Stephenie Meyer owns any Twilight characters and Twilight plot lines that may appear in this story. The remainder is my original work. No copying orreproduction of this work is permitted without my express written authorization. Don't steal, it isn't polite.

So wow! I am completely IN LOVE with the response I've received over the prologue! Looks like there are more closet/out of closet Carlisle lovers than I realized! WOOT! So here is the official first chapter. I couldn't have done this without the support of my Beta Isabel. She's a genius, for realz.

See you down below!

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Chapter One

~~The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning. –Ivy Baker Priest

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BPOV

As my father threw the last box into the rented U-haul, I groaned at the mere thought of where the next handful of unending hours would lead me. I was half-way through my senior year of high school, and we were moving…

…to a dreadful place.

…a place that repelled the sun and disguised the earth in green, mossy growth.

Forks, Washington.

My mother and father grew up in Forks. I was born there. It was where I spent the first three years of my life, but Arizona was the home I knew. The barren land was beautiful to me, having stimulated more lyrics inside my mind than any other inspiration I'd found.

I would have to get used to writing songs about rain and dreary hours.

I had been crammed into the small cab of the U-haul between my mother and father as we made our way toward the rainiest place in the continental U.S. I offered to drive our SUV, but Charlie refused, opting for the car dolly when he rented the U-haul. It unnerved me that he believed my driving so unsuitable.

My mother was never much for operating a vehicle of any kind, so there we were, snug as a bug in an obscene moving van.

The reprieve of a random hotel room here and there had split up the monotony of our travels, which was surely the sole reason that my sanity had remained intact.

My grandmother had been diagnosed with colon cancer one month before our move. I barely knew her, my mother and father distancing us from their past for reasons that hardly seemed to matter anymore. I'd visited her in Forks, mostly when I was younger, but it had been ages since I'd seen her. She had been deteriorating rapidly and my father wanted to be near his mother for her final days. The Swan residence would be left to him, and would now be our new home.

As we traveled down the weary highway with our destination nearly within our grasps, one phone call had turned the cab of our U-Haul into a sea of twisting devastation.

My grandmother had died one hour before we entered the town of Forks.

Too little, too late. As are most things in life.

I cried for my father, whose trembling hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white. I cried for my mother, who mourned her mother-in-law the only way she knew how. Dramatically. I cried for my grandmother, the woman I barely knew but whose blood was flowing rapidly through my veins.

I grabbed my notebook and scribbled lyrics furiously, the chorus filled with the words "our dying day."

I was a song-writer. Not a poet, not a journalist, not a novelist. I wrote songs. Words were the only thing in this world that brought me to life, but they were nothing without the right melody. I wasn't very popular in Arizona, so leaving my classmates behind wasn't a particularly difficult ordeal.

I was the quirky girl in school. The girl who had her hair in randomly-placed ponytails and wore bandanas over her head. The girl who drew stars along her eyes with a fine-tipped marker because she thought it would help her shine. The girl who had ink all over her hands, her jeans, her shoes, because while she knew the lyrics were always waiting in the midst for her to grasp, it never occurred to her to carry paper with her pen.

My eyes were very large, very wide, very expressive. The same color as a coffee bean - as a thousand coffee beans. I bit my nails and I wore a rubber band around my wrist to snap when I became nervous. I painted my chucks purple and I drew large flowers across my jeans, because I was Bella Swan. I wasn't normal…I was merely myself.

We pulled into my Grandma Swan's driveway, or ours, now that she had passed. My father immediately unloaded our vehicle from the dolly before moving along to the reclusive Forks Hospital. I wanted to see my deceased grandmother. I had the urge to run my fingers along her wrinkled cheek and see if she still felt like a person to me.

"Carlisle is with her now," my father spoke softly, placing his hand over my mother's as he drove.

Carlisle Cullen was my father's childhood best friend. Although it had been years since they'd lived in the same area, they'd managed to remain close through telephone and email. Their lives had drifted apart, but their boyhood bond was permanent. I had never even met the man that my father was so fond of.

No one believed that Charlie and Renee Swan were my parents on account of how youthful they appeared. I was a mistake. A surprise blessing, as my mother would say. She became pregnant at seventeen. My father? Sixteen years old at the time of conception. This caused quite the commotion in the minuscule town of Forks. It was no wonder Charlie had escaped to join the Phoenix Police Department when he had the chance. People in small towns had no shame when it came to gossip and slander.

We walked to the hospital entrance in fast but dreadful strides, the kind of journey you know you should take quickly but fear to the very depths of your soul. A dead mother would elicit such terror.

We rode the elevator in silence, my mother sniffling softly as she ran her fingers through my hair. The gesture calmed her more than I. We walked slowly down the hall until we came across Room 212, the room that had claimed my grandmother's soul and sent it on to the next realm. What a sacred place a hospital was, if you truly thought about it.

"Stay out here, Bella." My father's gentle hand on my shoulder held me in place.

But I wanted to see if she was real…

I obliged, walking into the nearby waiting room and doing exactly that. Waiting for my parents to reach acceptance of the cruel realities in life. Cruel Realities. The words struck something inside me…something that I desperately needed to get down on paper.

Damnit. My notebook was in the cab of the U-haul. It was up to my hand once more. I dug my blue-inked pen into soft skin, my tongue darting across my lip as I struggled to hold onto the words that were unleashing inside me. My grandmother had a piano in her home. Not a keyboard, although I'd still use my beloved Casio when the going got tough. But a piano…it was all I ever wanted and the one thing I could never have.

There was a ray of light in Forks, Washington after all.

I finished scrawling out my lyrics, my skin blue from the ink and red from the exertion. I loved the feel of it on my flesh. A soft throat-clearing told me I wasn't alone.

I looked up to see a crisp, gentle man. He looked pristine in his white hospital coat. He was perfectly unruffled in his white dress shirt and blue tie. Blue like the waters of Hawaii, blue like the sky on its clearest day. His eyes matched his tie, exactly.

The eyes of such an immaculate man should have held more stiffness, more conceit and more hard lines…less emotion, less life.

He was single-handedly the most beautiful creature I had ever laid my eyes upon. Not for the smooth line of his jaw or the uneven plumpness of his bottom lip. Not for the genetically appeasing stature of his body or the way his spine stood so straight as he walked. The beauty of this man was buried in the endless blue, the blue that showed so many secrets that could never be told. I wanted to steal them all.

He smiled warmly, pink tongue darting out to wet his unevenly curved bottom lip. "You must be Bella."

"You must be salvation." I smiled widely, not having an ounce of control over the words that escaped me, and not caring one bit.

He stood a moment, slightly taken aback, absorbing my features just as I had his moments ago. My long wavy hair, my ink-covered skin, my purple chucks, my fearless eyes. He took in my very essence; I felt it leaving my body and visiting his. He knew me now, but we'd never discuss it. A thirty-something doctor and an idiosyncratic teenage girl could never discuss such matters. It was highly inappropriate.

A lazy smile came across his lips, and he held out one strong hand. "I'm Carlisle Cullen. Your father is a friend of mine."

I nodded politely and took his hand, taking a hit of blue orbs and reveling in the softness of his skin before rereading the words spread across my palm.

My blood was pumping through me at a ridiculous speed. I'd never experienced such fire in my veins and it had me wondering why it was in such a hurry.

"I'm sorry about your grandma, Bella. I'm just giving your parents a moment to say their goodbyes." There was kindness, sympathy, earnestness pouring out of him in heavy waves. This man was good. I wanted to write lyrics to the beat of his sincerity.

"Thank you Dr. Cullen," I said promptly, smiling widely at him once more before going back to palm reading.

"Please…call me Carlisle."

"Carlisle." I tested his name out on my tongue. It tasted like cherries and a little like magnificence.

"Are you a poet?" he questioned softly, the blue splendor pulling along the jumbled words on my hand.

I scoffed at the word. "I write songs. I play music. That's what I do."

He hesitantly sat down next to me and leaned his elbows on his knees, his legs parted widely as he leaned down to my level. "And what do you write about, Bella?"

My body responded in a foreign manner each time my name rolled off of his tongue.

I quirked my head to the side and tapped my pen against my lips in mock contemplation. He chuckled at me, and I was surprised he understood my jest. "I used to write about the heat of Arizona, the sounds of the city, the kiss of two distant lovers. I wrote what my surroundings brought out of me." I paused and smiled wryly at the beautiful blond-haired man. "New scenery. One can only imagine what will inspire me now."

"I don't know," he mused, looking out in front of us. "The rain has a sort of beauty to it…I think you just need to look close enough. You need to look inside it."

My heart thundered in my chest at the simple conversation of rain. "Or I'll write about the color blue. Blue like the waters of Hawaii…blue like the sky on its clearest day."

My words escaped me heavily and in a lower octave. I'd never spoken in such a way. It unnerved me.

Carlisle cleared his throat and looked at me like he was trying to discover the world's greatest mystery. He looked away just as quickly. "Whatever you create, Bella, I have no doubt it will be astonishing."

He rose from the plastic seat next to me, his fingers tapping rhythmically against his black dress pants. Everything about this immaculate man was a song waiting to be written.

"Goodbye, Dr. Cullen."

I went against his wishes of calling him by his first name because I wasn't ready for him to leave the room. I wanted him to speak more of looking inside raindrops and writings of astonishment. I just wanted more.

He turned slowly, running one strong hand through perfectly groomed locks. How did he stay so flawless? "Bella, please call me Carlisle."

"Carlisle."

The taste was growing on me.

His breathing faltered before he lifted one hand in an awkward wave. "I'll leave you now. Your parents will be along shortly. It was nice meeting you…Bella."

He turned and exited the small waiting room, the distant smell of vanilla and laundry soap still looming in his wake. I inhaled deeply, taking the scent of the peculiar yet immaculate doctor and making it my own. Greedily. Hungrily.

It was nearly a half an hour before my parents returned. I spent my time drawing an eye on the thigh of my jeans. A blue, gentle, breathtaking eye. I barely looked up to greet my grieving parents, too entranced by the emotion I put behind that blue eye, and the way it made me feel to draw it.

"Bella," my mother chastised, sitting down next to me. "You ruin your clothes when you draw on them, baby."

I looked up and smiled comfortingly, running my inked hand along her cheek. "I'm not ruining them, Mom. I'm bringing them to life."

She leaned in and kissed my forehead, but said nothing. She used to understand what I was trying to say. She used to dig deeper. Now there weren't very many levels to my mother, and I was too terrified to find out why.

"You ready to go home, peanut?" my dad asked softly, running his fingers along the top of my head. My parents loved me so much. It saddened me that my mere existence had held them back before they were even able to grow up.

We walked from the hospital with somber steps, not looking back for our elder who lay dead in the building, leaving her remains to the strangers and workers of the hospital like something to be forgotten.

Maybe a hospital wasn't so sacred after all.

By the time we returned to my grandmother's house, the dreary day was quickly turning to night. We grabbed our essentials from the U-haul and piled into the eerily silent and rather ancient house. The musty smell assaulted me in a thick wave, but it was oddly soothing. Like my distant grandmother giving us one more reminder that she existed here, and that she would forever be a part of this…a part of us.

My father collapsed to the hardwood floors. To his knees…the strongest man I knew was reduced to nothing as the guilt of abandoning his mother overtook him.

I suppose technically he was abandoned first.

When my father impregnated my mother at the mere age of sixteen, my grandmother and grandfather were rather ashamed. My father never spoke of it but one night not too long ago, the night we found out of my grandmother's illness, my mother divulged to me how hard it had been for them when they found out about my life inside her body.

My father was kicked out of his home once his parents were made aware of my existence. My mother's mother took him in without question, her compassion strong enough to care for both of the scared teenagers/future parents. I had no real memory of her, as she died shortly before we relocated to Arizona when I was three.

The death of my Grandpa Swan finally reconnected my father with his mother when I was seven years old. Charlie had harbored a lot of pain, never getting a chance to say goodbye to his father. It took its toll, losing the prominent male figure in his life merely because he couldn't accept the family his son had created and loved so much. The death of my Grandpa Swan made my grandmother realize that life was too short to hold grudges against her only child, so slowly they bandaged their broken relationship. A relationship damaged because I had entered this world.

I cried in my mother's arms as she told me their tale, feeling like I had essentially ruined their lives and everything they could have become. My mother put a forceful stop to that. "Don't you dare blame yourself, Isabella Marie," she said sharply, her eyes burning into mine. "I was put on this earth to be your mother. If there's one thing I'm proud of, it's creating a person as beautiful as you."

After I suppressed my guilt, she went on to tell me how desperately in love she was with my father practically since the first day they had met. They'd been together since he was fourteen and she was fifteen, their devotion to one another beyond their meager years on this planet. My mother's eyes shined with life as she spoke of my father in their younger years. It pained me to see it, only because it reminded me of how seldom the fire inside of her burned in the present.

I knew she still loved my dad, and vice-versa. But it seemed as though the mediocrity of life was enough to extinguish the passion of young love. Was this existence really so mundane that even the love of your life wasn't enough to make it worthwhile?

I'd like to think that love made everything sparkle and shine beyond all light and reason.

But what did I know about love, anyway?

My mother had concluded our conversation by saying that the moment she became with child, she truly realized how spiteful and condescending people could be. They looked down on her, treated her like trash only because she loved my father so much, she couldn't bear to hold herself back physically.

I thought it was beautiful, albeit slightly unnerving to think of the physical aspects of my parent's relationship.

I knew just how two-faced the youth of today could be. I didn't cover my cheeks with makeup. I didn't leather my skin in a tanning bed. I didn't throw myself at the quarterback or guzzle liquor on my weekends. I was an outcast to them because I didn't poison my body and do what was expected of me. I refused to conform. I refused to lose myself in the mass reproduction of blonde girls and over eager boys.

High school felt like a foreign world to me. A language I never spoke and a general lack of understanding about my surroundings. I wasn't a naive child, trying to get the popular girls to like me. I didn't feel like a child at all, truth be told. It wasn't as though I thought of myself as some sort of prodigy. Maybe wise beyond my years was more of an accurate depiction. I saw more in the people around me, I looked deeper when I recognized a soul worth knowing, worth feeling.

Most recently, it was the soul of Carlisle Cullen.

A man twice my age and so very familiar to something deep inside me.

After bidding my parents goodnight, I walked upstairs to the room I'd stayed in a handful of times as a child, the layers of dust literally lining every surface. My grandmother had always kept the house in a state of utter cleanliness, but it was quite obvious that she couldn't keep up as her body deteriorated.

I threw my overnight bag on the musty bedspread and began setting my things along the dusty antique furniture. Once my necessities were retrieved from the bag, I slipped into my pajamas and sat in the window sill, the large bay window that faced the road equipped with a ledge wide enough for a person to sit and gaze. I truly had always loved this room.

I watched the raindrops as they slowly slid down the glass panes. I focused on each one carefully. They were different sizes, different consistencies, different entities completely. I traced my pointer finger along the drops from the inside, suddenly wishing I could feel the condensation on my skin. The rain was beautiful as it contorted my view of the outside world and landed soothingly on the roof of the house. It sang a hushed, gentle melody as it floated from the heavens, bringing life to the trees and subsistence to the wildlife living amongst them.

I suddenly knew then that even though Phoenix was a town that had inspired some meaningful words inside me, it all paled in comparison to the wonders of dreary, isolated Forks, Washington. I felt it around me, the chill of the air and the haze of the sky and the water that constantly filled the atmosphere. It was beautiful. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. In the cavity that held my heart.

I smiled as I watched the rain fill the sky with life, gazing inside of raindrops and knowing I might not have recognized such a beauty if not for one pair of endless, crystal blue eyes.

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So there you have it, the first official chap. Whatcha think? Huh, huh, huh? Review it, and I would be much obliged! :)

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Until next time!