A short update, but you've got to give me credit for speed! This is my (rather irresponsible to my real-life responsibilities, but life is short!) version of a count-down to Friday's movie that I won't be seeing. Hope you enjoy! (More to follow, but probably not as fast.) xo liza

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Bella's first reaction upon regaining the ability to move after her mind-blowing and terrifying phone call with Edward Cullen was to drop her traitorous phone back on the kitchen table and run for her room. Accidentally slamming the door behind her she closes it with such vigor, she moves straight to her bed and flies onto it, grabbing a pillow as she lands and shoving her head into it. Hunched over and almost hyperventilating, she has her eyes squeezed shut and is trying to close her mind to any thoughts or memories of the last fifteen minutes.

Experiencing some temporary success in blanking out her mind and focusing only on calming down her breathing, Isabella is immediately undone again when she slowly raises her head... and catches sight of the amazing bouquet on her desk.

Not only the visual assaults her, but once she sees the flowers she realizes she can smell them too, and even shoving her head into her pillow again can't get the sensory memory of their sweet fragrance out of her conscious awareness.

Which means she can't get Edward Cullen out of her conscious awareness…which means something else, some nagging fact both desperately dangerous and urgent keeps trying to come back in and completely overwhelm her. Which means she has to escape the room.

Leaping up off the bed, she trips on her own work shoes and falls hard to the floor, bruising her knee—but she hardly notices and is up again right away, surveying her room for a place to flee.

Finding nothing safe enough, she flings her door open again and looks up and down the hallway, weighing her options before running for Rose's room, the master suite at the end of the hall. Once there, Bella turns on the lights and makes a bee-line straight for Rose's capacious closet. Leaving the door open but not turning on the closet light, she heads for the very back and crawls underneath Rose's hanging formal gowns, curling up in a corner with an old ski jacket for a pillow.

Laying there in the relative dark, the apartment quiet except for the occasional honking noise from the taxis outside or the scraping of chairs from the suite up above, Bella calms down—so much so that she falls asleep.

Meanwhile, Edward Cullen is whipping through the necessary conversations to clear his schedule for the impromptu dinner date he believes he just arranged, starting with bringing the work conference he was leading when Bella's first phone call came through to an early close. There's no grumbling from his underlings at this unprecedented development, as they are all too happy to agree to reconvene the following morning-several of them knowing they will be spending their evening and night trying to adequately answer the questions he's already posed and grateful for the time to prep better for their perfectionistic, brilliant, aggressive but fair and generously-rewarding boss, and the rest happy for the surprising early end to their day and the opportunity to make their own impromptu dinner plans.

Having alerted his driver and personal security detail to bring the car around, Edward makes the rest of his arrangements from the backseat as Taylor—a fatherly-appearing middle-aged ex-Navy SEAL in a crewcut and suit, easy to underestimate with his low-key appearance but supremely good at what he does, which is: ensure Edward always gets to where he wants to be on time and with as little inconvenience as possible (to Edward, that is)—and arrives back at Rose and Isabella's building less than 24 hours after leaving it the night before. He smiles to himself at that fact, not being used to visiting the homes of casual dates more than once…especially given the number of his casual dates in recent years is fewer than the fingers on one hand.

To be precise, it's one—and that one only gone on as a hard-fought concession to an irritatingly meddlesome but affectionate and appreciated little sister.

So to find himself back at the scene of the crime against his own self-protective rules is a little surprising. But, he consoles himself, this has nothing to do with dating. This is a…welfare check, and he nods to himself as he thinks that term. Just a follow-up nicety made necessary by his accidental rudeness to a little girl on the phone tonight.

Well, not really a little girl; a woman who just looks and acts like a little girl. Which is, Edward thinks as he exits the door Taylor is holding open for him, somehow even more concerning.

Turning to Taylor, Edward says, "Wait here, please; we should be right out," then turns back towards the building and strides in the front entryway to retrieve the girl in question.

Looking at his watch when he fails to see said girl waiting for him on the other side of the glass inner entryway doors, he realizes he's five minutes early—a remarkable feat in NYC rush hour traffic and testament to the quality of his driver, bodyguard, and almost-friend. Smiling, he dials the girl's number, and hears it ring, then go to voicemail. He tries again. Gets voicemail again.

So he pulls out the big guns and calls his one-time casual date.

"Rosalie, hello."

"Edward Cullen. What did you do now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Bella isn't answering her phone. What did you say to her?"

"That's why I'm calling you. She won't pick up, and she's not down to meet me. Does she usually run late?"

"Yes, but that's beside the point. What are you doing picking her up? You didn't mention that to me!"

"Are you your roommate's keeper?" Edward winced a little after he said that, because he realized, indeed Rosalie was, and he'd just admitted her right to have a say in this situation. Cursing himself, he listened to Rosalie respond gleefully, as he would have in her shoes,

"Why yes, indeed I am. And you haven't cleared anything by me. Though I must say, the flowers were lovely and can be considered adequate toll for one night."

Edward laughed, glad Rose was in a playful mood because he wanted to keep this situation light. That's all it was, after all—a nice gesture on his part. "Don't you mean bribe?" he teased.

"Only if your intentions are less than I was giving you credit for," Rose leered back, but with a warning edge to the tone, letting Edward clearly know that his intentions better not be anything of the sort.

He was quick to reassure both her and himself. "My intentions are impeccable, Rose, and G-rated, I assure you. I felt bad about scaring that little rabbit of a roommate of yours, and when she finally took my call earlier I talked her into going to dinner with me. I thought maybe I could convince her that I'm not such a scary guy."

"Only you are such a scary guy, so that was bad logic," Rose returned, in a surprisingly warning voice.

Edward chose to stay light. "Oh, come on, Rose, I don't look that bad," he laughingly rejoined.

"Edward, be serious a minute. She's not answering my calls either. Which means she's upset. Or she's lost her cell phone again, but the fact that you're standing in our lobby and she's not seems to indicate the former. And that's not good."

The lightness and humor Edward was trying to maintain evaporated instantly, to his frustration and, rather unbelievably to himself, fear. "Then what do I do?" he asked Rose, as serious as Rose could ever have wished for—maybe a little too serious for their mutual comfort.

Rose sighed, then, thinking aloud, said, "Well, I'm too far downtown to make it back in less than 45 minutes, 30 minutes if we're really lucky, so probably the best thing is for you to try and fix this yourself."

"I'm game; tell me how," Edward interjected.

"I'll give you the access code to get you in the building, and then you go up and knock on the door. If she's not totally round the bend, she'll answer it; if she doesn't, then you need to go next door to 6B and ask Mrs. Cope for our emergency key. She's a batty old lady, but she loves Bella, so just say you're a friend and you're worried that Bella's sick and you need to check on her. I'll call Mrs. Cope first and tell her it's okay, but you'll have to repeat the story—she hates me and probably won't give me a chance to explain."

"Mrs. Cope, 6B, sick Isabella, got it," Edward said back.

"Good. Now this part is really important…" and Rosalie broke off, as she realized that she was about to share some highly personal information about her best friend with a man that neither one of them knew very well…although, she consoled herself, he was sooner or later probably going to be her step-brother-in-law, if she knew Jasper well at all (and she did), so really this was just bringing Edward into the family a little earlier than the formalities would dictate. And thereby having found a way to be okay with what she was about to say, Rosalie started with "Bel-" just as Edward broke in impatiently with, "What?" then heard Rosalie's voice and said, "Sorry, you were saying?"

Rosalie just hmmphed at his impatience, feeling both glad and worried for it, and continued, "Well, I was saying that Bella," and she took a deep breath and crossed her fingers that she wasn't about to be the worst friend in the world, ratting out her shy sweetheart of a roomie to an officious, aggressive man with a taste for…Rose wasn't sure what, the gossip around Edward Cullen wasn't nearly as specific as she would have liked, and was more speculation than fact, even with her inside connection to the family. The Cullens were extremely private, and even more protective of each other.

She paused again, and Edward lost it, letting fly with, "For God's sake, Rosalie, what the hell is wrong with your roommate? We're not getting any younger here!"

Rosalie was instantly pissed. "Fine, Edward, I'll handle it. You just leave and go about your business. Bella is none of your concern anyway."

Remorse and chagrin flooding him, Edward's response was immediate and genuine. "Rose, I'm sorry. I'm not a very patient man, I know. Please don't send me away; I really want to help. I…I feel a, I don't know, a connection to Isabella. And I want to undo whatever bad I did. Please tell me how?"

Mollified and reassured, Rose spills the beans. "I was trying to explain that Bella is a runner. I mean, she literally runs away when she gets upset. So when you go into the apartment, you'll want to be careful to stay between her, or wherever she may be, and the door."

"Oh," Edward said, processing this information. And a little surprised/disturbed at his physiological reaction to it, a reaction he had absolutely no intention of sharing with Rose. Or any other living human being. "All right, good strategy, Hale—I'll keep her pinned in and alert my driver to watch for her at the exit." There was a pause while they both reeled a little from the matter-of-fact rightness to Edward's attack plans for Isabella. Then he continued as an afterthought, "Any thoughts as to where she's likely to be in the apartment?"

Rose laughed. It was a little nervous, and a little real. "I know exactly where she'll be."

Edward smiled back. "Our Isabella is sounding like a creature of habit. Do tell."

"In the closet."

"What?" Edward was nonplussed by this; Isabella had seemed to be many things so far, but gay hadn't been one of them. What had he missed? Or was Rosalie joking-

"Literally in the closet, Edward. In my closet, most likely—she really likes it in there. She wanted it for her bedroom, but I told her it wasn't big enough. And besides, I needed the closet for my clothes, of course. But you know Bella…well, you're getting to know her, anyway."

"She likes closets," Edward responded, somewhat dully, as if this was an unintelligible fact that he was just trying to learn by rote for later regurgitation.

"Yes. Closets and blankets and bears. Stuffed ones, anyway. Well, not just bears, anything soft and cuddly-" Rosalie broke off as she realized she was wandering away from the point.

"Ooo-kay, I'll keep that in mind," Edward responded, his eyebrows raised and his tone dry.

Now worried she'd scared off Bella's best prospect since Rose had met her, Rosalie came back with, "Give her a chance, Edward; I know she seems strange, but she's the best friend I've ever had. She's the best person I've ever known!"

Back in control of himself, Edward responds easily, "I have no problem believing that, Rose, and I don't have to give her a chance; I'm already convinced I want to make sure she's safe. And happy. I'm just finding myself a little…surprised by what that might entail."

Leaving any possible double entendres from Edward's point of view alone, Rose says warmly, "I know what you mean, Edward; and I trust you, or I wouldn't be letting you help."

"Thank you, Rosalie; I'm honored. You've been Isabella's best protector, I can see that much already. Now shall we proceed?"

"Yes, let's get this over with. Call right away when you've found her, will you? I can talk her down if you put your phone on speaker."

"Okay, that's my back-up plan if the Cullen charm fails me. Now what's the code?"

And Rose gave it over, and in five seconds flat Edward Cullen was in the building.