themidnightson | (no subject) (Reply)

The conversation with Alice plays over and over in his mind while he watched Bella sleep. This isn't smart. There isn't any part of him that thinks it's the smart decision. But he's already asked her. And she's already agreed. And he wants to take to her there, to show her something that actually is precious to him. Even if has settled out in his mind as the day he should strip away her lingering naivety about him. She should know the truth.

About him.

About her effect on him.

To choose her own self-preservation.

This coming day, such an innocuous little Friday on her desk calendar mocking him, might be the last one she spoke so openly and freely with him. The last where she was fully innocent of the danger she was in every second he let himself be near her. He'd only so recently gotten to have long conversations with her and there was a chance it could be ripped out from under his fingers tips in a matter of minutes, by his own choice and voice.

It was another morning for questions.

Edward asked her about her mother, and mother's hobbies, more of her life in Phoenix. There was something soulful and sorrow touched about how she missed the land of sunshine and creosote. Then her grandparents and other important relatives, and school friends. All the people who shared the nearness and dearness of her life, who wiped her tears and caused her smiles, formed her trust and faith and habits, and never had cause to offer her a moments harms.

And, then, eventually, after taking far too long to get to it with how short the timetable is today, the boys that she'd dated.

It's maddening trying to determine by her expression, the tone of voice and the hot red flush of her blood scalding her cheeks how serious she is when she says she's never been interested in dating that much. It's hard to imagine. He can't help but notice her effect on the male populace all around her. Forks might be backwards but it was hardly a fluke in their makeup that drew them all to her.

There must have been others in Phoenix, too -- but she only said there was no history to give there.

Before he can hold on to the minutes they are gone, and he has to tell her he's leaving.

"Where are you going?"

"Hunting. If I'm going to be alone with you tomorrow,
I'm going to take whatever precautions I can."

"You can always cancel, you know."

"No. I can't."

"Perhaps you're right."

He had given into letting Alice formally meet Bella, part of a price for not being utterly alone in this -- and very much an unspoken assuagement to the number of times he'd quietly and not so quietly trod on the decades of trust between them as he denied her over and over and over again. He didn't apologize. He couldn't because she still couldn't be right. Yet she'd agreed to help him as far he'd let her and he'd relented against her not speaking to Bella.

Even if her futures still said tomorrow Bella might die in certain possible ways.

Everyone was coming ever closer to talking to her with Milliways already.

At least Carlisle, Rosalie, and Emmett already had.

Jasper and Alice had been respectfully distant.

It wasn't hard filching her key or her truck or swapping it with the Volvo, but it was surprisingly hard to leave the thing there and walk away with Alice. Bella was safely ensconced in her classes, focusing on a worksheet, which he can see when one or another of the students working on the same looks about in her classroom. He's going to be leaving her immediate distance. The limit of the city. They could even leave the state in the middle of it, when they aren't thinking about it --

and Bella attracted trouble as easily and commonly as she breathed.

The accident in this very parking lot. The men in Port Angeles. Every minute with him.

The idea of her finding trouble when he's leaving by choice, for a greater necessity of her future well being, and taking the only person capable of watching her from a distance, of knowing when the smallest twist of choice will turn dangerous or deadly. It's hardly the depth of all he's pleading with the pen when he writes on a scrap of paper --

Be Safe.

-- and leaves it on her driver's seat.