Edward Cullen

Bella and I sat through fifty minutes of Biology in tense anticipation for the bell to set us free. I couldn't be entirely sure that she was as tense as I was, of course, but her nervous fidgeting and constant glancing at the clock above the dry-erase board were a small hint.

But who knew. With Bella, I was liable to be one hundred percent wrong and she just really needed to take a leak.

The teacher, Mr. Banner, was at least more lively than most of the other teachers on campus. He had inflections in his voice every so often and he moved slightly faster than the speed of smell. He rambled on about the basics of scientific inquiry and current perspectives in Biology as I thought about Bella.

I didn't care that I would be skipping a class, because it would be time spent with her. I should have wanted to spend the time with her to advance my goals in the war, but I wasn't going to lie to myself and say that I wasn't looking forward to her company.

The war, Edward. You're over ten times her age. She should be irrelevant to you.

Yeah. Should be. Fuck off, subconscious.

I glanced over at Bella, who was seated with me at our table in the back of the room, and saw her texting. My eyesight wasn't as sharp as it normally would be with the sun out, but it matched human eyesight and I could see the name on her screen.

I'm usually not so nosy, but I couldn't resist looking at the contact she was texting.

Jacob Black.

Jacob fucking Black.

My target.

I felt my heart pick up just a bit as I mentally took a step back to assess my next move. I mentally started running through possible courses of action. Ask her about it when we skipped class. Steal her phone and look through it. Tell Carlisle that she'd made contact. Have him try to get a bead on the text signal.

Mr. Banner interrupted my scheming with an overly enthusiastic vomit of words. "Mister Cullen! How do you feel about that?" He wanted to know how I felt about biology in the last fifty years. I mentally cursed the human and resisted the urge to tell him that I'd been alive for all of those fifty years. I also resisted the urge to put a bullet in him.

Having a gun on a school campus was definitely not okay, but being jumped by a wolf on a school campus in the daylight was far worse.

I had been listening to his lecture the entire time in case something like this happened. I looked him right in the eye and gave him my verbal equivalent of a kick in the nuts. "The emphasis on moralistic approaches to science, especially biology, has never suited me well. Of course, one has to consider the subjectivity of what is defined as 'moral', but at any rate I'll always hold a behaviorist opinion and say that results are the goal and most important aspect of experimentation, never the method."

He had been expecting me to give him some garbage because he thought I hadn't been paying attention. His face was deadpan and his mouth was ever so slightly agape.

I didn't have to read his mind to know that he felt like an idiot.

"Very good Mr. Cullen. He brings up a great point, class, if we examine…" he trailed off into another asinine rant and tried to redeem himself while I lost interest and looked at Bella again.

She was staring up into my eyes with those brown, color-of-the-earth eyes of hers with shock written all over her face. I gave her a silent 'what?' and she betrayed more surprise.

She drew up a blank text on her phone, typed out a message and handed me the phone.

That was awesome! You're my project partner from now on with smarts like that, mister.

I smirked, erased her text, and wrote a response.

Well if you insist. I can't possibly say no when you twist my arm like that.

I handed her the phone back. I heard her giggle and I looked at her. She mouthed 'smartass' at me and I stifled a laugh. My humor is often lost on people. And not just humans. Vampires, werewolves, and humans alike usually don't understand that I'm hilarious. I've gotten used to it.

Bella pocketed her phone and I got back to thinking about her texting Jacob Black and what I was going to do. I could steal her phone, but I would have some trouble managing that. She wasn't a stupid human and fooling her would probably be a straightforward yet challenging proposition.

Not to insult Bella. But seventeen years on Earth won't teach you much, especially when the first ten are fuzzy and not well remembered.

I decided to wait until her and I were alone and bring it up in conversation. She would either give me all the information I needed, or she would give me fuck-all and I would go from there. I was playing fast and loose with my disguise as it was; being reckless in my planning and execution of this entire ordeal might as well be allowed, right?

Bella and I sat in silence for what felt like an eternity before the bell rang its shrill screech. The humans did their daily run for the door while I took my time getting up. Bella was getting her backpack on when she checked her phone again and stopped moving. She went from looking fine to looking tightly wound, almost instantly. I wondered what was troubling her and cursed the wolf who had protection magic on her. If only I could read her. For a second. This would be so much easier. She took in a shaky breath and pocketed her cellular and my intuition flared up and started going apeshit with red flags.

Something happened with the wolf. Something bad.

She looked up at me when she was ready and forced a smile. "Ready?" she asked.

She was trying to be strong. Admirable, but unnecessary with me. I would listen to whatever it was bothering her. As soon as we got to the football field.

We walked into the dark mist and I hoped that she wouldn't mind being outside in this kind of weather. She didn't seem to mind. "So," she said, "I don't know where we're going." She laughed slightly but she was visibly different after that last text. She looked ahead as we walked while I looked at her. I needed to know what was eating away at her.

"It's right around this corner. We'll cut behind the gym." She nodded without looking at me and we kept going. I practically had to nail my mouth shut so I wouldn't ask her what was wrong. If I asked too soon she might close up and tell me that it was nothing.

"Are you okay? You seem off" I asked, unable to resist. I internally kicked myself. Two minutes. I couldn't wait two minutes to ask her what was wrong.

Pansy ass, I chided at myself.

She was silent for a minute. "I'll tell you when we get there" she said, and I took back some of my self-directed punishment. She would tell me, just not right now.

We walked behind the gym on a sidewalk that rarely got any use; there was hardly any old gum covering it. The football practice field was up ahead and it was utterly deserted. The field actually had a pretty good view of the sky; there was no tree line on the far side of the field, so the mountains of dark clouds were completely visible. Even with Bella upset over something, I drank in the view.

The bleachers were another minute away and we walked in silence. When we arrived, I set my stuff down and went ahead of Bella to step up two or three seats. She took longer to set her stuff down and looked up at me. I felt some instinct inside of me click and I lost control of myself.

I outstretched my hand to help her up. She stared at me with those beautiful brown eyes again and reached out to me slowly, not quite hesitantly…it was more like she was trying to convince herself that I wouldn't snatch my hand back.

Her hand grasped mine and I let out hands stay linked like that for a second or two too long. I stroked her hand with my thumb and then helped her up to my level. She got to me quick and in a second she was in front of me, out hands still linked. Her fingers laced with mine for the briefest of moments before we broke our touch at the same time.

I felt my breath catch a little and I tried to ignore whatever it was that I was feeling at that second. I had known what I was going to do, but I probably should have shown some restraint. I'd wanted to touch her, but I wasn't prepared for it to have the effect on me that it did.

Head in the game, Cullen. Jesus fucking Christ. There's only an entire war going on.

Bella shakily sat down and I sat next to her. She looked more shaken up than before, but this time it was a good kind of shaken up. Almost like she was feeling what I was.

At least, that's what I wanted to believe.

War. The War. The WAR.

"Thanks" she said softly. I chuckled at her perfect timing. "Don't mention it" I said, turning toward her and staring into those eyes of hers once more. "So tell me. What's wrong?" I didn't want to brush off our moment, if you could call it that, but I still had to get to the bottom of her situation.

She shook her head and started fiddling around with her hair. "It's nothing. My friend, Jacob, he said he can't talk for a while and that he's having family problems. I'm worried about him, that's all. He never gets like this." I was relieved that she was having a problem that was manageable and admittedly trivial, and I was intrigued about what it meant if Jacob Black couldn't talk to her. Was the Quileute tribe on the move?

"How long have you known him?" I asked, needing to start from the bottom and work my way up to get her to tell me about him.

"God, pretty much my whole life" she started. "I met him when I was a little kid. I was probably four or five. We played all the time and were really close until my Mom made me move to Arizona." Her face darkened slightly when she got to her mother. "We talked a lot when I was away. He even came to visit once. My mom put the shutdown on that, of course, but we didn't let the distance affect us. I guess you could say he's my best friend. He's been there for me through a lot." She paused and started tying her hair into pigtails.

I didn't let the outrageously sexy pigtails distract me for too long. "So, are you guys, like, together…?" I played dumb, but in a lot of ways it was an honest question, because I didn't know anything about this wolf or what he was to her.

To my surprise, she laughed. "Oh god, no. Jacob is like my brother. That would be far beyond weird if I dated him. No. He's just one of the few people I can really rely on. Him, my Dad… they're really the only two. I wasn't allowed to talk to my Dad hardly at all in Arizona. My mom let me talk to Jacob but I had to really fight for that one. I had fought to talk to my Dad, too, but she wouldn't budge on him. She would have died before she let me maintain regular contact with him." Her voice became laced with acid as she described her mother again, so I veered the conversation into more relevant territory.

"So what did you tell him? Just now, I meant?" She finished with her pigtails and I called upon my iron will not to look at them. "I told him to just call me when he could. He'll eventually get all of this settled."

I nodded and looked out at the sky again. So, Jacob Black was most likely in the process of moving with the rest of the Quileute tribe. He was shutting Bella out, which was the real kicker; if she wasn't going to be near them any time soon, a blood bond would do nothing but fuck me in the head and we were lost.

I started to feel defeat set in upon me when I remembered Carlisle's words.

"She has vital intel that they are obviously protecting, so theoretically they would want to keep their one vulnerability close at hand. When the Quileutes go into hiding, they will keep contact with her to ensure that her life is proceeding normally."

So what was Jacob thinking? Perhaps he had no idea about the existence of werewolves yet, and he too really believed that family problems were the necessitation for his moving. I'd had full faith in Carlisle, and I let his words comfort me. Jacob might not be wise to what was really happening, but one of the older wolves in the tribe would eventually reach out to Bella or her father and bring her back into their peripheral vision.

It's okay. This doesn't mean defeat.

I let that thought rest easy and realized that I was now back to playing the waiting game.

Next step: feed her.

I mentally set that thought aside and felt my stress diminish by a marginal amount. I just had to maintain my disguise for now, then. I would forge the blood bond with her and wait for the Quileutes to bring me to them. I felt like all of this was too easy, but I realized that the amount of patience and time that this would require had sufficiently raised the difficulty of this operation. Not to mention the blood bond.

"I'm really sorry to hear that he's so out of touch. If you guys have been friends for this long I'm sure he has a good reason to be so distant" I said, shifting the conversation from subtle interrogation to genuine discourse.

She smiled at me and she looked like she was doing somewhat better. "I know. This isn't the first time he's gotten like this. I just don't like it when my friends suffer, that's all." Such a big heart this girl had.

Not the first time he's gotten like this. Drop your sissy talk for a second and ask about that, dipshit.

"He's been like this before?" I asked, curiosity coloring my tone.

"Oh, yeah. It's just regular life stuff. He fails a test, he beats himself up for it. He gets into a fight with his dad, he questions it. He's just really emotionally driven."

See that? Nothing at all. Fuck off, subconscious.

I nodded. I was becoming more interested in actually talking to her every second and decided that I had enough info for now. A few minutes of conversation about the wolf I was tracking felt meager, but I couldn't justify over an hour of discussion on him. I could pick up more bits and pieces as I went. That, and Jacob Black wasn't my only priority. I still had the task of getting myself intertwined into Bella's life enough and playing the human.

"I hear you. You just seemed really shaken up when we left class, that's all" I said, wanting to move the discussion into more cheerful territory. Bella having life issues wasn't favorable for me forging a blood bond with her, so understanding her issues was ideal for me dealing with the emotional shit storm I was soon to create within myself. But still, depressing teenage angst was something I was far out of touch with and I enjoyed happy Bella.

I mean, it's normal to not want to see someone suffer, right?

"Well, that was one part of it" she said, looking at her feet. I cursed inwardly and wondered just how I'd address that. I opted for charming lenience.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I just don't like seeing you upset, that's all" I said, doing my best to sound casual. I really did want to know what was bothering her, but I shouldn't have been as eager as I was to help her.

"It's kind of a long story. I mean, I'd tell you, but I really don't want to just ramble…" she trailed off, and I figured that she was leaving it up to me if I wanted to hear it.

Well of course I wanted to hear it.

"I'm here to listen" I said.

She took a deep breath and sat up straight, looking off into the storm clouds.

"I was thinking about an ex of mine this morning" she said, and I corralled myself into silence, praying to God that this wasn't an 'I miss him so much' situation.

"I got to thinking about how things turned out between us and it kind of brought me down. I mean, I try not to think about it, but comes up every now and again, you know?" She turned and looked at me, and she did look better; perhaps talking about what was effecting her had done some good.

And still, I couldn't say that I knew how she felt. For nearly two centuries I'd been alive, and most of those years had been spent hunting down the wolves, fighting the war.

I lied. "I know how it is. I'm sorry." Then I told the truth. "Whoever he was, he was an idiot."

She didn't look away. "Why's that" she asked.

"Well, he either let you go or he lost you. Either way, for him to have done either of those, he was a fool. Because it was you he lost." I really hoped that she needed no further explanation that that, because it was hard enough to tell her that much.

Not because I didn't want to tell her, but because I shouldn't have those kinds of feelings about the situation.

What was I doing? Jesus Christ, I should have just left it at 'I'm sorry' and moved on, but no. I was actually trying to connect with her.

That's your job, isn't it?

She smiled. "Thank you. But it wasn't quite like that. It was kind of a disastrous break up, which is what bothers me about it" she said. I was intrigued.

"Disastrous?" I asked, unable to stop myself from asking.

"His name was Blake. We met when I was a freshman. He was a junior. I know, the age difference was probably something I should have cared about, but I didn't. I was at Phoenix High, a school with over ten thousand students, so I felt really special when he started talking to me. I mean, there were literally thousands of other girls he could have chosen, but he wanted me. We had a history class together. After he introduced himself on the first day, I couldn't get enough of him. We talked all the time. We texted, he walked me to my classes, introduced me to some of his friends. It was wonderful. But I hadn't had a serious boyfriend yet. I'd had 'boyfriends' in middle school, but middle school relationships are kind of a joke, you know?"

I nodded. Waited. Needed to hear more.

"So, we in this weird kind-of-dating but not-really-dating half relationship thing. He had told me that he liked me, and he knew I was completely smitten with him, but we didn't go official or anything after he told me. We just stayed in, well, the weird half relationship thing. Until Christmas."

She stopped and I sensed that the story was going to go from informative to tragic, quick. With Bella it was liable to be anything, but I got the feeling that petty teenage relationship drama was not her flavor.

"We had Christmas break off, and we spent as much time together as we could. My mom didn't really have any strong feelings about him. She'd met him once and didn't really care that he and I spent a lot of time alone. Anyway, we were downtown one night, and there were so many people out. There's this huge Christmas tree that they put up downtown every year, and I wanted to see it. So we went there, and it was…well, magical. At the time I thought it was, anyway. We'd been downtown all night with his friends, and by that time they all liked me. I felt like life was perfect. My grades were pretty good for me being so obsessed with Blake all semester. But. We hadn't really taken things further than just texting all night and things like that. But that night, he held my hand the entire time. I guess he just decided that physical barriers didn't mean anything. I was so thrilled. And, by the time we got to the Christmas tree downtown, it was so late. There were still people out and I thought I was on top of the world. A freshman, pretty much dating a junior, and everything felt so good."

She paused again and I didn't speak a word. I was thinking that she would eventually reach the bad shit, but I'd gotten lucky and she was giving me every detail she could remember.

That's no sarcasm. I could listen to her talk about herself all day. And her voice. Yeah. I was definitely okay with her voice.

"But anyway. We got to this Christmas tree, which I'd seen before, but with him it felt special. We just stared up at didn't say anything. I can't remember what it is he said to me to get my attention, but when I looked back at him, he was kissing me. It was…exhilarating. It was like nothing could go wrong for me. The entire semester had passed so wonderfully, and now he was kissing me."

I ignored the weird feeling that set up shop in my chest and waited.

"Needless to say, Santa couldn't have brought me any better gift that night. I don't think I even slept that night after he dropped me off at home. My adrenaline was in overdrive and my heart didn't slow down a beat. I knew I was in love then. I thought life was perfect."

She stopped again. I knew that the gory details had to come out eventually and prepared myself for whatever this human had done to her.

"Well, New Years passed by in a blur and I thought that my entire life was set. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but I really felt that way. But, around the middle of January he started to get…weird. He would text me asking me where I was, making sure he knew I was close to him. At school he started getting overly physical. Always trying to keep me near him. He would throw a fit if I wanted to go somewhere that he wasn't. He started having his friends watch me wherever I went in case he wouldn't be near me. It all got so…stifling. His possessive side came out in full swing after he started telling me who I could and couldn't be around."

I nodded and was starting to become afraid of where exactly this was leading.

As a vampire who has seen the true horrors of war for one hundred eighty eight years, to say that I was afraid was pretty fucking heavy.

"Well, I wasn't having any of that. He and I started fighting, and eventually the perfect life I'd thought I had started to turn into something worse. He kept me in line with his words, and at the beginning it worked. Threatening to break up with me, mostly. If it was anything I couldn't handle, it was the thought of losing him."

"But, eventually, his words didn't work anymore. So he used his hands to keep me in line."

I felt anger flash though me. I couldn't say that I was surprised, but it didn't make me any less pissed.

The rage boiled in my chest and I tried to keep my cool.

"The first time he ever hit me was in school. We were having a talk behind one of the buildings during lunch. I told him that things weren't working, and our talk turned into a full blown argument. When I told him that I could leave if I wanted to, he snapped. He slapped me, right across the face. He played baseball for the school, so he was no weakling. He started apologizing immediately after it happened, begging me to stay, telling me it would never happen again. I was so shaken up, and so afraid to lose someone that had made my life in Phoenix bearable, that I gave him another chance."

I nodded and hoped that the end of this story came fast. I was going to burst from the fury tearing through me. The thought of some human piece of shit harming her shouldn't have upset me so much, but it did, and I had no chance of keeping a lid on those feelings.

"Very soon after that, the abuse got worse. He never hit me in front of anyone else, but I was foolish and kept sacrificing me free time to be with him. If we were alone, together, he usually wound up hitting me or using his strength to dominate me. By the end of the year, I was a mess. My grades had fallen, which gave my mother an excuse to turn into more of a bitch. She stopped letting me see him as often as I was, which didn't make him happy. He blamed me for it. Of course, the whole time the physical abuse was going on, he was emotionally abusive as well. He destroyed my self-esteem, he told me that if I wasn't him that I was nothing, that I was no one. He did everything he could to make me entirely dependent upon him. Of course, the last thing I needed by that point was him in my life any longer. About half way through summer, I realized that, and I guess that he was catching on to the fact that he couldn't fool me forever. So, he gave one last desperate attempt at keeping me with him forever."

I wasn't sure how much worse that this story could get, but I waited in silence.

"He figured that if he knocked me up that I would have to marry him because his parents had money. Not a lot, but enough that I would have to stay with him to raise the baby. But see, we'd never had sex. We'd never done anything like that together. So he decided that he would make a baby with me. Whether I liked it or not."

My fangs shot out and I clamped a hand over my mouth. It was a miracle that the gesture was easy to pass off as me being horrified, because if I hadn't she would have seen my chompers.

But I had fully heard what she'd said and if I was furious before, I was livid now.

I couldn't help myself.

"Did he…" I started.

"Did he succeed? No. Hell no. We were at his parents' house when he tried to force himself on me, and they got home before he could do anything. But that was only because I fought back. And won."

So Bella was no pansy. She could fight. I liked that.

"I broke his nose." She giggled. "It's bad to laugh, I know, but he didn't know who he was trying to violate. But anyway. That day I finally told him it was over. He begged me and begged me to stay, told me that he wasn't actually going to rape me, that he was just trying to keep us together, blah blah blah. I told him to go to hell. School was still three weeks from starting, so for three weeks he blew up my phone with calls, texts, voicemails asking to just talk to me so we could work it out. He started stalking me. Driving by my house. He even came to my window one night. I threatened to call the cops and he ran. This went on right until about two or three days before school started. Finally he called me the weekend before we went back, and he asked me to just listen to him. I told him he had five minutes. So for five minutes he told me that he loved me, that I was the only girl he'd ever loved this much, and that he couldn't live without me, and all that crap. I told him that we couldn't be together after everything he'd done, and that was that. I hung up on him. And I never saw him again."

Bella ended her story with perfect timing. I heard the bell ring in the distance we both remained seated.

"So…he doesn't call you, text you, annoy you anymore?" I asked, keenly aware that there was now a human male somewhere in the world that was obsessed with Bella. Not only was that a compromise to my plans and to victory in the war, but no one would touch Bella. No hair on her head would be touched by anyone, human, wolf, or vampire.

Bella gave a humorless laugh and shook her head. "No. He doesn't bother me anymore." She looked out at the clouds again. "I thought about Blake after Jake texted me because Jake was the person I went to after Blake tried to force himself on me. Of course he went batshit insane and almost told my dad, but I didn't want word of what had happened going around the school. It would only further ruin my life which was already looking pretty grim as it was. And when Jake said that he wouldn't be able to talk to me and that he didn't know when he'd be back, I kind of felt vulnerable. That's all."

I nodded. "Well, I know you don't know me that well and everything, but I'm not leaving any time soon, so if you ever need anything." I left it at that because I was trying to moderate my behavior, trying to clamp down on whatever it was that was compelling me to act this way toward Bella. I hardly knew her and already she was having this effect on me. I couldn't explain it but I also knew that as time went on, I would eventually understand. I would reason all of this out.

Wouldn't I?

She smiled. "Thank you. Really." She looked at me and again I was locked in her stare. I then remembered that there was a question I wanted to ask her.

"So, what if he tries to follow you here? If he's so obsessed aren't you worried that he might show up one day?" I was hoping that he did, because I would rip out his spine and bury him alive if I had the chance.

"He won't. He can't." She said, looking away again.

Awh, party pooper. I wanted to kill him. Badly.

"What makes you so sure?" I asked, genuinely curious.

She was silent. After a moment she looked at her feet.

"He's dead."