A/N: Another heads-up for those who requested it: this chapter is EPOV of the party at Rosalie's. Again, this is your cue to exit, stage left, if you don't want to read it.

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March 12, 2013 – Word Prompt: Backlash. Dialogue Flex: "There won't be another opportunity like this again."

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The woman giggles, fingering the stem of her wine glass with her fingertips, her blood-red nails shining beneath the ambient lighting of the downtown Seattle restaurant. I force myself to smile, all too aware of the fact that both Alice and Jasper are watching me intently; Jasper's look is encouraging but, as usual, I can't decipher the look in Alice's unnerving gray eyes.

I can't believe I agreed to this. Dinner with a coworker of Jasper's sounded relatively innocuous when he presented it a month ago, and while I initially protested – always, it seems, I protest – he ultimately talked me into it. "A casual dinner. She's new in town. She doesn't know anyone." And so I agreed, but dinner has only grown more uncomfortable as the night wears on. She's too blond. She's too blue-eyed. She's too interested. She's too…not who I want her to be.

And it's ridiculous, because Bella and I are over. We have been for six years, thanks entirely to my own actions. And yet just the simple act of talking to her again over the past few weeks has made me feel a familiar flicker of obligation: to protect her. To love her, as if I ever stopped. To honor a commitment to her, even if it only exists in my mind. To wait and see if there's even the smallest glimmer of possibility before I go down a road that doesn't lead to her.

A server appears to offer dessert, and Jasper's phone rings from his pocket. He excuses himself to take the call, and Alice takes the cue to visit the ladies' room. The girl – Laura, I remind myself – and I glance at each other in slightly nervous embarrassment over her nearly-empty wine glass and my completely empty tumbler that once held two fingers of Scotch.

"I'm having a really nice time," she murmurs, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table, and I nod, coaxing a friendly smile to my face.

"Me too." I realize my mistake when a spark of hope flares in her blue eyes. Suddenly, I feel her foot brushing faintly against my ankle, not enough to be overtly suggestive, but just enough to serve as the hint I suspect she's going for.

"It was really nice of your brother to set this up."

"He's a good guy," I agree, hoping to steer the conversation in a neutral, innocuous direction.

"He is." She leans farther forward, and the classy, elegant blouse she's wearing gapes just enough to show me a hint of her cleavage. It's the kind of thing I'd generally find incredibly sexy – a girl who isn't obvious, but isn't afraid to suggest at what she wants – but I'm left cold. "But I wouldn't mind at all if we ditched them for the remainder of the evening and got to know each other a little bit better."

And this is where it becomes even clearer that the woman knows how to play the game, because she's left it wide open: for dessert and coffee at a table for two somewhere else, or a sweaty roll in the sheets back at my apartment.

And I could. I'm single, young, healthy, and I could take this smart, pretty, friendly girl home and get laid without any fear of backlash, consequences, problems. And while there's a tiny, entirely male part of my brain that wants to take her up on the offer, the rest of me is screaming the truth: I may be single, but I'm not available, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.

And, if there's one way in which Rosalie did me a favor six years ago, it was giving me an immediate and bone-deep dislike of casual sex.

Laura's looking at me expectantly, and I search for the most graceful way to get out of it without lying; in the absence of inspiration, I excuse myself to the men's room.

In the darkened hallway leading to the restrooms, I cross paths with Alice. She's standing against the wall, scrolling through her phone. When she looks up as I approach, the screen bathing her face in white-blue light, I smile. "Was that phone call choreographed, or just coincidental?"

She smiles in return. "Coincidental. But I'm sure he would have found another reason to leave you two alone. He's a matchmaker at heart." I take a place beside her, leaning my shoulder blades against the wall painted the color of an eggplant. "She's nice," Alice offers, and I look down at my shoes.

"Yeah."

"Why don't you date?" Immediate, blunt, and my surprised eyes lift to hers.

"Sorry?"

"You don't date. Why not?"

"I…date."

"Not really." When I don't say anything, Alice lets her head tip back so that it's resting against the wall. "Bella's doing really well. I think whatever you guys talked about at Thanksgiving helped her."

I have no idea what that means. "Yeah?"

"She's…making peace with all that stuff from high school. Finally."

Making peace. That's what you do with something when you're laying it to rest, and it occurs to me that all of the conversations that to me felt like hello might be a long, drawn-out goodbye to her.

"That's…good."

"Jesus, you're a bad liar. Good thing you ultimately went with the honesty thing six years ago, because your poker face is shit." I've never heard Alice be quite so blunt before, nor has she ever willingly talked about the mistakes I made when I was eighteen, and my surprise must show on my face because she rolls her eyes. "You want her back."

It isn't a question, so I don't feel obligated to answer. Still, the words pierce me with their truth. If ever, in any universe, it were a possibility, I'd want it more than anything. "I don't know that that's possible." A non-answer, and I feel very lawyer-like all of a sudden. But it isn't lost on me that if there's anyone in the world who might have more vested interest in Bella's heart than me, it's Alice.

"She went through a lot of shit because of you." There's a spark, a fire, and I know who picked up the reins of taking care of Bella when I dropped them.

"Yeah."

"I don't know that she'll ever trust you again. Not like she did."

Nothing I don't already know, but it hurts just the same. "I know."

"She deserves more than being with someone she can't trust completely. That's a rough way to love."

"I've missed being her friend," I reply when I have nothing else, and it's the truest lie I've ever told. I missed it the most, but my love was always wrapped up in my friendship, conjoined twins that could never be separated.

"Me too," Alice says, dropping the subject, and we stand in silence in a darkened hallway, and I wonder if I have a new ally, or if Alice is simply the mouthpiece for the truths Bella is too hesitant to tell me.

. . .

"Come on, dude. Rosalie's parents are out of town, and her house is a fucking mansion. This is a one-time thing; there won't be another opportunity like this again." Ben is annoying, but he's one of the only people who has made the effort to entice me out of my den of self-loathing since the day Bella essentially broke up with me, told me she couldn't forgive me, slammed her front door in my face. I still can't quite believe I lost her, that I was that stupid. That with everything we've been through together, after a lifetime of friendship, there isn't a way to get her to forgive me. To hear me. That despite how much I love her, I don't have the power to fix the hurt I've caused her.

"I'm not really in a party mood, Ben." Not really in the mood for much of anything, except sitting in my darkened bedroom and trying to figure out how to make it right. I try to put myself in her shoes, to imagine what it would take if she'd let some other guy touch her, but the mere thought of it makes my stomach turn and my chest ache, and I can't bring myself to explore it any deeper.

"Nothing a few shots of Jack couldn't fix," Ben says, and I shrug, lacking the energy to argue. I'm so tired, and I don't have it in me to fight. I want to fight for Bella, but she won't let me, and the despair and the misery at the knowledge that she could choose not to forgive me is so unlike the Bella I know, the Bella I love, that it only makes me feel more lost.

I'm exhausted from hating myself, and it's only been a week. Knowing Bella hates me is an entirely separate exhaustion, one that makes me cry like a girl every time I let myself think about it. Bella has never hated me, even when we were kids and I'd do something to make her mad. She's always forgiven me, always cared despite my idiocy, but this time it's different, and I feel lost, adrift, cut loose without her. And the knowledge of what I've done to her is a deeper torture than I'm equipped to handle. Knowing that I took that beautiful, fragile heart and essentially smashed it on the blacktop of the school parking lot is what keeps me up at night, my desperation to fix it like a wheel in a mud puddle: spinning and spinning as fast as it can possibly go but getting nowhere, succeeding only in showering more mud over everything nearby.

When we step into Rosalie Hale's enormous house, I immediately want to go home. I don't want to be here, watching my teammates with girls draped all over them, seeing furtive gropes and shameless kisses around me, reminding me of everything I was too stupid to hold on to.

Ben claps me on the shoulder and leads me to a corner of the room where Mike is wielding a bottle of Southern Comfort and lining up a row of shot glasses on a glass coffee table. "Come one, come all," he booms, turning the bottle over and filling the glasses as we find seats on the couch.

The first one makes my chest burn almost enough to erase the emotional burn that has been smoldering for days, eviscerating me from the inside out.

The second goes down easier, numbing the burn of the first.

The third makes everything easier, the sounds, sights, reminders of the party around me fading to a blurry backdrop.

After the fourth, I feel nothing. Numb. Blessedly.

"Hey there." Rosalie's voice in my ear, hand on my shoulder, and as I whip my head around to look for Ben, the room swims. "Whoa," she says, laughing, rounding the couch and lowering herself into my lap. "Someone's having fun." It's a lie. This isn't fun. But it doesn't hurt like everything else, and maybe that's enough just for tonight. Another shot, and this time, Rosalie takes one, too. The room continues to swim, and if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine it's Bella's weight on my thighs, her arm crooked around my neck. When I open them again, Mike's rummaging around for another bottle, the SoCo empty and lying on its side on the now-sticky tabletop, and Rosalie leans in, voice in my ear barely more than breath. "Come with me." She loops her arm through mine and pulls me gently from the couch; I'm faintly grateful, because the room swims and lurches, and I know if I'd had another shot, I'd have thrown up all over the table. The room is suddenly too warm, and I follow Rosalie's lead, hoping desperately that she's taking me outside, taking me home, taking me away. It takes all of my concentration not to knock into people, walls, tables on my way through the crowd. I'm drunk, and I've never really been drunk, and I feel sick and free and depressed and relieved and like someone else entirely. And I miss Bella.

I follow Rosalie through a door and into a darker room, where she pushes gently on my chest, and suddenly I'm sitting on another sofa, the party pulsing behind the closed wooden door on the other side of the black room, walls of photos and books and other office-like things ghostly silhouettes around us. A study, my inebriated mind supplies, and it isn't until she's in my lap that I realize why this girl has pulled me into this room. She kisses me, something sweet and faintly alcoholic on her breath, and I don't kiss her back, too stunned and confused and lost to figure out how I feel about it. "It's okay," she murmurs against my mouth, hands at my belt buckle, and it's the first time I've been the inexperienced one, the first time I've been the one needing reassurance. And just for a second, I allow myself to imagine letting this happen.

I picture being with someone who doesn't need me to take control, someone who doesn't need me to protect her, to shield her, to guide her. I picture what it might feel like to be free to just…let go.

Then Rosalie's hands are in my pants and her top is off and I'm hard and it's happening, and the room is spinning in a haze of hormones and liquor and I'm so tired of feeling like shit and hurting and hating myself and despite the fact that kissing someone who isn't Bella leaves me cold, the possibility that this could feel good is too big a temptation to resist.

And I let it happen.

And I never would have thought it possible, but afterward, I hate myself even more.

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