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To think it had come to this! I was utterly fixated on the petty high school dramas that I'd once held so in contempt.
Mike was working up his nerve as he walked Bella to biology. I listened to his struggles as I waited for them to arrive. The boy was weak. He had waited for this dance purposely, afraid to make his infatuation known before she had shown a marked preference for him. He didn't want to make himself vulnerable to rejection, preferring that she make that leap first.
Coward.
He sat down on our table again, comfortable with long familiarity, and I imagined the sound it would make if his body hit the opposite wall with enough force to break most of his bones.
"So," he said to the girl, his eyes on the floor. "Jessica asked me to the spring dance."
"That's great," Bella answered immediately and with enthusiasm. It was hard not to smile as her tone sunk in to Mike's awareness. He'd been hoping for dismay. "You'll have a lot of fun with Jessica."
He scrambled for the right response. "Well..." he hesitated, and almost chickened out. Then he rallied. "I told her I had to think about it."
"Why would you do that?" she demanded. Her tone was one of disapproval, but there was the faintest hint of relief there as well.
What did that mean? An unexpected, intense fury made my hands clench into fists.
Mike did not hear the relief. His face was red with blood - fierce as I suddenly felt, this seemed like an invitation - and he looked at the floor again as he spoke. "I was wondering if...well, if you might be planning to ask me."
Bella hesitated.
In that moment of her hesitation, I saw the future more clearly than Alice ever had.
The girl might say yes to Mike's unspoken question now, and she might not, but either way, someday soon, she would say yes to someone. She was lovely and intriguing, and human males were not oblivious to this fact. Whether she would settle for someone in this lackluster crowd, or wait until she was free from Forks, the day would come that she would say yes.
I saw her life as I had before - college, career...love, marriage. I saw her on her father's arm again, dressed in gauzy white, her face flushed with happiness as she moved to the sound of Wagner's march.
The pain was more than anything I'd felt before. A human would have to be on the point of death to feel this pain - a human would not live through it.
And not just pain, but outright rage.
The fury ached for some kind of physical outlet. Though this insignificant, undeserving boy might not be the one that Bella would say yes to, I yearned to crush his skull in my hand, to let him stand as a representative for whoever it would be.
I didn't understand this emotion - it was such a tangle of pain and rage and desire and despair. I had never felt it before; I couldn't put a name to it.
"Mike, I think you should tell her yes," Bella said in a gentle voice.
Mike's hopes plummeted. I would have enjoyed that under other circumstances, but I was lost in the aftershock of the pain - and the remorse for what the pain and rage had done to me.
Alice was right. I was not strong enough.
Right now, Alice would be watching the future spin and twist, become mangled again. Would this please her?
"Did you already ask someone?" Mike asked sullenly. He glanced at me, suspicious for the first time in many weeks. I realized I had betrayed my interest; my head was inclined in Bella's direction.
The wild envy in his thoughts - envy for whoever this girl preferred to him - suddenly put a name to my unnamed emotion.
I was jealous.
"No," the girl said with a trace of humor in her voice. "I'm not going to the dance at all."
Through all the remorse and anger, I felt relief at her words. Suddenly, I was considering my rivals.
"Why not?" Mike asked, his tone almost rude. It offended me that he used this tone with her. I bit back a growl.
"I'm going to Seattle that Saturday," she answered.
The curiosity was not as vicious as it would have been before - now that I was fully intending to find out the answers to everything. I would know the wheres and whys of this new revelation soon enough.
Mike's tone turned unpleasantly wheedling. "Can't you go some other weekend?"
"Sorry, no." Bella was brusquer now. "So you shouldn't make Jess wait any longer - it's rude."
Her concern for Jessica's feelings fanned the flames of my jealousy. This Seattle trip was clearly an excuse to say no - did she refuse purely out of loyalty to her friend? She was more than selfless enough for that. Did she actually wish she could say yes? Or were both guesses wrong? Was she interested in someone else?
"Yeah, you're right," Mike mumbled, so demoralized that I almost felt pity for him. Almost.
He dropped his eyes from the girl, cutting off my view of her face in his thoughts. I wasn't going to tolerate that.
I turned to read her face myself, for the first time in more than a month. It was a sharp relief to allow myself this, like a gasp of air to long-submerged human lungs. Her eyes were closed, and her hands pressed against the sides of her face. Her shoulders curved inward defensively. She shook her head ever so slightly, as if she were trying to push some thought from her mind.
Frustrating. Fascinating.
Mr. Banner's voice pulled her from her reverie, and her eyes slowly opened. She looked at me immediately, perhaps sensing my gaze. She stared up into my eyes with the same bewildered expression that had haunted me for so long.
I didn't feel the remorse or the guilt or the rage in that second. I knew they would come again, and come soon, but for this one moment I rode a strange, jittery high. As if I had triumphed, rather than lost.
She didn't look away, though I stared with inappropriate intensity, trying vainly to read her thoughts through her liquid brown eyes. They were full of questions, rather than answers.
I could see the reflection of my own eyes, and I saw that they were black with thirst. It had been nearly two weeks since my last hunting trip; this was not the safest day for my will to crumble. But the blackness did not seem to frighten her. She still did not look away, and a soft, devastatingly appealing pink began to color her skin.
What was she thinking now?
I almost asked the question aloud, but at that moment Mr. Banner called my name. I picked the correct answer out of his head while I glanced briefly in his direction. I sucked in a quick breath. "The Krebs Cycle."
Thirst scorched down my throat - tightening my muscles and filling my mouth with venom - and I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate through the desire for her blood that raged inside me.
The monster was stronger than before. The monster was rejoicing. He embraced this dual future that gave him an even, fifty-fifty chance at what he craved so viciously. The third, shaky future I'd tried to construct through willpower alone had crumbled - destroyed by common jealously, of all things - and he was so much closer to his goal. The remorse and the guilt burned with the thirst, and, if I'd had the ability to produce tears, they would have filled my eyes now.
What had I done?
Knowing the battle was already lost, there seemed to be no reason to resist what I wanted; I turned to stare at the girl again.
She had hidden in her hair, but I could see through a parting in the tresses that her cheek was deep crimson now.
The monster liked that.
She did not meet my gaze again, but she twisted a strand of her dark hair nervously between her fingers. Her delicate fingers, her fragile wrist - they were so breakable, looking for all the world like just my breath could snap them.
No, no, no. I could not do this. She was too breakable, too good, too precious to deserve this fate. I couldn't allow my life to collide with hers, to destroy it.
But I couldn't stay away from her either. Alice was right about that.
The monster inside me hissed with frustration as I wavered, leaning first one way, then the other.
My brief hour with her passed all too quickly, as I vacillated between the rock and the hard place. The bell rang, and she started collecting her things without looking at me. This disappointed me, but I could hardly expect otherwise. The way I had treated her since the accident was inexcusable.
"Bella?" I said, unable to stop myself. My willpower already lay in shreds. She hesitated before looking at me; when she turned, her expression was guarded, distrustful.
I reminded myself that she had every right to distrust me. That she should. She waited for me to continue, but I just stared at her, reading her face. I pulled in shallow mouthfuls of air at regular intervals, fighting my thirst.
"What?" she finally said. "Are you speaking to me again?" There was an edge of resentment to her tone that was, like her anger, endearing. It made me want to smile. I wasn't sure how to answer her question. Was I speaking to her again, in the sense that she meant?
No. Not if I could help it. I would try to help it.
"No, not really," I told her.
She closed her eyes, which frustrated me. It cut off my best avenue of access to her feelings. She took a long, slow breath without opening her eyes. Her jaw was locked.
Eyes still closed, she spoke. Surely this was not a normal human way to converse. Why did she do it?
"Then what do you want, Edward?"
The sound of my name on her lips did strange things to my body. If I'd had a heartbeat, it would have quickened.
But how to answer her?
With the truth, I decided. I would be as truthful as I could with her from now on. I didn't want to deserve her distrust, even if earning her trust was impossible.
"I'm sorry," I told her. That was truer than she would ever know. Unfortunately, I could only safely apologize for the trivial. "I'm being very rude, I know. But it's better this way, really."
I would be better for her if I could keep it up, continue to be rude. Could I? Her eyes opened, their expression still wary.
"I don't know what you mean."
I tried to get as much of a warning through to her as was allowed. "It's better if we're not friends." Surely, she could sense that much. She was a bright girl. "Trust me."
Her eyes tightened, and I remembered that I had said those words to her before - just before breaking a promise. I winced when her teeth clenched together - she clearly remembered, too.
"It's too bad you didn't figure that out earlier," she said angrily. "You could have saved yourself all this regret."
I stared at her in shock. What did she know of my regrets?
"Regret? Regret for what?" I demanded.
"For not just letting that stupid van squish me!" she snapped.
I froze, stunned.
How could she be thinking that? Saving her life was the one acceptable thing I'd done since I met her. The one thing that I was not ashamed of. The one and only thing that made me glad I existed at all. I'd been fighting to keep her alive since the first moment I'd caught her scent. How could she think this of me? How dare she question my one good deed in all this mess?
