AN: So this is pretty much the last thing I ever expected to have happen. I labored for months and months, trying unsuccessfully to break my awful writer's block. Finally this week I admitted to myself that maybe I was just permanently blocked. I put SotF on permanent hiatus, to let anyone who was starting the story that it might never be finished. Of course, two nights later, I'm hit with a sudden, completely unexpected inspiration that helped me finish a chapter that I started last April. Now that I'm unblocked, I think the last few chapters of this will flow.

A caveat-this chapter is completely unbetaed and might be complete shit. You can even tell me that, if you think so. I just couldn't wait to get it to those loyal readers who have been waiting for so long to hear what happened with Edward and Brit Bitch.

Chapter 35: Questions and Answers

Edward

I didn't want to be here. In fact, I could think of about ten million places that I'd rather be—and most of them were with Bella, I was able to admit to myself—but to be those ten million places, I had to be here first.

Or maybe, I thought as I paced back and forth nervously in front of Gianna, it wasn't so much where I was that I hated, it was who I was forcing myself to talk to.

"Edward," she said gently—a little too gently, I thought—"please take a seat. You seem nervous."

You fucking think, I almost said, but I stopped myself right before the words spewed out. I was supposed to be behaving. I was supposed to be spilling my guts to her in an emasculated, totally-in-touch-with-my-emotions way. The problem with all of this was that the emotions that I'd spent my entire lifetime locking up and denying existed didn't seem to be on board with the new plan.

So instead of snapping, I plopped down on the couch.

"Where do we start?" I asked in frustration, annoyed by just how hard this was turning out to be. The bad half of my personality didn't want to stay leashed and Bad Edward, as I'd taken to calling him, was proving difficult to manage. "I don't know what you want me to fucking say."

Gianna just kept smiling away, as if I couldn't mess with her impenetrable calm, though I'd been doing my best to do just that the last few days. "Whatever you want to say, Edward. This is a safe environment—I want you to say whatever you feel comfortable saying."

I opened my mouth, sure that something, fucking anything, would come out. Whatever it was that I felt comfortable saying, but there was just empty, silent air between me and the counselor.

It felt moronic, sitting there in front of the woman, who couldn't keep a ridiculously pleased, cat-ate-the-canary smile off her face, as if she was so fucking glad she could help, with my mouth wide open and nothing forthcoming. I snapped my mouth shut.

For the first time in the forty five minutes we'd been in the same room, I thought I saw her smile falter slightly. See, the Bad Edward hissed slyly in my ear, she can't handle it either. Bella couldn't, and neither can she.

What could have been five more minutes or maybe fifty went by in more silence. The fucking woman just sat there, no longer smiling quite so bright, but grinning toothily at me all the same, and waited me out. It was too bad that when it came to waiting, I was the expert and she was merely an amateur.

"Edward," Gianna said, breaking the thick, heavy silence, "maybe the problem is that you don't feel comfortable saying what needs to be said."

Bad Edward wanted to say something nasty or possibly sarcastic, but I stifled that shit right away. Best behavior, I told myself, for Bella.

For you, I nearly heard her voice whisper back.

I shook my head, afraid that if I spoke again, all the vituperative hate and nasty, cruel remarks that Bad Edward was so proficient at making would spew out and I'd lose all the progress that I'd made so far.

Okay, so it hadn't exactly been progress, but at least we hadn't slid backwards. If Bad Edward was allowed to speak, I had a feeling that Miss Crest Whitestrips wouldn't be back for round two.

"If you can't say it to me, if you can't say it out loud even, that's not a bad thing," Gianna continued. "Words have a power to them that can make them tough to say. How about we try something else . . .writing them."

"Writing?" Even Bad Edward could be curious, it seemed.

"I'd like you to keep a journal." She lifted a simple black leather-bound book out of the bag resting near her chair, and thrust it at me. This time she was smart enough not to smile. Maybe she'd begun to realize that every single time she did, I felt an overwhelming urge to forcibly remove all those gaudy teeth with my fist.

I took the journal and casually riffled through the pages, feeling a strangely itchy feeling in my fingers, as if they couldn't wait to grasp a pen and sprawl the same words I couldn't speak on the blank sheets.

"Write down what you can't say," she instructed, "everything you've never said out loud."

"I don't think you get it," I interrupted Gianna before she could finish, "I'm Edward Cullen. I tend to overshare. A lot."

She gave me a knowing smile—this an antithesis of all the glitzy, shit-eating grins of earlier—and only said, "Well, then it'll be easy then, won't it?"

June 29

This is supposed to be easy.

A snap.

A cinch.

A piece of fucking cake.

Instead, all I'm writing is a bunch of synonyms so I can avoid it completely.

Instead, I'm going to make the argument that Gianna is fucking wrong, and writing a word is a lot more powerful than ever speaking it. No. Scratch that. The most powerful version of a word is when it's set to a melody you can't forget.

There are melodies in my head right now—a fucking ton of them, sneaking their way into my head and my ears. If I was superstitious, I'd say they were haunting me.

I just stared at this page for ten fucking minutes, debating if I should even write what I wanted to.

Fuck it, nobody's going to ever read this, Gianna included if I have my way, and so I'll just say it.

She's a ghost. Haunting me. Whispering her way through my thoughts and my brain and even my body, sometimes. I remember the way her hair felt as it slipped through my fingers, dark and soft and mysterious, but familiar. Like it was something I'd known I'd feel sometime during my life.

My entire life, there's never been a single woman that I couldn't forget as easily as I wanted to. I wish I could forget her, if only so I could sleep at night. I toss and turn and wait for insanity to take me and finish off what it started.

It's funny, I can almost think, almost conceptualize what I should say, when I think of her. If I sit here, perfectly still, and imagine the way it felt to feel her hair brush against my skin, I almost know what I should write.

Maybe that's finally where I should fucking start.

June 30

Last night when I couldn't sleep, I remembered when I ran away from home.

Maybe remembered isn't the right word. I'm not sure I ever really forgot, more like I never thought about it and so eventually I could pretend that it had happened to someone else.

Esme and I fought from nearly the time I could talk. I think maybe she wished some days that she could send me back to my father's family and say good riddance, once and for all. I was a real brat, but she wasn't exactly the sweet, accommodating type either. Our battles became fucking epic as I got older, and when I turned fifteen, it was safe to say that any influence she'd once had was completely gone.

We'd had a huge blowout that night, after I'd come home late after school—more like midnight than the four pm curfew that she'd been fucking trying to enforce. I was a little drunk and a lot high, and she'd launched herself at me, yelling about every single one of my worthless qualities.

Maybe something just snapped. I was upstairs, in my bedroom, putting my guitar in the closet, and I just wanted her to stop—stop talking, stop yelling, stop incessantly trying to turn me into something I didn't want to be. The top of my guitar case jutted out in front of me, and I had turned just a hair too fast, and she'd gone down like one of those skyscrapers they blast to a million fucking tiny pieces.

It was just as big and even more damning. When she picked herself up off the floor, she was quiet and I remember thinking that before she went down, I was still that scared little boy inside. He was gone the second the guitar case sent her flying to the floor. Then she told me to get out, and she stood by the door and unapologetically stripped me of every credit card and every last twenty that I'd pulled from my allowance account.

I still remember the last thing she said to me: "You're just like your father."

And I decided then that I would be exactly like him, because that would mean I was nothing like her.

I watched as Gianna read through the entry I'd written the night before, and tried not to smirk.

I failed.

She was quiet for a long time after shutting the leather bound journal, a contemplative expression on her face. "You have a lot of nerve," she finally said quietly, her dark eyes unexpectedly pinning me hard to the floor. I couldn't move and I couldn't look away.

"I don't get it. I did what you wanted," I said with as much false affront as I could manage.

"I didn't ask you to lie."

"You don't know that it's a lie."

She looked at me again, those eyes sending me to the floor as surely as Esme had.

Or had she?

Gianna threw the journal on the floor between us, like it was worthless and not worth the paper inside.

"We both know this is a bunch of bullshit. You're not a bad guy, Edward. Not the villain you want everyone to think you are."

"I'm fucked up," I said as straight as I could. "You know that." Even Bella knows that, and she loves me.

"Oh, I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is this whole bad boy persona that you've been working so hard at for the last ten years. It's not working."

I wondered if she had read anything about me before I'd hired her to counsel me back to normalness. Hadn't she read all the articles about drugs and booze and too many women? About the bar fights and the endless nights of partying? Surely she'd even read Bella's review of Aiming to Misbehave.

"Of course it's working," I scoffed. "Everyone believes it."

"What everyone else believes doesn't matter," she said so straightforward that I nearly gaped. Of course everyone's opinion mattered! Rosalie had recommended a therapist who was also insane. "The only thing that matters is what you think of yourself."

She paused, as if she was letting the insanity of her statements sink into my consciousness. "And what do you think of yourself?"

I didn't know how to respond. "I don't understand the question."

"You," Gianna pointed at me. "What do you think of you?"

I realized then that she'd been calling my bluff. And in a moment of ridiculous clarity, I understood more than I had in years.

"I never hit her," I said slowly. "I'm not the kind of person who would hit his mother."

Gianna sat back, then, a self-satisfied smile on her face. Her teeth didn't look nearly as white when she smirked at her success, especially when it was at my expense.

But was it really? "What do you want me to say?" I finally blurted out. "Do you want me to say that I act out so that I don't ever have to meet expectations? That my mother scares the fucking shit out of me? She's just so fucking perfect—she scares everyone."

The smirk didn't waver. "If it's true, then yes, I want you to say it."

"Fine." I paused. "It's true."

"You're not all that fucked up, you know," Gianna said conversationally, as if she wasn't spouting craziness. "At least not in the way that people think you are. You aren't an alcoholic. You aren't a druggie. You aren't an addict. You're just scared."

Maybe if her words hadn't been hitting me someplace deep down that I'd tried to forget about forever, I would have scoffed at the ridiculousness of that statement. But suddenly I wasn't sure it was impossible. Something had made me do all those things, and it wasn't enjoyment. I didn't like being an asshole. I wasn't happy; I hadn't been happy in so long that I wasn't even sure I remembered what it felt like.

And then I remembered. Bella. That was what happiness felt like.

"I have to go." I stood suddenly and awkwardly. "There's something I have to do."

Gianna's gaze narrowed on me. "Oh no you don't. Now that we're getting somewhere, you're not going anywhere, boyo."

I sunk back into the chair, thinking that Gianna herself could do a fairly decent impression of the Ice Queen when forced. "Fine. What are we going to talk about?"

I should have known when the Crest Whitestrips teeth came back with a vengeance, but I was stupid and naïve and ignorant.

"We're going to start at the beginning, of course."

We talked. And talked. And then talked some more. Gianna and I talked until our throats were parched and dry. We talked until we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. We went to bed, and then the next morning we got up and over breakfast talked some more. And then we talked the entire day.

The next day was the exact same. And the day after. And then the day after that, when I felt raw and flayed and absolutely naked—every single fear and pain and hidden insecurity laid to rest before Gianna—she finally sat back and went quiet.

I had been talking—well, I thought of it more as arguing, but Gianna insisted that we refer to it as 'discussing'—about how I didn't know how to be someone who wasn't the antithesis of Esme.

Gianna looked at me with this knowing smile. "And would it be the end of the universe to be something like her?"

Six months ago my answer would have been swift and unequivocal. Today, I paused and thought, before I answered her. "Not exactly . . but not every part of her," I added hastily. As if I would ever want to host garden parties and redecorate the Hamptons house every other year.

"Name one thing she's done that you respect," Gianna asked, which was pretty typical of her questions. She poked and prodded and pushed until everything I'd spent a lifetime hiding came spewing out. It wasn't pretty but at night when I laid in bed and thought about it, I had to admit that I felt . . .better. Definitely less like there was something toxic in my system trying to choke me to death.

"She saved me." I thought again. "Twice."

"So she's loyal."

"To me anyway."

"To people who matter. To people she loves," Gianna corrected gently. "And would you consider yourself a loyal person?"

At first, I had answered these types of questions with statements straight out of the Edward Cullen Fuck Off Collection, but Gianna had told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn't looking for some kind of overly dramatic pity party, but the answer for the person who I really was, underneath all the bullshit.

Now I knew better than to be a sarcastic shit, because just like Bella, Gianna wasn't going to take that.

"I'd like to think I'm loyal," I admitted. "I stood by Emmett. I stayed Jasper's friend even when he couldn't play ball anymore. And I promised Bella I would wait for her."

"Because you love her."

The way Gianna said it, it was so reasonable. Like it was the most obvious statement in the world. Why then did the words stick in my throat still? I knew I did, I just couldn't seem to voice the sentiment out loud.

Bella never had told me either, but she hadn't had to—it had been written all over her face when she'd left in the middle of the garden party. She'd known that I'd seen it and had been humiliated and upset that I couldn't reciprocate something that was so basic, so obvious.

"You do love her, don't you?" Gianna asked again and my tongue felt heavy and numb—stuck, even.

"I can't," I finally managed to wrench out. "I can't tell her. I can't say it out loud." I felt more naked than I had even through some of Gianna's soul-searching question and answer sessions. It was harder to admit I couldn't say it than I had thought it would be. Admitting it was like baring the deepest, ugliest part of me. The part of me that felt the fear the worst.

"Okay." Gianna sounded so reasonable, like this was a piece of cake. She obviously still didn't know me, and she clearly hadn't understood a whit about Bella, even though I'd talked about her all the time. "What is it that's so scary about telling Bella that you love her?"

The better question was: what was not scary about telling her?

"Um, everything?"

"Specifics, Edward," Gianna chided me gently. She knew I knew better. She also knew I was avoiding the question.

"I'll be. . .vulnerable. Open. She'll have all kinds of power over me." I said it in a rush, like I could take it back just as quickly. But I couldn't. It was out there now, and now neither of us could deny what I'd admitted to.

"Would Bella ever use any of that power against you?"

That was one of the easiest—if not the easiest question—that Gianna had asked me over the last several days. "Of course not. Bella would never do that."

Gianna spread her arms in confusion. "Then I don't see the problem. She loves you; she would never hurt you or use you or betray you. And what have you repaid that trust with? Nothing. You have given her nothing of yourself."

I wanted to fight back, to argue that I had given her everything I could give—my real name, my life, if it had come down to it. But those seemed like empty, hollow arguments when faced with what Bella was offering.

"Doesn't she deserve that part of you, Edward? For the kind of steadfast love that sticks with someone through what you two have experienced?"

She did deserve it, unreservedly, which was probably why I was hesitating. She really deserved someone much better than me, but as that knowledge settled inside of me, I also knew I was too much of a selfish bastard to give her up for someone else to take. If Bella was going to be anyone's, she was going to be mine. Hell, she already was, if I could find my balls and just tell her.

"I need to go," I said again, and this time, Gianna just smiled.

"I need to go," I repeated. "I need to go to her."

"Yes, you do," she agreed. "What are you going to tell her?"

"A lot of things, I think," I said. "About me and about my mom, and about why I've been scared to be me, but that she's always made it okay to be me. That she's always seen straight through all the bullshit to the real me. But mostly I need to tell her that I love her."

The smile Gianna gave me could have sold billions of Crest Whitestrips.

"Then what the fuck are you waiting for?"