THE TWELFTH TIME

There are three knocks at my door within ten minutes. I had just enough time to put on a pair of yoga pants and a tank top, to brush my hair, and freak out a little. Like, a normal amount of freaking out. Nothing too crazy like hallucinating or something. I do a little anxiety jig with my limbs at the sound.

I'm so glad I don't share an apartment. And that he can't read my mind.

"It's open," I call as I pace the small space.

Edward pops his head in - his irises are dark still. "That's not safe." He mutters and he shuts and locks the door behind him. He's wearing a rumpled black tee and joggers. He crosses the space to stand close to me and shoves his hands in his pockets.

"What can I say, I like to live on the edge." I try to sound snarky but he's so close… I'm looking up at him and my mind is blank. It comes out breathy.

His eyes flicker to the lava lamp, its red light casting a dim glow in the room, and then his eyes dart back to me. He takes a step closer. "What does it symbolize for you?"

"What?" I blink.

He jerks his chin toward the light. "The lamp." Of course he would notice the new thing in the room right away and get straight to the point.

"Oh." Shit, it's always hard to think with him looking at me like that. "Am I really your mate?" That's… not what I meant to say. I'll work with it though.

It's his turn to look confused. "Are you my what?"

"Don't lie to me." The again goes unsaid.

He looks down, runs a hand through his hair, and looks up at me with serious, fierce eyes. "Yes," he confesses.

He's so beautiful, my chest aches. I stare, lost in his eyes, and try to think about what I was planning to say…

"Breathe, Bella."

Right, I'm not doing that. Fuck, this is harder than I thought. I take in a deep gulp of air. "Lava lamps symbolize change. Like in morals. Y'know in the sixties when people started doing drugs and wanted peace. You were there, so I don't need to explain it…" I bite my lip. "So, it represents a shift. My shift. I know how to form sentences normally…"

As I ramble, he pulls on his mask of indifference just like I dissociated last time we were here; I watch as he constructs a brick wall behind his eyes.

"No, no, no. Don't do that." I point accusingly at his face.

"Do what?" His voice is monotone.

"Shut me out. I need you to be fully present." I'm still pointing at him indignantly.

I watch as he argues internally with himself. His brow furrows and I reach out tentatively with a finger to smooth the crease between them. He closes his eyes at my brief touch and his breathing stutters. When he opens them again after a few moments, his dark eyes reveal sadness, insecurity.

I take a deep breath because I'm ready to risk a tumble over the side of that precipice. "I'm your mate." I say to test it out. I haven't admitted it out loud like that yet.

He nods.

"You love me."

He nods again.

My voice is hushed. "Carlisle said that vampires struggle immensely without their mate."

Another nod, though this time reluctant.

"Edward, what made you come back to me?"

His black eyes trace my face. "I was always going to come back to you." He admits softly. "It just… took me a while to realize that."

"What about the distractions?"

"There were no distractions from the… the agony of being away from you. I'd left everything that was good in my world here with you."

"So, I guess I just don't understand… why it took you so long."

He sighs audibly. "In my mind, you were moving on without me. You were with someone who could take care of you in ways I could not. You were… living the human life that Rosalie so desperately craves."

I'm not Rosalie, but he's on a roll now, so I stay quiet.

"One night, I was focused enough to hear a couple reconciling. It was such a normal, insignificant, vapid fight that had gotten so out of control…

"Then I got to thinking of you, remembering you." He closes his eyes tightly. "I tried hard not to remember you at the end." When he opens his eyes, a sad smile crosses his lips. "When we were..." he doesn't say together, like the word would physically burn him on the way out. He shakes his head minutely. "I saw my monstrosity, my vampirism as an irreconcilable difference between us, and I considered that you likely saw these same differences as insignificant and perhaps even vapid."

I nod in confirmation.

Edward continues, "Something shifted for me then. I had to consider if I was wrong about my... monstrosity. If maybe my choice to leave my mate was hurting you just as much as me. I argued with myself for two days before I decided that it was moot. The only way I could prove to myself that you were happy - or on the other hand, in agony like myself - was to see you. So, I made the decision to leave.

"I didn't have the fortitude to take a plane back - I was terrified of what I might do, what I had become. I ran the whole way. It took days. When I arrived in Forks, I spied on Charlie, looked frantically through your room, trying to find the pieces of where you had gone. I was really only there for a few hours…" He sighs. "But it felt like so much longer."

"And when you found me?"

"I saw you at the track. Your scent - it's still the loveliest thing to me but was also part of what I feared most - it didn't awaken any monster within me." A look of awe crosses his face. His voice drops low like he's confessing a sin, "It just… made me feel awake."

I fidget with the hem of my tank. He's given me a lot tonight to mull over, but there's only one thought on my mind right now. "I have one more question and then I'll be done."

His face crumples in misunderstanding, always ready to be turned down by me. "Yes?"

I realize I'm not trembling anymore, I'm full on quaking. I breathe, "Why didn't you come back sooner?"

I watch as he processes what I just asked him. He cycles through several emotions in the span of about ten seconds: incredulity, hope, fear, and then hope again.

A sharp intake of breath. "Do you wish I would've returned to you sooner?"

"Yes-" I barely speak the word before his lips crash to mine. I stumble backward from the shock but his arms catch me.

Edward kisses me like I've never been kissed before, like a man gasping for air after being held underwater. Like I'm sunlight after a storm. Like I'm the light in the darkness. His cool hands cup my jaw and his thumbs brush against my cheeks.

My heart beats out a jagged rhythm as my shaking hands touch his chest, gripping his shirt tightly to keep from crumpling on the floor. Edward breaks away as I gasp for air; his lips trace a trail from my jaw down to my clavicle and back. "Bella," he moans, his breath sending a shiver down my spine.

"I'm sorry," I breathe as tears spill from the corners of my eyes. He kisses each away as if to consume my sadness. "I'm so sorry."

"No," he pulls back, still holding my face between his hands. His cool, sweet breath fans across my face. "You have nothing to apologize for. I'm the one who should be apologizing-"

This time, I cut his apology off with a fierce kiss. And suddenly he's pulling me across his lap on my bed, and I'm straddling him. He falls backward onto the comforter and his forefinger traces the edge of my tank top, over my décolletage. I think vaguely about how he's never touched me like this before as his tongue slips between my lips and he swallows my moan.

"What about your teeth?" I mumble as I pull back.

"I can handle it now."

He gently nips my lower lip in demonstration. I taste iron and feel his tongue caress the cut, his venom sealing it. Colors flash behind my eyelids and he pulls my damp hair away from my neck as he gently sucks the skin at my pulse point.

"How?" My voice sounds far away.

"Mind over matter. I thought I lost you forever. I won't do anything to put you physically in danger." His breath caresses my neck.

Involuntarily, I buck against him and his chest vibrates under my palms from his growl. His hips move up against my core and I feel all of him through the thin fabric of my yoga pants and his joggers.

"Fuck," I hiss.

His lips capture mine again and cool fingers brush under the top of my tank top, lightly grazing the tops of my breasts. He swallows each of my gasps.

Someone swears: I can't even tell if it's him or me. Reality blurs around us.

Something starts vibrating on the table. My eyes shoot open as blue light flashes across his features. The whites of his eyes are nearly gone - all I see is the blackness of his pupils. His hands move under the hem of my shirt and up to my waist.

Then something vibrates against my thigh and I realize our phones are going off. "Edward," I breathe as he takes my other breast in his hand. Focus, Bella. "Edward, the phones."

He pulls back to look at me and a line of venom connects his lip to my chest before he hastily wipes it away. He looks completely inhuman and completely… mine.

There's this intense possessiveness coursing through my veins and I can feel every pulse thudding throughout my body. His features seem sharper to me as my fingers tangle in his hair; everything around him is hazy. Colors bleed into each other as I try to focus on the room around us.

Suddenly I'm tossed on the bed, bouncing slightly, and as my eyes meet the bare ceiling, I hear the thud of Edward's back hitting the wall on the opposite side of the room.

"We stopped." He sort of snarls. His breath is coming out in a jagged rhythm. A pause where we both try to calm down. I lift my head to look at him; his phone is against his ear. "I know." His voice is barely controlled, a growl. Animalistic. He hangs up and nearly crushes it in his grip.

"Alice," Edward admits reluctantly, but his eyes dip to my chest and his teeth graze his lower lip.

I don't acknowledge that and return to gazing at the ceiling, calming my heartbeat. I feel awkward all over suddenly, jittery from the way we were touching. "I didn't realize mates… mated?" It turns into a rhetorical question.

"Bella," he groans.

"What?"

"You need to change," he grits out.

My eyebrows knit together. "Why?"

Another groan. Both hands are balled into tight fists at his side when I look back over at him. His face is fierce; my stomach somersaults. "You're too tempting like that. We can talk about this" - he gestures between us - "in the morning."

"It technically is the morning."

"It's a figure of speech, Bella," he says sarcastically as I reach a hand out to my phone. It's five AM.

"It's 5 AM!" I shriek-whisper, all too aware of my neighbors. "We made out for two hours?"

He shrugs. "Time behaves differently…" He runs his hands through his hair, which is officially a rat's nest between his anxiety and the way my hands were gripping the strands like a lifeline... "I haven't experienced it before."

I scoff. "We never did anything like that before." I throw my legs over the side of the bed. "I need a human moment. And your hair looks like shit." He chuckles as I stumble to the bathroom to splash water on my face and survey the damage.

"You can't even walk straight!" He whisper-yells at me.

"You're such a virgin," I say under my breath, knowing he will hear.

"Aren't you?" I hear him call - his voice goes a bit high at the end.

"Duh, but at least I kept you guessing." I shut the door to give myself space and protect his virtue.

I turn on the light - it's suddenly so bright - too bright - that I need to squint at myself in the mirror. I startle at what I see.

My lips are swollen, my eyes intense and shining like a junkie's. My skin is overheated, cheeks flaming red. I have a hickey at my pulse point.

I'm honestly… kind of excited about it? About Edward marking me, I mean. Feminist Bella feels like that should be a bad thing… but feminism is also about consenting to what you want to consent to… so…

Fuck, did he sorta bite me? Yes. Did I like it? Also yes.

My skin prickles like a pleasant form of pins and needles and the light is still too bright. Is this real?

I pinch myself. Hard. "Ow." That's gonna bruise.

Instantly, there's a light knock on the door. "Bella?"

Just hearing his voice when I'm like this… "I'm okay," I murmur, gripping the countertop for support.

Shit, I really want to go back out there. Is it safe to lose your virginity to your supernatural mate at five AM when he hasn't hunted in a while?

Rational Bella says no. Irrational Bella is pretty annoyed with her rational counterpart.

I turn the shower on as cold as it will go and jump under the stream, squealing at the abrupt temperature change that works instantly to cool my overheated skin.

A/N: Y'all had me laughing at your comments last chapter. Thanks for sticking with this.

I'm really interested in fleshing out the mating bond since it's not really talked about until BD and even then, feels a little underdeveloped. Let's pretend Edward is an actual adult though... like changed at eighteen, nineteen...

Plus, I think B needs to reconcile with the other Cullens before any *~final~* decisions are made. Expect a couple more chapters. I'm just winging this one.