Hello, hello! I hope you enjoy!

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Words are pretty silly things if you think about them hard enough. They can be the difference between friendship and hatred. They can be the difference between truth and lies. But they can also be taken so lightly that very often you find something you said may not be all as easy as you'd fist expected.

It was the same with Japer's words.

Sure he told me I should fight, but was that really so simple? Sure he thought that if I really loved Bella – and I did – that it could all fall into place very nicely. But it was easy enough for him to say it; it was harder for me to actually believe it.

So when he told me I should get up and go after her, I was momentarily taken aback. Where exactly was I supposed to start, where exactly was I supposed to find her? And when I did, what was I supposed to say to her? 'Well hello there Bella, see I was in the neighborhood and I thought…' That was sure to get me far.

I was feeling less angry as time went by, but that did not mean that I was happy. I was miserable at best. Hopelessness was almost as bad as rage, but it touched a different part, so that now I could say I had been punctured in almost every emotion I had ever found existed. Though if I were to say that aloud, those simple words would not have been worthy enough to really express the grief.

If Bella really meant what she'd said, if her looks of hatred had not been an act (and my mood was making me believe that they weren't), she was not going to be all that glad to see me. I was beginning to feel quite guilty, actually. Did I really have the right to go after her? Was I causing her unnecessary anguish that wasn't going to get her anywhere? Because if she really no longer felt the same way as I, would my efforts at trying to get her back not only be wasteful, but harmful?

I loved her enough to know that if she really did not want me, it was wrong for me to try to change her mind.

The problem was, my heart did not wish for me to give up. Even if it meant that I had to drag her by her ankles to get her to follow and shackle her to the seat of the plane. I was willing to cause her that much distress if it meant that I could take her home with me.

So though I didn't exactly feel right stalking the girl I loved, I didn't feel all that bad as I searched her name in the phone book.

"You're not going to find her in there," Alice said when she saw Jasper flipping through the Yellow Pages. "If she only moved recently she wouldn't be listed in those. Then again, she could be staying with someone else…."

"She looked like she was pretty familiar with that bar last night," I muttered quietly. "Maybe she's gone back."

"Possibly," Alice mused.

"You still haven't seen her?" Jasper asked, flinging the phone book onto a table and walking over to sit next to her.

"It's almost as if she's… not there. Like she's alive," she added in quickly when she saw the look on my face, "but she's vague and, well, cloudy."

I nodded to myself. I had seen in Alice's head the visions she'd seen and been pondering all morning. They were hard to understand and blurry. I could tell that Bella was alive of course, but her actions seemed so uncertain that they were almost like a mush. Alice couldn't figure out why Bella's future was like that, maybe it was that she hadn't looked for her in so long that her mind wasn't as attuned….

"Maybe she's drunk?" Jasper suggested.

"Maybe," Alice said uncertainly. "But I saw her alright before, and she seemed more than a little tipsy."

"Does it really matter?" I snapped. "Who cares why you can't see her clearly? Find her."

Both Alice and Jasper were used to my outbursts and they did not respond.

I wasn't exactly proud that I was being so short with them, but I didn't want them to know that Bella's unreliable future was unnerving, and scaring me more than they could imagine.

Jasper picked up the phone book a couple of minutes later and I sighed in frustration. Neither of them looked up as I walked towards the door, though Alice did whisper "good luck," as I left.

It was the third time I had circled the neighborhood. The first time I'd searched for Bella it had been just after dawn and not only did I not find her, I met close to no one at all. The second time I had read the thoughts of some of the tired office workers who were carrying their heavy suitcases and running to catch their various buses. But not one of them had seen a brown eyed, long haired, beautiful girl, who had lips that could glide so perfectly against mine, or had hands that knew my face as well as I knew hers….

I was regretting the fact that I had run so far away form her last night. Who knew it could be so easy to lose a human?

I walked quickly down the now crowded streets, but again, no one had seen Bella.

It took me over half an hour to reach the bar where I'd seen her last night. But there was no trace of her inside it and to my great misfortune it had rained last night, so that any hope of her lingering scent had been washed from the streets.

So how was I supposed to find her?

I continued slowly and halfheartedly down the long blocks. Some people stopped and stared at me as I went.

He's so cute! Lisa's gonna be so jealous....

Hottie alert! Maybe he's single....

Why does that guy look so sad? He's… wow… but he looks like he's in pain....

I tried to ignore them, but it was pretty difficult since I was also trying to sift for something about Bella.

And it was almost as if I had conjured her up, because not a moment later I turned around the corner and found what I had been looking for.

Bella was standing with her back to me, in front of an outdoor coffee house table. She wore a silly looking purple and pink striped apron and was talking to a customer in a very agitated manner.

"Well I'm sorry, but just because your last waitress gave you a free refill doesn't mean that -"

"She told me you don't have to pay for those," the man interrupted her with an air that suggested he had repeated this a few times already.

"I understand, but apparently -"

"Apparently you're waitresses are pretty lousy and inept." And with that the man stood up from his chair and walked away, leaving Bella there with an unpaid check and an empty coffee mug.

I went over to her automatically and dropped a twenty dollar bill into her hand from over her shoulder. She turned around instantly, and if I thought she had seemed stressed before, she looked worse now.

She looked like she was going to say something but closed her mouth quickly and turned away. I followed her into the coffee shop and to the front counter; she didn't make any movement to acknowledge that she knew I was there. She took her wallet out from her jean pocket and pulled a few bills out. She placed them on top of the check and then slipped it across the counter to the dark haired man standing behind it.

He gave her a very long look and frowned. Apparently this wasn't the first time Bella had had bad luck with her customers.

She didn't wait for him to rebuke her; she turned from him and hurried to a table in the far corner of the shop, where a very rowdy little boy was throwing muffin bits at the ceiling.

"Please, ma'am," she pleaded with the boy's mother, whose head was obscured by the newspaper she was holding. She looked up momentarily to say "Johnny, stop," then resumed her reading without even a glance in Bella's direction.

The boy didn't listen but Bella seemed too worn to argue any further. She gazed at the pair tiredly before she left them.

I trailed behind her as she crossed the room, past a couple who was asking for more sugar, and through a little door that was nestled quite cozily in the corner. She looked at the bleak tiled wall of the bathroom momentarily before she locked the door and turned on me.

It was as if a shadow had suddenly been lifted off her face, as if all her weariness had washed away and vanished so that I could barely even imagine that it had ever been there in the first place.

"I thought I told you to leave me alone," she murmured harshly, and unlike the calm pretense of the night before, she growled the remark.

"I -" She didn't let me continue.

"Have you both been following me then?" she demanded, though she seemed to be speaking mostly to herself. "Do you think it's funny?"

"Funny?" I questioned, and I couldn't hide the hurt in my voice.

"Yes, you must think it is since you keep on doing it." Her voice seemed to be rising with her temper. "Both of you. If I didn't know better I would have guessed you'd traveled together."

This time I caught the plural. "Both of whom?"

She didn't seem to hear me; she was preoccupied with a fly that was making criss-cross patterns through the air. Dipping down low, it buzzed close to the floor but did not land.

"I told Ken to take care of that," she complained as the fly now began to circle her head. "No one seems to take me all that seriously anymore."

The way she said it reminded me of what I'd been pondering earlier – how words can be both strong and harsh, but also seemingly innocent, all at the same time.

"I want to talk to you," I began slowly. I waited for a few moments, half expecting her to shout or yell. But she remained quiet and I took that to mean I was invited to continue. But I had been mistaken, because not a moment after I said "When we left," her eyes got very dark and her face turned very hard.

"Don't," she begged, or perhaps she had commanded it. "Stop."

"Bella."

She stepped back from me, so that she was pressed up against the wall, her hands held up in front of her as though she was protecting herself from an invisible force.

"Don't call me that," she hissed.

I was so taken aback by her abrupt change in emotion that I didn't know what to say.

"Never call me that again, do you understand?" Her voice cracked and I thought she was going to cry. But this new girl surprised me – she shed no tears, though her eyes were livid.

And I recalled from perfect memory what her friend, Ian, had called her last night. "You changed your name to Iz?" I asked.

"My friends like to call me Izzy," she said before she could stop herself.

"Izzy?"

She didn't cheat herself to answer me again.

And before any more of those horribly difficult, and so often misunderstood, words could be shared between us, there was a knock at the bathroom door.

Bella jumped at the sound of it, skirted past me and clicked the lock open. She paused only to drop the twenty I'd given her, back into my hands, before she hurried out of sight.

The young girl stared at me as I passed, and her eyes were wide with the many fantasies I could hear playing behind them.

I did not meet her gaze as she walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I leaned against the wall and had the fleeting wish that there had been something between Bella and me, as the girl had predicted.

But I let that thought drop like a stone as I noticed a faint buzzing noise from beside my ear. I looked in time to see the fly that had followed us out, swooping in terror around my head, starting for the front door.

But before it could escape, my natural instincts kicked in and I plucked the fly from the air and squashed it in my palm. A token for Izzy.

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That chapter was actually pretty long, so I'd like some reviews for that! (Please?) : - )