Next time? I shook my head, disgusted again.
I eased myself silently through the half-opened window.
Her room was small - disorganized but not unclean. There were books piled on the floor beside her bed, their spines facing away from me, and CDs scattered by her inexpensive CD player - the one on top was just a clear jewel case. Stacks of papers surrounded a computer that looked like it belonged in a museum dedicated to obsolete technologies. Shoes dotted the wooden floor.
I wanted very much to go read the titles of her books and CDs, but I'd promised myself that I would keep my distance; instead, I went to sit the old rocking chair in the far corner of the room.
Had I really once thought her average-looking? I thought of that first day, and my disgust for the boys who were so immediately intrigued with her. But when I remembered her face in their minds now, I could not understand why I had not found her beautiful immediately. It seemed an obvious thing.
Right now - with her dark hair tangled and wild around her pale face, wearing a threadbare t-shirt full of holes with tatty sweatpants, her features relaxed in unconsciousness, her full lips slightly parted - she took my breath away. Or would have, I thought wryly, if I were breathing.
She did not speak. Perhaps her dream had ended.
I stared at her face and tried to think of some way to make the future bearable.
Hurting her was not bearable. Did that mean my only choice was to try to leave again?
The others could not argue with me now. My absence would not put anyone in danger. There would be no suspicion, nothing to link anyone's thoughts back to the accident.
I wavered as I had this afternoon, and nothing seemed possible.
I could not hope to rival the human boys, whether these specific boys appealed to her or not. I was a monster. How could she see me as anything else? If she knew the truth about me, it would frighten and repulse her. Like the intended victim in a horror movie, she would run away, shrieking in terror.
I remembered her first day in biology...and knew that this was exactly the right reaction for her to have.
It was foolishness to imagine that if had I been the one to ask her to the silly dance, she would have cancelled her hastily-made plans and agreed to go with me. I was not the one she was destined to say yes to. It was someone else, someone human and warm. And I could not even let myself - someday, when that yes was said - hunt him down and kill him, because she deserved him, whoever he was. She deserved happiness and love with whomever she chose.
I owed it to her to do the right thing now; I could no longer pretend that I was only in danger of loving this girl.
After all, it really didn't matter if I left, because Bella could never see me the way I wished she would. Never see me as someone worthy of love.
Never.
Could a dead, frozen heart break? It felt like mine would.
"Edward," Bella said.
I froze, staring at her unopened eyes.
Had she woken, caught me here? She looked asleep, yet her voice had been so clear...
She sighed a quiet sigh, and then moved restlessly again, rolling to her side - still fast asleep and dreaming.
"Edward," she mumbled softly.
She was dreaming of me.
Could a dead, frozen heart beat again? It felt like mine was about to.
"Stay," she sighed. "Don't go. Please...don't go."
She was dreaming of me, and it wasn't even a nightmare. She wanted me to stay with her, there in her dream.
I struggled to find words to name the feelings that flooded through me, but I had no words strong enough to hold them. For a long moment, I drowned in them.
When I surfaced, I was not the same man I had been.
My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?
At the time that I had become a vampire, trading my soul and my mortality for immortality in the searing pain of transformation, I had truly been frozen. My body had turned into something more like rock than flesh, enduring and unchanging. My self, also, had frozen as it was - my personality, my likes and my dislikes, my moods and my desires; all were fixed in place.
It was the same for the rest of them. We were all frozen. Living stone.
When change came for one of us, it was a rare and permanent thing. I had seen it happen with Carlisle, and then a decade later with Rosalie. Love had changed them in an eternal way, a way that never faded. More than eighty years had passed since Carlisle had found Esme, and yet he still looked at her with the incredulous eyes of first love. It would always be that way for them.
It would always be that way for me, too. I would always love this fragile human girl, for the rest of my limitless existence.
I gazed at her unconscious face, feeling this love for her settle into every portion of my stone body.
She slept more peacefully now, a slight smile on her lips.