A/N 1: Hello, all my loverly readers (or otherwise silent lurkers). I know that when I replied to all of your precious reviews on Kingdom Come, I told you that I would be updating within a few days of posting the first chapter. Alas, that fic has me so completely overwhelmed and anxious already that I needed to take a few day's break, and then that few days turned into a few weeks, and then it was exams and then I had to pack my entire life into the back of a Chrysler Aspen and move 900 miles, and I suck. So these little bitties are to tide you over, bribe you to stay on board for my other whatsits, and to PLEASE forgive me for all-but abandoning Kingdom Come, especially so soon after it had begun (though I promise that I'm working on it). I recently restructured and am completely rewriting it! Which is good news, because the first version sucked. I'm wicked sorry, but please read, review, and enjoy these little stories.

Anywho...this will be a set of little vignettes, sort of. They're a little longer than typical drabbles, and a little shorter than typical one-shots. As in, it is physically impossible for me to write anything less than 400 or 500 words, so I can't rightly claim that these are drabbles. These are ideas that strike me when I'm cooking, when I'm on the tube, when I'm listening to music. Basically when I'm breathing. They won't always be happy, sometimes angsty, sometimes sad, just a wide range of topics and emotions and they are in no way shape, or form related. This collection is named for a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I really hope you enjoy. And sorry for the extraneously long AN.

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A/N 2: This one in particular is set post-Twilight - there's an entire summer we missed out on between Twilight and New Moon, and this is a little bit that was inspired by the wet, sweltering heat Buffalo was experiencing at the time of its writing, and is dedicated to my dear friend who saved me from a certainly horrendous lab grade on a certain Thursday evening, and to whom I promised something new to be posted.There'll be a few more of these "missing summer" bits in the future, I think, including, but not limited to, Edward's birthday.

Fire and Ice.

The air was hot and sticky and increasingly uncomfortable. The humidity in the atmosphere was nearly suffocating, infesting every crevice of the room and every breath inhaled with its intense asphyxiating powers. It was the warmest day Forks had seen in years - the heat index was nearly one hundred ten degrees.

"Stupid global warming," Bella muttered angrily.

Bella laid on top of her light, cotton summer sheets, trying her hardest to be perfectly still and not use any energy or produce any extraneous heat. Her father had offered to set up the single-unit air conditioner in her room, but she had declined on the grounds of not wanting to add to the problem that was causing this weather in the first place. Truthfully, she'd not wanted to block the only window in her room with a large, boxy air conditioner when her own personal air conditioner used the same window to sneak inside every evening - she'd rather suffer than lock Edward out.

Suddenly, the aforementioned cooling contraption sprang agilely through the wide-open window, his hair wind swept, messy and sticking up in every direction imaginable, but so sexy that Bella felt her already sky-rocketing body temperature inch up a few more degrees.

"Edward!" she cried, startled, not helping herself as she shot upright on her bed. He'd been absent the entire morning, off at some nearby nature reserve hunting large game. The typical shot of intensive relief splintered through her veins, the fist of dull despair that clenched her heart releasing its iron grip. She sighed, happy again for the first time in hours. Plus, seeing as his body temperature was a third of what hers was, he would serve once again as a perfect cooler for overheated flesh.

"Oh, Edward," she sighed again, eased. He was immediately at her side, pressing his icy lips to her forehead, and she believed she'd never felt anything quite as delicious.

"Lay down with me," she said, trying futilely to move his marble arms down to the surface of the bed. One of his perfect eyebrows arched, suspicious, as he held her mostly at an arms distance.

"Oh, not like that," she said chidingly, "I'm hot." His second eyebrow joined his first near his hairline, and she immediately realized her mistake. "You jerk! It's a hundred degrees outside!"

He chuckled softly, sweetly, his cold breath fluttering through her hair and cooling the sweat on her scalp. Her fingers dug into the fabric of his thin black v-neck t-shirt, trying to bring herself closer to him in an attempt to lessen the effects of the heat stroke she felt coming on.

"I'm just kidding," he said, smirking at his own little joke. He let the tips of his fingers trail down the line of her jaw, leaving behind a path of fiery sensations on her flesh, completely defeating the purpose of lessening the heat flowering throughout her body. "Hmm..." he mumbled, "You do feel warmer than normal."

She glared heartily at him, chagrined but eager to chill her burning skin. He finally pulled her into the circle of his arms and laid them both down on her damp pillow, at long last granting her assuagement. She pressed herself completely and totally against him, winding her legs through his, curling her fingers through his silk-like hair, and pressing her face in between his shoulder and his cheek.

She sighed contentedly, experiencing every cell in her body both burn and freeze at the same time, the former sensation erupting from the center of her heart and spreading throughout her body like wildfire, the latter at long last alleviating her skin-deep fever.

"Thank you," she murmured, relieved.

fin.