Noticing her lips made me feel that she was much too far away. I leaned toward her and picked her up carefully, my hands wrapped around the tops of her arms, then set her down beside me, only an inch of space between us. Much better.

I placed my hand on top of hers, welcoming the smolder of her skin with something like relief. “Why don’t you sit with me?”

She grinned.

“How’s the heart?” I asked, though it was beating so strongly I could feel the subtle vibrations dancing through the air around her.

“You tell me,” she countered. “I’m sure you hear it better than I do.”

Accurate. I laughed softly while her smile grew wider.

The pleasant weather wasn’t quite over yet; the clouds parted and a silvery sheen of moonlight touched her skin, making her look like something entirely celestial. I wondered how I looked to her. Her eyes seemed filled with wonder, much as mine must be.

Below us, the front door opened and closed. There were no other thoughts near the house besides Charlie’s muffled narrative. I wondered where he was going. Not far… There was a creak of metal, a muted clank. Something almost like a schematic flashed through his head.

Ah. Her truck. It surprised me a little that Charlie was going to this extreme to curb whatever he thought Bella was up to.

I was about to mention Charlie’s odd behavior when her expression suddenly changed. Her eyes slid to the bedroom door and then back to me.

“Can I have a minute to be human?” she asked.

“Certainly,” I responded at once, amused by her phrasing.

Abruptly, her brows lowered and she frowned at me. “Stay,” she ordered in a stern tone.

It was the easiest demand anyone had ever made of me. Nothing I could imagine would compel me to leave this room now.

I made my voice serious to match hers. “Yes, ma’am.” I straightened up and conspicuously locked all my muscles into place. She smiled, pleased.

It took her a minute to gather her things, and then she left the room. She made no attempt to hide the sound of the door closing. Another door banged more loudly. The bathroom. I supposed part of this was convincing Charlie she wasn’t up to anything nefarious. It was unlikely that he could imagine what exactly she was up to. But it was a wasted effort. Charlie came back inside just a moment later. The sound of the shower running upstairs did seem to confuse him, I thought.

While I waited for Bella, I finally took the opportunity to examine her small media collection beside the bed. There weren’t many surprises, after all my interrogations. I found just one hardback in her library, too new to be in paperback yet. It was her copy of Tooth and Claw, the one of her favorites that I’d never read. I’d not yet taken time to catch up on this lack—I’d been too busy following Bella around like a demented bodyguard. I opened the novel now and began.

I was aware as I read that Bella was taking longer than usual. As ever, the constant anxiety that she would at last see something in me to avoid quickly reared its head. I tried to ignore it. There could be a million reasons why Bella dawdled. I focused on the book instead. I could see why it was one of her favorites—it was both strange and charming. Of course, any story of triumphant love would fit my humor today.

The bathroom door opened. I replaced the book—noting the page number, 166, so I could return to it later—and assumed my statue-like pose from before. But I was disappointed; rather than return, she shuffled down the stairs. Her steps came to a stop on the bottom tread.

“’Night, Dad,” she called out.

Charlie’s thoughts felt slightly scrambled, but I couldn’t make out anything else.

“’Night, Bella,” he mumbled back.

And then she was dashing back up the stairs, skipping steps in apparent haste. She flung the door open—her eyes were searching the darkness for me before she was inside—and then shut it firmly behind herself. When she found me exactly as she expected, a wide grin spread across her face.

I broke my perfect stillness to return it.

She hesitated for a second—her eyes flashing down to her well-worn pajamas—and then crossed her arms in an almost apologetic posture.

I thought perhaps I understood the earlier delay. Not a fear of monsters, rather a more common fear. Shyness. I could easily imagine how, away from the sun and magic of the meadow, she might feel unsure. I was on unfamiliar ground as well.

I fell back on old habits, trying to tease her out of her insecurity. I appraised her new ensemble with a smile and commented, “Nice.”

She frowned, but her shoulders relaxed.

“No,” I insisted. “It looks good on you.”

Perhaps too casual a descriptor. With her wet hair looping in long seaweed tangles around her shoulders, and her face glowing in the moonlight, she looked more than good. The English language needed a word that meant something halfway between a goddess and a naiad.

“Thanks,” she murmured, and then she came to sit beside me, just as close as before. This time she sat cross-legged. Her knee touched my leg, a bright point of heat.

I gestured to the door, and then the room beneath us, where her father’s thoughts were still in a snarl.

“What was all that for?” I asked.

She smiled a tiny, smug smile. “Charlie thinks I’m sneaking out.”

“Ah.” I wondered how much my read of the evening with her father matched her own. “Why?”

She opened her eyes extra wide, feigning innocence. “Apparently, I look a little overexcited.”

Playing along with her joke, I placed my hand beneath her chin and gently lifted her face toward the moonlight as if to better examine it. However, touching her face put all jokes far out of my head.

“You look very warm, actually,” I murmured and, without stopping to think of every possible consequence, I leaned in and pressed my cheek against hers. My eyes closed of their own volition.

I breathed in her scent. Her skin blazed exquisitely against mine.

Her voice was husky when she spoke. “It seems to be…” She lost her voice for a moment, then cleared her throat and continued. “Much easier for you now. To be close to me.”

“Does it seem that way to you?”

I thought about this assumption as I let my nose skim along the edge of her jaw. The physical pain in my throat had never eased in the slightest, though it did nothing to take away from the pleasure of touching her. While parts of my mind were lost in the miracle of the moment, other parts had never stopped calibrating the actions of every muscle, monitoring every bodily reaction. It took up quite a bit of my mental capacity, in fact, but then, an immortal mind had a great deal of space to spare. This did not damage the moment, either.

I lifted her curtain of damp hair and then pressed my lips lightly against the impossibly soft skin just beneath her ear.

She took a shaky breath. “Much, much easier.”

“Hmm,” was my only comment. I was very much involved in the exploration of her moonlit throat.

“So I was wondering,” she began, but then fell silent when my fingers traced the fragile line of her collarbone. She took another unsteady breath.

“Yes?” I encouraged, my fingertips dipping into the hollow above the bone.

Her voice was higher and trembling as she asked, “Why is that, do you think?”

I chuckled. “Mind over matter.”

She leaned away from me and I froze, on guard at once. Had I crossed a line? Been inappropriate? She stared back at me, seeming just as surprised as I was. I waited for her to say something, but she just gazed at me with ocean-deep eyes. All the while, her heart fluttered so quickly that it sounded like she’d just run a marathon. Or was very frightened.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.

“No—the opposite.” Her lips curled into a smile. “You’re driving me crazy.”

A little shocked, I could only ask, “Really?”

Her heart was still thrumming away… not in fear, but in desire. Knowing this now sent the electric pulse in my own body into overdrive.

My answering smile was probably too wide.

Her grin grew to match mine. “Would you like a round of applause?”

Did she think I was so sure of myself? Could she not guess how entirely out of my wheelhouse all this was? There were many things I excelled at, most of them due to my extra-human abilities. I knew when I could be confident. This was not any of those times.

“I’m just… pleasantly surprised. In the last hundred years or so”—I paused and almost laughed at her somewhat smug reaction before I continued; she loved my honesty—“I never imagined anything like this.” Nothing close. “I didn’t believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with in another way than my brothers and sisters.” Perhaps romance always seemed a slightly foolish thing to everyone until one actually fell into it. “And then to find, even though it’s all new to me, that I’m good at it—at being with you.…”

Words rarely failed me, but this was an emotion I’d never experienced, that I had no name for.

“You’re good at everything,” she said, her tone implying that this was so obvious she shouldn’t have had to say it out loud.

I shrugged in mock acceptance, and then laughed quietly with her, mostly with joy and wonder.

Her laugh faded, and a hint of the worry line appeared between her brows. “But how can it be so easy now? This afternoon…”

Though we were more in sync than we’d ever been, I had to remember that her afternoon in the meadow and my afternoon in the meadow had been quite different experiences. How could she begin to understand the kinds of changes I’d gone through in those hours we’d been together in the sun? Despite the new intimacy, I knew I would never explain to her exactly how I’d gotten to this place. She would never know what I had allowed myself to imagine.

I sighed, choosing my words. I wanted her to understand as much as I could share. “It’s not easy.” It would never be easy. It would always be painful. None of that mattered. Possible was all I would ever ask for. “But this afternoon, I was still… undecided.” Was that the best word to describe my sudden fit of violence? I couldn’t think of another. “I am sorry about that. It was unforgivable for me to behave so.”

Her smile became benevolent. “Not unforgivable.”

“Thank you,” I murmured before returning to the task of explaining. “You see… I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough, and…” I took one of her hands and held it against my skin, smoldering embers against ice. It was an instinctive gesture, and I was surprised to find that it did somehow make it easier to speak. “While there was still that possibility that I might be”—I inhaled her scent from the most fragrant point inside her wrist, reveling in the fiery pain—“overcome… I was susceptible. Until I made up my mind that I was strong enough, that there was no possibility at all that I would… that I ever could…”

My sentence trailed off, unfinished, as I finally met her gaze. I took both her hands in mine.

“So there’s no possibility now.” I couldn’t tell if she meant it as a statement or a question. If it was a question, she seemed very sure of the answer. And I wanted to sing with joy that she was right.

“Mind over matter,” I said again.

“Wow, that was easy.” She was laughing again.

I laughed, too, effortlessly falling into her exuberant mood.

“Easy for you!” I teased. I freed one of my hands to touch the tip of her nose with my index finger.

Abruptly, the jocularity felt off, somehow abrasive. All my anxieties swirled through my head like a whirlpool. My humor vanished and I found myself choking out another warning.

“I’m trying. If it gets to be too much, I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to leave.”

The frown that crossed her face featured an unexpected note of outrage.

But I wasn’t finished cautioning. “And it will be harder tomorrow. I’ve had the scent of you in my head all day, and I’ve grown amazingly desensitized. If I’m away from you for any length of time, I’ll have to start over again. Not quite from scratch, though, I think.”

She leaned toward my chest, then swayed back again, as if she were catching herself. It reminded me of how she’d tucked her chin before. No throat exposure.

“Don’t go away, then.”

I took a steadying breath—a steadying, burning breath—and forced myself to stop panicking. Could she understand that the invitation in her words spoke to my greatest desire?

I smiled at her, wishing I could display a similar kindness on my face. It came so easily to her.

“That suits me. Bring on the shackles—I’m your prisoner.”

I wrapped my hands around her delicate wrists as I spoke, laughing at the image in my mind. They could bind me in iron, or steel, or some stronger alloy yet to be discovered, and none of that would hold me the way one look from this fragile human girl could.

“You seem more optimistic than usual. I haven’t seen you like this before,” she noted.

Optimistic… an astute observation. My cynical old self seemed an entirely a different person.

I leaned closer to her, her wrists still locked in my hands. “Isn’t it supposed to be like this? The glory of first love, and all that. It’s incredible, isn’t it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?”

She nodded, thoughtful. “Very different. More… forceful than I’d imagined.”

I contemplated the first time I’d really experienced the difference between first-and secondhand emotion. “For example: the emotion of jealousy,” I said. “I’ve read about it a hundred thousand times, seen actors portray it in a thousand different plays and movies. I believed I understood that one pretty clearly. But it shocked me.… Do you remember the day that Mike asked you to the dance?”

“The day you started talking to me again.” She said this like a correction, as if I were prioritizing the wrong part of the memory.

But I was lost in what had happened just before that, reliving with perfect recall the first time I’d ever felt that specific passion.

“I was surprised,” I mused, “by the flare of resentment, almost fury, that I felt—I didn’t recognize what it was at first. I was even more aggravated than usual that I couldn’t know what you were thinking, why you refused him. Was it simply for your friend’s sake? Was there someone else? I knew I had no right to care either way. I tried not to care.…” My mood shifted as the story followed its path. I laughed once. “And then the line started forming.”

As I had expected, her answering scowl only made me want to laugh again.

“I waited, unreasonably anxious to hear what you would say to them, to watch your expressions. I couldn’t deny the relief I felt, watching the annoyance on your face. But I couldn’t be sure.… That was the first night I came here.”

A slow flush began in her cheeks, but she leaned closer, intense rather than embarrassed. The atmosphere transformed once more, and I found myself mid-confession for the hundredth time today. I whispered more softly now.

“I wrestled all night while watching you sleep… with the chasm between what I knew was right, moral, ethical, and what I wanted. I knew that if I continued to ignore you as I should, or if I left for a few years, till you were gone, that someday you would say yes to Mike, or someone like him. It made me angry.”

Angry, miserable, as if life were draining of all color and purpose.

In what seemed an unconscious movement, she shook her head, denying this vision of her future.

“And then, as you were sleeping, you said my name.”

Looking back, it seemed as though those brief seconds were the turning point, the divide. Though I had doubted myself a million times in the interim, once I’d heard her call to me, I’d never had another choice.