Recap: Last chapter, Bella meets the family, minus Emmett and Rosalie, and hears the stories of their human lives (but not of their changes). Carlisle tells her that the Cullens have figured out that they need to leave Forks soon to keep the wolf pack's numbers down. Bella discovers what Edward keeps in the refrigerator (apples, not blood), and what scandalous pictures he keeps in his room, and that the Cullens are behind the Pacific Northwest Trust. Edward explains that vampires mate for life or the vampire equivalent, and offers to change her.

Some of you asked why I called Bella clueless last time: it's because she thinks the Cullens would take off without her. Of course they wouldn't! Oh, wait….

Also, to those of you whom I sent a teaser: I realize belatedly that it might have been misleading, so apologies. It was really just fluff.

Thanks to the lovely Camilla10 and to Mr. Price.

Chapter 15: Nakeyi

Some women would swoon at such a declaration of eternal devotion. I was not one of them. "I really am your special snowflake, then," I said sadly.

He winced. "Snowflakes are ephemeral."

"So am I. I'm going to die."

I didn't add the "someday," because that was both too vague and promised too much. Raquel's words from last night flashed through my brain: "Have you told him about Renee? I mean, he's immortal, and you're … not."

"I am all too aware of that," he said, and it was if he was answering both me and Raquel. He fell silent for a moment. "I could change that, you know," he added quietly. "You could be like me."

For the third time in the Cullens' house, I was unable to speak, but this time I was struggling to say what I needed without wounding feelings.

Edward watched me for a second, then pressed a fingertip to my lips, as if he found my silence all too eloquent. "But Alice said you would say no," he said.

His words released the ones that had been locked up in my chest. "It's not because I am disgusted by what you are," I said breathlessly in my rush to reassure him. "But you said that all of you have killed people –"

"Except Carlisle."

I dropped my eyes to my hands. "I wouldn't presume to think that I was like Carlisle," I said almost inaudibly. Edward had said that it had taken years for the other members of his family to control their appetites, that it was still difficult for some of them. And I had no confidence that I was enough of a special snowflake to be any different.

I looked back up at him, at his bleak expression. "I don't understand exactly how you become a vampire," I added, "and believe me, I noticed that everyone skipped over that part of their story, but I'm guessing that none of you chose to become one."

"True," he admitted.

"But I do have a choice. How can I choose to become someone who almost certainly will kill someone else?"

"You have a long time to think about it," he said, his voice determined. I should have corrected him, but I didn't have the heart to.

"I'm sorry," I said instead.

"Don't be," he said, and shifted me around so that I was straddling his thighs, my leggings sliding over the fine wool of his trousers. "You know, Alice also says she doesn't see a future where we're aren't together."

"Really? A long one?" I asked, hope suddenly trying to bloom inside me.

He shook his head. "Her visions aren't time-stamped. The important thing is that you are here now, and I plan to enjoy it to the fullest. For instance, never-" he ran his hands up my back "-would I have imagined when I moved here to Forks that my AP English teacher would one day be sitting on my lap in my bedroom."

"Really?" I said. "You couldn't imagine Val Berty making out with you on your sofa? It's a good thing he got that unexpected 'inheritance.'"

"That's a very good thing – I much prefer my fake-lesbian AP English teacher to my secretly gay one," Edward agreed, before leaning forward to kiss me while his fingers found the hem of my shirt and then the way underneath it. The chill of his hands quickly yielded to the heat of my skin, our hands roaming. My shirt was eventually discarded, my bra was unclasped, and I started slowly pushing his thin rust-colored sweater up and off.

I couldn't help gaping: I'd always preferred guys with hair, but seeing the smooth expanse of Edward's chest, with its perfectly proportioned muscles and gleaming skin, I could no longer remember why. Edward was everything a sculptor in ancient Greece would have wanted for a marble god: a body that said not just youth and health, bittersweet in their certain passing, but also strength and permanence. Immortality. The sculptor could take comfort in knowing that his stone Adonis – no, not Adonis, because Adonis dies - that his stone Apollo would grace the world long after his death, securing his fame among future generations; I could take comfort in knowing Edward would live on when I was gone. He might even remember me occasionally.

But that was for later. For the moment, my own fallible body was focused on desire, lust, love, the antidote to thoughts of disease and mortality, and as Blanche DuBois said, the opposite of death.

I put my hand in the center of Edward's chest, hard bone underneath the skin. He wasn't breathing. I looked up at his face to see the uncertain expression it had had before, the uncertainty of a boy showing a part of himself to a girl for the first time.

Someday I would tell him how breath-catching it was, his mixture of confidence and hesitation, how the vampire who ripped the buttons off my shirt the night before co-existed with the virgin who wasn't sure if I would like what I saw. Right now, though, I needed to tell him something else. "You're amazing looking," I murmured. "You know that, don't you? You must hear that all the time."

His shrug was defensive. "I can't hear it from you."

"Then I'll show you what I think," I said, and he seemed to vibrate under me as my hands explored his body as he had explored mine the night before, my lips following, tasting the curves of his neck and shoulders, brushing his nipples, his obvious arousal fueling my own. I moaned against his skin as his hips rolled beneath me, the contact even more potent than through our jeans before. I could feel his shape between my legs, and that almost overwhelming, primal, unwise urge to have him inside me immediately.

He felt it too. "Stop," he whispered, raising me above his lap. I whimpered in frustration. "Please, give me a moment."

I couldn't object to such a plea, and besides, this new position put my own chest in easier reach of his lips. As he leaned forward, I grabbed his shoulders to anchor myself and keep as still as I could. Fuck me, I could never have fantasized such a sensation as erotic as his tongue on my breasts. I whimpered again, this time out of pleasure in the present and the memories of his doing this to me last night, at his own obvious delight in eliciting a response from me that a human man never had.

If Edward wanted to remind me of the advantages of being a vampire, he was doing a compelling job.

My fingers lost their grip on his skin, and he lowered me back onto his lap so he could move his left hand between my shoulder blades, supporting me as I curved myself up into his mouth. His right hand covered my other breast, and I found the shape of his length again. He inhaled sharply as I stroked myself against it until I cried out.

His lips released my nipple and my eyes fluttered open to meet his. "Yes," I told him then, panting, and he guided my hips with strong fingers as he moved underneath me. I watched his face contort before his hands fell to the side, he arched up once, turned his head and groaned.

With his hands gone, I wobbled on his lap. Edward steadied me and twisted us around so we were lying on our sides, my head propped on his arm. I grunted a little as the muscles in my legs communicated how they felt about having been folded under me so long.

"Are you in discomfort?" Edward asked. For him, this sensation would be completely foreign, I guessed.

"I am fabulous," I said, and wriggled against him. "And grateful for yoga."

"Hmm?"

"I have runner's thighs, so it's only because of yoga that I'm not even stiffer than I am."

I put his hand on my thigh, still trembling, and his face cleared in understanding. "I can actually do something about that," he murmured. He kneaded my aching quads and probed the muscles around my knees as I moaned.

My eye caught the brown-paper-wrapped rectangle still leaning against an arm of the sofa. "You know, you paid for Raquel's brother's braces by buying that painting," I said lazily.

He rolled a knuckle along the top of my leg. "I thought I was paying for your trip to France."

"Nah. I'll probably never get to France, and Craig really needed his teeth fixed." I smiled, remembering how Raquel insisted on examining the work the orthodontist had done when Craig picked up Raquel and me at the airport in Phoenix.

"Why would you never get to France?" Something - confusion, consternation, maybe – crossed his face and vanished.

"Work, school, life," I said airily, not adding the "death." "Teachers don't actually have that much time in the summer, and it's more expensive to travel then, anyway."

His fingers traveled further up under my skirt, and I moaned again, but for a different reason. "Well, I'm going to take up a lot of your time, and I think we can manage to get you to France," he said, his voice slipping into a deeper, sultrier register.

"Mmm, sure, yeah," I said, not really paying attention. We were still half-naked, we were who we were, his lips were on my neck and soon we were moving against each other again.

I might be in a house full of vampires, but in this room it was just him, me and the ghosts of all the women in my family who died before they got old.

-έπ-

Raquel and I tried to figure out a way to do our long run together on Sunday afternoon, but the logistics were too difficult: if Seth ran with us, I'd disappear off Alice's radar; if Edward ran with us, Seth would be frantic; if both of them ran with us, Edward would still be able to read Raquel's mind; and nobody was happy about our running without a supernatural guardian in the woods where a cougar had confronted me.

So my best friend and I met in an empty corner of the diner after our separate runs so we could debrief each other on meeting the family of our respective significant other. Sue Clearwater was worried about her son's imprint not being Quileute or a least Makah, and Raquel acknowledged that spending her life in LaPush wasn't on her to-do list.

"But the wolves feel compelled to stay on the reservation," she told me. "Their protective instinct is really strong."

"Sounds familiar," I said, remembering how Edward had shoved Seth up against the wall when the wolf had burst into my house.

"Yeah," Raquel said. She was obviously thinking of the same thing, because she added, "It's good that Seth got to 'save' me from those drunks at the tavern. You know, even though he thought Edward wasn't so bad to hang out with, he was feeling a little raw about being manhandled. Vamp-handled, rather."

We both snickered a little at the foibles of men, and she went on, "Anyway, I assured Sue that I can wait, because one day Seth'll grow out of being on border patrol –"

"He will?"

"Sure, when your guys can't keep up the charade anymore and move away, Seth won't need to get all wolfy, and he'll become a regular person again." She saw something in my face, and said more gently, "You know that they'll have to move away, right?"

"Yeah, they mentioned that," I said. I batted around a carrot slice in my soup with a spoon.

"Did they say when?" Raquel's voice was excited, and I realized that from her perspective, the sooner that the Cullens left, the sooner Seth would be a "regular person" again. But that also meant the sooner my life in Forks would be upended.

"No, but they're aware of the effect they have on the Quileute, and want to minimize that," I said.

Raquel put down her own soup spoon and considered me a moment. "When they leave, what will you do?" she asked quietly.

I shrugged and mumbled, "We haven't really talked about the future yet."

Raquel pursed her lips in disapproval. "So you haven't told Edward about your family history yet," she said. "You know, he's got a temper, and he's going to be upset when he finds out."

"Probably," I said, swirling my soup some more. "But he suggested that I could just skip the whole dying part of being a human anyway."

There was a silence and I looked up to see that Raquel's expression was troubled. "That would certainly solve a big problem for you," she said.

"It would solve a big problem for anyone," I noted dryly. "But I said no."

She didn't appeared to have heard me."Of course. TBut the idea is .." Raquel's voice grew more heated. "God, it's repellent. Why would you want to become – why would you do that to yourself?"

I was affronted on the Cullens' behalf. "They're not repellent. I just don't want to kill anyone."

"What?" Raquel said too loudly, and too late, I understood that I had made a mistake. She looked around the diner and lowered her voice. "I thought that the only reason that the Cullens were tolerable was that they don't kill people."

Apparently the Cullens had not told the wolves everything about their own family history, and I shouldn't either.

"They don't, and I've never felt anything but safe with them," I said hastily. "But they are what they are, and so that potential is there. It's why Seth didn't want you to go running with a Cullen without his being there to protect you. Just as Edward is reluctant for me to hang out with Seth, who at any moment could turn into a wild animal with gigantic claws and disembowel me."

This time, it was Raquel who was affronted, on Seth's behalf. "Yeah, but he won't," she protested. "If you want to take that idea further, you have the potential to kill someone every time you're behind the wheel of your Honda. But you don't."

"But I could, and a hundred people in this country die every day because of car crashes."

"And you get into your car almost every day anyway. I mean, absolutely, I think it's disgusting, to be …. like that, but since you don't seem to - " She stopped, grimaced at what she was suggesting, and continued, "I don't know if I could stand being around you. But you could do it."

"Let's not talk about this anymore now," I said, making a stop sign with my hand. "Listen, you wouldn't believe the art what the Cullens have in their house."

"No, I probably couldn't," Raquel said sourly at my change in subject, but I could see that she was intrigued.

"You know that painting of me you had in Bree's show –"

Raquel figured it out instantly. "No, really? The Cullens bought it? Esme bought it?"

"Edward, actually. He's 110, he can buy his own art."

"Hah, someone really is perving to your naked picture, huh?" Raquel teased me, but I kept my own face expressionless, so she went on, with a touch of disappointment, "I guess that means no one will ever see it again."

"Maybe?" I admitted. "On the other hand, they also have a David Hockney and an Alexander Calder, so you're not in shabby company."

I was still telling her about the Cullens' art collection when I noticed a tall, handsome, not-regular-person Quileute hanging around outside through the diner's front door. Fuck, I just disappearedShit. I sent a quick text to Edward to reassure him that it was merely Seth coming to drive my friend back to Seattle. Raquel snorted as I typed.

"He's got you on a short leash, huhdoesn't he?" she said.

"I wouldn't talk about leashes if I were you, Señora Lobowolf girl."

She raised an eyebrow. "Ah, but at least in my relationship I'm the one holding the leash. You, on the other hand, have a mountain lion by the tail."

-έπ-

Edward suggested that I do my laundry at his place, but I didn't want Rosalie and Emmett, the vampires who wanted to kill me, to hate me more than they already did by forcing them out of their house just so I could have clean underwear. So I had my usual dinner with the gang on Wednesday, and went to the Laundr-O-Matic afterward.

There was a television blaring Fox News chained to the wall in back - this was a Republican town, after all - and I took advantage of a lull in customers to shut it off. Finally, I could do my work in peace.

But I thought that too soon, because when I turned around, I saw a former friend under the lights of the parking lot outside. I automatically reached for my phone, but hesitated over what to write. I wasn't sure that "I'm fine" or "911" was appropriate, so I settled for "Jacob."

'Why are you here?" I asked as he opened the plate-glass door. I couldn't help sounding hostile – the last time I'd seen him was after my unusable interview with Old Quil Ateara, when Jacob had nearly dislocated my shoulder by dragging me into the woods to make me watch him turn into a big fucking dog. And since then I'd learned he wanted to get me fired by making me look like a sexual predator. So, yeah, I wasn't in the mood.

"Bella," Jacob said. "I wanted to talk to you without your boyfriend taking over the conversation the way he does." He said "boyfriend" with contempt in his voice.

"You could call."

"You could hang up. Or he could make you hang up."

I glared at him, and at his implication that I was a pawn in some wolf-vampire game. "I have to tell my linguistics professor in Tucson that my Quileute project fell through, and you know, I have a job I want to keep and bills to pay," I said, annoyed. "So if you're not here to apologize about screwing me over and scheming to make me unemployable, I don't want to hear it." To make my point, I reached into a dryer and started pulling out sheets.

"How do you know about that?" he asked. The curiosity was palpable in his voice.

"Fuck off, Jacob."

He huffed. "I'm sorry it messed your thing up with Old Quil, but it had to be done," he said. "And if you stop spending time with a 'student,' you won't get into trouble at work."

Since that was essentially a non-apology, I didn't respond. I snapped the wrinkles out of a flat sheet, and Jacob reached out to grab one end, whether to be helpful or be an asshole, I didn't know. I yanked it away from him. "Don't touch my sheets," I said. "I'll just have to wash them again to get the wolf smell out."

His face twisted at my words, and their implication. "You really let him in your bed?" he spat out. He looked nauseated. "You can't be –" He stopped as the door opened behind him.

"Hola, Señora Alvarez," I called out as Gracie's mother walked into the Laundr-O-Matic.

"Hola, profesora," she answered, and we exchanged pleasantries while she took two pairs of pants out of a dryer, I started another dryer cycle for my duvet cover and Jacob seethed. Mrs. Alvarez glanced at him dubiously when she finished folding, but I gave her a reassuring smile so she'd be comfortable enough to leave me alone with a thuggy-looking young man who I was pretty sure hadn't showered all that recently.

Jacob started up again as soon as the door closed. "How can you even stand –"

I cut him off. "Don't say something about something that's none of your business," I said as I watched Mrs. Alvarez walk across the little parking lot, lugging her clothes in a plastic bag over her shoulder.

"It is my business," he said, slamming his fist on the table next to us, making my laundry basket jump. I glared at him, and he slumped, suddenly looking weary. "This wolf thing is like puberty, only a thousand times worse," he grumbled.

I felt a pang of sympathy for the sweet guy I used to know, the one who was now hidden under wolf bravado and wolf responsibilities. "Yeah, sure looks that way," I muttered as I searched the drum of a dryer for a missing sock.

"It's my job to protect humans from vampires," he said. "And you're human. For now, from what I've heard."

I nearly hit my head on the dryer door at his words, and their implication. "What –" I began, but halted at the sight of another visitor, this time someone with white marble skin who was the shape and size of a defensive tackle. For a moment I wondered if he would fit through the door.

"Black," the shape said in a thunderous baritone. By now, I could recognize a vampire when I saw one, and so I wasn't surprised to hear wolf-snarling next to me as the newcomer approached us.

"Cullen," Jacob said shortly, the fatigue gone from his stance.

"Emmett?" I guessed. A smile lighted the vampire's face at that, and damn, he wasn't Edward, but he was still astonishingly handsome, with his bright gold eyes and curly dark hair. Even better, he didn't seem to want to kill me.

"This guy bothering you?" Emmett asked me.

I tried to say something, but Jacob talked over me. "You were here the last time," he told Emmett. "So you know that if any of you attack someone, the treaty's void."

"Sure, and you already violated the treaty by telling on us to Bella," he said easily. "So I figure, we get a free one."

"No!" Jacob and I said simultaneously, he in outrage, I in horror.

"I'm just kidding," Emmett said, not entirely convincingly. He spread his arms in a way reminiscent of a gigantic vulture, the fabric of his white t-shirt straining over his shoulders. "Aw, come on."

"The point is, any plans you have to make Bella one of you can't happen," Jacob said. Both his jaw and his fists were clenching, and I edged away from him in case his werewolf hormones went amok.

Emmett's face darkened. "The point," he said, "is that any plans that Bella has for her future are nothing for you to become involved in, Black. You delivered your message, so go away, and let Bella do what she needs to do."

That last clause could be interpreted to apply either to my laundry or my life, and Jacob obviously didn't miss that. He stared at Emmett, and Emmett stared back, secure in his physical superiority over a lone wolf, until Jacob dropped his eyes.

"We'll be watching," Jacob said, sullen and needing the last word. We watched the door close behind him.

"Well," Emmett said, shrugging, then smiled. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Bella. Sorry about all the testosterone in the room."

I eyed him cautiously. "I don't mean to be rude, but where's Edward?"

"Lurking nearby. It'd cause talk to have him come here. It's fortunate that Black kept himself together – people can even see in from the street driving by." As if to emphasize his point, Lindsey Mallory's mom and a guy I took to be her boyfriend walked in with their baskets. She seemed disconcerted to see my companion, but waved at me and began loading washing machines as Emmett started an "I'm like, dude!"-filled monologue about the University of Washington, frats, his indecision over a major, etc. It was impressive, how convincing he was.

Mrs. Mallory's boyfriend strolled toward the silent TV, and I interrupted Emmett's flow to call out, "I don't think that's working." He looked at me doubtfully, but a minute later he and Mrs. Mallory headed out.

"Hmm," Emmett said. "You might need a little more practice on your lying. It's an ability that comes in handy."

"I'll work on it," I said without sarcasm, and tried to guess how tall Emmett was. He looked as if he could crush me with one hand – it was easy to see why Coach Clapp was so peeved that he wouldn't play football - yet I felt no dangerous vibe from him at all.

"So," he asked, "you're not going to guess my accent the way you did with everyone else?" He looked a little let down.

"Oh," I said, thinking over our conversation, and realizing that nothing had jumped out at me, no Pacific Northwest markers, no Northern cities vowel shift, no R-dropping, no "pen-pin" merger. "General American. Which means I'd have to bet that you're from the Midwest like Esme, though of course you could be from anywhere."

"Hah, I stumped you." He grinned at me, obviously delighted. "Eastern Tennessee. But back in the 1930s, an Appalachian accent was not a prestige accent, so I suppressed it. It's an effort to bring it back."

We talked about how accents in America had changed during his decades as a vampire as I finished up the laundry, finding, to my utter lack of surprise, that Emmett was far more knowledgeable than I about them, and that he could also do a wicked Katharine Hepburn imitation. "Dexteh, would you mind doing something for me? Get the heck out of heah," he said, channeling Tracy Lord in "The Philadelphia Story."

I pulled out my duvet cover, which was finally dry. "Can you help me fold this?" I asked Emmett.

He hesitated, and I said, realizing, "Oh, Edward won't like your scent on my sheets either, will he?"

"'Either'?" Emmett's face darkened again. "The wolf didn't touch your things, did he?"

"No, I stopped him." I struggled with the duvet cover a moment, then gave up and just shoved it into my basket. "What was Jacob talking about? How does he even know about it?"

The vagueness of my questions didn't seem to faze Emmett. "Well, you could interpret that section of the treaty as preventing Edward from changing you into one of us. Or not. I'm sure we could out-argue the wolves on that."

"You do know that I said no to Edward, right?"

"Yes. But do you want a dog telling you what to do?" He regarded me thoughtfully for a moment before continuing: "And you could change your mind. As for how Black knows – well, did you tell anyone?"

"I told Raquel. I didn't know it should be a secret from her," I complained. "So she didn't know either."

"There you go. She must have told Seth Clearwater, and then Black used the Vulcan mind-meld to find out –"

"What are you talking about?"

"You know, the Vulcan mind-meld from 'Star Trek.'"

"The one from the 1960s?" He nodded. "I'm 24. I've never seen it."

"But there are reruns all the time! Youth is no excuse for ignorance." I waved my hand to encourage him to move on. "Okay, okay, when the wolves are airing out their genitals together in the forest, the whole pack can hear one another's thoughts, Edward says, even from a distance. From a military standpoint, it's useful, since – hey, you've studied linguistics, you can figure it out."

"Huh?"

"Wolves don't have lips," Emmett said smugly.

"Just so you know, we didn't cover the speaking abilities of supernatural creatures in college."

"That's a shame. Anyway, the wolves can't talk, obviously. But with the mind-meld, when Clearwater thinks about something Raquel has said to him, bam - Black knows it too."

I shook my head and hoisted my knapsack onto my shoulder. "And in supernaturally acquired Quileute, no less. Just when I think I've heard all the freakiness of Forks, I learn something else," I muttered. "By the way, why are you here?"

Emmett slid my basket onto his palm, then lifted it up like a waiter balancing a tray. Clever. It kept his hands – and his scent – off my laundry. "I was next to Edward when he got your text," he said. "We were, ah, dining al fresco."

"Sure," I said, careful to keep my tone casual. "But I thought you and Rosalie wanted to kill me. That's why you weren't at the house when I visited."

Emmett looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed. "Oh, I don't want to kill you."

Hmm. "And Rosalie?" I asked.

"Well, she might," he conceded cheerfully. "I was just keeping her company."

-έπ-

January in Forks was everything that everyone had warned me it would be. The days that weren't below freezing and gray were just above freezing and wet. I caught myself missing Tucson's 300 days of sunshine as I made my way to school day after day in my Civic, my bike consigned to a corner of my living room, my running shoes perpetually drying out next to it.

Happily, I had someone to, if not warm my bed, at least share it with me. The progression of our intimacy was slow, but I went to sleep satisfied, even if there was always a moment when I wanted to beg Edward to just slide into me, I was so ready, there was surely no danger, and had to restrain myself. If he could stop himself from attacking me in one way, I could stop myself from attacking him in another.

It was important that I kept telling myself that.

But apart from making out, we couldn't do the usual boyfriend-girlfriend things – no movie dates with Angela and Ben, no walking down the street hand in hand, our only contact in public being a greeting in church on Sunday and an excruciating hour every weekday when I had to pretend that the man who worshipped my breasts at night was a student in my classroom like any other.

When school was canceled for a snow day, Edward started planning how he could teach me to cross-country ski, there was a perfect remote stretch where he could make a track for me … until Alice called to tell me that Mike Newton was going to suggest sledding on a hill near Lake Crescent, and that it would be prudent for me to agree.

Edward growled, but I went, and enjoyed it – I'd never been sledding, and Mike had a great assortment of toboggans and stuff thanks to his business. Angela had us all over for hot chocolate afterward, I made crepes, Samantha Wells brought Kahlua, Lakshmi Mallory took out a baggie and rolling papers that I declined, we played poker. Nobody looking in would guess that one of us was getting texts from a vampire.

I ducked into the kitchen to respond to Alice's advice on how I could win the next hand. "That's cheating!" I typed, grinning as her frowny-face answer to my answer arrived before I could hit Send.

"Bella, are you … with somebody now?" I jerked my head up in surprise. Mike's face was red with embarrassment.

"What?"

"Is that him?" Mike nodded toward my phone, which I had instinctively clutched to my chest for protection. Nobody needed to see that I was trading emoticons with a Forks High senior. Out in the living room, Angela was objecting to Samantha's trying to take a picture of her with a cigarette because, you know, teacher morality clauses.

"Um, no," I told Mike, but to my ears I sounded as if I was hiding something, and evidently to his as well.

"Who is it?" he persisted.

I sighed, because Emmett was right, I wasn't going to be convincing trying to deny it. "Somebody not from Forks," I said softly, and with some truth.

"Yeah, ever since you came back from Arizona, you've been different," Mike said. He stared down at his feet.

Good - Mike was assuming that if I had a local lover, I'd have spent the day in bed with him rather than sledding. But dammit, if Mike noticed my change in mood, other people might too. "Mike, would you not say anything to anyone?" I asked. "It's very new, and I don't want –"

"Yeah," he interrupted me, some emotion twisting his face. I shoved my phone into my pocket, and Alice left me alone the rest of the evening.

But when I told Edward about this exchange after I crawled into bed next to him that night, underneath my new electric blanket, he seemed more pleased than anything else. "Don't worry," he told me, a warm hand stroking my arm, then lightly outlining a bruise I'd obtained on a sled run that ended in a tumble. "Mike noticed because he was watching you so closely. He thought he had a chance with you, and now he's missed it."

"But I never gave him any – Wait," I said, my eyes narrowing. "Why do you think that?" Poor Mike. At least he'd never know his brain had been invaded.

"Because I am a man," Edward said, demonstrating by pulling up on the tank top I'd just put on, and nuzzling the skin over my ribs that he had just uncovered. "And I have heard many men's thoughts." His lips moved up, and I inhaled sharply as they met the lower curve of my breast. "They are predictable, and if by some unhappy circumstance I were in his situation," his mouth hovered over my nipple, "I'd be thinking the same ones that he is."

Then warmth bloomed where Edward's tongue touched my flesh, and at that moment exposure seemed to me to be a very fine thing.

-έπ-

I threw my red pen onto my kitchen table so hard that it bounced and landed on the floor. "Oh, just bite me," I said bitterly.

Edward looked up from the quizzes he was correcting, startled. His mouth opened and then closed without a word.

Shit. "I'm sorry," I mumbled. "But look!" I pushed Justin Stanley's "Scarlet Letter" essay over to him. "It's such blatant plagiarism."

Edward read aloud, "'Even so strict a moralist as St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed that all acts, even sinful ones, have at their root the pursuit of the good. Every sin, says Aquinas, "includes an inordinate turning to a mutable good"; inordinate and mutable though Hester and Dimmesdale's love may have been, it was also a good.'" He dropped the paper onto the table. "It does indeed seem unlikely that Justin Stanley would be able to produce this. He was surprised that Dimmesdale was Pearl's father."

I didn't bother to ask Edward how he knew this. "What's worse, Justin's got one of the same paragraphs as Lindsey Mallory does in her essay," I said instead.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'll scan both of these essays at school tomorrow and submit then to Turnitin." The plagiarism-detection website would confirm Justin's cheating and tell me where he cribbed his essay from; it would also, I suspected, clear Lindsey of everything except making the bad decision to go out with an arrogant coddled quarterback. "I can give him a zero, but I bet Banner won't punish him otherwise. Football culture sucks."

"One of many reasons we've never lived in Texas," Edward said. He tapped the essay with a long finger. "I know who wrote this."

"What?" Edward was constantly astonishing me with the breadth of his knowledge, but this seemed too random even for him.

"Esme was asked to write an introductory essay to a Hawthorne collection a few years ago – it was when she was teaching at Green Mountain College in Vermont and the rest of us were at Dartmouth and Middlebury."

I forgot all about Justin Stanley. "You were at Dartmouth? When?" I asked, my stomach coiling unpleasantly.

"From 2001 to 2007. Are you all right?"

"Damn Charlie to hell," I spat out, and pushed away from the table, my chair squealing on the floor. Edward raised his eyebrows.

"I got into Dartmouth," I said, my voice hollow. "I would have started in 2006."

"But?"

"Charlie didn't want me to leave Arizona. He wouldn't fill out the financial aid form. You would have been a grad student? You could have been my T.A.?"

"I was in the molecular medicine program," Edward said slowly, anger seeping into his own voice, "so probably not. But I would have found you. I would have found your scent and followed it anywhere. I would have – dammit!" He was gone then, the creak of the back door telling me he had sped into the woods.

I picked my red pen off the floor and then paced as I waited, stopping occasionally to stare at the kitchen window that looked out on the road. It was covered with a curtain now, of course, but if I opened it I would see the Stanleys' tacky McMansion and the two expensive S.U.V.s in the driveway, the fruits of Sharon Stanley's dubious real estate dealings. Justin was probably inside playing "Madden NFL" or getting wasted or jerking off. Like a lot of teenagers. But still, blech.

I wondered where Edward had gone to vent his ire. Like almost anyone who wasn't able to go to her dream college, I had gotten over my disappointment – after all, in Tucson I had met Raquel, and I had fallen in love with linguistics. But now I wished that I could break something too, as I imagined what might have been: Edward and I could have met as graduate student and freshman meat, and no one would have blinked an eye. There would have been no need to hide; there would have been no wolves, but Esme and Alice would surely have figured out a way to manage the Big Reveal.

What I didn't doubt was that the two of us would have been together, walking hand in hand, yes, across the campus Green, running trails in the White Mountains without any worries about being seen together. At UA I had never had a boyfriend-boyfriend, or felt the desire for one, but now the thought of what I had been deprived of was like a furious burning coal in my chest.

A wave of cool air announced Edward's return. He looked calmer now, calm enough to wrap his arms around me and kiss the pulse points in my neck. His mouth was cold but felt so wonderful that it didn't matter.

"What did you do?" I asked, a little hazily.

"I cleared out some of the stumps in that field of slash along the trail. I kept meaning to do that anyway."

"That's good," I said absently. "Maybe something will start growing there now." I arched my neck to encourage his lips to travel, but Edward pulled back.

"I also realized something," he said. "Perhaps at Dartmouth we would have encountered each other under the worst circumstances. Perhaps suddenly one night when you were walking home from the library, or your job. When I was alone." He dropped his arms and stepped away from me. "Without Alice to scream at me, without witnesses. Without my being able to hear as your mind pleaded with me to stop. A crime of opportunity."

"You won't hurt me," I said, reaching toward him. He hesitated, then took my hand, but stayed where he was.

"I would have hurt you so, so much." He followed the lifeline on my palm with his finger. "And I never would have known what I had missed."

"I wouldn't have either," I said, adding silently, and maybe that would have been better for us both. I couldn't be sorry about meeting Edward, and being with him now, but the consequences for us were going to be heart-breaking. And I could certainly be sorry about the years I would never get back.

I apparently didn't school my expression properly, because I was suddenly in his arms again.

"Don't be sad," he said quietly. "That's not what happened. And you could still go to Dartmouth some day."

"I don't think there's a graduate program in linguistics there."

"You could go as an undergraduate," he said meaningfully. Oh, as a vampire. I blinked and turned my head, and he went on, "Please just think about it. You have time."

"No, there isn't time," I said, pressing myself as much as I could against him. "Six years! Six years we could have been with each other. Six years when we wouldn't have had to be a secret."

"If I had been able to control myself," he reminded me. "But – let's do something now. Take a trip with me. Next month, when we have that break. We'll visit some place where we can go to a concert together, where I can kiss you in public, where we can sit in a restaurant –"

That made me laugh despite my anger. "Why would you want to go to a restaurant?"

"Because it's what couples do in this country and in this era. Will you run off with me?"

I could see how the sneaking around that would be involved could be dangerous. Maybe someone from Forks would see us, maybe going on a trip would be the straw that broke the wolf's back. Ah, fuck it.

"Of course," I said.

"Good." He smiled brilliantly at me, and the kitchen around me seemed to shimmy a bit. "I'll make the arrangements, with Alice, certainly. Are you finished with grading tonight, please?"

No, but fuck that too. "Yes," I said, and squeaked as Edward caught me up and made one jump to the turn of the stairs, one jump to the second floor, both of us laughing, the laughter becoming moans and gasps under fingers and lips, skin against skin.

We had missed six years, and we might not have much of a future, but we had this moment, these moments. It would have to be enough.

Chapter title: "I am leaving," from "Nakonzonga" by Lokua Kanza.

Men – they always want what they can't have, right? (Mr. Price says he doesn't know what I'm talking about.)

The "pin-pen" merger is a marker of Southern accents - like Emmett, I had to work to suppress mine and say "pen" differently from "pin." Now I do it automatically.

Thanks for reading and reviewing, and have a fabulous New Year's!