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Thank you all for reading! As I've said previously, I've already posted the first few chapters of this story on Twilighted, so I'll post them all at once here to keep everything up to date ;-) Please let me know what you think?

Ooh, this one was very, very good. In fact, the best yet, I'd say...

I had heard his voice on numerous occasions, enjoyed his velvet growls as he reprimanded me for willingly putting myself in danger. I had even seen him, a bright light in the dark waters as I'd drowned this morning, and had actually thought my subconscious couldn't have stored away his perfect features in more perfect detail. Yet here he stood, in my bedroom, not five feet away from me, the Greek god of my past and imagination, and he was more beautiful than memory could ever have served.

So as far as hallucinations go, I had seemingly won the grand jackpot, the all-inclusive five-star-hotel-trip to whatever exotic location you could possibly think of. Either that, or I'd finally gone completely and utterly mad.

It was probably the latter.

Of course, his appearance hurt me much more than his absence. Last time I had seen him like this, as real as he'd ever get, he had told me he didn't love me. That I wasn't good enough for him or his family. Seeing the love of your life again after he told you that you were no more than a distraction just had to be painful, hadn't it? In my limited experience of love and loss, I thought it was bound to be. Even if he only came back as a figment of my imagination.

Nevertheless, to see him again brought me back from the numb state I had existed in for the last seven months, and I liked it. I was suddenly able to feel more than the gaping hole in my chest. I felt reverence for his beauty, delight in his sudden reappearance, and wonder as to why I could see him now while I was lying in my bed, relatively safe in comparison to my latest endeavours. I felt pain, but also some form of happiness. He was with me again.

I stared into his eyes, afraid to move and lose him once more. Saying goodbye again would be the end of me now, no doubt. Exhaustion kept me silent and still on my bed and I could have lain there for days, admiring his posture and the wonderful depths of his eyes, had my body not suddenly shivered with the cold it could no longer ignore. When it happened again, I closed my eyes and tried to recover my equilibrium. I had to keep still. If I gave in to my emotions now, if I lunged at him like the crazy person I had become was on the verge of doing, he would go for sure.

Closing my eyes brought me no rest, though. It really was blasphemous to have this perfect creature - whom I had pined for constantly during the last seven months - stand in my bedroom and not look at him. I opened my eyes and to my distress saw him striding towards the window. My panic brought my voice back again and destroyed my attempts at retaining any personal dignity in this reunion, but it served its purpose. He turned around. I felt my control start to slip as I begged him once more not to go and an unbidden tear escaped my eye and trickled over my cheek. Damn it, I shouldn't have spoken to him.

Or perhaps I had been right to talk to him, because it made him talk too. I could hear his voice, and though I didn't really listen to the words I revelled in the sounds he made. It didn't matter that I felt colder than I'd ever felt before, or that it hurt my throat to breathe, or that the mattress poked painfully between my shoulder blades. For the first time in seven months, I felt something that wasn't pain, but resembled happiness. He spoke again, and I willed myself to focus on his words this time. He was asking me something, the words somehow ringing a bell in the back of my memory, but I still didn't understand. Then he sat down next to me, so close I could actually smell him, and asked me such an obvious question a small part of my mind began to wonder if he really was a figment of my imagination. That part grew bigger when I felt the mattress shift beneath his weight.

"Have you been hurt?" he asked.

Well, of course I'd been hurt. He hurt me. He told me he didn't want me. I croaked out the shortest answer I could think of in order to avoid the stabbing pain in my throat and I think I saw a flicker of pain, or regret, in his eyes. His pain became obvious when he tried to touch me and I shrank back for fear of letting him disappear so quickly after his arrival.

"Bella, where are you hurt? Please, tell me."

I pondered his question for a while, but thought it a very strange one. Where was I hurt? Tradition would urge me to say I had a broken heart, but I found that such a terrible cliché and besides, that was only part of it. Truthfully, I hurt everywhere. Nowhere he could fix me...

He had taken out his phone and began talking into it very fast, so fast I couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. I seized the opportunity to gape at him. His beautiful bronze hair was in perfect disarray, exactly as I'd remembered it, but his eyes were pitch black with dark circles underneath them. I frowned. The Edward I remembered had always had a flawless marble skin and golden eyes. Even my delusionary Edwards were well fed and healthy. Yet the Edward seated here, on my bed, was obviously starving.

"When did you hunt?"

I hadn't meant to ask him as he was in the middle of a conversation, but somehow I just blurted it out. He stopped talking and stared at me in surprise while the shadows under his eyes grew even more pronounced, and I grew worried for him.

"I don't remember," he said after a while. His eyes searched my face, presumably looking for a clue as to what could possibly be going on in my head for me to ask such a question, while he finished his phone call. When he'd closed it, he stood up and opened the doors of my closet. I studied the muscles in his back and shoulders as he searched for something in the unconquerable mess that my wardrobe had become. Though I knew he would never need any sleep, something in his manner of moving made him look tired. I grew confused; this Edward really was very different from the ones I'd gotten used to.

He was carrying a thick sweater and a small pile I recognized as my winter pyjama bottoms and an old T-shirt when he suddenly stood by my side again.

"Carlisle told me to get you warm," he said, shrugging apologetically. "He's coming over to see you. He'll be here in a few minutes."

Carlisle?

I didn't know what to make of this. I'd never imagined him before. If I could see Carlisle in a few minutes, would that mean I really was crazy? Or could it mean that he was real? And if the dear old doctor was real, his son ought to be too, didn't he? I searched his eyes again. And unbidden, unwelcome and unstoppable, hope exploded like fireworks in the hole in my chest, filling it relentlessly.

He held out the clothes in his hands, looking a bit embarrassed when I made no move to take them from him. I was still reeling from the dizzying feeling in my chest, a hopefulness I hadn't felt in a long while. I couldn't take my eyes off his face.

"You should were these," he said, indicating the clothes with his head. "You know, you're turning blue."

So what? Who cared if I was turning blue? All that mattered now was whether he was really here or not. But I couldn't ask him directly for fear of getting the wrong answer. A fear that was starting to make me feel really nauseous. But since I already knew he didn't love me, and any answer in that direction wouldn't come as a surprise to me, I could ask him a slightly less risky question.

"Why are you here?" My voice sounded fragile and feeble, soft even to my own human ears, but I had no doubt he'd heard me. He stood there for a few seconds, clothes in his hands, before he sat back down on the edge of my bed.

"I came to check on you." His voice was hesitant. "I wanted to know how you were doing." He fell silent and regarded me for a minute, wearing a tortured expression. "Bella, what happened to you? Please, tell me why you're... like this," he ended feebly.

I didn't want to answer that. He wasn't allowed to know I had jumped off a cliff to hear his voice; he'd pity me, which I imagined would be worse than the indifference he'd shown towards me for the past months. I needed to distract him and hastily blurted out the only question I could think of.

"Are you real?"

I realised my big mouth had gotten the better of me. Again. Though perhaps it was better to just know the answer to the question I wouldn't be able to get out of my mind anyway. Rip off the band-aid...

His beautiful lips formed the words that were either my salvation or my final downfall when he suddenly looked away. I followed his gaze, saw Carlisle Cullen standing in my room and, feeling my stomach heave, threw up violently over the edge of my bed into the waste bin that had miraculously appeared right in the line of fire.

For those of you who don't like overlap: don't worry, it will rarely happen again ;-)