”There was obviously more. “And?”Her voice was low; a human would have had a hard time hearing her. “I was wishing I could believe that you were real. And I was wishing that I wasn’t afraid.”A flash of pain stabbed through me. I’d been wrong. I had frightened her after all. Of course I had.“I don’t want you to be afraid.” It was an apology and a lament.I was surprised when she grinned almost impishly. “Well, that’s not exactly the fear I meant, though that’s certainly something to think about.”How was she joking now? What could she mean? I sat up halfway, too eager for answers to pretend nonchalance any longer.“What are you afraid of, then?”I realized how close our faces were. Her lips, closer than they had ever been to mine. No longer smiling, parted. She inhaled through her nose and her eyelids half closed. She stretched closer as if to catch more of my scent, her chin angling up half an inch, her neck arching forward, her jugular exposed.And I reacted.Venom flooded my mouth, my free hand moved of its own volition to seize her, my jaws wrenched open as she leaned in to meet me.I threw myself away from her. The madness hadn’t reached my legs and they launched me all the way back to the far edge of the meadow. I moved so quickly I didn’t have time to gently release my hand from hers; I’d yanked it away. My first thought as I landed crouched in the shadows of the trees was her hands, and relief washed over me when I saw they were still attached to her wrists.Relief followed by disgust. Loathing. Revulsion. All the emotions I’d feared to see in her eyes today multiplied by a hundred years and the sure knowledge that I deserved them and more. Monster, nightmare, destroyer of lives, mutilator of dreams—hers and mine both.If I were something better, if I were somehow stronger, instead of a brutal near pass at death, that moment could have been our first kiss.Had I just failed the test then? Was there no longer hope?Her eyes were glassy; the whites showed all around her dark irises. I watched as she blinked and they refocused, fastening on my new position. We stared at each other for a long moment.Her lower lip trembled once, and then she opened her mouth. I waited, tensed, for the recrimination. For her to scream at me, to tell me never to come near her again.“I’m… sorry… Edward,” she whispered almost silently.Of course.I had to take a deep breath before I could respond.I calibrated the volume of my voice to be just loud enough for her to hear, trying to keep my tone gentle. “Give me a moment.”She sat back a few inches. Her eyes were still mostly whites.I took another breath. I could still taste her from here. It fueled the constant burn, but no more than that. I felt… the way I normally did around her. There was no hint in my mind or body now, no sense that the monster was lurking so near to the surface. That I could snap so easily. It made me want to shriek and tear trees out by their roots. If I couldn’t feel the edge, couldn’t see the trigger, how could I ever protect her from myself?I could imagine Alice’s encouragement. I had protected Bella. Nothing had happened. But though Alice might have seen that much, watching when my break was still the future and not the past, she couldn’t know how it had felt. To lose control of myself, to be weaker than my worst impulse. Not to be able to stop.But you did stop. That’s what she would say. She couldn’t know how not enough that was.Bella never looked away from me. Her heart was racing twice as fast as normal. Too fast. It couldn’t be healthy. I wanted to take her hand and tell her everything was fine, she was fine, she was safe, there was nothing to worry about—but these would be such obvious lies.I still felt… normal—what normal had become in these last months, at least. In control. Just exactly the same as before, when my confidence had nearly killed her.I walked back slowly, wondering if I should keep my distance. But it didn’t seem right to shout my apology across the meadow at her. I didn’t trust myself to be as close to her as before. I stopped a few paces away, at a conversational distance, and sat on the ground.I tried to put everything I felt into the words. “I am so very sorry.”Bella blinked and then her eyes were too wide again; her heart hammered too fast. Her expression was stuck in place. The words didn’t seem to mean anything to her, to register in any way.In what I immediately knew was a bad idea, I fell back on my usual pattern of trying to keep things casual. I was desperate to remove the frozen shock from her face.“Would you understand what I meant if I said I was only human?”A second too late, she nodded—just once. She tried to smile at my tasteless attempt to make light of the situation, but that effort just marred her expression further. She looked pained, and then, finally, afraid.I’d seen fear on her face before, but I’d always been quickly reassured. Every time I’d half hoped that she’d realized I wasn’t worth the immense risk, she’d disproved my assumption. The fear in her eyes had never been fear of me.Until now.The scent of her fear saturated the air, tangy and metallic.This was exactly what I’d been waiting for. What I’d always told myself I wanted. For her to turn away. For her to save herself and leave me burning and alone.Her heart hammered on, and I wanted to laugh and cry. I was getting what I wanted.And all because she’d leaned in just one inch too close. She’d gotten near enough to smell my scent, and she’d found it pleasant, just as she found my face attractive and all of my other snares compelling. Everything about me made her want to move closer to me, just exactly as it was designed to.“I’m the world’s best predator, aren’t I?” I made no attempt to hide the bitterness in my voice now. “Everything about me invites you in—my voice, my face, even my smell.” It was all so much overkill. What was the point of my charms and lures? I was no rooted flytrap, waiting for prey to land inside my mouth. Why couldn’t I have been as repulsive on the outside as I was on the inside? “As if I need any of that!”Now I felt out of control, but not in the same way. All my love and yearning and hope were crumbling to dust, a thousand centuries of grief stretched out in front of me, and I didn’t want to pretend anymore. If I could have no happiness because I was a monster, then let me be that monster.I was on my feet, racing like her heart, in two tight circles around the edge of the clearing, wondering if she could even see what I was showing her.I jerked to a stop where I’d stood before. This was why I didn’t need a pretty voice.“As if you could outrun me.” I laughed at the thought, the grotesque comedy of the image in my head. The sound of my laugh bounced in harsh echoes off the trees.And after the chase, there would be the capture.The lowest branch of the ancient spruce beside me was in easy reach. I ripped the limb from the body without any effort at all. The wood shrieked and protested, the bark and splinters exploded from the site of the injury. I weighed the bough for a moment in my hand. Roughly eight hundred sixty three pounds. Not enough to win in a fight with the hemlock across the clearing to my right, but enough to do some damage.I flicked the branch at the hemlock tree, aiming for a knot about thirty feet from the ground. My projectile hit dead center, the thickest end of the bough smashing with a booming crunch and disintegrating into shards of shattered wood that rained down on the ferns below with a faint hissing. A fissure split through the center of the knot and snaked its way a few feet in either direction. The hemlock tree trembled once, the shock radiating through the roots and into the ground. I wondered if I’d killed it. I’d have to wait a few months to know. Hopefully it would recover; the meadow was perfect as it was.So little effort on my part. I’d not needed to use more than a tiny fraction of my available strength. And still, so much violence. So much harm.In two strides I was standing over her, just an arm’s length way.“As if you could fight me off.”The bitterness disappeared from my voice. My little tantrum had cost me no energy, but it had drained some of my ire.Throughout it all, she’d never moved. She remained paralyzed now, her eyes frozen open. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. I was still so angry at myself, but there was no fire left in it. It all seemed pointless. I was what I was.She moved first. Just a little bit. Her hands had fallen limp in her lap after I’d wrenched away from her, but now one of them twitched open. Her fingers stretched up slightly in my direction. It was probably an unconscious movement, but it was eerily similar to when she’d pleaded “Come back” in her sleep and reached for something. I’d wished then that she could be dreaming of me.That was the night before Port Angeles, the night before I learned that she already knew what I was. If I’d been aware of what Jacob Black had told her, I never would have believed she could dream of me except in a nightmare. But none of it had mattered to her.There was still terror in her eyes. Of course there was. But there seemed to be a plea in them, too. Was there any chance she wanted me to come back to her now? Even if she did, should I?Her pain, my greatest weakness—as Alice had shown me it would be. I hated to see her frightened. It broke me to know how much I deserved that fear, but more than either of those burdens, I could not bear to see her grief. It stripped me of my ability to make anything close to a good decision.“Don’t be afraid,” I begged in a whisper. “I promise—” No, that had become too casual a word. “I swear not to hurt you. Don’t be afraid.”I moved closer to her slowly, making no movement that she would not have time to anticipate. I sat gradually, in deliberate stages, so that I was once again where we’d begun. I slouched down a bit so that my face was level with hers.The pace of her heart eased. Her lids relaxed back into their usual place. It was as if my proximity calmed her.“Please forgive me,” I pleaded. “I can control myself. You caught me off guard, but I’m on my best behavior now.” What a pathetic apology. Still, it brought a hint of a smile to the corner of her lips. And like a fool, I fell back into my immature efforts to be amusing. “I’m not thirsty today, honestly.”I actually winked at her. One would think I was thirteen instead of a hundred and four.But she laughed. A little out of breath, a little wobbly, but still a real laugh, with real mirth and relief. Her eyes warmed, her shoulders loosened, and her hands opened again.It felt so right to gently place my hand back inside hers. It shouldn’t, but it did.“Are you all right?”She stared at our hands, then glanced up to meet my gaze for a moment, and finally looked down again. She started to trace the lines across my palm with the tip of her finger, just as she had been doing before my frenzy. Her eyes returned to mine and a smile slowly spread across her face till the little dimple appeared in her chin. There was no judgment and no regret in that smile.I smiled back, feeling as though I could only just now appreciate the beauty of this place. The sun and the flowers and the gilded air, they were suddenly there for me, joyous and merciful. I felt the gift of her mercy, and my stone heart swelled with gratitude.The relief, the confusion of joy and guilt, suddenly reminded me of the day I’d come home, so many decades ago.I hadn’t been ready then, either. I’d planned to wait. I wanted my eyes to be golden again before Carlisle saw me. But they were still a strange orange, an amber that tended more toward red. I was having difficulty adapting to my former diet. It had never been so hard before. I was afraid that if I didn’t have Carlisle’s help, I wouldn’t be able to keep going. That I would fall back into my old ways.It worried me, having that evidence so clear in my eyes. I wondered what was the worst reception I could expect? Would he just send me away? Would he find it difficult to look at me, to see what a disappointment I had become? Was there a penance he would demand? I would do it, whatever he asked. Would my efforts to improve move him at all, or would he just see my failure?It was simple enough to find them; they hadn’t moved far from the place I’d left them. Maybe to make it easier for me to return?Their house was the only one in this high, wild spot. The winter sun was glinting off the windows as I approached from below, so I couldn’t tell if anyone was home. Rather than take the shorter route through the trees, I paced toward them through an empty field, blanketed in snow, where—even bundled up against the sun’s glare—I would be easy to spot. I moved slowly. I didn’t want to run. It might alarm them.It was Esme who saw me first.“Edward!” I heard her cry, though I was still a mile out.In less than a second I saw her figure dart through a side door, racing through the rocks surrounding the mountain ledge and stirring up a thick cloud of snow crystals behind her.Edward! He’s come home!It was not the mindset I’d been expecting. But then, she hadn’t seen my eyes clearly.Edward? Can it be?My father was following close behind her now, catching up with his longer stride.There was nothing but a desperate hope in his thoughts. No judgment. Not yet.“Edward!” Esme shouted with an unmistakable ring of joy in her voice.And then she was upon me, her arms wrapped tight around my neck, her lips kissing my cheek over and over again. Please don’t go away again.Only a second later, Carlisle’s arms encircled us both.Thank you, he thought, his mind fervent with sincerity. Thank you for coming back to us.“Carlisle… Esme… I’m so sorry. I’m so—”“Shush, now,” Esme whispered, tucking her head against my neck and breathing in my scent. My boy.I looked up into Carlisle’s face, leaving my eyes open wide. Hiding nothing.You’re here. Carlisle stared back at my face with only happiness in his mind. Though he had to know what the color of my eyes meant, there was no off note to his delight. There’s nothing to apologize for.Slowly, hardly able to trust that it could be so simple, I raised my arms and returned my family’s embrace.I felt that same undeserved acceptance now, and I could barely believe that all of it—my bad behavior, both voluntary and involuntary—was suddenly behind us. But her forgiveness seemed to wash the darkness away.“So where were we, before I behaved so rudely?” I remembered where I had been. Just inches from her parted lips. Enraptured by the mystery of her mind.She blinked twice. “I honestly can’t remember.”That was understandable. I breathed in fire and blew it back out, wishing it would do some actual damage to me.“I think we were talking about why you were afraid, besides the obvious reason.” The obvious fear had probably driven the other out of her mind completely.But she smiled and looked down at my hand again. “Oh, right.”Nothing more.“Well?” I prompted.Rather than meet my gaze, she started tracing patterns across my palm. I tried to read their sequences, hoping for a picture or even letters—E-D-W-A-R-D-P-L-E-A-S-E-G-O-A-W-A-Y—but I could find no meaning in them. Just more mysteries. Another question she would never answer. I didn’t deserve answers.I sighed. “How easily frustrated I am.”She looked up then, her eyes probing mine. We stared at each other for a few seconds, and I was surprised at the intensity of her gaze. I felt that she was reading me more successfully than I was ever able to read her.“I was afraid,” she began, and I realized gratefully that she was answering my question after all. “Because… for, well, obvious reasons, I can’t stay with you.” Her eyes dropped again as she said the word stay. I understood her clearly, for once. I could hear that when she said stay, she didn’t mean for this moment in the sunshine, for the afternoon or the week. She meant it the way I wanted to say it to her. Stay always. Stay forever. “And I’m afraid that I’d like to stay with you, much more than I should.”I thought of all that would entail if, after all, I forced her to do exactly as she described. If I made her stay forever. Every sacrifice she would bear, every loss she would mourn, every stinging regret, every aching, tearless stare.“Yes.” It was hard to agree with her, even with all that pain fresh in my imagination. I wanted it so much. “That is something to be afraid of, indeed. Wanting to be with me.” Selfish me. “That’s really not in your best interest.”She scowled at my hand as if she didn’t like my acknowledgment any more than I did.This was a dangerous path to even hint at. Hades and his pomegranate. How many toxic seeds had I already infected her with? Enough that Alice had seen her pale and grieving in my absence. Though it felt as though I, also, had been corrupted. Hooked. Addicted with no hope of recovery. I couldn’t fully form the picture in my head. Leaving her. How would I survive? Alice had shown me Bella’s anguish in my absence, but what would she see of me in that version of the future, if she looked? I couldn’t believe I would be anything more than a broken shadow, useless, crumpled, empty.I spoke the thought aloud, but mostly to myself. “I should have left long ago. I should leave now. But I don’t know if I can.”She still stared at our hands, but her cheeks warmed. “I don’t want you to leave,” she mumbled.She wanted me to stay with her.