No one could be still like Edward. He closed his eyes and became as immobile as stone, a carving under my hand.

For an instant, I felt a thrill of genuine fear, raising the hair on my arms. The look only lasted a second, but it chilled me more than the freezing wind.

I was sure, though, in the instant our eyes met, that he didn’t look harsh or unfriendly as he had the last time I’d seen him. He looked merely curious again, unsatisfied in some way.

His liquid topaz eyes were penetrating — trying futilely, I assumed, to lift the truth straight from my mind.

I so very nearly took you then. There was only one other frail human there — so easily dealt with.

It was unquestionably a complication that I couldn’t simply read your thoughts to know what your reaction was to me. I wasn’t used to having to go to such circuitous measures, listening to your words in Jessica’s mind… her mind isn’t very original, and it was annoying to have to stoop to that. And then I couldn’t know if you really meant what you said. It was all extremely irritating.

I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.

He must see how absorbed I was by him; he must not want to lead me on… so we couldn’t even be friends… because he wasn’t interested in me at all.

He was dangerous. He’d been trying to tell me that all along.

There was no rational explanation for how I was alive at this moment.