A/N:

Sorry this chapter took a while. I've been sick as a dog and my mind has been too muddled and foggy to complete a thought, let alone write. I'm finally feeling a little better today and posting this was the first thing I thought of doing. Yay, I can finally breathe through my nose again!

Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the characters; I own my twist on the plot.

Chapter 16

As I looked over at Bella sitting stiffly in the passenger seat of my car I worried if I would ever completely know her. She was humming an innocent tune in her head which seemed entirely inconsistent with the enigmatic and slightly dangerous vibe she radiated on the exterior. Perhaps I was the only one who had penetrated her protective wall. I was the only one who could clearly see the girl inside the dark shell.

Even though I had spent the most agonizingly emotional, intimate night of my life with her with her there was still much I didn't know. I was beginning to learn how to control my mind reading ability, but I resisted probing her for information she was not ready to share. Even when I sometimes slipped and rooted around her brain for a glimpse of her thoughts, I sensed an invisible shield cocooned around her mind and heart. Perhaps she was learning to control our mental link as well, and though I know she deserved some privacy, it pained me to be unwelcome.

I sighed heavily, the wind slapping relentlessly against the protective frame of my car, and linked my fingers with hers. Each time we touched I was amazed anew at the tingling rush of electricity that captivated my entire body. Was this some sort of vampire magic? Or was this just the magic of Bella? I looked down at our two hands, hoping that through my flesh, she could comprehend the full extent of my feelings for her. That with my touch, I could erase the outside world so that it was just us, two souls combined as one.

I brought our entangled hands to my mouth and brushed a kiss along the tips of her sharp knuckles, wishing that more than just the flesh of our hands were touching. I reluctantly pulled my hand away to start the engine of the car and looked into her amber eyes. She still had secrets to tell. I didn't even know where she lived. I only knew of her tiny cabin in the woods and when I had found it empty before, I had to assume that she had somewhere else where she primarily lived. I realized that I didn't even have her phone number. There were so many things that I still wanted to know about her. There were so many unanswered questions clouding my mind.

"So, where do you live?" I asked her, anxiously awaiting one of Bella's small mysteries to be solved.

"Turn right at the light," she offered, a small smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

I wanted so desperately to bombard her with questions, but I forced my mind to calm and accept that she would eventually let me in. I was concentrating on hiding my anxiousness from Bella when her voice pulled me to the surface.

"What are your parents like?" she asked, and a forlorn whisper of a name popped into my head. Charlie. The longing in her tone tugged at my heart and again I found it difficult to switch gears and answer her.

"Um…my parents, they're great, I guess. My dad's a doctor and he's really good at his job. But no matter how busy he is, he still makes time for us. I really admire him. I know that sounds stupid, but he's really a great guy. Oh, and he loves baseball and opera, not exactly always in that order."

Charlie loved baseball too, Bella thought clearly but before I could ask who Charlie was, she asked another question.

"What about your mom? What is she like?"

I smiled automatically when I thought of my mom. Bella noticed and I watched the amusement register on her face. I knew it was weird for a teenager to be so close to his mom, but we'd always had a good relationship. She respected me and gave me enough freedom that I'd never felt any inclination to rebel against her. I guess I'd always acted older than my actual years – so much of typical adolescent behavior didn't appeal to me. Plus we'd moved so often that it was hard to forge meaningful relationships with other kids my age. I felt more comfortable hanging out with Esme than most girls my age until I met Bella. I tried to imagine what Bella might want to know about my mother and answered with some trepidation.

"Well, she is an incredible mother. She loves to bake. And she gets bored easily. We move a lot and it's always because my mom wants to move somewhere new. She always says that it's good to see things from a new perspective. But really there's not that much difference between places. Life wasn't that different in Alaska than it is here. I mean, except for you, of course." I tilted my head in her direction, feeling the familiar pull in my stomach.

"Esme is also a brilliant musician in her own right. She was my first teacher. She could have been great but she gave it all up for us. I think that our mutual love for the piano is one of the reasons why we're so close and probably why she is so fiercely protective of me. I've actually never brought a girl home that she liked. But I've never been serious about any of them either."

Bella growled as streaming images of random girls and women passed from her mind to mine in a too fast a progression for my brain to siphon. I realized that she was trying to put a face on the relationships of my past. I only wished that I could somehow make her understand that none of them meant anything, that I couldn't even remember half their names. They were nearly as faceless to me as they were to her. I squeezed her hand lightly and as it seemed as though she didn't feel it, I squeezed again much harder.

"But she is very loving, and very generous. She will love you. Please say you'll come on Friday. They want to meet you."

"They know about me?"

"Yeah, well Alice let it slip that I've become kind of…attached to you."

"Oh," she said flatly, her eyes fixed on the road, her body frozen in position as she often was when not overtly making an effort to appear human. "Make the next left at the big tree," she added in a monotone while her thoughts were swirling with images of a woman who looked much like Bella but older. Bella saw her as she was standing in an airport a distance away. She was smiling through her tears as she waved and blew kisses.

"Is that your mother…that you were seeing at the airport?" I asked in a gentle voice, not wanting to push her into an area that she wasn't yet ready to go with me.

"Yes. It was the last time I saw her. Pull up to the white house on the corner," she said, pointing at the homey structure and sufficiently changing the subject. I wanted to ask more about her mother, but my focus now turned to the house where my Bella lived. I don't really know what I was expecting, but I didn't even remotely imagine that she was living so close to town in such a run of the mill suburban neighborhood. It was the kind of neighborhood where working class families lived, with older homes that were once rather nice, but were now in various levels of disrepair. The white ramshackle structure with broken terracotta pots on the front porch and sagging, broken shutters on the windows hardly seemed the appropriate house for a vampire.

I followed Bella up the well-worn staircase to the front door and through the threshold into the vacant entryway. My eyes travelled from one room to another trying to find some part of my beautiful vampire girlfriend in the shabby interior. I thought that seeing Bella where she lived might give me more insight into her mysterious past but there was nothing of her in this very ordinary dwelling. In fact, I was more baffled than ever. Bella sat down in a chair at the round oak table in the kitchen and I sat down across from her, hoping for some illumination.

"This isn't really what I expected," I said, reaching over to grasp her hand.

"What, did you think I lived in a cave or something? Maybe a dark castle with moats and a dungeon?"

"Well, not the moats," I answered and we both chuckled.

"Last time I looked there weren't too many castles in Forks."

"No, I guess not," I conceded.

We sat in silence for several minutes, our hands intertwined on the table while my eyes wandered. I found myself investigating the contents of the kitchen like a detective searching for clues. There was a rusted metal pot rack hanging over the stove, the pots dusty with disuse. A varied assortment of spice containers sat on the back of the stove as reminders of meals consumed long ago. There was a dehydrated yellow sponge sitting abandoned on the edge of the sink, curled and shriveled. I was surprised to see an open can of beer sitting on the countertop near the refrigerator and even more startled to see the several school photographs of a much younger Bella attached to the refrigerator by magnets in various shapes of vegetables. I began to understand that this house was a shrine to a different time, a life that ended for Bella when that monster sunk his fangs into her neck and made her like him.

"This was Charlie's house…my father, Charlie. He lived here. I came to visit him in the summers when I was a kid. I'd only lived here for a few months when I was attacked by James and then I had to leave. Leaving Charlie was really hard. It was the hardest part of what happened to me. Because we'd just started to get to know each other again. And he was a really great man," she gulped back a tearless sob and collapsed forward, resting her head on the table in her grief. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. She kept moaning his name in her head.

I reached out to her and put my hand on her shoulder, moving it slowly upward through the strands of her hair. I caressed her scalp, rubbing small circles with my fingertips. She was thinking of him in his police uniform standing by the doorway, skillfully wrapping his gun holster around his waist, an action that was plainly second nature to him.

"It's okay Bella, we don't have to talk about this," I whispered, willing her to understand that I would wait for her to share everything with me.

"Thank you for not pressuring me Edward, but I want to talk about them. Sometimes, they don't even seem real, like they ever existed. Sometimes I feel like I never existed, like my human life was an illusion. That's why I continue to live here in Charlie's house. It proves that it was real." She stood and walked to the refrigerator and gingerly brushed her fingertips over her school pictures as if a firmer touch would cause them to disintegrate.

"I guess my mother sent all my school pictures to Charlie. When I moved here I was surprised to see them. I didn't know. I wish that I'd had more time with him." She turned toward me resolutely and shrugged as if closing a door on her emotions.

"I moved here because of my mom, Renee. I wanted her to be happy. It had been just the two of us for so long and I knew she was lonely. And then she met Phil and he made her so happy. He was a minor league baseball player and was on the road a lot. I knew that my mom really wanted to go with him on the road but she stayed at home for me. So I decided to try living with my dad for a while so that Renee and Phil could be together."

The image of Renee in the airport popped into Bella's head again. She waved and blew kisses and smiled through her tears.

"My mom had a cell phone but she never could figure out how to use it. She was hopeless with technology. It was funny really. She would call me from gas stations, truck stops, diners. The last time she called me from truck stop somewhere between Florida and Alabama. I could tell from her voice that she was really happy. Phil had been playing well the last few games. He'd hit a couple home runs or something. They were talking about moving him up to a Triple-A team for a while. All she talked about was Phil. She was so proud of him."

The next part is the hardest to say. Edward, hold me.

Bella grabbed my hand and pulled me from the kitchen to the lumpy couch in the living room, aptly positioned in front of the only relatively new item in the house, the large flat-screen television. She urged me down next to her. I put my arm around her, tucking her in close. It was oddly like embracing the trunk of a tree, all stiff and hard angles. But as she curled into me I could have cared less. I loved her.

Bella sucked in a deep breath, and as I had noticed she could go for extended periods without breathing, I wondered if it was simply out of habit.

"Soon after the call, the bus that Phil's team was travelling on was in an accident. The driver swerved to miss a deer on the road and drove into a steep ditch. The bus was top-heavy and flipped over, tumbling a ways down the hill. My mom…"

Mom and Phil and the driver of the bus were all killed.

"Everyone else walked away with minor injuries," Bella said, her melodious voice full of pain.

"Charlie helped to get Renee and Phil's bodies back to Forks. They both were buried in the graveyard here next to where my grandparents were buried."

And now Charlie is there too.

"I was at the graveyard visiting my mom when James came after me." There was so much venom in her voice in the last part of this statement that I hardly recognized it and I flinched. Bella recovered quickly and caught my gaze. Her amber eyes seduced me, placating me.

I'm sorry, Edward. I will never hurt you. I could never be angry with you. Faster than I could see, she had lifted her hand to my cheek and began to caress it gently. I couldn't resist leaning into her palm, her touch stirring the blood in my veins.

When Bella's hand returned to her lap, my senses returned to me and I asked her the question that remained, "But what happened to Charlie?"

Her face when she raised her eyes to mine was filled with a pain so deep and inexplicable that I immediately wished I hadn't asked the question. Her eyes dropped again, her soft, anguished voice breaking into my mind.

Can we leave that for another time, Edward? Won't Esme be wondering where her beloved son is?

She stood and walked me to the entryway. I noticed Charlie's gun holster on the coat rack near the door. I swallowed my desire to ask her more questions. I had an irrational need to reach out and touch the holster as if to verify that it was real and not simply a ghostly remnant of Bella's memories. But Bella was an expert at distraction. She elegantly stretched to her tiptoes and lightly brushed her ruby lips across mine.

Edward, I'll miss you tonight. It's so hard to stay away.

"Then don't Bella," I said aloud, her lips only inches away. "I want to be with you too. All the time."

She took a step backwards and shook her head from side to side, sadly. "You would tire of me."

"Never," I said with passion – a passion only Bella could arouse in me. "Please come to my house on Friday. I promise it will all be okay."

"So many things could go wrong. I don't eat. Won't they notice? Sometimes I forget to act human. What if they don't like me?"

"Bella, they will adore you. Don't worry about any of those things. I will help you – remind you to breathe and move and everything. Please?" I tried to plead with my eyes, a trick that always worked on my mother.

Images began to flash through my mind – James with blood dripping down his chin, a frightened deer running frantically through the forest. I could hear its galloping foot falls and then tinkling laughter, like bells, as the face of Bella's mother attacked my consciousness like a ghostly apparition. Her face faded just as quickly as it appeared when I heard the familiar hiss of a beer can being opened. I automatically turned my head to the side, my ears searching for the source of the sound when Bella's thoughts again became mine and I saw her father, his head cocked back, taking a long gulp from the can in his hand.

"Okay, I'll go," she said, bringing me slowly back to her.

I eased my mind from its stupor, shaking the lingering fog from my brain, and gradually came to understand the meaning of her words. When the realization set in, enthusiasm and a sense of relief bubbled deep inside of me. Her acceptance meant more than it seemed on the surface – her agreeing to meet my family meant she was willing to give us a chance, willing to face her fear so that we could be together.

I dipped my head to kiss her, pulling her to me in an embrace. Her arms wound themselves around my waist, her hands travelling upward over the muscles in my back. I released a heavy sigh of contentment. There was no where I would rather be than in her arms. It felt so right. As if we were made for each other, two halves of a whole, two puzzle pieces perfectly melded together.

As I descended the stairway and reluctantly made my way to my car I heard Bella's parting thoughts ring clearly in my mind.

I love you, Edward Cullen. Thank you. Thank you for making me feel alive again.

End Notes:

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