From My Bedroom Window (A "Through the Kitchen Window" outtake)

Rating: T

Summary: "I feel silly, and I feel vindicated, and I feel sad. I feel a lot of things, but what I don't feel is nothing, and I'm not entirely sure what that means."

Acknowledgement: HollettLA. Awesome now. Awesome forever.

A/N: This was written in 2013 for the Fandom4LLS fundraiser. Apologies that it's taken me this long to post it, and sincere thanks to everyone who asked for it and who donated to a great cause.

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again."

The oft-referenced sentiment has never felt so simultaneously true and absurd as it does now, as I lay in bed staring at the rectangles of moonlight cast on the ceiling by the windowpanes of my childhood bedroom. The illustrious Mr. Wolfe's meaning was clear: once a man has set out into the world, home is ever changing in his absence, and as a result, any attempt to return to the home of one's childhood is an exercise in futility. The home is no longer the same and neither is the man.

That said, the sounds that this house makes as it settles in the darkness are the same as they always were, and my parents' footfalls on the stairs and low murmurs behind the closed wooden door of the room across the hall as they get ready for bed are the same, and the direction my mind takes when I peer through the darkness to look at my bulletin board is the same until I notice that the photo I'd turned around years ago is staring back at me, reflecting my younger face. Bella's younger face.

I rise slowly, quietly, and pad across the wooden floor on bare feet, unpinning the photo and gazing down at it before flipping it over. I remember penciling the well-known words there in a moment of particular anguish, as the throbbing in my split lip kept time with the thumping of my heart. In truth, I remember everything.

Returning the photo to the cork board, poem once again facing out, I glance at my rumpled sheets before cracking my door open and straining to hear the sounds of my parents' voices in the darkness, but I'm met with silence. I slip down the hall, avoiding the floorboard outside Jasper's old room that creaks before coming to a halt in front of the only door in the house that ever intimidated me.

In keeping with ol' Tom's theory, the man I am is no longer afraid of a door – no longer afraid of anything related to Bella Swan, for that matter – and I push the door open gently and step inside. I imagine that I can still smell her here, though I was never in a position to know what she smelled like once she was old enough to stop smelling like sunscreen and strawberry bubble gum. I look around the sparse room at the simple white eyelet bedspread, the wooden dresser, the nightstand that holds nothing but a small clock and a reading lamp. It is a guest room, nothing more. I feel silly, and I feel vindicated, and I feel sad. I feel a lot of things, but what I don't feel is nothing, and I'm not entirely sure what that means.

Returning to my own room, I slip back into bed and stare out into the inky nothingness outside my window, imagining that I can see Charlie Swan's house, imagining that behind one of the windowpanes across the way, there's a girl…even though I realize I don't know where she sleeps at night these days.

I left a lot of things behind when I ran, but I'm not sorry that I left. I had to. Self-preservation. Growth. Escape. Call it whatever you want, I had to go, and in going, I realized that someday, eventually, I would come home again. In my absence, I had experiences that had nothing to do with Bella: I dated other girls. Loved other girls. Made love to other girls.

At the end of the day, though, whenever one of those relationships ended, I found myself wondering what ever became of the girl who threw a better slider than most of the guys I knew, better even than a couple I played college ball with. Whenever I was sitting alone in a dorm room on the opposite side of the country, I'd wonder. It was an idle kind of wondering, though – the dreamy, gauzy, what-if kind of wondering that people engage in when they receive invitations in the mail to ten-year reunions and suddenly think, "I wonder whatever happened to…" It was harmless. Innocent. Indicative of nothing more than curiosity.

The first time I actually thought that perhaps Bella's and my story wasn't over was when I saw her that Christmas, beautiful and healed and holding my favorite pie in her mittened hands. When I flew back to Florida and couldn't do more than kiss my girlfriend on New Year's Eve because when I closed my eyes, it wasn't Amy's face I saw. When my wondering became something more than idle.

I remember a seemingly innocent game of Spin the Bottle all those years ago, during which I handed over to Bella the last part of myself that I'd been holding hostage, and I remember the next day when she left it on the nightstand in the guest room like a "thanks, but no thanks." I remember the moment I threw a punch, the night I asked her to choose me, the morning I laid it all on the line. I remember her shaking voice when she said goodbye, her unsteady footsteps as she walked away from me.

I remember it all, and I realize that while home may change, the memories I took with me the day I left it are as crystal-clear as they were four years ago. I realize that all the parts of home that make it such a minefield are the ones I carried with me, and I wonder what Mr. Wolfe would have to say about that.

French toast. I should have expected it, but it's a testament to the fact that I've been gone for four years that it doesn't occur to me until I descend the stairs to the smell of cinnamon and maple syrup that my mother would pick up our Sunday morning tradition once again. I don't have the heart to tell her that I avoided French toast in the college dining hall like a case of the clap because I couldn't taste syrup and cinnamon without tasting blood, anger, and humiliation. I don't have the heart because when she hears me enter the kitchen, she turns to beam at me, flour on her chin and joy in her eyes.

"Morning," I say, crossing the expansive kitchen to retrieve a mug from the cabinet near where she's beating the batter into submission while Billy Joel plays on the radio on the opposite counter.

"Morning," she replies, dunking a slice of challah bread into the mixture and dropping it onto the griddle, where it sizzles. I pour myself a mug of coffee and lean against the counter.

"Dad at work already?" I ask, and she nods.

"How'd you sleep?"

"Like the dead," I half-lie. Once I finally drifted off, I slept well enough, but shutting my mind off enough to get there was a bit of a challenge. "What are you doing today?"

"Not much. A few errands. Why, what do you have going on?"

"Absolutely nothing. Want to hang out?"

My mother beams, and I realize in this moment that I'd forgotten a very basic truth about my mother: that there was never anything else in the whole world that she'd rather be doing than spending time with her kids. A faint pang of sadness hits me when I realize that, over the past four years, her opportunities to do so were probably pretty minimal. "I'd love to," she says, trying unsuccessfully to hide her joy.

"Okay." I glance toward the griddle, where the batter around the edges of the first slice are papery and dry, and she flips it with an expert flick of her spatula. "French toast, huh?"

She peeks up at me, and if I thought she might have forgotten the last time we ate French toast together, the half-guilty, half-worried look in her eyes gives away the truth. "I thought…it had been a while since I made it. I thought you might like it."

"It smells great. Thanks." The pinch of concern around her eyes disappears, and my mother smiles. I return it, bumping her shoulder gently with mine. "It's good to be home."

She grins, reaching around my shoulders and wrapping her small hand around my other bicep. "It's good to have you home."

June melts into July, and I relax back into the life I thought I left behind: weekend cookouts on the back deck, helping my dad flip burgers or marinate steaks; pickup basketball in the driveway whenever Emmett or Jasper stops by the house; sorting through old clothes and old books and old things in my bedroom so that my mother can take them to Goodwill and, ultimately, turn my bedroom into something like a study or a guest room. It isn't until August that the ghost that has danced around the periphery of my awareness since my return to Forks takes its place at center stage.

I'm sitting at the table going through my course catalog when my mother bustles into the kitchen, purse and keys in hand. "Okay, honey, I'm just running out for a bit, okay? I'll be back in plenty of time for dinner." I feel her lips on my hair and I glance up.

"Okay. Where are you headed?"

"Just to Port Angeles," she says, avoiding my eye to rummage in her handbag. "I have to pick up a few things for dinner, and something I ordered from the bookstore is in." I love my mother, but she's a terrible liar.

"Okay if I tag along?" I ask, closing the catalog and standing. "I haven't been to Port Angeles in years."

She's a deer in headlights, even as she nods. "Of course you can come."

I disappear up the stairs and grab a few things from my room before following her to the car. As we drive, her guilty conscience gets the better of her and she admits to maintaining contact with Bella, as if it were some great secret. I don't tell her that I'm secretly relieved to hear it; as angry, as heartbroken, as jealous, as hurt, as bitter as I was when everything with Bella went to hell, I wondered who would look out for her when she stopped letting me do it.

"Something at the bookstore?" I tease, and the way my mother flushes slightly reminds me of another pair of pink cheeks, and in this moment it seems absurd that I ever thought distance would make me forget anything.

"I visit," she confesses. My mother would have made a good Catholic.

"Mind if I take your place this time?" I ask, and I ignore the disappointed flicker in my mother's eyes. I know she's curious, but the last thing I need for this particular moment in my life is an audience. Or a cheerleader.

"Of course not," she replies, and I nod before looking out the windshield, taking deep breaths as I try to come up with an opening line. What does one say after four years of silence?

The bell that jingles overhead when I step into the freezing air of the tiny florist is chipper, and when the girl behind the counter looks up at me and smiles, I feel a surge of disappointment trip through me. "Can I help you?" she asks, blue eyes warm, and I hesitate.

"Callie, did you order more paperwhites? We have a few more orders for funeral arrangements." The voice is familiar, as is what it does to my heart, which is now galloping in my chest. Equally familiar are the brown eyes, which lift from the clipboard they are studying to focus on the tiny girl behind the counter before flicking toward me and widening. "Edward?" she asks, sounding as flabbergasted as if I were Santa Claus.

"Hi," I say. Not too bad, as opening lines go.

"Hi," she replies. "Um…" She glances past me, and I fight a smile.

"My mother's shopping."

"Oh," she says.

"I was wondering if you'd have a word with me," I say, and her eyes dart to the young girl beside her, who's watching our back-and-forth with undisguised curiosity.

"Um. Sure. Callie, you okay out here for a minute?"

The girl nods, and Bella gestures toward the back of the store. I follow her. Again.

"I can't leave the store," she apologizes, stepping through a large swinging door painted the same green as the forests in which we grew up. "Callie is still learning the ropes and I'm the only other one here today." The back room of the store looks like a workshop, long tables littered with the debris of floral arrangement: stems, leaves, petals, small chunks of green foam, scissors, ribbon, sheets of clear plastic and colored tissue paper. It's also freezing. "So," she says, but doesn't continue, and I nod.

"So."

"You look well." The minute the words are out of her mouth, she winces. Once upon a time I might have known why, but four years of distance – geographical and emotional – have made her less familiar to me. The old Bella would have winced in discomfort because she felt awkward, perhaps felt the words were too stiff, too formal. I opt to pretend this is the same Bella until I get confirmation otherwise.

"Likewise."

We stare at each other for a few moments before she blows out a breath. "Congratulations. On graduating. Your parents are really proud of you."

I smile. "Thanks." I look around the space. "Congratulations to you, too. This is…very cool."

She fidgets. "It's just a job."

"My mom tells me about your arrangements. She says you're very talented."

The blush. What it does to me. Still the same. "Yeah, well, your mother's always thought the best of me."

I see the opening, and I spent too many years not saying things. "She wasn't the only one."

Brown eyes fly to mine, and for once, I don't look away. The surprise registers on Bella's face, and I wonder if she's catching on to what I already know: things are different now. For what might be only the second time, she's the first to look away. The first time was when we were standing on a front porch all those years ago, and I asked her to pick me. "It's really good to see you," she says finally.

"You, too."

Another silence, and finally, the girl I loved makes a reappearance, her frustration getting the better of her. "I'm sorry I was such a coward," she says quickly, and if I weren't so stunned by the words, I'd tell her that her choice of them indicates the complete opposite to be true.

"I'm sorry I didn't listen better," I say instead.

"I would have had to talk for you to have had something to hear," she says, and we resume staring at each other.

I feel my courage falter, but I refuse to be the boy who runs. Not this time. "Bella, I did love you."

"I know," she says, and it's the second time she looks away, so I step into her personal space and curl my index finger under her chin to lift it before stepping back again. "I loved you too," she adds. "I just…" She trails off and shakes her head. "I didn't know what it meant. I didn't think it could mean what I wanted it to mean, what I was too stupid to realize I wanted it to mean. I knew I'd lose you eventually, and I thought it would hurt less if it was on my own terms." She gives one small, sad shake of her head. "I was so stupid."

I reach into the back pocket of my jeans and pull out the photo, laying it gently on the table to our right, picture side up. "I'm still this boy," I say, tapping it lightly with one finger. "Tell me you're still this girl."

Brown eyes track downward, and when they track back up, they are suspiciously bright. "I'm parts of that girl," she says. "I like to think I'm the better parts, but honestly, I'm still figuring that out."

"Okay," I reply, and we stall, lapsing into momentary silence before I move us forward again. I nod, blow out a breath. "So. Are we done, then?"

Her surprised eyes find mine before they dim and she drops her gaze, her posture deflating slightly, and when she speaks again, her voice is sad. "Of course. Yeah. No hard feelings." She looks back up at me, and there's that same sad, brave girl I remember, the girl who yelled and cursed at me on a porch so many years ago, pushing me away even as her fingers curled with the desperate need to hold on. I'm just glad that this time, I'm paying attention.

"Oh, you crazy girl," I say, pulling her into my embrace, and seventeen-year-old Bella makes a momentary appearance when she tenses, but then she melts into me and I feel something in me take flight. "I mean are we done with the past? The bad parts?"

I feel small hands clutch at the fabric of my shirt where it covers my lower back. "Can you really do that?"

"I missed you," I whisper, even though I've spent four years lying to myself about that very basic truth. "I want to know you again. What you've been doing while I've been gone. What you want to do next."

"Me, too," she says, releasing my shirt and stepping back.

"Have coffee with me next week."

She smiles, and I feel something in my chest loosen. "Okay."

When I pull my mother's Lexus sedan into the parking lot of the small café Bella named, my palms are slightly clammy around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. I dry them on my jeans as I peek through the windshield, trying to convince myself that this isn't stupid, that stepping out on a limb doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing so with a noose around my neck. That said, lessons learned the hard way are difficult to forget.

I swallow and glance at my reflection in the rearview mirror. I flatten my damp hair and wonder how much of the old me Bella will see when she looks at me. I can't deny that I'm still trying to figure out the Bella ratio: how much of the girl I loved is still there, and how much of her is a brand-new woman about whom I know almost nothing. I wonder, as I glance at the café's blank windows, how much a shared history is worth, and how much there is that I have to learn before I'll ever know Bella's heart again. I try not to wonder if I ever did to begin with.

Pulling the keys from the ignition, I step out of the car; the day is uncharacteristically sunny, and I squint as I approach the glass double doors. When I step inside, I scan the small café. Just when I'm convinced she hasn't arrived yet, I see a small hand raise in a half-wave from the booth beside the window in the corner; as I approach, I wonder when it was that the Bella-radar I once had that made me tuned to her like a compass needle lost its magnetism.

"I wasn't sure you were going to come in," she says when I reach the table, and I'm confused for a moment until I realize that I'm parked just outside, and she was apparently witness to my moment of hesitation.

"Just wanted to make a good impression," I half-tease, sliding into the empty booth seat across from her. But her shrewd brown eyes are watching me dubiously, and I shrug. "Nervous." I promised myself I wasn't going to lie to her anymore; I'll be damned if I start again now.

"Me too," she admits, exhaling as if in relief, and I wonder fleetingly how different things might have been if we'd been honest with each other as kids.

"Yeah?"

She nods. "Yeah." As if meeting my ante with a confession of her own, she peeks up at me. "You've always made me nervous."

Genuine surprise chases any trace of embarrassment from my face. "Why?"

"You were always just…so steady. So calm. So…self-assured and self-possessed. I was always intimidated by you."

"Are you kidding? Bella, you scared the hell out of me. I always felt like I wanted to take care of you, and yet I was terrified of you. It was the most confusing thing ever."

She half-laughs. "I've always had a good poker face."

"I'll say."

"I was always a good bluffer, too." I remember her words from years ago, her words last week: I hate you. And then, I loved you too. I don't know which is the lie to which she's referring, but for the first time in years, I let myself hope.

Grateful for the opening, I open my mouth to speak, but we're interrupted by a waitress. We both order coffees, and when she disappears, I'm trying to find my words again when Bella speaks, fiddling with the salt shaker.

"So tell me about Florida."

"It was hot. Tell me about you."

She looks up, pushes the salt shaker away. "Hot?" she presses.

"Stifling. You'd walk outside and you'd immediately be sweating, as if you'd just walked into a wet blanket. It was muggy, and training in that heat was brutal. But the baseball was good, and I made some good friends. School was school. The food sucked. I had an apartment that was too small. I missed winter. Now tell me about you."

"Were you ever in love?"

I lean back, and I have at least one answer to my question. The girl who always tried to brace herself for the worst is still very much alive. Now, though, she's paired with this brave woman who isn't afraid to ask the questions outright. "Yes."

She nods. "With Amy?"

"Yes."

"With anyone else?"

I tilt my head. "Yes."

She nods. "Good." The surprise must show on my face because she shrugs. "It's good, to love different people, even if doesn't work out. It teaches you what you like and what you don't."

It's a good point, one I never really thought about. "Have you?" I ask. "Been in love?"

"Yeah."

"With Jake?"

"Yeah."

"With anyone else?"

"Just the one," she replies softly, and with the way she's looking at me, I learn another truth: this Bella is more honest than the one with whom I grew up. This one puts words to the truths swimming in her eyes, the truths I spent years thinking I'd misinterpreted. Before I can reply, she blows out a breath and looks outside. "So. I'm a florist. I live in a small apartment – too small, really, but it's okay because it's mine. I go home to Forks for dinner once a week, on a night Charlie isn't working, and sometimes I sleep over. I don't have a degree and I don't have a life outside my job, and I don't even have a cat because I don't want to fulfill that particular cliché at the ripe old age of twenty-two. And when I was eighteen, I was stupid and reckless and selfish and scared and I hurt the best friend I ever had, and I've regretted it every day since."

I let all of her words settle over me, using the best ones like soft silk against my raw, scarred patches. Finally, I lean forward. "Where do you sleep?"

"What?"

"When you go home to Forks. Does Charlie still have your bedroom?"

"Of course he does."

I nod. "And when you look out your bedroom window, and you see my house, what do you think about?"

Something in her eyes changes, and I don't know if it's good or bad or happy or sad or what, and I realize that for all I know this girl – knew this girl – there's a whole hell of a lot I don't know, and no matter how brave or reckless I'm feeling, it's still possible that I could push too fast, too hard, and lose her all over again. Before I can apologize, take a figurative step back, the waitress appears with our drinks, placing the steaming mugs down between us and asking if we want anything more. After she retreats, Bella is gazing at the curl of steam wafting heavenward.

"You know, my mom never wanted to live in a small town."

I raise my eyebrows; I never knew much about Bella's mother, and I only remember her vaguely. "Really?" I ask, opting to just go with the abrupt subject change, and her non-answer.

"Really." She reaches out toward the small caddy between us and retrieves a pair of sugar packets, but she doesn't rip into them; instead, she fusses with them, pressing them together as if she's trying to merge the granules together despite the paper wrappers between them. "She wanted to go to New York City and be something big. Have a big life."

"Doing what?"

She half-laughs. "Who knows? I don't think she'd figured that out, exactly, but she knew she didn't want to spend her whole life in some tiny town in the middle of nowhere."

"So what changed?"

Her eyes pin me. "She got knocked up." I feel my mouth fall open slightly, and Bella nods. "Yep. Me." She shakes her head. "She never had any intention of marrying my dad, I don't think, or staying in Forks, but then she got pregnant and so she got married and she stayed. And then she died there. She never even got to see New York, let alone have the big-city life she grew up imagining for herself."

A pang of sympathy for Bella's mother knocks me in the ribs, but I can't quite pick my way through the confusion. "Bella, I don't—"

"She regretted her life, Edward. She never would have said it out loud, but sometimes I'd catch her dressing up in this fancy dress she had but never wore anywhere, or going through all of these vintage New York City postcards she'd had in high school. Whenever we went to the grocery store, she'd buy all of the fashion magazines and make me promise not to tell my dad because he thought they were such a waste of money. She was a big-city girl; she was just trapped in a small-town life." Suddenly, her voice drops. "I trapped her."

"No, you didn't," I say immediately, but she cuts me off.

"Obviously not intentionally. But my existence…that's why she never got to live her life. The life she wanted. And I know she loved me, and I know she loved my dad and she was happy enough, but she always regretted that she hadn't at least had the chance to try something else."

I shake my head, trying to root out the point she's trying to make. "I don't really—"

"I didn't want to do that to you," she says quickly, her gaze sliding out to the street beyond the café window, the half-moons of her fingernails turning white as she continues to squeeze the sugar packets. "I didn't want you to be with me and miss out on everything you could have had. Because that's what would have happened: either we'd have made a go of it and you'd have fallen in love with me and sacrificed opportunities to be wherever I was – because let's face it, my opportunities were always going to be limited – or we'd have tried it and realized it wasn't a good fit, and you would have tried to make the best of it because you felt sorry for me."

I feel a flash of anger at that. "I never felt sorry for you."

"I loved your family, Edward, but I always felt like a charity case. The poor, motherless girl whose own father didn't even want her around."

"I wanted you around," I say. "It was never about charity, Bella. Not for me. Please don't do that again."

"Do what?"

"Belittle how I felt for you. It was insulting when we were teenagers; I think it's even more insulting now."

"Sorry." She's back to the sugar packets. "I just…I spent my whole life feeling like a burden, but you were the only one who never made me feel that way. I mean, your family was great – it was nothing they did. It was just…how I felt. First I felt like a burden on my dad, then on your family…I couldn't have handled feeling like a burden to you, too. It felt easier to just…let you go."

"Even though I didn't want to go."

"I thought…I didn't think you could know what you wanted until you had a chance to experience it." At this, she looks up at me, her expression careful. "And when I saw you that Christmas…with Amy…I felt like I had done the right thing."

I shift in my seat. "Amy was…"

"She seemed really nice," Bella cuts me off. "I was surprised when your mom told me it didn't work out. She seemed…" Again, she looks out the window, and a sardonic half-laugh slips through her lips. "She seemed like exactly the kind of girl I'd have imagined you ending up with."

"She was great," I agree. "But, in the end, she wasn't who I wanted." She doesn't respond, so I take the risk of walking farther out on the already trembling branch. "I wish I could say the same about your boyfriend, but in truth, I always thought he was a Grade-A dickhead." It isn't until I've said the words that I realize I've phrased them in the past tense, and I lean forward. "Tell me you're not with that idiot anymore," I say, and she laughs, though it's tinged with something bitter – a sweet coffee drink made with beans just slightly too strong.

"I'm not with that idiot anymore," she says, and the bitterness is in her words as well, but the chocolate of her eyes is nothing but sweet.

"What…" I lick my lips. "If you don't mind my asking, what…happened? I never wanted to ask my parents, but…I was curious."

She shrugs. "We'd been having problems for a while. Then I found out I was pregnant. I went home to tell him, and he was passed out on the couch – wasted after a two-day bender. Which, sadly, wasn't all that unusual at that point. By the time he sobered up the next morning, I told him, and he went ballistic – freaking out about how we couldn't have a baby, he didn't want one, he wasn't ready…" She trails off, waving a dismissive hand in the space between us. "Typical bullshit. Anyway, not that I was over the moon to be knocked up by such an asshole in the first place, but I was upset, and hurt, and disappointed, and so I got in my car to get away from him just to cool off and collect my thoughts. Stupid – I was crying, and driving too fast, and I lost control and swerved."

I shake my head, rage flowing through me at Jake's unbelievable selfishness and residual pain as I remember the panic I felt flying across the country, praying that she would still be alive when I got there. "That was…"

"Stupid," she supplies, finally ripping the sugar packets open, and I shake my head again.

"I was going to say, that was one of the worst days of my life. My mother called me, and I thought…" I swallow. "Bella, I worried that we would never have a chance to fix this. The whole plane ride, I…"

"What?" She's frowning at me, her hand frozen just as it's about to tip the contents of the sugar packs into her mug.

"Huh?"

"Plane ride?" Suddenly, I remember asking my mother not to tell her I'd come. Desperate, as always, to hide my vulnerability from her. Then I remember how, despite my best efforts to shield my weak spots, she still managed to hit them every time.

"Yeah. I, uh…was there. I flew out that night."

Her frown deepens, and she lowers her hand, her coffee still unsweetened. "But…I never saw you. I didn't…no one ever told me."

"I asked them not to," I admit. "When the doctors came out, they told us that you were going to be okay, but that the baby…" I swallow and glance at her, but she's still looking at me expectantly. "And then Jake came, and I realized that you didn't need me there. So I thought it would be best if I just…went back to my life and let you get on with yours."

She shakes her head, staring at me, and I force myself not to fidget, not to squirm beneath her unrelenting gaze. Finally, she looks down, pouring the two packets of sugar into her coffee, the granules finally merging as she picks up her spoon. "When I saw you at Christmas, I thought I'd done the right thing. I thought you were…happy."

"I was."

She nods. "I was glad. But I was sad, too. Does that make any sense?"

"Yes." I remember the muddled feelings, the glee at knowing she was okay and the concurrent overwhelming jealousy when I pictured her pregnant with another man's child. The unbearable pain of letting go when you'd rather hold on. "It makes sense."

"It made me feel selfish."

I think about that, about all the time I'd spent angry, furious, hurt, heartbroken, silently throwing that word and so many others at Bella, even more hurt that she was no longer around to hear them, that the only place I'd had to fling them had been at her retreating back. "Bella, I want to say something now so it doesn't come out wrong later."

"Okay." She's wary.

"You very nearly broke my heart four years ago."

She nods sadly, her shoulders curling forward ever so slightly. "I damn near broke my own, too."

"Don't do it again."

"I won't," she promises.

"I deserved better," I say, and sad brown eyes climb to mine.

"You always did."

I shake my head. "Not better than you," I clarify. "But I deserved better than that. Even if you didn't love me the way I loved you, as your friend, I deserved better than that."

"Yes," she says, meeting my eyes. "You did."

"But Bella, there were parts of it that were my fault, too. I should have been braver. I should have told you I loved you when I first realized it, before I even kissed you during that stupid Spin the Bottle game. And I shouldn't have done that; our first kiss shouldn't have been a game. It should have been real, and honest. I shouldn't have even have let Jake be a possibility. But I was a coward, too, so it's not all on you."

She smiles, but it's a soft, sad smile, the kind of smile my mother used to get when she had to tell me or one of my brothers that the highest heights of our imagination weren't possible in the world in which we lived. I sort of hate that smile. "Edward, I knew. I knew before Spin the Bottle. But I could pretend it wasn't there. I couldn't pretend anymore after Spin the Bottle."

I'm embarrassed on behalf of my sixteen-year-old self. "Pretend you loved me?"

Her sadness only deepens. "Pretend I didn't."

This is it. I'm walking out to the edge of the limb, and I know it's going to break. What I don't know yet is if she's going to catch me before I fall, or if I'm going to hit every branch on the way down. "And now?"

"Now what?"

"What are you pretending now?"

She shakes her head, dark hair shifting against her shoulders. "I'm not pretending. Not these days."

"So?"

"So what?"

I blow out a frustrated breath, and I remember that sunny Sunday morning all those years ago, and the words we hurled at each other like darts. "I get you. I love you, and I get you. I get what it's like to be broken, okay? I get all the things you think I didn't get back then. I know for a fact that I loved you more than Jake did, because I could never not want a baby we made together, even if we were eighteen or twenty or fifty. I loved you then, and I love you now, but I need to know what you want that love to look like. If you want us to be friends, and that's all there will ever be to it, okay. If you want more, okay. But I need to know because I can't go back to where we were before. I can't go back to loving someone who refuses to love me back."

There are tears in her eyes, and a few years ago, I would have rounded the table and scooped her into my arms and apologized for making her cry and backed down, not forcing her to answer the question. But she's an adult now, and I'm not her surrogate brother anymore – never was, if we're honest – and I need this answer.

"I want more," she almost whispers, looking at me steadily, even though I can tell by the twitch in her fingertips, the shift of her weight on that plastic booth seat, that she desperately wants to look away. "I want you. I want it all."

I feel joy, untethered and untempered, surge through me. "Then take it," I tell her. "Because it's your turn to come after me."

She gazes at me, those brown eyes shifting, before a spark I haven't seen in years comes to the surface: the wild-haired girl from my childhood, rising to the challenge. "Buy me dinner."

"When?"

"I'm going to Charlie's tomorrow. The day after?"

"Where should I pick you up?"

She grins, the first honest, open grin I've seen from her in years. "You know that house you can see from your bedroom window?"

The next night, I'm lying on my bed, flipping through the fantasy baseball magazine that my dad pilfered from the hospital waiting room as the house once again settles around me. The sky outside my window is dark, and the hallway outside my cracked door is dark, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one awake until I see the crack of my door widen from the corner of my eye and my mother's face appears in the gap.

"Sleep soon?" she asks, and I nod, glancing at the small alarm clock beside my bed.

"Yeah."

She nods, then slips inside my room. Her red fleece robe is one that my brothers and I bought her for Christmas the year I graduated from high school, and it's too warm for the summer months, but something tells me she wears it all year long. "You turning in?" I ask, and she nods even as she lowers herself to sit on the edge of my bed.

"It's been so nice having you home."

I smile, teasing. "You remember it's only temporary, right?"

Her own smile is faintly sad. "I do. But it's still nice."

"It's nice to be home," I admit, and something in her shoulders relaxes. I realize, suddenly, that when I ran four years ago, Bella wasn't the only thing I left behind. I still don't regret it, but I realize now that the train wreck of Bella and me had more collateral damage than I realized at the time. "Thanks, Mom."

Her eyebrows arch. "For what?"

I shrug. "Just…for being Mom."

Her eyes sparkle, and I know she's doing the girly-emotional thing, so I close the magazine and drop it on my bedside table. "Well, thanks for being Edward."

I grin. "French toast tomorrow?"

She beams, and I'd never say it aloud, but my mother's sort of beautiful when she smiles like that. "You bet." She rises, pressing a kiss to my hairline. "Want me to close your curtains?"

"Nah, I still have to brush my teeth. I'll get them."

"Okay. Goodnight, sweetheart."

"Night, Mom."

She slips back through my door, and I rise from the bed, crossing my room to reach for my curtains. As I do, I spy a glowing yellow rectangle almost directly across from mine, the only lit window in the Swan house. I pause, hands still holding the curtains, thinking of the nights I spent watching a vacant window, wondering about the girl who only half-lived behind it. Suddenly, a silhouette appears, too small and too slight to be Charlie's, but too far to make out any detail. It pauses, arms stretched wide like an embrace, and I realize that Bella's likely about to close her own curtains. She pauses, and we gaze at each other across an expanse of darkness. Suddenly, she brings one hand closer to her body, and lifts it, as if in a wave. I smile to myself and return the gesture, and we stand there saluting each other for a minute before she finally pulls her drapes closed. A moment later, the room behind them goes dark.

I close my own, padding to the bathroom to brush my teeth before returning to my room and flipping off the light before sliding between my sheets. The house is silent, and my room is dark, and even though I can't see it, I know the photo of Bella and me from all those years ago is still across the room, pinned to my board, staring at me through the darkness.

You can't go home again. But perhaps, if you're very lucky, you can take the best parts of it with you when you leave.

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