AN: Sorry to break it to all of you, but I don't own Twilight. I do have a crazy-ass work schedule just like my girl Bella does. :o)

Thanks to Yenny for prereading. Anyone interested in beta reading for me, send me a PM. Thnx!

That Moment

Chapter 1 – Rewind

BPOV

"Yeah, Mom… Okay… Listen, I gotta go…Losing my signal…" I hit the end button and dropped my cell into the passenger seat. The light in front of me turned green so I hit the accelerator and pulled forward along with a hundred other cars, all full of people that were in just as big a hurry as I was. I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration as some asshole cut me off. I hate traffic. I hate people. Driving through this godforsaken town would be a hell of a lot easier if there weren't so many damn people around. Right? And it's not like I live in some big city where there are a million people trying to coexist in a five square mile area. No. I live in the small town of Forks, Washington. Where there are five hundred people spread out all over God's green acre. But the 'town' itself consists of exactly one main street and five traffic lights.

Thanks to someone's brilliant planning, the sawmill changed shifts at the same time the kids were dismissed from school. So every day at least half of the population was trying to drive through town to get to work at the same time the school bus drivers were trying to drop off busloads of energetic brats. I rubbed my temples and tried to take a deep breath before looking at the clock. Fuck. 4:15 already. My class was going to start in fifteen minutes and I still had to get there and make copies of the syllabus. So not a good way to start a new quarter.

Under normal circumstances I leave my full-time job early enough to miss all of this mess, but not today. Today my boss decided it would be a good day for a little one-on-one chat about my life. As if she knew anything about my life! It took me almost a half an hour to convince her that I'm just fine. So my husband – make that ex-husband – is a world class asshat. I'll deal with it and go on. It's not like my life is over just because my marriage is, right? Right. But apparently my work has been suffering as of late. Well no shit! I've had a lot on my mind, you know.

I finally managed to pull into the parking lot of the community college, parked my car and grabbed my messenger bag. I had exactly three minutes to spare before my class started. Since I was running so late, I didn't have a chance to read through my class list, which really irritates me. I hate walking into a classroom and having no idea who will be sitting there when I turn around. By the time the Xerox was finished spitting out my copies and I made it to the classroom, I was five minutes late. Perfect.

I allowed myself a deep, calming breath before I put on my pleasant-but-tough teaching face and turned to face the classroom. There were roughly twenty students staring back at me. Most of them were about my age, although a few were younger, probably right out of high school. Class dynamics had changed drastically in the last couple of years. It used to be that most of the students were "traditional", meaning right out of high school, with a few "non-traditional" students mixed in there. But as the economy had gone to hell in a hand basket, enrollment had increased dramatically. Most companies were offering college tuition as part of their severance packages now and quite a few members of our community were taking full advantage of the opportunity.

I had already started reading off the roll when one of the names caught my eye. Edward Cullen. Great. Could this day get any worse? I called his name and looked up to see if it was the same Edward Cullen that I had gone to high school with. His auburn hair caught my attention right away and his emerald green eyes locked on mine before I could look back down at my paper. Fuck. He was staring right at me.

"So this is Finite Math. My name is Bella Newton," I cringed at the sound of the name as I said it. That would have to be changed immediately. "Please, call me Bella." I went on to tell them a little bit about myself, how I worked full-time at the paper plant and taught part-time in the evenings, where I went to college, what I expect from my students, and so on and so forth. It was my typical first-class spiel. I would give the same speech later this evening to my beginning algebra class. Of course, all eyes were on me, but one set in particular was burning a hole in my back as I wrote the notes on the board. I didn't have to turn around to know it would be a set of piercing green eyes that I was feeling.

I spent the next hour and a half reviewing algebra techniques and pointedly trying to ignore the man sitting in the back row. And his friend. The big guy with curly brown hair and ripped muscles that kept trying to flirt with me. Yeah. I ignored both of them as they sat back there, staring at me and whispering back and forth to each other. Occasionally one or the other would chuckle and I would have to turn around and give them my stink eye. The one that said "shut the hell up and pay attention, dumbass".

When class was over I had several attendance slips that needed to be signed. The students that were on unemployment had to have a paper signed at the end of each class to prove to Uncle Sam that they were here. They lined up at the desk and handed me their papers one by one. I initialed them and handed them back over. I wasn't paying any attention to the students, so when one of them cleared his throat I looked up to see who it was. My eyes immediately locked on his. He smiled that crooked smile of his and my breath caught in my throat.

"You look really familiar to me," Edward said in that velvety smooth voice of his. "Have we met before?" Oh God. That voice sent shivers down my spine. Had I actually forgotten how incredibly sexy he sounded?

"Yeah, we've met." I signed his paper and handed it back to him. "You used to cheat off of me in physics class." He laughed, confirming my suspicion that he knew exactly who I was.

"Oh come on Swan. I'd like to think that you would remember me for more than just that." He winked at me. Feeling the weight of his gaze on me yet again sent a warm wave of energy coursing through my body. I swallowed hard. The past was the past and it needed to stay there.

"That was a very long time ago, Cullen." I gathered my books together and brushed passed him. "See you on Wednesday," I said over my shoulder as I left the room. Truth be told, I was dying inside just at the sight of him after all these years. This quarter would be the death of me.

I managed to put him out of my mind long enough to teach my second class of the evening. It was a typical algebra class. No surprises in the roll call, thank God. I don't think I could have handled two in one day. There was this one guy, though, that I could tell right away would be trouble. He was kind of cute, had this Brad Pitt type of thing going on with a leather jacket and his dirty blonde hair pulled back in a long ponytail. Completely went off on me when I told the class they couldn't use their cell phones as calculators. He actually demanded that I buy him a calculator since he didn't have one. As if! Over privileged asshole.

It was almost nine o'clock when I finally got back in my car to leave the college. I took a deep breath and hit the speed dial on my phone.

"Hey Babe," my cousin Alice answered on the first ring. "Are you on your way?"

"Yeah, I'll be there in a few. How's Charlie?"

"He's great. Where does he get all that energy from?" She laughed, but I knew she was only half-joking. Charlie was a handful. Or two. Bouncing off the walls did not begin to describe my severe ADHD nine year old son.

"I wish he'd share some of it with me. I'm worn out."

"I bet you are. You work too hard, you know."

I snorted. Of course I work too hard, but someone has to pay the damn bills. Mike was a worthless lazy ass long before I filed for divorce, and that sure as hell hadn't changed any.

I picked Charlie up from Alice and we headed home. Of course Alice had already made sure he ate and took his bath, so all I had to do was put him to bed. She was a lifesaver for sure. I have no idea what I would do without her. I warmed up some leftover manicotti and turned on House. No matter how hard I tried, though, my thoughts kept coming back to Edward Cullen. I had forced myself to not think about him for so long that I had almost forgotten why. Eventually I gave up trying to block the memories from my mind. I turned off the TV, washed up my plate and went to bed. As I lay alone in the dark, I let my mind drift back to high school, back fifteen years ago to when I first met him.

I had moved to Forks my junior year of high school to live with my dad. I was shy, quiet, and backwards back then. Edward was the quarterback on the football team and all around most popular guy in the school. I was lucky enough to be paired with him as my lab partner in Chemistry class. For five months we sat side by side in that class and never spoke to each other. I didn't speak to hardly anyone my junior year, actually.

A week in to summer vacation my dad decided to drag me off on a camping trip with none other than Carlisle Cullen and his son Edward. Looking back on it, I have no idea what my dad was thinking, forcing his seventeen year old daughter to spend a week in the wilderness with a teenage boy that had a less-than-spotless reputation. I'm pretty sure that at that point he was still pretending that I was the son he always wanted instead of the daughter that he was stuck with.

The second day there, my dad and Carlisle went fishing, leaving Edward and I alone at the camp. You have to realize, this was the nineties. Laptops and cell phones and portable video games were not really an option back then. It was so freaking boring.

"So is there anything to do around here," I finally asked him. "I'm going to die of boredom this week, I swear to God."

He stared at me like I had two heads or something.

"What?" I finally asked, unnerved by his piercing green eyes.

"You've never spoken to me before."

"You've never spoken to me before either," I pointed out. "But I didn't just assume you were mute."

He laughed. I laughed. The tension between us was broken. We spent the morning talking and joking around. In the afternoon we went for a hike and explored some nearby caves. It was the first time since I moved to Forks that I had let myself have fun, of any kind. Edward was cool and collected and confident in himself, all things that I wasn't. I had known right away that we weren't even close to the same playing field on so many different levels.

But for that one week it didn't matter that we were polar opposites. It didn't matter that we had basically nothing in common. For that week we were the best of friends. We talked about our likes and our dislikes, our pet peeves, our plans for the future. By the end of the week he knew me better than anyone else ever had.

On the last day of the trip we had been hiking again and came across a beautiful meadow of wildflowers. I laughed when I saw it because it looked like something out of a movie. I stood in the middle of the meadow and held my arms straight out, spinning myself around in circles like a top, faster and faster. When I stopped, the world kept spinning around me. I took a few steps and stumbled, but I didn't fall. Edward's arms caught me and pulled me upright. He held me as I laughed, and he chuckled along with me. When the world finally stopped spinning, I looked up into his eyes and he looked down into mine and we were standing there in the middle of this beautiful field of wildflowers and there was that moment. You know that moment. The one where you just know he's going to kiss you. He was going to. I knew it. I felt it. I wanted it.

But he didn't.

Instead he closed his eyes and released me from his embrace. When he reopened them, they were void of passion, void of emotion. He smiled at me, but I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking "Stop while your ahead dumbass. You really want to make out with the socially deprived police chief's daughter? Yeah right." That was the moment I realized it, that there was no way in hell that Edward Cullen would ever want me. He was only socializing with me at all because there wasn't anyone else within a hundred mile radius.

I had shrugged it off, pretended like I hadn't recognized what had just happened for what it really was, and I had waited until I got home that night before I let the tears fall. Somewhere in the middle of my heartbreak I had convinced myself not to ever let him know how much he had affected me, and to never give him the chance to do it again.

I had failed miserably.

EPOV

"I'm telling you, that chic's wound so tight, all you would have to do is find the right string to pull and hold on for the ride." Emmett slammed his beer down on the table.

"Yeah, well, good luck with that one Em," I seethed as I lifted my own beer and took a long drink. The dimly lit bar and eighties rock music wasn't exactly helping my mood. I was anxious, upset, and edgy. Okay, I was pissed off. And I had the intense desire to punch something. Or someone. Hard.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Emmett watched me for a long moment, gauging my mood and coming to whatever conclusions he needed to in that overactive brain of his.

"Come on Em. You know who that was, don't you?" As soon as she had started to speak in that classroom I had known it was her. I would know that voice anywhere. It was deep, husky even and belied her true tomboy nature. Her brown hair hung loosely over her shoulders, pulled back on the sides to keep it out of her eyes. Those eyes; pools of milk chocolate that a person could sink into and never return. The second she called me name I felt like I was in high school all over again, trying to hide my erection so she wouldn't have a clue how much I wanted her.

Emmett had a dumbfounded look on his face that told me he didn't have a clue.

"That, my friend, was Miss Isabella Swan, the ice princess herself." I took another drink as recognition dawned in his eyes.

"No shit?" He cracked up laughing. Emmett was the only person that knew of my secret obsession with Swan. In high school I had been on a mission, to find out why she was as cold as she was to everyone, especially me. Especially after we went camping and I shared some of my deepest secrets with her.

"I talked to her after class. She fucking blew me off and never looked back. Just like old times." My bottle slammed down on the table. "What the fuck did I ever do to her? Huh? I was nothing but nice to that bitch."

Enter Rosalie, Emmett's six foot tall, blonde and beautiful wife. She sat down next to him and eyed me like I was crazy or something.

"Who are we talking about?" She picked up Em's beer and took a drink. Neither one of us answered her. I just glared, trying to get across the whole it's-none-of-your-fucking-business with me eyes. She shrugged her shoulders like she really didn't give a shit if I told her or not. "Maybe she didn't want 'nice' from you, Edward."

I stared at her in confusion and probably looked like a true dumb ass. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? If she didn't want me to be nice, what did she want?

"Okay Cullen, after all these years I would think you would have learned something about women. Suppose you liked someone, really liked her, but she never gave any indication that she wanted to be more than just friends. Would you be willing to put yourself out there and put your feelings on the line when you felt there was a good possibility that she didn't feel the same way and would not only shoot you down, but also ruin your friendship with her as well?"

I heard what she was saying, but was there any way it was possible? All this time Bella had actually had feelings for me and was just hiding it? Highly unlikely. She was cold to everyone, not just me. Always had been.

But what if, just what if, Rose was right?

I said my good-byes and left the bar. I had to burn through this energy. I couldn't change the past and there was no sense dwelling on it either. I started running. The cool air calmed my nerves, the pounding of my feet against the pavement set the pace for the rest of my system, evening out my blood pressure and draining the tension from my muscles. It had been years since I had ran like that. I didn't pay any attention to where I was going, I just went.

As my feet pounded against the sidewalk I let my mind wander. Of course it went right back to that camping trip. The first day there I was helping set up the tents when Chief Swan pulled me aside.

"Listen here, son," he had said. "If I catch you looking at my daughter wrong this week, we'll have problems. If you touch my daughter this week we'll have even bigger problems. Do you understand? She's off-limits."

At that point in time Bella hadn't ever even spoken to me, so I figured it was going to be a very long, very boring week. I was wrong. Dad and Chief Swan had gone fishing every day, leaving me alone with her. And every day I would get the same warning. As the week went on we got to know each other. We had so much more in common than I would ever have imagined. She was smart, funny, and of course beautiful.

The last day we went hiking and I almost kissed her. Almost. But her father's words echoed through my mind and I stopped myself.

"Fuck me!" Yes, I actually said it out loud to myself. My feet stopped moving and I leaned over, putting my hands on my knees and breathing hard. What if Rose was right? What if by not kissing her that day she figured I wasn't interested in her. What if that one moment had decided our fate?

If it was true, then I had truly fucked up that day. I felt like a damn light bulb turned on in my brain. Looking back at the time we spent together with this new little insight changed the entire perspective of our relationship. She didn't talk to me for three months after that day.

Which means that the second time I had fucked up, it had been major…huge…gigantic. In fact, she left town that night and I hadn't seen or heard anything from her since. Until today.

I gave myself enough time to catch my breath before I turned in the direction of home and started walking. Bella was back in Forks for a reason. Maybe, just maybe, I would have the chance to prove to her that I wasn't the same dumbass that I was in high school anymore.


AN: Reviews are awesome. Just sayin... :o)