Sorry for the wait; Christmas madness kicked in, and then I decided to get sick. And stay sick. And get sick again. Anyways, consider this a late New Years present, even if it it a pretty short chapter compared to others. New update soon, I promise! Thank you to jansails, muffinmom, ded1, corkykellems, snowflakelover, and nickaroos for your reviews, TheEagerScribbler, Wollerosekaufn, and ded1 for your faves, and TheEagerScribbler, corkykellems, ded1, huda1220 and mama2roo for your follows!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MOOD IN BIO was more lighthearted than usual; someone had heard that Banner's last class had gotten to watch a movie, and everyone was hopeful we'd be doing the same. Nothing cheered up a room full of moody teenagers faster than the prospect of not having to do any actual work. Because of this, everyone was busy chatting, and Edward and I got fewer stares than we might have otherwise. Mr. Banner was nowhere to be seen.

We took our seats quietly, and for once the silence was almost amiable. We'd come to some sort of truce during lunch, and while I certainly hadn't suddenly come to trust him, I had a slightly more optimistic outlook than I'd had this morning, fake relationship aside. My improved mood only got better when Banner came in wheeling a tall stand with an ancient television and VCR on it. He was met with cheers, which he ignored.

Of course, it took about five minutes to actually get the video playing, but once he did someone flicked off the lights, and suddenly I was alone, in the dark, next to Edward. The room wasn't pitch black, but the battered shades were down, blocking any meager light that might have crept into the room. The parallels to one of my nightmares was a bit much. I squirmed in my seat.

If Edward noticed my discomfort, he pretended not to. I managed to get a grip about fifteen minutes in, and we sat in slightly strained silence for the remaining time. We didn't finish the video, either, which was good; hopefully we'd spend tomorrow's class finishing it. I felt slightly flushed and awkward as Mr. Banner told someone to turn the lights back on, as if I had been caught doing something I shouldn't have been.

I glanced over at Edward, and at the same time he glanced at me. He looked similarly uncomfortable, right down to the flushed face, but was quickly regaining his composure. He offered a small smile, which I belatedly returned as he stood up and stretched a bit. It reminded me of a cat, I thought suddenly, and brushed the thought away, gathering up my things.

"I have gym next," I muttered, zipping up my backpack.

He shrugged. "I'll walk you."

We were quiet again on the way to the gym; the fog had dissipated outside, but it was still freezing, which didn't really encourage conversation. I was almost happy to be escaping to the heated gymnasium. "See you," I said, and he nodded before I slipped inside the double doors.

I spent gym eying the racket in my hand as if it were a bomb set to go off at any moment, and from the looks other people were giving me, they felt similarly. I didn't have high hopes when Clapp ordered us to make teams, but Mike came over, to my relief. I spent most of the class cowering behind him as he single handedly won three games out of four without so much as breaking a sweat. There was something to be said for having befriended one of the best athletes in the school.

"So you and Ed Cullen are a thing now?" he asked as we returned our rackets, and I felt a bit less complimentary towards him.

"Yeah," I said a bit more shortly than was polite, and he looked like a rebuked puppy. Feeling bad about this, I beat a quick retreat to the girls locker room to change.

American History went by quickly, and then the final bell was ringing and I was unsure of what to do. Was I supposed to seek Edward out, now that we were 'dating'? Was that what boyfriends and girlfriends did? But he wasn't outside my final class, so I made my way to the parking lot, almost relieved to be free of the pressure of having to act as though we were in a relationship, if only for a little while.

But when I reached the parking lot, I saw him balancing on the curb nervously, and, while tempted to just head straight for Toy Truck, wandered over to him.

"You probably just want to get home," he apologized without really apologizing, and then said, "So I'll pick you up Saturday morning?"

"I'm driving," I reminded him sternly, and he rolled his eyes a little.

"Yes, I remember. I suggested it."

The rest of the school was crowding the area now, either heading to the line of buses, which was really quite short given the small student body, or to their cars. Most of the juniors and seniors seemed to carpool. Edward and I were under a bunch of eyes all at once now, and turning red, I quickly hugged him, as if to prove to the masses that we were in fact a couple. He was completely taken aback by this, and returned the brief embrace stiltedly just as I was pulling away.

"Everyone was watching," I hissed, and he gave me an 'I can see that, Bella' look before I walked away.

The afternoon and evening passed quickly; I didn't have much homework. I had a very strange dream in which Edward and I had to get married to prevent a war between vampires and humans, and woke up at three in the morning half horrified, half amused by the sheer insanity of the whole thing before falling abruptly back asleep.

The next morning I felt better than I had the previous day, and was almost calm at the prospect of seeing Edward again. Dad and I ate breakfast in silence together; he fried both of us eggs, a special treat. As we deposited our plates in the sink he looked at me for a moment, and then asked cautiously, "You still going to Seattle this Saturday?"

Saturday. Seattle. Right. Lie.

"Yesssss?" I stretched it out like a piece of gum in my mouth.

"Can't believe no one asked you to the dance," he said gruffly.

"It's girl's choice," I reminded him, wishing he'd drop it. The dance was the least of my concerns right now.

He frowned. I internally cringed at the idea of my own dad pitying me for not having a date. Wait. If the whole school thought Edward and I were dating, then it was only a matter of time before it got back to Dad. He didn't know yet; he would have said something last night. But why hadn't I thought of this before?! I was still thinking in Phoenix terms; only in Forks did you have worry about your dad finding out about your fake relationship as soon as he got into work.

For now I just kept my head down until he left for work, not looking forward to dinner tonight at all. I doubted Dad would grill with questions too much, the way Mom would have, but stony silence and suspicious looks might be worse. Sometimes I was convinced he thought I was still fourteen.

Edward was hanging around the parking lot when I got to school, and we awkwardly stood beside one another, fingertips millimeters away from touching, silently wondering what to do.

"Are people wondering why we're not….," I felt my cheeks light up as if matches had been struck beneath the skin. "….You know, kissing or anything?"

"Yes," he muttered back to me, but studiously avoided my gaze. I focused on the cracked pavement.

"Would you like to play a game?" he asked after a few moments of tired silence.

I raised an eyebrow.

"What kind of game?" It was not flirty or coy; rather it was a tone of flat disbelief.

"We could ask each other questions," he explained stiffly, but I could almost sense the embarrassment lurking underneath. "If we're going to… do this then we should know more about each other, right?"

"Fine. You first," I insisted.

"What's your favorite color?" he asked tentatively. The question was so innocuous I laughed.

"Um, brown."

"Brown?" Now he was smirking.

I grew slightly defensive. "It's… safe. Nurturing. It's the color of dirt and rocks and trees." When I thought of brown I thought of Arizona; I thought of old men and women with rough, tanned skin, of the endless desert, of my mom's warm eyes. Everything that ought to be brown here was coated in sickly green or shrouded in cold grey.

"What's your favorite color?" I swiftly turned the tables.

He thought for a moment. "Green."

"Your eyes are green," I complained, sure this was the reason for it.

"My mother's eyes were green, too," he retorted, and then without missing a beat: "What sort of music do you listen to?"

"Everything."

"Everything," he repeated doubtfully.

"I like all types. What about you?"

"Me too," he admitted, reluctantly, and then in a significantly lower tone, "But that sort of comes with the not aging territory."

I did snicker a little, in spite of myself.

He walked me to English, and our questions turned to movies. I'd seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Phantom of the Opera last year and loved them both; he'd preferred The Village and Howl's Moving Castle. It was my turn to smirk at the admission of the latter, and I couldn't help but innocently ask if he'd seen Van Helsing, too. Edward narrowed his eyes in amusement at me.

When I saw him again after Spanish we talked about places we'd been. I wasn't surprised to hear he'd been, well… everywhere. All across the Americas and most of Europe; his 'family' had never stayed for any prolonged amount of time in Asia or the Middle East, he admitted.

"How many…. like you are there, then?" I did manage to summon up the nerve to ask, in a rare empty stretch of hallway. "Are you… the only ones or?"

He shook his head and my stomach clenched with distant fear. "No. No, there's many covens. All across the globe. Most are small," he added quickly, as if that made up for it. "We're one of the larger ones, with seven. And many of us are… drifters, you could say. Some are less social than others. Before, we were staying with another coven, all female, in Alaska."

Wonderful. Yet another state to cross off my bucket list. How many covens were there in America alone? I never did ask, and when we sat together at lunch I was grateful the subject changed to books. We talked about books for a long time, all the way through Bio as well, whispering during the video when Banner wasn't stalking the classroom; Edward was a voracious reader, just like me. I felt like I'd never talked that much in my life; I was hoarse by gym.

I barely said anything in gym; Mike seemed to be under the assumption that I was wandering about in some love struck daze, and so bemusedly let me silently hide behind him once again. Still, I was almost eager as I changed out of my gym clothes, which seemed odd. I usually despised interrogation sessions, even with good friends, and while maybe Edward and I were haltingly, unwillingly on our way to becoming friends, I shouldn't have been that happy to trade questions and answers with him like jokes or riddles.

The sky was threatening rain outside, but Edward and I lingered on the sidewalk as the parking lot. "Last question of the day," he assured me, and I rolled my eyes. "What do you miss most about Phoenix?"

I froze and glanced up at him. He had that peculiar, almost hopeful expression again on his thin face.

I almost sighed, but stopped myself. "I miss the cicadas," I found myself admitting. "Even right on the outskirts of the city- where my mom and I lived- you could still hear them. In the summer, you know? Sometimes they were louder than the traffic. Here all you hear at night is rain and wind. And I miss the trees in Arizona. They're nothing like the ones here. The palo verdes especially. The leaves look like feathers. And the sky… the sky stretches on forever. You can even see past the mountains, not like here. And the mountains are so pretty; purple and orange and gold, like something out of a sci fi movie… The sun's everywhere. In everything. My mom used to say when I was little that she thought the Arizona desert was like Heaven looked like." I found myself smiling in spite of myself, and he was just watching me, green eyes less sharp than usual.

"It's just… it's really beautiful there. People don't think it'd be so pretty, because it seems like everything's dead, but really, nothing's more alive." Everything was stripped bare in Arizona, laid out in perfect disorder as far as the eye could see. In Washington everything was hidden, concealed, just out of my view. Where I had grown up there were no mysteries, no secrets, just glorious certainty, that the sky was never going to end, that the mountains would never fall, that the sun would never truly set.

Now that I had stopped talking at last I realized the parking lot was rapidly emptying. "What do you miss most about Illinois?" I asked quickly, embarrassed I'd rambled so much.

He considered this thoughtfully. "I miss my old house," he finally said. "There was a big tree outside and there were a lot of windows, and the sun was everywhere," he echoed me, whether purposefully or not, I had no idea. "And we had an old piano. My parents taught me how to play it when I was very young. I'd spend hours practicing."

"That sounds… nice," I said quietly, suddenly feeling a small tear of sympathy opening up in me, before we were distracted by the beeping of a car. The other Cullens had pulled up alongside us in the Volo. I suddenly wondered what, exactly, they knew, and took a step back. Rose was driving, Emmett alongside her in the front, and she didn't look happy. Her and Edward exchanged an unreadable look and he glanced back at me. "I have to go."

"Right," I croaked out, trying to not sound at all intimidated by the sudden increase in the number of vampires in my presence. I was reduced to waving awkwardly as he got in, and then hurriedly made my way to Toy Truck. It was starting to rain.

The sky had gone almost completely dark as I pulled in the driveway at home, and the rain was now pouring down like a thousand buckets all overturned at once. I hurried inside, and read in front of the TV with the volume muted, until lights from the driveway shone into the dimly light living room at around what should have been dusk. This wasn't surprising, but then a second pair of headlights pulled into the driveway, and that made me put down my book and peek curiously out the window. A smaller black car had followed Dad's cruiser into the driveway. The rain had lightened to a substantially lighter drizzle, and the front door swung open.

"Bella!" he called, obviously expecting me to be upstairs, and then blinked as he saw me standing, book in hand, mere feet away. "There you are. Come say hi to Billy and Jake, they're over to watch the game." Yes. This was exactly what my evening had needed. I forced on a smile and waved as the Blacks came through the door.

Complication, complication... Ransom the birth of a new destruction... It's different now; it's what we always wanted.

- Killing Joke, 'Complications'