She got up, hesitating for a moment as if to check her balance. I held the door for her, and we walked out into the rain.

I watched her as she lifted her face to the light rain with her eyes closed, a slight smile on her lips. What was she thinking? Something about this action seemed off, and I quickly realized why the posture looked unfamiliar to me. Normal human girls wouldn’t raise their faces to the drizzle that way; normal human girls usually wore makeup, even here in this wet place.

Bella never wore makeup, nor should she. The cosmetics industry made billions of dollars a year from women who were trying to attain skin like hers.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling at me now. “It’s almost worth getting sick to miss Gym.”

I stared across the campus, wondering how to prolong my time with her. “Anytime,” I said.

“So are you going? This Saturday, I mean?” She sounded hopeful.

Ah, her hope eased the sting of my jealousy. She wanted me with her, not Mike Newton. And I wanted to say yes. But there were many things to consider. For one, the sun would be shining this Saturday.

“Where are you all going, exactly?” I tried to keep my voice nonchalant, as if the answer didn’t matter much. Mike had said beach, though. Not much chance of avoiding sunlight there. Emmett would be irritated if I canceled our plans, but that wouldn’t stop me if there was any way to spend the time with her.

“Down to La Push, to First Beach.”

It was impossible, then.

I managed my disappointment, then glanced down at her, smiling wryly. “I really don’t think I was invited.”

She sighed, already resigned. “I just invited you.”

“Let’s you and I not push poor Mike any further this week. We don’t want him to snap.” I thought about snapping poor Mike myself, and enjoyed the mental picture intensely.

“Mike-schmike,” she said, dismissive again. I smiled.

And then she started to walk away from me.

Without thinking about my action, I automatically reached out and caught her by the back of her rain jacket. She jerked to a stop.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I was upset—almost angry that she was leaving. I hadn’t had enough time with her.

“I’m going home,” she said, clearly baffled as to why this should upset me.

“Didn’t you hear me promise to take you safely home? Do you think I’m going to let you drive in your condition?” I knew she wouldn’t like that—my implication of weakness on her part. But I needed to practice for the Seattle trip—to see if I could handle her proximity in an enclosed space. This was a much shorter journey.

“What condition?” she demanded. “And what about my truck?”

“I’ll have Alice drop it off after school.” I pulled her back toward my car carefully. Apparently, walking forward was challenging enough for her.

“Let go!” she said, twisting sideways and nearly tripping. I held one hand out to catch her, but she righted herself before it was necessary. I shouldn’t be looking for excuses to touch her. That started me thinking again about Ms. Cope’s reaction to me, but I filed it away for later. There was much to be considered on that front.

I let her go as she asked, and then regretted it—she immediately tripped and stumbled into the passenger door of my car. I would have to be even more careful, to take into account her poor balance.

“You are so pushy!”

She was right. My behavior was odd, and that was the kindest description. Would she tell me no now?

“It’s open.”

I got in on my side and started the car. She held her body rigidly, still outside, though the rain had picked up and I knew she didn’t like the cold and wet. Water was soaking through her thick hair, darkening it to near-black.

“I am perfectly capable of driving myself home!”

Of course she was. But I craved her time in a way that I’d never really wanted anything else before. Not immediate and demanding like thirst, this was something different, a different kind of want, and different kind of pain.

She shivered.

I rolled the passenger-side window down and leaned toward her. “Please get in, Bella.”

Her eyes narrowed, and I guessed that she was debating whether or not to make a run for it.

“I could drag you back…,” I joked, wondering if my guess was correct. The consternation on her face told me it was.

Her chin held stiffly in the air, she opened her door and climbed in. Her hair dripped on the leather, and her boots squeaked against each other.

“This is completely unnecessary,” she said.

I thought she looked more embarrassed than really angry. Was my behavior entirely offside? I thought I was teasing, that I was acting like the average besotted teenage boy, but what if I’d gotten it wrong? Did she feel coerced? I realized she had every reason to.

I didn’t know how to do this. How to court her as a normal, human, modern man in the year two thousand and five. As a human, I’d only learned the customs of my time. Thanks to my strange gift, I knew quite well how people thought now, what they did, how they acted, but when I tried to act casual and modern it seemed all wrong. Probably because I wasn’t normal or modern or human. And it wasn’t as if I’d learned anything usable from my family. None of them had had anything near a normal courtship, even excepting the two other qualifications.

Rosalie and Emmett had been the cliché, the classic love-at-first-sight story. There had never been a moment when either one had questioned what they were to each other. In the first second Rosalie saw Emmett, she’d been drawn to the innocence and honesty that had evaded her in life, and she wanted him. In the first second that Emmett saw Rosalie, he saw a goddess whom he had worshiped without cease ever since. There had never been an awkward first conversation full of doubt, never a fingernail-biting moment of waiting for a yes or no.

Alice and Jasper’s union had been even less normal. For all the twenty-eight years up to their first meeting, Alice had known she would love Jasper. She’d seen years, decades, centuries, of their future lives together. And Jasper, feeling all her emotions in that long-awaited moment, the purity and certainty and depth of her love, couldn’t help but be overwhelmed. It must have felt like a tsunami to him.

Carlisle and Esme had been slightly more typical than the others, I supposed. Esme had already been in love with Carlisle—much to his shock—but not through any mystical, magical means. She’d met Carlisle as a girl and, drawn to his gentleness, wit, and otherworldly beauty, formed an attachment that had haunted her for the rest of her human years. Life had not been kind to Esme, and so it was not surprising that this golden memory of a good man had never been supplanted in her heart. After the burning torment of transformation, when she’d awakened to the face of her long-cherished dream, her affections were entirely his.

I’d been on hand to caution Carlisle about her unforeseen reaction. He’d expected that she would be shocked by her transformation, traumatized by the pain, horrified by what she’d become, much as I had been. He’d expected to have to explain and apologize, to soothe and to atone. He knew there was a good chance that she would have preferred death, that she would despise him for the choice made without her knowledge or consent. So the fact that she had been immediately prepared to join this life—not really the life, but to join him—was not something he was ready for.

He’d never seen himself as a possible object of romantic love before that moment. It seemed contrary to what he was—a vampire, a monster. The knowledge I gave him changed the way he looked at Esme, the way he looked at himself.

More than that, it was very a powerful thing, choosing to save someone. It was not a decision any sane individual made lightly. When Carlisle chose me, he’d already felt a dozen binding emotions toward me before I’d even awakened to what was happening. Responsibility, anxiety, tenderness, pity, hope, compassion… there was a natural ownership to the act that I’d never experienced, only heard about through his thoughts and Rosalie’s. He already felt like my father before I knew his name. For me, it was effortless and instinctive to fall into my role as son. Love came easily—though I’d always attributed that more to who he was as a person than to his initiating my conversion.

So whether for these reasons, or whether it was because Carlisle and Esme were simply meant to be… even with my gift to hear it all as it happened, I would never know. She loved him, and he quickly found he could return that love. It was a very short period of time before his surprise changed to wonder, to discovery, and to romance. So much happiness.

Just a few moments of easily overcome awkwardness, all smoothed out with the help of a little mind reading. Nothing so awkward as this. None of them had been clueless and floundering like me.

Not a full second had passed while these less complicated pairings passed through my mind; Bella was just closing her door. I quickly turned up the heater so she wouldn’t be uncomfortable, and lowered the music to a background volume. I drove toward the exit, watching her from the corner of my eye. Her lower lip was jutting out stubbornly.

Suddenly she looked at the stereo with interest, her sulky expression disappearing. “Clair de Lune?” she asked.

A fan of the classics? “You know Debussy?”

“Not well,” she said. “My mother plays a lot of classical music around the house—I only know my favorites.”

“It’s one of my favorites, too.” I stared at the rain, considering that. I actually had something in common with the girl. I’d begun to think that we were opposites in every way.

She seemed more relaxed now, staring at the rain like me, with unseeing eyes. I used her momentary distraction to experiment with breathing.

I inhaled carefully through my nose.

Potent.

I clutched the steering wheel tightly. The rain made her smell better. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. My tongue tingled in anticipation of the taste.

The monster wasn’t dead, I realized with disgust. Just biding his time.

I tried to swallow against the burn in my throat. It didn’t help. This made me angry. I had so little time with the girl. Look at the lengths I’d already had to go to in order to secure an extra fifteen minutes. I took another breath and fought with my reaction. I had to be stronger than this.

What would I be doing if I weren’t the villain of this story? I asked myself. How would I be using this valuable time?

I would be learning more about her.

“What is your mother like?” I asked.

Bella smiled. “She looks a lot like me, but she’s prettier.”

I eyed her skeptically.

“I have too much Charlie in me,” she went on. “She’s more outgoing than I am, and braver.”

Outgoing, I believed. Braver? I wasn’t sure.

“She’s irresponsible and slightly eccentric, and she’s a very unpredictable cook. She’s my best friend.” Her voice had turned melancholy. Her forehead creased.

As I had noticed before, her tone sounded more like parent than child.

I stopped in front of her house, wondering too late if I was supposed to know where she lived. No, this wouldn’t be suspicious in such a small town, with her father a public figure.

“How old are you, Bella?” She must be older than her peers. Perhaps she’d been late to start school, or been held back. That didn’t seem likely, though, bright as she was.

“I’m seventeen,” she answered.

“You don’t seem seventeen.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“My mom always says I was born thirty-five years old and that I get more middle-aged every year.” She laughed again, and then sighed. “Well, someone has to be the adult.”

This clarified things for me. It was easy to understand how the irresponsibility of the mother would result in the maturity of the daughter. She’d had to grow up early, to become the caretaker. That’s why she didn’t like being cared for—she felt it was her job.

“You don’t seem much like a junior in high school yourself,” she said, pulling me from my reverie.

I frowned. For everything I perceived about her, she perceived too much in return. I changed the subject.

“So why did your mother marry Phil?”

She hesitated a minute before answering. “My mother… she’s very young for her age. I think Phil makes her feel even younger. At any rate, she’s crazy about him.” She shook her head indulgently.

“Do you approve?” I wondered.

“Does it matter?” she asked. “I want her to be happy… and he is who she wants.”

The unselfishness of her comment would have shocked me except that it fit in all too well with what I’d learned of her character.

“That’s very generous.… I wonder.”

“What?”

“Would she extend the same courtesy to you, do you think? No matter who your choice was?”

It was a foolish question, and I could not keep my voice casual while I asked it. How stupid to even consider someone approving of me for her daughter. How stupid to even think of Bella choosing me.

“I—I think so,” she stuttered, reacting in some way to my gaze. Was it fear? I thought of Ms. Cope again. What were the other tells? Wide eyes could designate both emotions. The fluttering lashes, though, seemed to point away from fright. Bella’s lips were parted.…

She recovered. “But she’s the parent, after all. It’s a little bit different.”

I smiled wryly. “No one too scary, then.”

“What do you mean by scary? Multiple facial piercings and extensive tattoos?” She grinned at me.

“That’s one definition, I suppose.” A very nonthreatening definition, to my mind.

“What’s your definition?”

She always asked the wrong questions. Or exactly the right ones, maybe. The ones I didn’t want to answer, at any rate.

“Do you think that I could be scary?” I asked her, trying to smile a little.

She thought it through before answering me in a serious voice. “Hmm… I think you could be, if you wanted to.”

I was serious, too. “Are you frightened of me now?”

She answered at once, not thinking this one through. “No.”

I smiled more easily. I did not think she was entirely telling the truth, but neither was she truly lying. She wasn’t frightened enough to want to leave, at least. I wondered how she would feel if I told her she was having this discussion with a vampire, and then cringed internally at her imagined reaction.

“So, now are you going to tell me about your family? It’s got to be a much more interesting story than mine.”

A more frightening one, at least.

“What do you want to know?” I asked cautiously.

“The Cullens adopted you?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated, then spoke in a small voice. “What happened to your parents?”

This wasn’t so hard. I wasn’t even having to lie to her. “They died a very long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, clearly worried about having hurt me.

She was worried about me. Such a strange feeling, to see her care, even in this common way.

“I don’t really remember them that clearly,” I assured her. “Carlisle and Esme have been my parents for a long time now.”

“And you love them,” she deduced.

I smiled. “Yes. I couldn’t imagine two better people.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“I know I am.” In that one circumstance, the matter of parents, my luck could not be denied.

“And your brother and sister?”

If I let her push for too many details, I would have to lie. I glanced at the clock, disheartened that my time with her was up, but also relieved. The pain was severe, and I worried that the burn in my throat might suddenly flare up hot enough to control me.

“My brother and sister, and Jasper and Rosalie for that matter, are going to be quite upset if they have to stand in the rain waiting for me.”

“Oh, sorry, I guess you have to go.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t want our time to be up, either.

The pain was not so bad, really, I thought. But I should be responsible.

“And you probably want your truck back before Chief Swan gets home, so you don’t have to tell him about the Biology incident.” I grinned at the memory of her embarrassment in my arms.

“I’m sure he’s already heard. There are no secrets in Forks.” She said the name of the town with distinct distaste.

I laughed at her words. No secrets, indeed. “Have fun at the beach.” I glanced at the pouring rain, knowing it would not last, and wishing more strongly than usual that it could. “Good weather for sunbathing.” Well, it would be by Saturday. She would enjoy that. And her happiness had become the most important thing. More important than my own.

“Won’t I see you tomorrow?”

The worry in her tone pleased me, but also made me yearn to not have to disappoint her.

“No. Emmett and I are starting the weekend early.” I was angry at myself now for having made the plans. I could break them… but there was no such thing as too much hunting at this point, and my family was going to be concerned enough about my behavior without me revealing how obsessive I was turning. I still wasn’t sure exactly what madness had possessed me last night. I really needed to find a way to control my impulses. Perhaps a little distance would help with that.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, sounding not at all happy with my revelation.

More pleasure, more pain.

“We’re going to be hiking in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, just south of Rainier.” Emmett was eager for bear season.

“Oh, well, have fun,” she said halfheartedly. Her lack of enthusiasm pleased me again.

As I stared at her, I began to feel almost agonized at the thought of saying even a temporary goodbye. She was so soft, so vulnerable. It seemed foolhardy to let her out of my sight, where anything could happen to her. And yet, the worst things that could happen to her would result from being with me.

“Will you do something for me this weekend?” I asked seriously.

She nodded, though clearly mystified by my intensity.

Keep it light.

“Don’t be offended, but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So… try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?”

I smiled ruefully at her, hoping she couldn’t see the real sorrow in my eyes. How much I wished that she wasn’t so much better off away from me, no matter what might happen to her there.

Run, Bella, run. I love you too much, for your good or mine.

She was offended by my teasing; I must have done it wrong again. She glared at me. “I’ll see what I can do,” she snapped, jumping out into the rain and slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.

I curled my hand around the key I’d just picked from her jacket pocket and inhaled her scent deeply as I drove away.