A/N: Hi old friends and new!

Thank you for the amazing response last chapter. I read through the reviews on my birthday and it really made my day ever better! I'm also so happy to see more people are finding this story and enjoying it. Welcome!

I won't talk long since I know there's probably a bunch of anticipation, but I do have a question for you guys.

As I said in the first few chapters, the majority of this story is based upon my life and I will be posting a run through of the real people behind every characters and the real story behind every single chapter. I'm thinking I'll post that as an epilogue whenever I wrap up this story, or would you like to see it sooner? Let me know in the reviews.

Enjoy & leave a review!

xx, S

Fog swallows up Bella, whether the fog is from the weather or my brain I do not know. She gets closer and closer, walking towards me, until she's perfectly visible and standing inches from me.

I glance up at her and she's looking down at me, eyes dark and puffy from lack of sleep. The look on her face expresses everything that I fear: abandonment and sorrow.

I place the Camel firmly between my teeth, almost crushing the filter from the tension in my jaw. I inhale deeply, the embers at the tip of the cigarette lighting up as I continue to darken.

"We got on tour three days ago." Bella states, her voice croaky. "The first day you were happy, spending time with everyone, then you shut off and became this." She waves her hand in front of her, motioning to me sitting on a bench, baseball hat on, hood up, chain smoking.

"I've tracked you down every free second I've gotten and you're always gone. You've left me in the dark."

My tongue doesn't seem to work; all my body knows to do right now is lift my right hand to my mouth, place the Camel in my mouth, inhale, exhale.

And that's what I do.

"Goddamnit this isn't fucking fair and you know it. I haven't fucking slept an hour in three days and haven't been able to live my life because I'm so worried about you." Bella chokes out. "What happened, Edward? We've told each other things no one else has ever know about us, and now some kind of doom has come over you and you won't even talk to me?"

Tears pool at the corner of Bella's tired eyes.

The embers reach my lips, and I throw what's left of the cigarette down on the ground right before pulling out another.

"Bella, I can't meet your family. I just- I can't do this. Any of it." I say it so quietly I can barely hear myself.

What the fuck am I doing.

"Edward, what are you talking about?" She moves to take the space on the bench next to me I feel her light touch on my shoulder, but nothing can bring me to recognize her presence.

"Fucking hell." I mumur, my head feeling even heavier in my palms. My eyes are fixed on the ground, looking at every speck in the pavement below me, clouded by the smoke escaping from in between my index and middle finger. I bring the cigarette to my lips again, inhaling so deeply as if the smoke will cloud up every memory of that time in my life and make it go away.

It doesn't.

"Edward, stop doing that, this isn't like you and it's scaring me." Bella's hand appears, trying to grab my cigarette from me, but I jerk it away.

"Bella, I'm a bad fucking person and I can't continue living this life in front of you- it's all a lie."

I don't have to shift my gaze to know Bella's face is hard, her tough shell fighting to block the tear trying to escape her eye.

"Ed-" I hold my hand up to her sitting to my right, cutting her off.

I chuckle at myself without humor thinking about how much money a producer would pay to get this scene captured. A broken man sitting on a bench by the river with a cigarette in hand, slouched over with his forehead in his palms, his eyes not leaving the ground, as his girlfriend sits to his right looking as if she's about to cry.

Oh, how Oscar worthy, Cullen.

"You see, Bella," my eyes shift up to the boats drifting by as I suck on my cigarette, "when I was 18 I had an affair with my mom's best friend." I say out, with no emotion. "'Fucking disgusting' is what you're probably thinking, huh sweetness?" My words were filled with nothing but pure anger and distance.

What is happening to me? This cold, brash bastard isn't who I am. I'm so fucking angry at myself, but I can't make her see that it's me who I'm mad at, not her.

"Edward Anthony Cullen what is going on with you." This wasn't a question, clearly, and Bella stands up so quickly and moves to stand right over me.

"You see," I wave my cigarette in the air, my eyes still haven't moved from the pavements' specks. "She got pregnant, but it wasn't mine. It was with her loyal husband." I chuckle darkly. "This, quite obviously, ended the affair, but once she had a baby and I started to get famous and pull in cash when I was about 20, she shows up at one of my house parties looking for me." I take a drag.

"As people would normally find me those days, I greet her as I'm in bed with two girls who are snorting coke off my chest. Classy." I stomp out my cigarette harder than necessary. "She pulls me out of bed and into the bathroom and starts to clean me up, while convincing me to run off with her… I think her excuse was "the domestic life wasn't for her". I was thoroughly fucked up, and I lash out. I lose it. At the end of it all, I tell her she was a convenient fuck and a symbol of my teenage rebellion, nothing more." I finally look at Bella, who's sitting on the other end of the bench with her knees tucked into her chest. She looked like a mess.

She's a mess because of you, Edward. Get it together, you should not tell her your biggest secret like this and treat her like shit.

"I didn't know that she was clinically depressed. Her running off with me was her last ditch effort. She took her own life that night, and I was too busy filling myself to the brim with booze and drugs to even notice until the fucking eulogy appeared in the paper."

This was it. It was out there, and there was no going back.

I can't bear to look at Bella. I already knew she was horrified.

"I am the reason why her daughter doesn't have a mom. I killed her." My nails dig into my palms as I make fists clenched so tight I'm sure they turn purple.

"Edward, goddamnit." Bella shoots up and moves back to standing over me, then crouches down and forcefully grabs my jaw, yanking my eyes to hers.

"What you did was fucked up, bu-" That was all I needed to hear.

This is the moment I dreaded since I met her- I know Bella won't see me in the same way anymore and I don't blame her. At all. God, I love her so fucking much. But after what I just told her, I know she can't love me.

I know I'm about to be shot down. I know my heart is about to be ripped from my chest.

But I'm a coward.

And I can't bear that pain.

So I'm going to shoot first.

I'm going to go right where it hurts her most, and it will be horrifying to have to hurt her.

But that will hurt far less than if Bella is the one to leave me.

"I'm sorry" I whisper to myself, before I unleash.

My hand shoots to her wrist and rips it from my jaw.

"Don't you fucking dare try and tell me about what's fucked up and what's not!" I roar, my own voice scaring me.

"Edward, you didn't let me fin-" Bella yells back, but I can't stop. My heart and head are screaming for me to stop, but my irrationality is taking over.

"You know what, Bella? You have such a fucking hard shell around you that you see the mistakes in everybody but yourself. You give up on everybody. How can you sit here and judge me for acknowledging and sharing my biggest regret in life when you abandoned your sister when she had a mental illness she can't control, and you can't even recognize the mistake in that."

Edward goddamn Cullen leave. Right now. You've gone too far.

"I told myself that I was wrong for standing up to my sister my whole life, until one day I woke up and vowed to never have anybody, including myself, say that to me again because it's not true. I know that day I told you everything, you were someone who saw that I made the right choice when I walked out that door. What the fuck has happened to you?" Her body shifts from anger to defeat, her posture loosening and eyes softening, her face drooping into one exhausted grey cloud of nothingness.

She looked broken.

"The person I'm speaking to right now isn't who I confessed my love to for the first time in the ocean during a rainstorm that day. This person in front of me isn't who was just there a few days ago. I know you had to tell me about your past, and I understand you've been worried about it these past few days because I felt the same way before telling you about my sister. But this is not the way to do it and you know it. And this is not you-" Her eyes scan me from head to toe and she chokes out a sob.

"If you were here right now, I would tell you to quit defining yourself from your past. I'd tell you I love you and that there isn't anything you can do to make the universe separate me from you and that you are not defined by your mistakes in life." She begins to cry harder.

"But," She tugs the hem of her hoodie up to her eyes to wipe the tears, revealing the stomach I had kissed lovingly in bed just a few days ago.

Before all of this.

"But the fact of the matter is that that person has left. I have faith that the person I know and love deeply will come back, but for now I can't wait around when you're like this and insulting me in the most painful way possible and saying I was wrong for separating from the person who abused me for years." She makes me jump, grabbing the pack of cigarettes in my lap and throwing them in the river beside us letting out a scream that even scared me. Her sobs get louder, and my mind numbs more. I can't even formulate a thought- everything is just at an eerie stillness. All I know is that I'm selfish and I am wrong.

I thought the right thing to do was to lash out at Bella and say things I don't mean at all just to push her away, but to watch her hear them was easily the most painful think I've had to endure. I now know that the pain of her breaking my heart would be nothing compared to the pain I'm feeling now.

"You figure yourself out. By tomorrow, I want you off the bus and in a hotel; you won't be welcome back until the man I know reappears and promises me to never scare me with this act again. Tonight I'll stay on the boys' bus so you can spend the night in your bunk, but tomorrow morning I want you gone. And don't you dare try and reach me until you get your shit together." My body's numb.

Congrats, Edward. This is what you wanted. Are you happy now?

"Maybe I'll hear for you, or maybe I'll be proven an idiot who believes in people too much and I won't hear from you. I just hope you make the right choice."

The clouds over Bella and Edward have darkened since they sat down. Boats pass by, causing tiny waves to lap against the river's edge. If you hold your breath, you can hear the sounds of the strong waves crashing against the Australian cliffs on the coast a few miles away.

A fog horn echoes from the coast, and the sound of kids' giggles as they jump off the school bus is in the wind.

If you were to look from above, everything would look normal. The morning boats pulling into the harbor, kids getting home from school, families going for an evening sail on the river. But if you were to zoom in real close, you'd see a broken man on a bench by the river, head in his hands, realizing he made a massive mistake that he intended to be the protection from his own heartbreak.

Here, he's realizing that this heartbreak is worse than any one he could've endured. He made a mistake and he can't take back what he said.

If you were to shift half a mile to the east, you'd see his heart walking away into the heavy fog, fists in pockets, and tear stained cheeks, walking to the arms of a man she once called her own.

As an onlooker, you know that they both are suffering such great pain only because they love each other so much, maybe too much, but they can't see that.

To the man on the bench, he couldn't imagine anyone loving him after knowing that information, so he thought he had to break the woman's heart to she wouldn't break his first.

To the woman marching on in the fog, she would find it physically impossible to ever break the man's heart, so she's puzzled as to why he just pushed her away when all she wanted to do is pull him close.

It's almost painful for you to watch... Two lovers' hearts break over miscommunication and misunderstanding that you see so clearly, but they cannot.

The woman soon disappears out of sight and into the fog, and the man sits and sits until the kids who had gotten off the school bus hours ago are fast asleep.

The world kept spinning, but to those two people the world had come to a strong halt.

A/N:

Oh shit...

See you soon ;)

xx, S