A/N: Thanks for your lovely words. xo

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March 7, 2013 – Word Prompt: Magazine. Audio-visual Challenge—Imagined Image: Spirale Infernale.

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"What are you doing?" I ask, pushing my textbook away from me, phone cradled between my shoulder and jaw as I lean back into my sofa and pull throw cushions out from behind me to toss them to the floor.

"Working on a freelance piece for a local travel magazine," she replies, and I hear something that sounds like a laptop being closed. Her undivided attention is a small thrill. "What are you doing?"

"Just studying."

"Right. Alice mentioned you were in law school." I wonder absently what else Alice and Bella talk about when they talk about me. I'm ashamed just trying to imagine it, and I have a sudden flash to the way Alice – tiny, elfin, fine-boned Alice – would bodily put herself between me and Bella anytime our paths crossed after I lost her. How, at Christmas, she didn't laugh at anything Rosalie said, her tiny mouth pinching together instead in a tight mockery of a smile. "Do you like it?"

"Yeah. It's a lot of work, but I like it. It's interesting."

"That's good. Media law?"

"Yeah," I reply. And perhaps for the first time, I identify my career aspiration for what it is: the most roundabout possible way to protect her when it was no longer my job to do it any other way.

The conversation feels like a spiral staircase, a steady climb of chitchat leading to a destination I can't see from the bottom. And just like when I was eighteen, I fight the urge to push her for more. The stilted, awkward talk of strangers is maddening in its plodding pace, and I don't know what it is about this girl that makes me feel the urge to push, but I can only think that it's because, when it comes to Bella, I've always wanted everything.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Okay." The wariness is back, and I curse it. Curse myself for putting it there, then and now.

"Is there more that you want to say? I mean…are there more things you want to…clear up? I'm not totally sure of…where we are."

I hear her blow out a breath. "Me either." It sounds like she's sharing a confidence, and for the first time in six years, I feel like Bella and I are a team. Maybe we can be lost together in the mess I made. "I guess…if there's stuff to say, we should say it so that we can maybe move forward. But I don't think we need to rehash everything just for the sake of it."

"Okay."

After a beat: "Was there…something you wanted to clear up?"

I'm opening my mouth to say no, but the word catches in my throat. There's a lot I want to clear up, but I don't know where to begin. "There's a song I can't get out of my head," I admit, surprising even myself; I wasn't sure I would ever have the courage for this particular revelation.

"Oh?" Back to wary, mixed with a little bit curious.

"Are you familiar with Great Big Sea?"

"Is that the name of the song?"

I chuckle, despite my anxiety. "So that's a no. Great Big Sea is the band. It's sort of a folk-rock band that sings folk songs and sea shanties."

"Wow. That's…specific."

"They're actually really good," I say, and I hear her laugh. Something in my chest loosens at the sound.

"Okay." But her doubt is clear in her tone.

"Anyway. They have this song. And ever since November, it's been sort of niggling at my brain." I don't tell her that I've been playing it on near-repeat loop in my car for the past two months.

"Okay." I had forgotten, in the years between now and then, the way Bella would unknowingly employ some of her father's cop tactics. Never giving any indication of what she was thinking, always waiting it out like the most seasoned detective. Lost in my silent reverie, I don't realize I've dropped the thread of conversation until Bella finally presses. "What's it called?"

"Huh?"

"The song. What's it called?"

"'How Did We Get From Saying I Love You,'" I say, the last three words and their implication making a chasm open in my chest, a void filled with insecurity and anxiety and apprehension and all of the things that have been my typical downward spiral whenever I think of the girl I hurt so spectacularly all those years ago.

"Hm," is all she says, and not for the first time, I wish her dad had been a dentist or an electrician or pretty much anything where interrogation wasn't a regular part of his job.

When it becomes clear she's not going to give me anything more, I hurry to elaborate. "It starts out with these two people who meet on a street corner and start talking about the weather and making small talk, and the guy starts ruminating over the fact that he can't really figure out how they went from saying 'I love you' to 'I'll see you around someday.'"

She's silent for a few moments before I hear her soft exhalation. "That's…really sad."

"Yeah," is all I can find by way of a reply, and we sit in silence for the space of a few breaths before I finally pluck up the courage to ask the question that's been turning over in my mind for months, and, if I'm being honest with myself, years. "Hey, Bella? Can I ask you something else?"

"Okay," she says haltingly, and I will myself not to be deterred by the obvious hesitation.

"If you could go back. If you could go back and…not love me. If you could change it all and just stay my friend, not ever be my girlfriend. If you could make it so that I never kissed you…would you?"

The silence on the other end of the phone is so absolute that the buzz of the wireless connection becomes audible, equal parts comforting and nerve-racking. It's the only confirmation I have that she hasn't hung up on me, that she's still there. Not for the first time, I wish we were having these conversations face-to-face.

I know how I want her to answer, and I hate that it makes me feel even more selfish than I already am when it comes to Bella. I know I hurt her; I know I fucked it up about as badly as I possibly could have, but to hear that she'd prefer none of it had ever happened would crush me, erase all of the happy thoughts I still have of the days when she was mine. The fact that every single one of those happy thoughts is tempered by the reality of how I destroyed us is a weight I'm willing to shoulder as penance, as long as the memories can stay mine.

Finally, when I've reached the point where I'm about to speak, to let her off the hook, to attempt to translate her non-answer into something comprehensible, her voice comes over the line in a soft whisper.

"No."

"No?" I ask, a nearly foreign flare of hope firing through my chest, lighting wishes that have no business being lit. She's quiet again, and I force myself to be patient.

"No," she says again, finally, a little stronger this time, and I can't quite curb my surprise.

"Really?" I cringe at the pathetic hope in my own voice, praying that she isn't reading more into it than the simple truth of the fact that I'm relieved nearly to the point of tears that she doesn't regret me enough to wish it all away.

"Yeah," she says finally, softly. "I mean, obviously I wish that things could have happened differently. If I could change anything, I'd change…that."

"Me too," I nearly whisper.

"But when I think about all of the good things…" She trails off, and I allow my mind to catalog a few of them myself: that kiss in the blanket fort, the countless kisses that came after it, the feel of her small, fine-boned hand in mine. The way it felt to know that she was mine. That she had my heart as much as I had hers. "When I think about the good things, I could never wish they hadn't happened."

I blow out a breath. "Me either."

We lapse into silence once again, the truth between us alternately heavy as a closing curtain and light as a balloon set free. I'm honestly not sure which feels more true.

"Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"I, um. Have to go."

"Oh. Right. Sure. Okay."

"Talk to you soon?"

I won't allow myself to think that the tone in her voice is hope, even though it sounds a whole hell of a lot like it. "Definitely."

. . .

When I read her words, I feel humbled. I knew I loved her with everything I had; I had no idea how completely, how absolutely she loved me back. I mean, yeah, I assumed. I figured. I believed her when she said it. But to read her words, to hear the absolute trust behind them, very nearly bowls me over. When I look up into her face, the face I've known since we were ankle-biters, I'm hit with a wave simultaneously familiar and foreign that my heart hitches: she's mine. Mine to love, mine to protect, mine to take care of.

"You know I feel exactly this way too, right?"

A little of the nervousness in her dark brown eyes melts away, and I see her thin shoulders relax. "I do now," she says, as if she's teasing, but I can see the half-truth of it in her face.

And when I look at her, young and trusting and vulnerable and strong and uncertain and beautiful, so beautiful, I'm overtaken once more by a wave of wonder that she's mine.

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