I don't own these characters. They are the sole property of Stephenie Meyer. I only borrow them. No humans are permanently harmed through my actions, though I do confess to harassing, annoying, torturing, and exasperating them – just because it's fun. I make no money from my little stories, sad day. I only play in the sandbox, I didn't build it.

Author's Note: If you happened to read "The Bigger They Are" this isn't that kind of story. This one is dark and explores the idea of redemption and forgiveness and consequences. Being forgiven does not necessarily mean finding happiness, nor does it mean that the consequences of our actions are voided. Sometimes it's about the suffering and the lessons we learn from it – and it is that suffering and pain that makes us better people. This isn't a light or fluffy story. And it might not be the type of story you're looking for. That's okay. No hard feelings. My mother says that sometimes I just need to indulge in my Irish, angsty side. Perhaps she's right. Anyway, I'm almost done writing the last chapter of this story, so there will be no delays in posting. It is six chapters long with an epilogue that I might just include with the last chapter. Sometimes the ending that is right isn't necessarily a happy one.

Of Thorns

Chapter 1: No Longer in Service

"I'm a bad boy because I don't even miss her.

I'm a bad boy for breaking her heart…"

Free Fallin' by Tom Petty

The man jerks in his sleep, still fast in the grip of his dream. The dream. She is perched above him, her breasts bouncing gently as she rides him. Her smile is tender and loving as she gazes down on him.

"Edward," she whispers and his heart still remembers her voice. It is unforgettable. On the day he dies, he will remember her voice. He will know it. "I love you so much."

He wants to tell her the simple truth that has both defined and destroyed his life.

He opens his mouth to speak those words. Those simple, sacred words. "I love-" She puts her fingers over his lips, stopping the sounds he wants to say. As she always does. Her smile fades, leaving only sorrow in her lovely, familiar face.

"No lies," she murmurs, her tone pleading with him. "Please…no lies. I can't bear it when you lie to me."

He pauses and then nods. He knows the words are not a lie. He knows the only lie is the life he lives. But for her, he can remain silent. So he does. He thrusts up into her, his body saying what she won't let his words express.

He feels his orgasm closing in on him, relentless and undeniable. She demands that from him; he is helpless to stop it. He wants to stop it because he knows once he finds his pleasure, he will lose her. Again. It is always the same. First joy, then loss. The highest high, the lowest low. Redemption and damnation.

"Bella!" he gasps, holding tightly to her hips and she moves faster. Faster. He is going to die from the sensations that wash over him. Then she throws her head back and calls out his name and it is the sweetest sound he has ever heard. It is enough to make him tumble over the edge.

She shudders and he trembles, both from his pleasure and the knowledge of what is about to happen.

She leans down and kisses his cheek, tenderly. It is a good-bye and they both know it. He tries to hold her, but she disappears and he is left with his spent cock flopping uselessly on his belly, still moist with her heat and his own seed.

He closes his eyes in despair. She's slipped from his grasp…as she always does.

But he will not remember the dream.

He never does.

~OT~

I didn't wake up so much as regain consciousness. That's how it usually worked. I no longer knew what genuine sleep felt like. Instead, I passed out, tumbled into the black abyss and that was that. It was easier that way, less messy. I was all about making things easy these days. Anything else was just too much effort.

I blinked up at the ceiling, but it took me a few minutes to recognize it as my own. That happened more than it should probably. But what did it really matter? My place, someone else's… It was all the same really. I was still lost no matter where I was. I didn't really mind. I found a sort of odd comfort in the feeling of perpetual wandering.

Fuck… I rubbed my hands over my face but it didn't help me feel more human at all. It just made me feel…disconnected. Then I felt something soft and warm shift at my side. Big brown eyes opened wide and she smiled at me.

I fought the urge to shove her out of my bed. Wrong brown eyes, too light, no depth, there was really nothing significant there…

The thought flashed through my head before I could stop it. Before I totally lost my shit, she closed her eyes and mumbled, going back to sleep, or maybe passing out again. Who knew? Who cared? As long as she didn't fucking overdose and die in my bed. The publicity would be horrendous. A part of me knew I should have been horrified at my callousness, but mostly I didn't give a shit that I didn't give a shit.

Then something stirred on my other side. I turned to see blond hair tumbling over my pillows. Right… I kind of remembered now. I vaguely remembered getting drunk – really drunk. And then I had wrapped up my evening with a little weed and coke. It had been pretty much a typical Tuesday night. Well actually, I had topped it off with the two women in my bed.

Again, nothing out of the ordinary.

There was a time when I would have at least attempted to remember their names, but now I didn't even try. They were interchangeable, disposable. Hell, I could probably replace myself in my life with some other self-absorbed prick and no would notice the difference. Shit, that was edging dangerous toward self-pity and self-pity would mean I cared.

Enough.

I eased out of the bed and heaved a sigh of relief when neither of the women woke up. I'd throw them out later, but right now I needed a little hair of the dog that had chewed me up into little pieces and barfed me out on the expensive carpet. Luckily, there was always lots of booze –and drugs - in my house. There was always lots of everything in my house… I stumbled over a broken table. I wanted to be angry about it, but the truth was I really didn't give a fuck about anything I owned. If it broke, I'd buy another one. If I lost it, I'd get something better.

Having money gave me the freedom not give a flying fuck.

As I lit up a joint and sucked in a little bit of I-don't-give-a-damn, I wondered why I had brought the brunette home. What fevered, damaged part of my brain had thought that was a good idea? Usually I avoided brunettes like the plague they were. She had, however briefly or inaccurately, reminded me of her. That alone should have been enough for me to shove her off of my lap. Dark hair stirred up dangerous memories, forbidden thoughts and longings. As always, thoughts of her caused a pang of something that resembled shame to run through me. Who knew I still had even a part of my conscience left?

I'd have to get rid of that immediately. That sort of shit could ruin me. It was the one luxury that I couldn't afford. It was excess baggage, an unnecessary complication. My life was complicated enough. Killing myself was taking far longer than I had hoped. Of course, I was taking the long and winding road, lacking the balls to go straight for the prize. There were times when I longed for the courage to simply pull a trigger or take a flying leap off a cliff somewhere. Hell, I'd settle for driving my car into a wall. It might be messy, but it would be over. There would at least be peace in over.

I closed my eyes and decided to let the memories come. I was already hurting. Why not just go for broke and embrace the agony? There was something freeing in it, something dark and destructive that called out to the shadows inside of me. I wanted to lose myself in that cold embrace. I hungered for destruction. I craved it, chased it.

One day I would find it and the final crash would be both glorious and complete – a personal little Hiroshima. Or Armageddon. Maybe I was thinking too small. Planetary destruction seemed more the ticket.

The pain was not just mental. The older I got the higher the physical price I paid for my slow self-destruction. The toll on my body was accumulating. Flesh and bone reminded me that I was not indestructible or immortal. For that I was grateful. If I couldn't die, how could I end the pain? I was too much of a coward to just smash the hourglass of my days, so instead I watched as the grains trickled down, shaking it every now and then to speed up the process. Slowly…slowly…one day I'd push too far and the last grain would slip through and the pain would finally stop.

I wasn't about to quit the process; I just knew that come morning I would hate myself as my body protested my abuse. Well, hate myself more. It was pretty much a full time occupation. I was good at it. Practically a virtuoso by now and I was committed to my craft.

I liked it that way. If you can't despise yourself then who can you despise?

Lucky me, I could even pinpoint the exact moment in time I'd started to hate myself – and with good reason. It had been outside a concert hall. We'd just played a show and we were fresh off the high of the crowd, not to mention a few well chosen pharmaceuticals. I was fucking stoked, in more ways than one. Back at the hotel I had a little hottie waiting for me. She was small and blond and had a mouth that would make Ron Jeremy weep with joy, or at least that's what Sim had told me. He would know; she had blown him in the tour bus three weeks ago. After I let her suck me off with that glorious mouth, I planned to bend her over the couch and fuck her. I was in the mood to claim her ass, just as a little variety. After that, I would kick her out. I wouldn't ask her name. I wouldn't even pretend to want her number. I would just be done with her. I would come inside of her – one way or the other - and then kick her out.

I had a full agenda planned.

Then I had looked over at the crowd of screaming girls and I had seen her. Bella. A girl from a dream I had once had when I pretended that I was something better than what I was. Like all dreams, she wasn't supposed to be here, in the now. While I was awake. She belonged irrevocably to the land of lost fantasies and things that were no longer possible.

It was a shock to see her there. Our eyes met and she smiled and I knew in that instant that she still thought I was the nice guy she'd dated all through high school. Her sweetness and goodness shone like a beacon on her pretty face. She was that reassuring glow in the coalmine, a lighthouse in the storm.

But I neither wanted nor needed to be saved. I had set my course and I intended to see it through. I'd rather have a short and spectacular life than a long and insignificant one.

Just like that, I remembered that she was nothing more than a flashing sign that said "Small town sucker!" I felt sorry for her; I felt smothered. She was a pitiful reminder of what I might have become if I hadn't gotten out of there. I couldn't let her get close. She would ruin everything; suck me back into the currents of the life I had left behind.

So I let my eyes slip away from hers as if I hadn't seen her. She knew I had. Just as I knew that she knew. But like always, she let it go and moved away, not even bothering to give me a look of reproach. It was almost like she was the one who had broken my heart, not the other way around. But we both knew the truth.

I was the one who had done the breaking. By the time I turned around to make sure she was gone, I had fallen victim to the memory of what I had done to break her.

Typically, I hadn't even had the balls to just end things with her. No, not me. That would have been the decent thing to do, but so much messier – for me at least. So I just stopped calling, hoping she would get the message sooner rather than later. I was still capable of guilt in those days. Talk about a useless emotion. I was in my first year of college and I had found a band to jam with to relax. Music was my saving grace.

And one day it would kill me. I could hardly wait.

We got some local gigs and I had discovered that girls really liked musicians. I fucked around and pretended there wasn't a sweet, brown-eyed girl waiting for me in my shitty little hometown. I acted like she wasn't sitting at home, being good and being faithful while I was being neither of those things.

The more I fucked around the more I realized that I wasn't worthy of her, so the more I fucked around. It was a vicious cycle of betrayal and desperation. I told myself that it was better for Bella that way. I wasn't good enough for her; I had always known that. I was just proving my own point now. I didn't want to face the scene that would surely ensue when I told her I didn't want to see her anymore. And what if she forgave me? Her grace would be my undoing. So I took the easy way out and hoped that time and distance would do the job for me. It did.

Bella had always been smart and she got the picture. After a few weeks, she stopped leaving messages on my phone. A few months later, she graduated and moved away to college, or at least that's what Alice told me. By that time my band had started to make it. We had had the outrageous good fortune to open for a band whose original opening act had come down with the flu. Their bad luck was our good fortune. That band we opened for made it big and they didn't forget us. The fucking flu had changed our lives.

Soon we had a recording deal and I had a new phone and phone number because I was so fucking important and Bella wouldn't have been able to leave a message even she wanted to. And it was good to be me, so easy to forget small town girls with big brown eyes and trusting hearts. Before I knew it, our band was the next big thing and my parents and sister were moving to LA to be near me. All of my ties with Forks were severed. I didn't have the sense to be ashamed of my relief.

It had been seven years since I left Forks, more than five since I'd seen Bella and almost six since I heard her voice.

For some reason, though, she was weighing on my mind today. Maybe it was the pair of brown eyes – the wrong eyes, a small voice inside my head reminded me – that were in my bed. Or maybe I was just… tired.

I was so fucking tired of it all. The drugs, the booze, and hell even the women had been blurring into each other for years now. I was tired of the fights with my band mates. I was sick of not having any privacy, of feeling like a fucking prisoner in my own home. I was sick of feeling sick, tired of being tired.

My phone was in my hand before I realized what I intended to do with it. My fingers were punching in the numbers that by some miracle I had never forgotten even after all of the shit I had done to my brain. Somehow, I needed to hear her voice. I had a funny feeling that it just might heal me somehow. I didn't want to be healed, but maybe I needed to be. I was too fucked up to dispute the logic of that little argument.

I knew it was selfish, but I never pretended to be anything but an egotistical, self-centered bastard. It was my nature, the way I was wired. I just had the oddest feeling that if I could hear her voice, something inside of me, whatever small bit of goodness that was left in me, might be roused back to life. It would pull a Lazarus and somehow I might be all right. I might even feel like a human again, instead of this soulless monster I had somehow allowed myself to become.

"The number you have reached is no longer in service. No further information is available about-"

I hung up.

And for the first time in years, I felt tears on my cheeks. Of course they were tears of self-pity and frustration, but I was still surprised that I was capable of them at all.

What the fuck should I do now?