"Speed dating?" Bella's face flushed an obscenely becoming shade of scarlet. She reached up to twist a lock of hair around her finger—a telltale symptom of nervousness. "I don't really know much about it. I've never done it before."

Edward looked upon her blush with a wistful throb of affection, though he knew his admiration for the rosiness in her cheeks sprang at least partly from inclinations he'd rather not possess. He never wanted to dampen her spirits. There was nothing in all the world more dear to him than her happiness, but she was still leaning against him, their arms not separated by any distance at all—much less a friendly one—and it was enough to make the questions that had been plaguing him essential to ask.

"But you're going to try it?"

"No," she said quickly. Then she shifted apart from him, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "I mean, I'm not sure. I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet."

"It's a relatively straightforward process from what I understand. I've never attempted it, of course, but from what I've heard of others' experiences, it can be a useful way to become acquainted with potential partners. It's low pressure, convenient..."

He let the statement drift away unfinished, unable to bring himself to verbalize any more possible benefits of the practice. What he'd gleaned from strangers' thoughts over the years could assist her in making a decision. Unfortunately, that didn't make the information even slightly easier to share.

Bella eyed him strangely. "Do you actually want me to go?"

"I want you to do whatever you believe to be best for you."

She sighed in a harsh way that conveyed annoyance. "That is such a non-answer."

"Fine, then," Edward said brusquely, abandoning all efforts to appear impartial. "Selfishly, I don't want you to go. It is, obviously, difficult to contemplate you being with anyone else, even in the most unofficial capacity. Unselfishly? I agree with your mother, Bella. You shouldn't spend your life alone."

This answer seemed more satisfying to her, and she nodded slowly, irritation giving way to quiet thoughtfulness. Her deep brown eyes roamed the length of the room, and the silent rumination was a tried and true recipe for insanity. Finally, disappointingly, her gaze fell to her lap.

"I'm okay alone." Very quietly she added, "I don't know how else I can spend my life anymore."

Edward exhaled. He was comprised of a substance so hard as to be impenetrable, but the heavy resignation in Bella's voice was enough to pummel the air straight from his lungs. Hadn't he been clear in the past and as recently as one day ago that he would be anything to her that she wished? That he would be only too grateful—overjoyed, really—to be permitted to spend her life with her?

"Why would you say that?"

"Because, Edward..." She looked up at him, seeming to search his face. Whatever she found there evidently displeased her. Her eyes grew wet, and she drummed her fingers in an agitated fashion against her knee. "Because no one at that stupid restaurant's going to want to date me anyway. I'd have to spill a drink down someone's shirt or something just to get them to take a second look."

"I doubt that." He rolled his eyes. Would she ever develop the ability to see herself clearly? "Likely as you spilling your drink may be, I have it on good authority that brave, extraordinarily kind, and witty women are highly sought-after."

"You think I'm witty?"

"And brave to a fault. And far too kind. Yes, Bella."

She beamed, reaching across to his side of the piano bench to place her hand overtop his. Her feeble, human grip constricted fractionally for a moment, then eased. The pressure seemed so minute to him, there was barely a discernible difference between when she was attempting to squeeze his hand and when she was simply resting her palm on his knuckles. Her hand was so very soft, so light and pliant, it was as though the backs of his fingers had been encased in thin cotton, the material threadbare and certain to tear at anything even distantly related to what, to him, constituted ordinary movement.

It was a sobering reminder of just how careful he had to be, if he wanted to touch her in return at all. And how he wanted! Edward never felt cold, not truly, until Bella returned to impress upon him what warmth felt like. The heat radiating from her hand into his was exquisite. It made a live wire of his arm, molten solder of his fingers. It was her touch that resuscitated him, making him feel more awake than he'd felt in all the years he'd been incapable of sleeping.

More than anything, he yearned to kiss her. It needn't be on the lips, necessarily, though he missed the staggering intensity of that particular fusion of torture and ecstasy perhaps most of all. The sort of friends Bella wanted to be apparently did not kiss like that.

They did, however, hold hands for hours at a time, caress each other's fingers repeatedly, and lean against one another to the total annihilation of any personal space. All of which were ambiguous liberties Bella had taken with their supposedly strict friendship. In combination, they led Edward to believe it likely that she would not object to a little creative interpreting of his own.

He shifted only what she had already given to him in friendship. Her hand was on top of his, so he simply bent his arm and raised it to his mouth. He executed the motion slowly enough that she could see what he was doing, could guess his intent, and he waited a beat with the radiating heat of her skin mere inches from his lips.

He monitored for any sign she wanted to pull away—the hint of a tug, even just an increase in muscle tension. He listened for the faintest mumble of protest.

Bella said and did nothing, though her heart rate began to increase.

Edward kissed the back of her hand. The fire against his lips seemed to merge with the fire in his throat the instant he did so, making him feel, rather bizarrely, as if actual flames would burst from his mouth were he inclined to open it. More importantly, he was kissing Bella for the first time in months, and, even as his body burned, his mind was positively thrumming with contentment. Her perfect, floral scent engulfed his senses. He concluded the gesture by skimming his nose appreciatively along the veins he spied beneath her skin, the pale surface especially thin and translucent in this area.

Against all his worse instincts and a few of his better ones, he drew back and released her hand, taking a moment to compose himself. He wanted to inform her that he loved her madly. He asked a question instead.

"Was that… overly friendly?"

Bella shook her head, her heart still beating double time, by the sound of it. "It was nice. Really nice."

Her voice held a tad of that breathless quality which Edward found worrying. Seeing as her life depended on it, she should really regard oxygen deprivation more seriously.

Otherwise, though, it appeared his kiss had been well received. Bella had not jerked away from him. She did not look horrified, or ashamed, or angry. She was not burying her face in her hands. She seemed… pleased. Pleased at something which, by Edward's estimation, ventured at least tentatively outside the bounds of what she had told him she wanted.

"Bella, why do you think friends is better for us?"

"It just makes it easier for me to go back home. A little easier, anyway. Not a lot." Bella's brows drew more closely together. "Isn't it easier for you, if we don't remind ourselves of how it used to be between us?"

"My memories don't degrade like yours." That was what made them such an addictive remedy for her absence. "Nothing we avoid in the present will reduce the potency of the past from my perspective."

"Right, infinite vampire memory… I guess I wasn't really thinking that specific superpower through."

Bella's expression turned apologetic. She redistributed her weight on the bench, the seat creaking as she fidgeted. She sat up straighter and reached around to rub her lower back.

Edward felt terribly inconsiderate. "It's hardly a superpower. And clearly doesn't prevent me from being forgetful of human needs. Shall we go sit someplace more comfortable?"

"I'm fine," Bella insisted, the reply sounding equal parts automatic and defensive. She stood and stretched, in any case, extending her arms toward the ceiling. Then she turned to peer out the uninterrupted glass of the south wall. "Actually, do you want to go outside? It looks like it might be more than ten seconds before the next downpour."

He emerged from behind the piano to evaluate the condition of the weather for himself. His attention was drawn immediately, reflexively, to the sky. She wasn't wrong. In fact, it didn't appear as if there was any rain in store at all.

"The cloud cover doesn't seem very reliable," he said, thinking that this would be a day he would need to stay out of the public eye, a day he'd be missing school if he was currently attending.

"Yeah, so? Are you not up for sparkling today?"

Considering how dangerously well-informed Bella was, Edward couldn't be entirely sure why strolling through the sun-dappled backyard with her should feel so unnerving. He theorized the root of it lay in having a bit less control than he was accustomed to exercising over other situations. It bothered him that there was an aspect of his true nature which he could not restrain at will. While he could modulate his speed and strength to make himself appear as near to ordinary as possible for Bella, he had no say in the extent to which his skin reacted in the sunlight. The exposing rays fell upon him unpredictably, with a mission all their own, and wherever and whenever they struck, there was nothing he could do to make the bizarre glimmering more palatable or at least less ostentatious for her.

Not that Bella had ever responded negatively—correctly, really—to his alienness.

As he inched along beside her at an excruciatingly sluggish pace, it even began to seem as though she was targeting the bright spots in the overlong grass. There was no other discernible rhyme or reason for where and in which directions she wandered. There were no intriguing landmarks to journey toward, no flourishing weed that appeared more worthy of attention than any other.

Bella set him on a path not unlike the proverbial yellow brick road, her lingering glances alight with the glow of some unflinching, unorthodox emotion Edward found too ethereal to classify.

They walked until they neared the banks of the river winding through the outskirts of the grounds. As a general rule, Edward did not frequent this section of the property. Not during the final years he called this place home, at least. His aversion to the spot had everything to do with the single row of benches that had been placed alongside the water.

There were three of them. They were comprised of natural elements. The stone seats and wooden backrests had been carved and woven together by vampire hands, the craftsmanship of excellent quality and fine-tuned to Alice's every specification.

These benches had been made by members of his family to serve a singular purpose.

That purpose was not to provide seating by the water.

"Life is just so… well, not normal but believable with Renee," Bella was telling him, continuing to chat amiably. She progressed toward the river and, without pause, navigated around the bench in the center and half-sat, half-leaned on the armrest. "I go to work and come home and start questioning if everything I remember about you is real, and even though I know it is, it's like I can never fully accept it until I actually see it for myself again."

She looked to the space beside her expectantly, then glanced over her shoulder upon realizing she was alone.

Edward stepped out from the shade of a cluster of tall cedars, realizing only then he had neglected to follow her forward. He came to stand behind the bench and folded his arms over the backrest. He tried to assume a position that appeared as casual and unaffected as hers.

"These are pretty." Bella ran her hand along the intricate weaving of the wood. "Did Esme make them?"

She truly had no idea.

"No, these were mostly Jasper and Emmett's doing. With Alice's guidance, naturally."

"Alice designed these just to throw out in the woods by the river?"

"For our wedding."

Bella hopped up, whirling round on the bench as though it had struck her. She blinked at it and stared. "Oh, crap, I'm sorry. I tried really hard not to pay attention to a lot of the details. Anything I found out just scared me more."

"That's all right." Edward stifled a sarcastic remark on her tendency to embrace life-threatening risks while treating ordinary milestones as incidents of encroaching terror. "I'm not sure you ever saw them. They were completed right before Phil's accident."

Bella ground the toe of her tennis shoe into the riverbank, heedless of the mud. Her voice always had an endearing gruffness to his ear, but now it grew truly coarse. "I wish… things could have gone another way, back then."

"As do I." He tried to meet her gaze.

She did not look up.

The rush of the water filled the silence.

Edward was thankful for the ambient sounds, the cushioning white noise. They had been so close to forever. It still weighed on him that their wedding had never been officially canceled. At the start, there was only a postponement to allow for adjustments in light of the tragedy. Time to arrange Phil's funeral, time to grieve. Time for Edward to step back and let Bella fly away to be with her mother—the one who needed her most.

Renee had been pulverized by the loss. When Edward came to visit, he discovered her childlike mind had been reduced to a splintered, writhing chasm. She was unable to cope and scarcely well enough to function. In the depths of her agony, she clung to Bella like a life preserver, and, as more time stretched on, Bella agreed to accompany her on her move to Phoenix and later agreed to stay there to help her settle in.

Edward spent as much time as possible with them in their simultaneously sunny and heavily shadowed world, always fabricating excuses to remain indoors even though Renee was often too distraught to give any thought to his habits. He and Bella eventually decided they would get married the following year. And then, when circumstances still did not improve, they tentatively rescheduled their wedding to take place a year beyond that.

And so on.

And so forth.

Bella, who had been dead set upon becoming a vampire almost from the moment she claimed to reciprocate his impossible love, no longer spoke about being turned. The most she would say, with weary resolve, was that she couldn't die on Renee too. That an additional loss of that magnitude would prove fatal to what remained of her mother.

It was an enormous relief for Edward not to be committed to damning her any longer. He was happy to see Bella continue to move forward as she was always meant to. She had time for everything now. Time to go to college, time to cultivate normal friendships, time to work odd jobs and try new foods and adopt a pet canary.

Little by little, all that time banded together to insert an inevitable barrier between them. Edward could only claim to be so old for so long before his immortality rendered his assertions less than convincing. It became too unwise for his family to remain in Forks. He couldn't allow Bella's parents, or any of Bella's friends in Forks or Phoenix (some of whom he had become acquainted with through outings at night), to see him in person anymore.

Bella told everyone they'd broken up, ostensibly as a public smokescreen to explain his departure to others in her life.

However, from that point onward, their relationship was irrevocably changed.