Big thank you to Monica, as always, for beta-ing this baby and to my fandom buddies who pre-read for me. Couldn't do this without you.

If you're looking for some amazing WIPs to sink your teeth into my current reading list:

The Procedure by iambeagle (super swoony Edward set in a sinister dystopian society where memories of failed relationships are erased).

Toxic Waste by Lozz . of .London (addictive drabble with flawed characters)

Someone Else's Baby by Ciarashayee (two boys mixed up at birth)

Clean Sneak by Belladonna and the FictionFreak (Mobward in the age of the flapper. Kitten and Cullen are 🔥)

Happy Weekend!

Chapter 28

Edward drives us to his rental, Oz happy in the backseat: a nighttime adventure. He drives slower than I remember, maybe for my benefit. It makes me wonder how much Rose actually talks to him about me. The radio is faint, but when a song we both used to like comes on, he turns the volume up. Closing my eyes, I drown in a kaleidoscope of memories.

Two chords into the next song, he changes it.

"You used to hate it," he says as he pulls up to a red light. It makes his bruised eye look worse. "Changed station every time."

"I still hate it."

His smile is almost victorious, as if he's saying, 'look, I know you.' But he doesn't. He knows a version of me that doesn't really exist anymore.

Ten minutes later, he pulls up into the drive of a small, single-story house, and as I wait for him to unlock the door, my own reservations kick in. I guess I'm expecting to be confronted with traces of him and Alice, and I'm not sure how to handle that.

He flicks light switches on as my eyes dart around. To my relief, there's very little evidence of anyone living here. There's nothing personal lying around—at all. But it still doesn't feel quite right, being here. Not being here with Edward, but being here in a space he shared with her. I rub at my arms and sit on the sofa stiffly. Oz jumps up to sit by my side, a constant buffer.

"Is it okay he's here?"

"I don't care," Edward says.

I bite my lip.

"And… Alice?"

"I. Don't. Care," he repeats, enunciating each word.

"Ned," I sigh.

He pushes hair out of his eyes, reluctance written all over him.

"She's been staying with her mom for weeks. No reason she'd show now."

I look around again, eyes sweeping over the room. It's smaller than the place he had last year.

I wonder whether they chose to rent it together.

I wonder if he's had sex with her right where I'm sitting.

A sharp breath in, nauseated, finding him watching me closely. And suddenly there's no point in holding back.

"Alice?" I ask him, finally. "Really? With how she treated Jasper… how she treated me? You said you didn't even like her like that."

I can't contain the hurt, my voice climbing in pitch. He sits down heavily next to me.

"It's none of my business," I backtrack when he says nothing. "Don't feel—you don't have to answer that."

He leans forward, rubbing palms together. "I do." He clears his throat, his voice thick. "I just want to be honest cos… it made… sense, at the time. She… her Dad passed away a few months after Jasper, and she helped me when I was… bad. In a bad place. And I thought—she seemed different. And I needed to try to move on. It wasn't. I wasn't healthy, like, how I was. How I am. I don't know. She was just there." He measures his next words. "It was a mistake. It was nothing like what I felt with you."

I play with Oz's fur. Certain phrases more hurtful than others.

"Bella," he touches my hand, stilling it. "It was nothing like us."

My heart beats hard against my chest, tears welling up, despite his vehemence.

"Makes me feel sick," I tell him, honestly, moving my hand away.

"I'm sorry," he says, trying to look me in the eye. "I'm really sorry."

"No, it's—Don't apologize. You're right. I pushed you away, I've got no right to be upset about it."

Even though I am. Even though it guts me. Even though I don't understand it. Even though I knew that's what would happen. He'd move on. I just never thought it would be with her.

"Are you… you're seeing that guy though, right?" Edward asks. "Ben."

"That's not the same," I say, reflectively. And it's really, really not.

His lips purse together in a thin line, his eyebrows furrowed. I don't think he even thinks that. That it's the same. I think he's just feeling things out, especially if he is jealous, like Heidi seems to think.

"Isn't it?" he laughs, kind of half-annoyed. "You could be with him, and not me?"

We're standoffish for a minute, staring at each other hard.

I look away first, staring at a picture on the wall.

"I told him last week I just want to be friends. I'm not in the right place for… that." I swallow. "I didn't sleep with him. Not with anyone, since."

He blinks. I don't need to ask him to know his answer. It's written all over his face.

I hide blurred eyes behind my hair, letting it hang forward as I busy myself unlacing my Docs with stiff fingers, my ankle throbbing.

"It wasn't like… It wasn't straight away," he says, as if it somehow softens the blow. "I didn't just walk out the hospital and—"

"You don't have to justify yourself."

I slip one boot off, and then the other, the words tight. One glance at my ankle and I can see it's swollen underneath a black sock. I swear.

"Austin's going to kill me."

Peeling the sock off, I gently massage the area over with cold fingers. I knew I was pushing myself too hard the last few days, and now I'm paying the price.

Edward's on his feet, heading into the kitchen. The sound of the freezer opening and drawers being pulled out and pushed in. He returns with a bag of peas and a dishcloth.

"Put your foot up here."

I don't protest. I swivel and elevate my leg on the armrest of the sofa as he carefully wraps the peas in the dishcloth and holds it to my ankle. My toes wiggle, painted red, a grimace at the cold as it seeps into my skin.

"Who's Austin?" he asks, looking up from underneath his hair.

His expression makes me feel weak, a nervous flutter in the pit of my stomach.

"He's my physical therapist. One of Emmett's friends."

"The guy in the video? Of you walking?"

"That'd be him. I still can't believe Rose posted that."

Edward smiles a little. "I can."

"Thank you," I tell him quietly, as he runs a finger along where I know there's a purple-red scar. It's like a millipede, stitch marks for legs. I'm rigid at first, holding air in my lungs at the contact, but as he carries on running his finger back and forth along it, I relax.

"Had my fair share of skate-related ankle injuries," he tells me. "Lived with two doctors."

"Handy," I quip.

"Definitely was." He pauses and stares at me, again eyes trailing over my face, tension back in his own.

"I feel like… I feel like I need to justify myself to you. Anyone else? No chance… But to you, I feel like I do. There's… I think about it every day. Trying to figure out how it all went so fucking wrong. Y'know? How one minute everything was fucking... amazing, and the next." He looks away, out of a sliding patio door that reflects a mirror image of us back. "The next Jazz is dead, my girl is in the ICU, and the doctors were telling us they don't know if you're going to make it through the next few hours."

He licks his lips, talking to my foot, frowning at it, his eyes glassy.

"I texted you just before it happened. Guess you don't remember that?"

My mouth is dry. "No. I'm sorry."

"We talked the night before. You were drunk, and happy. You asked me to be your boyfriend, and I was stoked because that's what I wanted, and I was just… I missed you so much and it had only been a few days. You were supposed to fly out to LA the next morning. And then instead I'm flying out of LA, meeting your brother at the airport. Trying to help my Aunt and Uncle hold it together. Burying Jasper. And you didn't… after all of that, you didn't want me anymore. Sometimes I think about what I could've done differently. Maybe I should've made you come out earlier. Maybe I didn't try hard enough to convince you."

He re-adjusts the peas.

"I know." My eyes tear up again. "I know. If we'd left later, or earlier, or if we never went camping at all. None of it would ever have happened. But you can't go back, Edward. You can't change it. And it's no one's fault. Not Jasper's, or Rose's, or yours, or mine. It wasn't even the trucker's fault. Not really."

He snorts in disbelief.

"It was his fault. He fell asleep at the fucking wheel, Bella. Every fucking driver knows not to drive when you're tired. It's fucking driving 101. One lapse in judgement—"

"I don't want to talk about this," I interrupt him. "It's… it's done. He was punished. He wrote me the longest letter, apologizing. It was an accident."

Edward shakes his head, his spare hand pulling at the neck of his t-shirt.

"What do you want to talk about then?"

I heave in a breath as I stare at the ceiling thinking about things, the whispered conversations behind thin curtains. And I want to tell him those things, the little things that built up over weeks to the point it smothered me. The things that built up a wall. The things that ultimately made me end things.

When I tell him this, he's quiet. He shifts his head minutely, a small nod for me to go ahead.

"People would say stuff when they thought I wasn't listening, but I heard. In the hospital. It put all these… really dark, negative thoughts in my head. Intrusive thoughts."

"Like what?"

"Stuff like… how tough my recovery was going to be. That they hoped people would stick around cos, you know… living with someone who's disabled is hard. People get bored. Tired of it. It's a novelty, and then it's a drag. One nurse said losing my foot would ruin me. That she hoped someone as good looking as you could look past it, but she wouldn't bet on it. And 'it's such a shame because she's so pretty'. As if that even fucking matters when you almost die."

I bite down hard on my lip.

"That's fucking bullshit," Edward says angrily, nostrils flared.

"Is it? I don't know. Maybe they were right. Anyway, that's what I kept going back to. They've seen thousands of patients. They've seen things. And I was so... I was angry and sad. And I was jealous of anyone with a foot, anyone who could walk and go to the bathroom by themselves. I was jealous of Rose, because she never had to go through any of it. And of Jasper, because he didn't either. I thought—thought I was doing both of us a favor, in the long run. If you love someone, you let them go, right? That's what people say. It was better than watching you walk away from me when it got too much. At points, it got too much for me. I wanted to check out of life. I think I basically did some days."

"You didn't even talk to me about any of this," he says, incredulous. "Did you talk to anyone about this? Anyone at all?"

I shake my head.

"So you just decided for us both." He moves, so he's sitting by my head, looking down at me.

I gaze at him, my eyes already brimming with tears. "I was protecting myself. At least it was on my terms."

He looks at his hands, picking at a piece of skin near his nail bed and then smoothing his thumb over ink.

"Can you understand how I feel?" he says. "Can you understand how fucking… that phone call I got was the worst of my life. I've never… and then to go from you wanting to be with me to… nothing."

"I'm sorry," I tell him. "I didn't want you to resent me. Do you?"

He hesitates, and it's all it takes for me to burst into tears.

He moves on to his knees on the carpet beside my head. I'm twisting to face him as face rests on his hands. He takes one of mine, holding on to it tightly, kissing my knuckles.

"No," he says. "Never."

We stay like that for a while; until the peas fall off my foot and on to the floor and we've shifted. He's on the sofa with me, curled in toward each other, hand woven tightly with mine. We talk until our voices are hoarse, and I'm so tired my eyes can't help but flutter closed.

"Bella, I'm gonna move you. There's a spare room."

"I can move," I protest, but he's already picking me up, carrying me down a hallway.

He pulls back sheets, a small kiss pressed to my forehead. "I'll let your parents know you're here. Do you need any meds?"

"In the morning. Thank you," I murmur. Just as he turns to leave, I catch his hand. "Will you stay with me?"

His voice is deeper, scratchy. "If you want me to."

I nod, lip between my teeth. "Give me a minute."

When he comes back he settles beside me slowly, and then fidgets. I move closer to him, seeking out warmth, my head coming to rest on his chest.

"Your heart's beating so fast," I whisper.

"You," he says, simply. He takes a deep breath and expels it.

"I loved you so much," I whisper into the darkness.

I can almost feel his smile as he kisses the top of my head.

"I know."

...

We sleep past midday, exhausted, his body wrapped around mine. He only stirs when I move, feet softly padding over carpet, peering in doors until I find the bathroom.

I let the water run, splashing my face, examining swollen eyes. Taking a tumbler from the sink and filling it with water, wetting a dry mouth. I try to smooth down my hair to no avail and sigh.

He's sitting, when I move back into the room, his feet planted on the floor, elbows in his knees.

"Morning."

"Afternoon."

He smiles, and I do the same until it fades.

"I'm just going to grab some food," he says. "Nothing here. You still like Cheerios?"

"I do."

"Coffee?"

"I don't drink it anymore."

He looks surprised.

"Any reason?"

"I don't like the taste," I shrug, half apologetically. "Some people have complete personality changes after a traumatic brain injury. I just don't like coffee, or any hot drinks to be honest. Water's fine."

"Got it," he says.

He hovers before he leaves.

"I'm not going anywhere," I tell him. "Maybe the backyard. Oz could do with a walk."

"Good. I feel like—"

"Me too," I interrupt.

We smile at each other before I laugh. There's the overwhelming feeling of not being done here. Questions lingering, wanting to just… be around him. Be around each other.

I wander from the guest room to the living room, as soon as the front door closes, peeking through the blinds as he reverses out of the drive.

I let Oz out in the backyard and taste the humid air on my tongue. It's starting to ramp up with the heat of the afternoon sun. Leaving the door open to the yard, to let the air circulate, Oz comes in and out. I sit myself on the sofa, turning on the TV, and allowing my mind to drift, to replay the past forty-eight hours.

I'm trying not to get ahead of myself. About what this means. What everything means.

Edward's gone for all of twenty minutes when the front door opens.

Oz bounds to the door barking, but the shriek of surprise is definitely someone feminine.

Not someone, though.

Alice.

I stand, guilt all over me.

"Would you call that mutt off," she snaps, her face pale and her eyes flashing angrily.

"Oz," I beckon. "Sit." His tail thumps on the floor as he sits; a beat that does nothing to dispel the tension.

"Can't fucking help yourself, can you?" she says, her voice shaking. "Not as if I expected any different."

"I'm not—we're not—"

"I don't give a shit," she interrupts, talking over me, her voice loud "You're still here. In our space. I can't believe he's being this fucking stupid."

"I don't—"

"You have no idea, do you?" she sneers. "What you did to him."

"I—"

"Let me tell you, because I think you should know just how fucked up he is right now." She shakes her head, wipes the mascara from under her eyes, her next words cutting. "You ditching him like you did made him spiral into depression. And I'm not talking about just feeling sad. I mean months of him hardly leaving the house, not showering, not skating. He didn't get out of bed for fucking weeks, and when he did, he drank himself stupid. He got into fight after fight after fight. He almost got kicked out of college. He's had poor performance after poor performance, doing something he loves. He's throwing himself off fucking cliffs. He's been on antidepressants for months. All because you couldn't think of anyone else but yourself."

"It wasn't like that—" I begin, only to get interrupted again.

"Well, what was it like? Because from where I'm standing, it was fucking cruel. It destroyed him. And I was left to pick up the pieces. Just like I always knew I would."

She looks away, her eyes glassy, another tear falling and my heart; it hammers hard against my chest, so hard it's uncomfortable.

"All I wanted was him, and all he wanted was you."

My eyes find the floor, tight knots in my stomach.

"But you know that already, right? You know that; otherwise, you wouldn't be here."

She turns on her heels and walks past me, disappearing down the corridor. I can hear drawers opening and closing, slamming and stomping of feet and doors. She's unsubtle in her anger, and part of me can't even blame her.

Her bag is bulging when she reappears.

"Where is he?" she asks, nostrils flaring.

"Out. Getting food. Look, I'm sorry if—"

"Keep your apologies. I don't want them," she spits, making for the door. She turns just before she reaches it. "You know what? Fuck you both. You both fucking deserve each other."

When she leaves, she slams the door so hard it rattles through the house, through my feet, into my bones.

The door opens again moments after, and she sticks her head around it. Callous now, hatred in her voice.

"Just know he enjoyed every minute of fucking me."

The door closes again. Leaving me inhaling shakily, feeling like all the air in my lungs has been squeezed out. Unsettled and unnerved, my stomach sick and crawling. Regret. Guilt. Oz looks at me as I tremble from head to toe, a cold sweat prickling on my skin.

I'm over to the bathroom, my head over the toilet, throwing up before I can stop myself.

It burns, acrid.

"Fuck."

...

"Bella!"

Footsteps, heavy on the floor, going back and forth hurriedly.

"Bella?"

His voice is panicked and filled full of worry but it doesn't move me, I'm stuck like glue with my head on my hands and my knees drawn up to my chest, face sticky from tears.

I feel him before I see him. His presence—stopped in the doorway of the bathroom. He falls to his knees with a thud, crawling towards me, until he's holding me so close, my face is in his neck.

I dissolve, crying.

I don't have to explain; he already knows. Alice texted him, he tells me.

He shows me his cell. Venom in black.

"She's out of line."

"She's upset," I mumble. I can feel the clamminess of his skin against my face. "Lashing out. Can you blame her?"

I pull away, searching dark eyes. We're so close, so-so close. His breath fanning over my face—minty with a hint of coffee.

If Rose were here, she'd probably say that finding me here was karma.

"Did you love her?" I ask, unable to stop myself.

He scoffs, "No!"

"So, it was just sex?"

"It wasn't even that."

"Please, just be honest with me," I beg. "Please."

He brings his fingers up to his forehead and rubs at it.

"Bella."

"Please, Ned? Please. From the start."

He bites at his lip ring, shaking his head.

"Fine. We got together a month or so before Jasper's birthday. I was drunk, she kissed me. We… slept together. I don't remember it that well. She wanted a relationship. Labels. I said okay. Like I said, I thought I should try and move on, but I didn't really try. I was pretty shitty to her. And," his cheeks flush redder and he stutters, awkwardly. "Like… my drive for sex is pretty much non-existent. Like my dick doesn't work. Not even if I try and jerk off. The doctor says it's the antidepressants. Maybe psychological. Either way, we didn't didn't do that a lot. She made me feel fucking shit about that too."

He tries to play off his embarrassment but fails. His eyes well up, and I'm overwhelmed with the need to hug him closer. Turning in his lap so I'm straddling him. His back against the tub now.

His eyes are trained downwards.

It's like we're carving down to the bone—these conversations.

It's instinctual, to lean down, to hold his face in my hands and to kiss him right then. Chaste. On his cheek, his stubble rough against my lips. His eyes squeeze shut, his fingers tightening their grip on me. He smells the same. He smells just like I remember. His hand moves to cup my face, forehead to forehead.

"I'm sorry I made you so depressed," I tell him, my eyes burning. "I'm so, so, sorry, Ned. I'm sorry."

He nods. Acceptance.

We stay like that. Tangled limbs. Charcoal hearts. His hand runs up and down my spine, my fingers twisted in his t-shirt and playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.

"We should eat," I mumble, as my stomach growls, lifting my head from his shoulder, swiping a hand under my eyes; hours or minutes later, I'm not sure.

He moves us, easily, setting me on my feet gently.

He warms his cold cup of coffee in the microwave when we're in the kitchen, a bag of breakfast treats abandoned on the side, along with a box of Cheerios.

"Can you even warm it in a disposable cup?" I ask, as it hums and turns.

"Guess we'll find out."

I raise a spoonful of Cheerios to my mouth and force myself to eat them. They taste like cardboard.

As it turns out, you can't microwave coffee in a disposable cup. Edward's expression makes me laugh as he looks mournfully at the puddle in the middle of the microwave.

"What are we doing?" I stir my spoon in milk, watching the hoops spin in a miniature whirlpool.

"Eating breakfast at two in the afternoon?" he responds, grabbing a paper towel.

I smile.

"You know what I mean. What happens now?"

Last of the super angsty chapters (imo) for those GRs who like to moan 😉