Writings

The fan clicked as it swept back and forth, rustling the pages of the cheap spiral notebook that lay open on my desk. I put down my pen and leaned across my desk a bit, letting the air blow over my textbook. The weather had warmed literally overnight, which my Michigan-native classmates had told me was entirely normal for August. My apartment was now flooded with sticky air thanks to my leaving the window open earlier in the morning. I’d succumbed to the outrageous prices at the campus bookstore and run out to purchase a little eight-inch oscillating fan which now blew across my desk, clicking.

I had deliberately rented a one-bedroom apartment, knowing that I couldn’t deal with a roommate, but at my mother and therapist’s suggestions, I’d rented one in the student housing complex to ensure I’d be near others I could make friends with. My neighbors were a shy first-year Ph.D. in biochemistry named Nitya with whom I occasionally exchanged a smile as we both entered our apartments, and a master’s student in English literature named Daniel, who, if the sounds that came through the wall were any indication, would either be writing his thesis on pornography or be delivered to the emergency room for an injury to his wrist.

Aside from that, it was pretty quiet, and I was more or less alone. I liked it that way.

So far, medical school encompassed a lot of reading. There were four thick textbooks on the shelf above my little university-provided desk. We wouldn’t be starting any of our anatomy studies for almost four weeks, but one of the huge things hammered home to us by the M2s and M3s that had held a panel session on  the first day was that we ought to be studying those textbooks as soon as possible. I’d ducked a couple of the new-student mixers and had gotten through a third of the musculoskeletal system book already.

The new macBook Air on my desk was a graduation present from Renee, Phil, and Charlie, although it had probably been mostly bought by Phil. “It will be a good way to keep in touch, sweetheart,” my mother had said. It sat before me now, glowing, and I absently scrolled the mouse back and forth, watching the little icons in the toolbar enlarge and shrink as I ran the cursor over them.

Combined with my experience the day before, the computer couldn’t help but bring back the image of that old slow machine I’d had in Forks, where I often had needed to take a shower while it booted, and had waited even longer to manage to get an email from Renee. I remembered sitting alone in that room at first, then answering emails with Edward standing over my shoulder, then lying with him on the bed, the touch of his hands, his lips…

My head was in my arms on my desk before I even realized I’d started sobbing.

How was I supposed to explain this to my therapist, I wondered. “Yeah, well, it turns out my dead boyfriend’s  father is also an M1. Oh, how? Well, see, they’re all immortal, and he’s forever stuck at twenty-three…”

I groaned. There was no way to tell anyone the truth. Except for one guy, and yesterday he’d given me the biggest brush-off ever executed.

The macBook glowed happily.

But then again…

Seized with an idea. I clicked on the little blue Safari icon, and the program launched straight to my e-mail, derailing me at once. There were three emails in my inbox. Two were from the university—a crime report about some break-in on south campus, and a welcome back letter from the president. I tagged these for deletion. The third was from Renee.

Renee Dwyer to me

Hi sweetheart,

Just writing to check in that the move went okay. We sure miss you in Florida already. Phil’s out at the moment, so I thought I’d catch up quick. Not much has happened since you left. The dishwasher broke again. I think I’ll have to convince Phil it’s time for a new one, whaddya think? How’s your new apartment? Are you studying hard? Meet any cute boys? We miss you!

Love,

Mom

Leave it to Renee. As much as she sometimes seemed to understand me, there was still this tiny part of her that often manifested itself in e-mail closings, the part that thought that getting over Edward was just the simple matter of finding another boy to fall in love with. After all, I had only been seventeen.

I sighed, thinking back to my attempts to date during undergrad. There had been Enrique, a boy from my biochemistry lab. We’d heated up quite a bit under the microscope, but in the end it had fizzled…the first time we made out in the dark laboratory while running a four-hour experiment, his hands reminded me a little too much of the last hands to touch me that way and I hyperventilated. He rushed to the blue-light campus phone for assistance, and we broke up the following week.

Derek, the one who’d followed after, had been wonderful, in his own way. He was patient and slow, and he seemed to get that losing a boyfriend the way I had wasn’t something you could just up and forget about one day. We’d actually dated for almost half a year, which, to me seemed like a world record. And it was—Edward and I had dated for six months almost exactly before that fateful birthday party. I had realized this abruptly the evening Derek and I had gone out for a fancy dinner to celebrate our anniversary, and promptly burst into hysterical tears in the middle of the restaurant. He was understanding, but as always he was confused. And rightly so—my story didn’t make much sense. I had dated a guy for six months as a junior in high school, and on my eighteenth birthday, his family had moved to Los Angele to separate us, and six months later he had been driven to kill himself. Never mind that telling anyone I had seen it happen brought up way too many questions to which I didn’t have good answers.  For that reason, in the end, I couldn’t manage to be with Derek. There was simply too much we didn’t have in common; too many things I couldn’t tell him.

And that was where Carlisle came in.

It seemed like every time I closed my eyes I could see the cold sneer that had crossed his face when we’d run into each other in the hallway outside the auditorium. I hadn’t spent much time with Carlisle over the course of that one summer—infatuation with a boy will do that, even if you are at his home nonstop—but everything I remembered about my boyfriend’s father was his gentleness. His easygoing smile, the way he seemed to worry just the right amount about what Edward was up to. He had invited me freely into his office, whenever I cared to be there—to look at his artwork, to browse the centuries-old books he kept there. When he hadn’t been working, which to be honest hadn’t been often, he had spent much of his time with Esme. There had been something wonderfully reassuring in the way one could find them together on the one-person chaise in the living room, her head on his shoulder as they both lay there, reading. I would watch them sometimes, at the way Carlisle would smile as he stroked his fingers through Esme’s hair, and wonder if Edward would look that blissful after eighty years.

I had never seen Carlisle angry. Not once.

Could it really be because of me?

My mother’s email glowed at me from the screen, reminding me why I had opened my laptop in the first place. Knowing Renee’s impatience, I quickly hit reply and tapped off a quick message:

Isabella to Renee

Hi Mom,

First days are going well. Bought my books. Apartment is nice—furniture is sort of old, though. The grocery store isn’t far, which is nice. No boys. Talk to you soon.

Love,

Bella.

A little green message popped up to let me know that my message had been sent, and I opened a new tab and pulled up the university directory. If Carlisle was really here, he shouldn’t be that difficult to find, right? I clicked in the little box and typed in Carlisle Cullen.

0 Match(es) Found

answered the computer.

Well, that made sense. Given what his friend had called him, I hadn’t very much expected him to be using “Carlisle” anyway.

William Cullen. I tried.

Still nothing.

I spent the next forty minutes trying everything I could think of. William Carlisle. Carlisle William. Carlisle Williams. Then I repeated them all again, just in case something would appear. There was no result.

Sighing, I lay my head on the cool desktop, but was startled back up almost at once when a little chime indicated an incoming mail. I groaned. Leave it to Renee. What had I said, I wondered, that could possibly require further clarification? I was already reaching for my cell phone to call her and assure her that really, the first forty-eight hours of medical school had gone swimmingly when I actually looked at the screen and nearly choked.

There was one new e-mail. But it wasn’t from Renee.

Edward, William John. (no subject)

I choked.

William Edward.

It made perfect sense. Well, except for the William part. But I could ask him about that later. My heart racing, I clicked on the message.

William John Edward to me

Dear Isabella,

I wanted to apologize for my gruff demeanor yesterday, but I felt it might be better for us both if others thought I did not know you.

I regret intensely that circumstances have thrown us together, for it has always been my wish that you be able to live without interference from our family. I am deeply sorry that you were drawn into our affairs to begin with, and I do not wish to further burden you with my presence.

I will submit my request for disenrollment at once, and I wish you the utmost success in your years here.

Sincerely,

Carlisle

—

sent from my iPhone

“No!”

He couldn’t do that to me.

Request for disenrollment? Was he crazy?

My breath was starting to come fast again, and before I had time to calm myself, I was wheezing.

“God damn it,” I heard myself say. Were they all this insane? I had always chalked Edward’s behavior down to Edward—Carlisle couldn’t possibly believe he was some kind of threat to me, could he? He could spend hours in an operating room literally up to his elbows in human blood. He wasn’t going to suddenly snap and bite me.

I forced myself to breathe more slowly; in through the nose and out through the mouth. It sounded funny, animalistic, even. But my heartbeat slowed, and I became able to think more clearly. Pinpoint what is making you upset, my therapist had always said. What is the real fear?

The real fear was losing the truth. Seeing Carlisle had made it real again, even for just a minute. Although I had every evidence that my experience had been genuine—the dent in the side of my old truck; the saved emails from Alice; the stamp in my passport from L’immigrazione italiana. But over the years, it had faded. Alice’s email address was disconnected; Jacob Black became just another one of those kids from Forks who posted on my Facebook wall on my birthday. His own profile listed him as “In a Relationship” with some pretty Native girl I’d never heard of.

It was hard to force myself to remember. And it was hard to remind myself that it had all been real.

Carlisle made it real. Seeing him sitting there, so obviously taking up space in the world…he was real. My vampires existed, and even without Edward, they still were around.

I needed him to make it real again.

I clicked “reply.”

Isabella to William

Carlisle, please. I’m sorry I shocked you. But please don’t go. Please. Can we at least talk?

The reply was instantaneous. I imagined him typing at what had to be a ridiculous speed, out of sight of human eyes.

William John Edward to me

I’m afraid that wouldn’t be prudent.

—

sent from my iPhone

Wouldn’t be prudent?  What on earth was that supposed to mean? I clicked reply again and started typing without thinking.

Isabella to William

Please.

I need to see you. I need to know you’re real. I know it’s silly, that I should be able to handle all this on my own. And I have been. I got here. A lot has happened since I saw you last. But the thing is, I can’t tell anyone what really happened. Everyone thinks I’m just an ordinary teenage psychiatry case, except for Jacob Black and we’ve fallen out of touch. No one knows about you. I’ve kept your secrets. I’ve kept you safe.

Please talk to me.  I’m begging you.

Please.

I clicked “send” and stared at the screen. The response was not instantaneous this time. All told, it was probably under a minute and a half, but it felt like eons. Sweat rolled down off my forehead, landing in little splotches on the spiral-bound notebook where I’d been jotting notes. The blue lines blurred.

My email pinged.

William John Edward to me

I’m still going to disenroll tomorrow.

I almost punched my  laptop, but there was a second line to the message.

There’s a coffee shop called Sweetwaters downtown. I’ll be here until I start to lose cloud cover.

—

Sent from my iPhone

At once my stomach jerked. He’d listened. This afternoon. Right now. I could go talk to him right now. I was already reaching to the back of my chair for my purse when a second message came through.

And Bella? I make no promises.

Well, that was okay. I wouldn’t make him any promises either. I had made Edward a whole slew of promises, and a fat lot of good those had done.

Grabbing my keys, I headed out the door.

~||x||~

One of the most astounding things about Ann Arbor was its ability to support a coffee shop approximately every hundred yards. Starbucks was here, of course, with three locations within a short walk of the middle of campus, but there were at least three other chains plus a few independent shops, and any given shop often operated within a block of another. They were little havens of pseudo-studying—like every shop I had been into so far, Sweetwaters was full of people who appeared to be students, hunched over laptops, a handful with books open beside them, although it was a bit early for anyone but the most studious to be buried in their schoolwork.

I didn’t see him at first. I went to order a mocha, thinking that perhaps I had somehow beaten him here, when a deep voice from behind me ordered “another of what she ordered” and a hand knocked my proffered debit card out of the way. I spun and gasped.

Like all of them, Carlisle’s countenance was so perfect it hurt. I’d only caught a short glimpse of it yesterday, and all I’d been able to register at that moment had been the flicker of annoyance across his face. Yet his face was also achingly familiar, and my heart sped at once to see this man I really hadn’t laid eyes on in seven years. I stared at him as the boy behind the counter swiped his card and handed a receipt back to him, and I realized at once why I hadn’t seen him among the other patrons.

His hair was still untidy, twisting around the frames of the sunglasses he’d shoved up onto his head. He’d traded the hoodie for an undershirt and a navy blue polo, through the collar of which peeked a beaded choker.  The jeans had been replaced by loose-fitting cargo shorts, and he’d bottomed off the outfit with a pair of worn-looking tan flip-flops. He looked, for all intents and purposes, exactly like every other twenty-something guy sitting around.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. In the summer I’d been with Edward, I had seen his father without a tie maybe four times. Well, no, scratch that—I’d witnessed a few family baseball games. But even then, his dress had been oddly serious: Carlisle had an old-fashioned striped baseball jersey that was his preferred attire for the games. Now he stood before me sans tie and button-down shirt, looking every bit the part of the quintessential American frat boy.

“Something’s funny?” He handed me my mocha and gestured toward a table not far from the counter. I was struck immediately by how utterly normal his table looked. His backpack occupied one chair, it was unzipped and I could see two thick medical textbooks inside. On the table lay a new-looking MacBook and an iPhone. There was already a coffee cup next to the laptop, and a plate containing the shredded remains of a cranberry muffin.

Carlisle was a lot better at the acting human thing, I realized at once. I remembered how the Cullen kids would sit at their lunch table every day, before utterly untouched trays of food. Now that I thought back on it, why no one had ever questioned them about this was absurd.

I slung my purse over the back of the chair opposite his and sat down. We sat in silence a long time. I sipped my mocha, and he lifted his to his lips periodically between fiddling with his iPhone.

“It’s good to see you,” I said finally.

He grunted.

“It’s polite to say it’s good to see me, too.”

“I generally prefer honesty to politeness.” He didn’t look up.

I gulped. Somehow, I had imagined this going very differently. I figured I would greet him, and he would smile, and we would hug, and then we’d talk about everything I’d done in the seven years since we’d last seen each other. Yesterday, I had written off his expression as shock and surprise, but now I wasn’t so sure.

Looking up from the phone, he announced, “I have about twenty minutes; thirty if I push it, but I’m trying not to be unsafe. Nor do I want to be stuck here until dusk.” He gestured across the table. “You wanted to talk to me. Start talking.”

Rude, my mind told me, and surprised, I at once threw the thought out. This was Edward’s creator; the man who had stood in the role of his father for over eighty years. He was loving, caring, always gentle.

Carlisle wasn’t rude.

“What…what are you doing here?” I stammered.

“I’m enrolled in medical school. Just like you. Next?”

“The others?”

He shrugged, leaning back in his chair. “Alice and Jasper are living in Saskatchewan. He’s an adjunct professor at the university there, and she’s volunteering for a non-profit that sells clothing made in third-world countries. Rosalie and Emmett were in Siberia the last time I checked but that was about a year ago.”

“So it’s just you and Esme.”

His gulp was audible, and it took him a full two seconds to answer me. When he did his voice was low and slow.

“Esme is in Alaska.”

I frowned. “She’s visiting Tanya?”

“I have no idea. I don’t—” He breathed out slowly, through his nose, the way my psychiatrist had taught me. Then he took another “sip” of his mocha and said simply, “We are no longer speaking.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me. And please don’t make me say it again.”

The world shifted. Edward’s and my whole relationship had been defined by the presence of these other three couples. Alice and Jasper, Rosalie and Emmett, yes, but at the core were Esme and Carlisle. The one who had turned Edward and the woman who matched him so perfectly. The leaders of that coven, but so much more than that. They were a true mother and father to the other five; Edward even called Esme “Mom” more often than not.

And they weren’t speaking?

“How long?” was all I could manage.

Carlisle’s eyes squeezed shut. He would know, I realized, down to the minute. Some part of that expanse of memory and processing power that was his vampire brain had been keeping track of every second of the last seven years. His left hand closed into a fist and then relaxed open again, and as my eyes went to it, I realized that the yellow gold ring which had always been there was gone.

“Six years,” he said, not opening his eyes.

Six years. Almost the entire time we’d been apart.

“Oh, Carlisle,” I breathed. I reached across the table for his hand, but when I made contact, he jerked it backward as though I’d hurt him.

“Will,” he corrected me. “It’s Will now.”

My heart pounded. Right. I took a deep  breath. In some ways, it was easier. Carlisle Cullen was the man who had been married to Esme, the gentle man who had invited me into his study whenever I pleased, who had doted on his son. This other man with his surly demeanor and disaffected tone, the one who would look me in the eye and claim not to know me—this guy was Will Edward.
And that he’d changed into this man…well, that was my fault entirely.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“You should be,” he snapped.

There was a resounding smack as his hand clapped over his mouth. His eyes flew wide open, and my jaw dropped as tears sprang to my eyes.

Carlisle’s hand did find mine, and I shivered as he grasped it. It was cool to the touch—dead, and yet so very much alive as it interlaced its fingers with my own.

He held my hand a moment until I was able to stem the flow of the tears. When I did, he pulled his hand away, and began carefully winding the white earbuds around his phone. He didn’t meet my eyes as he slipped the phone into the front pocket of his pack.

“That was a hideous thing of me to say. I’m sorry.” He looked at his watch. “I need to go, before”—he glanced at the patrons sitting within earshot—“Well, you know why.” He slid the laptop back into the front pocket of his pack and slung the bag over one shoulder as he stood.

It took me several seconds to regain my voice, and when I did, it was shaking. “Are you leaving, leaving?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the counter, as though somehow the drinks menu held the answer to this question. When he turned back to me, his jaw was tense and his brow furrowed.

“I will wait,” he answered slowly. “I won’t make a decision yet. It’s not as though it will be a problem if I don’t get my tuition back.”

I shook my head. The tears still threatened.

“I am sorry,” I answered. “I’m shocked. It’s just that you and Esme—you were always—you and she are—” Soulmates. Partners. Forever.

His eyes squeezed closed once more. When they opened again, the expression that flickered across his face was no longer anger.

It was sorrow.

“Divorced, Isabella,” he whispered. “The word you’re looking for is ‘divorced.’”

And then he was gone, his plate and his cup disappearing with him, his body weaving gracefully through the crowded store.

Forward
Back

Six Years Later

The medical school at the University of Michigan is consistently ranked in the top ten, and usually in the top five in the country. My classmates hailed from all over the world, about half from Michigan and half from everywhere else. According to the dean who stood at the front of the auditorium in her white coat, we were supposedly the best of the best, and the brightest crop of students they had seen in many years.

But as I listened to her drone on about our MCAT averages, the only thing on my mind was how damn cold it was already.

Everyone had already assured the Arizonian/Floridian that this was just a temporary cold snap, that Ann Arbor was usually unbearably hot until at least Labor Day, and it rarely snowed before Halloween. As though snow at any time was somehow a good thing. But here I was, sitting in a lecture hall at the end of August and it was somehow already in the fifties.

Not so much my idea of good weather.

Renee had urged me here, saying that it would be good to get away from Florida, that she would be fine with Phil, and how could I pass up the opportunity to go to a top-ranked medical school almost for free?

Because free it was. With many thanks to my having locked myself in my psychiatrist-prescribed single room for the entirety of my freshman and sophomore years at UF, my finishing GPA was a perfect 4—even with the grueling biology and pre-med courses I’d piled on. It had taken me three years to feel like socializing even a little, and that had left me with a lot of time to hit the books. So when I applied to Michigan, they’d jumped at the opportunity to have me. Out of state, single parents, female scientist, first-generation graduate student…I was some admission person’s wet dream, for sure.

Michigan had barely even been on my radar, originally. I’d picked neurobiology because it made sense, and because after him, I wanted to have a better handle on the mind. I’d spent hours in the lab at Florida working on the brains of degus and sheep, trying desperately to understand why he had been able to hear—and why his gift had stretched to everyone but me.

The studies had kept me going, through the years when I couldn’t bear to go out, and had been my constant even as I’d started, reluctantly, to make friends. But a single glimpse of a boy whose hair was the right shade of rusted copper, strains of a piano piece I’d heard him practice, the scent of spices on someone’s cologne, never quite as sweet as his scent, but close enough—these things sent me spiraling out of control. I would retreat to my room, call my psychiatrist in a panic, spend a few hours hyperventilating and crying, and then return, always, to the lab. My animals were comforting, in their strange way. I never discovered anything about telepathy, but my honors thesis on the limitations of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors won three awards, and landed me a fully funded spot in Michigan’s medical science program. It would be seven more years of school, but I’d end up a “double doctor,” and really, seven more years of facing mainly cadavers and rodents seemed like a perfectly fine idea.

There were nearly two hundred of us in the entering class, a number which, according to the rumors I’d already heard, would dwindle quickly. My cohort of medical scientists was much smaller: only seven. We’d met for dinner the night before at a pizza place off campus. Three women and four men. Half geneticists, which was common these days. I was the only neurobiologist.

One of the other medical scientist guys, Daniel, had already given me the eye, and as much as I’d tried to deflect him, I had mistakenly answered the question about whether or not I was seeing anyone incorrectly. I’d answered honestly—no, but how did I explain I didn’t have the desire to? There had been two during undergrad, each as short-lived as the other. My therapist had rejoiced at the time, but both relationships had lasted less than a month.

“I’m not ready,” I’d told her both times, when I’d inevitably turned down my suitors. The boys and I had gotten close, even made out some, but then hands on me would not feel like his hands—or even worse, they would feel like his hands—and I would be reminded that the last boy I had loved I had driven to his death.

And that was always enough. As it turns out, “My last serious boyfriend killed himself” is a real relationship-ender.

I’d told my parents and my therapist just enough of the truth to get them to leave me alone, leaving out the crucial details, of course. They thought Edward was nothing more than a tortured seventeen-year-old whose irresponsible—or, more likely, overtaxed—parents had managed to overlook severe depression. I had hated framing Carlisle and Esme like that, but Alice had assured me I would be forgiven, and besides, it was crucial that the Cullens not be exposed.

Alice was the only one I had ever seen, and she disappeared after she’d managed to smuggle me out of Italy. Later, after I’d served my term in the psychiatric hospital in Jacksonville—suicide risk, they’d dubbed it, and used it as an excuse to hold me for weeks—she would write to tell me that the whole family had returned briefly to Forks to exterminate “The Redhead” and assure my safety. Jake and the Quileute boys  had helped, but beyond that neither she nor he would be telling me more.

“It’s better you forget all of this, Bella,” Jake had told me quietly, the last time I’d seen him, four years ago. “It was wrong of that leech to drag you into all this to begin with.”

I had stormed out on him and dialed Alice at once, only to find her phone had been disconnected. I asked Charlie to check on the house, and he informed me it had been bought for use as a vacation home by some Nike executive who wanted to have a base camp for hiking the Olympics. My emails to Alice went unanswered, and, after a few months, began to bounce.

Renee hovered for exactly one year, at which point she wanted to get back on the road with Phil. I finished high school with a tutor at Jacksonville Memorial Hospital and went to UF because I had nothing better to do, at first only part-time, making the fifty-minute drive twice a week, but then moving to campus after a year. The therapy helped—the drugs helped more—and the shrink visits went from daily to twice-weekly and finally to monthly.

See, Edward? I thought from time to time, as I made my way through an honors degree. I can get by without you. And so I had, complete with summa cum laude and multiple awards. I stayed on campus all summer, still breeding degus, and then, two days ago, shoved all my things into a ten-foot U-Haul and drove myself up to Ann Arbor, hauling my aging Toyota.

The little car had been one of my first triumphs of therapy. The monstrous red-orange truck had, of course, not come down from Washington with me. Charlie thought it wouldn’t make the trip. For four years I had forced him not to do anything with it, until one day he called and said Jake couldn’t keep the thing running anymore unless someone was driving it with more regularity. I had wanted it to at least go to someone on the Rez, but to those boys the truck reeked of him, and so the truck, with its clawed-out radio, dented side, and painful memories disappeared to a collector in Port Angeles.

I refused to let Charlie send me the money. He’d bought the thing, anyway.

And so I got by, with a new car, in a new state, with new friends. But the truth was that my life for six years still felt like a postcard constantly going back to that room in the house in Forks with the huge glass wall. Wish You Were Here, it said.

Shaking my head, I forced myself out of thinking about it, and instead forced myself to look around the auditorium. Some of the medical scientists had sat together today, and I could see them in a little cluster down in the second row. I’d arrived later and slunk into the fourth row from the back. I felt old, compared to my classmates, in part because I was—it had taken me two extra years to finish my degree thanks to all the therapy, and in part because of all I’d been through. Their excitement was strange to me, and I let the chatter thrum in my ears as I hunched down in my seat and tried to listen to the dean.

The dean of the medical school was a woman with a broad smile and a pleasant voice. She was encouraging all of us to work hard, to love our studies, to forget about specializations until later, when we’d had more experience. Some of my classmates were scribbling down notes—these would be the ones who would panic over every exam. Others were fiddling on laptops and iPhones—they would be either the whiz kids, who never had to lift a finger, or the smart alecks who hid ineptitude behind jokes. I glanced around the room, my mind beginning to count, to think about how to analyze this class’s chances for success statistically, when I was poked in the arm.

“Do you know that guy?” came a whisper.

I turned. The person next to me was leaning back in his chair, trying to appear to be paying attention to the dean. But he cocked his head in the direction of another, three rows down. From the back, all I could see was sand-colored hair curling slightly at the neckline of a hooded sweatshirt—typical fall attire here, I gathered.

Returning my eyes to the dean, I murmured, “No. Why?”

“He keeps checking you out.”

Frowning, I looked back down the rows. The guy in question was slouched in his chair, fingers drumming on the top of a venti Starbucks cup as he stared forward as absently as the rest of us. There was something vaguely familiar about the angular jaw, the Roman nose. I studied him for a moment. He twisted in his chair and pulled out an iPhone, which he tapped on a few times as though he were checking something. A moment later, he turned toward me again.

At once, his face yanked itself from the memories I’d tried so furiously to bury. It made sense, of course, as his features were as unchanged as they ever would be. But it was so jarring to see him here; his usually neatly-combed hair looking as snarled as every other boy’s beneath the pair of sunglasses on his head; his customary shirt and tie replaced by a black hoodie bearing the words MICHIGAN TECH in huge white letters. For a moment we stared at each other, and then he casually turned back to face the front, sliding the sunglasses down to cover eyes whose color I knew all too well.

My mouth clamped shut instinctively. I would have to remember to tell my therapist in Florida about that. I had finally mastered what she’d taught me. Breathe in through the nose, slowly, slowly—there. And hold it. Exhale. In again. When I was certain I wouldn’t hyperventilate, I looked back at him.

His eyes were now fixed on the front of the room, and now it was I who was watching him. His tall frame was slouched into the chair, his feet kicking up on the back of the empty chair in front of him. Running shoes, with ankles showing between the top of the shoe and the fraying bottom hem of his jeans. Edward had worn them from time to time, but even he preferred slightly nicer shoes, and of course Alice was forever bringing back the latest in Italian leather footwear for all of them.

It made sense, I supposed. Medicine was a field that changed almost daily, although surely all of them could find time to read every single medical journal and stay abreast of new developments. But then there was licensure, and being able to prove a recent residency, and now that I’d thought about it, it was unbelievably short-sighted that it had never occurred to me that he’d need to come back to school periodically.

The irony.

Whatever the dean said for the next twenty minutes was lost. Were they all here? I wondered. Esme, at least…my heart raced as I thought about how wonderful it would be to feel the embrace of the woman who had been so quick to think of me as her daughter. Lost in thoughts of this nature, I didn’t notice the dean wrapping up. It wasn’t until his feet dropped off the chair that I recognized the rustling bags and the creaks of auditorium seats springing upward as their occupants vacated them. I got out of my seat, too, shoving into my bag the steno pad on which I had idly doodled the mean MCAT scores of my class.

In the time it took me to do so, he disappeared from his seat into the throng of M1s. I felt the panic rising again. Why hadn’t he waited? Surely he knew I would want to talk to him. They could move fast; he could disappear. But then, he couldn’t move that fast in a roomful of humans. He wouldn’t risk it, would he? Finally I spied the shock of corn-silk hair, the back of the black sweatshirt, the new-looking navy knapsack.

I jumped over the row in front of me, banging my shin and landing on my hands and knees in the aisle. A hand immediately came to my upper arm and pulled me upright.

“You okay?” a deep voice asked, and I looked up into dark eyes and dark hair.

“That was some jump,” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m fine; I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m just trying to catch up to someone.”

Someone who was moving faster and faster away. I ducked a few students in the aisle, squeezing past them, bumping backpacks and messenger bags out of the way. Behind me I heard muffled “Hey”s and “Sorry”s and even an “Excuse you”.

“I’m sorry,” I called backward to no one in particular. But when I looked up, he had hit the door of the auditorium. Still jostling my way through a few more people, I called out his name.

“Carlisle! Carlisle, wait!”

I could have sworn I saw the slightest hitch in his step, but one, it wasn’t possible for him to stumble, and two, he didn’t turn. I kept pressing my way through bags and bodies, calling his  until I was a couple feet from him. And by some small mercy, the guy standing next to him noticed me.

He tapped Carlisle’s shoulder. “Hey—Will?”

The name stopped me short. My feet quit moving of their own accord, and my jaw dropped a little bit as he spun to face me. There was no way I had mistaken his face, could there be?

Then he turned and I knew it was impossible. No one else had those eyes. The rich, honeycomb gold, the way in their expression, they carried the weight of centuries. I remembered at once the first time I’d met him, how he’d seemed weary, but was gentle and kind…and casually evasive.

“D’ya know her?” his comrade said, cocking his head toward me.

I realized at once that I’d accidentally trapped him.  He couldn’t claim to have a child as old as I was, not if he was pretending to be an M1 student, so he couldn’t explain how we truly knew each other. He couldn’t very well claim to have gone to my college when he was wearing a sweatshirt from another institution. And then I saw flicker across his face something I’d never seen. His brow furrowed, and my breath caught as I realized for the first time I was seeing Edward’s gentle father, not looking with his usual kindness, not with pity, or even confusion, but with anger.

And the tears were already stinging my eyes when that beautiful voice I’d first heard in the tiny hospital on the other side of the country answered evenly, “No. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Forward
Back

The sun beat down on the open square, and the images ahead of me waved back and forth unsteadily through the humid air. I could see bits of water flying upward from the fountain before me, disappearing into the air as they evaporated into a thick steam that permeated the whole scene. Bodies were thick around me, the red cloaks stroking my own skin as I ran.

Overhead, the clock was already tolling as I pushed myself through the crowd. Each bell seemed to ring its way into my very core as my lungs burned. The piazza seemed to slant uphill toward the castle and toward the alleyway where I could already see him standing. A young girl had turned toward him, but it was only she and I who seemed to see.

I screamed his name. He didn’t divert from his path.

“Edward!”

His eyes were closed, and even though I was racing toward him to save his life, I cursed him under my breath. Infernally cocksure, absolute in his belief that the world was the way he saw it. He wouldn’t even open his eyes, couldn’t search me out in the crowd, see me barreling toward him at my top speed, which to him must look as though I were wading through molasses.

“Edward! Look at me!”

The shirt began to slide from his shoulders, and a tiny rainbow skittered across the stones from the single band of light that graced his skin.

Around me I caught the reek of sweat, of stale water blowing into the air from the fountain. The water would mask my scent. Undesirable, but the fountain was the fastest way to him. I stepped into the cool water and began to dash through it, the fluid slowing my movement little by little.

He stepped forward.

The little girl pointed.

The sunlight hit his chest, his face, his shoulders, and for a split-second, he glowed before me. He was exquisite, every plane of his body. I had once run my fingers over that chest, admiring it, loving the way it felt against my cheek on a cool spring evening. “You’re beautiful,” I had always told him. He still was, standing there, silent, shimmering in the noon.

But he had never given up seeing himself as the hideous monster he believed himself to be, and nothing I’d ever been able to do could convince him otherwise.

And as my knee lifted to press me further through the water, firm hands in what appeared to be elbow-length gloves appeared from the darkness behind him, clapping themselves on his shoulder and dragging him backward, away from me, into the darkness.

Forward

Six years ago, she lost everything. But when chance brings her sad past into her new present, she ends up getting—and giving another—the opportunity to truly heal.

A New Moon AU.

Begin Reading