Recap: Last on TaWfI, Bella and Angela have a dinner with Jessica Stanley at which Jessica expresses her admiration of under-age Edward in his jeans and Angela blurts out that Bella is straight, contrary to rumors. Bella agrees to coach a cross-country club; among her runners are Eliza Teague, Gracie Alvarez, Justin Stanley and two vampires, with Alice leading the pack and Edward shuffling along behind. Edward and Raquel get to know each other by Skype, and Edward tells her that he and Bella plan to move to San Francisco after the school year. Edward the Virgin finally gives it up. A tryst in the English department closet is interrupted by Principal Banner summoning Bella to his office to tell her that she's been accused of improper contact with a student. And the chapter ends with Bella mentally cursing out Jacob Black.

You may remember from an earlier chapter than Gracie Alvarez's mother earns her living cutting salal, an ornamental evergreen used by florists, in the forest around Forks. Also that one of Edward's alter egos is Alex Shapiro, a medical student in Seattle.

Thanks again to Camilla and Mr. Price, who contemplated writing a kumquat addendum, a sort of alternative Bella-Banner scene with a predictably tiresome male point of view, but then got skeered.

Okay, one last excerpt from the teacher's manual:

Chapter 18: Tremendo lío

"Legal representation is another benefit the union provides to teachers. Unions are able to hire top lawyers to represent you if you are sued for any reason pertaining to school activities. If you are disciplined by a school or district administrator, a union representative can be present with you for consultation." Rominger et al.

Fucking, fucking Jacob Black.

And then all I could think about was what a disaster this was. Male teachers could sleep with a student and get caught and confess to it, and the news would get a paragraph in the local newspaper. Female teachers made the front page, led the evening news, and then had their faces and names splashed all over the Internet. Even if I was cleared, the story would dog me – fuck you again, Jacob Black – the rest of my life. I wouldn't be employable, I wouldn't get admitted to grad school.

And that was nothing compared with what would happen if Edward's name became public enough to rouse the vampire cops, the ones that he had so clearly warned the wolves about.

How could Jacob do that? Even if he hated the Cullens, how could he be so unheeding of the consequences to his own family and neighbors? To Seth and Raquel? We were all in this supernatural business together, like it or not . . .

"Bella?" Bob Banner was asking me. "Are you all right?"

"I'm … flabbergasted," I managed to get out even as my stomach twisted and bile threatened to rise into my throat. "How — why would anyone say that about me? Who said that about me?"

Instead of answering, Bob slid a slip of paper with numbers on it across his desk to me. I picked it up gingerly.

"Is that your telephone number?" he asked.

I glanced and nodded, since there was no use denying it. The 520 area code – Tucson's area code, because nobody ever changed numbers anymore – pointed a finger at me, and the info would be in Bob's file on me anyway.

"I was shown a number of text messages from and to that number involving the student," Bob continued. "They looked like meeting times."

What the hell? Meeting times? Jacob or another wolf could have snatched my phone, I supposed, but no one could have taken Edward's, and all my texts to him now went to "Alex Shapiro" anyway. There were texts to Alice, too, but she never set up meeting times, she simply showed up where she knew you'd be. Which meant -

Just then the door flew opened and Alice herself burst into the principal's office, Shelly Cope behind her. Alice shut the door on Shelly's protests and hopped onto the desk, her perfect, pale legs elegantly extending from her gauzy pink miniskirt, like Lauren Bacall on Harry Truman's piano. Bob watched her with his mouth agape, as did I.

"Mr. Banner, Mr. Banner!" Alice trilled. "I have such great news I had to tell you right away. I just learned that I got into Stanford off the waiting list!" She leaned forward to adjust Bob's knit tie and pin him with her gaze. "Isn't that wonderful?"

Bob agreed mutely and while Alice chattered on about Stanford's programs, and Palo Alto, and the beautiful campus, I discreetly unrolled the scrap of paper she had dropped onto my lap.

"Stall," it read. "Also: the buttons on your blouse are misaligned."

Shit. I looked down to find she was right.

"Oh, Mr. Banner, I knew you'd be pleased," Alice was cooing when I redid the final button. "Ooops! I didn't realize you were having a meeting with Ms. Swan, my favorite teacher! Well, I'll leave you to it." She winked at Bob, bounced off his desk and sashayed out.

Silence settled on the room as Bob ran his finger around his collar and caressed his tie where Alice had adjusted it. Yeah, Bob, I know how you feel.

I cleared my throat, and Bob jerked his head toward me, obviously having forgotten I was in his room. "Oh, yes, where were we?" he muttered, still looking dazed.

Stall, Alice had said, and there was an easy way to do just that. "You know, I'd feel more comfortable having this conversation if Ron were part of it," I said. Ron Jefferson, the government teacher, was the union rep at Forks High, the buffer between teachers and accusations of misconduct.

"Yes, yes, of course, that's your right," Bob said, obviously relieved. "Ron's in class now, so let's see when he can meet with us. Bella …" he trailed off, before shaking his head and continuing. "I'm sorry that this has come up, and so close to your leaving us."

I wasn't sure he was actually that sorry – he'd been pretty annoyed when I told him that he needed to find another English teacher for next year. But there was something else weighing on his mind: "And I understand that you have a, um, girlfriend? In Seattle? So this accusation seems, um?" He trailed off again, aware he was saying too much.

He sounded so much like a teenage girl at the end, with his upward inflection and high pitch, that I almost wanted to snicker. And he had given me a useful piece of information: I wasn't being accused of an improper relationship with a female student. Too bad that I had to disabuse him of his notions about me.

"I'm not gay, despite the rumors," I said. "Don't defend me based on that."

-έπ-

Leaving behind an unsettled Banner, I stepped out into the hall and looked around for Alice. She was waiting around the corner, next to the display case of dead students. She already knew my question.

"It's not Edward," she said immediately, then held up a finger to ask me to wait. She went into a sort of trance while I paced from the yellowing photos of Ethan Yorkie's dead brother Eric and Eliza Teague's dead sister Erin – van victim and vampire victim - to the administration building's window, where I could look out on the parking lot, empty of people except for a heavily pregnant Shelby Wells – vagina victim? - heading to the nurse's office. She wasn't going to make it to the end of the school year.

Maybe I wasn't going to either, I thought glumly.

"I've got it," Alice announced, and took out her phone, flagrantly disobeying school rules. She had a hurried conversation I couldn't understand, slipped the phone back into her jacket pocket and turned to me.

"First, Ron Jefferson," she said briskly. "Don't bother to seek him out. Did you know that he's been shopping a book manuscript? It's a political thriller. A publishing house in New York is going to ask him to fly out there immediately. No time for a meeting with you and Banner."

"A publishing house?" I repeated dumbly.

"It's been more a nostalgic investment than a profitable one, but it'll pay off today," Alice said and I tried to get my head around the idea of a Cullen House, or a Sanguine Books. "Ideally, this will all be settled before he comes back, and he'll never hear about the accusation. He may be your union rep, but he's got a big mouth. Second, blame Bruce Clapp."

"Pinche culero," I spat out. Clapp was a fucking asshole. "Why? Who?"

Alice looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Justin Stanley, obviously. If you made advances to him that he's been rejecting – that's his story, not mine - then the F's you've been giving him are suspect, and he can play quarterback in the fall, see? The proof are the texts you've sent him about practice times –"

"I've sent those to pretty much all the runners."

"Doesn't matter. Banner doesn't have enough experience and confidence to dismiss even a ridiculous accusation. The evidence may be flimsy, but the effect won't be, if this gets out. The Clapp really just wants you to back off on Stanley, he doesn't have a team without the guy, but he didn't think this through – which may be one reason I didn't see this coming," Alice said, annoyance obvious in her voice.

I sighed, but I could see that there was a silver lining. "At least Edward's not involved," I said.

Alice raised an eyebrow. "If you end up with reporters following you around or camped outside your house - oh, yes, he will be. Those runs in the woods that you two do …" she smiled at me conspiratorially – "well, that you used to do until you got distracted by doing other things in the woods, would be risky. By the way, why did you tell Banner that you're straight? It was a useful fiction."

"I didn't want him defending me on false pretenses. It's unethical."

"Ethics! Who cares about ethics right now?" Alice said, shaking her head. "We're talking about survival. You always have another chance to be ethical, but you don't always have another chance to survive. Anyway, you need to go, the bell's about to ring."

"Okay, but one thing – did you really get into Stanford off the wait list?"

She snorted. "Of course not. Stanford's wait list is just a fiction to make legacy kids feel better."

"But –"

"But, Banner will remember no details of my incursion except my legs and that I was close enough to him to adjust his tie. Go to lunch. Try not to glare at Clapp too much."

-έπ-

I did try: I didn't make eye contact with Clapp as the period began, not even when he asked, "Is Ron skipping lunch?" and the late-arriving Barbara Goff answered, "He got a call as we were heading over here – the Manicule Press is interested in his novel! He's on his way home to pack for a flight to New York as we speak!" She was breathless with excitement, and Jeff Masen, Angela and everyone else chimed in with comments of "That's great!" and "Good for him!"

Everyone else except Clapp, that is. "Manicure Press, what's kind of a name is that?" he grumbled.

"Manicule," Barbara corrected him. "Which means …" she trailed off uncertainly.

Jeff the English teacher stepped in. "It's an old-fashioned punctuation symbol," he said, "a pointing hand."

"Yeah," I said, looking up from the salad that my roiling stomach wasn't allowing me to eat. "It looks like this." I extended my right arm, made a fist with my hand, and then, unable to stop myself, jabbed my index finger toward Clapp. J'accuse, it said, you pinche culero.

-έπ-

I was better that afternoon with Justin Stanley. I ignored him in English, which was not a problem since he never volunteered answers, and I ignored him at practice, the last session before the race on the mostly forested trail at Lake Sylvia. We were having an easy run today so that legs would be fresher on Saturday - not that I had any hopes of Forks outperforming bigger schools with actual legitimate cross-country teams.

I watched my runners take off, then caught up with Eliza Teague, trailing the main pack of girls. While she still brought up the rear, she had greatly improved over her weeks of training, her legs reshaped by muscle. She smiled at me as I fell in beside her, but her face was strained.

"Coach Swan, do you really think I can do three miles in the woods?" she asked. "What's the course like?"

"I'm told" – by my vampire associates –"that there's a hill at the beginning, but after that it's pretty flat. Go slowly over the hill, then you can speed up as you get more comfortable, and then go all out when you get out of the treeline. But you know, it's no big deal. I never finished in the top 5 at Arizona. And we all know that Alice Cullen is going to smoke everyone."

"Yeah," she said, her laugh nervous. I didn't know if it was because I'd mentioned a Cullen, or because she was still worried about her performance. Truth be told, Eliza would probably come in last, but there was no shame in that. As the saying went, she'd still be faster than all the people sitting on their sofas. The other truth was the Alice had already told me she wasn't going to compete, both to annoy Clapp and to avoid attention.

"Hey, what's up with Gracie Alvarez?" I asked Eliza after a while. Gracie hadn't shown up for practices, nor had she been in class for the last few days either, and her absences were unexcused. She was so close to graduating and using her Pacific Northwest Trust scholarship at Udub – both she and Eliza had been ecstatic when I'd handed them the letters that informed them of their awards – and I worried that something might sabotage her, perhaps her sense of responsibility to her young siblings, or her mother, fearful of sending her daughter off to college, as Charlie had been with me …

Eliza looked stricken. "Ms. Swan, um, I mean Coach Swan, can you keep a secret?" she asked.

Well, I'm sure keeping a fuckload of them right now, I thought immediately, and then mentally clapped my teacher's hat back on my brain. I considered her question a moment while we jogged along. "I have to be honest, if it's something that means I have to notify child protective services, then no," I answered.

Eliza looked startled for a moment, then said, "Oh, you mean abuse, like child abuse? No, it's not that." She lowered her voice. "Gracie's mama got taken by the border patrol. She and the other cutters were bringing their salal in from the woods to be weighed, and she got caught up in a raid."

"Oh, no," I whispered. My classes had grown noticeably smaller since September, as was typical for a places like Forks – because of pregnancies, because students needed a job to help their family pay rent or a subprime mortgage or for child support. But the biggest losses here came from immigration problems, and the feds were weirdly active on this remote stretch of the border (when you took the Victoria ferry, you went through American passport control twice). The soccer team had essentially disappeared after a big raid; Angela's volleyball team had been cut in half.

"Is Mrs. Alvarez back? Did she get an immigration bond?" I asked. I'd had some experience with this in Tucson, at the New Arrivals school where I had taught last year. I knew that as a woman with young kids, Mrs. Alvarez would be a likely candidate for temporary release.

"No, or not yet, I guess?" Eliza said. "Gracie's at home with her younger brothers and sisters. Their mama called from the detention center in Tacoma and told them to stay out of sight."

I let out a long exhalation. "Okay, I can get in contact with the guy who runs the Pacific Northwest Trust – he's a lawyer," I said, and Eliza immediately brightened.

Alice and a cluster of boys led by Justin had passed as we talked, running the return portion of our loop. Edward was trailing the pack, jogging alone as usual, and I allowed myself to look over at him and see if he had heard. He mimed making a phone call with his fingers, then pressed those fingers to his lips, the same fingers that had touched me so intimately that morning before Banner's summons, the same lips that made me putty when they were on my neck. My eyes lost focus and heat surged over my torso, heat that had nothing to do with running.

And then, as the Irish toast says, the road rose up to meet me.

I stumbled spectacularly, and disastrously, over nothing. The heels of my hands scraped over School Street as I tried to break my fall, but I went down on a hip anyway, dragging a knee along. I strangled a "Fuck!" that wanted to burst out in most unteacherly way.

There was silence around me for a moment before Eliza exhaled an "Oh, Ms. Swan!" and I realized that if I wasn't bleeding yet, I would be very soon. My eyes met Edward's, and I silently begged him to turn away, to keep running as if I weren't sprawled out on the asphalt.

But he had come to a halt, his face a mask now, and stayed immobile as the front runners reversed their steps and joined the little crowd around me, not sure how to come to the aid of a teacher. "Ms. Swan, can you get up?" Eliza asked.

"Not yet," I muttered, pressing my palms into the ground, keeping the blood from flowing, I hoped.

"Coach Swan, I have the first-aid kit!" Everyone turned in the direction of Alice's arresting voice. She was carrying the white box I'd left on the bleachers next to the water jug – she would have had to run like a bullet train to get back here so quickly, but I didn't care at the moment. All I wanted was my wounds covered.

To my astonishment, Edward moved then, taking the kit from Alice and shouldering aside the gawkers to kneel next to me.

"Let me take a look at your hands," he said quietly, and added, even more softly, for my ears alone, "Don't argue."

I snapped my jaw shut and obediently presented a palm, red seeping out from the skin. Edward opened the box and got to work, silently. His cold hand cradled mine, the touch soothing away the lump of painful tears in my throat. Distantly, I noticed sniggering as he smoothed a bandage over my right knee.

Edward's fingers stilled and he whipped his head around. "Fuck off, Stanley," he snarled. The acid in his voice silenced the giggles immediately.

"Language, Cullen," I said without heat, then more loudly, "Guys, go finish your run! Eliza, go ahead without -"

"I'll run with you," Alice said, flashing a small, nontoothy smile. Eliza, a deer in the vampire headlights, allowed herself to be escorted away.

A few moments later, Edward and I were alone. "Thank God everyone left," I muttered.

"Except that one of the neighbors is watching us from her living room window," Edward said, frustration in his voice. "I want to take you in my arms and run you home to your bed right now, but I'm going to have to settle for helping you up. Let me do all the work. Are you ready?"

I nodded, and he put his hands on my waist. A second later I was on my feet, wincing at the pain in my hip and back as I put weight on my leg.

I didn't know it then, but I wouldn't be running again in this life.

-έπ-

Edward indeed took me into his arms when I arrived home, but instead of flying me upstairs, he carried me over to my sofa.

"Do you need anything?" he asked as he deposited me onto the futon.

"Yes," I said, kicking off my running shoes. "Ice."

"That I can provide," he said, a trace of humor reappearing in his voice. He arranged me on his lap, then slipped a hand into my shorts and around my aching hip. I sighed into the contact, and stared at the bandage on my knee.

"Thanks for fixing me up before," I said after a while. "Um, the blood didn't bother you? It doesn't smell good to you anymore?"

He snorted. "I wouldn't say that. But it's both intoxicating and tolerable, like a sip of Montrachet instead of an inhalation of crack, I suppose. Since we first made love, it's been like that – Carlisle suggests that that changed our bond, made me less of a danger to you. In fact, I could –" he stopped, reconsidering.

"What?"

He shook his head, but I'd been with him enough by now to know what comment he was suppressing ("Hey, Bella, I got immortality for you, babe!" if not quite in those words). Instead, he said, "It killed me to see you hurt and lying on the street, and to be constrained in coming to your aid."

"It was nothing. You've seen me fall before. And I'll recover from this too."

"There are other things that could happen to you." His head turned, and I followed his gaze to Raquel's portrait of my dead mother watching us with unblinking eyes. I wondered what she would think of Edward. Would she be repelled by him, like Raquel, a normal human response? Or would she have been unafraid of him, as I was, signaling something bizarre – something else bizarre, I should say - in our genetic makeup.

I changed the subject. "Why did you curse at Justin Stanley? What was he thinking?"

"I cursed at what he was saying to his buddies, which was neither imaginative nor worth repeating. What he was thinking, on the other hand … Sometimes people will say that someone's mind is a cesspool. Stanley's isn't that deep – though it's just as disgusting. He's convincing himself that you have been coming on to him."

I put my hands over my face. "God help me," I groaned.

"Yes," Edward said grimly. "Stanley's on his way to believing that he's the victim here. People who behave badly do that often. How's your hip?"

"I could use an ice break."

He pulled his hand out of my shorts and I wriggled off his stone lap to curl up next to him. Now his gaze settled on the corner where Renee's cello stood in its case behind my bike.

"You never play that cello. Why?"

"I don't know how. I think my mom hoped I'd learn someday, but she wasn't good enough to teach me, and we couldn't afford lessons. Even if we could have found a cello teacher in Laconia."

"May I?" he asked.

"Sure. You know it's not a full-size, and that it's probably in terrible shape."

He pushed aside the pillows and moved the latches on my futon sofa so it flattened into a bed, then plucked the cello from the corner, returning to my side to unlatch the case, pull down the endpin and settle the instrument between his legs.

"I guess you know how to play," I said, without surprise. "Is that bow okay?"

"I've rosined it, and I replaced the strings when you were asleep one night. Now I can tune it without waking you up." He deftly adjusted the strings, the sound astonishingly beautiful. "Rostropovich wouldn't have played it in concert, but it'll do for –"

"Have you seen Rostropovich in concert?" I interrupted him.

"Yes, London in 1968. The Soviets were displeased by his performance. Your turn," he said, pivoting the cello so it was between my legs. "I'll show you how to play."

"Umm," I said, raising my hands to display the bandages on my palms.

"I won't hurt you," he promised me. Letting the cello rest against my chest, he came to kneel behind me, and leaned over my right shoulder. He curved his right arm with the bow around my waist and grasped the instrument's neck with his other hand.

"Put your fingers on my hands," he said, and I obeyed, awkwardly snaking my arms around his.

It was weird at first, but soon his mastery of the instrument allowed me to relax, to feel his hands working underneath my own, his cool skin soothing my abraded palms, tendons flexing and fingers dancing as he played the most famous of solo cello pieces, from the first of Bach's suites, beautiful when performed even by mediocre players, sublime performed by him – and sublime when listening to them as his breath curled around my nape, the cello vibrating against my torso.

"That's amazing," I said when the last note faded. "Do you know all the suites?"

"Well enough," he said as if that were nothing. "Shall we try something else? I think you'll recognize it."

I did, though not in this form: as Edward knew, I listened to Philip Glass when I did prep for school, and one of my favorites was an album of his that (as Edward didn't know) Renee had had me play a lot when she was ill, probably his most accessible work. Edward started playing a version of one of the pieces, the cello turning the plaintive melody originally played by a soprano sax into something darker and much more sensual, long notes and arpeggios – I never thought of Glass as seductive music, but this was like sex, like thrusting … I slumped back against him and turned my face into his chest, letting his scent overtake me, the smell stronger than anything I could hear.

Edward's hands went still. "Have you had enough of this lesson for tonight?" he asked, his voice sultry. He pulled the cello out from between my legs, sliding it back into its case, and when he returned to the sofa, I pushed my hands into his chest, eager to get his shirt off, then yelped in pain.

"Shhh," he said, before blowing on my palms. "Hands to yourself, it looks like. Let me do all the work again."

And so I kept my hands curled as Edward pulled off my top and unhooked my running bra, my nipples peaking as he gently massaged the skin that had been underneath the band. His long hands skimmed my torso and I arched as he lay me back on the futon and eased off my shorts, maneuvering them over the nascent bruise on my hip.

"Don't forget your clothes," I murmured, and he obliged by yanking them off without ceremony, allowing a glimpse of hard muscle and cock before he was above me, his bare skin on mine making me shudder.

"Am I too cold?" he asked, and I kissed him in answer, because he was cold, but I didn't care. I cared only about touching him, about having the lines of his body pressed against mine, our legs tangled, my sex rubbing against his – oh, right there, right there … ouch. I had unthinkingly grabbed at his waist.

Edward bit off a curse and unwound my legs from his. "No hands," he reminded me, grasping my wrists and crossing them above my head. "Keep them up there," he said. "I'll be busy down here."

I sucked in a breath as his mouth explored my breasts, sending out trails of fire with every lick. He then slid down my body, his head stopping at my thigh just above my knee, and he licked there as well, his hand cupping my sex, testing there, I knew, for abrasions that would be vulnerable to his venom. However clinical the intent, the effect was exquisitely arousing, and his lips landing on my clit made me gasp again and buck. He bracketed my thighs with his arms, avoiding my injured hip, and latched on, tongue moving with the confidence of a man who thoroughly understood what he was doing. I was rendered immobile, and my only outlet was to scream when my climax hit.

"Stop, stop," I moaned, and Edward finally raised his head to look at me with a very pleased expression. "Your turn now," I told him between pants.

"Stay there," he said, releasing my legs, and tilting his head for a second. Then he gathered the pillows he had pushed aside before, arranging them in a sort of wedge. I eyed it speculatively. "To protect your hands," he said, and patted the mound of cushions. "Stomach here."

"I'm sure this is entirely for my benefit," I said, teasing, putting myself in a kind of supported forearm plank, my palms out of danger.

"Entirely," he purred as his body covered mine, his chest brushing against my back, legs alongside mine, lips moving across my shoulders, his scent heavy around me. I was being caged by a vampire.

He pressed inside me easily, our groans accompanying his strokes. I could barely move in this position, and that gave me a thought.

"Wait," I said.

He stopped immediately. "Something hurts?"

"Not at all. Just let me adjust a bit." I wriggled underneath him and he got the idea, maintaining our connection and allowing my legs to close so that his knees were outside mine. Now he could barely move, and he hissed out a gratifying string of curses at the feeling.

"I'm not going to last long this way," he muttered.

"Then don't," I said and pushed up as best I could against him. He somehow managed to insinuate his hand around my non-injured hip and find my clit, wet and pulsing still, and soon we were both crying out.

Continuing to cover me like a stone carapace, Edward pushed aside my hair to kiss my damp neck, and my tremor in response shook us both. "I wish I could protect you like this forever," he said. "From falls, from illness, from stupid accusations."

"You know that's impossible," I said. "Even for a vampire."

"I know," he said, and pressed his lips against my shoulder. His words then were barely audible. "Don't leave me, Bella," he whispered. "Please, just don't leave."

-έπ-

Saturday dawned with torrential rain, but this being the Olympic Peninsula, nobody seemed to feel that meant canceling the race. Bruce Clapp drove the bus, and everybody else slept on the long ride to Lake Sylvia, lulled by the steady swishing of the windshield wipers. Well, the Cullens didn't, of course, because they were making their own way to the park. Nor did I, since between my bruised hip and wrenched back and a case of bloat – my stomach still didn't seem to have recovered from my time in Bob Banner's office or the persistent tension in my life since - I couldn't find a comfortable position on the bench seat. So I did work instead, responding in monosyllables to Clapp's conversational gambits. I couldn't find it in myself to be more than coldly polite to him.

The rain had subsided to a mist by the time we arrived, parking in a lot already filled with teams. Some of them even had matching uniforms, an intimidating contrast to my runners in their motley combinations of blue and gold. Alice and Edward were already there as well, Edward in his usual modest track pants, Alice in a miniskirt and rain boots.

"Cullen!" Clapp barked at Alice. "Why aren't you ready to run?"

"Oh, I injured my hamstring on my last practice and my dad – Dr. Cullen, you know—told me to give it a rest," Alice answered perkily. "I came just to help Coach Swan with timekeeping because her hands are out of commission."

Clapp scowled, since he'd wanted to show Alice off to the other coaches. "What are you going to do without Cullen?" he said to me.

"Your boy Stanley's going to have to step up. But," I added, looking over his shoulder, "that's going to be futile, anyway."

"Disgusting," Alice spat out next to me. "And inconvenient."

We watched as Seth Clearwater and five other young men jumped from the cab and bed of a pickup truck. Not only did they skip any semblance of a uniform, they'd opted for jean cutoffs and unzipped hoodies, showing off smooth chests that attracted all eyes. They looked ready to pose for a hot-firefighters calendar.

"Don't those guys ever wear shirts?" Clapp complained. "How can they think they'll be allowed to compete in those clothes?"

"Since it's not an official race, La Push wear whatever they want as they wipe the ground with us," I said. Considering the circumstances, I was feeling much more kindly toward shapeshifters, even those named Jacob, than I was toward Clapp. "Ms. Cullen, do you want to lead the warmup? I need to hand in our roster."

My path to the sign-in table took me past the wolves, who greeted me with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

"Why are you walking like that?" Seth asked me. "I have to report back to Raquel. With details."

I flushed guiltily, because I hadn't talked to Raquel, reluctant to tell her about the Stanley situation until we had a solution of some sort. "Oh, I tripped the other day," I told him, displaying my bandaged palms, "and my back is still bothering me. Age and humanity, you know. So, are you planning to win?"

Seth could see that I wasn't trash-talking, but asking a sincere question. "Of course," he said, shrugging. "We could always use free food. Who should we watch out for?"

"The Montesano runners are pretty good," I said, pointing out the boys in maroon-and-white stripes. "This is essentially their home course, and one of them won the division last fall. But will they really be competition for you? Maybe you should be more worried about going too fast."

"How fast is that?" he asked.

"If you go faster than 15 minutes, you'll be the fastest high school boys in the country, so don't; if you do 16:50, you'll handily win this."

"What about that guy?" Seth said, nodding toward Edward, who was pretending to warm up while watching us.

"Cullen? Strictly back of the pack," I answered.

That set off a round of hooting from the wolves. "Yeah, back of the pack like you, Noah," Seth teased a younger guy with shaggy hair. Meanwhile, I could have sworn that a pair of vampire eyes was shooting daggers at me.

"Hey, we're all back of the pack when Jacob's around," Noah pointed out.

"True dat," one of the other wolves said, and I had to smile at the incongruity of that bit of urban slang here amid the firs and ferns.

When the appointed time came, the boys took off in the field that was the site for the start and finish line; the girls followed, splashing mud; Alice and I waited with the Clapp.

A plausible amount of time later, a muddy Seth emerged from the treeline, the other wolves close on his heels, and loped easily across the finish line. "They should at least pretend to be breathing hard," Alice muttered for my ears.

The La Push guys were giving one another high fives while the Montesano champion, winded and baffled, slogged his way across the field. An Elma runner emerged a few seconds later, then one from Eatonville, more from Montesano, and finally –

"Here comes Stanley," Clapp announced, with a small degree of satisfaction. "He'll be our first, at least."

"No, wait," Alice said. "Look, there's Edward! He's a very fast sprinter."

Indeed, back-of-the-pack Edward caught up with Justin, then surpassed him, arms pumping, chest heaving. A nicely convincing performance.

"Way to go!" Alice cheered, before writing down Edward's time, then Justin's. Clapp stomped off to his coaching buddies, and Edward sent me a flash of mischievous grin.

The rest of the field trickled in. The La Push girls (who, Seth informed me, had actually practiced) placed respectably enough for first place to go to the Wolves, not just the lower-case wolves.

"Are we all done here?" Clapp had wandered back over to me and Alice, both of us waiting for our last runner to emerge from the woods.

"No, Eliza Teague is still on the trail," I said. I had become a little worried. "Alice, based on her times, what do you think? Wouldn't she have made it out by now?"

Alice scowled, knowing I was really asking her if she could get any glimpse of Eliza. "I think," she grumbled, emphasizing the verb, "that someone should backtrack and look for her. Maybe her path's being blocked by an elk, or a feral dog. Hey, Edward!" she called toward her brother, who made a show of looking up from his phone, then ambled over.

He agreed to look for our missing runner, and jogged away across the field and back into the forest. Several minutes later, he reappeared, his arm supporting a limping Eliza, dirt streaking her T-shirt. They appeared to be chatting easily.

"Good job, Edward," Alice breathed out almost inaudibly.

Eliza was laughing as they crossed the finish line, but she sobered into an apology when she saw me. "I'm sorry, Coach Swan, I fell –"

"That's okay," I cut her off. "You saw me take a tumble just the other day. Are you hurt?"

Edward answered for her. "Eliza fell in a rocky section – an easy place to twist an ankle. Maybe some ice would help?"

I nodded, thinking of his version of ice therapy, his cold hand curving around my hip… gah. I shook myself. "I have some in a cooler in the bus. How far do you think you got, Eliza?"

"Um, it was after the 4K sign," she said.

"4.8," Edward said.

"Great, so you know you can run a 5K," I told Eliza. "And you made it across the finish line, so you completed the race. Congratulations!"

"Thanks," she said, beaming, and turned to Edward, not a trace of fear on her face. "And thanks so much for coming to help me. It was really nice of you."

"No problem," he said. "Let's get you some ice."

"I'll come along," Alice declared. The three of them walked toward the bus, leaving me with a sullen Clapp.

"Those Cullens," he muttered as my phone buzzed. "They're so …." He went silent in his search for a suitably dismissive adjective.

"Generous," I said, reading my new text from Alex Shapiro. "Dr. and Mrs. Cullen have ordered pizza for us in Montesano in honor of their son's first-place finish." I glanced up at Clapp. He looked as if he had bitten into something sour, and I pressed my lips to suppress my smile as I read a follow-up message.

"I hope Clapp and Stanley choke on it," Edward had written.

-έπ-

I opted for a hike that Sunday after church, my complaining back making me unwilling to tackle my usual long run. Edward and I headed toward his house - Esme and Carlisle had cut short their Asia trip (and, I learned to my astonishment, skipped a meeting about preserving tiger habitat in the Sundarbans on the Indian coast, a cause dear to Esme's heart) because of the Stanley/Clapp accusations, and we needed to talk strategy. That didn't stop us from making a detour to the Cullen orchard, nor did the wet ground, still sodden from the previous day's downpour. Edward simply pulled out a tarp and a blanket from the toolshed, and our bodies crushed the fallen apple blossoms beneath us as we made love in physical and mental privacy.

Unfortunately, I thought as Edward helped me up from our makeshift bed, while orgasms had always seemed to help my backaches in the past, this particular injury was proving resistant even to vampire-induced climaxes. I really was getting old.

Our boots were so muddy we left them on the porch, and Esme greeted us inside, looking exactly the same as before her journey. That's the vampire life, I mused, no trial, no tribulation, no trip having an effect on Esme's beauty, only the eyes, if you were comfortable enough to study them, hinting at a century of experiences, and even then I wondered if I was imagining it.

"Darling," Esme said after the customary greetings and embraces, "I am positively boiling with rage over that coach. The gall! The venality! All for a football game." Her lip lifted in a snarl, and she no longer looked like Myrna Loy's more gorgeous sister but an avenging angel with very sharp teeth. "He and that boy are going to be very sorry that they did this. I could tear their heads from their necks!"

"What?" I said, startled and a little unsettled by the cold fury evident in her voice, and the knowledge that if she wanted to decapitate Clapp, she could do it. Next to me Edward said something under his breath, and Esme's face smoothed into conventional pleasantness.

"So, I understand that it all started when you and your colleague Angela were discussing Edward's attributes at the diner?" Esme asked, teasing now.

I grimaced. Edward had learned from dropping in on Justin's and Clapp's brains that an inspiration for the whole scheme had been Jessica Stanley's announcing to her cousin that I wasn't gay, a gossipy tidbit that Justin had passed on to his coach.

"Actually, we were discussing Carlisle's attributes," I muttered, and then, hearing Edward snicker, I added with a smirk, "It was Jessica Stanley who was in raptures over Edward. Angela and I were being age-appropriate, at least."

Edward made a strangled noise next to me, and Esme smiled sweetly at us.

"Well, I agree that Carlisle is irresistible. And I think I have a plan. It turns out that –" She fell silent and her head whipped around toward the front door. In a flash she was gone, the door clicking closed behind her.

"What's going on?" I asked, still feeling the breeze from Esme's passage.

Edward chuckled. "Carlisle's coming up the drive, and Esme's dashed out to meet him. We won't be seeing them for a bit."

"Huh. Didn't they just spend several weeks together? Aren't they tired of each other?"

"No, why would they be?" Edward said, seeming genuinely surprised, then grinned. "Carlisle went to the hospital for just a few hours; you should see them what happens when he's away for a double shift. Come on in - you can sit while we wait."

I grunted as I plopped down on the sofa under the red Calder mobile in the living room, its drops of blood rotating gently in this odd house's ventilation. Edward slipped his fingers under my sweater to touch my lower back. "Talk to Carlisle about this – maybe he has some ideas for you," Edward said.

"Human back pain is notoriously unamenable to treatment," I said ruefully. "At least your hand there provides some relief. Has Carlisle ever done sports medicine?" I knew that in Forks, at least, he specialized in emergency medicine, a field where quick thinking and reflexes saved lives, and the patients weren't in a condition to freak out over being treated by a vampire.

"He knows something about everything in medicine, though naturally –" Edward's tone grew wry – "his greatest expertise is with diseases of the blood. His nose is excellent, much better than mine – I still get distracted by the idea of blood as, um, food. Thalassemia, sickle-cell anemia, uremia, lymphoma, leukemia, hemophilia ... he can identify them all by scent. Curing them, of course, is an entirely different matter."

"That's true for backaches, too," I pointed out. Edward rolled his knuckles around my lower back and I groaned. "I don't think I've ever had one that hurt this much. Ugh. What's this plan Esme is talking about? Do you know about it already?"

Edward shook his head. "She hasn't mentioned it before, and I didn't get a good line on it before all her thoughts turned to Carlisle. Something to do with lawyers rather than violence, though."

"Yeah, that was a little disconcerting," I admitted.

We chatted about the possibilities for dealing with Clapp while we wanted for our ancient lovebirds to reappear. Finally the door reopened, with Esme and Carlisle laughing about something as they whirled into the living room. Their joy was infectious and I smiled at them, my pain temporarily forgotten.

But then, Carlisle stopped abruptly, his nostrils flaring, his eyes focusing on Edward's, then on mine.

"Oh, Bella," he breathed out. "What's wrong with you?"

Edward's fingers froze on my back. "No," he whispered. "No, God, no."

-έπ-έπ-

Chapter title: "Big mess," from "Mulata," by Raúl Paz.

Yes, another cliffhanger, but it should be rather obvious by now where this is all leading.

You might be amused to learn that all the research I've had to do about races ended up inspiring me to run a 5K for the first time. And I was geezered plenty, but I didn't come in last! I even did some chicking and geezering of my own. I'm pretty sure I'll never run as fast as Bella, though.

Again, the bit about the deported soccer team is true.

I tried to put some links on my profile page to football coaches behaving badly, Glass, Rostropovich and an adorable video of a couple playing a cello, as well as an article about Raquel's least favorite Catholic saint – but FF doesn't seem to be allowing me to link to anything but youtube; does anyone know why? The links work on preview, but not in real life.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!