Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight. So glad to have gotten some feedback on these first four chapters. Please keep it coming! :) Trying to update more often.

I walked straight to my car from the library that night. I popped a few more Valiums (admittedly one more than was prescribed) and waited impatiently for them to take effect. I didn't like the way Edward seemed to have a knack for rustling my tail feathers. Maybe I'd overreacted. Maybe I'd been too harsh. I didn't know. He'd just caught me off guard. I'd panicked.

I saw Edward at lunch the next day but he didn't say anything to me. I told myself that maybe he hadn't seen me, but I was pretty sure he had. Ordinarily, I would have asked Alice what she thought about it all but it just seemed too awkward. She would think I was being silly and overly cautious and maybe I was. I had never been a very trusting person. I couldn't help that.

Before her diagnosis, my widowed mother had paraded a nearly unending slew of men in and out of our lives, all of which had been equally big losers. There was Ted who'd ditched town with a thousand dollars out of my mom's savings account, Brady who she'd caught sleeping with the twenty-three-year-old college intern at his law firm, Larry (a married used car salesman) and Brandon who was only nine years older than me, just to name a few. Her most recent escapade had included a torrid affair with our family physician. Needless to say, I'd started getting my flu shots at CVS and skipping yearly checkups all together. For whatever reason, most of Renee's relationships seemed to end the same way. They would get tired of each other and would then moe on to different people. It was an endless cycle and something that I didn't really want for myself. I couldn't stand the idea of watching people come and go from my life like that. Watching her do it had been hard enough.

So, romance had never seemed too glamourous. I wasn't sure I really wanted to fall in love or get married. I wasn't even sure if I believed in that kind of love. A boyfriend was the last thing on my mind, right next to any sort of realistic prospect of having sex any time soon. But I didn't want Edward to think that I didn't like him, or that I was unwilling to be friendly. Of course, I wanted us to be cordial. We were lab partners.

On Wednesday, I looked for him in lecture. I waited by the entrance for a long time before it occurred to me that he probably wasn't coming. Was it because he didn't want to feel like he had to sit with me and the girls after bringing it up on Monday? I didn't know. A few minutes later, Rose and Alice found me and dragged me to our usual spot in lecture hall. People kept filing in and I kept watching. If I was being totally honest, I would say that I felt a bit disappointed every time I saw that whoever had wandered in was not Edward. Fortunately, I had never been very honest with myself.

"Who are you looking for?" Alice asked me, leaning in close and whispering under her breath.

"No one." I answered quickly.

She shurgged and turned her attention back to the professor.

There were only fifteen minutes of class left at this point and I had traded my listening ears for a pencil and a sketch pad. When I heard the door at the back of the hall open, I figured it was probably just someone going to use the bathroom or cutting out early, but I had to look. When I turned around, I was surprised to find Edward sitting at the back in one of the chairs closest to the exit, backpack still slung over his shoulder, seemingly intently listening to whatever it was that the professor was saying. I decided that I would go and apologize to him for leaving so abruptly the other night. It was better to smooth things over, I thought, than to hold a grudge or maintain whatever suspicions I had about him.

I tapped my pencil impatiently beside the sketch I had been working on and noticed Alice looking at me sideways, as though she had just heard a secret of mine that I didn't want her to know. I turned to her, rolled my eyes, and proceeded to ignore her curious glances. Those fifteen minutes seemed to be dragging on forever. I couldn't wait for the professor to dismiss us.

"Alrighty then..." he finally anounced at the end of a very long lecture on microbiology. "There will me a practice test in class on Friday so bring your clickers and your notes. This is open book so you will be able to look things up. It's just an exercise to test yourself on what you know." I heard the door squeak open but the professor was looking right at me and I didn't want him to think I wasn't paying attention. "Other than that, we're all done here. Have a good week, everybody!"

I stood quickly, bag already in hand, and told the girls I would meet them in the cafeteria for lunch. They nodded knowingly and I rolled my eyes again, smoothing out the skirt of my dress and walking away. Edward was already gone but I hoped to find him nearby. I look down the hall both ways, searching the growing crowd for thick, messy auburn hair and there he was, quite a distance away from me and headed back towards the canal.

"Edward!" I called but he didn't seem to hear me. I ran to catch up with him, feeling a familiar burn in my lungs a bit sooner than I would hae liked. "Edward! Edward, wait up!"

When I caught him, I was huffing. I worked for a moment to catch my breath. Edward didn't stop walking, only let me fall in step beside him. Was he mad at me? I hoped not.

"What do you need, Bella?"

He was so mad at me.

"I, um..." I breathed in deep, making one more attempt at regaining my composure. Was it the running than had taken my breath away or the anxiety settling in my gut. I wanted another Valium, but Edward didn't need to see that. "I wanted to apologize for jumping down your throat the other day. I mean, I still don't agree with you..." Way to stick your foot in your mouth, Bella. "But I shouldn't have freaked out on you like that, so..."

"Yeah, it's okay. I was being a jerk. I get it. I'm sorry I put you on the spot like that, too. I realize, in context, it probably seemed like I was saying..."

"Saying what?" I urged?

"Like I was asking you out. I didn't mean it that way."

For some reason, this clarfication made my breath catch.

"We can be friends, Bella. I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable. I'm not the best with words sometimes."

I nodded. "I understand. I just wanted you to know that I'm sorry I went off on you. I wasn't right about that."

Edward nodded in return. "Good. Well, I gotta go but...see you around?"

"Sure, sure. See you around."

I stopped in my tracks and Edward kept on walking. He'd told me that everything was fine, that I hadn't upster him. But if that was the truth, then why did I feel so unsteady, like something negative had just transpired between us. Our conversation had felt more like a face off than words between friends and for the first time since we'd met, I started to question whether or not I really wanted to be just Edward's friend.

Brushing it off, I decided it didn't matter. I was no good for him. I had too many secrets, too much baggage.

Which reminded me...

Today was therapy day. I had an appointment with the Good Doctor at one o'clock which meant I would be rushing back and forth between here and Carslisle's office. I could hardly wait.

About an hour later, I found myself sitting in the parking lot of the Good Doctor's priate practice, about twenty minutes down the road from where I had lab at three. My appointment was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago but, for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car. I didn't know what I was waiting for but nothing seemed right. The sky was darker than usual. My car heater didn't seem to be able to keep up with the cold and I felt hopelessly confused. Why was this thing with Edward bothering me so much? I barely even knew him. He was just some guy that I'd barely spent any time with. The semester would end and I'd probably never see him again. We would go our seperate ways and I would forget all about him, and him me. So what was the problem? Why had my heart skipped a beat when he told me, not in so many words, that he wasn't interested?

I closed my eyes and listened to the cars flying past me on the nearby expressway. I imagined them headed somewhere far away from here, leaving this town behind in their rearview mirrors on their way to bigger and better things and suddenly I wished I was them. I wished I could just start my car and go, never to look back again. I could disappear. No one would know what had happened to me and, breifly, I wondered how many people would really notice I was gone. How many days would my mom sit in her room before she realized I hadn't ever come home?

I turned over the engine and thought long and hard. It was too late to go and talk to the Good Doctor about all this. The whole institution of talk therapy had never seemed very cathartic to me. Yet I didn't feel like going back to school either. I couldn't face Rose and Alice and their questioning stares or Edward and his witty banter with me. I couldn't face the glaringly obvious truth: that I was not like everybody else. I reached into my bag and dumped the entire bottle of Valium out into the palm of my hand. For a long time, I just stared at them. It seemed like hours before I snapped out of it.

Tossing the pills back into their bottle, I stuffed them deep in my bag and flung open the door. I was crying, I realized, as I walked through the doors of the sparsely decorated office. I didn't wait to be recieved by the receptionist or invited through the doors to the back, simply pushed on through, all the way back to the Good Doctor's office where I found him sitting at his desk as usual, patiently awaiting my arrival. I was late often.

"Hey, Doc." I said, plopping down in the chair across from him. I only had thirty minutes left. I was determined to make the most of it.

We talked a bit longer than usual and I cried a bit more than usual. I told him about the boy in my class and my mother and sister and he listened.

"So...do you feel that you've lost control of your anxiety disorder, Isabella?"

I hated it when he called me that.

I shrugged. "I feel...I can't even describe how I feel. It's like I'm nervous all the time, but it's more than that. I feel confused and...lost. Like I can't stop moving but I have nowhere to go."

"And how has your medication been affecting you? Any side effects? Complaints?"

Dr. Cullen had been considering a dosage increase for several months. He thought maybe I was buiding up an immunity. We had talked about discontinuing the meds all together but that hadn't gone very well the last time I'd tried. My anxiety was getting worse and, to a certain extent, I didn't think either the Good Doctor or myself quite knew what to do about it.

I left the office than day with a new Valium prescription: 10mg tablets taken four times a day. It wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for, but maybe it was something.

After stopping by the pharmacy, I headed home in the snow, a little less than thrilled with the way my life seemed to be turning out.