Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, they're Stephenie Meyer's, but the story is mne, all mine.

The steady, constant beeping was the first sound I registered. I kept my eyes tight shut as I tried to place it, fearful of opening them for reasons I couldn't quite name. I shifted, felt a tugging at my hand and the firmness of the mattress beneath me, and knew where I was.

Hospital.

No. That wasn't right. I was lying on something firm, but not uncomfortable. The air around me was sweet, fragrant, not the harsh, antiseptic smell I knew so well from ER visits. It was...floral? No, that wasn't right, either. Not entirely. But it was close enough.

My eyes fluttered open.

I saw the reason for the floral smell at once, a huge arrangement of what looked like very blurry flowers was on the table beside my...bed? No, it was a couch. I could see the back of it. The unknown aroma, quite different from the flowers? I hadn't seen what caused that yet.

But I could still hear the frenetic beat of a heart monitor, feel the pull of something in my hand. Monitors and IVs did not belong in a living room. I closed my eyes again, confused. Was I dreaming again?

"No you don't, Bella."

Cold and warm. Hard and comforting. The touch to my cheek set the monitor beside me pinging out of control. The voice reached through to the very essence of me, pulled me forward, and my eyes opened again.

I turned towards the source of it, but I couldn't focus.

"Bella, love?"

Another cold touch. My own breathing and the monitor's blip were the only sounds in the room.

I blinked again to clear my vision and found myself staring at twin orbs of pitch black.

"Edward," I gasped.

My hands came up to cover my face, but I couldn't cover my eyes. They were locked on his, unable to move away or close. I was frozen in place, kept prisoner by his intense, probing gaze and the unmistakable emotions I saw in them.

I heard dim, distant, echoing voices. One I knew. One I loved. It was his voice, Edward's. And mine. But his lips weren't moving, and I wasn't speaking. The conversation was in my mind.

You said you loved me.

You knew that already.

It's nice to hear, just the same.

Then, from nowhere.

You are my life now.

I gasped, waiting for the pain again. It didn't come. Only silence. I couldn't even hear the monitor's beep anymore. The silence was deafening. Ominous. It stretched on between us, our staring eyes locked. I started to shake because sound was returning – a powerful, rushing sound, like an oncoming train.

It slammed into me with the same amount of force and I knew I'd have crumpled to the ground if I hadn't already been lying down. I wanted to close my eyes, but they wouldn't obey. They were still locked on Edward's.

The influx of images. It was too much. They came at me over and over and over again, battering the inside of my mind like an invading army. I whimpered, and my eyes finally closed.

Edward's black eyes. An angry face over a biology lab table, angry and glorious.

A crooked finger across a crowded lunch room. A wink. A crooked smile. A bottle cap spinning and long, pale fingers.

Staring at a black and white computer screen, researching fantasies that were all too real.

Furious eyes in a darkened car as strange men surrounded me. Those same eyes across a restaurant table. The sweet smell of him coming from the borrowed leather jacket I wore.

His beautiful, uncertain smile as he offered me a ride to school.

"Bella? Bella! What's happening?"

His favorite food was mountain lion. Emmett's was an irritable grizzly bear.

A secluded meadow in the midst of a rainforest, the sun bright on his mesmerizing skin. His hand cool in mine, his cheek to my chest. A masochistic lion in love with a stupid lamb.

Running faster than I'd ever traveled outside an airplane, slung across his back like a backpack.

The first kiss, my attack. Oops.

Sleeping with him beside me, his soft voice humming in my ear. My lullaby. Sitting in my rocking chair, arms wide, waiting for me.

Hearing him play, Esme's, Mine. Meeting his family. My family.

Baseball. And James. Frantic packing, saying goodbye, my flight from Forks. Impatience and a ballet studio.

My Angel. Calling me back from the black.

Black. It was all around me again, the nothingness of it pressed in on me. I waited, gasping, for it to swallow me whole and pull me away.

"Bella."

Was it memory? Or was it now?

His soft, sweet voice was a caress, a tether, as it had been then, as it always would be. I reached out and took it. My eyes opened.

"Edward...," I said, my voice soft, hoarse. I wasn't even sure if my voice was audible, but it didn't matter. He heard me as I new he would.

There was so much I wanted to say, but I couldn't move my mouth. The intense pain was gone, but it left a bone-deep exhaustion in its wake. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open.

"Tired," I managed just as I lost the battle with my eyelids. My hand reached out blindly to find his. It did, and I sighed deeply, content.

"They're all open," I said, but it sounded slurred when it came out. I wasn't sure he understood. "You were..." But my exhaustion won before I could finish.

It was the voices that woke me.

"Alice."

"Edward, I've told you already. Soon."

"And you can't be more specific than that?"

"Honestly, Edward, you'd think that after over a hundred years, you'd have learned some degree of patience."

I laughed.

Edward was beside me before my next heartbeat.

"Bella?"

I was smiling before my eyes opened, both thrilled and relieved to have his voice so close. He was really here, right next to me, not an echo through the mist – elusive and untouchable.

As his face came into focus, my hand reached out, searching blindly until at last it came into contact with his cool, hard skin. I sighed, though it sounded more like a purr. This was the security of my dream world brought to me in vivid reality. Edward, by my side. Edward, holding me. There would be no other place, no other person, that would make me feel this way.

"Edward," I managed through my dry throat, coughing slightly.

"Let me get Carlisle," Edward said softly, already moving to stand.

"No!" The vehement denial was a rasp and my hand tightened on his. It felt so weak, though, I wondered if he even felt it.

Apparently, however, my intention came through clear enough and Edward sat back down, choosing to call out to Carlisle instead.

It seemed to take forever for Carlisle to check me over, to remove the monitor's sensors and dispose of the IV. I had to close my eyes for that one. He'd brought ice chips for me and I sucked on those while he worked, relieving my parched throat. But still, I didn't speak except to answer his questions about how I felt. I merely stared at Edward, and he at me.

The moment was too private, and it was for Edward alone. So I waited until Carlisle had left again, taking his medical equipment with him, and reached again for Edward's hand.

"Can we go somewhere," I paused and looked around the main living area, "a little less out in the open?"

"Of course," he agreed readily.

I pulled my elbows in and pushed myself up; even that slight movement caused my head to spin a little. I grimaced.

"Allow me," he said, his voice that perfect cadence of an earlier, more genteel time. He scooped me easily into his arms, cradling me close to his body.

"Don't drop me," I teased.

"I think I can handle it, Bella," he laughed back, and I was relieved to see some of the tension truly leave his face. There had been something magical about Edward's smile from the moment I'd first seen it, and it felt like a true homecoming to be in its presence again.

In no time at all, we were in his room. Edward sat on big leather couch, I sat on Edward's lap. His arms were tight enough around me that I knew he was in no more hurry to let go of me than I was to be released.

"You said," he began. "Right after you came back, you said they were open. Does that mean..."

I smiled. "Yes, Edward. I remembered everything. It's all back, every crooked smile, every glare across a biology table, every out of control van and baseball game. They're all back now, the doors are all open."

I stopped, biting my lip. I knew what had to be said, what I had to say, but I was having trouble getting the words out. Everything I'd put him through over the past year... I'd felt the remorse of it before my memories had come back, but this – knowing everything I'd left behind, feeling every emotion of our journey to find our way together – my actions in Phoenix were just that much more horrible. I didn't know what I'd have done if he'd ever left me in such a fashion, but I could imagine. I shuddered.

"Bella?"

"I'm so sorry, Edward," I managed after several deep breaths.

His hand stilled in the process of running up and down my back. "What on earth could you possibly have to apologize for?"

"I forgot you; forgot the best part of my life. I said I'd love you forever, and then I left you without a ..."

I never got the chance to finish my apology. Edward turned me just enough to enfold me in his arms. He kissed my apology away with a desperation I'd never felt from him before, not even at the moment of our parting so long ago in his garage.

His lips moved over mine ruthlessly, his hands tangling in my hair. I tried to remember how to breathe, how to think, but Edward's mouth wiped even that essential knowledge from me. I didn't need it anyway. With Edward's lips on mine, with his intoxicating scent in my nose, his delicious taste in my mouth, breathing and thinking were non-essential distractions.

It wasn't until my head started spinning that Edward finally pulled his lips from mine. Though he didn't need the oxygen as I did, we both dragged in gasps of it while our bodies remained together, foreheads touching. He continued to rain soft kisses over my skin, my cheeks, my jaw, the sensitive hollow beneath my ear and I struggled to find my words.

"It was you, you know," I said breathlessly.

"What was me?" he said softly into my ear. I shivered, his cold breath on my skin causing the opposite reaction and spreading warmth through me. Warmth and something else – something I didn't entirely understand.

"You were the key, Edward."

He pulled back then, his eyes on mine, his expression confused.

I continued before he could ask. "Before I came here, there was nothing. Just a big black hole in my mind. Then I returned and little things came back, inconsequential things. Nothing that made sense. It wasn't until I saw you, touched you, had you in my life again that I started to truly regain some of what I'd lost. The most precious things I'd lost.

"And then, in my bedroom," I stopped because he stiffened suddenly. Instinctively, I reached up and placed my hand against his cheek. "When I collapsed..." I stopped again, but not because of any reaction he had but because that time was already slipping from me.

"What happened, Bella?"

"I'm not entirely sure," I said and my brows contracted as I struggled to remember. "I was lost, searching. I heard your voice, I felt safe, but the memories wouldn't come. All the doors were locked. There was," I paused, searching for the right way to explain it, "there was another me. She kept taunting me, holding my memories from me."

"Another you?" Apparently, I wasn't the only one confused.

"That's the best way I can explain it, she looked like me, talked to me. She said she was the reason I couldn't remember, that she was...some sort of barrier, or shield, or something, that protected my mind from pain. That remembering would only bring more pain, so that's why she kept the doors locked."

"But you opened them," he said softly, "you found a way to open the doors."

"No, Edward," I smiled, "you did. I heard you playing Esme's favorite. I was tired, exhausted and frustrated, but then you switched to my lullaby, the doors opened and I found my way home again. When I opened my eyes, when I saw your face, the memories came back. All of them, every moment we spent together."

"You were thrashing," he said and the pain he'd gone through in that moment was evident in his voice, and etched in every line of his face. "When you opened your eyes again, you looked at me and started shaking. We didn't know, I didn't know, what was wrong. It got a little tense there for a bit," he paused, the hint of a wry smile on his lips, "I might have punched Carlisle, I don't remember."

I couldn't be sure if he was teasing me or not, but it didn't matter. The result was the same and a small bubble of laughter crept up my throat and escaped my lips. He smiled fully then, the same crooked smile that had always sent my heart into overdrive.

"I missed you," I said into the silence. "Even when I didn't remember you, there was this ache here," I brought my hand up to cover my heart. "I didn't understand it; I just knew I had to figure out why. What I was missing, what I'd lost beyond just my memories."

"I missed you, too, Bella. More than I can express in words." He must have decided to try and tell me in other ways, because his lips were on mine again, glass smooth and seductive, moving with mine in ways they never had before. The unfamiliar warmth started to spread from my lips outward, touching every part of my body.

My position on his lap was precarious at best, and not the most comfortable. My neck was craned in an awkward position, so I shifted around to face him more fully, my knees on either side of his legs. I didn't realize the foolhardiness of this move until I tried to get closer to his intoxicating kisses and my body brushed against his in a way it never had before.

We both gasped.

Shaking slightly, I pulled away to look into his eyes. I'd seen them in every variation, or so I'd thought. Light from a recent feeding to black with thirst and everything in between. But I'd never seen his eyes like this – hungry in a way that had nothing to do with blood, mine or anything else's.

I knew it was hunger I saw there, because that was the only word to describe what I was feeling. A burning hunger that was prickling my skin, increasing my heart rate and setting my blood to thrumming in a way it never had before.

This was want. Need. Physical and new, terrifying and exciting. My head lowered, searching for his lips again as my body shifted above his again, slowly, experimentally.

I brushed against him again, felt the hard ridge beneath me and a wildfire erupted in my veins. So lost in this new feeling, I didn't notice that he'd turned to stone beneath me. Not until I bent to kiss him again and felt his stone lips utterly still beneath mine.

"Edward?" I asked tentatively. My voice sounded like someone else's, low and hoarse with the desire still burning through every nerve ending. Desire and a need that was becoming almost painful.

And then he was gone.

It took me a minute to move past the sudden loss of his body beneath mine and the shock of his departure to look around to find him. He was still there, as far as he could get while remaining in the same room with me.

"Edward?" I asked again, confusion taking the place of the desire in my voice. "What is it?"

"You...," he stopped and scraped a hand over his granite face. "You said you remembered everything."

"I did," I answered, feeling my eyebrows contract in a frown.

"Then you remember what I told you, that first night in your bedroom. I can't ever lose control around you, Bella. You're too fragile. That," he waved a hand toward me where I still sat, my breathing ragged, "isn't an option for us."

I had to work to concentrate on his words while I stared at him. My body was still suffering the after effects of newly discovered need. Slowly, though, my higher brain functions returned. As did a memory from my time in the mist, the sneering me calling back the night Edward had explained why we could never be close...that way.

"Yes, I remember," I said at last. My frown had not eased away, if anything it intensified. The room grew steadily quieter as our breathing eased. The need, so out of control before, had lessened and I was able to think. It took me all of a few seconds to find the solution.

A smile bloomed on my face and I rose off the couch, not surprised to find my legs shaking. I managed to make my way over to him nonetheless, stopping just in front of him to place my hand on his cheek. His expression was wary, his head cocked to the side.

"There's only one solution then, isn't there?"

"Bella," he sighed when I moved closer still, pressing my body against his.

"You know it's true," I said, but without as much conviction. By the look on his face, he knew no such thing.

"What do I know?"

"The only solution is for you to change me, Edward. Then I won't be as breakable anymore."

The smile borne of my conviction that this was the best course of action melted away a second later when he picked me up and carried me back to the couch, touching as little of me as he could in the process.

"E-Edward?" I stammered, staring after him, confused.

"That's no solution, Bella."

"Of course it is," I countered.

"I will not end your life."

"You wouldn't be, though, don't you see? You'd be starting it," I said, trying to close the distance between us, but he darted away before I'd even tried to get up off the couch.

"I will not turn you into a monster, will not doom you to this existence."

His continual brush offs and adamant stance, the denial of what I knew to be the only answer spiked an anger in me I'd never felt before. Everything we'd been through...? Had it all been for nothing after all?

"So, what then? You love me. I'm your life now, or so you said, but we're going to what, Edward? Live out my human life celibate forever? You'll kiss me, but not touch me further than that? You'll stay with me as my seventeen year old companion when I'm middle aged and you have to pose as my son? Or my grandson when I get old? What sort of a life is that?"

"Bella, you've been ill. You don't know what you're-"

I held up a hand, cutting him off. "I know exactly what I'm saying, Edward Cullen. I'm saying that I love you, that I want to spend my life, my existence, with you. I fought through the hell of losing my memories of you, through the nothingness of mist and confusion I was just trapped in to find you again. I want to love you in every way there is, not just hand holding and stolen kisses that leave us both panting and frustrated. I deserve, we deserve more than that."

Edward hadn't moved, hadn't even breathed. He was still as stone on the other side of the room, staring at me with an expression that looked...looked like someone had lit him on fire.

I tried to stand, to go to him, but my legs, weak from however long I'd been trapped in the mist, started shaking violently beneath me as soon as I did. Angry at my weakness, I dropped back onto the couch with a huff. Still, Edward didn't move.

When, after five long, torturous minutes, he hadn't so much as shifted his weight, I knew I had my answer. He wasn't going to change me; he wasn't going to touch me.

He loved me, but not enough to keep me. Not enough to love me in every way.

"Alice?" I called out, my voice just barely higher than my normal conversational tone. It didn't matter, I knew she would hear me.

"Yes, Bella?" she answered, mere seconds later from the other side of Edward's closed bedroom door.

"Can you take me home, please?"

The door opened and she walked in. There was no surprise on her face, no confusion over why I was asking her for a ride. Of course there wasn't. Everyone in or near the house had heard my angry words. I wondered idly if she'd seen this coming, but I didn't ask. I didn't want to know.

"Sure I will," she said simply and walked over to where I sat on the couch, holding her arms out as if to carry me. When I tried to stand, she merely shook her head. "Your legs aren't strong enough for stairs, Bella. You'll fall and that will hardly help in your recovery."

Knowing she was right, just my few minutes of standing before Edward had exhausted them; I relaxed and let her pick me up. I was almost half a foot taller than Alice, but she carried me as easily as if I were a child.

The tears started down my cheeks when her arms tightened around me. Her cold embrace felt so familiar, yet wrong at the same time. These were the wrong arms holding me, these arms were taking me away from everything I'd ever wanted and could never have.

I spoke just before we cleared the threshold of his room. "If you change your mind..."

But I couldn't finish, because I knew he wouldn't. And to say it would make me sound just that much more pathetic. Instead I buried my head against Alice's shoulder and let the tears come. I thought I heard Alice say something, call Edward a fool, but I was crying to hard to be certain.

"Bella?"

Charlie's worried voice was the only thing that had a chance of pulling me from my tears and making me find some measure of composure. Because it wouldn't do for Charlie to see petite Alice carrying me to the house, she walked next to me instead, letting me lean on her for support as we made our way to the house.

"What happened? Are you all right? Carlisle said I couldn't come see you and I've been out of my mind..."

"She's fine, Charlie," Alice said in her voice like wind chimes, then muttered something too low for even me to hear. "Just tired from her illness."

Charlie was next to us now and reached an arm out to take her place supporting me. "I've got her Alice," he said, "thanks for bringing her home."

"Not a problem at all."

"Why didn't E—"

I looked up when he didn't finish his question to see Alice with her hand up, shaking her head at Charlie. Something passed between them, but I was too lost in trying to control my own emotions to think too much about it. I just let myself be led into the house and settled on the couch by my father and listened with a heavy heart as I heard Carlisle's Mercedes pull away from the house.

Alice was gone. She wouldn't come back. My life with the Cullens was over in a way I'd never thought possible. I waited for the tears to come, but the grief had moved beyond tears. I was too numb for even that much emotion.

I heard Charlie's boots clomp up the stairs and back down again. Seconds later, I felt Grandma Swan's quilt wrap around me, Charlie's hands squeezing my shoulders before he moved back to his chair.

"Bella?"

I raised my now-dry eyes to his and had to blink a few times to register the look on his face. Even after the blinking, I couldn't put a name to it.

"What happened to you at the Cullens?" he asked when I didn't respond.

"I...I collapsed, I think. My memories were trying to come back and I...fainted or something."

Charlie nodded, as if that gelled with his assumptions. "And did they, come back I mean?"

"Yes," I said softly, the tears trying to creep their way back into my eyes. I should have been ecstatic. I should have been smiling and laughing, but laughter was further away from me that the mountains of the Moon.

"Bella."

I didn't speak; I couldn't around the emotion clogging my throat. I could only meet his eyes.

"I don't pretend to understand your connection to the Cullens, or theirs to you. I got a glimpse of it for the first time in Phoenix, watching them in the waiting room. They, Carlisle, Alice and Edward," he paused when I flinched at Edward's name, but only briefly. "They looked like I felt, helpless and scared green. And then, when it became clear that you'd be going to Jacksonville with Renee, again their faces, his especially...I knew there was something more than your first boyfriend going on."

I still couldn't speak, all I could do was stare at my father.

"I do know that there's something about the Cullens that isn't...well, it isn't normal."

I found my voice enough to try and splutter a denial, but Charlie merely held up a hand.

"I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Bella, but I'm not an idiot. I'm also a cop. If you think a boy, a family, was going to get that close to my daughter, my only child, without looking into them, you don't know me very well. Maybe it was missing having you here, my way of trying to help you or get closer to you by finding out more about this boy who seemed to be as lost as I was without you around, but I started looking into him, and his family. I found some very confusing things and those things started me looking closer. I don't know who, or what, they are, but I know it's not a doctor and his adopted teenagers. At least not after you scratch the veneer off the surface."

My jaw dropped. If Charlie had searched into the Cullen's past, suspected something off about them, why were they still here? Or was Charlie truly more like me than I'd ever thought – unable or unwilling to disclose their secrets because he saw the goodness in them? The irony wasn't lost on me; the fact that Charlie's acceptance came just as it was no longer necessary.

"Like I said, I don't pretend to understand your connection to them, but I know it's there. You love them, and they love you. I can hear that clear enough whenever I talk to them, or when you did."

Charlie seemed to be running out of words and that didn't surprise me. I didn't think I'd ever heard him use so many in one conversation before. Not one that wasn't with Billy Black about the Mariner's chances at least. He stood and walked back over to me, his hand squeezing my shoulder again.

"I was afraid, when Carlisle called and told me you were ill and staying there, that the time had come when you'd go with them, wherever it is they go when they move on. I'm happy that I was wrong about that, that I've got the chance to see you again. To tell you," he paused, the same emotion that had been clogging my throat earlier must have lodged in his, "to tell you I love you, Bells."

"Dad," I managed, but nothing else came out. I wanted to tell him that I wasn't going anywhere but back to Jacksonville to pack for college, that I'd come see him again at Christmas, that I wasn't ever going to go away with them because there was no chance of that happening now. All I could manage, though, was a whispered, "I love you."

Charlie left me then, giving me my privacy. And I did what I'd wanted to do since leaving the Cullen house. I curled into myself and cried for all I had gained, and everything I'd lost.