Sorry I didn't get to post this yesterday. Three minutes into the ten-hour drive, the three-year-old asks, "Almost there?" Long car rides with kids, man.

Anyway, this is yesterday's chapter; today's will post shortly, too. And a note regarding the reclassification: nothing about the story arc has changed. If I could use three categories, "romance" would still be in there. So the arc of the story is still what it was when I began posting. I hope this answers those questions! :)

Thanks, as always, for reading. xo

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February 19, 2013 – Word Prompt: Cord. Plot Generator – Idea Completion: Making a mountain out of a molehill.

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"Bella, I don't think you want to do that." Alice's face is grave.

"Why? I mean, he made a mistake. I know that. He knows that. But…I love him. I want to at least try to understand why he did it. I want to at least see if maybe I can forgive him. If maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion." I don't tell her the rest: that it's been a week, and I'm not sure I'm meant to be without him; that the pain of his betrayal is doubled by the pain of not being his. I'm ashamed to admit to being that weak.

"I don't think this is exactly a 'mountain-out-of-a-molehill' situation," she says, her words uncharacteristically cryptic.

"What?"

She chews her lip before responding. "What if there was more you had to forgive him for?"

I sit, as if my body anticipates the blow before my mind knows it's coming. "What does that mean?"

A sigh. "The baseball team's party the other night. He went. It was at Rosalie's." I shake my head but say nothing, so Alice continues. "He had sex with her."

"No, he didn't," I say immediately. Reflexively. He wouldn't. He couldn't have. There's no way we had a fight and then three days later he lost his virginity to someone else. There's just…no way.

"Angela told me during study hall," Alice says, and I'm confused by the tears in her eyes. Surely, if one of us is crying, it should be me. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – my body seems to be entirely focused on the suddenly complex task of breathing. In. Out. "He was drunk," she offers; again, I shake my head.

"Edward doesn't get drunk." Immediately, I want to suck the words back into my mouth. As if I know anything about Edward after all.

"He was upset," Alice says, discreetly wiping a tear from her cheek. "Angela said he was really upset about you guys breaking up and Ben kept giving him shots and Rosalie was hanging all over him."

I close my eyes and know immediately it's a mistake; an image of Rosalie kissing Edward, of Edward touching Rosalie, flashes behind my closed eyelids. My eyes fly open. "I think…" I lurch from the bed, nearly tripping as I lunge for the door. "I think I'm going to be sick."

Alice holds my hair as I throw up, then holds my hand as I break down.

. . .

"What are you doing here?"

"That's becoming her standard greeting," Charlie says from behind me, but the humor leaves his eyes when he sees the man standing on his porch. "Though in this case, I'd say it's a valid question."

"Chief Swan," Edward says with a polite nod. "I just stopped by to see if I could have a word with Bella."

Charlie looks at me, and I have a brief flashback to the days when Edward and I were first dating, and our parents were trying to adjust to that fact, trying to redraw lines that hadn't been moved since we were toddlers. I would stand inside our front door just like this, asking permission to go out with my boyfriend, when in years past I would simply tell Charlie I was going to Edward's and let the door slam behind me before he could even answer. His face looks just like it did then, as if weighing what letting me go with Edward might mean. What it might cost one or both of us. Finally, he shrugs. "That's up to Bella, I'd say." He disappears back into the house to punctuate his point. Or perhaps he simply doesn't want to bear witness.

"Hi," Edward says, his hands once again in his pockets.

"Hello." Cool, detached. I can do this.

"Would you come for a walk with me?"

"Edward, it's practically winter." He looks confused, as if the idea that I might not enjoy taking a stroll while my nose gets frostbitten hadn't occurred to him. I sigh. "We can sit," I say, gesturing vaguely to the porch steps.

"Okay." We settle side by side on the top step, just as I'd sat beside Emmett. It occurs to me that the last time I sat beside this boy on this step he was breaking my heart, severing the cord that had tethered us to each other for far longer than the two years I'd been his girlfriend. I risk a sideways glance at him, and once upon a time I might have been able to tell if his thoughts were taking the same path as my own. As it is, his face is nearly a stranger's, and I know nothing. "I… Bella, I feel like there's so much to say and I wanted us to have the chance to say it before tomorrow. Or tonight."

"I'd never wreck your parents' party."

He shakes his head. "I didn't mean that. I just…I'd like it if we were more comfortable around each other. I don't want to spend the whole night on the opposite side of the room from you."

I shift as the cold of the wooden porch step seeps through my jeans. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't think—" He blows out a breath. "I think maybe it's what I have to say."

"Okay."

"Okay." He rubs his palms against the thighs of his jeans, and his eyes track over the vacant front yard before he turns them on me. "I'm sorry. That's first, because it's the most important. I'm so sorry." He pauses, as if to give me chance to respond; I still don't know what I'm supposed to say, so I stay silent. "Bella, I was a teenage kid bulldozed by hormones. I'm not proud of it, nor am I using it as any sort of justification. I just…I know it doesn't make any sense to you, but when I was around you I could barely refrain from just launching myself at you. I always wanted to be touching you. All the time. I wanted to kiss you for hours, and touch you, and do everything with you. And I knew you weren't ready, and that was okay, and I'll regret for the rest of my life that what I did when I wasn't thinking made you doubt that I was happy to wait for you. Wanted to wait for you."

I look away from his earnest eyes. "Clearly you didn't."

"What happened with Rosalie shouldn't have happened."

I pin him with a glare. "Which time are you talking about there, Edward?"

He looks chastened. "The first time." A cringe. "I mean, both times, obviously, but right now I'm talking about the first time. I realize how stupid it's going to sound, but I didn't really realize what she was doing until her hand was down my pants, and I'd just… I'd never been touched before, and my body reacted before my brain could catch up. And it did, it caught up, but by that point I was half gone. I closed my eyes and all I could see was you. I'd been dreaming about feeling your hands on me for so long, and I just…all I could see was you."

Now I feel sick. "Stop," I whisper; he steamrolls my words, ignoring them.

"God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So sorry that my stupid, teenage hormones wrecked us. So, so fucking sorry."

"You think I wasn't hormonal, too? You think I didn't want you, too?" Because I did, even if I didn't know what to do with it. But this truth, this honesty, is one he doesn't deserve.

He shakes his head. "I didn't think that."

"Here's something I've always been curious about." He nods, and I ask him the question that has always bothered me about cheaters. "The way I see it, one of two things is true: either you thought of me when it was happening and you decided to do it anyway, or you didn't think about me at all." He appears to be waiting for more, but I don't have any more to give him. When he realizes that's my question, his shoulders slump as if he knows there's no way to reclaim whatever he hoped might be salvageable.

"Which answer would be the better one?"

"I don't know," I tell him honestly, and I don't.

"I never stopped thinking about you," he says after a pause in which I watch our breaths combine and swirl silver in the space between us. "Not then and not since."

"What about the second time?"

His self-loathing is nearly palpable, and I'm ashamed to realize I'm enjoying his pain. In some fucked up way, it's like vindication for seventeen-year-old Bella. "I was drunk." Another head-shake. "Again, not an excuse. I just…I was just so sad. Sad, and drunk, and miserable, and heartbroken, and so, so fucking angry with myself for hurting you, for ruining everything. And she was there." He looks away. "In hindsight, I suppose I was hoping that I could find at least some tiny way in which I could feel something good, but the whole time, all I could think about was how I always thought my first time would be with you." He swallows, and when he looks back up at me, his eyes are glistening. "I always wanted it to be with you."

"But you couldn't wait," I spit, and he flinches as if I've struck him.

"I'm sorry," he says again, and perhaps it's six years of hurt or perhaps it's because suddenly, in this moment, he's eighteen and I'm seventeen and he's breaking me all over again, but I'm grateful for the sudden surge of anger that courses through me.

"Sorry's an awfully pretty word, Edward. But here's the thing about words: in the end, they don't mean anything."

"Don't," he says, a flicker of fire in his sea of misery. "How can you say that? You love words. You've always loved words. You used to say words mean everything."

I look away. "I used to say a lot of things." I love you. I want you. I trust you. Still facing the railing, I say new words. "Please leave."

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