like a lie,
candlelight hair swirling around your head Her lips are so pink and open and Her
fingers are wet as they brush against your cheek and you turn your head quickly
to catch them in your cold mouth, making Her gasp, releasing against her thigh in
a long shuddering suck that's so close to the place it should be, and She tastes
like summer stone fruits and you twist her fragile fingers around your tongue
stealing every drop, not noticing as one small bone cracks in your fervor and
swells pulsing with warm blood and She cries out in a single sob, tensing in a way
you don't like, and the base of your belly flip-flops in a new way that worries you,
like you've turned inside-out and hung out to dry, and you pull back to see Her
purple fingertip sticky with your cold venom and there's an urge you've never
know and you gently, so gently, cup the back of Her head in your hand and lay
Her back to her pillows, other hand smoothing up and down the softrounded
smoothwhite length of her belly, one finger circling twice the tiny little hollow –

"Bell-La," you say softly, taking her mangled hand between your own, sliding it
across your lips softly, breathing more death into Her tiny blue string veins, your
milkgreen eyes wide and staring right into the alive brown staring emptyfull
space of hers, something changing, growing inside you and you're frightened.

I opened my eyes when my finger hurt terribly and I felt the bone shatter around
something liquid and suddenly I was staring into Dream Edward's green eyes, not
nearly so empty as last night but drenched in icyhot fear as he looked
tremulously back at me, holding my head and my belly and his glass lips gliding
over my injured hand – how had that happened? Why would I dream myself into
even more pain? – in soft apology as he sang me my name.

I touched his face gently and noticed its hollow lightness, the cold of his heartless
state soothing the ache of my bones and he closed his eyes and he smiled and
my heart broke because it was just the same smile I remembered, beautiful white
teeth.

"Edward," I sighed, still loving how he touched me as his fingertips spread circles
over my stomach, feeling me all over, and his face changed and hardened like
stone, melting and reforming into something alien and ghostly and with the
darksharp remnants of carved out hollow pieces and his white teeth gleamed in
the moonlight shining in through my window and I was frightened as he set his
hardsoft mouth against my neck again and growled, low and purring in his chest,
male and predator and primal and my name spilling from deep in his chest, bella
bella bella.

His mouth pulled at me as he slid down my body, hands sliding over my skin
reading my Braille and playing my chords, fingers grasping and touching and
finding new places and seeming to reach inside me from all angles and feel my
organs, tightening my lungs with frosty chill and clenching somewhere deep
inside below my stomach and holding my heart in his hands like he always had
and always would, turning it all around.

"Oh, Edward," I whispered, watching as his face lowered to the curve of my
stomach and his lips brushed lower and lower towards the curve of my lowest
bones and the wisp of brown curl that Edward liked even though it embarrassed
me and Alice asked me twice to let her wax it off with molten sugar and Dream
Edward's back rippled and strengthened and arched like a cat as he took in the

smell of me, hands running up and over my wide hipbones and the long stretch of
the sides of my thighs. "Edward, I miss you."

He looked up at me then from between my legs, mouth razing iced air over my
pink skin and making me burn, but his green eyes were lost and sorry and he
didn't speak in words, didn't say he missed me, didn't tell me he knew who I was,
couldn't tell me where his heart now lay.

Bella giggled and threw her little hands all over Edward's shoulders, not knowing
that she hit him a little too hard, chanting "Eddur Eddur Eddur" like it was the
only word she knew – she did know six others – and he laughed, catching her
hands like pattycake.

Bella picked up his discarded Goldenbook, studying the illustration of Big Bird and
Snuffleupagus on the front before throwing it down in Edward's lap, big round
brown eyes smiling pleadingly to him, sticky hands turning pages in his lap.

And Edward 'read' to her, garbled nonsense to Esme's ears when she walked past
their quiet room carrying tearstained Jasper after having locked Mary Alice away
in her crib for a much-needed nap. She stopped for just a moment, wishing she
had time to unearth her camera from Carlisle's crowded desk to take a picture as
Bella's small head rested against Edward's shoulder, his arm around her
shoulders as she happily babbled over his words and pointed, cooing, to the
pictures in his book.

Bella's belief that Edward's half-words told her the story of those pictures was
absolutely tangible.

Bella's belief in Edward, unwavering.

Her sweetseeping scent is even stronger here, where you need to be, where
you're staring transfixed at the way Her skin and muscles move as though you've
never seen anything real before and this is the first moment of your life.

Ed-werd rings out in a soft purr up above you and suddenly there's a small warm
weight on your head and you dart up and away only to see her hand reaching out
and you realize that smallfluttering heaviness was her broken hand, running
through the flame of your hair, and now She looks so sad that Her scent is fading
away like water and that can't be okay, She can't be water and falling and
darkness because

she

is light

and you can't let Her fade, not before you can taste her incandescence and use it
to relight your own burn, you have to get out of this darkness and She is the key.

Your face lowers and you inhale greedily, stealing her scent with her essence, and
you luxuriate so fully in the silksoft tang of her citrus and salt and blue and red
and white white white and pollen and stamen and orchid and kisses and then
your mouth descends, longsticky tongue smoothing and stealing and tasting and
she makes a beautiful noise and the corners of your lips turn up and you feel
something new.

Something Light.

Something inside your ribs feels like it's bubbling up, filling with air and sun and
strawberry and kittens and pink chiffon and sparkling like a single multifaceted

diamond, throwing prismatic rainbow over everything your suddenly opened eyes
see.

That warm weight finds your head again but you're not afraid this time, knowing
the gentle touch of her hand as her fingers slide through your hair and press your
mouth closer to the source of Her sweetness, nourishing you and nurturing you
and letting you take Her away.

Once Esme returned Jasper to Rosalie, who every day looked a bit worse for wear
in trying to support herself and her son all alone, shunned by her family and the
scourge of the conservative town, but who today had regained just an ounce of
her formerly radiant sparkle when she told Esme that a new mechanic had
started at the garage near the Rez where she had found work, a boy from Alaska
with curly brown hair and dimples, a boy who didn't leer at her when he smiled,
Ernest or Emmett or something like that, she darted to Alice's small yellow
bedroom to check on her sweet little girl, who still napped peacefully – the only
time those little hands weren't grabbing and those little legs were still! – in her
white crib.

Edward and Bella were still quiet, but Esme didn't worry. Edward was always
quiet, and Bella was safe with Edward.

Esme headed into the brand new kitchen that she and Carlisle just added onto
the house, looking out over the unfinished wood porch that she already imagined
her babies sunning themselves on in the summer and envisioned long autumn
evenings with Carlisle, sitting tangled on a polished porch swing, drinking red
California wine and talking under the stars.

She smiled at the bric-a-brac board above the stove, decorated with little tidbits
she'd found at the dustymusty antiques bazaar in Port Angeles: little white
milkmaids with blue pinafores and tulip hats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding
hands, great gray majestic ibises. She set a pot of chicken soup to boil and heard
a thump from the living room, and so set to check on her precious Edward and
Charlie's Bella.

She looked to the fading light out the window and frowned, wondering just when
someone would return for the little girl.

She stared in wonder at the sight before her when she reached the entryway to
the ivory room.

Bella stood on wobbly legs, holding the edge of the coffee table for dear life, her
pudgy little knuckles bright white with effort. Her big brown eyes were wide and
trained on Edward's face where he stood, a few feet away, arms out and
encouraging, soft smile on his round angel's face.

He clucked at her, finishing a pep talk in baby's babble with a sweet, "Bullah…
yes."

Bella shook her head and swayed on her feet. "No," she whimpered, clutching
harder to the table.

Edward nodded, gesturing towards himself with fat toddler arms, cooing in a
voice no girl could resist. "Yes."

Bella's brow furrowed in concentration and her lips pouted out like a duckling's
bill. Edward grinned at her, steady on his feet, singing soft songs under his
breath.

Esme held her breath, knowing that the way Bella's knees bowed out, she wasn't
anywhere close to ready to walk.

"Bullah."

Bella took a deep little breath, let go of the table, and though she knew she
would fail, for Edward, she took a step forward and tried.

Sunlight streamed in through my window and I groaned, wondering when I had
fallen asleep and why my hand hurt so badly and why I was nauseous again after
not having cried the day before. I rolled onto my stomach and felt it roiling,
overflowing yet empty and the only thing I could feel was angry at Edward, or
Dream Edward, or dead Edward, or beautiful living Edward on the last night of his
life not living up to his promise.

I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night.

I could never live with myself.

"And you didn't have to," I mumbled, gritting my teeth against the bile and
feeling the vertebrae down low near my hips popping and grinding against their
disks like slowsliding tectonic plates, and I was their earthquake.

I turned a throbbing head towards my nightstand and beyond it, the window,
wishing the curtains might shut themselves and block out the light, and I could
have sworn that I saw the streaming misty trailing tail of my Dream Edward
slipping out into the abyss of bluewhite bright.

On my nightstand in a small pink wooden frame stared a faded photograph of my
father and a little brunette baby girl I assumed to be me and a brown-haired
woman whose face I didn't know. I reached out to take the photograph when I
caught sight of my hand, the fingers black and swollen and needing to be
splinted.

Circulation was cut off on the fourth finger of my left hand by a silver and
diamond ring that I knew to be Edward's. I sighed, my dolorous head dropping
dolefully down to the pillows again, sore hand stroking the white spot he left on
my sheets, relishing perverse and masochistic in the way the tiny fibers of the
cheap cotton sheets scraped against the blackpurple blue of my broken fingers.

just a little,

edward.

please.

Now it caused me physical pain, too.

"God, Bella, you are so beautiful," Edward breathed, warm air escaping him in a
soft puff and tickling Bella where his head rested against her open thigh,
watching her closely as he always did, memorizing the light reflecting from her
dew in the morning light as they languished, alone, solemn, warm in Bella's small
bed as the rest of their classmates lazed through first hour.

Edward exhaled shakily as his eyes compulsively traced every curve and shadow
of Bella's slim center finger as it disappeared again and again; he knew the

frayed triplicate pink lines at the insides of her white knuckles, webbed gently
with lacework blue veins that Edward worshipped and feared for carrying her life
through her body, connecting her heart to her fingertips to the sea of pink his
mind swum in now, and hers was the only life that mattered.

Bella shivered and her small nipples tightened as Edward's insecure breath
rhythmically caressed her sensitive skin, driving her fingers to seek deeper, to
pretend harder.

For the fourth time, Edward spent himself in a dozen strokes of his own hand or
less, wetting Bella's sheets and belly; one teardrop pearl netted sparkling against
the nestle of her brown curls, ebbing with the rocking of her hand, and Edward
had groaned at the sight of a part of him, some of his life, touching her so
intimately, touching that skin. As always, his head rested on her open, welcoming
thigh, feeling her strong pulse comforting his cheek where they touched.

"I wish I knew what you were thinking," Edward whispered. His hands clenched
to fists at his limp sides, trying with every shred of humanity that he possessed
not to touch Bella, not to defile her, not to ruin her, because she was an angel
and he was horrible, a demon, for thinking of her the way he did, he had to be,
and he could never let her know how he wanted her.

"You're touching me," Bella murmured back, voice strained and soft like velvet.
"Your fingers… your mouth… oh, god… Edward… it's always you, Edward, always
you…"

Edward swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing against the thin skin of Bella's
thigh. "How am I touching you? How – I mean – I – don't – " he trailed off and
turned his face against Bella's thigh again, trying to hide his traitorous face from
her view while soaking up as much of her distinct scent as he was allowed.

Bella made a soft sound deep in her throat, a mewl like a kitten cry. "Inside me,
Edward. You're touching inside me, with your fingers. And you're kissing all over
my chest, Edward, you've never put your mouth anywhere but my face but it'd be
so nice…"

Edward was silent for a long time, and Bella closed her eyes in regret rather than
pleasure: her words spooked him, irked him… disgusted him? Edward never
expressed his desires, except that first time, and he'd looked about to
spontaneously combust in shame and panic and looked about to cry both of the
rare times it'd been questioned by Bella since.

"Edward, I – "

"What if I hurt you?"

His voice was tiny, and she felt the fearful quiver of his lips as they brushed her
skin softly, completely incapable of causing her pain.

Bella smiled in trepidation, her fingers sliding away from her own skin and for the
fourth time, traced her sandysweet flavor onto Edward's trembling lip. The tip of
his velvet tongue met her fingertip briefly in his haste to claim his prize. With an
innocently wanton gleam in his green eyes, he traced the tiny circles of Bella's
fingerprint with the tip of his tongue.

"You won't hurt me," Bella breathed softly, faithful in every way to the boy
shifting carefully up onto his knees before her.

Edward stared down at the girl lying trustingly and open beneath him, wanting to
know her every goosebump and freckle and the direction of every flyaway hair.

He had imagined this woman so many times he had to pinch his thigh to make
sure he wasn't dreaming her into life, a pale specter with big brown eyes so
innocent and wide and sultry with heavy lavender lids dappled with twines of
precious veins.

Every night before he fell asleep he imagined their wedding night. The ring he
planned to give her in another month's time traveled with him in his pocket every
day, and when he climbed into bed he examined the small silver circle and nested
diamond he wished were bigger, and marveled at how dainty Bella's fingers were
to be thin and slight and strong enough to bear this ring she didn't know existed.

Thinking of Bella's hands became risky business after the age of eleven, when
he'd suddenly found one day that trying to do pre-algebra problems with Bella
was, quite frankly, a problem. She twirled her pencil between her white fingers,
delicately nibbled at the silver of the eraser, groaned under her breath when the
numbers vexed her, and for the first time in his life, Edward had understood why
sex was considered an urge.

He wanted those hands to touch his body in ways that even he never had.

He wanted to hold back her curtains of brown hair and watch as her mouth
enveloped his length. He remembered blushing furiously as the thought crossed
his mind, and Bella asked him what was wrong, and he'd wanted to get up and
claim that he needed water and run to the kitchen for a glass, but something was
wrong and right and painful in the front of his pants and he was confused and
mortified and knew beyond anything, anything, anything else that it was
imperative that Bella never, never know.

And that night was the first time he'd performed what would become his covert
ritual. That first night, he'd spit on his palm when he felt his skin becoming raw,
but slowly, over the years, he'd found lotion that smelled like Bella's skin when
she was fresh and clean after a shower (he generally started with the image of
her standing naked beneath the water, back arched and ass out, mysterious
nipples small and pink and hard…) and a soft fleecy blanket that was close to the
gentle caress of Bella's long, soft hair.

He imagined the sounds she would make when they were married and she was
his and he finally was allowed to lay claim to her however he wanted, allowed to
put his mouth on every inch of her body and taste her and allowed not only to
think terrible dirty things about her but… maybe… to do them?

But Bella was worth more than the mistreatment he imagined, surely, he would
always chastise himself after, even while his belly was still sticky with want.

Sometimes his fantasies were sweet and almost worthy of his Bella… he imagined
how it would feel to remove her white wedding dress clasp by clasp, kissing her
smoothpretty shoulders and long white back all the way down to her waist…
laying her back against the soft bed and sucking at her pink fat responsive
nipples until she was desperately wanting, then sliding so gently inside her as
husband and wife that she would feel no pain…

But more and more often he was consumed with darker wants that were not
gentle or tender or loving or anything he associated with the sweetsoft girl lying
so trustingly before him; she opened herself up to him heart soul mind and body
and her sleepy small smile told him that Bella had no idea how often he imagined
tying her wrists with satin cords, leaving her lilywhite legs free to manipulate how

he wanted – over his shoulders, tight around his waist, wide wide wide and high;
how he wanted to push her pretty face against the pillows and sate himself in her
from behind, delicious vulgarities hissing from his mouth as he bit at her winged
shoulders, chipping away at his angel; the way eating lunch beside her every day
had become physically painful with his desire to feel her throat squeezing around
his cock and how so very badly he wanted to acquiesce to her surely-innocent
pleas for him to make love to her, how he very nearly needed to possess her and
consume her and own her and mark her and make her his in ways that no one
could steal from him, ever.

But now… Bella was young and pretty and his and so beautiful that it hurt a little,
the sweet way she smiled encouragingly up at him and her small fingers clenched
nervously at her sides, as though she thought he didn't want her like this, didn't
love seeing her open and pink and wanting for him, didn't dream of it every
moment of his life.

"Edward," she crooned in sirensong, "Edward, please, you won't hurt me; I
promise."

Almost paralyzed by indecision – moral conflict; his angel Bella on one shoulder
wet and naked and eyes shining, begging him for release, to be allowed to fold
her wings and the devil himself on the other shoulder, dark and frightening with
Edward's own face and poisonous green eyes sullying Bella with his existence in
her world, both whispering in crescendo the same thing:

you

want

her.

"Oh, Bella." Voice strangled, life lost to fear and refusal giving way, loosening,
opening his throat to take in freshcold sweet air and sun and strawberry and
kittens and pink chiffon and want and understanding and her fingers were back in
that place when he looked down at her, rubbing small lines up and down around
her clit as she waited for his conscience to catch up – "I love you."

Awkward, frightened, clumsy long fingers like knobble-kneed doe legs running
scared from an apparition in the wetgreen forest, Edward reached forward and
brushed his fingertips across Bella's pink skin, taking in the feel of her for the first
time, his world turning upside-down.

"Bella," Alice said tentively, looking at me with big eyes from below her black
bangs. "Can I tell you something kind of… personal?"

I furrowed my brow, trying to ignore the persistent ache in my head. "Of course."

Alice sighed heavily, a shifting skeleton in her black mourning clothes as she
wriggled uncomfortably on my bedspread. Edward's stain was hidden by a
periwinkle pillow. "Bella… I think I might be going crazy. Maybe something is
wrong with my brain, too, like with… well, you know."

Edward's aneurism, hiding dormant in his beautiful mind as a cobra in sand,
virulent and blackshiny waiting to strike.

My heart constricted; not Alice, too. "Why? What's wrong."

Alice, pretty Mary Alice who loved her twin brother so much, who I had known as
long as I'd been alive and without whom Jasper simply couldn't… be, refused to

meet my gaze. "I thought I saw Edward yesterday. He was leaving your house in
the morning fog."

My heart stuttered and skipped and my breath came short and fast and I didn't
know how to live for a moment as my lungs did something very strange with the
air I held in them.

"I don't think that's crazy, Alice," I heard my voice say through the rushing in my
ears, not knowing how the sounds had fallen from my lips in my stupor as the
only words in my mind ran circular courses buzzing like bees –

just a little,

edward.

please.

I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night.

i wish you were

real.

I could never live with myself.

Maybe he hadn't. Maybe he had. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was.

You spread out on your back beneath the white porch and draw your hand lazily
up and down, wanting but content, not frantic, the closest thing to peace you've
found in your life as you think of Her.

Bella

You reel with flickering visions of a baby with Her eyes surrounded in white lace,
and older taking Her first steps; She's fluttering in and out of the life of a woman
with brown hair who looks like She would if life ran away without Her; She wore
little white socks over her dainty white feet and held herself close to the wall of a
gaudy big room filled with aluminum foil stars and the smell of burgeoning
pheromones; and She panted and writhed for a red-haired boy whose life you
wanted to end.

She was yours, not his, not this red-haired boy who haunted every moment of
her life.

Through diamondine goggles that spun bluepurple yellow light like a kaleidoscope
over my view, black light tunneling roundsharp wheels around the sides of my
eyes, I saw my friend Alice's morose, nervous white face, sharing Edward's nose
and the shape of his lips; her jaw smaller and heart-shaped, pointed at her chin
like cupid.

"I hate him for leaving us," she whispered. "When I saw him, I was only happy
for a second… and then I was so angry."

Just before the rippling pinprick black overtook my eyes in a hyperventilated
faint, I thought of the blankness of his gaze last night when I professed that I
missed him, and how his greenglowing gaze made it clear that he did not miss
me back.

I had only cried once.

He left me when he promised never to go.

My world turned upside-down as I felt my head fall forward.

"Me, too."

"Are you sure you'll be OK, Bella?" Alice asked me, big eyes round with worry
from my faint and aches and mysteriously fractured finger, as she stood in the
shadow of her boyfriend at my front door at nightfall.

"She's OK, Liss," Jasper soothed. A spray of scars like constellations marred his
face, a reminder of the accident on slick ice that broke Edward's bones and
concussed me and left Alice with blood on her hands.

I could feel the blow that sent me to the ground and see the white stars behind
my eyes, but I wondered what happened, and how I had fallen; I should have
been crushed by the bumper of the blue van, but some strange angel saved me
and I never thanked him.

Alice's large eyes like kittens' were wide and round and I thought of Edward's
warm green gaze, so different, and the cursed jadeite of my Dream Edward, my
night visitor, my ghostly lover who I had begun to crave with the weight of my
bones.

I smiled at Edward's sister. "I'm OK, Alice. Really. I just didn't feel well when I
woke up this morning, and I probably suffered dehydration all day."

Alice's eyes narrowed, Isis stretching long and lean. "Didn't feel well… how?"

I shrugged and felt the slow grind of my muscles' weave as the strained fibers
pulled and protested, twisting around the gargoyle spikes of my bones as my
shoulder gave a loud pop and Jasper winced. "Sore," I said with a wry smile,
referencing the ghastly sound. "Nauseous, a bit. And my finger was broken."

Alice furrowed her smooth, pale brow: "Nauseous?" Her face was serious when
her hand found my arm. "Bella, I know you and Edward were… that he wanted...
But…"

just a little,

edward.

please.

I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night.

I could never live with myself.

oh, edward, oh…

please don't stop.

it's okay.

i wish you were

real.

i wish you were

real.

i

wish

you

were real.

"No," I said quietly, and felt something twist against the lie, deep in a hidden part
of my stomach, nudging at me from the inside and wanting to bite and claw its
way free, but I felt a duty, a secrecy, a shame enough to keep it safely stored
inside me, not wanting Alice and Jasper to see.

It was my truth: Only Edward shared it with me, and he died that night as he
crept back inside his window after I stole something precious from him, took an
essential part of his soul.

Edward was lithe as a mountain lion when he pounced from the wide-open
windowsill to the floor. He landed softly on the balls of his feet, as he did every
night; he kicked off his shoes and tumbled into Bella's bed.

"You're early!" She laughed delightedly. His legs tangled with hers beneath the
sheets as he pulled her closer to press every line of their bodies together. Bella
could feel the hard line of silken skin she liked to touch pressing against her
through the sharp denim of his new school clothes, and she wanted to spread
open the teeth of his zipper and devour what lay behind it.

"Mmm," he groaned softly into the crook of her neck. She was babydown white
and lily-of-the-valley, hooded pale purity drenched in sweetly scented wet that
tickled his nose and made him ache. "I wanted to have more time with you
tonight."

Bella rolled over, slid her arms around his lean waist and felt his heartbeat
thrumming life through him. They had no idea that life would only spark inside
him for another few hours; he had no intention then to pass on his life to Bella in
her baby blue childhood bed.

"I'm glad," she whispered.

Edward touched his forehead to Bella's gently. "Someday, we'll be together all
through the night." His voice was velvet in her ears. "We'll fall asleep together in
a big white bed and I'll wake up with you in my arms."

And he kissed her, slow and sweet, like honey pouring from a spoon. When
Edward kissed Bella, he fought back his demons tooth and nail, striving to keep
from pulling her inside like a tempestuous spirit and letting her essence flow
through his veins; he reminded himself sternly of his plans for their future, for
their wedding night when he would kiss every inch of her white white body
beneath her white white dress, and none of his darkness would stain her because
the whitegold band around her finger freed him.

The sunset blinds your etched retinas in shades of red as you spy through the
slats of the mansion's porch, measuring the danger of the blond-haired man
approaching the steps of Her house. His jaw was square and his eyes pale and
quick, and his face riddled with small scars. The blond man's arms stretched

sinew between the bones beneath his sunbrushed skin, and he held his muscles
like he had something to prove.

She answered the door half-held by the little black-haired girl with the
sandalwood scent; the man paid little attention to Her and had eyes only for the
curves beneath the smaller girl's clothes.

She looked different tonight in the bright red twilight. Bella's skin looked
smoother and her button nose straighter, the dark shadows beneath her eyes
enunciating her emaciated cheekbones and making her face look marble and
crystal and ice, lips red. Her brown hair falls in tangled curls around her shoulders
and down cascading over her hollow hummingbird shoulders and fuller beautiful
breasts meant for your tongue to taste as you feed from her every inch of smooth
skin.

bella bella bella bella bella bella bella bella bellabella Bella bella.

You squirm against the dirt, happy that the sun is setting and you can go to her
soon; her scent sings to you on the night air and buoys you to Lightness as your
swollen flesh begs happily with the contentment of knowing your acquiescence:

You will feed from Her tonight.

With a great liquidgreen polluted flash at the horizon line of the wet leafy Hum,
the sun disappeared into seablack abyss and you stretch your long limbs and float
up twisting into the breezecool young night air and there's buttery light drifting
towards you from a window above your home beneath the white mansion's white
porch, and curiosity and warmth and the smell of smoke and seashells and sin
draw you towards the unknown glass.

Beyond the window, the blond boy and little dark-haired spark are tangled
together in a seething mass of rolling roiling red and white skin; you fill with the
evergreen stench of betrayal and disgust but you're fascinated, watching and
wondering if She moves this way, if Bella could wrap around you with arms and
legs and what would happen if you touched your teeth to her long neck and if her
knee could perch over her shoulder, because you can see the depth of the blond
boy's reach inside the black-haired sprite and you're hungry and wanting and
emptying fast and your joy's turned to ravenous scorching need and blind
possession and you tear your sticky fingertips from the butterwarm window,
steamed with sex against the ice-shard sky, and flee to Her window, to Her room,
to Her bed:

bella bella Bella bella.

For Edward, the concept of marriage was something beautiful and full and rich
and red, thick and sweet with support and love and unconditional understanding
and the promise of soft mornings in bed and smiling babies that grew into close-
knit siblings and young adults who brought lovers like family into the home and
warmed it – glimmering coals in the hearth with happiness made possible only by
our union: his understanding shallowly shaded only by Carlisle and Esme, even
though he'd seen Rosalie and Emmett raise Jasper without marrying because they
believed love was enough, even though he'd watched me fall on my face trying to
take my first steps without my mother because she had decided that being a wife
wasn't good enough for her dreams.

I leaned back against my bed and grew up.

I realized that he was not the righteous and perfect, leading me like a lamb with
his virtuous shepherd's crook, so steady-footed and certain that love and

marriage were the same, that to be wed was to be happy; nor was I right in
thinking that we could only fail, that we would be just as happy together whether
or not we tried to walk down Pastor Weber's pale cream aisle and pronounce a
kiss before the entirety of town.

Both Edward, and I, were childishly skewed in our perceptions, poisoned equally
by the fruit of our parents' pricklyfruit trees; Carlisle and Esme fed Edward sweet
pinesap of happiness that blinded him; Charlie's quiet languor spread his spotted
symptoms to me, filling the back of my throat and my tongue with bitterness I
couldn't shake.

Edward didn't deserve to have his fluttering heart punished by my unfounded
fears, but I deserved to be taken seriously, to be considered competent enough
to have a say in my own affairs.

We loved each other so completely that we crippled each other.

It were as though he were just my brand of heroin: dark resin in my veins that
spawned a brightdark ache, and I always wanted more, even if it meant selling
the things that should have meant most to me… my beliefs, my self.

Though that wasn't quite fair, I reasoned as I readied myself for my Dream
Edward's arrival, taking off my clothes and lying naked against my sheets still
streaked with Edward's reluctant white semen… my sheets smelled musty and his
sweet, comforting scent was gone; my bedclothes needed washing soon. Edward
had never been harmful to me, not like a drug, not like a sickness that made me
shake and sweat and steal; Edward was beautiful, a good heart and a good soul,
strong and willing to believe in a better future for us, for me, than I had the
strength to believe, because without him, I would never have tied my hair back
and faced the world.

I would have stayed hidden behind my curtain of hair forever.

Now, I saw clearly, despite needed to learn to see through the blueblack blur of
my burial veil.

"Mmm," Bella moaned softly, writhing beneath him, his air-chilled hands beneath
the t-shirt she wore as a nightgown, teasing at her small, pointed breasts. His
fingers were cool but flushed with excited levity, rough at the tips from piano and
guitar and being a boy but soft with his privileged upbringing and the curator's
care he used to examine Bella's pinkest skin. "Edward… please…"

He shuddered and kissed the hollow beneath her ear, all breath and life and pulse
meeting pulse. "Not here," he whispered, one hand trailing down to ghost over
her white panties. He wanted someday for her to wear all black, sheer lace she
could feel through, geometric anomalies in strings and triangles, and he would
never share that. "Not with your dad sleeping in the next room. And not when I
have to leave you after."

"But I'm ok with that!" Bella insisted, her hand mirroring his trail, slipping under
the waistband of his crinkly new jeans, resting over burgundy briefs and feeling
the wet spot where he wept wanting. "Edward, you know that I understand that
your leaving doesn't mean you don't love me. I need you. I want you. Right
now."

Edward exhaled through his nose sharply when her small hand squeezed, and
Bella heard him swallow: a hopeful sound. His fingers tapped softly over the
sensitive curve only he had ever seen, that he memorized every misdrawn line
and the single darkflush freckle just inside a secret lip. Beneath her underwear

she was brown and pink and white; she was the cream ivory keys of his piano,
and he could draw the lullaby from her with the smallest effort.

"No," he whispered softly, finally, dishonestly. "I do love you. And I do need you.
And I do so, so want you." He kissed her face then – softly – finally – honestly. "I
will only treat you the way you deserve. I can't take this experience from you and
disappear into the night. I could never live with myself."

"Then at least let me see you," Bella begged, sliding her hand inside the slit of
the burgundy cotton and feeling satin over sandstone, wanting to taste. "Let me
touch you while your fingers are in me."

Bella is waiting for you – you, not Ed-werd, not her red-haired lover, not her own
small broken fingers, you; your touch, your tongue – when you glide through her
chilled window, barely noticing the fiery burn that licks at your throat and face
and convex of your ribcage at the quickbeating fluctuation of her awoken heart.

She lies naked atop her blue sheets, every inch marzipan and cherry divinity and
frosted white strawberry nipples and burnt spun sugar sticksliding to the
sweetness between her legs, and she sees you hovering above her faded floor,
and her red cherry lips turn up at the edges and you feel a tremor run through
you again at the sight of her face –

She's smiling for you.

She's happy… because of you.

"You did come," she breathes, and though you can't understand her words she
didn't make his sound, his ed-werd, and you feel your mouth turn up too, smiling
back with ghostwhite teeth as you cross the threshold of her vestal bed, not
frightened any longer and ready to sate your need in her.

"You look so beautiful like this," Edward whispered, staring down at the place
where his fingers disappeared, wondering salaciously in the back of his lascivious
mind if there would be a way to see this on their wedding night, to watch her
body swallow him slowly over and over into the warm silken breaking point
between her soft white thighs.

She was not beautiful, she argued in her head; her legs splayed open without
muscle tone and streaked inside with inexplicable stretching scars despite her
thinness, her belly moved with his hand's every thrust and one breast was just a
mite larger than the other and they looked flat as pancakes when she lay on her
back like this and her body was blushing from her hairline to her nipples and her
hair was all tangled where she writhed against the pillowcase and her fingernails
were bitten and she could see their raggedness as she watched her own hand
slide up and down over Edward's perfection.

Edward exhaled hard and blinked away the mesmer clouding his eyes, trying to
keep at bay the cloying cloud of pleasure, to prolong this moment, this night,
feeling something dark well up beneath his heart as he looked at beautiful Bella
with a part of him touching where no one else ever would and her fingers on him
and for the first time he was brazen enough to bend his head and place a solitary
kiss on one of her tiny nipples, flushed crimson red and so perfect he could cry
and the moment the softstrange skin touched his mouth and he heard her
whispered cry he was a man possessed and his lips opened and his tongue swept
down to savor her around and around and her hand clutched his head to her
chest and his hips shifted so that he lay in the forbidden vee of her open legs and
her palm and thin fingers contracted around him as his hand shifted and twisted

and pressed insistent inside her and she came like a tornado all over his fingers
and she whispered his words of undoing:

"Just a little, Edward. Please."

My dream lover was Edward gone beautifully wrong, tonight shining with leaves
in his hair and Puck's wild smile on his angel face, a beautiful nude like the last
Edward I had seen but churning clouds of ice where his legs should have been,
and it didn't bother me, because his beautiful cock was still perfect and I wanted
him inside me and I told him so silently without words as he moved over me on
the bed.

I was surprised when he lifted my injured hand first, inspecting my swollenblack
finger with the sweetest expression of sorrow.

"Bella," he murmured quietly, looking me in the eyes, "Bella…"

He kissed my finger, cold lips and hot hot heat, and my broken heart mended a
little and the seams ripped again, because Edward was beautiful and dead.

Edward felt his soul break in half as he studied the womanchild lying beneath
him, trusting aphrodite, wicked succubus, wanting to take her and possess her
and claim her and make her bleed red for him on her blue sheets, and to protect
her and cherish her and honor her and keep her from ever feeling a moment of
pain.

"I can't," he whispered, strangled by his own breath, her hand clutching vice-like
too-tight around his sensitive skin, feeling her muscles hold tight around his
fingers, keeping him trapped and suffocating inside. "Bella… please… I can't…
love, I can't, I can't…"

"You can," Bella goaded, torturing him with a thumb tracing the peachslit in his
head. "Edward… just the tip… just touch me there with this – " another squeeze –
"Just a little… just a taste."

Brokenbone tears filled Edward's eyes as he tried to deny her and failed,
drowning in the knowledge that in the next moment he would break every
promise he had ever made to himself, that his love, live, meaning were
converging at a crossroads and – unknowing – by the breaking dawn, all three
would be over.

"I love you," he whispered desperately as he slipped his fingers from deep within
her and her grip loosened around him and he fell, hanging, slack, ended. "I love
you, I really love you… please don't forget that when I leave… I love you."

"I know you do," Bella whispered back, flying and alive, feeling the sharp press of
his hipbones over hers, both of them too skinny. "I love you, too, Edward. So
much."

The powderdry satincloth head of Edward's undoing touched lightly against Bella's
open orchid lips and Edward jolted, electrified, floundering, lost, and knew that
the string to his unraveling had been pulled.

She's looking at you with an intensity you wish you could keep forever and it
pangs you with a bittersweet sea salt hurt that it will flee her in time and you
can't look at her girlpretty face anymore.

With a sweet welling swell of venom mouth mouth finds her neck, the place
where her pulse beats strongest, dark and pretty and making you dizzy with

sweetwanting headiness and your tongue touches her skin, drawing her essence
to the surface in exchange for a dark bruise, your mark on her – yours, not the
bright-haired boy who's made her writhe.

"Oh!"

A small squeak escapes her and she doesn't say his name, doesn't call out for ed-
werd, and you're giddy enough to grip too hard and your fingers press into her
skin and softcrack bones and more of her blood and her soul and her life ebbs
bruising to the surface and you smile to see the shape of your hands on her hips
but her eyes are full of wet again, and you feel weighted and dark and you don't
like that; you're hungry and needy and you want her wet between her legs
instead and you bend down to suck kisses against the place where you've hurt
her.

The whorled dark spots decay and darken when your death kisses them, and your
green eyes flash on something sad at the sight of her pretty body losing light.

"Oh, Edward," Bella cooed, wrapping her legs around Edward's slim hips, sliding
his naked skin along her slick pink openness, feeling the satinsuede of his
reluctance swelling and thrumming with blood and life and Edward shuddered
through his shoulders, groaning softly into Bella's hair, knowing now how it felt to
have his cock touching her pretty puss and painfully aware that in one tiny shift
he could be pressing inside her.

"Bella," he sighed, rumbling in his chest like a purr, "You were made for me. We
were made to be like this."

And Bella shifted her hips.

And Edward felt the forbidden welcoming press of his head against her opening,
new and terrifying and falling into a well and Bella sighed, teeth tugging his
earlobe, breath ghosting cold over his goosepimple skin:

"We were made to be like this."

Edward's glass ghost had a soft mouth, wet with something cold and sweet that
made my skin tingle like spearmint as his cherry-blossom tongue slipped up and
over the skin my own Edward never dared to lick despite all my pleading. I
gripped his flame-tipped hair in my hands to drive his face closer to me even as I
felt the movement of his lips and tongue and nibblebiting teeth drinking me in
deeper and deeper as though he had been starving since the beginning of time.

The brightsparkle collapse of my orgasm against Dream Edward's face stopped
my heart for a moment and I saw myself float up out of my skin and stare down
at the concave twisting brown-haired girl on the bed with her face and chest
flushed red with boiling blood and eyes shut tight against her swollen broken
fingers touching needily at her swollen nipples, a ghost – transparent and dark, a
glowing David in marble, incorporeal and beautiful and frightening and
monstrously angelic – with his face buried between her thighs, jaw wide to
consume her and tongue working deep.

Dream Edward lifted his face before my muscles relaxed and my heart restarted
his glowing green eyes met mine and his human wonderful crooked smile quirked
his face as he met my gaze, floating in the air, and

i

wanted

him

and my heart fell with a thud as I met my liquidtrembling body again and
realized:

I might love Edward more dead

than I ever had alive.

"Oh, Edward," Bella gasped, her teeth grinding against the pain she should have
expected as the head of Edward's cock pressed forward, opening her, hurting her,
too big for her unpracticed small space. The pain was welcome; for once, this was
real, Edward really held his weight on his forearms at her sides and stretched her
virgin skin, that this wasn't another dream.

"I won't break you Bella, I won't, I can't, I won't," Edward's mumbles were a
scattered suggestive rainbow array, scrambled thoughts and broken words. "Tell
me to stop, I can't break you, I won't, I won't…" He groaned as the fat ridge at
the bottom of his head popped against resistance and was engulfed in flame.
"Oh…"

Bella smoothed a hand through Edward's soft hair, nails scratching against his
scalp and he groaned again into her neck, arms shaking as he held himself above
her. "Please don't stop." Edward moaned a crinkling soft cry as Bella's fingernails
raking against the tender nape of his neck was too much to handle and before he
was even really inside her he was lost, Bella's oversensitive nerves feeling every
pulse of his warm white rush, and Edward collapsed, heavy and warm and pulse
raging righteously as Bella let him seep inside softening, caressing his head
gently,

aneurism beneath her fingers a ticking time bomb approaching

zero.

"It's okay."

Satisfaction sustenance silken sweet strawberry symphonic seduction, sliding
slick and strong and strident stealth into blinding blueblack bright pink perfect
salvation.

Her body welcomes and warns, the burst of bright red blood a greedy delectable
new sensation to your feeding –

The others had not given you the bittersweet thick syrupy gift, weight and body
and beauty, when you took from them, and you smile –

Bella is special.

Your hips hit against hers long slow and deep with every selfish slurping thrust,
warm and comfortable and suddenly with a longing that shatters you to the core
you wish you could live here instead of beneath the cold porch, that you could
spend all of your time touching and feeling this amazing girl; realization that she
isn't Light, she's

Home.

She's fluttering and squeezing and you're taking and slurping and consuming and
scarring and she's cumming again, tight around you, and she moans, "Edward…"

And you smile against her shoulder before your teeth take a tiny bite, drawing
more beautiful blood into your mouth with the extraordinary taste of her soul, her
life, drawing her spark into your skin –

"Yes."

You could cry If you understood crying, green eyes burning burning freezing with
something like winter and you bury your face into her neck, lips breathing bruises
into her skin as she shivers and draws icicles of heat down your back –

You are Edward, ed-werd, Her word.

She's never wanted her red-haired lover; She's never dreamt of never moaned
for never cum to the boy who's dirtied Her bed: She's always wanted you, you,
you.

You're sure of it.

You can feel it in Her quivering muscles.

You can hear it in Her tempest voice.

You take your fill and Her face is wet with salt and She's cooing for you turtledove
curling chords for Edward.

And you're gone, flying through Her window,

exploding with

Light.

Bella was intimidated to go to Port Angeles with Edward for their first real date.

Edward had been to Paris.

Edward had been to Chicago.

Edward had been to Seattle.

Bella had never gone anywhere, and besides, Edward was beautiful. Edward at
thirteen had his braces removed and smiled with impossibly straight, white teeth;
Edward at thirteen had longish, messy, thick bronze hair that infuriated Esme and
ignited every girl in town between the ages of ten and twenty; Edward at thirteen
suddenly grew four inches to nearly six feet tall, limbs beautifully long and
gangly, outpacing everyone with his long stride.

Charlie couldn't afford to get braces for Bella, and both daughter and father were
too stubborn to accept orthodontia as a gift from the Cullens, so her two eyeteeth
stood out, just a little, against the rest of her mouth like little fangs, and she was
terribly self-conscious still.

Alice kept trying to convince Bella to dye her hair, too, touting its mystical
properties of self reinvention… and Bella finally caved, as she always did to either
Cullen twin, and Alice painted long pink streaks into Bella's hair on either side of
her face.

Rather than gifting her confidence, Bella was grounded for nearly three weeks –
Charlie forgot to formally lift her punishment after two, since he was almost
never home – and she felt ridiculous, wishing for her plain brown hair to grow
back after Lauren had called her "Baby Spice."

Alice didn't get called names despite her boyish black haircut and her stature as
the shortest girl in their class. Bella felt shrimpier even though she stood two
inches taller, because Alice lived large and everyone knew that she was cool
because she said so.

Edward called Bella 'cool.' But he called her 'pretty,' too, and even 'beautiful'
once… and those endearments weren't true.

All the same, she smiled at her reflection as Rosalie finished pinning back the
pink streaks so that they framed her pale face; Alice insisted on lending Bella
bobbypins lined with shining silver stars and she felt glamorous and so unlike
Bella Swan.

So much more like a Cullen.

"You look plain gorgeous, Bella," Rosalie assured her, smiling softly with aged
eyes at the young blushing girl before her, sitting with her eyes closed in front of
the small, clean bathroom mirror in her small, clean house. Bella wore a plain
blue-and-white sundress and a cream colored sweater that didn't match, but the
eyelet trim was pretty and she wanted to feel pretty. "You're gonna dazzle that
boy."

The little girl's cheeks flushed dark crimson in the mirror. No one had ever called
her 'gorgeous,' and though she didn't believe it, the words soothed deliciously in
her ears and tasted good in her mouth when she whispered it softly to herself as
soon as Rosalie's back turned, intent on stitching up a tiny rip along the seam of
her cardigan.

"Gorgeous."

I woke late into the sun burning a white trail across my bed from the window,
and I rolled onto my stomach, hoping the pressure of my own weight would kill
the nauseous roll and toothy bug clamped inside me, and wishing that I could go
back to sleep and stay with Edward, my imaginary ghost-lover.

Edward was more beautiful than any human boy ever could be, with
smoothglowing white skin and a cupid's arrow jaw and lips so soft and pink and
pliant that I wanted them on me always. They tingled cold like mint against my
skin, and left black bruises that I liked up and down the skin he kissed and
sucked and touched. He made me his, boldly, and I liked it.

His neon green eyes saw right through me, burning through my skin to all of the
shameful secrets I held beneath and turning them into power and prowess,
making me feel like Mata Hari or Greta Garbo or Bettie Page, the strongest,
sexiest women I never thought I could be. The sight of his eyes staring into mine
as I floated above my own body, exorcised by orgasm, and their roguish,
wondering wink making my lungs shrink even in memory, and the room swirled
woozily in on me as I hyperventilated in my bed.

When Edward saw Bella from his perch in the open cab of big Emmett's Jeep, his
heart flew into his throat and his pants felt tighter.

She looked like an ethereal fairy princess, all miles of white leg and pink cheeks,
with softly waving oceans of brown curls floating on the warm summer breeze

around her face. The damned pink streaks weren't nearly so noticeable now that
a few weeks had passed, and somehow tonight the cotton candy strands looked
gossamer and petalsoft natural instead of forced and false and all things he
dissociated from Bella, his sweetheart.

Her dress was modest, but ended above her knees, exposing long smooth legs
that Edward knew one day he could touch and kiss, but that day was not today.

He wished it were.

Her lacy cardigan seemed taunting and adult, little glimpses of skin showing
through the floral pattern of the yolk and cap sleeves, and her tiny breasts were
framed like a heart inside the three open buttons at the top. Edward felt his
cheeks warm at the sight of Her, his Bella, his date, maybe his girlfriend, the
woman he wanted to spend all his life with and to marry and to see carry his
children.

She caught sight of him leaning out of the side of the Jeep and she smiled, biting
her lip like the dirty pictures Jasper shared with Edward in secret a few months
back and that he kept hidden in brown paper beneath the mattress of his bed.

"Bella," Edward sighed, bounding out of the open side of the big red Jeep and
holding out both arms to hug her.

She was a tentative fawn in her affections, stepping up to wrap her arms around
him with the weight of moths' wings, the front of her body pressed so lightly
against every electrified inch of Edward that he could have cried, and didn't
understand why.

You are the fairytale prince Her childhood mind envisioned when she thought the
word 'Kiss': She thought of your green eyes and your white teeth and your pink
lips, you know it, you know it; in Her mind, kisses have always meant your
worship of Her lips and the way She feeds you life so sweetly.

She imagined your fingers and your lips the first time She came, her own timid
fingers coaxing confused the sweet nectar you love from between her legs and
your wild abandon in her mind, reckless and needy and focused fulcrum on her,
making her want, making her twist and flipturnbeautifulcome.

When her redheaded littleboy lover poked his fingers inside Her the first time She
was craving for you, wanting your freedom your knowledge your deathly desire
for Her body mind and soul, and you do, you

want Bella –

And for the first time you know that She wants you, too.

And you

Care.

I regained consciousness slowly, willing myself to stay asleep and gone because
that was when Edward came for me, and

I

wanted

him.

I vaguely discerned that when he was alive, edward existed and treated me
nicely, with worshipful trying fingers and sweet eyes filled with shame, and I
knew that once upon a time, I had felt him inside me thick and white, but I had
never known what it was like to have edward fill me because he was too crippled,
flaccid with fear.

Edward made me whole.

I shifted from my stomach onto my side, relieving the pressure on my abdomen
and feeling a pang between my legs, and when I reached down, I found blood
with my fingertips, and sudden freezing panicked relief flooded me because
something was so, so very wrong but I couldn't bring myself to care because
edward and Edward had both been inside me last night, I knew it, I could tell
from the spill of my own blood and the bite of cold that I remembered flooding
me, collapsing like a vacuum, making my heart palpitate and I felt a little light, a
little biting nipping life, die inside me.

I spread my hand over my stomach and the other curled over a breast, letting my
fingers feel the remnants of edward beneath one palm and Edward beneath the
other, feeling sweat gather on my skin beneath the blankets that still smelled of
them; I willed myself back to sleep.

Port Angeles was a small city – a little rough around the edges and nothing
impressive.

Edward cringed inside when Emmett's Jeep roared into a faded parking space,
proudly bearing its decrepit meter: a mark of metropolitan progress, in front of
the nicest restaurant Edward could afford.

He wanted so much more from this night and for his girl than he could find and
give. He wanted more than flickerdying neon and sticky checkered tablecloths
and was deeply embarrassed by the tacky wicker-wrapped grappa bottles,
suggestively dripping with white candle wax, that stood drunkenly peglegged on
their little reserved round table.

He pulled Bella's chair out for her and her cheeks flushed with the pink blush he
loved as she smiled sweetly at him over her shoulder, and Edward's heart sank
that he couldn't make her first date as beautiful as she was.

Bella felt small and plainjane as dapper Edward in his navy blue suitcoat held
open his hand at the curb outside the restaurant, Emmett's open-air Jeep purring
beside the shining chrome box he called a "parking meter" and that Bella
recognized from photos of New York City.

He led her, smiling softly, into the restaurant lit with dim, romantic red light bulbs
and gave their name to the hostess as "Cullen" like it was nothing, and Bella's
heart sank a little wondering if maybe it really were nothing, because the blonde
girl who led them to their little round table couldn't have been more than three
years older than they and she smiled at Edward with a lush edge that Bella knew
she would never really master.

She wanted to be a Cullen so badly. She envied the closeness Alice and Edward
had to handsome Carlisle, and how whenever they drove through town together
in Carlisle's convertible, everyone smiled and approved of the head of the Cullen
house, even adored him. She never missed the fact that while adults respected
her own father and the widows and old maids of Forks plied him with pies and
pickled beets, everyone her own age – and many of the other men – sneered
when they passed his cruiser.

Even when the lights weren't flashing and he was just taking his daughter to
school.

Bella's secret deepest want was to have a brother or a sister, the way Edward
and Alice had each other. She wanted a secret silent language like the one the
twins perfected. She wanted comfortable camaraderie. She wanted confidence.

Mostly she wanted to be a Cullen because it was enough for Esme to decide to
stay, while being a Swan made her own mother leave.

You smile because Bella is sleeping again and you can feel Her pulling you
towards the bed where She lays, wanting you desperately with sweet tangy blood
where you've never tasted it before and want it most and long pretty legs that
wrap around your hipbones and little secrets you think no one has known about
Her except you –

One inner pink lip has a tiny freckle, and you kissed it and found it a compass
rose to pull her orgasm from her with your teeth –

Her first and favorite kisses happened outdoors beneath the rare and warm

sun.

You scowl suddenly when the place where your stomach should be clenches in
something like fear because She loves sun, She loves Light and the only thing
you can give her is this dark mouldering place beneath the white lattice porch
where –

You sit up suddenly and the top of your head strikes the wood, blistering a dark
hole in its knots –

A pair of eyes is staring right at you through the diamontine pattern in the wood;
wide and hazel and not belonging to Bella and full of the overripe smell like your
own that infuriates and terrifies you and gazing at your form like you're
something monstrous and strange and something twists in your abdomen
because you can smell traces of Bella on this girl and you don't want her to tell
Bella whatever it is she sees beneath the white porch.

"Edward?"

The girl's voice is small and incredulous and fits her round little face and sets a
pang behind your ribs like palm fronds and salt and double-helix twisting
thoughts and you cringe away from her further into the darkness because you
suddenly feel tied down with lead weights like you should stay away from Bella
and this girl this creature this little half-a-soul could know it and you need for her
to forget that she's ever seen you so she doesn't realize what you did to Her.

The pinched white face doesn't disappear. "I knew I saw you, Edward. I knew it."

Her sounds are foreign but her tone is clear –

She doesn't mind that you're there in the dark because she needs you almost as
much as Bella does.

You smile into the damp dirt of your home, knowing you'll never hurt her, and
she won't tell Bella to stay away because that would hurt your Bella.

The hostess led the two to a family-sized table in the middle of the room. Bella
could see couples much older than she and Edward scattered all around the main

room, and families that reminded her of less refined Cullens or a more refined
Rosalie, Emmett, and Jasper, crowded into booths around the wooden walls.

The hostess ushered them into a plain table, covered with its checkerboard
oilcloth, and Bella could have swooned with how romantic it was, just like the
lady and the tramp.

"Would you like to place your drink orders now, or when the rest of your party
arrives?"

The blonde addressed Edward, dismissing Bella completely.

It struck the brunette suddenly, and she wished that Rosalie hadn't pinned back
her pink bangs so she could hide behind them:

The hostess thought she was Edward's sister.

It made more sense than to believe someone like Edward would be here on a
date with someone like Bella, the daughter of a civil servant, with the rip in her
cardigan hastily sewn up with mismatched thread and with stupid pink streaks in
her hair like some little kid playing dress-up while Edward stood beside the chair
he pulled out for her in his tailored blue blazer and black button-down shirt over
his lanky chest and pressed pants over his long legs that made him so tall and
masculine already.

Edward smiled winsomely. "Actually, if it's alright, I think we'd prefer something a
little more intimate."

Bella gaped as he held out the hand not clutched around her waist, casually
tucking a ten-dollar bill into the hostess' slack hand. She had never seen anyone
other than Carlisle know so slickly how to bend society to his will, and the kernel
of her heart felt even smaller and more insignificant as she stood so cloddish
beside Edward's grace.

Edward pulled Bella's seat out for her and held her hand as she slid into the seat.
He smiled shyly down at her as she blushed and bit her lip, adjusting the bell of
her dress around her legs, and without thinking, Edward smoothed his hand over
her hair, completely certain that she was the most beautiful girl in the world that
night.

"Perfect," he murmured under his breath, then quickly bit the inside of his cheek,
because Alice had warned him that Bella was evidently completely oblivious to his
feelings and thought that his sincere compliments and eagerness for the night
was just his humoring her because she lived next door and they'd known each
other so long and she was his little twin sister's best friend.

Edward sat down across the small table, admiring the way the flickering yellow
light from the candle resting on their table in its green bottle played against
Bella's delicate features, painting chiaroscuro shadow and highlight over her
bones and beneath her long eyelashes.

Her lower lip was trembling.

"Are you alright, Bella?" Edward asked finally, reaching timidly across the table to
take her hand into his, hoping against hope that she would give it to him. "You
look nervous."

Bella shook her head, beautiful pink that forced Edward's hand to lift without his
consent to cup her cheek gently against his palm as he stroked the bone with his
thumb, to fill her cheeks. She smiled tremulously.

The blonde hostess set two glasses of water and two Cokes that Bella couldn't
recall Edward ordering down in front of them.

She squeezed Edward's hand. "I feel very safe with you."