See You Somewhere Down the Line

I woke up the next morning in the rocking chair with a peculiar feeling. It took me a while to recognize it because it had been so long since I had last felt it. I actually woke up that morning feeling well rested. For the very first time in three months, I slept dreamlessly.

But did I? Something tugged at me from the back of my mind—last night, I was under the impression that Edward Cullen was in my room, right when I was about to…

No, the rational side of my brain said firmly. You just heard his voice. You also heard Vickers' voice and he's in prison right now. At least, that's what Mrs. Andrews said. It was all in your imagination.

I was doubtful. What about his arms? Did I dream that he held me, too?

Of course you did, my rational mind scoffed. What would you have done if he really did touch you?

I would have freaked, I answered my own question grimly. I would have had a reaction much like I did when the nurses in the hospital tried to move me to the bed. There was no way I would have let him hold me like that, especially when I was so emotionally vulnerable.

It must have been a dream. But it was a very nice dream, and it was enough to chase away the nightmares for one night.

Once I was fully awake, I glanced at the clock; the red numbers said it was two thirty in the afternoon. Thank goodness that it was a Saturday.

I showered and dressed carefully, pondering on ways to pass my Saturday. Eventually, I settled on the idea of running some errands, since we were dangerously low on edible food. When I was dressed, I ran downstairs to find something to eat. As I was searching the cabinets for the last granola bar, I found a note next to the sink.

Bella,

I'm out fishing with a friend. His number is 866-7584. Call me if you need anything.

Charlie

I rolled my eyes and crumpled the paper in my fist. Charlie was really hung up on this whole calling him thing, no matter how many times I told him I was fine.

I grabbed my jacket from its peg in the hallway and ran out the door, locking the door firmly behind me. A huge surprise greeted me the moment I turned around.

Edward Cullen stood in my driveway, emerging from the driver's seat of a shiny red convertible with the tan roof protecting the undoubtedly luxurious interior from impending rain. He was smiling at me with a disarmingly charming grin, though the look in his eyes said he was a little unsure. "Hello," he said.

"Hi," I replied warily. What was he doing here?

"I just thought I'd check up on you," he said, answering my unspoken question. "I wanted to make sure that you were doing well."

"I am."

"That's good." But he still stood there, watching me with an oddly protective look on his face.

"Um…can I help you with anything else?"

Suddenly his excruciatingly lovely face broke into a breathtaking grin and his golden eyes sparkled with intense charm. "Well, I know that Chief Swan usually goes fishing on the weekends and you don't seem like the kind of girl who likes fishing, so I thought you might be a little lonely."

I blushed. "What makes you think I don't like fishing?"

His smile just widened. "Well, where are you heading right now?"

He had me in a corner and he knew it. "If you must know, I'm going to run some errands. I don't really need any company—in fact, it's probably going to be pretty boring, so you should probably go find someone else to hang out with."

He tilted his head to the side, like a child asking a hard-to-comprehend question. "I can make it less boring," he offered innocently.

My heart pounded at the thought of Edward Cullen accompanying me to the supermarket in all his ethereal beauty. I opened my mouth to tell him no, but the words that came out instead were, "Well, if you really want to."

His eyes suddenly lost their wary edge and they gleamed with happiness. "I do. I'll even be your chauffeur."

I finally turned my attention to his ride. "Whose car is that?" I demanded as I stepped off the porch and stumbled, slightly dumbstruck, toward the shiny red convertible.

"This? This belongs to my sister, Rosalie."

I frowned. I suppose I'd never really paid attention to anyone else in school, but I was absolutely certain I would have noticed his sister. People as beautiful as Edward Cullen shouldn't be allowed to have siblings.

"What about your car?"

Edward's smile suddenly disappeared and gave way to a glower. "It was totaled when that pitiful excuse for a human tried to kill you."

My eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "You drove the silver Volvo?"

He nodded.

"Then what did you drive me home in yesterday?"

"That was Carlisle's," he explained as he opened my door for me. "I would have taken his again, but he's at work, so I was left with Rosalie's car. Emmett's car would have been overkill."

"Why?" I asked as I slid in. He closed the door behind me and walked around to open his door.

"Emmett has a Jeep Wrangler," he replied. "It's good for driving off road, but it's not very practical for everyday use."

"If you have cars like this then why do you bother with a Volvo?"

He grinned at me. "You must not have been very aware of your expression, but you were in awe. Can you imagine the same reaction two hundred times over if Rosalie drove her car to school? We don't really like it when people ogle our cars."

I snorted. "So why bother having them?"

His smile turned into a self-satisfied smirk. "Because we like to drive fast."

That was an understatement. The moment I was buckled in, his foot was on the gas pedal and we were speeding through the empty streets. My eyes widened in slight terror when I saw the speedometer needle inch ever closer to one hundred.

Edward must have noticed my fearful expression because he very abruptly changed the subject. "So where would you like to go first?"

I tore my eyes away from his dashboard and looked at the list I had made before I left the house. "Um…I need to go to the grocery store," I offered weakly.

He nodded. "To the grocery store it is then."

Minutes later he pulled into the parking lot and turned off the ignition. The weather was predictably cloudy and wet, so I made sure to tuck all my hair into the hood of my raincoat before I climbed out of the car. But Edward was already at my side, opening the door courteously.

"Er…thanks," I said uncomfortably.

"No problem," he replied.

Being with Edward in a grocery store was so strange. Grocery shopping was such a normal, everyday thing; countless individuals all over the world performed this task without ceremony, and the fact that Edward was here confused me. People as beautiful as Edward didn't belong in grocery stores. Seeing him observe tomatoes with a mild sense of curiosity struck me as so odd, as so out of place that I very momentarily forgot what I was doing just to stare at him.

Suddenly, he was staring at me across a bin of onions. "You don't have to do this, you know."

I frowned. "Do what?"

A small smile pulled around his lips. "You don't have to awkwardly search for something to talk about with me," he explained gently. "You can just say whatever you're thinking. In fact, I'd like to know what you're thinking. You always have the strangest expressions and it makes me wonder what goes through your head."

I reached into the onion bin for something to do with my hands. "I was just thinking how strange it is to see you in a grocery store," I stated, trying to play off my blush as a reaction to the sudden warmth of the store. "I can't picture someone as beautiful as you in a place as ordinary as this."

My eyes widened in horror when I realized that I had just called him beautiful to his face. But Edward simply smiled. "I admit, it's been a very long time since I've been in a grocery store. The smells are a little bewildering." He picked up an onion and sniffed it. A look of disgust immediately blanketed his features.

I gave him a small smile. "Well us regular folk are used to it."

He grimaced at me, but said nothing. I continued through the store, trying to ignore the blatant stares from the other shoppers. It seemed as if I wasn't the only one disconcerted by Edward's perfection.

We got to the canned food aisle before we spoke again. Edward had been examining a can of fried onions with a look of distaste, not unlike the one he wore when he sniffed a fresh onion. "What is the obsession with green bean casserole? It looks entirely unappetizing."

I looked over his shoulder and grimaced at the picture. "I never really liked it myself."

"Then why do people insist on making it? I've never heard a single good thing about it. Even the name sounds disgusting. Casserole," he said slowly, as if to emphasize his point. Then he shuddered.

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "But what I want to know is who thought that casseroles would make a nice housewarming gift. Whoever came up with that idea needs to be shot."

Edward laughed. A part of me shied away from the beautiful sound, but a larger, much stronger part wanted to keep making him laugh. "I have no idea," he replied. "The concept is rather bewildering to me as well. When my family and I first moved to Forks, we must have received a million casseroles from the friendly citizens of Forks."

That tiny smile returned to my lips. "Did you eat any of them?"

He shot me a look of playful horror. "I didn't go anywhere near them. Emmett tried one of them, though."

"And what did he think?"

Edward laughed again. "He said it tasted like dirt."

The mention of his brother suddenly sparked a curiosity about the rest of his family. "How many siblings do you have?"

"Four," he replied. "We're all adopted; Emmett, Alice and I are siblings while Rosalie and Jasper are twins. Esme is actually my aunt and she took us all in." His face softened at the thought of his adoptive mother.

"You love her," I observed.

He nodded. "Carlisle and Esme are two of the most loving beings in the world. I'm eternally grateful to them—they've given us all so much."

My stomach twisted in longing. A pain so fierce shot through me at the thought of his perfect family; it was a sharp reminder of what I had lost and what I could never regain. But despite this intense pain, I wanted to know more about the Cullens.

"Do you get along with your siblings?"

His face broke into a wide smile. "For the most part. We bicker like any other family, but it's playful—nothing serious at all. We all have different personalities that make it easier for us to live together."

"Are your siblings as…are they…" I struggled to find the right words without making me sound like a total idiot. "Do they look like you?"

He must have realized my efforts because he smirked. "I suppose they do. Many of the children at school seem to think that Rosalie is, ah…hot…but I personally don't see anything. And besides, they're wasting their time. She's in love with Emmett."

My eyebrows shot up my forehead and Edward snickered. "Are you surprised?"

I struggled to find the words. "I—it's just—I think that's very…unorthodox, that's all."

He shrugged. "I suppose it is. But Alice and Jasper love each other as well. As long as they're not related, does it really matter?"

I thought for a moment. "No, it doesn't. I'm just not used to the idea."

He smirked again. "I see that."

I was suddenly intensely curious. From what he told me, Edward seemed to be the odd man out. "What about you? Are you in love with anyone?"

His eyes became guarded in an instant. "I've never been in love before," he replied. "I've never met anyone who caught my eye."

Skepticism etched its way between my eyebrows. I found it very unlikely that Edward had never met anyone that caught his eye. "Really?"

He must have heard the disbelief (I wasn't really trying all that hard to hide it) because he rolled his eyes. "I'm serious. No one has ever really been worth the effort."

I felt my heart lighten with a strange feeling; it felt suspiciously like hope. "Oh."

He sharply threw his gaze towards me and I could feel his eyes burn holes into my skin. "What about you? Are you in love?"

That hope inside of my chest abruptly shattered. "No."

"Have you ever been in love?"

"No."

He must have realized my sudden and abrupt change in mood because his eyes were immediately gentle and he didn't say anything further. I hurried to the check-out to pay for the groceries.

When we were safely in the car, he turned to me with a concerned expression. "Bella, what happened?" he asked. "What happened in Phoenix?"

I looked up at him, which was a terrible mistake. When would I ever learn that looking into his eyes was always a bad idea? But despite the pull in his glorious eyes to tell him the truth, I swallowed the story in my throat. "Edward," I whispered, my voice strangled with the words that wanted to answer his question, "I don't know if I can tell you."

"You can tell me anything, Bella," he reassured me. "I won't tell anyone else, if that's what you're worried about. Your secrets are safe with me."

"I'm not worried that you'll tell."

"Then what are you worried about?"

I turned my gaze downward; this was the terrible truth that I had been longing to suppress. This was the truth that bothered me more than anything else. "I'm worried that if I tell you, you'll hate me forever."

The mood was excruciatingly silent. Then his beautiful, silky smooth voice broke through the tension with words I never thought I'd hear. "Bella, I could never hate you. Nothing you could ever say or do could make me hate you."

The treacherous hope I felt in the grocery store welled up inside me once again. How I longed to believe those words…how I longed to trust him with the secret that threatened to swallow me whole. But a part of me still stubbornly gripped at my skepticism. I hardly knew Edward; I was introduced to him only six days ago. How could I possibly tell him? How could put my faith in some stranger?

But I looked once again into his gaze and I knew. There was a feeling, deep inside of me that knew he would keep my secrets with me and guard them as his own. And he wouldn't judge me for actions of past. He would instead hold me accountable for my actions in the future.

Tell him part of the truth, a long dormant voice inside of me urged. You don't have to tell him the whole truth. Just the part of it that you feel comfortable with.

I took a deep breath, preparing for the story that had cost me my life.

"As you know, I come from Phoenix, Arizona. I lived there all of my life. My mother met my father down there and they fell in love. They got married and they moved into a nice suburban home and I was born two years later. My family was so ridiculously average that my mother would make fun of us all the time; she said we belonged in a nineteen fifties sitcom." I thought I saw Edward smile, but I couldn't really be sure. My vision was glazed over with the memories of my childhood.

"We lived next door to a man named Alan Vickers." The mere mention of his name sent tingles crawling across my skin. Edward noticed my reaction, but he didn't say anything. "And he was a good family friend. He would come over often and we would have dinner parties. He would baby-sit me whenever my parents went out on a date and he would buy me Christmas presents and show up to my birthday parties. He would even pick me up from school whenever my parents had to work over time."

I swallowed hard. Those memories were the hardest part of this particular story. Those were the memories of one of my best friends and the greatest mentor I ever had. His voice didn't used to be the terrible throaty whisper that haunted my dreams; it used to be a wonderful, welcome sound. His laughter was practically the soundtrack to my childhood.

"Then one day, I came home from school to find the house completely empty. That wasn't really unusual since my parents worked over time a lot. But it was a Friday and they promised that we would all go out to watch a movie that I had been dying to see as a family, so they said they would go home as soon as they could. I just thought that something came up at work and they couldn't get out of it. So I went to the closet in the hallway to hang up my raincoat—it had been raining that day—when something yanked me inside the moment I opened the door.

"It was my mother." The memory of the terror paralyzed my muscles. "She pulled me to the ground and told me to stay in the closet and not make a sound. She said that she was going to try and—and hold him off. She told me to run the minute I got the chance. I didn't understand what was going on, but I knew it was something bad." Tears started to well up in my eyes but I hardly noticed. I was too immersed in the memories. "Then she…she handed me her cell phone and she said, 'I'll call you when it's safe.' But there was some part of me that knew…deep down, I knew she wasn't going to call me.

"Suddenly, the front door opened and a voice was calling my name. 'Bella!' he shouted. 'Bella, are you home yet?' It was Alan, but that didn't surprise me. We had given him the spare key to our house in case of emergencies. But Mom was suddenly terrified. She turned to me and she said, 'I'll hold him off as long as I can and when I do, run. Run as far as you can. Don't let him catch you.'

"But I knew that she was in more danger than I was. There was something in her voice that just told me she didn't expect to live and I couldn't bear the thought of her dying. So I swore that if something were to happen, I'd make sure she made it out of there alive."

This was the hardest part of this story. This was what haunted my dreams in the weeks preceding the trial.

"Suddenly, the closet door opened. Alan was in the doorframe with this…this terrible look in his eye." I could never properly describe it; his pitch black irises gleamed with a strange ferocity that horrified me to this day. "And when he saw me, he said, 'Bella? Renee? What are you doing in the closet?'

"That's when Mom launched herself at him. She tackled him to the ground, screaming, 'Not my daughter, you bastard! Not my daughter!'" What I couldn't tell him was that my mother had been dressed in nothing but her underwear, bearing cuts and bruises all over her skin.

I struggled to continue. "She was punching every inch of him she could, but…but my mother, she was never really strong." My voice began to crack and I knew the sobs were fast approaching. "He was stronger than she was and I knew that he wasn't going to let her hit him anymore. Then he grabbed her wrists and forced them backwards. He got up and pushed her against the wall. When she stood up, she tried to hit him again, but I pushed her out of the way. I couldn't—I wouldn't—let him beat her up. So I told her…I told her, 'Mom, run! Just go!'"

The look in her wild eyes was forever burned in my brain. They shined with terror, anguish, concern and pain. "She shouted, 'Bella, no!' But when she tried to launch herself back at him, I pushed her away again. 'Mom, I'll take care of it! Just go! Run!'"

There wasn't much space in that tiny front seat, but I managed to curl myself in a ball and clutch my knees to my chest; the hole had once again started aching. "She looked so hurt and so vulnerable. But I must have said or done something that really hit home because she did eventually run. She turned and ran out the door, as fast as she could. That was the last time I ever saw her."

I wiped the trails of moisture off my face only to leave the way clear for fresh ones. "Two weeks later, I woke up in the hospital. They told me that my parents were dead and that Alan killed them. From what I know, my father had been at work when all of this happened. When he came home to find the house empty, he went next door to ask Alan if he had seen us. That's when Alan killed him."

The car was silent for what seemed like hours. I let Edward absorb the story as I struggled to still the shaking of my chest. The memories were back now, playing in front of me in full color and sound. It was like I had lost my parents all over again.

Finally, Edward spoke up. "And what happened to your mother?"

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. "She tried to come back for me," I rasped. "She tried to save me. But she never got the chance."

I wiped the fresh tears from my eyes and looked up at Edward. I was immediately swept away by his expression; it was the most painful, most beautifully tortured look I had ever seen in my life. His eyes held anger, resentment, pity, compassion, grief and anguish all at once. I dazedly wondered what he was thinking in that moment.

"Bella…" he whispered.

That one word held almost all the emotion his eyes did and it caused the tears to build up again. Three months of complete agony, despair, rage and sorrow poured out of me. By telling my story, I ripped open the wounds, letting them bleed afresh. It all rushed out in surge of pain, threatening to sweep me up in its rapid, unrelenting current.

"I was trying to save her, Edward," I gasped between sobs. My mother's beautiful face popped up in my head. Her perpetually bewildered expression burned themselves in my eyelids. I would never see her smile again. I would never listen to her play the piano or hear her sing in her mediocre, sometimes off-key voice. I would never get to watch her show off to her husband and daughter the newest moves she learned in her interpretive dance class. She would never cook those crazy experiments or twirl around happily in the bright Arizona sun. She was lost to me forever because of my stupid mistakes. "I was trying to save her."

Suddenly I was encased in something cold and hard. I looked up and saw Edward's arms wrapped around my tiny frame. I waited through my sobs for the inevitable reaction. I hadn't allowed anyone but a doctor to touch me for the last three months, and anyone who tried instantly ceased due to the immediate and sometimes violent response that ensued. One touch set something off in my head; I would no longer be human, but I would fight like an animal being threatened.

But when Edward held me, I felt no reaction. In Edward's cold arms, I felt safe. I felt comforted. This realization only made the tears flow freer.

"Bella," he murmured, "it wasn't your fault."

"Yes it was," I insisted. "It was my fault! If I had just tried harder—if I fought harder, if I did something or if I tried to kill him, then my mother would still be alive!"

"No, Bella. He would have killed you too."

I wailed. "It would have been better than this!"

Suddenly, his cold embrace was gone and I missed the presence. I looked up to see him regarding me with a pained, but thoughtful expression. I sat completely still, trying to stifle the sobs that still shook my body.

Finally, he seemed to reach a decision. "Buckle up," he ordered.

I was taken aback. "What?"

"Buckle up. I'm going to take you somewhere."

My grief temporarily gave way to my confusion. I slowly reached behind me for the buckle and strapped myself in. "Where are you taking me?" I asked.

He sighed. "Bella, you've shared one of your greatest secrets with me. It's time I returned the favor."

A/N - Phew! This chapter really wore me out. But aren't you guys proud of your girl? She's taking steps!

If you want to know more about this chapters (and future chapters) you can check my blog. It's listed as the website on my profile. And as always, don't forget to review!