Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. It is not being distributed for profit. Stephenie Meyer owns the copyright to the Twilight Saga. No copyright infringement intended.

Reminder: This story is rated M and may not be appropriate for readers under the age of 18.


Chapter 12

September 2009

BPOV

Luckily, my apartment was only a short distance from Binghamton High School. Had it been any farther, I'm not sure I would have made it back in one piece. I ran through the front door, dropped my bag and started pacing. Like a live wire, I shook with raw energy. My body pulsed with adrenaline, my mind spun with too many questions. I was about to lose it.

Settle down, I admonished myself. You are a scientist — act like one. I needed to look at this logically, stop reacting emotionally, take each item and examine it. I forced myself to sit down and think.

Okay, first item: I needed answers. If there wasn't a reasonable explanation for this, it would be the last straw — the final proof that I was certifiably insane. Because as much as I might try to deny it, I knew he was the same guy from Forks six years ago. It was him.

Frustrated, I took a deep breath and let it out. Logic said it was not possible that some guy from my high school six years ago would turn up here, looking exactly the same, wearing exactly the same jacket, with exactly the same friend, driving exactly the same car, and still be in high school. It was too crazy, even for me.

I knew I had to get to the bottom of this, and that meant I was going to have to find a way to talk to him. But the fact that he was evidently in high school made the situation even more complicated. I couldn't approach him at the school — god, there were probably laws against that kind of thing — but still, I had to have answers. I'd have to find some other way.

I closed my eyes and my thoughts drifted to images of his distinctive, bronze-colored hair . . . but I didn't want to think about that too hard. I knew that hair. I ran my fingers through it every night in my dreams. Did I just happen to remember his hair from that brief encounter all those years ago, so much that I made it a characteristic of my dream lover? It must have impressed me at the time . . . although I don't remember actually having that thought six years ago. Still, it was the easiest explanation. It was the only explanation.

These days, I latched onto explanations wherever I could, because if I thought too hard, I'd find myself mired in the inexplicable anomalies from my dream life. The scent I now caught all over town. The blood on the sheets. The button. The indentations on my pillow and mattress. Although not foolproof, the explanations I had come up with for all of these things were good enough to lock them all up in a compartment so that they didn't strengthen the nagging feeling that somewhere, under all of this, I was completely of my mind.

And now I had another enigma to deal with, separate and apart from my dreams. This guy from my high school was a fact, not a figment of my imagination, and not an apparition in my dreams. He was a living, breathing real mystery that could be solved. Surely there was a simple explanation for his unchanged appearance, for the fact that he was still in high school. There must be an easy explanation. There just had to be . . . didn't there?

One thing I knew for sure. He had absolutely nothing to do with my dreams.

* * *

Two weeks later, I had still not managed to find a way to talk to him.

It was a Saturday, and I was back on the cobblestone street, looking through the bookstore window at the latest release from my favorite contemporary author. I wanted to buy it, even though I was on a tight budget. I opened the door of the shop, heard the familiar tinkling of the doorknob bells, and stepped inside.

As soon as I drew my next breath it hit me. Hard.

I stopped, closed my eyes for a moment and willed myself to be calm. It's only a hallucination. I took deep and controlled breaths and remained composed as the scent moved through me. It was stronger than my dreams, stronger than that time in the music store, more distinct than I'd been picking up around town lately. Today the scent was somehow sharper, more . . . erotic, and I felt a moment of panic that my illness was worsening. But there had been no seizures, not a single sign of even a petit mal incident. It's your subconscious. Ignore it, it's not really there. I took another deep breath and walked towards the hardcover fiction section to grab a copy of the book.

And there he was.

He was standing at the back of the store with a book in his hand. When I approached, he raised his head and looked at me, nostrils flaring and chest heaving and . . . then he seemed to just freeze in place, not moving a muscle. For a moment I could swear the only thing about him that seemed alive was his eyes — golden eyes boring into mine with fear and apprehension and a trace of something else I couldn't identify.

This was it, this was my opportunity. Bracing myself, I walked right up to him, literally trapping him in a tight corner of shelves. When I got closer, he avoided my gaze and his eyes darted around like he was looking for a means of escape. Not so fast, you. I want some answers.

"You were in my biology class years ago in high school, weren't you?"

I blurted my question like an accusation, nerves making me sound more confrontational than I meant to be. His eyes grew wide as he stood motionless in front of me — I swear he wasn't even breathing.

He was looking down, to the side, behind me, anywhere but at me. "No," he said, a little too emphatically. "I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get this book for my class."

Before I could offer a comeback, I started to lose my clarity of thought. I felt dazed, lulled in his presence. I was drawn to his golden eyes, his voice like velvet, even the scent that flowed off him in waves — my mind accepted it and did not even wonder why he was the source of the scent that was so familiar to me. I could feel my heart skip, my body reacting to this guy I didn't know. He was taller than I'd remembered, his face as handsome as an angel's. My eyes were starting to feel heavy and my head feeling light when a movement caught my attention and pulled me back to reality.

He was trying to walk around me.

Regaining my senses, I held my ground and blocked his way. "I'm not mistaken. You look exactly like someone I knew in Washington State."

He squinted his eyes into a wince, looking almost like he was in pain. "It wasn't me. I've never been to For— . . . I've never been west of the— " He was stammering. "Excuse me, I have to go."

He sidestepped me and walked away.

I stood there stunned. He was about to say "Forks" before he stopped himself, and by the look of panic on his face, he realized his mistake. But before I could react he slipped away, darting up the aisle and around a bookcase, leaving me to simply stare after him. I watched as he walked to the front of the store, obviously in a hurry to leave. I saw the store owner whisper something to him, put his book in a bag, and hand it to him.

I was still staring at the front of the store when I heard the deep creaking of old wood moving. It was coming from the next aisle over. I peered through an open spot in the bookcases that separated the aisles and gasped in horror at what I saw. A child was climbing up a bookcase, and had made it up to the fifth shelf when her weight caused the old and massively heavy case to slowly tilt forward. In a moment it would come down on top of her and there was no way the child would survive it!

And suddenly, before I could even scream for help, he was there. How did he get back here so fast? He grabbed the child and scooted her across the floor, sliding her safely away while he braced his back against the teetering bookcase.

The case was solid hardwood, at least ten feet tall, and loaded with books. It had to have weighed a thousand pounds, minimum, and it was now coming down on him. A few hardcover books began to rain down on his head and shoulders as the shelf fell further forward. He was going to be crushed; he was as defenseless as the child against its weight.

Unable to look away, I stood and watched the scene play out from my undetected position in the next aisle. As I stared, I saw him do something . . . impossible. He deftly spun around, reached wide and grabbed the bookcase, lifting it a good foot and a half off the ground. Holding it mid-air, he carefully shifted it so it was upright once more, then gently placed it back on the floor in its original location. It rocked and creaked for a moment before it was still. The whole maneuver took him all of about four seconds.

Neither strained nor winded, he stood there, calm in the midst of chaos, his eyes on the bookcase, making sure it remained stable. I was transfixed, not believing what I had seen, trying to process it so it might make sense. But nothing was making sense, nothing could make sense. No one should have been able to lift that bookcase the way he did.

It was then that he turned around and saw me.

We locked eyes, and it was just like it had been that day in front of the high school — all sound stopped, all movement stopped, everything grew still and the rest of the world fell away as we stared at each other, each unable to look away from the others eyes, as we both silently acknowledged what was happening and neither of us had any power to prevent it.

It could have been minutes or merely seconds, but he abruptly jerked his gaze away from me. Before I could say a word, he turned and ran to the front of the store, and when I heard the tinkling of the door bells I knew he was gone.

Still dazed, I looked back to where he had just lifted the bookcase, saving the child and himself from certain death. And there, on the floor, was the book he had purchased, still in its bag, obviously discarded in his haste to right the bookcase and get away from me. Very quickly and discreetly, I slipped over to the other aisle, reached down, picked up his book, and put it in my backpack. I don't know what made me do it, but in that moment I just wanted something that was his.

Shouldering my backpack, I walked to the front of the store and saw the shop owner looking at the front door, the doorknob bells still swaying back and forth. When she turned and looked at me, I noticed once again her oddly colored golden eyes. Just like his.

"Who was that?" I couldn't help asking her. I'd never been so curious about anything in all my life.

"That was my son," she said. And then she walked away, leaving me dumbstruck once again.

EPOV

I was a good ten miles down the road before I pulled over and stopped the car. So much had just happened. She had been standing there, right there, in front of me — closer than I'd ever seen her. Her huge brown eyes, her alabaster skin, her long silky hair, her beautiful body and the scent of her blood — she was nothing like my fantasies yet exactly like my fantasies. Everything about her was exponentially more potent, more vibrant than in my imagination. Mercifully, although the bloodlust was there, it was not overpowering this time. Instead I was hit with wave after wave of raw lust and love for this woman. It was everything I could do to stop my breathing in the bookstore, to freeze my muscles and stop my trembling. She was right there, inches in front of me, all I had to do was reach out . . .

And then I made my first mistake — I nearly said Forks — and she noticed it. I might as well have confessed, because she knew what I had been about to say, there could be no denying it. Perhaps that could be handled; long life and slow aging was not necessarily anything supernatural.

But then I made the biggest mistake I had made in over 90 years. I let a human see me do something I should not be able to do. I thought I was so careful, that no one was looking — and dammit I had to stop the child from being crushed. But Isabella saw me lift the bookcase, its weight completely insignificant to me.

I groaned, holding my head in my hands while I tried to divine a way out of this. If she talked, if she learned what I am, and if they got wind of it, her life would be forfeit. I could not allow that to happen. Now that I'd found her I knew I would not survive if anything happened to her.

I reached across to the glove box and opened it, pulling out the blue scarf and raising it to my lips and then to my nose, breathing deeply. This innocent-looking scarf was what kept her alive today. It had worked.

My mind was already spinning with next phase of my plan.


A/N It's Monday!!!

Thanks to ALL of you who have reviewed, please please review to those who haven't.

And a special thanks to Lilliput who put up with last week's last minute edits from me. Thankfully, she's not only not a violent woman, but she lives too far away to beat me up.

Song lists are on Lilliput's profile, enjoy!