I glared into his topaz eyes, trying futilely to burn his face with the anger that was brewing inside of me.

"Jesus, Rosalie," he finally muttered, sounding nothing like the bitter Edward that I had been condemned to for the past century. "You try to fit everything into two categories- what you love and what you hate. It doesn't work like that, Rosalie. Some things aren't in black and white. Bella, for one. The way that I feel about her is the most multihued thing that I have ever felt."

"I know so much more than you think," I retorted. "I don't need a reason to dislike a human." His eyes narrowed as he furrowed his brow.

"What's this about Rose? Bella never did anything to you," he reminded me, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. The truth was, I disagreed with him completely. But I remained silent. Everything that I would say would be mistaken, misunderstood. I didn't even understand my own reasoning. There would be arguments over my selfishness, and I didn't want that. I had had enough of those to last me a lifetime.

...

It had all started with Edward. Things like this always did.

"I'm not going to spend the rest of my life with you tormenting me, Rosalie," he had snapped. I had gotten angry, though a tiny part of me (okay, a very big part of me) was satisfied. He had never let on that I provoked him, but now I had solid evidence. My efforts to make his existence miserable had not been completely in vain.

"You don't know me," I had retorted, my voice thick with acid and implications of a tortured past. When Edward had remained silent, I had stormed off to fix my hair.

I'd always had my vanity. Before Emmett, before eternity, vanity was the only constant in a world where everything was a living hell. Vanity was not a gift; it was a sanctuary. I jumped at every compliment, and I marveled at my numerous admirers.

Then my humanity had been stripped away, and soon after, my simple pleasures had followed.

Edward Cullen did not adore me. True, I'd never craved his affection, but the knowledge that I was, in fact, resistible, shot through me like a thousand javelins.

By the time I had found Emmett, I had begun to resent eternity. My life, or lack of it, had been decided by a stranger, and that hardly seemed just. The purpose of human life was to reproduce, to carry on legacies. Vampirism didn't appear to have a purpose. Unless it was to control the human population, but even Carlisle had found a way around that.

Emmett, I soon decided, was my savior. He had always insisted that I was his savior, but that was ridiculous. After all, I had only saved him from a bear. He had saved me from an eternity of never-ending heartache. When I had recognized this, I had decided that maybe it wasn't in black and white. Maybe everything was multi-colored, and there weren't two kinds of people in this world.

Unlike me, Bella didn't want children. The truth was, we did not need children. That was a dream of mine that had faded as quickly as my human life had faded.

As all of this sifted through my sieve of a mind, I realized that Edward had been right. Of course, I would never tell him that.