A/N: Thank you for reading. I hope you find something to peek your interest.

EPOV

Carlisle walked me back through the main doors and out into the car park. He had to put his hand on my shoulder when we neared my car because I just didn't see it there. I was looking at it but just didn't see it. I went to the driver's side and felt in my coat pocket for my keys but before my hand had closed around them Carlisle had taken them and was leading me to the passenger side door.

I looked at him and blinked wildly not understanding his intentions. This was my car, my beloved silver Volvo estate. Tricked out Volvo estate at that. Rosalie and I had worked on this car together to make it go faster, sound faster and feel like a dream. Why was Carlisle now insisting he drive it home? Maybe there was actually something wrong with me. Perhaps I was ill and he wanted to take me home before he explained it to me fully.

"Son, trust me. Let me drive you home and we can discuss this. It's alright. You are alright. I swear I will tell you all that I know about this, um, condition. But let me get you home safely first."

I looked at his face and nodded slowly. Ok. Carlisle will take me home. Carlisle will drive me home and then he will tell me what just happened and then everything can go back to normal and I can get on with my, life? Existence?

Ok. I can do that. I can hang on the few moments it will take to get home.

I slid into the passenger seat and let my head drift backwards till I felt the headrest meet my neck and scalp. I closed my eyes and exhaled deeply as Carlisle pulled the car out of the car park and away down the long on ramp that would take us to our home set high in the hills above the town.

Alice was sitting on the front step as we approached the house. She leapt up and came forward to my door in a blur, reaching for the handle at the same moment that I opened it from the inside. She allowed me to unfold myself from the car before she wrapped her long, slender arms around my waist and squeezed me tightly.

"What are you doing Alice?" I barked so loudly she took an involuntary step backward, letting me go immediately. I hung my head when I realised I had startled her and felt sorry that she was now looking at me with wide hurt eyes.

"Sorry Alice, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm just a bit, um, unsure of myself at the moment. Forgive me?" I shot her as sorry a look as I could muster and waited patiently for the curve of her smile that I knew she would offer me. Alice was my sister and although I shouldn't play favourites she was mine. My best friend if truth be told. Her gift of being able to read our decisions and turn them into glimpses of our futures coupled with my ability to read peoples thoughts brought the two of us closer together than anyone else in our home. We shared a deep appreciation for each other's trials and tribulations and for the distress that our separate gifts sometimes bought us. We may not be blood related but we were the very closest of siblings in any conventional sense. I liked to think that we were closer than actual siblings in many ways. Alice knew me as well as I knew myself and shared everything with me, and I her.

She grinned up at me from under her lashes and waited for my returning smile. I gave it to her freely and she looped her arm around my waist again and we walked up the stairs and into the house together.

"I'm so happy for you Edward. I knew it would happen for you one day, I never gave up hope for you. You deserve this." Alice pushed towards me mentally as we took the internal steps two at a time together.

When we were standing outside the door to Carlisle's home office she gave me one last squeeze on my hand and bounced away before I could ask her what she was going on about. She really was the most annoying creature I had ever met.

I heard her husband, my brother Jasper greet her fondly as she entered their room on the third floor and plopped herself down on the sofa next to him and into his waiting embrace.

I could hear Esme one floor above me in her own room. She was shuffling blue prints from side to side upon the huge table there.

The television in the recreation room to my left was blaring out the score from some football game and I could clearly hear Emmett tapping his foot impatiently as a runner made his way far too slowly for Emmett's liking down the field.

"Run you moron. God, you run like a 14 year old girly man." Was the loudest thought in the house and of course it was coming from the grizzly bear that was my brother Emmett.

My other sister Rosalie was not within the house. I could hear the clinking of metal on metal and deduced that she was in the garage to the back of the yard. There was a building there that housed her prized tool collection and our assorted cars, bikes and all things mechanical. Rose would not surface from the garage until dark, if she came inside even then.

That left Carlisle and myself. He was now standing behind me. Looking at me with expectation. I realised he was waiting for me to open the door and go into his office so I reached out and did just that.

"Have a seat, son."

I took the seat opposite his desk and heard the red leather cushioning on his enormous winged chair sigh as he took his place behind the desk. He was grinning at me and had his hands folded on the desk. He looked pleased. About what I had no idea.

I was still reeling. I felt uneasy. Like I was waiting for a diagnosis that I felt sure was going to be bad. I felt like one of his patients. I felt like his patient more than I felt like his son at this moment and that was unnerving at the very least. But still he continued to grin.

"What happened to me Carlisle?" I asked cautiously.

I had heard, or rather read, in the minds of some of Carlisle's less fortunate patients that they sometimes would prefer not to know the outcome of their many and varied tests conducted by my father. They would prefer to go about their lives and not ever know what it was that was about to claim them and I felt an uneasy affiliation with them in this moment. Perhaps it would be better not to know how I was to meet my end? Perhaps ignorance truly is bliss?

I knew that I was impervious to all the simple diseases that could very easily claim a human life. I also knew that there were few things, if any that could actually render a vampire ill or cause death. Logically I knew these things. But the strange and unnerving feeling I'd had since being at the hospital today seemed to override my sense of logic.

I had studied hard and gained two separate medical degrees myself these past decades and I knew almost as much as Carlisle himself about the human body. But I was at a loss to explain the sensation I had felt when I touched Isabella today.

I looked to Carlisle for the answer and again saw him grinning at me from behind his desk.

"Edward I don't want you to worry about this son. You aren't ill. You aren't hurt. You aren't injured. This is a normal process. This is what you were designed to do." He said steadily.

"I'm designed to kill, Carlisle. I was in complete control of my thirst today in the hospital, I swear it. I felt no compulsion to hurt Isabella or her mother today. This is not a simple reaction to the smell of a human Carlisle. Though Isabella did smell particularly desirable to me I was in control."

"I know you wouldn't have hurt them Edward. I know you were in complete control as always. You weren't feeling the urge to hunt or stalk prey today Edward. Tell me more about what you felt when you saw the child today please?"

"I don't recall feeling anything out of the ordinary Carlisle. I was concerned, of course, about the break to her wrist but you had that under control. And I felt no more sympathy or empathy with her than I would another of your patients."

"But when you touched her, what did you feel when you touched her?" he asked. He slid forward in his chair and leaned towards me as if what I was about to impart was the secret to the universe. When in reality it was me who was seeking answers from him. I was more confused than I was at the hospital and sighed before I answered.

"It was a jolt of some sort. An electrical charge. Perhaps it was merely a discharge of static electricity? I can't explain it any other way."

He leaned back into his chair and it let out another sigh as if he and his chair were mulling over my explanation.

A wide smile lit his face as he clasped his hands together with a loud slap.

"Well then. I think I can shed some light on this for you." He waited for my nod and took a deep breath. "As I said son this is a normal process, albeit one that probably seems very foreign and frightening for you right now. But trust me when I say it's normal and it's happened for all of us with the exception of Alice and Jasper so far."

THIS happened to Esme and Carlisle? Why didn't I know about this then if Rosalie and Emmett had felt like this before? I had been created before either of them but I don't ever remember either of them coming home one day glassy eyed and stumbling around like a fool. What about Esme, had she had this happen too? Carlisle himself? And why not Alice or Jasper?

The look on my face must have intrigued Carlisle because he waited for it to dissipate before he continued.

"Edward, please. Calm down and let me explain before you jump to any conclusions. Everything is going to be fine. It is in our very nature that this happens to us son. It is embedded within us when we are created. You have always seen us as very set, unchanging, static creatures. But I see us as more evolved than that. While its true that we don't change in any physical form for the duration of our existence but we can and we do change emotionally. And that's what happened to you today. You have always thought you were destined to travel this path on your own because you hadn't found a mate. But I've always known that one day you would find the one being that could complete you emotionally." He seemed happy with his explanation and settled back into his chair again, waiting for me to take this information in.

Surely he wasn't suggesting that I was destined to spend my life with a human? It couldn't be so. Carlisle was the one who had returned from the hospital today suffering some sort of mental breakdown, not myself as I had previously thought. It was a ridiculous notion. That a 95 year old vampire could spend so many decades alone only to what, fall emotionally for a human child. It was idiotic in the extreme. Unless Carlisle meant the woman? Surely not? She clearly showed her distain for me in the cubicle today. It was obvious that she was the mother of the child and therefore not meant for me. But the child. Isabella. It was absurd to think that she was destined for me. It's true I had felt a pull towards her. I had felt compelled to be near her. At the time I had put it off as a natural desire to see the child well and healed from her obvious injury. Any normal man would see a child hurting and would wish for it to be healed again, happy again. This was not an abnormal reaction to a child. Of this I was sure. I looked again to Carlisle and waited for him to impart more pieces of the puzzle.

"Edward. Let me tell you about my own experience with this phenomenon, for want of a better description. The day I met Esme. I had that same glassy look in my eye as you hold now. Shall I share it with you now?" He asked obviously delighting in the chance to share his most precious memory with me.

I nodded nervously; still unsure that what I was about to hear was in my best interests. Perhaps the diagnosis of some terminal illness would be easier to hear?

"Edward you aren't JUST designed to kill. You are designed to love too. We are capable of deep love. Lust even. But surely you are aware that we are also capable of love?"

Love?

Chapter 2 A lesson