After the end of Eclipse…

I woke up one morning, with Edward by my side, the love showing deeply in his amber eyes, and I realized that it wasn't enough for me. I still wanted him, terribly I must add, but there was something missing. It was the small Jacob-sized hole that continued to rip and tear at my heart. And I had no idea how to fix it. I wanted a hold on Jake- and I couldn't lie to myself anymore. I didn't want him just as a brother- I loved him too much after all we'd been through. I would always love Edward infinitely more so- I mean, he was my perfect Romeo, my forever-after soulmate. I didn't know what I was going to do. I just didn't know.

That day we went to school, I was so distracted. Edward had to whisper the answer to me in biology, and I could see him looking questioningly at me all day- wondering what I was thinking, and he was obviously frustrated, I could see it in his eyes. But he was being surprisingly patient and not asking me to speak my mind. Somehow I needed a distraction for him…Alice! At lunch I acted like I had suddenly found the answer and I perked-up, smiled, and asked Alice if she wanted to go out for some girl-time. Edward looked confused, but mollified if only a little.

So Alice drove us out to Port Angeles, and we walked in and out of shops- her pointing out cute trinkets and pretty outfits, while I mmhm-ed and ahh-ed at the right places. We walked down to the beach just as the sun was setting (it had been cloudy all day, so it was alright for Alice and I to go shopping together). We sat down on the beach, and I just stared out at the waves and the sun slowly sinking into them. Alice turned and looked at me with a knowing look in her eye. "Bella, why? You know you can't have the two of them." She frowned, and opened her mouth again, but I interrupted her. "I know that. And I know that I'm going to marry Edward, and I'm going to deal with it. But I can't help wishing that I could just fuse them together, or at least make them be friends. Don't you ever wish for impossible things, Alice?" I put my head in my hands, and closed my eyes with a sigh of frustration. Alice put her arms around me and I leaned onto her marble shoulder. I knew that nothing in my future had an answer for me, but nevertheless, it was comforting for Alice to show me the reasoning that I needed to wrap my head around. The next day at school I tried to smile more for Edward- and I did beg him to kiss me before gym, and the fire was still there, so I wasn't worried about that. I just felt a sense of premonition- like something was happening and it couldn't be stopped. I hated feeling out of control. I could be rushing to my death and be totally at peace, but I couldn't be dealing with a simple relationship problem on my end and feel calmly about it.

Then Angela was absent from school. Ben said she had mono, and he made a few jokes that he'd be missing her kisses, but it seemed like more than that. He seemed truly worried about her. I mentioned it to Edward, and he said it looked like Ben was trying to think of other things than Angela, so he didn't get a good look at what the problem was. Alice said she didn't see anything different in Angela's future, and not to worry, but worry I did. I called Angela to see how she was doing, and she sounded really stressed on the phone. She told me that she was on the mend, but she didn't see how she'd be better any time soon. This struck me as ridiculously coincidental, and I felt a strange déjà vu when I drove over to her house the next day after school. Edward had frowned at me when I told him what I was doing, but since she wasn't a werewolf or anything he didn't seem too bothered that I was going to see Angela.

I got to her house and all the curtains were drawn. I knocked on her front door and rang the doorbell three times before I gave up. I walked back down the driveway towards my truck when I heard a crashing noise coming from inside the house. I ran around back to see if her back door was unlocked, because what if something had happened to Angela? We would all miss her terribly! Everyone thought nothing was wrong, but apparently something was serious. Luckily, the back door was unlocked and I ran upstairs towards her room where the noise had come from. I wrenched open her door, I saw a flash of green flames hovering around the ceiling, and then Angela noticed me. Her face was already gaunt, but it paled in comparison when she saw me. The flames disappeared when she slightly flicked her fingers, and she said in a rough voice, "Bella, you shouldn't be here. Please leave. I'm not well, as you can see." I ignored her pleas for me to leave, and I sat on the bed next to her and hugged her. We sat there for a minute like that, and then I had to ask, "What was that on the ceiling, when I came in, Angela?" She answered bitterly, "That was a remnant of my 18th birthday present." I gasped, and then I started laughing. Angela looked startled, and I started to wonder, was I really insane? I had said to Edward a while ago that I didn't care if he and Jake were mythical creatures, that if Angela was a witch, she could join the party too. And that's just what she was. I finally got a hold of myself, and I said "Angela, are you a witch?" and she looked at me deeply, as if she was reading deep into my eyes in order to see if I was trusted. Then she slowly said, "Ye-es." I said, "Okay." And gave her another hug. She seemed surprised and as if a great weight had been taken off her shoulders. She began to tell me that her relatives in the ancient past had been rumored to have weird powers, but everyone in her family thought it was a joke, that they had all known magic tricks or something. But when she turned 18, and had gone to blow the candles out, the flames had turned green and had flown up to the ceiling. They would follow her around the house if she left them out, and they seemed to whisper weird things to her at night. They weren't exactly creepy, just really inconvenient, she said. "But you can flick it away right? Like you did when I came in." I said. She replied, "Yes, but I'm just now getting control of it. That's why I said I wouldn't be in school for a while. That's why we said I have mono." I nodded my head- I'd heard that one before.

Well that was one long afternoon with Angela. I'd visit her after school, give her schoolwork, and eventually I convinced her to let Edward and Alice in on it. She had already let Ben know of course- and he was worried, but he still loved her. We were all so happy for them- I mean, of course Angela's powers were a trial for her to deal with, but in time she would surely be able to go back to school, right?

It was 3 months when she finally came back to school. Luckily for her, that's the usual time it takes to get over mono. But it was a bit too much for her, and she was out for a week after she started back at school. Eventually after a few weeks of this, she was able to go to school longer, and finally 5 months later, Ang was fully back at school. But one day, Jacob came to visit me at Angela's house and Edward was there, and it startled Angela so much that her powers flew out of her control. They must have heard my wish that I could have both of them, because Angela fell to the ground in a dead faint as almost all the energy was sucked out of her, and it created a new man.

He was skinned like a normal man- not marble pale, and not russet-skinned either. He had medium length hair and it was a honey brown color. His eyes were a dark amber brown, and his face was a morph of the two of them. It had Edward's Victorian wisdom, with Jacob's jaunty youth. He was tall, looked strong, and looked at me with his new eyes but with the same, old, now new, combined love of them two of them. It came as a shock to the both of us…the three of us?...And he spoke, with the chiming tune of Edward's lovely voice, with a bit of Jacob's roughness, "Whoah. What just happened to me?" he stared around, saw Angela on the ground, looked at his hands, and quickly comprehended that he was a new man now. "I'm both Edward and Jacob? What is this?!?" He sat down on the ground and began to think…As he was pondering his situation, I picked up Angela off the ground, and woke her up- she seemed deathly tired, but I had other things on my hands to deal with. I suddenly heard a car screech to, outside her house, and I figured it was Alice. Sure enough, she unlocked the front door on her own, and came running. The words, "You both disappeared…" died on her lips when she saw what Edward had become. She cocked her head to the side, and looked at me weirdly. "Well, Bella, it seems as if you got your wish. So what are you going to do about it now?" she said. I took that as a rhetorical question, and ignored Alice for a second. "Jake and Edward? Oh, what should I call you now? Do you still love me? Because I still love you!" He glanced up at me, stood up in one quick motion, grinning a smile that was new and yet still the same, and said "How about EJ? And of course I still love you. I have told you so many times that I love you to the core of my…my heart!" and as I saw the Edward in him rejoicing, he leapt towards me, cradled me in his arms, and kissed me, deeply and passionately. It was with the class of Edward's previous breath-taking kisses, but with the reckless abandon that always accompanied Jacob. Truly this was heaven. I now had the love and perfection of Edward, set to the adventure and caution-less passion of Jacob. With Edward I had always felt loved for forever, but a little limited; he had had to protect me and he wouldn't let me go sometimes- he was too overprotective. With Jacob, he had loved me and protected me; yet when I asked him to stay for me, he left anyways. I could deal with his leaving, yet I didn't want to. Now, I wouldn't have to deal with any of these problems- hopefully they would all cancel each other out! I would never feel that half-guilty longing for Jacob that I'd felt before. I wondered if this was what the Magdalene had felt when she met Jesus. The perfection with which he had carried himself coupled with the purity that any girl would want for herself. I was no longer Juliet caught between Romeo and Paris. I was Juliet in a world of my own.