Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns everything Twilight. I am but a humble, excited sojourner in Forks. No copyright infringement intended.

Notes: Underlined lines are quoted from (in order of appearance):

New Moon, p. 23

Twilight, p. 473

Chapter 2: Turnabout

Edward's POV

After my last words, Bella closed her eyes and stood frighteningly still. At first I thought she was in shock which, knowing my girl, would not have been impossible.

Then she opened her blazing eye, and my mind cleared of every thought save how unbelievably sexy she looked. It was a heated side of Bella I'd only seen in flashes in our bedrooms and once in the backseat of the Volvo as we learned what all the cinematic fuss was about. Her body was coiled as if to spring, her hair wild in the sudden breeze, and I wanted to scoop her up, press her warm body against a tree, and kiss her until our lips were numb.

Although sensual excitement seemed an odd reaction to my words, I wouldn't dare question any chance to hold her one last time, to feel her pliant curves as my lips savored the taste of her perfect skin...

"Edward Anthony Masen Cullen!"

I blinked out of my randy trance and gaped at her.

"Of all the obnoxious, presumptuous, asinine, immature …"

Her tone belied the passion in her eyes, and I realized my conclusion was incorrect. What I'd thought was arousal was something else entirely.

"… outlandish, unbelievable, misogynistic, Neanderthal bullshit! Okay, calm down, Bella. You sound like you have Tourette's… And stop looking at the branch. You'd probably pull a muscle or something… Then again, Charlie has a gun in the house… Damn, no silver bullets… No, no, no, violence never solves anything… Oh, I could just strangle him! Stupid, unreasonable, stubborn, overreacting …"

I watched in bewilderment as her tantrum continued. Bella was … angry with me?

I mentally rehearsed my farewell dozens of times in my room. I'd been so careful to prevent further attachment since her disastrous birthday party. As I stood here, resolved to break our hearts, I was so careful not to waver. I ignored the shift in her eyes when I said we were leaving, balled up my hands to keep from reaching out to confess I loved her more than my worthless life and was leaving only to keep her safe. I turned my eyes skyward and asked a God I didn't believe in to make Bella strong enough to handle my words.

Now as I watched my muttering muse stem the tide of her rising ire, I wondered if there were a God up there who answered prayers from monsters like me.

And I wished I had been more specific.

Bella was five strides away, but it felt like fifty. As her rant slowed down, she fixed her eyes on me, hard and full of an anger I didn't know she had in her. Oddly enough, she strongly resembled Alice's vision of her as a newborn, and I shuddered inwardly against it.

I was prepared for various reactions to my goodbye–crying, screaming, even fainting—and steeled myself against them as best I could, believing any pain now would be well worth it in a month or a year or however long it took her to forget me and move on with her life in the naturally fluid way she would have if Carlisle had let me die in 1918.

But I hadn't banked on anger, hadn't even considered it. And as she expelled a loud breath, I wondered why she was so cross. She closed her eyes again while her hands met in an aggressive position of prayer, ready to speak directly to me.

"When we left your house the other night." Her voice was low and controlled. "I needed something positive to focus on. I knew you would be no help, so I looked up into the dark beauty of the night sky. It was so simple and peaceful and exactly what I needed after what happened in the house. While waiting for you to climb in the truck, I took another peek at the sky and spotted Alice and Jasper from the corner of my eye."

Oh no, I thought. What did she see? What else could that blasted Jasper have done? Was that why Alice has been reciting The Canterbury Tales in Cantonese every time I came around? The possibilities made me angrier by the moment, but I demanded patience, hoping whatever Bella saw strengthened my case that her life would improve after we left.

"Jasper must have just returned," she continued. "Maybe he saw us and decided to stay hidden until we drove off. He was balled up so tightly, holding so still, I almost thought he was a statue.

"Alice found him on the side of the house. She laid her hands on his shoulder, and he shrugged away without looking up. He folded further into himself and snarled. It was the most terrifying sound I'd ever heard. Then Alice did the most amazing thing."

Her voice was full of awe when she looked at me. "She stayed."

I expected elaboration, but she gave none. Her earnest eyes bore into me, willing me to understand the significance of what she saw, but I was lost. Alice stayed with Jasper? And?

"She stayed, Edward."

Her irritation at my non-reaction mounted, and she threw up her hands. "Of course you don't get it. That's the whole problem!"

She fumed across the space between us until our noses nearly touched. Though she was human, and a small, clumsy one at that, I was nervous enough to step back.

"Alice stayed!" she shouted. "She saw Jasper's struggle and knew he needed time to deal, and she let him do that while she stayed. She didn't tell him how to feel. She didn't blame herself for his pain and do something outrageous to make it better. She. Just. Stayed!"

I heard the insult and her point and ignored them both. "That is a different situation altogether. Alice's presence was not hurting him."

"Maybe it was," she countered. "Maybe he was so low that her consolation only made him feel worse. Maybe her love and understanding was the last thing he could handle, and that's why he turned away from her." She caught my eyes again. "But she didn't leave him just because she couldn't fix it."

"You don't think Alice would leave Jasper if she believed she was putting him in danger?"

"I think Alice respects Jasper, and they would make their decisions together."

My eyes widened in shock and confusion, and I stared at this lovely, infuriating girl who made my life worth living. I planned to make her believe I didn't want her, would have said I didn't love her if I thought it would help. The words were lined up in my mouth, ready for recitation when the moment came. The words would have crushed my beautiful butterfly into a pile of dust, but I could have done it. I would have done it because as long as she lived beyond my infecting her life, I could have lived with whatever revolting thing she thought of me.

But this… the idea that I didn't respect her… it was an attack on my essence, on the part of my nature providing the lone shred of humanity I still possessed. For her to believe such an abhorrent thing… it could not be borne.

"You don't think I respect you?"

She held up a delicate finger. "You took me to prom without asking, knowing I didn't want to go and never would have gone in a million if you hadn't dragged me."

"I wanted to show you how good it was to be human! And I wanted to take pictures of you in a pretty dress and revel in our love in front of our classmates and my siblings. What's so wrong with that?"

She continued as if I hadn't spoken. "You encouraged your family to celebrate my birthday after I repeatedly urged you not to throw me a party."

"We wanted to show you how much we love you."

She folded her arms across her chest, pinning me with an icy stare. "You refuse to change me."

"Of course I do!" My composure shattered Alice's vision resurfaced again in excruciating detail: my warm angel cloaked in hard white skin, her innocent mouth gleaming with venomous incisors, staring down her kill with blood red eyes. "I cannot allow you to give up your life for me."

"You cannot 'allow' me?"

I heard the implication, the accusation in her tone, and some wiser, more practical part of me demanded I pull back and approach from a different angle. But I couldn't compromise on that unfathomable point, no matter what kind of monster that made me.

"You should not have to surrender your mortality to be with me, Bella," I said with less steam. "I will never consider that an acceptable course of action, and I will never consent to it."

"I don't need your consent"—she punctuated the word—"to make a decision about my life. And if you think I do, that proves you don't respect me. And how can you love me if you don't respect me?"

Her question slapped me hard across the face, the force of her words paling only in comparison to the challenge in her eyes, eyes I stared into only a few nights ago, wishing for the thousandth time that I could see into her pretty mind…

We were lying in her bed with another lazy Sunday under our belts while Charlie idled at Billy Black's unaware. Her head rested on her pillow, and a halo of soft, silky hair framed her contented face as she placed her hand against my cheek. The sensation was exhilarating in its tenderness, and I'd placed my hand on top of hers, sealing the moment in my mind. She looked up, eyes full of wonder and joy, and for the next hour or more, I gazed into those eyes, hoping she could see and understand the depth of love and eternal devotion my frozen heart held for her.

Now as those same eyes implored me to settle the question in her mind, I abandoned my prior course and determined to make her understand, to say whatever was necessary to restore that tranquil light to her eyes.

"Bella." I stepped forward and cupped her face in my hands. "You know how much I love you, how you've completely changed my life." The familiar color rose to her cheeks, and the vice around my heart began to relax its grip. "I didn't think I had any life left in me until you thawed it out." I caressed her cheek with my thumb, sending her heart into another gear. She relaxed into my touch, and I wanted to faint with pleasure. Maybe this wouldn't end badly. "Do you really doubt my love for you?" I kissed on her forehead, and she sighed. "Can you really doubt that, after all we've shared?"

She stiffened in my grasp and retreated. "You are leaving me 'after all we've shared.' How is that different?"

"It is different because I am leaving to save your life." Realizing my outstretched hands were empty, I let them fall to my sides. "It is different because I have no choice. You doubting my love for you is just…"

"What? Ridiculous? Absurd?"

I cringed, thinking of all the times I'd used that word to describe her reactions.

She paced in front of me. "Now that I think about it, I understand why your family doesn't respect me either."

"My family has only the highest respect for you."

"Really? Is that why they insisted on buying me gifts and helping Alice with that damn party?"

I swallowed an exasperated sigh. "We've been through this. They did all that for you."

"Bella, the last real birthday any of us had was Emmett in 1935. Cut us a little slack, and don't be too difficult tonight. They're all very excited."

Her imitation of my voice hadn't improved, but its haughty tone was new.

"I wanted to spend my birthday with our family." Despite the tension, my heart warmed at her possessiveness of my strange clan. "Like we always do, with Jasper and Emmett arguing over that Madden game, Alice obsessing over her wardrobe, Rosalie huffing as she stomps upstairs, Esme stuffing me with treats while Carlisle smiles at all of us from the far corner of the room. And you." Her smile broke my heart. "I wanted you beside me nuzzling my hair, holding my hand, playing the music of my life just by your presence. I didn't want a party, Edward, but nobody cared."

"We did care, love. That's why we tried to make your birthday special."

"Edward, every day I spend with you and your family is special." I heard the tears creeping into her voice and loathed myself for putting them there. "That's why I want to become immortal. Because the idea of a heaven without all of you in it is something I can't bear to imagine."

Had I been human, my knees would have buckled under the weight of her confession. She not only loved me, as preposterous as that was, but she loved my family: my bloodthirsty, vampiric family. Loved us so much that she wanted to stay with us for all eternity. I had no room inside me for this, no proper place to put such an illogical declaration.

"I love Charlie and Renee," she continued. "And I cannot fathom what I'd do if something happened to them. But I've never had a real family with crazy cousins, loud siblings, or exotic aunts to teach me fascinating things. Just me and one of my parents. But in you, I found a home, a place where I belonged and would never be alone again. With you, I found a family, a wild mix of moods and textures where I fit in like the final piece to a jigsaw puzzle. The notion that I could have the man I love and a family to boot was a dream come true."

Her sincerity ate me alive.

"And I know what you all are, that being with being with you endangers my life. But what am I supposed to do? Pretend I don't love you to keep me safe? Return to my loneliness because it's the practical thing to do? Forget your family because one day they might want to kill me?" I blanched as she shrugged. "I can't do that. I know how crazy that sounds to you, but I don't know what else to do. It's like she said in Steel Magnolias, 'I would rather have a few minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.' Edward, you gave me more minutes of wonderful since your arrival than I would have ever had without you."

My eyes burned with tears I couldn't cry, and she steeled her voice.

"That's why I don't know how to accept what you did today, bringing me out here to say you and your family were leaving. How am I not your family? How you could leave me here without Alice, Esme, even that cranky Rosalie? But most of all, how could you even think of leaving me? How could you do that and think it's okay?"

"Bella." I pulled her into my arms and cradled her against my chest, unable to bear the distance any longer. "I had to protect you. After what happened the other night"—an involuntary spasm unsettled me as I remembered our thoughts as we stared at her bloody arm—"I couldn't bear the thought of that happening again." I kissed her hair as I inhaled her scent, the intoxicating aroma sweetening every needless breath I took. "I couldn't handle it, love, and the only way I knew to keep you permanently safe was for us to leave." I took her face in my hands again, begging her to see the hell of my past two days. "Can't you see that?"

"No, I can't." Bella raised her hands and removed mine from her face. "What I see is that I was right in Phoenix."

"Phoenix?" She hadn't released my hands yet, and I held on to that hope as tightly as I could without shattering it.

"When I was in the hospital, I said a man and a woman have to be somewhat equal for the relationship to work. I was referring to our… species… because that seemed the biggest disparity. But now?" Her wistful expression tore my heart in twain. "I realize that difference is secondary to our major problem: You trust your judgment more than you trust mine, and you always will. And though that attitude was appropriate in the early Twentieth Century, it is a reality I will not accept."

The bluntness of her statement obliterated any physical pain I might have felt when she released my hands and clasped hers in front of her.

"Edward, I love you and want to be with you forever. But I cannot do that if you insist on trying to run my life." Her voice shook with ferocity, and I heard the fluctuations in her heartbeat. "Charlie didn't do that when he had the right, and I refuse to let you do it even in the name of love."

With more than a century's worth of knowledge and experience at my mental disposal, I had no idea how to respond. I wanted to tell her she was wrong and had misunderstood. That I wasn't trying to run her life; I was trying, despite all her resistance, to save it. But she would use that logic against me. I briefly thought of meeting her tacit demands by apologizing and vowing never to decide her life for her again. I wanted to tell her that because I wanted so badly for that to be the truth.

But if those words ever left my lips, I would be lying. Because I knew myself. I knew who and what I was, and I could not become someone who would support a decision that would ruin the very best part of her to appease her need for feminine independence. I could not pretend my eternal love for her would ever resulting in me cosigning her desire to sacrifice her life and chance at eternity with God because she fancied herself in love with me now.

And that would always be the sticking point between us, our perpetual stalemate. To let her believe otherwise, even if to keep her here for another minute or day, would be a lie. And as many as I'd told today, I could not bring myself to tell another one.

She knew I was debating with myself, and to her credit, she waited until the end of my private tirade to ask, "Can you promise that from now on, you will respect my decisions no matter how much you disagree with them?"

It was as if she had a gift for requesting what I could not give.

Her eyes searched mine, brave and intense in their openness, and I knew I would never love her more than I did in that moment.

Every villainous part of me cried out "Yes, you idiot! Promise whatever she wants now and amend it later!"

But my fading integrity on the line, I swallowed my selfishness. "I'm sorry, love, but I cannot make that promise."

Bella nibbled her bottom lip as she nodded. "Thank you for your honesty," she said at length.

She glanced toward her house and sighed, an anguished sigh that pulverized what was left of my soul. Because I had done this to her. Not Jasper, not James, but me. The monster she loved.

Her emotions were shifting. I heard it in her erratic heartbeat, caught the musky tones her scent now contained. When she turned around back to me, her chin was up but her eyes were sad. "Then I guess this is it," she said.

I didn't know what my expression revealed—I had long ago disconnected from my useless body—but her face contorted, and she rushed into my arms, gripping me with all her might. Shocked and awed, I held her, murmuring honeyed wishes into her hair and neck.

She cradled my cheeks and brought her soft lips to mine, kissing me with a hunger and intensity that made me weak. Her tongue slid across my bottom lip, and I lifted her off the ground, pressing against her as our lips desperately sought the connection our hearts were missing.

Just as quickly as they begun, her kisses became slower and fewer until our mouths were closed, less than a whisper apart. She released my face, and I lowered her to the ground. She was breathing hard, and with each exhale, her scent unraveled another layer of my resolve. I wanted to say something, say anything to keep her here a moment longer, just long enough for me to somehow repair what I had stupidly broken.

But before I could open my mouth, I heard, "Goodbye, Edward." My heart stopped as her lips brushed my cheek. "Good luck."

She ran out of the forest on the same path by which I brought her here. And although I was sure she didn't have superhuman speed, by the time I found the strength to open my eyes, Bella's front door was closed.

Ummm... that wasn't supposed to happen! Stay tuned ;)