March 27, 2013 – Word prompts: Outsmart.

. . .

"I didn't go." A week after our last conversation, and I've been avoiding calling her because I felt like, after our last talk, the ball was pretty squarely in her court. I've spent the past seven days imagining her going out with some tall, dark, good-looking guy wearing a baker's apron and brandishing a platter of cupcakes like a bouquet of flowers when he arrived on her doorstep, and those mental images combined with the lack of contact with her have made me irritable and sad. And yet, all of that dissipates when I hear her voice on the other end of the phone.

"Didn't go?"

"On the date. I didn't go."

And it's my turn to test. "Why not?"

"Because I didn't want to." Her voice is gentle, soft, beautiful.

I blow out a breath. As I pass the hall mirror, I realize I'm smiling. "Was it the threat of halitosis that did it or the hunchback?"

She laughs, quick and short, then sobers. "No. It was you."

I try to glean her meaning. Can't, so I ask, "What does that mean?"

"I thought about it after I got off the phone with you, and I realized that I just…didn't want to go." When I'm quiet, she sighs. "Edward, I don't know how I feel about dating you again. It still scares me. I'm not that girl I was when we were kids. But I meant what I said in my letter: I still have her in me. And she wouldn't survive being hurt by you a second time. That's the part of me that thinks maybe it would be better if we just…tried friendship instead."

My heart plummets. "Oh."

"But then I turn down dates with attractive, eligible men. Who bake." I don't say anything, because I don't know what she's expecting me to say to that. And really, it feels like she isn't really saying all of this for my sake. When she speaks again, her voice is small, an echo of the girl I broke. "Tell me you won't hurt me again."

"I won't," I say immediately, automatically, vehemently. "I won't, Bella, I swear I won't. I couldn't. It would destroy me, to hurt you."

"Me too."

I can't quell the tide of hope swelling and cresting behind my breastbone, a giddying twister of anticipation I've never felt before. "Is that…are you saying yes?"

Please, please, God, let her be saying yes.

"To a date. I'm saying yes to a date."

And I'm grinning into the middle distance, another crack in my heart, another crack in our fractured history sealing itself together.

"I'll take it."

. . .

I didn't expect to wind up back in Forks after graduating from college, but I have three months to kill before I start law school. The town, always small, feels even smaller now. I look at the backdrop of my first eighteen years and, for the first time in my life, it seems almost foreign. I look at my bedroom, and at the pictures I left behind of a younger me, cocksure and arrogant, thinking he could outsmart the world, and he seems like a stranger. For the first time, I realize the truth: I outgrew Forks. I outgrew my hometown, my childhood, my past. There's so much that I shed when I shed the skin of my childhood, and when I look back over the discards, there's really only one thing I regret leaving behind.

I think about the things I kept, and they're few: My family. My passion. My regret.

I wish I could find a way to trade the regret for the girl who put it there.

My first morning home, I open the cupboard above the stove to find a familiar canister of cocoa powder, and I'm momentarily struck dumb. After a beat to regain my composure, I push it aside in favor of the coffee lurking behind it and try not to read the symbolism written in the choice.

. . .