March 13, 2013 – Word Prompts: Abusive, exclusive, reclusive.

. . .

"Hi." Bella's voice is soft in my ear as I open my apartment door, and I wonder if it means something that she's calling me the night I say no to the first woman to offer me anything in ages.

"Hi." The door clicks closed behind me, and I'm alone in my apartment. A familiar sensation, given what Emmett refers to as my reclusive tendencies. But also most decidedly not alone, because for this moment anyway, I have Bella. "How are you?"

"I'm good. How are you?"

"Good."

"No big plans on a Friday night?" she teases, and it would be so, so easy to lie. But I can't.

"I actually just got home."

"Oh." I can hear the hesitation, the unwillingness to ask, so I man up.

"Jasper set up a sort of…double-date," I say, and I wonder briefly why my palm is hurting before realizing that I'm squeezing my keys in a white-knuckled fist.

"Oh." For a woman who makes her money in words, she doesn't give me many of them, and I try not to let the familiar guilt crest.

"More of a favor to him," I continue.

"How was it?"

"The steak was good," I say, and to my relief, I hear a soft, barely-there chuckle.

"The steak, huh? Is that a euphemism?"

"Definitely not." Her candor surprises me, and I'm taken back to her words from before: she's different now, and while at first the thought made me sad, now it only intrigues me. I just hope she'll let me discover all the ways in which it's true.

"Okay."

"What about you?"

"I called you, didn't I?" I try not to read into the implication that, if she had something better to do, my phone would have stayed silent. Instead, I silence my abusive self-monologue.

"You did. How was your week?"

"Oh, you know. The usual." But I don't, and I want to ask, and I don't know if I'm allowed, because even after three months of these occasional chats, this slow getting-to-know-you-again small-talk, I have no exclusive rights to the details of her life. Even if I want them. "How's Alice?"

"Good," I say, curious suddenly about how often they speak, if that's another bridge that she's rebuilding. That train of thought brings me back around to my fear from earlier: that while I'm thinking we're building, Bella thinks we're just clearing away the rubble of something we demolished years ago. "She, um. Actually mentioned you."

"Oh?"

"She said you were…doing better. With stuff. Our stuff. From high school." Jesus, I sound like an idiot.

But Bella still speaks my language, even after all this time, and that has to count for something. "Yeah. I think I am."

"Yeah?"

"I'm…coming to terms with everything, I guess. Making my peace."

There's that phrase again. "That's what Alice said." And I can't take the possibility of this being goodbye. I have to know. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah."

"Is this…when you say 'making peace.' Does that mean you're trying to put me behind you? Or just that you're trying to put what happened behind you?"

She's quiet for a few minutes, and as always, I have to force myself to be patient, not to push. "I guess I'm coming to grips with the truth of it all. With the realization that I was mad at you for what you did, but I was also mad at you for some things that, in the long run, you had no control over."

I'm grateful, for once, that she isn't sitting across from me, because I'm positive that the surprise is etched into my face. "Like what?"

"Like my first time not being what I wanted it to be." I'm faintly surprised by the sharp stab of pain that spears my chest at her words, at the sharp, matter-of-fact tone in which she delivers them. It's not as if I was harboring delusions that Bella was still a virgin, that there was still any hope of my being her first. But when I picture her sharing that moment, that experience, that milestone with someone else, it makes me want to cry or yell or put my fist through a wall. Likely all the things she was feeling years ago, magnified a thousand times by betrayal. "Edward?" she murmurs when the silence has dragged on for too long, and I try to quell the furious surge of emotion her confession has unleashed.

"I'm here," I reply, forcing as much neutrality as I can into my voice.

"I was mad at you for that, and it wasn't your fault."

"Yes," I say, wondering if my voice sounds as sad as I feel. "It was."

"No, it—"

"It was," I say again. "Was it…" I trail off, unsure as to how to put words to the question swirling around in my brain amid images of Bella beneath someone else's body, someone else's fingertips, someone else's kisses. Someone else's pounding heart. "Was it bad?" A tiny, ugly part of me wants her to say yes, to let me believe that in those moments afterward, she had at least a shred of regret that made her think of me. Made her wish, despite all of the ways I let her down, that it had been with me. But the bigger part of me – the more mature, more selfless part, the part that deserved her once upon a time – wants her to say no, to tell me that while I stole a lot from her, she was able to find someone else who made that experience what it should have been for her. What she deserved it to be.

"No," she says instantly, and I'm proud of the immediate swell of relief at her words. But the relief is short-lived as she continues. "It wasn't…bad. It just…wasn't special. For something I'd put so much hope on being special, it just…wasn't."

"That is my fault," I reply, and self-recrimination is thick in my voice. "I would have made it special for you. It would have been, if I hadn't—"

"Don't," she cuts me off. "That's not why I'm telling you this. I'm trying to make you understand that some of my anger at you was my own stuff, you know?"

"Who—" I trail off, debating the merits of details. Knowing I don't have the right to ask, knowing our friendship isn't there yet and wondering if it ever will be.

"A guy who lived in my freshman dorm," she says simply, and I try to read more into her voice, but the words are bland. I wonder if that's intentional. "He was nice. Friendly. Funny. We dated for a while." I try to picture this guy, but unsurprisingly, I can't.

"Well, that's good," I say finally, unsure of where we go from here. "I'm glad it was…okay."

She laughs, and the light, tinkling sound loosens the knot in my chest. "Yeah. It was okay. Just the adjective a girl dreams of for her first time." A familiar guilt niggles the edge of my brain, but the levity in her voice tells me that she isn't rehashing the blame game. We're silent for a few moments before she speaks again, and the cautious tone of self-preservation has crept back into her voice, the tone I've come to hate because of what it implies: that between my loving her and losing her, she came to view me as someone she needed to protect herself from. "What about you?"

I'm slightly adrift in the rolling sea of conversation and emotion, and I frown at my wall. "Me?"

"Yeah. Your…first time." I think I hear her swallow, but it's hard to hear subtle sounds over the suddenly thumping beat of my own heart in my ears. "Was it…okay?"

"Bella," I say, the word barely more than breath, but I don't know where else to go with it. She knows what my first time was, and I know what it did to her. I really have no idea what she's asking.

As if she's read my mind, she speaks again, her voice low. "I've spent years imagining it, you know. Even though I never wanted to. It's like…one of those worst-case-scenario things that you can't switch off – I just…kept picturing it, but because I never really knew what happened, my brain sort of came up with all of these possible scenarios, each one worse than the last."

"I'll tell you whatever you want to know," I say softly, because if this is something I can give her, some way to take away at least the pain of wondering, I'll do whatever I can.

"I guess I just…how did it happen?"

For a brief moment, I let myself think back to that night: the storm of self-loathing I'd been living in for a week, the loneliness of losing the girl I loved and my best friend in one spectacular mistake of my own making, the unfamiliar hazy cloud of alcohol muddling my thoughts and only barely numbing my pain. "I went to the baseball team's party. At Rosalie's. I got really drunk on shots, and at some point she sat in my lap. We were all sitting in the living room, but then Mike ran out of liquor. I was just sitting there, wasted, wondering how the hell I was going to get home, and then Rosalie was pulling me to my feet. I sort of thought she was going to take me home because she wasn't nearly as drunk as I was. But then she was guiding me into another room. Then she was kissing me." I pause, listening to Bella's steady breaths through the phone line. "Are you…is this…"

"I'm fine," she says, her voice uncharacteristically neutral, and I don't like it. "Keep going."

I lick my lips, discomfort and guilt and shame a familiar prickly blend within me. "I, uh…she took off her shirt and then started undressing me, and then we just sort of…fell on the couch. I didn't…it didn't last very long." I suppose I should be ashamed of that fact, but frankly, I'm only glad.

"Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"If you hadn't…I mean, if I hadn't been a factor. If sleeping with Rosalie hadn't hurt me…would you have still regretted it?"

I frown. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"I mean…as first times go. Would you still regret it if I hadn't been in the picture?"

"Yes," I say immediately, fiercely, the moment I catch on. "Bella, I didn't love Rosalie. I didn't even really like her. I never would have had sex with her that night if I'd been sober. The only reason it happened is because I was wasted and sad and stupid and…" I trail off, feeling embarrassed suddenly. Stupidly, because what more can I confess that could be more embarrassing than what I've already shared?

"And?" she presses.

"Selfish. It was a mistake. It would have been a mistake even if you hadn't been a factor. The fact that you were…just makes it that much more selfish." The word is right there on the tip of my tongue. "More unforgivable."

"I'm sorry," she says after a moment.

"Sorry?"

"That your first time wasn't special, either," she says, and her voice is the voice of my best friend, the girl who loved me long before we were in love. The girl who would have been gentle with my heart, even if I'd never given it to her to hold in the palm of her hand. And I realize, with the kind of clarity reminiscent of a parting of clouds, that even if we never get back to where we were, and even if all we ever have is the friendship of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls filled with remember-whens and how-are-yous, that part of me will love this girl and her soft, kind heart for as long as I live.

"Bella," I say, because I'm bowled over by gentleness I don't deserve, and I can't say anything else.

Suddenly, I hear the sound of a dog barking in the background, and the soft, intimate tone of voice I remember from inside a blanket fort vanishes, replaced by something bolder, something more distant. "Shoot. Sorry, I have to go. I have plans, and…my doorbell just rang."

"Oh. Sure, of course. Sorry. Have a good night."

"Thanks, Edward. You too." She pauses, and I want to keep her on the line forever. "It was good talking to you." It's the same thing she said the first time we talked, but this time, I hear what she means: it was good talking. Telling each other things. Real things.

"It was good talking to you, too."

. . .