December

by StarryEmeraldNights

The summer after graduating high school, Bella Swan accepts a job at the CIA. Her first assignment – undercover at Columbia University in New York. Befriend the boy named Edward Cullen, and obtain the confession you need from him about the activities of his friends. If you have to, make him fall in love with you – but whatever you do, don't fall in love with him back. AU AH

I had my eyes closed as the plane lifted off the tarmac, but soon I opened them, and I turned towards the window. Before me, the city lights of Manhattan were soaring into view, a crawling spiderweb of a million people in a million different homes.

There were so many moments in that city I wish I could now forget – the first time we kissed, in the rain, under a bridge in Central Park. Walks through the most lively of places. Running across the Brooklyn Bridge. When he took my breath away, seeing him waiting for me at the bottom of the staircase at Grand Central Station. He stared into my soul that day as if I was his world.

Reader, I played him. It had been my job to play him; it had been my job to keep people safe. But what I did to him – it was unforgivable.

For what had not been my job, was to realise what a truly good person he was, despite the actions of his friends. What had not been my job, was to fall in love with him at the same time as I played him for a greater cause.

By the time I realised I was falling for him, it was absolute free fall. Once you've leapt off the roof, there's no stepping back onto the ledge. So this year - it was incredible. This December, magical. This winter was the most beautiful of my life.

But, just as I always knew would happen, I eventually ran out of time. I had achieved what I needed to do, I had done my job. And then like I was told to, I packed up and went away.

This afternoon, I left him. I left him shattered, confused, played; and it shattered me to do it.

I will return home to Arizona for a little while, on decompression leave. Then I will return to Langley. But I know at this moment, as I tear my eyes away from Manhattan and hesitatingly close my eyes, that I have left a piece of me behind on the tarmac.

Because when I close my eyes, all I can see is his face, and that Columbia library, and the view from his Aunt Esme's house across Rhode Island Sound. And I know, as I enter my own kind of personal, barren December, that those magical, real December moments will never fade.

December was everything to me.

– and Edward –

I am so, so sorry. And I hope you know that there will never be a time when I will not stop, and wait, and think of this December, and pray that you might one day forgive me for what I did to you.