Disclaimer : "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer.

Recap: Last time, Bella and Edward had quite a chat in the Cullen apple orchard, where he tells her about Alice and Jasper's special powers, that his family debated whether to silence her permanently, that he'd once been a killer vigilante, that Raquel is Seth's imprint, and that he was born in 1901. Their conversation is cut short when Bella has to meet the human gang for dinner, but Edward promises to meet her when she's done. Oh, and there's some kissing.

A reminder here that this Bella is not canon, but Edward is, pretty much, and thus inclined to find her perfect. And I loved hearing from all the supervixen Garbage fans out there! I saw them in concert last year, and they sounded fabulous.

Thanks as always to Camilla10 (who because she is awesome and organized has posted 11 chapters of an AU for you to check out, "The Fleeting Moment," in the weeks since my last chapter) and to Mr. Price, who has something to say at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 12: Quelle heure est-il au paradis?

We hadn't all gotten together for a couple of weeks, so we had some catching up to do. Mike recounted the Christmas rush at Newton Outfitters; the county's leading retailer had done well in 2011. Angela had spent much of the break with Ben, and we ribbed her gently about her new-old romance and how he wasn't going to make his deadline if she kept him from working on his book. I described the sunny weeks of my vacation in Arizona – after the events of the last few days, that seemed like an eon ago - and succeeded in making my companions depressed about the weeks of clouds and rain ahead of us. As the youngest cop on the force, Tyler had spent the holidays working, and had stories about festive family celebrations that required police intervention.

I wondered how he would feel if he knew how many predators I had just discovered in Forks.

I begged off drinks at the Sawmill Tavern after dinner, and went to the Laundr-O-Matic, where I haphazardly dumped my dry clothes into my basket. I might have surpassed the speed limit to get back to my house.

I heard a knock as I walked in. I ran to open the back door, dropping my basket along the way.

It was a good thing that I knew the speed of the man who was there, or I would have yelped in surprise when I found myself lifted and spun around while cold lips roamed my face and throat. When Edward finally let me down on trembling legs, it took me a minute to find my voice as I stared up at him. His eyes were noticeably lighter.

"What did you do while I was away?" I asked.

"Like you, I grabbed a bite to eat," he said casually.

I considered my supernatural suitor for a moment. What he said wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the truth, either. "I see what you did there," I said.

"Ours is a life of half-truths and omissions," he agreed, grimacing. "People interpret what we say according to their own expectations."

"What do you call, um, drinking among yourselves?"

"Hunting."

"Oh, yeah, Carlisle and Esme mentioned hunting at the parent-teacher conference. And I tried to picture them with rifles and orange vests and couldn't."

He smiled at that. "Orange is not a good color for us."

We kicked off our shoes before I took his hand to lead him toward the kitchen table and the folders that awaited me there. It sucked blue balls, but I had to grade some vocab tests tonight.

"Does 'hunting' change the color of your eyes?" I asked as we sat cater-corner around the Formica surface.

He shot a baleful look at the papers I was arranging in front of me. "Yes."

"How?"

He started to tell me, about eyes and genes and venom, about never needing to sleep or rest or breathe, about the utility of handwarmers, about the unpalatability of human food, about extraordinary strength, magnified senses and intractable memory, about the annihilating effects of scent, especially mine … about never becoming ill, never dying. We had moved on, for the moment, from what he had done, to what he was.

The vocabulary tests lay untouched before me as he spoke, as I absorbed just how different he was from me. It would be easy for me to consider myself as inferior to him in every way if I didn't see his focus on me, his obvious worry about my reactions as he described his physiology, his desire as he caressed my wrist and traced the lines in my palm while he talked.

"My heart has been still since 1918," he said, reminding me of my comment in the orchard. He took my hand and placed it on his chest, over his heart, where I felt only cotton and cold and the curve of muscle. Nor did I feel anything but smooth skin when he moved our hands to the artery in his neck, which lay still under my fingers.

But while his heart didn't move, mine sped up for both of us. For there was a craving that raced in my veins despite – or because of - cold skin, sharp teeth and mutated genes, a craving fed by weeks of what I could now acknowledge as flirting and surreptitious touches. "Do vampires have sex?" I blurted out.

"Yes," he said instantly, then stopped short. "At least, with each other."

"Not with humans?"

"That happens, but -" he hesitated a moment "- it poses some danger to the human."

"Why? Because of the blood?"

"The blood and the disparity in strength."

Disparity in strength. I had to wonder how much of a euphemism that was. Well, he hadn't damaged me yet.

"So is there hope for us?" The answer was irrelevant as to whether I would want to be with Edward, but a no would be intensely frustrating.

"I am assured," he said carefully, "that it is possible. Is this something that you have done before?"

I assumed he wasn't asking if I'd ever had sex with a vampire, but whether I'd ever had sex before, period. "Does it matter?" I responded.

"Of course it does," he said, looking puzzled at the question. My heart dropped.

I wasn't ashamed of the people I'd been with or what I had done with them. I had learned something about what I liked and disliked from each encounter, knowledge that I could put to good use with Edward. But I would be disappointed to discover that he was old-fashioned in a double-standard way.

"I know that statistically most of the kids in class with you should be virgins," I said cautiously. He nodded in confirmation. "But I'm 24. How many 24-year-olds do you know who are?"

To my shock, he raised his hand.

"But, but," my words burst out, "how can that be? You're gorgeous and brilliant and you can be charming when you want and … well, you're 110." I stopped spluttering at his pained expression, and silently cursed myself. I despised slut-shaming, and here I was shaming someone for his lack of experience. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean –"

"Believe me, you are not the first to have that reaction," he said ruefully. "When you meet my brother Emmett you will see what I have had to endure for decades and conclude that I am a saint. But before you decide that I am a saint, you have to consider this: to whom would I have lost my virginity - a vampire who preys on humans? A human who couldn't know what I was?"

Seth was in the same situation, I realized, gathering his courage to tell Raquel, an outsider innocent of shapeshifter myths, before making love to her.

"Besides," Edward went on, "apparently my tastes are very specific, since you're the first person I've met in 93 years whom I've …" he trailed off, seeming to search for the right word.

"Been attracted to?" I suggested.

He seemed dissatisfied with the phrase, but nodded. "That will work for now," he said.

I dropped my chin in my hand and thought about the last few days, his confidence, his seductiveness, the way he made me melt the day before with just the briefest contact of his lips … "Wait, was that your first kiss yesterday?"

"Yes." He made the "stop" symbol as I started to protest that he had misled me. "Remember, I really am 17. By some measures."

"Not the most important one," I grumbled, still stunned by the idea that in a relationship with a beautiful centenarian vampire I'd be the more experienced partner when it came to sex. Unless said centenarian vampire was so freaked out by my nonvirginal status that we wouldn't be having any. "Edward, why does it matter to you what I have done?" I asked.

Again, he looked baffled by my question. "At least one of us should know what we're doing," he said slowly, as if he were speaking to a child.

My breath left me in a big huff. "Oh," I said, flailing. "I thought that because of your age, you know, that you might be judgmental about my sexual history. "

He snorted. "Because of my great age, I've learned to not be judgmental. When you've heard a century of contradictory mores and rules, you start to ignore them all. Ellis, Freud, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Hite, the sexual revolution, the abstinence movement …"

"Okay, okay," I said, lifting my own hand to stop him. "But why are you worried about experience? It's not rocket science."

"Rocket science I can handle." He was totally serious, I could tell, and it made my automatic giggle die in my throat. "This is much more difficult, not so much because of the blood anymore, but because of the strength. I need to go slowly, and I'm grateful you know what to do." He grinned suddenly and moved his chair closer to mine. "I need to have make-out sessions the way teenagers do. You can show me."

"Um," I said in a near moan, because he had started tracing lines from the inside of my wrist to my elbow. Which no guy had ever done to me before, and I had to wonder why – it was so innocent yet sensual at the same time, my arm an erogenous zone I had never considered. Whatever Edward lacked in experience I suspected he made up with instinct and theoretical knowledge, and the thought made my stomach coil pleasantly. "Um, I've always skipped the qualifying heats and gone straight to the finals of the race, so to speak."

He looked confused and his fingers stilled. "But you have had boyfriends and –"

"No, I haven't. Is that what you are, my … my boyfriend?" I asked, the word feeling odd in my mouth, and he grinned again.

"That will work for now, don't you think?"

"Except with the school administrators," I said. I drew my hand from his and pointed at the test papers with a red pen. "I have to do this tonight."

"I can help," he said, pulling the pile to his side of the table and gently extracting the pen from my fingers. And before my eyes, he graded 51 tests in a matter of seconds, and pushed the papers back to me. "My classmates still don't know the difference between 'ambivalent' and 'ambiguous,'" he observed after I thanked him. "For the record, I'll note that I'm not the first about you, but I'll strive to be the second."

"Actually, we'd be better off if we both seem unambiguously uninterested," I said, "though I'm dubious about my ability to do it."

Really, how was I going to manage that? How was I going to stop myself from revealing my feelings for this dazzling man watching me in my classroom, from looking like the besotted teenager I had never been?

"We've been doing that for months," he reminded me. "And no one in my proximity has thought, 'That creepy Edward Cullen has a crush on Ms. Swan.'"

Instead of making me feel reassured, I had to wonder what was worse - that he had to hear his classmates calling him creepy, or that his classmates all had their thoughts invaded. I tried to shake that off by examining his work.

"Wow, that's just like my writing," I said. "Doesn't it hurt to write like me when your own hand is so beautiful?"

He ignored that. "Your turn," he said, and I entered the test results into my grade book, then sighed and shuffled class papers into their proper folders. Relentless organization was the bane and savior of every teacher. "I need to shower," I said. "Will you stay?"

He nodded. "Shall I make up your bed?" he asked as we stood up.

"You don't sleep. Do you know how to make a bed?"

"There's no need to be sassy, young lady."

I made my shower quick, twisting my hair into a bun to keep it dry. When I was finished, the newly washed sheets were on my bed, somehow neat and uncrumpled. Edward was at my window with a book in his hand, looking out into the darkness. He had changed since our hike, into a long-sleeved forest green T-shirt and black jeans that, I couldn't help notice, his ass looked great in.

"You might want to consider curtains here," he said, turning to me, his eyes raking over my flannel pajama bottoms and tank top. It wasn't what I normally wore to bed, but I figured we could work up to that.

I looked from him to the blackness beyond the window and then back. "I don't have any neighbors behind me."

"But you do have wolves." He said it that way someone might note that a house has termites or bedbugs. "And they have, shall we say, keener eyes than humans."

My own, weak eyes shot back to the dark yard. "They're out there right now?"

"No. They're too busy patrolling the area where Alice and Jasper are lounging along the treaty border. But since the woods here aren't covered by the treaty, they're here often." He answered the question on my face. "Often enough that I can distinguish them by smell, disgusting as it is."

I thought back to the times when Jacob remarked on unpleasant odors in my back yard, and had speculated that my classroom was rife with dead vermin. "Do the wolves find your scent repugnant too?"

"Yes, though I can't fathom why, since apparently they've managed to become accustomed to their own stench."

I stared out the window some more, trying to figure out if I'd danced around naked in front of it or made some other exhibition of myself, then stopped. If the wolves saw me in the altogether, that was their problem, not mine. After all, it wasn't as if they could read my mind.

Besides, I was much more interested in knowing if someone else had seen me naked.

"Can you see into my window when you're lurking over in the trees?" He startled, and I grinned at catching him. "At the dance, you said you had heard me listening to Philip Glass in my classroom. But I've done that only here, at home."

He didn't try to deny it. "It helps me to have as much exposure to your scent and your heartbeat as possible," he said in justification. "But I never looked in your window as you, um, undressed."

"Uh-huh," I said, though I believed him – he sounded aghast at the idea of being thought a Peeping Tom. "You merely eavesdropped. Though how much of my scent could you get from way back there?" I asked, waving my hand toward the woods.

He hesitated, and my eyes narrowed. If he had been sneaking into my house, I would not be pleased. "Sometimes I sat on the eaves next to your window," he confessed after a few seconds. "Believe me, your scent is potent even in that situation. In the beginning, when it was warmer and you left your window open, it was devastating."

"Okay," I said, considering. I had to applaud an activity that might have reduced the likelihood that he would chomp on me, even one that impinged on my physical privacy. "I can understand why you did it, but don't do it again."

He nodded and looked relieved, and my gaze dropped to the book in his hand. It was the copy of "Bel-Ami" he had lent me.

"You didn't get that at a garage sale, did you?" I asked, abruptly realizing that he may very well have known the "Elizabeth Anthony" on the bookplate personally.

"It was my mother's," he said in confirmation. "I was born Edward Anthony Masen. She died in the Spanish flu epidemic in World War I."

I bit my lip. Damn me. "I'm sorry I said that stuff about nobody remembering her."

"It would be true about almost anyone else," he said. "Also, I don't remember her as well as I would like. Carlisle has stronger memories of her."

"How did that happen?" I said, but he shook his head.

"Could I tell you about it another time?" he said, and I recognized the pain of someone else whose mother had died too young. He changed the subject, tilting his head toward my futon bed. "Is this a holdover from your college days?" he asked.

"Yeah, but it's what I prefer anyway. The law requires that most mattresses, the kind you use with box springs, have chemical flame retardants, and I don't want the carcinogens. My futon is just made of wool so it doesn't need chemicals." Its other great quality was that it didn't squeak during sex, but I decided to leave that little fact unspoken for now, and instead sat down on the bed. "Here, let's check out your sheet-making prowess," I said, sitting down and patting the mattress next to me.

Watching Edward walk the few steps from the window to me was like a marathon of anticipation. He could have done it in a millisecond, I knew, but he moved slowly, the distance between us like a fog of lust he had to push through. Then he was there, beside me, eyes searching mine.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," he said back, smiling.

We stared at each other for a moment, trying to figure out the first move when it came to this human-vampire interaction. Finally, I leaned forward, aiming for his lips, but his words stopped me.

"Could I try something?" he asked. He reached for my chignon and tugged at it. "May I let down your hair?"

Heh, turn-of-the-last-century foreplay, I was on board with that. "Of course," I said. And of course, since this wasn't the turn of the last century, I didn't have hairpins for him to pull out, just an elastic ponytail holder. No matter, I turned my back to him and he unloosed my hair, slowly and gently, than ran his fingers though the strands, spreading them around my shoulders. I closed my eyes in bliss as his hands massaged my scalp, and waves of heat traveled along my skin.

When he stopped, I shifted around and smiled at him like a stoner.

"You have amazing hair yourself," I said, reaching up to graze it with my palm, and snickered at a memory. "Like Robert La Follette's!" The Progressive-Era Wisconsin governor would have been human Edward's contemporary. What a thought.

"You must have noticed that pathetic collage by that talentless friend of Raquel's," Edward muttered.

I leaned back a little so I could scrutinize his face. "You saw Riley's work at the gallery?" I asked, and he nodded. "Your assessment is a little harsh."

"And I saw him invite you to his apartment when you two were outside the bar." He said the words as if they tasted bad. "He thought his chances were good."

"You were there, you stalker, across the street," I breathed out. "I had persuaded myself that I had imagined seeing you because …" because I was so sexually frustrated was true, but not the considerate thing to say right now "… well, because I was obsessing over you so much."

"You were?" Edward sounded thrilled at the idea that I had been pining over him, and I wrinkled my nose at him.

"And you were jealous of Riley," I said, realizing the motivation for Edward's unfair artistic judgment.

"Intensely," he agreed, and there was an undercurrent in his voice that made decide that he never needed to learn just how close I had come to going home with Riley. Some guys would get off on hearing about it, but I suspected that Edward Cullen, vampire b. 1901, would not.

In any case, he no longer seemed interested in the topic, or maybe it spurred him on, because suddenly his hand was curved around my neck and his lips were on mine, and we started making out like … teenagers.

That is, teenagers who had to worry about the physical peculiarities of supernatural creatures. Edward ended up on the other side of the room from me a few times, but with longer and longer intervals in between. When he did, I tried to wait patiently – I didn't worry that he would hurt me, but I wanted to show respect for his own worries.

And I discovered the pleasure of just kissing someone you loved, of being kissed by someone intent on thoroughly exploring my throat and earlobes and jaw, temples and cheeks and nape, places stinted when the goal is fucking a convenient partner.

Which didn't mean that I didn't want more, too. "Can we French kiss?" I asked during one of his breaks. "I mean," I added, not wanting it to sound like a demand if he wasn't ready, "is that possible?"

I could hear him inhale deeply from across the room. "I would like it to be," he said, and added thoughtfully, "Such a simple thing, yet there is danger in it … My teeth are sharp, you have to remember that, but the venom lets down only when I'm on the hunt. I can kiss you that way, but it would be safer if you didn't try it on me."

I nodded and he returned to the bed, and my mouth. Our hesitation was mostly gone now, arms knowing how to where to slide and to hold, lips understanding where to brush and fit. His tongue touched my lower lip, and my mouth opened, and his taste saturated my breath and my senses.

We ended up pressed against each other on the mattress, legs tangled, the fabric of his shirt gliding against my breasts, his hands cradling my head, my own hands roaming the contours of his back. This time we had to both break away: when my thigh brushed his groin, making him hiss and shudder, when I had to turn my head to breathe non-Edward air and clear my mind.

As the night deepened around us, I became fuzzy and boneless and exhausted, and Edward disengaged himself from me to ask if I was all right.

"I think I have to become used to you just as you become used to me," I said before my words were overtaken by a yawn. "Your own scent, when it's so close – it's heady."

He muttered something about vampire lures, and I shook my head. "I think that's a you-and-me thing, but I suppose I could make out with Alice for a while and see if it's true."

He lifted an eyebrow at me. "You know, you don't have to burnish your lesbian cred with me," he said, then leaned over to whisper in my ear, "and vampires don't like to share."

Yeah, I'd called that one right.

I shivered at the words and the feeling of his lips on the shell of my ear, but Edward pulled away again, and stayed away even when I protested. "You need sleep, and I -" his voice transitioned from concern to wryness "- should, um, take a break," he said.

Aha. That could be a bloodlust issue, or a lust-lust issue, but based on what I feeling against me, I'd wager on the latter. If he needed to go release some tension in the shower or "grab a bite to eat" again, he should do that … and perhaps describe it in detail to me later, when we were at that stage.

So I tamped down my impulse to urge him to keep kissing me. Instead I scrambled under the duvet and turned off the bedside light. When Edward made to follow me, I sleepily raised my hand to stop him.

"No jeans in the clean sheets, I don't care how good your butt looks in them," I mumbled.

"What was that? I didn't quite catch what you said," he said, teasing me. But I fell asleep before I could answer, falling instead into dreams of cool limbs encasing me.

Too few hours later, my eyes blinked open. Edward was next to me, but sitting on top of the covers, a book open on his lap. He watched me with interest as awareness gradually returned to my brain.

"Your jeans are on," I said, stating the obvious.

"Good morning. I had to leave for a little while, and then I worried that I was making you cold when I came back." He indicated the paperback in his lap. "I borrowed some of your books to read – I hope you don't mind."

"Nope. What's that one?" The early-dawn light was still too dim for me to read the title.

"Tony Hillerman, one of his mysteries set in the Navajo Nation, so your neck of the woods." He frowned. "Or rather, no woods. I thought I'd learn something about a part of the country I can't spend much time outdoors in."

"Hey, we have woods in Arizona. Lots of ponderosa pines."

"And lots of sun."

There was no denying that, and I sat up, shut off my alarm before it could go off, and turned my thoughts to the practicalities of the morning and the difficulties of our day ahead at Forks High.

"Don't you need to go home and get your car?" I asked.

"I'll run to school, and Alice can drive in on her own. She's done it before."

His words dislodged a memory. "That's right. At the beginning of the school year, she came but you didn't. Why?"

He shifted on the sheets, and looked uncomfortable. "After I had that … reaction in your classroom that first time, I drove to Alaska –"

"You drove to Alaska," I said, trying to calculate the time that would take and failing to fit it into the few days he'd been gone.

"I don't sleep, remember?" he said, waving around himself to indicate his tucked-in side of the futon. "So I drove to Alaska to get away. I told myself I was doing it for your own good."

I opened my mouth to say, "Don't leave me for my own good – that's insane," then closed it again without a word. I no longer needed to worry about preventing Edward from meeting the perfect age-appropriate woman. He literally had all the time in the world for that. But one day, I would need to tell him to leave me for my own good.

Edward was regarding me curiously, and his hand stroked my sleep-warm shoulder. "Bella? Despite the horror it causes you, can I just say here how much I wish I could read your mind?"

I shrugged, and took the opportunity to rub my cheek against his knuckles for a moment before answering. "I continue to be ecstatic that you can't. But what I want to say is that I understand your feelings. After all, I kept telling myself that I needed to stay away from you for your own good. We were both trying to do it."

"And we never succeeded," he said, his voice happy.

Not yet, I thought, looking at the vampire in my bed. But I didn't say that. "And I won't succeed in getting to school on time if I don't start getting ready. How do you feel about oatmeal?"

A wicked grin lighted his face. "I prefer more protein than that in the morning," he said, and his lips met my neck where blood thundered under my skin, and for a few lovely moments I forgot all about the long hours ahead when we had to play Ms. Swan, teacher, and Mr. Cullen, student.

Once I got to school, though, I had a hard time forgetting about Edward, my boyfriend. I found myself pressing my fingers to my bottom lip, recalling the sensation of his mouth on mine, or curling my hand around my neck where his breath had raised shivers on my skin. At lunch, I was vaguely aware of Angela eying me, perplexed, while Bruce Clapp jabbered on about a spring cross-country team and I responded with preoccupied mumbles, able to think only of my future lover just out of sight on the other side of the salad bar.

Edward, at least, knew how to act. While Alice's face was wreathed in excited smiles – at the end of class she even skipped up to my desk to whisper, "I knew it would work out!" - her brother returned to his role as sullen student, slumping in his chair, not making eye contact, refusing to answer. He would sacrifice his participation grade in the name of discretion.

It was reassuring to never be the recipient of a conspiratorial wink or a spate of exhibitionist French – but it was also disconcerting, even distressing, to spend an hour with him without contact, without acknowledgment.

By the end of the day, I was burning not to kiss Edward, but just to see some sign of our connection on his face. And that was what I got when I got to our meeting place on the trail, but there was also a hard line to his jaw and a tightening around his eyes that told me he was uneasy about something.

And apparently, he didn't want to kiss me either, at least not at that moment. When I reached him he grasped my shoulders, holding me still. "We have company," he murmured.

"Huh," I said in realization, glancing at the trees behind him. Of course, the wolves must have been hanging out by the trail in the afternoons, because otherwise how would Jacob have known that Edward and I were running together? "Can you hear them?" I whispered.

He shook his head, and grimaced. "I can smell them abundantly. My family is arranging a distraction. Are you ready?"

I was, eager to work out the day's stresses with a good sprint. But when I ran my eyes over his body, once more in those sexy-as-hell running tights, I was abruptly assailed by doubts.

"Why are you still running with me?" I asked. "This must be ridiculously slow for you." Staying at my speed was probably the equivalent of me keeping pace with a little old lady using a walker.

Edward looked pained. "Please don't feel uncomfortable about this," he said, his tone low and pleading. "I need this time with you, to get used to your heartbeat, your scent ... your heightened scent and heightened heartbeat, I should say. And, you should know, I very much enjoy spending time with you. Besides," he murmured, stepping closer to me, "I don't trust them," and tilted his head toward what I presumed was the hiding place of our shifty Quileute watchers.

He smiled suddenly and announced, "And now they're leaving." My breath left me in a squeaky huff as he lifted me up so he could kiss me thoroughly.

"I've been thinking of that all day," I admitted when he finally put me down.

"As have I."

Edward started off, first as always, but I called out, "Wait, wouldn't it be more effective with the whole scent-and-heartbeat thing if I were in front? Upwind, so to speak?"

He winced. "Yes, but ... I chase prey."

"Ah."

I thought about this and his vampire lures as we followed the path around ferns and tree trunks, the only sounds the squelch of my sneakers in the mud and my panting breaths that sent out little puffs of white air. When we returned home, the wolves were still gone, Edward told me, busy patrolling their border now that Esme and Emmett, vampires they had outed and who might take vengeance on them, were loitering there. Protecting the people of the reservation was a bigger priority than spying on me.

"I have another question," I said when we reached the back porch, our habitual conversation spot. Edward's eyes darted to the door of the house as if to ask, "Wouldn't you rather do this where it's warmer?" but he nodded.

"So," I said, "when you did that shoe-tying bit the day I tried to run in front of you …" I trailed off, remembering how his proximity had made me hazy and willing. At the time, I had figured that that was a result of my infatuation with him. But now that I had a basis of comparison, I realized that my compliance had an artificial element, a quality that was different from how I had felt last night when I was overwhelmed by his breath and taste. "You did something to me to make me agree to stay behind you, didn't you?"

His hesitation gave me my answer even before he said yes, and I sighed and grabbed my fleece hanging by the door. We were probably going to be outside for a while. I wasn't deluded – okay, not entirely deluded – and I knew that being with Edward involved a lot of risks to me physically, professionally and, most of all, emotionally. I accepted that. But I had to protect myself with at least this one boundary.

"So it was some sort of vampire compulsion?" I asked. "I thought that was Jasper's specialty."

"Jasper's gift is much more powerful than my small nudges of … persuasion," he said, watching me warily, and my uneasiness spiked at his acknowledgment of his abilities.

"Don't do that to me again," I said, my voice harsh. "You can explain things to me now. I want - I need to make my own decisions. I need to be in control of my own destiny. Will you promise me that?"

Edward finally moved, toward me, and I stepped back. My retreat sent a flash of hurt across his face, but he stopped. "If, heaven forfend, you encounter another vampire, my ability to calm you enough to take countermeasures or to slow the spread of adrenaline in your blood, it might save your life," he said. "Or if you get caught in a riptide, or are in a plane crash, or face a cougar again or -"

He continued with his list, pacing now on my little porch. His idea of what things threatened me was so different from my own that I zoned out for a moment, until he stopped, pulled his cellphone out from the pocket of his running shirt and stared at it in puzzlement.

"Is the phone going to decide for you?" I asked, puzzled myself.

"I'm wondering why Alice isn't weighing in on this."

I had a surge of anger. I needed him to do this not based on the outcome, but on principle, the principle that I had a right to my personal autonomy. "Maybe she foresees how pissed I'll be if you don't answer me yourself," I said, my voice hard.

"I've never," he started, yanking on his hair in agitation before resuming, "I've never had to think so much before about what could hurt someone, and it's appalling, the list is so long. And you" – he began to pace again — "you are so danger-prone, there are so many near-misses -"

"I am not danger-prone, and everybody has near-misses," I interrupted him, but that didn't seem to make him feel any better. "Okay, how about a compromise? If I'm not in a plane crash or being attacked by a vampire or otherwise facing immediate death, you promise not to use any 'persuasion' or whatever you call it on me."

He halted his pacing and seemed to weigh my offer. "I don't like it," he said.

"That's the thing about a compromise – you don't like it, but you can live with it," I pointed out. "I mean, I'd prefer a blanket prohibition, but I'll make this concession."

In truth, it wasn't much a concession on my part, since I had no objection to Edward's saving me from wandering cougars. What he couldn't save me from was my own destiny, and I didn't want him to try.

A silence stretched out. By Pacific Northwest standards, it wasn't that chilly, but it was as cold now as it ever got back in Laconia. I shivered and I watched my breath condense in the cooling air.

Edward looked at it too, and slumped, and said at last, "I promise. Now, I'll ask you simply, without vampire lures, can we go inside before you catch your death from cold? Please?"

So we did. I wondered if he knew that his "please?" worked as well on me as any compulsion.

School on Friday was a little better. Edward was still a morose adolescent, and I was again distracted after another night of grappling on my bed - we hadn't made any "progress," so to speak, and it was becoming obvious that I would need to figure out a way of releasing my tension on my own.

But I had the knowledge that I had a weekend ahead to be with my secret boyfriend, albeit a weekend filled with food-pantry work, school prep work and a church service I shouldn't skip for appearance sake. And I should try to get some cooking in there too, I decided, not realizing how complicated the next two days were going to become.

That night we were back in my kitchen, where I had just cobbled together dinner and Edward, having already finished his weekend homework, was racing through a stack of quizzes for me. I had to move aside Esme's cobalt-blue Dutch oven and the Arizona linguistics department's recorder to find room for my plate of pasta and Brussels sprouts.

"Hey, could you take that back to your house?" I said, indicating the Dutch oven.

"You can keep it," Edward said, marking a red X on a quiz before looking up at me – I was going to have to work more on the distinction between "paramount" and "tantamount," I could see. "Oddly, we don't have much use for it."

"I have my own," I said, pointing to a vintage burnt-orange Le Creuset visible on a shelf.

"Perhaps you can use a new one?" he suggested, giving it a dubious look.

"Hey, that pot has been used by generations of Higginbotham, Zapatero, Espinoza and Carabajal women. It's an heirloom." I bit into a sprout, relieved that it was edible even after a long stretch in my refrigerator. The bacon I had cooked it in helped too.

"It's from the 1970s, based on that color, and it has a chipped handle."

He was right, of course, and I shrugged. "No, you caught me, but it works fine. And this way, Esme will have a container the next time she wants to bring me homemade chicken soup."

"How was it?"

"Delicious. Remarkably similar to the soup at the diner," I said demurely, and he exploded into laughter.

"You caught us. We can all cook to some degree, but if we don't have to -"

"You can tell Esme that I like the diner's soup."

He put down the red pen and straightened the stack of tests before responding, "Why don't you bring the pot to my house this weekend? You can tell Esme yourself."

"Would your whole family be there?" I had trouble swallowing a bite of penne, and Edward noticed.

"Are you ... nervous?"

"Sure," I said, flapping my free hand anxiously. "I've never, you know, met someone's family as a significant other."

"Neither have I. They all love you."

"Even the ones who want to kill me?" Oops. I hadn't planned to say that, but some bits of knowledge tend to prey on a girl's mind.

Edward's face darkened. "There will be nobody there who wants to kill you."

"I could interpret that so many ways."

"This is the way to interpret it: nobody there wants to kill you. I know." His voice was firm, and he tapped his temple in emphasis. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be inviting you to my house. Now, what are you going to do about this?"

He was trying to distract me, and it worked: I grimaced as he pulled Professor Robles's recorder toward him.

"Ugh, I have to send that back, but I have to erase it first, since it has some of Old Quil Ateara's story about you on it," I said. Edward looked at me sharply, then fingered the empty slot on the side of the machine in a mute question. "Yeah," I answered, "Jacob Black took the memory stick, but he didn't realize that I was recording on the internal memory."

Edward stabbed a few buttons and my voice, then Mr. Ateara's, rang out in my kitchen:

"White?"

"Kabathla."

"Blue?"

"Thlopa."

"Green?"

"Thlopa."

"Oh, I see, okay. Black?"

"Shipa."

Edward stopped the recorder. "This is terrific," he said, looking delighted. "It would be immensely useful to know Quileute."

"You don't know it already?" I said in surprise as I carried my plate to the sink.

"Sadly, the Quileute Berlitz CDs are always sold out, and for some reason I've never been able to engage a native speaker as a tutor," he said dryly. "Which is unfortunate because the wolves communicate with each other in Quileute."

"The wolves talk?" I asked, trying to figure out how that would work.

He tapped his temple again. "Mentally. In their normal form they tend to think in English, but when they're wolves they have a sort of Quileute-speaking group mind. And phasing gives them the fluency in Quileute that the reservation classes have never managed to come close to achieving."

"Phasing makes them fluent?" The notion was so astonishing that I dropped heavily back into my chair.

"It's almost like a light bulb going on," Edward said, looking at me curiously. "You take the news that I don't sleep or breathe or age with complete aplomb, yet the idea that a few members of a small tribal band can speak their moribund language bowls you over. I think I should be insulted."

"It's just – " I started flapping my hands again, like a lunatic. "You can say pretty much anything about being a vampire, and I have to accept it because, well, what do I know? But you tell me something that goes against the current theories of language acquisition, and of course I'm amazed." I knew that scientists had identified language genes in humans, and even, a few researchers claimed, a genetic basis for tonal languages like Chinese and Navajo, but the idea of some process that made young men in one genetic pool instantly fluent in a certain tongue...

"Is it a genetic thing?" I asked. "I mean, do the wolves' genes mutate when they undergo the change? Or is there another sort of trigger?"

"We don't know. After all, the wolves aren't inclined to let us experiment on them. But that seems plausible - some outside influence, namely us, causes the receptors in their genes to switch on."

"Like cells exposed to pollution or radiation that become cancerous," I mused.

"Being compared to pollution is not exactly flattering."

"The smell," I said suddenly, ignoring his air of affront. "The atoms of your scent that they find so revolting. Enough exposure, and bam! they speak Quileute." Linguists on both sides of the nature-versus-nurture language acquisition debate would scream if they could hear this … not that they ever could.

I was bouncing in my seat, but Edward was still calmly sitting in his chair opposite me. "I don't see how you're not blown away by this," I told him.

He considered that a moment. "Perhaps it's because my kind have a similar transformation. We undergo the change to vampire, and suddenly we can acquire any language easily. Such as –" he paused as if waiting for a drum roll "-Tohono O'odham."

"Tohono O'odham," I repeated flatly. "Raquel's dialect of it?" My friend had taught me a few words, but the language's distance from English and Spanish meant that I would need years of practice to become merely proficient.

He shrugged a little. "Her dialect has been a little harder to track down, but yes, I've been able to study it." He took up the pen again and tapped it on the table a couple of times. "It was so frustrating that I couldn't read your mind, so I was eager to meet your best friend, the person you might have confided to about me. And then there we are, in that bookstore in Seattle, and she turns out to think in a language that I don't know or even recognize –"

"How does that work?" I asked. "The non-'Ulysses' version of mind-reading, I mean."

"When people live in the moment, that's easy to understand – I just to watch through their eyes," he explained. "But their mental monologues – seeing something that sets off a memory and prompts a conclusion, that's more useful for me when I'm listening for threats. I could tell that encountering me and Alice and Esme was making Raquel think, and I couldn't decipher what it was. Because as your hero Noam Chomsky says, 'Language is thought,' and higher thinking inevitably involves language. In Raquel's case, thinking about something like me involves Tohono O'odham."

"So the second I tell you what Raquel's mother tongue is, you're on the Internet looking it up," I said, remembering how he ignored me in the car on the way home in favor of what I thought was playing on his laptop.

"Yes. I've become rather comfortable in it," he said blithely, adding with an infuriating lack of modesty, "and now I've added it to the stable of languages I can understand."

Wolves have nothing on me, was the underlying message, but I could focus only the hot wave of envy washing over me. Edward had strength, beauty and intelligence – and the one superpower I wanted most.

"I hate you," I said fervently.

His satisfied laugh was cut short, though, by something that made him first go still and then spring from his chair.

"Seth Clearwater is coming," he said, his voice low and strained. I dashed over to the window and looked through the curtains, but all I saw outside were the lights of the Stanley house across the street. Then a second later, I could glimpse a pair of headlights at the end of the road. I turned around to look at Edward, now at my front door.

"He's not alone," he said. "Raquel is with him. He's told her about me. She knows."

Chapter title: "What time is it in paradise?" from "Sénégal Fast Food," by Amadou & Mariam.

Bella is still clueless about some things, but then Edward isn't telling her everything yet, is he?

Links about killer mattresses and language genes on my profile. And yes, the researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute say that the majority of American 17-year-olds are virgins. That changes at 18, though.

Thanks for reviewing!

And a note from Mr. Price: I suppose if poor Edward can hold out a century without getting his rocks off, we readers can wait a few more months or so until Mrs. P. decides it is O.K. for these two to finally do it. But I think the author is toying with us readers. As a certain teacher in this story once put it: Elle ne joue pas franc jeu. (Fortunately, in real life, she did not move quite so slowly.)