Avaleigh1: Well, obviously it was about Mike, but part of me wanted to change it just because I hadn't even really considered the possibility that you suggested.

Book2romantic: I have no idea what you are talking about. Look, they're fine.

LiveAndDontRegretIt: So I'm only supposed to be protective of people that I am going to end up dating? Because holy crap, I'm going to end up dating a lot of people. Why aren't all of us more protective of each other?

mamacat20: I don't scare easy, don't worry. It actually can be a bit of a problem sometimes.

Most of the rest of you seem to have had your remarks addressed by the chapter you're about to read. But hello to the new readers, melissa-thelostcullen and Lady Dragona.

And to Bells: Regarding your review, yeah, I totally lied about your reading habits. I'm pigeon holing us into characters from a fictional series. They probably still think of me as being tempted to suck people's blood.

Half of me was going to use this to taunt you over things that are happening in real life right now. But I changed my mind. Instead, I just want you to not feel so guilty when all of this has blown over.

*Edit: You realize that this response to you was months ago, right? Because, dear Bella, I am now totally allowed to taunt you in real life.

"Tell me I did the right thing, Ed."

Shocked. No, I couldn't have been shocked. We'd talked about her breaking up with Mike lots of times. It wasn't shocking. It wasn't expected. It just was. I immediately laid down next to her. Bella scooted so that her face was pressed into my shirt. She was still curled up into a ball, but she was so small that I had no problem getting my arms around and holding her.

"I did the right thing, didn't I?" she pleaded. I felt her hands grab the front of my shirt, just to hold on.

Bella had broken up with Mike. Some situations aren't about right and wrong. Is it right that a person should be so miserable, so frightened all the time? Of course not. But it also isn't right that anyone should have to hurt the person that they care about more than anything else in the world.

"We're you happy?"

"No, I haven't been happy... I don't know..." She didn't exactly have to be decisive right now. The big moment when she would have to stand her ground had already happened.

"Then I'm glad you broke up with him. I want you to be happy. He probably does too." It's a funny thing, happiness. Mike probably did want Bella to be happy. But he probably also wanted her to keep dating him. They were mutually exclusive, it seemed, but it was what he wanted. He got a nice front row view of how the things he wanted are impossible. Let's face it, it sucked to be Mike right now.

Her phone started beeping from where it was hidden under my pillow, and I pulled it out to see who it was.

Mike, of course. I wonder how many times he had called before I got back. Or even how long it had been since she had broken up with him.

"Do you want to talk to him?" I asked the ball that was still curled up against my chest.

"Yeah," she said. But it sure didn't sound like it. I let her pull back and take the phone.

"I'll ..." I'll what? Give you privacy. Go hide for a moment? Sit in the lounge? Wait at the door? What the hell do you do when you know that someone you love is about to get hurt, but they feel like they have to? Especially if you have no right to interfere.

"I'll be around," if you need me. Not that there's really anything I could do. She didn't stop me as I left. She didn't say or do anything to make me think she wanted me to leave, but she didn't stop me.

"Ed," called out David, one of my housemates, as soon as I walked into the lounge. "Spades?"

The usual spades table was already set up, with Matt and Lily, two other people who played a lot of spades, seated and shuffling cards. "No thanks. I'm just taking a break before I actually start doing some work."

Lying seemed called for. I wouldn't want people to know about how my relationship was. In fact, I tended to threaten my fellow students if they seemed too interested in Tanya. She was mine, and I didn't want them to even think they had any chance with her.

"You doing work?" he asked. "I never see you work."

"I've got a single. And I usually do my work after everyone is asleep." He shrugged, and went back to spades, where Lily had recruited another player. The funny thing was that he was right. I hardly ever seemed to do any work. I mean, it wasn't that I didn't have it, I just couldn't find the will to do it most of the time. Nothing in me seemed to care about it. I really needed to get my shit together. Instead I watched a hand of spades.

There was really no way of knowing how long I had decided to exile myself from our room, if I was just waiting for that phone call to finish. I would have been surprised if Bella had decided to come out and get me or anything. So after a few minutes I just wandered back to my room, pretending the whole thing had just been some sort of break from doing homework like I had told Dave.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where the emotion in a room is palpable? Where you can feel the relief like a physical thing? Where you can cut the tension with a knife? Sadness like a weight on everyone's back? This was kind of like that. Except even though Bella's emotions were a solid thing in the room, they were so messed up, screwy, and out of control that you couldn't pin one down. Mostly they were bad ones, it seemed. Maybe some relief was in there.

Well, she was done with the phone call.

"Let's play set," Bella immediately announced. Which was fine. Who was I to pry at what must have been an incredibly traumatic conversation? It wasn't like I was a psychologist or something. I was just the random emotional support. I was also the random patsy getting their ass kicked at set, because Bella was not fucking around with that game. I mean, usually I only stand about a third of a chance anyway, but she was focusing everything on those stupid cards, while I went ahead and paid more attention to her than to a game that I probably would have lost even if we had both been our normal selves.

"Is there anything you couldn't forgive Tanya for?"

I suppose Bells could go ahead and talk, now that she was so far ahead in the game that it didn't matter how many I got.

"What do you mean?" It was a stupid response. But I was fishing for exact information about a phone call I'd just missed.

"Could she ever do anything to make you stop loving her?"

That was a different question. Or, maybe not so much. "I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe if she did something that showed she wasn't the person that she is. If she turned into a murderer or something."

Or not. Half of me always wanted to turn into a psychopath. It was such delicious fun, whenever I let myself have little cruel power trips. But the idea was the same. There might exist some action to demonstrate that I was completely wrong about who Tanya was, and about the nature of our relationship. Anything short of me finding out she wasn't really the Tanya I knew and loved, I could forgive.

We lapsed back into silence. It must have been a really bad phone call. I could hear responses that went unspoken, just because Bella was too kind to take her pain out on me or call my relationship into question. She had been so shaken by that conversation.

"What do you want to do for dinner?" I asked as I shuffled the cards. She'd quickly won the first of what was a rather short game anyway.

"I don't care." Dinner wasn't usually an issue at all. We had a dining hall in our dorm. I was usually the one who got hungry first, so I tended to dictate when things shifted more towards food.

"Do you want to go to Bartlett?" Bartlett was a different dining hall that was a couple blocks south of us in the middle of campus. It was considered to have better food than ours, but more importantly, it would not be filled with people who knew us by sight and saw us in the hall every day.

"If you want."

After another couple of games we headed off to eat. Alice hardly ever ate with us anymore, as I had somehow convinced her to give fencing a try, and now she attended every practice and was thinking of buying her own equipment and running for some sort of officer position on the club next year. She always ate after practice with the other fencers. So it was only Bella and I who headed out into the cold to get slightly better food at Bartlett.

Bella and me and my phone. I quickly snatched it out of my pocket, feeling an additional degree of awkwardness answering at that moment.

"Hey, Love." I answered in about the same manner I always did, but it felt like I was speaking ill of the dead, or somehow flaunting my own happy relationship right in front of Bella, when I did it this time.

"Hi Eddy." I breathed a sigh of relief at Tanya's voice. It didn't have anything in it to suggest that she was feeling bad, that she had any problems, or that she was thinking of doing anything that she thought I would disprove of. It was cruel, but at the moment, I could end the call quickly to help another person who needed me more at the moment.

"How was your day so far?"

"Pretty good. The volleyball team has a big trip this weekend."

"I know," I answered, my mind finally bringing up the memory of her telling me that they were traveling to St. Louis or somewhere for a tournament. She had also asked me to watch the online video stream of some of the games. "I can't wait to watch."

"Yeah, well, maybe you should have watched some in high school when you could have actually been there in person."

"You know I couldn't show that much school spirit for such a god awful institution."

"Not even for me?"

"You're the reason I didn't drop out." Only sort of true. But it sounded so romantic to say, I just had to do it. "I was about to go eat. Could I call you later?"

"Oh yeah, sure. I should probably go eat too."

"Ok, I love you."

"Love you too." I hung up, turning my attention back to Bella. She was not reacting to the whole thing. Probably trying to give me the privacy that I always demanded for those phone calls. "Sorry."

"Why?"

I didn't answer. It just struck me as a bad idea.

The dining hall in Bartlett is on the second floor, and we made our way up there. She ended up getting a chicken quesadilla, while I got a steak burrito. Mexican food is one thing our usual dining hall sucks at. Taking our seats didn't seem to really change anything though. I am sure she knew there were a thousand questions I had, and I'm sure she could have ranted at me for a couple days about guys, relationships, and every facet thereof. But instead we just ate quietly, talking about random inane things if we spoke at all.

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