Note: No, you're not going crazy - I posted two chapters today. (Or, I don't know, maybe you are going crazy. Not about this, though.) My class just ended in a flurry of stress (group project and presentation - enough said) and I'm taking a vacation, which for me means turning into a hermit. I might still answer PMs and reviews since they're delivered to my email and I like to keep an orderly inbox. Maybe not, though. Maybe I'll stop checking my email.

Here you've got Edward's first step towards telling Isobel about vampires and her reaction. Next Saturday will be Port Angeles.


XXVIII.

"Whether you believe it or not, it's true," I told Isobel.

She was silent for a moment, glaring across the table at me. Around us swirled the normal sounds of high school lunchtime, but our little corner of the cafeteria was frostily silent.

This wasn't going especially well. I had started off badly by wanting to have lunch alone with her. Or rather - by deciding we would have lunch alone and sending Alice off without actually asking. "That's not the deal," Isobel had reminded me.

"We need to talk about yesterday," I had countered.

She had given me a repressive frown. "I know that, but you don't get to unilaterally alter deals. That isn't how this works."

I had apologized, but she hadn't been ready to immediately forgive me, so I got on with saying the things I needed to tell her leading up to explaining everything. She needed to know, before I started giving up secrets, that I didn't deserve the label she had given me after the accident with Tyler. I wasn't good. I was the farthest thing from it.

She didn't believe me. In retrospect, I probably should have waited for forgiveness.

Now we were glaring across a table at each other.

"I believe what I have evidence for, and the evidence doesn't support your claim," she argued.

"You don't have all the evidence," I returned, burying my fingers in my hair. This was…awful. Worse, even, than I had imagined. Isobel's refusal to believe what I told her about myself would have been flattering had there been any chance that she was right about me. But she wasn't. She wasn't. I didn't deserve her good opinion and soon she would know it, too.

"It's not like you're offering me any new evidence to change my mind!" she hissed, leaning forward. "Telling me that you're not the good guy - that you're some kind of villain - after we've become friends, after you leap to my defense every time I'm in a Tyler or Mike situation, after you saved my life is not convincing. All it does is make me think that you don't see yourself clearly at all. Like body dysmorphia, but with your entire personality."

I let my head hang as she finished speaking so that I wouldn't have to meet her eyes, hating myself more in this moment than I ever had before. She was the one who didn't see me clearly - she saw me as I wanted to be, not as I was. Why couldn't I be the person she saw? Why did I have to be...this? "I'm going to give you the evidence," I muttered. I was going to give her more evidence than she could probably take. "I just want to prepare you for it first."

"Right now?" she asked.

I risked a glance at her. Her eyes were wide with surprise. And maybe fear? I couldn't tell. "Am I giving you the evidence right now?" I clarified.

She nodded.

"No," I told her, watching with a complicated ball of mixed-up emotions as her shoulders relaxed. "It's not...something we should talk about in public."

She crossed her arms. "Okay. Maybe we could talk after school - but don't think I'm willing to go somewhere private with you for lunch tomorrow. The deal was - "

"I won't be here for lunch tomorrow," I interrupted. "I'm…" It seemed silly to lie to her about something like this when I was about to tell her everything else. But what else could I tell her right now, before she actually knew anything? "I'm going camping, remember? We leave tomorrow morning."

"Oh." Her brow furrowed and her hands gripped her crossed arms, making it look more like she was hugging herself.

What was she thinking? I didn't know, but I did know that she wanted me to follow the rules we had agreed to. "Alice and I will join you and your friends for lunch on Monday," I promised. "If you want…" I hesitated, not really wanting to offer what I was about to offer, but knowing that Isobel would probably appreciate it. "If you want us to, we'll eat with your group Tuesday, too. To make up for today."

For a moment she stared at me, but then a smile touched her lips and she stopped gripping her arms. "I would like that, thank you."

There was no guarantee she would still like it Tuesday, but I didn't point that out.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. I didn't know what to say and she seemed to be lost in thought. I wondered, as always, what she was thinking, especially when she raised one finger to her lips and began tapping them lightly, unconsciously taunting me. I didn't realize that I was staring with helpless longing until she spoke again. "You're going to need a lot of evidence, Edward. A lot - because I have a lot of evidence that you're a really nice guy."

I tried to return her smile, but I couldn't. I had the evidence. I had all I would ever need and more. "Don't make plans after school on Monday," I told her. "We can start talking about details then."

"That will work," she agreed, the smile slipping from her face.

We both fell silent again - but this time it was distinctly uncomfortable. I cast about for something to say - preferably something that would once more lighten Isobel's expression.

She beat me to it. "Are you looking forward to going camping?" she asked with a sigh, rolling her shoulders as though loosening tense muscles.

I was looking forward to my race with Jasper and Emmett - at least a little - but I couldn't talk about that yet. "I'm looking forward to seeing that movie with you more," I said, dodging the question.

"Have you seen a production of Les Mis?" she asked. "Or do you just know it from the soundtrack?"

I had seen the very first run of Les Mis on Broadway, but not only was it another thing I couldn't yet talk about, the circumstances surrounding it were...not the sort of thing I wanted to dwell on. Still, there was probably no harm in admitting that I had seen it, as long as I didn't get too specific. Alice had already given Isobel the impression that some of our family liked live theatre.

"Yes," I said. "I saw a Broadway production a while back."

Her eyes widened a little and she smiled. "Oh yeah? I'm jealous - I've only ever seen a school production that this arts high school in Phoenix put on a couple years ago. It was pretty good, but it wasn't Broadway."

We spent the rest of lunch discussing - perhaps a little too determinedly - the various operas, ballets, plays and musicals we had seen. None of it mattered much, especially in the face of the reality I would begin revealing Monday, but it was safe and I enjoyed hearing more about what she liked. I found out, for instance, that she had only seen three ballets - The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Giselle - and of those liked Giselle the best. She told me a little more about her mother, too, in the course of explaining all the high school productions of Broadway musicals she had seen - the son of her mother's employer attended the arts school she had mentioned. Most of the employees got yearly bonuses, but Renee was a somewhat irregular employee, so, on learning that she liked musicals, she had been offered tickets to whatever the school was putting on at the end of each school year instead. She had accepted happily, preferring - according to Isobel - tickets over money anyway.

The bell eventually put an end to our conversation and we parted. I spoke with her briefly again in our Spanish class and once more after school, but she was in a hurry to get to the grocery store to buy ingredients so she could leave something for her father to eat while she was in Port Angeles on Saturday.

That night was...long.

Alice and Jasper both took pity on me and requested that I get out my guitar so that they could sing. Carlisle came down and joined around midnight and we had an impromptu concert, much to Esme's delight. Emmett was less delighted - his mind was entirely on racing and he would have happily spent the entire night talking about it - and Rosalie retreated to the garage to get away from us. Playing didn't keep me from thinking about Isobel, but it gave me something specific to think about as opposed to finding myself constantly nagged by nebulous anxiety. I wondered if she would enjoy a night like this, what kinds of requests she would make, and whether she would participate or, like Esme, relegate herself to the audience.

Jasper decided it was time to begin readying his car around dawn and our group broke up. I was equally inclined to be done by then - my car needed no tweaking, but wisps of a melody had kept troubling me as I listened to the other three singing and wondered about Isobel. Esme took Alice up to help her decide on curtains for the window seat she had nearly finished in our second-floor library, leaving me alone with the piano.

I worked on drawing out the melody teasing the edge of my mind, already certain of the opening chords but not quite knowing their rhythm. After some trials, I finally settled on one that was reminiscent of human breathing, but longer and slower - the cadence of sleeping respiration. The cadence - I might as well be honest - of Isobel's respiration while she slept. It was a wistful, longing melody, one that expressed what I felt knowing that I could not be near her as she slept - knowing that, even if I were near her, her mind would be far away from me in the land of human dreams. Waking her mind was more distant than that of anyone else I had ever met; sleeping I was shut out entirely. The pain of that separation found its release in my music.

The result was...not quite a lullaby. More like a nocturne. Isobel's Nocturne.

I spent most of the day working on it. Though a great deal of the melody was simply in my head as though waiting to be written down, there were a few more difficult sections - full of unexpected chord progressions - that I had to spend time toying with to get right. I wanted Isobel to like the song I had written about her, for one thing, and would be unhappy if she lumped it in with "pretentious avant-garde crap." That meant, I thought, smiling to myself, that it needed both rhythm and what she would consider a coherent melody. Even so, the melody couldn't be too predictable, because predictability was more or less the opposite of Isobel herself. I needed a balance.

Eventually Emmett's enthusiasm for racing wouldn't let him leave me alone any longer - especially since Rosalie and Jasper were otherwise occupied. Since he had nothing to do, he dragged me up to the library to look at dirt bikes. Jasper's suggestion had taken root in fertile ground, and he wanted a second opinion on the options he was considering after several hours of intensive research.

"If we're spending this much, we're going to need to expand the garage so we have somewhere to keep them." Our garage already had the capacity to hold sixteen cars, and the workshop had another space with professional-grade equipment that Rose used for examining, repairing and testing upgrades to our vehicles. We could probably find space for two dirt bikes, but Emmett was talking about buying three or four.

Emmett shrugged at my objection. "Esme would enjoy that, and she could add on that upper floor she's been talking about. Maybe the pixie girl would finally get a real lab."

I snorted. "I think Esme would claim the space as a drafting room."

"You know Rosie'd be all over that. Get a 3D printer up there - some top-of-the-line computers with AutoDesk-"

"Carlisle might enjoy the chance to experiment with new prosthetics," I mused.

"Shit, let's get these bikes ordered and give everyone the excuse to get started on what they want to do anyway!"

I stopped him, pointing out that adding onto the garage would still take time. We could get two now, but we needed to announce our plans to the rest of the family to make sure that everyone else was willing to go along with them. He grumbled good-naturedly but couldn't deny that I had a point, so we sat down to seriously argue out the merits of the various bikes he had found, including whether we wanted two-stroke engines, four-stroke, or one of each. Since we had no real experience with the differences, we decided on one of each to start with. Emmett, however, was fairly certain that we would prefer (and could easily handle) the more intense power delivery of a two-stroke engine.

Jasper and Rosalie came up to get us at dusk - we were supposed to drive out to the road where we were going to race, but they were quickly drawn into our argument over which brands and models would be best to start with. Rosalie quickly took control and made the final decision - not only was Emmett essentially wrapped around her finger, it would be foolish to ignore the advice of our car and engine expert.

"Leave it," she snapped at Emmett as he moved to begin the process of ordering our bikes. "We're already running late. They'll be here when you get back."

Esme, Carlisle and Alice were all waiting for us. The latter two were a surprise - usually they had little interest in racing. It seemed this was to be a family gathering, though.

We piled into the cars we were going to be racing and drove over, warming ourselves and our cars up a bit on the easier, paved roads. I hadn't driven the Tesla much, but I found I was pleased with the way it handled. The acceleration was responsive and it hugged the road like nothing else I had ever driven - even better, maybe, than Jasper's R8. We would find out for certain soon.

Everyone got out at the small turnout at the bottom of the logging road we had chosen. We liked it because it wasn't as narrow as most logging roads, at least not for the first couple of miles. Logging trucks, with care, would be able to pass passenger vehicles headed up to where the work was happening, and it featured several wider stretches to allow the trucks to pass each other without one having to back up all the way to the camp or back to the main road. It still wasn't safe - it might have been even less safe than the narrower roads since there would be room for us to try to pass each other at any point. That did make it more exciting, though.

Between Alice's gift of foresight and my inability to entirely shut her out, there was no point in drawing straws or playing rock-paper-scissors. Instead she told us the order we would end up choosing: me against Emmett, Emmett against Jasper, and then me against Jasper. Emmett didn't have the patience to wait for his races.

Rose was riding with Emmett in his race against me, so she climbed in the car with him and we got into position. The others, meanwhile, chose some trees from which they could view most of our race track. During the race I wasn't taking part in, I would provide additional play-by-play commentary, but for now they would just have to put up with missing parts of the action.

Emmett pulled up beside me and rolled down Rosalie's window, gunning his engine and grinning like an idiot - which was exactly what he looked like when he was a fraction of a second late in responding to Jasper's "GO!" shouted from somewhere in the treetops. I could pick out the sound of his swearing over the noise of our engines as I immediately pulled ahead.

I spent the first part of the race keeping myself positioned so that Emmett couldn't pull past me as I tested my car against the non-ideal gravel surface of the road. When I was reasonably certain that I understood its limits, however, I let loose on the throttle and began slowly but inexorably pulling ahead as I took corners at speeds that Emmett's Corvette couldn't possibly match. In the end, it was no contest - I won by a substantial margin.

Emmett was going to need a different car if he wanted to race on these tightly winding roads.

Losing the first race caused Emmett to get serious, and he booted Rosalie from the car before he raced against Jasper. He spent a few minutes checking his car over to make sure that the race with me hadn't damaged anything necessary, like a tire. I leaned against my Tesla, waiting and listening to opinions from the peanut gallery seated far above our heads. I didn't need to join them, of course, in order to see the entire race, and they didn't need me up there to narrate for them. I could speak in a conversational tone from here and it would be perfectly audible to them.

Rose spent a few moments helping Emmett look over the Corvette before turning away from him to - I thought at first - join the others in the trees. Instead, though, she approached me.

I could immediately tell she was trying to hide her thoughts from me because her mind was hard at work deriving complex solutions from long, difficult calculus equations. "I just wanted to say 'thank you,'" she told me, her tone making it sound as though she were the one conferring the favor on me, "and that…"

She hesitated and her mathematical smoke-screen faltered for the briefest moment. I didn't have time to see her actual thoughts, but I felt some of the emotion behind them: anger - perhaps even fury - but directed at herself more than at me. I certainly still had my share, but whatever Rose's problem was, it wasn't just with me or Isobel.

"We need to discuss your thing with the Swan girl," she went on in a lower voice. "I know that. I'm just...not ready yet."

I nodded an acknowledgment, and then she did disappear into the treetops.

It made me curious - what would she have to say when she finally was ready? What was her anger all about?

There was no more time to ponder it - Emmett and Jasper were ready to go. I watched carefully, waiting until I was certain that Emmett was paying attention, and then roared the starting word. They took off in a storm of squealing tires, smoke, and thrown gravel.

Emmett's showing was better this time. He knew the course and had a good idea of what his car could do, while Jasper still needed to work that out. For several seconds they were neck-and-neck, maneuvering around the tight corners in perfect sync, less than a foot separating them as they drove side by side.

Slowly, however, Jasper found his footing and began to pull ahead. There were cheers and groans from the spectators - the latter mostly belonging to Rosalie while Alice was responsible for most of the former - as it became increasingly clear that Jasper simply had a car better suited to the course we had chosen. I kept up my commentary, but it was a foregone conclusion before they had reached the halfway mark, and no one was surprised when Jasper won by several feet.

This time both Alice and Rose came down to congratulate and commiserate with their respective mates. Alice bounced over to Jasper, chanting "Jazz, Jazz, Jazz, Jazz," and clapping her little hands. He scooped her up into his arms and planted several kisses on her mouth before setting her down again and sending her back to Esme and Carlisle.

Emmett, for his part, was swearing good-naturedly at his car, our cars, the road, and conditions in general. "Rematch!" he demanded, pointing at both of us.

"Another night," Jasper drawled with a chuckle. "Let me and Edward have our race, you attention-deficit gorilla."

"Next time we come up here, we can bring the bikes," I promised Emmett. "We'll race our cars on a road that will give you more chance to accelerate."

He shook his head and sighed. "Rosie, I think I need another car," he admitted, eyeing my Tesla with confused disappointment.

She patted his giant bicep. "Just wait till I've had a chance to reverse-engineer Edward's engine, baby. I'll build you the best damned electric car that's ever been designed."

Emmett climbed up to join the rest of the family while Rose thanked me as I held the door open so that she could get in. Jasper and I positioned ourselves, both of us focused on the task ahead and both equally ready when Emmett roared his "GO!" from the treetops.

It was clear from the very first that the race would be close. First Jasper would pull slightly ahead and then I would, jostling for position and trying to run the other off one side of the road as much as get in front. The trees and stripped, exposed hills swept past. One wrong move for either of us and it would have been over - both for the race and for our cars.

Neither of us made a wrong move.

Rose's weight changed the balance of my car very slightly - not much, but enough that I could feel the difference. I couldn't turn quite as sharply or at quite the same speed. It was enough that, slowly, Jasper started finding himself in front more and more often, and managed to secure his victory by a matter of three or four inches.

Alice led the others down from the trees to surround him in a cheering group, and Esme snapped several pictures of him kissing her. I rolled my eyes at them, but joined in with some applause - he had won mostly fair and square. I had invited Rosalie to ride along, after all. Another time the result might be different, and there would be plenty of chances for rematches.

We all spent a little while looking over the various little dents and dings caused by thrown gravel on our cars, rehashing the results of the race and what we might have done differently. As our discussion began winding down, Alice suggested that, as long as we were out in the woods, we might as well go hunting together.

I knew exactly what she was doing - keeping me occupied as well as she could until daylight came and effectively trapped me in the house and its immediate environs. She knew as well as I did that, given too much time to think, I would be unable to resist the siren call of Isobel's presence.

It was hard to decide whether I felt more grateful or resentful for her intervention. Either way, I agreed to her plan and we went hunting.