[Disclaimer] Everything Twilight belongs to Mrs. Stephenie Meyer

**Visions of Mates**

I don't think I understand," I whisper nervously while Bella's face looks as if she's about to start crying any moment.

"How do you know what my human name was? Is that something that James told you about me?"

She reaches out her hand and when her warm fingers close around my wrist I feel their heat radiating through my entire body. Is this how it feels like to be alive?

"I can't explain to you what happened with me. I don't understand it. I don't understand how a dream can be so realistic. I don't…I don't…,"

Her voice turns into a desperate sobbing and as gently as I can I pull her against my chest. My fingertips move down the small of her back in slow circles while I feel the warm wetness of her tears soaking through the fabric of my shirt.

"Oh Bella, please stop crying. Everything is going to be okay."

"No, it's not! I should have found a way to protect you better. They put you in this horrible Asylum. They left you alone in the darkness although you were so scared of it. I'm so very sorry, so very sorry."

Asylum?

Darkness?

How in heaven's name should Bella be able to protect me? The thought itself seems so weird to me. I wonder if she's about to have a panic attack or if this is probable a result of all the pain medication they had given her back in the hospital in Phoenix. Whatever it is, it's confusing me far more than anything else I have experienced before in my life.

"Mary Alice Brandon. Your human name was Mary Alice Brandon, but you liked that I called you Alice, just Alice."

"Mary Alice Brandon." I murmur, trying to bring some connection between the words and my extinguished human memories. There is none. She could have told me that my name used to be Katharine Miller and it wouldn't have made any sort of difference for me. I can't imagine myself as a human, it's impossible. Being a vampire is all I know, all I understand. Maybe that's why I suck so horribly at acting human.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" she whispers after a few moments of awkward silence filled with nothing but her breathing and the frantically beating of her heart in her chest. I try not to concentrate too much on it because visualizing how her sweet blood gets pumped through her veins is too tempting in a forbidden way.

"Alice?"

"I see the future in my head. That probably makes me the last person on earth who has a right to call anyone crazy."

I plant a kiss on her hair and inhale its scent that is barely noticeable under the strawberry perfumed shampoo she's using.

"You have to tell me everything you know. Everything you've seen."

"I don't know where to start."

"Well, you told me what my human name was. That's a start."

She frees herself out of my embrace and tries to stand up from the bed, almost stumbling over her wastepaper basket before she leans back against the wooden desk on the other side of the room.

"You lived in Mississippi with you parents and your little sister Cynthia."

"Was I pretty?"

The words are out of my mouth before I can think and I wonder why of all the things I could have asked her about my humanity, this is the first one. It sounds way more like something that Rosalie would have liked to know than me. But of course, Rosalie knows exactly how her face used to look like when she was a human.

"Yes, you were, a lot actually." She whispers and there is somehow a longing tone in her voice that I don't understand. Did she like me better when I was human?

"I liked your hair…and your eyes…and most of all your lips."

When she says the last part she cups my face in her right hand and circles the fingertip of her forefinger over my lower lip.

"It still looks the same but it feels so different."

Slowly I lean forward and kiss her mouth, feeling her already hectically heartbeat increasing even more. I can hear her blood rushing through her breakable skin and combined with her velvety smooth lips against my own it's the most amazing sensation of desire that ever happened to me. Kissing Jasper doesn't even come close to how this is like. Maybe because he doesn't smell as temptingly delicious as she does.

Eventually she pulls back, panting and gasping for air. Did she forget to breathe? Do humans tend to forget to breathe during a kiss or is that just another sign of Bella's clumsiness?

"We can't do that anymore. It's wrong. I'm with Edward and you are with Jasper."

I don't really like that she's mentioning the guys right now. Whatever is happening between me and her, it has nothing to do with them. This is just between me and her.

But what is between me and her? I love Jasper so much. He's my mate. He's the first vision of another person that I had when I woke up after the transformation and it took me so incredibly long to find him.

She starts crying again and I taste the salt of her tears when I press my lips tenderly on hers again. I don't want her to be sad. It makes me sad and because Jasper usually helps to keep me from enduring that sort of negative emotions it hits me with its entire force.

"I don't want us to stop, Bella. You mean so much to me, maybe even more than I have words for it."

"When you kiss me, can't you remember? Can't I make you remember, just one tiny bit?"

I take a small curl of her hair between my fingers, admiring how the copper shades of it reflect under the light of her lamp.

"I don't need to remember to know that you are special to me."