As I met her penetrating gaze, read the surprise and the sympathy there, I abruptly yearned for sleep. Not for oblivion, as I had before, not to escape boredom, but because I wanted to dream. Maybe if I could be unconscious, if I could dream, I could live for a few hours in a world where she and I could be together. She dreamed of me. I wanted to dream of her.

She stared back at me, her expression full of wonder. I had to look away.

I could not dream of her. She should not dream of me.

“You haven’t asked me the most important question yet,” I said. The stone heart in my silent chest felt colder and harder than before. She had to be forced to understand. At some point, she must be made to see that this all did matter—more than any other consideration. Considerations like the fact that I loved her.

“Which one is that?” she asked, surprised and unaware.

This only made my voice harder. “You aren’t concerned about my diet?”

“Oh. That.” She spoke in a quiet tone that I couldn’t interpret.

“Yes, that. Don’t you want to know if I drink blood?”

She cringed away from my question. Finally.

“Well, Jacob said something about that,” she said.

“What did Jacob say?”

“He said you didn’t… hunt people. He said your family wasn’t supposed to be dangerous because you only hunted animals.”

“He said we weren’t dangerous?” I repeated cynically.

“Not exactly,” she clarified. “He said you weren’t supposed to be dangerous. But the Quileutes still didn’t want you on their land, just in case.”

I stared at the road, my thoughts in a hopeless snarl, my throat aching with the familiar fire.

“So, was he right?” she asked, as calmly as if she were confirming a weather report. “About not hunting people?”

“The Quileutes have a long memory.”

She nodded to herself, thinking hard.

“Don’t let that make you complacent, though,” I said quickly. “They’re right to keep their distance from us. We are still dangerous.”

“I don’t understand.”

No she didn’t. How to make her see?

“We… try,” I told her. “We’re usually very good at what we do. Sometimes we make mistakes. Me, for example, allowing myself to be alone with you.”

Her scent was still a force in the car. I was growing used to it, I could almost ignore it, but there was no denying that my body still yearned toward her for the worst possible reason. My mouth was swimming with venom. I swallowed.

“This is a mistake?” she asked, and there was heartbreak in her voice. The sound of it disarmed me. She wanted to be with me—despite everything, she wanted to be with me.

Hope swelled again, and I beat it back.

“A very dangerous one,” I told her truthfully, wishing the truth could really somehow cease to matter.

She didn’t respond for a moment. I heard her breathing change—it hitched in strange ways that did not sound like fear.

“Tell me more,” she said suddenly, her voice distorted by anguish.

I examined her carefully.

She appeared to be in some kind of pain. How had I allowed this?

“What more do you want to know?” I asked, trying to think of a way to keep her from hurting. She should not hurt. I couldn’t let her be hurt.

“Tell me why you hunt animals instead of people,” she said, still anguished.

Wasn’t it obvious? Or maybe this didn’t matter to her, either.

“I don’t want to be a monster,” I muttered.

“But animals aren’t enough?”

I searched for another comparison, a way that she could understand. “I can’t be sure, of course, but I’d compare it to living on tofu and soy milk; we call ourselves vegetarians, our little inside joke. It doesn’t completely satiate the hunger—or rather thirst. But it keeps us strong enough to resist. Most of the time.” My voice got lower. I was ashamed of the danger I had allowed her to be in. Danger I continued to allow. “Sometimes it’s more difficult than others.”

“Is it very difficult for you now?”

I sighed. Of course she would ask the question I didn’t want to answer. “Yes,” I admitted.

I expected her physical response correctly this time: Her breathing held steady, her heart kept its even pattern. I expected it, but I did not understand it. How could she not be afraid?

“But you’re not hungry now,” she declared, perfectly sure of herself.

“Why do you think that?”

“Your eyes,” she said, her tone offhand. “I told you I had a theory. I’ve noticed that people—men in particular—are crabbier when they’re hungry.”

I chuckled at her description: crabby. There was an understatement. But she was dead right, as usual. “You are observant, aren’t you?” I laughed again.

She smiled a little, the crease returning between her eyes as if she were concentrating on something.

“Were you hunting this weekend, with Emmett?” she asked after my laugh had faded. The casual way she spoke was as fascinating as it was frustrating. Could she really accept so much in stride? I was closer to shock than she seemed to be.

“Yes,” I told her, and then, as I was about to leave it at that, I felt the same urge I’d had in the restaurant: I wanted her to know me. “I didn’t want to leave,” I went on slowly, “but it was necessary. It’s a bit easier to be around you when I’m not thirsty.”

“Why didn’t you want to leave?”

I took a deep breath, and then turned to meet her gaze. This kind of honesty was difficult in a very different way.

“It makes me… anxious”—I supposed that word would suffice, though it wasn’t strong enough—“to be away from you. I wasn’t joking when I asked you to try not to fall in the ocean or get run over last Thursday. I was distracted all weekend, worrying about you. And after what happened tonight, I’m surprised that you did make it through a whole weekend unscathed.” Then I remembered the scrapes on her palms. “Well, not totally unscathed,” I amended.

“What?”

“Your hands,” I reminded her.

She sighed and her lips turned down. “I fell.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said, unable to contain my smile. “I suppose, being you, it could have been much worse—and that possibility tormented me the entire time I was away. It was a very long three days. I really got on Emmett’s nerves.” Honestly, that didn’t belong in the past tense. I was probably still irritating Emmett, and all the rest of my family, too. Except Alice.

“Three days?” she asked, her voice suddenly sharp. “Didn’t you just get back today?”

I didn’t understand the edge in her voice. “No, we got back Sunday.”

“Then why weren’t any of you in school?” she demanded. Her irritation confused me. She didn’t seem to realize that this question was one that related to mythology again.

“Well, you asked if the sun hurt me, and it doesn’t,” I said. “But I can’t go out in the sunlight—at least, not where anyone can see.”

That distracted her from her mysterious annoyance. “Why?” she asked, leaning her head to one side.

I doubted I could come up with the appropriate analogy to explain this one. So I just told her, “I’ll show you sometime,” and then immediately wondered if this was a promise I would end up breaking—I’d said the words so casually, but I could not imagine actually following through.

It wasn’t something to worry about now. I didn’t know if I could be allowed see her again, after tonight. Did I love her enough yet to be able to bear leaving her?

“You might have called me,” she said.

What an odd conclusion. “But I knew you were safe.”

“But I didn’t know where you were. I—” She came to an abrupt stop, and looked at her hands.

“What?”

“I didn’t like it,” she said shyly, the skin over her cheekbones warming. “Not seeing you. It makes me anxious, too.”

Are you happy now? I demanded of myself. Well, here was my reward for hoping.

I was bewildered, elated, horrified—mostly horrified—to realize that all my wildest fantasies were not so far off the mark. This was why it didn’t matter to her that I was a monster. It was exactly the same reason that the rules no longer mattered to me. Why right and wrong were no longer compelling influences. Why all my priorities had shifted one rung down to make room for this girl at the very top.

Bella cared for me, too.

I knew it could be nothing in comparison to how I loved her—she was mortal, changeable. She wasn’t locked in with no hope of recovery. But still, she cared enough to risk her life to sit here with me. To do so gladly.

Enough that it would cause her pain if I did the right thing and left her.

Was there anything I could do now that would not hurt her? Anything at all?

Every word we spoke here—each one of them was another pomegranate seed. That strange vision in the restaurant had been more on point than I’d realized.

I should have stayed away. I should never have come back to Forks. I would cause her nothing but pain.

Would that stop me from staying now? From making it worse?

The way I felt at this moment, feeling her warmth against my skin…

No. Nothing would stop me.

“Ah,” I groaned to myself. “This is wrong.”

“What did I say?” she asked, quick to take the blame on herself.

“Don’t you see, Bella? It’s one thing for me to make myself miserable, but a wholly other thing for you to be so involved. I don’t want to hear that you feel that way.” It was the truth, it was a lie. The most selfish part of me was flying with the knowledge that she wanted me as I wanted her. “It’s wrong. It’s not safe. I’m dangerous, Bella—please, grasp that.”

“No.” Her lips pouted out stubbornly.

“I’m serious.” I was battling with myself so strongly—half-desperate for her to accept my warnings, half-desperate to keep the warnings from escaping—that the words came through my teeth as a growl.

“So am I,” she insisted. “I told you, it doesn’t matter what you are. It’s too late.”

Too late? The world was bleakly black and white for one endless second as I watched the shadows crawl across the sunny lawn toward Bella’s sleeping form in my memory. Inevitable, unstoppable. They stole the color from her skin, and plunged her into darkness, into the underworld.

Too late? Alice’s vision swirled in my head, Bella’s bloodred eyes staring back at me impassively, expressionless. But there was no way that she could not hate me for that future. Hate me for stealing everything from her.

It could not be too late.

“Never say that,” I hissed.

She stared out her window, and her teeth bit into her lip again. Her hands were balled into tight fists in her lap. Her breathing hitched.

“What are you thinking?” I had to know.

She shook her head without looking at me. I saw something glisten, like a crystal, on her cheek.

Agony. “Are you crying?” I’d made her cry. I’d hurt her that much.

She scrubbed the tear away with the back of her hand.

“No,” she lied, her voice breaking.

Some long-buried instinct had me reaching out toward her—in that one second I felt more human than I ever had. And then I remembered that I was… not. And I lowered my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my jaw locked. How could I ever tell her how sorry I was? Sorry for all the stupid mistakes I’d made. Sorry for my never-ending selfishness. Sorry that she was so unfortunate as to have inspired this first, and last, tragic love of mine. Sorry also for the things beyond my control—that I’d been the executioner chosen by fate to end her life in the first place.

I took a deep breath—ignoring my wretched reaction to the flavor in the car—and tried to collect myself.

I wanted to change the subject, to think of something else. Lucky for me, my curiosity about the girl was insatiable.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“Yes?” she asked huskily, tears still in her voice.

“What were you thinking tonight, just before I came around the corner? I couldn’t understand your expression—you didn’t look that scared, you looked like you were concentrating very hard on something.” I remembered her face—forcing myself to forget whose eyes I was looking through—the look of determination there.

“I was trying to remember how to incapacitate an attacker,” she said, her voice more composed. “You know, self-defense. I was going to smash his nose into his brain.” Her composure did not last to the end of her explanation. Her tone twisted until it seethed with hate. This was no hyperbole, and her fury was not humorous now. I could see her frail figure—just silk over glass—overshadowed by the meaty, heavy-fisted human monsters who would have hurt her. The fury boiled in the back of my head.

“You were going to fight them?” I wanted to groan. Her instincts were deadly—to herself. “Didn’t you think about running?”

“I fall down a lot when I run,” she said sheepishly.

“What about screaming for help?”

“I was getting to that part.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You were right,” I told her, a sour edge to my voice. “I’m definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive.”

She sighed, and glanced out the window. Then she looked back at me.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” she demanded abruptly.

As long as were on our way down to hell—why not enjoy the journey?