The Twilight Twenty-Five
thetwilight25 dot com
Prompt: #9
Pen Name: Chocaholic123
Pairing/Character(s): Bella / Edward
Rating:M
Word Count: 497
Photo prompts can be found here:
thetwilight25 dot com/round-eight/prompts


A/N - Thank you all for your lovely words of support. they make things so much better when inspiration is in short supply. This flash is based on a picture of two hands clasped together. As usual, my mind wandered ...


She was sitting in the theater when it happened, that thing she would measure the rest of her life against. It was her watershed; the moment her river started to surge downhill, drowning everything she thought she knew in the process.

She'd been eighteen for exactly three days. The candy-sugar aroma of her favorite vanilla cake still seemed to linger in the air, and her cheeks ached from too many forced smiles. Her daddy looked at her like she was a stranger, a woman stealing the place of his little girl, when he could bear to acknowledge her at all.

Our Town was playing at the Portland Playhouse, the barely-there set recycled from last year's Crucible. Their teacher had chosen eight of them from a class of thirty, and there they were, sitting in row G, their coats rolled into fat sausages at their feet, passing crumpled bags of candy along the line.

Somehow she'd ended up next to him. She'd once heard the cheerleaders refer to him as 'Sex-Ed', and it wasn't hard to see why. Like every other girl at Forks High, she'd spent hours staring at his perfectly proportioned face, imagining what those full, firm lips would feel like pressed against her own. She hadn't gone as far as her best friend, who had filled every inch of her planner with the words 'Mrs. Jessica Cullen' written in varying degrees of legibility, though she was still a little embarrassed by having such an obvious crush.

But then she'd sat down in the seat beside him and noticed the way he stared at her lips. There was something almost wild in his expression. It was like there was a war waging behind his verdant eyes, and the wrong side was winning.

"Do you remember this bit from our read through?" His breath tickled at her ear, acting like a catalyst to tighten every inch of skin on her body. Bella nodded, barely paying any attention to the action on stage. Her nervous excitement at his proximity was almost too much to bear. She was hyper aware of his warm thigh next to hers, brushing her skirt as he whispered in her ear.

He was silent for a moment. On the stage, George confessed to his mother that he wasn't ready to wed, and Bella remembered their heated discussion about George's motivations in class, and how his eyes had burned in a way that sent heat to the pit of her belly.

"I still think you were wrong." Her confession was a whisper. His lips turned up into a smile that made her heart miss a beat. His thigh moved closer still, enough for her to feel the outline of his thigh muscle through his jeans. Then Mr. Cullen curled his fingers around hers, dragging her hand toward him so the others couldn't see what they were doing. Her blood raced at the illicit nature of his touch, the knowledge that it was totally wrong.

And she let herself drown.