Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise, I just use their creations to have my wicked way with them. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story would be nothing without my amazing beta-team, Jadsmama and Ladysharkey1.

Kiss: verb (used with object) 1. to touch or press with the lips slightly pursed, and then often to part them and to emit a smacking sound, in an expression of affection, love, greeting, reverence, etc.: He kissed his son on the cheek. 2. to join lips with in this way: She kissed him and left. 3. to touch gently or lightly: The breeze kissed her face. 4. to put, bring, take, etc., by, or as if by, kissing: She kissed the baby's tears away. 5. Billiards, Pool. (of a ball) to make slight contact with or brush (another ball).

Kiss

I need you.

After yesterday I never thought I'd hear her say those words but when she did, they came with none of the relief and fucking triumph I had imagined.

No, they came with fucking agony as I listened to my girl sobbing on the phone; the jumbled mess of words she managed to stammer in between heavy breaths gave me just enough to know where she was.

"I have to go." Jenks' assistant looked as shocked as I would have been had it not been for the crying girl in my ear. I shrugged. "It's an emergency. Tell Jenks I'll call him as soon as I can."

Jenks and my dad weren't going to like me leaving. Hell, I knew it was probably the shittiest thing I could do in that moment, especially since Jenks kind of held the purse-strings to my future as a free citizen and all, but I had to.

Necessity knows no law and all that bullshit.

As I turned to leave I could just make out the familiar shape of Jenks as he came out of his office, confusion setting in on his usually so fucking controlled features as he spotted me hopping into the elevator. All I could give him was an apologetic smile.

I needed to be closer to Bella.

As I jumped into a cab different scenarios of what might have happened to her started to form in my head, not really making the fucking urge to lash out any better as I bounced my leg with impatience. I believed the cab driver was as fucking relieved as I was when he finally dropped me off on the corner of University and Waverly, though I didn't stop to think about it for too long, my eyes were already scanning Washington Park for the familiar fragile shape of my girl.

When I found her, all of the pent up anger that had started to build over the course of the past twenty minutes or so deflated at the sight of her as she helplessly sat there, huddled up on a fucking park bench with her arms wrapped firmly around herself as if that was the only way she could stop herself from falling apart.

Shit! What the fuck happened to her? And who do I have to kill for doing this to her?

I approached Bella carefully, knowing she didn't like to be touched, although all I really fucking wanted to do was take her in my arms and keep her safe—even if it was just to hold her together and let her know she wasn't alone in this shit. Whatever it was, I would be her protector.

"Bella?" She only looked up when I called out her name; the blind fear and panic I saw in those big brown eyes made my own fucking desperation grow exponentially as I hunched down in front of her. "Are you…? Can I…?" I had so many questions I didn't know which to ask first.

She nodded, putting her hands in mine. "I'm fine," she spoke, even though her voice alone told me she was anything but fucking fine. "I'm just…" She took a stuttering breath. "I'm unharmed…I just saw someone…" Her eyes widened and her bottom lip trembled as her gaze lingered shortly in the direction of the building I knew housed the History Department.

"Do you want to get out of here?" I suggested, sensing that the time wasn't exactly right to ask her why she was crying.

She nodded enthusiastically, her teeth gnawing her bottom lip. "Take me…take me somewhere beautiful." The whispered words made my heart fucking bleed, my free hand balled into a fist by my side as the other took hold of hers as tightly as I could without hurting her. My mind frantically searched for the perfect spot to take this beautiful broken girl.

For a moment I debated on one of my favorite thinking spots near Carl Schurz Park but I figured she'd rather be somewhere more private than out in the open.

So I took her to one of my other favorite places, which also happened to be the preferred spot of just about half of fucking New York. Luckily though, with it being Monday afternoon, thankfully the gazebo near the pond in Central Park was blissfully devoid of people, which was kinda cool since it looked like it was going to rain soon and offered us a shelter from the weather.

It was either this or Grand Central Station.

"It's so pretty," Bella muttered as her eyes traveled the course of the lake before settling on the lone rowing boat floating around in the middle of it. "Thanks for bringing me here."

"I come out here a lot to think…or just to hang out with my guitar and play." I shrugged as I sat down next to her and I mentally slapped myself for not bringing something to eat or drink or maybe even a blanket. She looked like she could do with either one of those. "It's a good spot for sorting out your thoughts."

"It is," she acknowledged, slightly turning towards me. "So I guess I owe you an explanation, huh?"

The watery look in those big, red-rimmed eyes all but killed me. She looked so lost, mirroring how I felt sometimes but worse, seeing as her emotions went way beyond my own pathetic fucking post-teenage-style angst.

"You owe me nothing, Bella," I answered, wishing she would just look at me and see how much those words were the truth. "If you just want to sit here and be quiet, you've got it. If you want me to get the hell away and leave you in peace, I will—though I might hover a little bit in the periphery to make sure you're okay."

"But what if I want to talk?" Her question kind of took me aback a little as I hadn't really expected her to want to talk about whatever the fuck was happening with her. I mean, not that I knew a whole fucking lot of people or anything, but Bella was one of the most closed off, private people I'd ever met.

Craning my neck, I watched her looking away from me. "You want to talk?"

"I think," she paused, plucking at the sleeve of her jacket, "I think it would be a good thing to tell someone besides my therapist. I've been quiet about this so long that it's gotten harder and harder to tell someone but I think…I know now's the time. That is…if you want to hear it?"

Her question kindled the tiny bit of hope that had sparked when she called me—me, of all people. "I want to."

"Okay." She nodded, shuffling in her seat as she fell quiet for so long I was beginning to think she was bailing out on me after all. "I was raised very protectively."

I frowned, wondering what the hell that had to do with the reason she was crying but she just went on. "My dad was the police chief, so that basically left me excluded from the local partying scene and even apart from that, he never let me go anywhere alone unless I submitted to an hour-long debriefing on all the risks I could run into on my way."

I couldn't help but snort incredulously. "What the hell?"

She smiled back, though it was a forced, watery one. "I guess all the stuff he'd seen in his days in the big city kind of got to his head a little, even though he'd moved away from Seattle years before. Anyway, when I got a full scholarship to U-Dub, he almost wouldn't let me go. It took my mom, and even my history teacher, to convince him that a local community college wasn't the place for me. And even then…"

She let out a deep breath; her attention temporarily averted as she watched a kid run by with his nanny chasing after him and trying, in vain, to keep him from climbing the rocks by the shore. "Sometimes I wish I would have listened to my dad," she muttered, her eyes still trained on the kid as he was peeled away from the rocks by his pissed off caretaker. "I might have ended up in some dead-end job being miserable but at least it wouldn't have been as bad."

I grabbed her hand, needing to do something to show her my support. It felt icy in mine, weightless even though the trust she was giving me at the moment hung heavily on my shoulders. "Something happened to you in college, didn't it?"

She nodded. "I was so far out of my depth when I first started class. I'd never been away from home, never even socialized that much, so after the first couple of weeks, I saw that groups had formed and friendships had been made and once again I'd ended up somewhere along the periphery. I was tolerated by the others but not liked enough to be invited to their get-togethers. I was lonely, I guess. Alone and vulnerable, which was the perfect combination for him."

I didn't get the chance to ask questions before she went on. "He was one of the department's shining stars; a scholar whose works on historiography and historical thought had earned international acclaim and who was very sought after…I remember I felt so daunted, seeing his name so often on my class schedule. And lucky." She snorted deprecatingly. "Well, lucky me," she added with bitterness.

"He did something to you, didn't he?" I wanted to kill him, even though I didn't even know the fucker's name. It didn't matter to me because that dick was going to be dead. My fingers curled around the bench my ass was parked on, trying to keep me from jumping up and scaring the shit out of my girl. This is about Bella, not me. Stay calm and just listen to her.

She nodded. "It started with him taking me aside one day and telling me that my work did not meet the university's standards." She shifted on the bench, pressed her lips together and took a deep breath before she plunged back in. "I know now that that was never true, but back then I didn't have anything to go on. I had no friends and no experience. I was naïve and unprepared and so…so I believed him. How was I supposed to know that the only reason he'd picked me was because he knew he could easily manipulate me and no one would notice? I was a classic victim."

Fucker! I tensed, bracing myself for her words as she went on. "It all began so gradually…so smooth and yet so fast. One moment I was simply doing some archiving for him in exchange for one-on-one tutoring to get my knowledge up to par, and then the next he took me home to work with him there and then…then other things."

As much as I had intended to keep a neutral attitude and not make this shit any harder for her, I couldn't stop the growl from erupting from my chest. Her hand grabbed mine a bit tighter as if to support me when it should have been the other fucking way around. "He had no right, Bella," I snarled, forcing her eyes on mine.

"He never forced me," she whispered, her voice barely audible above the sounds of nature and people fucking gallivanting about as if nothing was wrong with this fucked up world. "Everything I did was out of my own free will. I think that's what scared me the most about all of it—I genuinely thought he liked me, even if the signs weren't all there, I pretended they were!"

"It wasn't your own free will," I argued. "Can't you see? He was playing fucking mind games with you to get you where he wanted you to be."

"But I let him!" she snapped, the fire back in her eyes much to my relief. "I let him control my mind…my body…my whole damn future. Hell, I even gave him my virginity because I was too damn blind to see that his 'love' for me was nothing more than a ruse to get me to be his next little plaything. How he…how he got off on my innocence…my ignorance."

"You didn't know…" I started only to have her interrupt me almost immediately with a self-hating snort.

"That's right, I didn't!" She huffed, angry tears filled her eyes. "I would never have let it go that far…I…I gave him me on a silver platter and I never stopped to think about anything but whether or not it was good enough for him. That's the extent to which I was under his control."

I saw it immediately—why she never wanted to be touched and the reasons she always seemed to doubt the people who were close to her. Fuck, how would anyone ever be able to trust again after having been through something as sick as that? "But it ended, right?" I asked, probably as much for my sake as for hers. "You managed to break free of him."

"Only just." She deflated again, the doubt and shame returned in full force as she retreated back into herself. "By the end of the academic year I started to notice a change in him…he was pulling away, growing more distant and finding more and more ways to punish me for something I'd done wrong."

I took in a sharp breath, wondering just what this 'punishment' had entailed. "Go on."

"I now know that he was probably just prepping me for the next step in his scheme. I mean, I can only guess about this because no one else came forward when I filed my complaint with the dean but…I don't think it was his first time doing this. I believe he had a different freshman warming his bed every year only to sell them off at the end when he was done with them."

It was starting to get harder to keep my voice calm. The deeper she got into the history of her abuse, the more I wanted to find that bastard and fucking end him. "Sell them off?" What the fuck happened to her?

"I never knew about this," she whispered, her tone insecure as if she expected me to fucking judge her or something. "If I had known...I never even would have gone over to his place. I would have ended it on the spot. It was…he tricked me." She drew a shallow breath, her eyes everywhere but on me as she gathered her courage and spoke again. "It was somewhere around April when he invited me over to his house one Friday night. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, not even when someone delivered my clothes—if you could call it that—to my dorm room about an hour or so before I had to leave. It just…he liked to see me a certain way and I had learned early on not to ask too many questions about it."

Sick fucker! I had to take in a deep breath to stop myself from interrupting her with the tirade that had been building up steadily over the past couple of minutes. How anyone could prey on someone so sweet and innocent as this beautiful girl sitting next to me…I mean, I'd done some pretty sick things in my day but never in a million years would the thought cross my mind.

"When I arrived at his house, I immediately knew something was up," Bella meanwhile went on, her voice sounding more and more detached and robotic as she distanced herself from what had happened. I knew that tone all too well, having had used it myself time and time again when I explained what had happened to my mom. It was…easier. "There was this man sitting with him at the table—a friend, or so he introduced him. But the way he was looking at me…" She took a shaky breath, her feet digging into the gravel as if to keep her firmly on the ground while her mind traveled to a place I fucking knew she didn't want to be. "He had me serve them dinner which was kind of strange in itself but then, when he ordered me to clean up, he came into the kitchen and started to talk and I just…everything just fell apart."

As a teardrop fell down her cheek I had to sit on my fucking hands to stop myself from reaching out to her and touch her. I knew, though. I knew instinctually would be the worst fucking moment to lay my hand on her, not when she was still trapped in the house of that lunatic.

"He took me by the hand and pulled me to the door where I could see them all still sitting, sipping their brandy," she went on, her voice shaky but still so very far away. "He told me he'd been very selfish, keeping me to himself for so long and that it was time for me to show his friends how lucky he was…how good a girl I could be…" He voice trailed off as she needed a few moments to pull herself together again. Hell, I needed a few moments to pull myself together again too! "I didn't understand and I…I panicked, which only set him off."

"What did he do?" I snarled; the possible scenarios of what that sick motherfucker might have put her through made my throat close up with fear.

"He threatened me," she explained, still keeping her eyes on her feet. "He told me that if I didn't go along with it, he would make sure my days at the university were numbered. I didn't care, though. I was shocked but, most of all, I felt so angry and betrayed. It wasn't until he dragged my parents into it that I realized just how far he would go to save his own ass. It didn't help him, though." She smiled, and for the first time since she'd started her story it was a positive one. "I let it all happen to me that night, looking for a way to escape and when I found it, I fled all the way back to Forks, coming back only to file my complaint with the Dean's office on Monday."

"And did they fire the bastard?" I growled, wishing I would have been able to get my hands on the prick who'd done this to her; who had killed part of her soul.

She grimaced. "Not exactly."

"Not exactly?" With that, I'd had it, jumping up from the bench and pacing in front of her like a fucking caged lion as I vented my rage. "What the fuck? The guy abused his authority and you, using his position as a way to trap you, and he attempted to pimp you out!"

She cringed, making me fucking curse myself for going too far. "It was always my word against his, Edward, and he spun his version brilliantly, using all the facts to make up a story that had me looking like the guilty party. I never really expected…at least, I don't think I was." She sighed, some of the tension my outburst had caused seeping away again. "The worst thing was when the rumors started."

I sat back down, flashing an apologetic look before I dared to speak. "Rumors?"

"With my case under scrutiny by a university committee, everyone involved was bound to secrecy...which made it so easy for him to get the rumors started. I still don't know how he did it, but I'm so sure it was him. After all, how else would a rumor spread that I was sleeping around all over campus, trying to fuck myself through my freshman year because I was too dumb to actually earn my credits?" She shook her head, the naked pain visible in her whole being fucking breaking my heart. "In the end, the university pressured me into striking a deal with them: they'd pay me a very handsome sum and would make sure I would be able to transfer to any university I wanted and Professor Banner would be under close scrutiny for five years. Just to be on the safe side, mind you, since I'm still convinced they didn't believe a damn word I'd said."

"And you took the deal?" I couldn't believe it. She actually let the son of a bitch get away with it?

"I had no other choice," she sobbed. "The university was so eager to settle and even my lawyer was convinced that my chances were slim if we ever went to trial. I had no proof, remember? I went along willingly with everything he suggested and when I left, he never physically tried to force me back." She shook her head, her powerlessness slicing through my fucking heart. "In the end I took the deal, even if just to get away from the gossip, the dirty looks, and most of all, from him."

"And you went all the way to Holland to feel safe again." It made sense now; the strange behavior but mostly the fact that a girl like her had chosen to be so far from home.

"The Netherlands," she corrected me. "And though technically it was me fleeing, it proved to be the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It was bold and scary, and it taught me how to live independently away from my mom and dad."

"And now he's back?" I guessed, combining what she'd told me with the reason we were sitting there.

She nodded faintly, the fear back in full force. "The Professor in my Historical Theory class announced that he was going to be giving some guest lectures a few weeks ago but…but I thought I had more time to mentally prepare myself, but today…he was just there. And he tried to talk to me."

"What can you do to keep him away from you?" I asked. "Can you get a restraining order against him?"

She bit her lip, hunching into herself like an oyster clamming up. "I don't know."

"It's not goddamn right that assholes like him can fucking screw with the law and get away with it," I snarled. "That little bitch shouldn't be allowed to get anywhere near a university again!"

"I agree." She sighed, shaking her head. "But what am I supposed to do? It's not like my word matters against someone like him! The best thing I can do is just avoid him until he's back in Seattle. This is only temporary," she muttered, sounding like she was trying as hard to convince herself as she was trying to convince me. "He'll go away again in a few weeks—maybe even a few days."

Having experienced the unfairness of the law firsthand I knew there might be truth in what she said, even though I really didn't like it. At all. "What can I do to help?"

"Just…" When her eyes sought mine, the emotion in them knocked me over completely. It was something I'd never seen in someone who wasn't family, and I would have been lying to think the amount of hope and trust didn't scare the ever loving crap out of me. "Be here with me? You're the only person I know who makes me feel safe."

"Of course," I immediately agreed, taking a huge risk by draping my arm over the back of the bench, my surprise almost as big as hers as she immediately leaned in and let me touch her.

Holy fuck! I was touching her.

It felt good to finally have my arm around her, even though it scared me just how tiny and vulnerable she was. There was some deep, protective shit going around inside my brain; the promise I made to be there for her more than just a few fucking words. It meant something to me. It was a goal I never knew I had.

"Edward?" Her voice sounded hesitant as her head bowed slightly as she peeked at me from behind her hair.

"Yeah?"

She looked straight forward but I could feel the tension in her frame as she spoke. "Can you make me forget today has ever happened?"

How the hell am I supposed to do that? I frowned, trying to think of fun shit to do around here that would make her forget her fucked up past that was suddenly bleeding into her present. I only came up with fucking blanks, though. The only things I knew to do were hanging out with fucked up people, doing drugs, drinking, and having meaningless sex.

Not exactly shit she was going to benefit from.

Almost as soon as I'd convinced myself that I was just about the shittiest fucking person she could have made her appeal to, one thing started to stand out in my mind. It had been the thing I had been thinking about almost non-stop ever since I met her, though in my mind the situation had been slightly different.

"I want to try one thing," I started, angling my body to face hers, her face scrunched up in confusion as she did the same. "You have to keep very still."

"Alright," she muttered.

I smiled, feeling equal parts elated and fucking depraved as I gave out my next order. "Close your eyes, baby."

"Okay," she whispered, blushing as she obeyed. Did she know what I was planning to do? The sight of her, though—her eyes closed and her full, pink lips slightly parted, trusting me—almost made me cum in my pants for the sheer sensuality she exuded without even knowing it.

There was nothing that could prepare me for the feelings I had as I brushed my lips against hers once, twice…testing the waters until I deemed it safe to linger a little longer, and fuck! I may not have been what was right for her, even if she claimed she needed me, but in that moment I knew she was everything I needed; my reason to become a better person.

My Brown Eyes.

My girl.

Thoughts?