A/N: My thanks again to VampsHaveLaws for creating the banner upon which this story is based. Thanks, too, to everyone who took the time to read this little story. :) I've enjoyed hearing from you!

Chapter Four: Physicists Prove Vampires Cannot Exist

Fact: No heartbeat constitutes a state of non-life. Death.

Theory: She's a zombie.

No way. Those were gross and she wasn't falling apart. But even thinking it had me feeling a little sick to my stomach. Then her sheet slipped and I reassured myself that – whatever she was? – she wasn't a zombie.

The whole lack-of-heartbeat notwithstanding, the sex had been mind-blowing. Not that she'd blown anything else, but yeah. And seeing her body again was totally distracting me.

Until my phone rang with Weird Al's signature theme: "White and Nerdy." Seriously. Men didn't come any more white and nerdy than Weird Al. Except, maybe, me. But Weird Al was totally cooler.

"It's my sister," I told Isabella.

A faint buzzing sound reached my ears and my TA grimaced. "That's Dr. McCarty."

A hundred things flashed through my mind. "Wait. Hell. He's one of you. Whatever you are."

"Shut up, Edward!" she rasped. "You have no idea of the trouble –"

We scrambled, naked, to reach our phones and somehow my arm was around her waist and her hair brushed me with every move we made as we answered our respective callers.

"Rose, hi."

"What's the matter, Genius? Run off with Isabella? Talking about that cat thing?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, relieved that my big sister had given me an out without even knowing it. Telling her I had been sleeping with my TA might have been awkward, even if she was in favor of it. "We started talking after class and, you know, one thing led to another."

My sister snorted. I could hear her through the phone. "Yeah, well, one thing led to another over here, too. I happen to be in the office of Dr. Emmett McCarty. He seems to be short one Teaching Assistant. He told me this when I found out you were a lot later than normal, Little Bro, so I of course went to go find you. In case that cat-thing was fatal."

"I told you. Time kinda got away from us."

Next to me, Isabella leapt from the edge of the bed, her hair swirling around her, sending that amazing smell my way. I watched her move, pale limbs perfect, as she kept her back to me. The buzz of her conversation with Dr. McCarty proved that he was one of whatever she was, anyway.

"You're with him?" I asked my sister, suddenly wondering how she was. Did she think Dr. McCarty...smelled good? "I'll be embarrassed tomorrow, Rose, but are you okay?"

The weirdest thing happened. My big sister giggled. "Okay? Have you seen your professor? If his TA is even half as hot, I will cook dinner for a week."

I had to chuckle, then. It sounded as if Rose was cupping her hand over the phone. But if Dr. McCarty were like Ms. Swan? I bet he could hear her anyway. It was just a theory. "Twice as hot. I want steak." Then, I huffed a breath. "Rose...are you sure you're okay?"

"You aren't getting all the action, Edward. Your professor and I have a date."

"Great. My sister's gonna date my prof. We have to talk," I said before we disconnected .

He's not human! was what I wanted to whisper into the phone.

Thinking that, all the factors clicked together in my head, almost physically. Almost loud. Almost, I expected to see Isabella snap her focus back to me as I figured it out.

Pale skin. Avoidance of sun. No conventional kitchen stuff. She had admitted to biting...?

No heartbeat.

"Vampire," I breathed, the syllables barely leaving my lips.

"No!" She buzzed into her phone and then threw it on her bed, where it slid under a pillow. "Edward, no. I mean, physics prove vampires don't exist. So, no." She didn't meet my eyes, however. She just turned and slid on her underwear. And though she was perfection in every possible way? I was thinking she was not entirely natural. "I – I don't go draining humans and I don't sleep in a coffin," she said, her voice a little too bright, I was thinking. "See?" she added, finally meeting my gaze and sweeping her arm around.

I caught my reflection in the mirror and blushed. Bending swiftly over, I pulled on my boxers and sat back on the bed. "You said you bite," I reminded her.

She bit her lip as she collapsed on the bed next to me. We sat and hitched our bodies around so that we were facing one another. I focused on getting an answer from her. "You said if you told me, you'd have to kill me." Somehow, that idea hit me more seriously now than it had before Rose told me she had a date with Dr. McCarty. Still, I didn't feel like I had to leave, either. "But I guessed, right?"

She winced, swallowed, and compressed her lips together. "You said vampire," she murmured, looking at my bony knee. "You really think I'm one of those?" Her eyes rose to meet mine, shiny and vulnerable. "Did I feel like that just now?" she asked, nodding at the pile of blankets on the bed, rumpled and smelling of the two of us.

"I've never had sex with a vampire before." Cocking my head, I added, "You didn't tell me to my face that you weren't, either."

She blinked and drew herself up a little. Still, her eyes shifted to land anywhere but on my face. "Edward... I'm not a vampire."

"You're a terrible liar, Ms. Swan."

I realized that I had lost a lot of my nervousness around her. I thought it was because the sexual tension had been cleared up, but also because she was suddenly as much a puzzle as a beautiful woman. Women were intimidating but puzzles demanded my respect and focus.

Isabella Swan compelled all of my attention, in every way.

"Edward..." She took my hand between hers. "I'd have to change you, if I were to tell you. And it hurts, a lot. I – I don't want to hurt you."

She wasn't lying; this much I could see. I nodded. "I'm not really into pain, you know? But what do you mean about changing me?"

Isabella slid one hand up my arm, coming to a smooth stop at my jaw, which she held while she studied my face. "I hear your heartbeat now. You won't have one, then. Your skin? It'll be like mine. And your eyes, Edward? They're so beautiful," she whispered. I lost the ability to breathe, for a second. Her sincerity was apparent and I'd never had anyone, ever, pay me this kind of attention. "Breathe," she suggested, her expression lightening a little as she smiled.

I shook my head, inadvertently dislodging her hand, and gulped in some air. "You said it would hurt? What happened to you?" I couldn't imagine her having to suffer.

Her smile, brief as it had been, was pressed away by her agitation. She pushed herself off the bed, went to the closet, and tossed on a blue dress. "Edward...I have to change you or kill you. You don't understand."

She was dead serious. I could see it and it scared me. "I – I should get home. I, I need to talk to my sister. She's got a date with Dr. McCarty and –"

Shaking her head, Isabella had her arms around me in less than a heartbeat. "No. I can't. It's the law. The Romanians – you don't know what they'll do to me...what they'll do to you..."

"Wait. Back up."

She told me, then. All of it. How she had been dancing at a USO party in Seattle during World War II. The lights went out and the dance was canceled and one of the enlisted men offered to walk her home.

"He was a real gentleman," she said, "but he was never available during the daytime. I figured he was on duty."

"How did a vampire get enlisted?"

She cringed at the word vampire, but answered. "He wasn't really enlisted. He had been hunting, Edward. He took his last prey's uniform."

"Ouch."

After blowing out a breath that smelled just so good, she continued. Isabella and the vampire dated while he was "home on leave" and she remembered thinking how fit he was. "But times were more conservative, you know," she reminded me. They hadn't had sex, but they had spent a great deal of time together.

Too much time, as it turned out. She had figured out there was something about him. Isabella Swan had been a good science student, in high school.

"Two men, short but really intimidating, showed up while we were, uh, parked." She lifted her brow at me and I smirked. "They found out I knew what Randall was, you see, and took us both away."

While in Romania, Isabella told me, Randall was punished severely. She watched as he was dismembered and then burnt, limb by limb, his still-alert head forced to witness everything. "It was the very worst thing I had ever seen," she whispered.

I gathered her into my arms and we found a place for ourselves against the plain brown headboard of her bed. Something had shifted between us, in just the space of a few minutes. I could still see our reflection in the mirrored closet doors –

Does she like having sex in front of a mirror? Would she want to with me? And hey, if she's a vampire, how come I can see her there, anyway? I guess Hollywood's got vampire stories as wrong as they do rocket science.

– and all of a sudden, I went from being this nerdy but hopeful student in a state of constant TA-induced arousal to what looked like a guy who had his shit together. In response, I hugged her closer, ignoring the fact that her body wasn't comfortably embraceable.

"I'm really sorry," I murmured into Isabella's hair. "That must have been the worst thing."

She blew out a breath. "Almost. They told me they could kill me or make it so I lived forever." She leaned back, still in my lap, and met my eyes. "I was twenty-one. What do you think I'd pick?"

"I totally understand."

"No, but you will."

One of the Romanians, just at the time of Bella's change, was visited by a "daughter" of his – a woman named Sasha. "Stefan had sired Sasha a long time before, and they'd been lovers for a while before Sasha decided to make her own coven with only females."

My mind instantly flashed to a group of women that were hot and sexy like Ms. Swan and that ever-horny teenager tried to stand up and take notice. I swallowed and hoped Isabella didn't notice. Think zombies. Think dead pussy - - cats! No! Shut. Up.

"Sasha didn't have the same diet the others did, and when I found out, I asked her to show me how she hunted."

"What? Diet?"

She smiled and I felt her cool nose burrow into the hollow of my throat. "I don't drink human blood anymore. Only from animals. That's why my eyes are gold and not red." Her sigh was melancholy when she added, "I'll miss your green eyes."

My heart started to pound as I suddenly got it. She was going to make me like her. I felt myself try to hyperventilate. "Isabella..?"

"Tell me about your life," she said, moving in a blink to straddle me and press firmly against the headboard before ripping – literally – her clothes from her body with an ease that made me gasp. My eyes rolled back in my head a little and I couldn't seem to take in that that hot, I have sex in front of mirrors look was in her eyes for me. "Tell me about your sister. Your parents." With a strange sort of delicacy, she ground down on me and rocked over my persistent hard-on. "I never should have let this happen to you, and I'm so sorry. But you'll be one hell of a physicist when you can go back to school. I bet we could do some amazing things together."

I groaned. Even in the face of possible maiming, it seemed my body wanted Isabella Swan. And I loved her mind. I captured her head in my hands and kissed her. I realized, then, that she had been very careful to make it so that her tongue went into my mouth. "Teeth?" I wondered.

"Sharp."

With a strange, poignant whimper, Isabella Swan tongued my throat and made a cool, scented path to my boxers. When we had sex that time, I watched her ride me in the mirror.

I watched her dark hair brush my thighs as she leaned back and cried out.

I watched her ass as she leaned forward, her speed scary but also fantastic as I came inside of her.

And then I watched, very carefully, as she apologized and bit my throat. My final human memory was the reflected image of our bodies joined in a way that had nothing and everything to do with superposition.

Physicists may have been able to prove that vampires aren't possible (1), but I now know better. Tiny subatomic particles in Isabella's venom worked to change my basic physical properties in multiple ways.

I didn't get it, the first time I saw myself in a mirror. Where I'd been tall and lanky and awkward-looking, I had changed. My skin was all cleared up, for one. My hair was kind of a bronze shade instead of the brownish-red it had been. I looked like I'd been working out with Dr. McCarty, too. But as Isabella told me would happen, my eyes were red at first. They became more gold eventually. I had become the kind of guy other people stared at, like I'd stared at Isabella.

I didn't get to see her for a while – too conspicuous to have Rose and Edward Cullen disappear at the same time as Dr. McCarty – Emmett – and his Teaching Assistant. Emmett called in an old friend of his, another "Southern Boy" like himself, named Jasper Whitlock. Jasper had taught countless new vampires how to adjust to the new life and new body. Bella came to visit and when I saw her –

Wow. I had thought she was sexy before? To an exponential factor of at least a thousand, with my sharp vision. Not only that, but when I held her for the first time, something sizzled inside of me. And inside of her, too, she said.

Jasper laughed and told us about being mates and suggested that Bella might want to take a sabbatical from the university for a while.

"Y'all are gonna be pretty busy," he drawled, wiggling his eyebrows.

"That's for sure!" called his mate, a tiny woman named Alice.

"I think I can handle that," Isabella murmured to me before she led me off to the room that had been loaned to me in this sprawling, hilly property in Appalachia. (Emmett and Jasper apparently had wealthy friends!) "I have a few things to teach my favorite student."

You know, they say that curiosity killed the cat. But with Schrödinger's cat? You can't tell for certain how the outcome went because to monitor the experiment precisely means ruining the parameters and, thus, the trial. So the cat cannot be proven dead without disrupting the experiment. It remains, theoretically, between life and death. Like me.

I have an idea that maybe, maybe physicists like me and Isabella might be able to figure it out without dying ourselves in the process. I like the idea of proving another theory.

The End

(1) ht tp: / / io9. com / 52 412 52/ physicists- prove-that- vampires-could- not-exist

A/N: Yes, one may imagine that Emmett changed Rose, too, and they will all exist happily ever after. After Emmett recovers from the fact that Rose rips off both his arms as soon as she realizes what he's done to her.

Thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with Nerdward and Ms. Swan. :) I had a great time with them!

~LJ