Disclaimer: SMeyer owns "Twilight" and its outtakes, not I.

Recap: In the last chapter, Edward got his name back after figuring out how he was being a controlling bastard to Bella. They kiss.

At some point, I suggested that this would be the last chapter. But it's not. Anyway, all the rest is pretty much all fluffersmutter. Or smutterfluffer. Whatever.

Thanks to Camilla10. And, I guess, Mr. Price.

Chapter 7

One kiss turned into 20, and then the owner of the mask shop stamped an elegantly shod foot before theatrically clearing her throat, reminding us that we were blocking her door. Edward gave her a brilliant smile and smooth apology that left her stammering, and we walked back down the street to the alley leading to my little hotel.

We paused for a kiss, or three, against the beige stucco wall, then stumbled, or at least I did, to my room, passing a surprised Alessandro and the Senegalese woman mopping the hallway. She shrank back from the supernatural predator, and I tried to send her a reassuring look, though I knew it was pointless. It was something I would have to get used to again, as much as I wished everyone else could see Edward as I did.

Well, not exactly as I did, for some time later Edward and I were closer to naked than we'd ever been before. Unfortunately, I was also shivering.

"Damn," I muttered as he retreated from me and pulled up the bedclothes between us and around me.

"We need to get an electric blanket," he said.

"Yeah, we should. Why didn't we have one in Forks?" I asked.

He looked guilty. "I thought of it," he admitted. "But I decided that we needed the temperature barrier between us. "

"We needed it?"

He winced. "I didn't deserve to be that close to you."

"That means I didn't deserve it either," I said, narrowing my eyes at him.

"I'm sorry. And we'll rectify this lack as soon as we can. But we also need to decide what we're doing next."

"Hanging out in bed sounds good," I said hopefully. God, did it sound good, especially since Edward had somehow seemed to have forgotten the boundaries he had set for us before. My shirt had landed on a chair across the room, his shirt was on the floor; his palm had just curved with infinite care around my ribcage, inches from my hammering heart, when my shivers had betrayed me. I longed to ask what had changed, but just in case he really had forgotten those boundaries, I didn't want to remind him.

"It does," he agreed, kissing me again. Happily, mouth to mouth was not too cold for comfort. "Except for one thing," he added, replacing his lips on mine with his icy fingers and drawing them down my throat so that I shivered again.

"Oh, fine. Let's talk," I said, snuggling into the bed.

"Now that you're not longer a scholarship student, what are your plans?" he asked. "Do you want to return to Forks?"

I was silent a moment, because despite being a practical person in many ways, I'd spent the time since our conversation in the bell tower simply waiting and hoping. What did I want to do? I definitely didn't want to go home yet with months left before I could even think about taking the G.E.D. … or whatever convention dictated that I do in the human time left to me. In fact, traveling around the world with the man lying next to me would be my preference by far. But I would quickly be impoverished in euro-land, and he knew that.

"No, I don't want to go back," I replied finally. "And yes, I see your none-too-subtle point. I'll be out of money pretty soon here."

"So you would like to continue traveling?"

I squirmed in my swaddling. "With your money?" I asked for clarification.

"My money?" He raised an eyebrow. "If you choose to see it that way. But that is the logical option, wouldn't you say?"

I nodded warily.

"We should leave Venice. We've enjoyed some favorable weather," he said, without any acknowledgment of the irony that what was favorable for us would be deemed unfortunate for anyone else. "But the sun is coming, and so are many more travelers. It will become oppressively crowded here."

"Okay," I said. "Where do you think we should go next?"

"You'll find out."

"No!" I yelped, flailing in the sheets. "No more unilateral decisions!"

Even lying down, he managed to shrug gracefully. "My money, my decision. Our money, our decision."

I glared at him, and he sighed and pulled himself away so that he was sitting up. I hated that sigh, that sign of his exasperation. By the time I had struggled out of the sheets so I could join him, he had retrieved my shirt and was waiting to hand it to me.

"Why are you sighing?" I asked as I slid my arms through the sleeves. "Why are you annoyed at me?"

"I am not annoyed at you. But I am frustrated that we are so far apart on this subject. Why are you so reluctant to accept my money, to think of it as yours? It's not even a sacrifice for me."

I was the one to sigh this time. "You've never been in a situation where you couldn't make ends meet, right? But when I was with Renee, she lived paycheck to paycheck, even though Charlie was pretty good about child support. And I ended up dealing with the phone calls and letters from bill collectors, and knowing that Renee was borrowing money from co-workers and boyfriends to make the rent. So money was always a worry. We needed it and I hated that we needed it."

"Rather like us and blood."

"Yeah, I guess," I said uncertainly, not having seen it that way before. "I don't like being beholden. And I'm uncomfortable being dependent on the kindness of strangers." I said the line from "A Streetcar Named Desire" with a bad Southern accent to lighten the atmosphere, and he laughed.

"Okay, Blanche. But," he continued more earnestly, "we Cullens are dependent. Emotionally, certainly, because it would be extraordinarily difficult to maintain our diet without one another's support, but also financially. And there's no expectation of being beholden to anyone, or controlling anyone. Our mutual dependence is what makes us family. A family that you're part of.

"When I set up that scholarship fund for you, it wasn't with any idea of controlling you, or forcing you into choices I wanted you to make. Quite the opposite: I wanted you to be able to make your own choices, choices that weren't dependent on money."

"It felt like an order," I muttered. "And bribery."

"Carlisle told me that, and I'm so sorry. It wasn't meant that way at all. I never for a moment thought you would tell anyone about us. You have to understand that. Please?"

I nodded because I did see that now, and he went on. "And while I have to admit that your dropping out of school wasn't among the things I hoped or expected you would do, what you did with the money, coming here to Europe, accorded perfectly with my intent. You saw the money as an order, an obligation, but in our family we see money as freedom, and privacy: it's what allows us to live as we do without too many questions."

I slid my fingers along his jaw and into his hair because, well, I had the freedom to do that now. "I can see that, but you can see, can't you, why I would take it the way I did, in the circumstances?" I asked.

He closed his eyes as I rubbed his scalp gently. "I can now," he said after a moment, "but I couldn't then, not in the state I was in – and you know that for a vampire that had to be quite a state. So it didn't occur to me that my methods would provoke your resentment. I saw only that having our lawyers structure it as a scholarship would give you an easy answer when people asked where you got the money."

"Like Mrs. Stanley."

"Especially Sharon Stanley. " He opened his eyes and a flash of annoyance crossed his face so that I dropped my hand. "Not only could she not give me any information on where you were, her mental commentary on me, you and the rest of my family was appalling."

"You visited her at the bank?" I asked. "Before you broke into it?" He nodded. "You really broke into it?"

He waved that off. "There was no damage … that anyone noticed. The more important question is, can you see my money, my family's money, as our money? As our family's money?"

I opened my mouth, then bit my lip, unable to say the words.

"You are going to give up your life because of us," Edward said gently. "Why can't you accept from me, from my family, something that is so paltry by comparison?"

When he put it that way, I felt like a jerk. "I'll try," I said, and gave him a weak smile.

"Good," he said, willing to claim victory where he could. "So, on to the subject at hand: where would you like to go next?"

I giggled a little. "Jeez, after all that, I have no idea. What do you suggest?"

"Ljubljana, Vienna, Bratislava, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Dublin or London," he said immediately.

"And what connects all those cities is ...? "

"Weather," he said, grimacing. "The places in between will be sunny for a stretch. It is one of the disadvantages to traveling with me."

"Huh. I guess we won't be seeing Athens, then."

"No," he corrected me. "We can ... in December or January. We can go anywhere when the timing is right."

"Oh. Do we have to leave here immediately?"

"No, but I can't go out safely beyond tomorrow. Besides, I find your landlord troubling."

"Alessandro?" I frowned. Alessandro had been so nice to me. "You only saw him just now. He can't be thinking anything odd about you yet."

"Oh, but I've heard him," Edward said, his words reminding me where he had been the last several nights. "And he certainly thinks about you."

"C'mon, I'm too young for him," I said reflexively.

He slid down onto his back, laughing. "In all my years of reading reactions to Rosalie and Alice, I've almost never heard someone think they were too young for him. Inexplicably intimidating and unapproachable, certainly, but not too young. Eighteen-year-old girls are almost universally attractive, and most are unaware of it. And men are swine."

"What about women?" I said, daring to rest my hand on his stomach, really asking about their reaction to him.

He inhaled sharply and shuddered. "Sorry," I said. I began moving my hand away, but he captured it and put it back on his skin.

"I like it. Where was I? Um, women are much better behaved," he said. "They actually like men their own age, though they'll often make exceptions for Carlisle, I've found …. In any case, you have a landlord, not a landlady." He smiled at me. "Now, enough talk about Alessandro. Your hand, however …"

I smiled back at him. He was giving me permission to explore. And I would, at least until my fingers grew numb.

If I wanted to avoid a problem with my visa, I'd have to go back to Britain, but not yet. Vienna, I decided.

But before we went, I had to do something uncomfortable first. "Dad?" I said into my phone as Edward flipped through my guidebook's section on Vienna - he hadn't been there for "a while," which meant since before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"Bella," Charlie answered, worry obvious in his voice. Edward looked up sharply. "You're not calling me to say you're coming home, are you?"

"Is something wrong?" Thoughts of wolves and vampire enforcers flitted through my mind.

"The Cullens are here," Charlie whispered as if to hide the news from the other people around him at the police station. I frowned at Edward, who tapped his wrist to indicate that he hadn't had time to tell me. "I ran into Alice Cullen, who chattered on about how much she had missed Forks and was coming back to finish school here and how Carlisle was returning to the hospital. But I don't know if - well, I realized after that she didn't say anything about that boy –"

"Because he's here in Venice," I interrupted him. There didn't seem to be a gentle way to say this now. "With me."

The silence wasn't deafening, because my cheap phone had plenty of static. But it was heavy until Charlie broke it.

Charlie being Charlie, he didn't waste time asking for the hows and wheres. He went straight to the point. "Did he explain himself?" he asked.

"Yes." Edward extended his hand in a mute request for the phone, but I shook my head at him.

"And you gave forgave him?" Charlie went on.

"Yes."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Yes."

"Tell that boy he doesn't have my forgiveness."

"I'm sure he already knows."

"Good."

We made a last visit to San Giorgio Maggiore so that I could actually absorb the peerless view from the bell tower, and that evening we walked along the canals, stopping to kiss on quiet little bridges like new lovers on their first night in Venice, the moon shining on the water in a portent of sunny skies ahead. The next day we drove out of the city where we had rediscovered each other. We headed northeast in another sleek Audi, speeding through the unguarded crossing to Austria, stopping in Graz for lunch and to buy a blanket, and Vienna was well and truly clouded over when we arrived there.

When I objected to the expensive hotel Edward was used to staying at – "We're spending my money, after all," I pointed out, cleverly, I thought – he pointed out that a hostel wouldn't have a valet who could park the car and drive it back into the shadow of the awning covering the hotel entrance if the sun made an unexpected appearance.

"Also, it's spacious and extremely comfortable," he added slyly after I had acquiesced.

The place was all that, I had to admit, when I saw our sixth-floor suite, decorated in grays and creams; its quiet elegance was a pleasant contrast to the white, trim-laden exterior of the hotel, which made me think of a wedding cake. Whatever we were paying, it was probably worth it.

Vienna had never been somewhere I had dreamed of going, but I fell under its charm as we walked a few blocks to a restaurant for my dinner. Perhaps that had 99 percent to do with my companion, who spoke German with a flowing cadence that was nearly as knee-weakening as his Italian, but it was also because Vienna felt like a real city, not a beautiful decaying museum like Venice. It wasn't as lively as London, say, but the streets were filled with people biking home from work and stepping into busy bars and crowded cafes.

White asparagus was in season, and it seemed to be in every dish on the menu of the restaurant, which was casual but obviously fashionable, with high white walls that were covered with ribbons of graffiti letters. It was also delicious. I knew that human food either disgusted or baffled Edward, but the asparagus seemed to bother him most of all – he eyed me uneasily, shifting in his seat, until I finished off the fat white stalks, holding them in my fingers and washing them down with a glass of Grüner Veltliner as the Viennese around us did. He looked so uncomfortable that I asked him if he was all right, but he shrugged off my question.

That night we put our new blanket to use.

It was a wondrous thing. A few times, in the summer before my ill-starred birthday, we had gone to the meadow when the sun was strong enough to warm Edward's skin as we lay together talking or reading or chastely touching. Here, with Edward's rules about necking having been abandoned somewhere between Forks and Venice, we weren't so chaste, and the feel of bare warm flesh against bare warmed flesh was devastating.

"My God … this feels amazing," I gasped after I slid off the hotel's robe and slipped under the covers where he was waiting. The familiar jolt upon contact was there, but it competed with the deliciousness of his legs scissored in mine, of our torsos touching. I ran a hand over his shoulder and down his back in fascination, but I stopped when his eyes snapped shut and he seemed to freeze in place. Crap. "Edward? Are you all right?"

His eyes opened and he smiled slowly. "Yes," he finally said. "Yes, I am. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the idea that you and I will feel this good to each other every time we touch this way."

"We will?" That too was amazing.

"We will," he promised me. "It is one of the advantages to traveling with me." Heated fingers caressed my face. "Your skin, your cheek … your lips," a fingertip ran over the seam of my mouth, "your lips will always be this sublime to me."

His own lips followed the path his fingers had taken, then moved down the side of my neck, brushing against the skin even as his palm curled around my ribcage again. This time my shivers weren't from cold.

"Nobody would ever have felt this way to me," he murmured into the hollow under my ear, then pulled back slightly to look at me. "And nobody else will ever feel this good to you," he said, his eyes darkening even as I stared into them. "Not that you'll ever have a chance to find out."

A flare bloomed in my chest at his words. "Controlling bastard," I stuttered out.

"I am, that way. I'm not ashamed of it."

I sat up a bit so I could maneuver. "Then I guess I'm a controlling bastard too, because you'll never get a chance to find out either," I told him. He let me push him onto his back, and I attacked his neck. Unlike him, I didn't have to hold back; I scraped my teeth against his skin, sucked at his flesh, did my vain best to mark him as he shuddered underneath me. My own hands explored his chest, and then my mouth did. His scent was so powerful here, I lost track of time, and myself, and concentrated only on dragging my tongue across his collarbone, grazing my nails on his nipples.

Until I was suddenly whirled away so that Edward was hovering over me and pinning my hands above my head. "Jesus, Bella, give me a minute, I'm destroying the sheets," he growled, then groaned as he looked down my body. Our movements had pulled the blankets down to our waists. He released my hands and slid down so his face was level with my chest.

"Minute's up," he murmured, and lowered his lips to the swell of my breast.

I fleetingly thought to scold him for talking to my cleavage, but all I could manage was a whimper for a long time.

That was as far as we went that night; my fingers caught in one of the rips in the sheet and split it to the hem, and the sound startled us into realizing that we should stop while we could. I dropped off into sleep, Edward molded around me, and the contact made it the best night's rest I'd had since my birthday.

The next day a courier from the Cullens' lawyer showed up at the hotel with an envelope that held documents of various shapes and sizes. I watched as Edward affixed a rectangle of paper to a page in my passport. It had French words on it, and was covered with watermarks and shiny lines.

"Is that legit?" He raised an eyebrow at my question. "Never mind, I don't want to know," I said hastily.

"This document says that you're a resident of France, so you can travel in Europe as long as you like without violating the visa rules," he explained.

"Really? And where do I live in France?"

"You have a very pleasant 19th-century town house in a leafy suburb of Paris."

I should have known. Well, Bella, if you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.

He acquired a suit and I a dress, and we went to the opera house we could see from our terrace in the Hotel Cake. The Staatsoper had the extravagant architectural details that Austria's Hapsburg emperors had loved, but it was even more impressive once Edward told me that the red and gold auditorium and many of the opulent reception rooms had had to be rebuilt after it was bombarded by the Americans during World War II.

It was my first time seeing an opera, and I hoped I would like it since he so obviously did. Fortunately, it was an easy one, Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," played for broad laughs on a two-level set, and filled with melodies that were vaguely familiar. I watched the English translations of the Italian libretto on a little screen in the seat; Edward, who had no need of such aid, watched me.

"That was a lot of work just to get to a wedding," I observed during intermission, in between sipping champagne and trying not to gawk at Edward. I wasn't the only woman in the vicinity with the same problem, because damn, the man looked good in a suit. But I was the only gawker who would be taking off his tie later.

"There'd be no opera if it were easy."

"We could be an opera," I said thoughtfully.

He flinched. "Let's not be. So many operas end badly."

We also had a night of talking about how we had felt after things had ended badly on my birthday. It was a hard night. I forced myself to be honest – and it was necessary since he had Sharon Stanley's mental image of me looking haggard as I deposited my paychecks etched forever in his own mind. When we were finished, I was exhausted and Edward was so wound up that I made him promise to go for a run in the Vienna Woods while I slept. We weren't over everything yet – the hurt and resentment had left their traces on me, the self-loathing and despair on him – but I knew he would come back.

The rest of our nights, though, he spent hours and hours putting into practice nine decades of theory of how to give pleasure – a caress down my spine, a brush of his fingertips across my breast, his palm sweeping up the inside of my thigh and beyond, exploring me in ways I had never done myself. I did the same to him, if less adeptly and with less knowledge, but that had its advantages: my skill increased along with his control and the survival rate of our bed linens.

Still, considering the time we devoted to our mutual exploration, we moved very slowly. That was because he was cautious and I was clueless, but also because it was also glorious to linger. After that first night, I was better at warning him before moving into new territory; he relaxed as he learned to trust me.

So it was that I had to gather my courage and say the words. "I want to do that to you too," I whispered into his neck one night after he had stroked me to climax, my hands still fisted in reaction. He made a noise I took as a yes. "But I don't know how to do it right. I don't know what will feel good to you," I confessed. I had been around vampires enough to have some small sense of how strong and fast they were – I could be neither as strong nor as fast as they would want.

He was quiet for a moment, and I waited. Finally, he took one of my clenched hands and kissed the knuckles. His face was intent in the soft light of our bedroom. "Whatever you do will feel –" he searched for a word, then gave up "—beyond anything I can describe. I can guarantee you that."

"You can?"

"I can."

He pulled my hand down under the cover, to his erection, which twitched when my fingers touched the skin there. He moaned, then smiled impishly. "See?" he murmured. "Your slightest touch feels good."

"Yeah," I said, torn between doubt and the urge to put my fingers on him again, "but that's not enough to –"

"Just let me show you?"

I nodded, and he guided my hand around his length. "This," he said, squeezing my hand tight and pulling up, "is enough. But so is this." He loosened his grip so that I was barely holding him and drew my fingers up slowly. "My kind," he grunted as our hands continued moving languidly, "is sensitive to any contact, even if it would be too soft or even imperceptible to a human. However you touch me –" his breath caught as my palm curved over his tip – "will be the right way."

Thus encouraged, I continued my investigation, which was met by his gratifying responses. But the angle was awkward and I stopped.

"Would you sit up?" I whispered. He moved with startling speed to the edge of the bed, his feet on the floor. I scooted over so that I was behind him and touched his shoulder; we were both warm enough to go without the electric blanket for a while. Perfect.

I inched closer until my thighs were around his hips and my breasts pressed to his back. We both moaned at this new contact – because he didn't sleep, he was always curled around me, so he could watch as I drifted off. I had never spooned him. That was a situation I would have to change, obviously, because this felt too awesome not to repeat frequently.

In this position I could nibble on his shoulder blade, sweep my lips against his vertebrae after giving him a second to be prepared; I could snake my arms around his waist and caress his torso, slowly making my way down to the tops of his thighs.

"Okay?" I murmured as warning.

"Thank God," he said in answer, and my hands returned to his erection, moving the incredibly soft skin over the hardness of his length. I kept my strokes at a steady pressure and speed that was comfortable for me, and laid my head against his back, feeling his inhales and exhales quicken under my cheek, the rumbles of his groans under my ear. His arms brushed my own as his hands gripped his thighs to help him focus, the muscles in his forearms tensed into stone. I couldn't keep my sex from pressing against his skin, and that seemed to undo him; he arched and stilled, and my hands became too slippery to stay on him.

We stayed as we were for several moments, our breaths slowing, before he left for a second and returned with a towel. He handed it to me as I grinned up at him, thrilled at what I had done and frankly admiring how at ease he seemed standing naked in front of me. Maybe that wasn't a problem when you had a flawless body, but it was also evidence of a sexual openness that I once would not have expected from someone of his era.

"You are adorable," he said, laughing.

"I am extremely proud of myself," I said, tossing the towel to him so he could use it.

He considered that a moment. "I am proud of myself too," he said, wonder in his voice. He leaned forward, bracketing my thighs with his arms as he kissed me. My arms wound around his neck, and he guided us back down onto the mattress and pulled the blanket back over us.

We kissed for a long while before I pulled back, struck by a question that stirred in my meager storehouse of sexual knowledge.

"Edward?"

"Hmmm?" With my lips moving, his moved to my ear.

"Uh," I stuttered. "Um, why didn't we need, um, lube when we just did that? Is that a vampire thing?"

That stopped him. "Such a 21st century question," he mused, a finger tracing my jaw.

"Asking about vampires?"

"Smartmouth. So, I was born in 1901."

"I know," I said, puzzled.

"And most baby boys in America in 1901 weren't circumcised." He gave me a mischievous smile. "Men of your father's generation, however –"

"Stop right there." I cut him off and gave him a dirty look. "Lube," I demanded.

"Adorable," he said again, lips again on my ear. "The foreskin means I don't need lubrication. Sometimes in the shower I might use it, but it's not necessary."

Holy fuck. I trembled as his breath spread along my skin, as my mind processed his forthright words. The images, oh the images they evoked …. I whimpered before realizing it.

"Bella, are you finding this conversation too much?" His voice was equal parts questioning and sultry.

"It's just, um, imagining anyone else doing that is really kind of a turn-off," I mumbled, hiding my face in his neck, "but when I picture you in the shower and you're, um –" I couldn't quite finish the sentence.

"Thinking of you." The voice was all sultry now, the fingers cupping a breast, thumb stroking a nipple so I jolted.

"Do you?" I whispered.

"Always of you." His hand slid, easily and surely, between my thighs. "And the reality is always better."

Those sorts of nights meant that I spent my days in such a haze that the twisted barley sugar columns in the 18th-century Jesuit Church made me think not of Baroque gaudiness but of Edward's legs tangled in mine in the warmth of our bed. And the church's dome and oculus - trompe l'oeil, but spectacularly convincing – barely unnerved me. Edward had his arm around me, after all.

Vienna was full of similar Baroque beauties and Hapsburgian excesses like the opera house, but also gorgeous buildings from the Vienna Secession at the turn of the last century, with their simple straight lines and sinuous curved ones. I loved them, and Austrian art of the era as well – as I discovered when we visited the Belvedere, a palace-turned-museum, where I saw Gustav Klimt paintings for the first time. I was fascinated by his luxuriant gardens and women who seemed to turn into waterfalls and rivers. Much of it was darkly erotic, making me think of lushness and twisted sheets.

"Why have I never heard of this guy? He's obviously crazy, but he's so compelling," I asked Edward.

"You seem to find everything from the period compelling," he teased me. "Klimt, the Secession, me…''

"And Rupert Brooke," I remembered, going on to tell him how the parallels of the poet's life and his had affected me so in London.

The comparison didn't please him. "He was a cad. I hope you have a higher opinion of my commitment," Edward muttered, then changed the subject. "You know, Klimt also died in the Spanish influenza epidemic," he said, coming to a stop before a portrait of a lovely young woman with a cloud of reddish hair framing her head. She looked a little uneasy at being on display, perhaps because Klimt had painted her surrounded by staring golden eyes. "Fritza Riedler, 1906," the wall label read.

"This has always reminded me of my mother," Edward said quietly. "Her hair, the shape of her face, the way she's holding her hands."

"You have your mother's eyes, Carlisle says. And her hair, too?" I asked, turning to him from the portrait.

"Yes, though hers wasn't quite this ... exaggerated," he said, running his hand through his own. "But my face is my father's."

"I wish I could have met them," I said wistfully.

An odd expression flashed across his face, but then the corner of his mouth curved up and he said, "You can."

I looked at him, baffled.

"You can," he repeated, his smile growing. "There is something I've been waiting decades to show you."

A/N: So, I'll have an explanation for why Edward is being so, um, hands-on here (as I wrote in my other story, I think canon Edward isn't meant to be a prude), but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.

After you've done that, do check out the story I'm translating, Elysabeth's "Eyes of the Moon." I recently posted an amazing chapter, the one that made me ask Elysabeth to let me translate it.

Art links on my profile page.

Mr. Price here again.

Now, first off, let me say that I had no intention of adding any comments to this chapter. Because it is the last chapter, and the author should have the last word, right? Only, as it turns out, this isn't the last chapter after all, is it? And so, all bets are off.

Regular readers of my commentary may recall that at the end of the previous chapter (once naively referred to by her many admirers as the "penultimate chapter"), I strongly suggested that lovely as Mrs. Price's descriptions of young love were, it was time for some lemons. Imagine my shock to learn that not only was the author no longer intending to wrap things up, she was not even going to provide any lemons. Instead, she was talking about something I had never heard of: a lime. It sounded like a lemon without any flavor (or, perhaps, juice).

But I have just finished the chapter, and though I think you will all agree that it would be nice if Mrs. Price would write a bit more quickly, it is not bad, not at all bad, though the digs at men may strike some – me – as a bit much. And for a lime, that was pretty steamy. Lemons are still promised for the next chapter. And dare we hope for a cumquat?

A/N: Yeah, I can't believe he said that either.