Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,51

my thoughts were intolerable, too.

Because I could kill every spider in her home, cut the thorns off every rosebush she might one day touch, block every speeding car that got within a mile of her, but there was no task I could perform that would make me something other than what I was. I stared at my white, stone-like hand—so grotesquely inhuman—and despaired.

I could not hope to compete against the human boys, whether these specific boys appealed to her or not. I was the villain, the nightmare. 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 I had been the one to ask her to the silly dance, she would have canceled 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.

Could a dead, frozen heart break? It felt as though mine would.

“Edward,” Bella said.

I froze, staring at her unopened eyes.

Had she awakened, 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 as though 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 I became a vampire, trading my soul and mortality for immortality in the searing pain of transformation, I had truly been frozen. My body had turned into something more like stone than flesh, enduring and unchanging. My self, also, had frozen as it was—my personality, my likes and dislikes, my moods and 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 would never fade. More than eighty years had passed since Carlisle found Esme, and yet he still looked at her with the incredulous eyes of first love. It would always be so for them.

It would always be so 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 that love for her settle into every portion of my stone body.

She slept more peacefully now, a slight smile on her lips.

I began to plot.

I loved her, and so I would try to be strong enough to leave her. I knew I wasn’t that strong now. I would work on that one. But perhaps I was strong enough to circumvent the future in another way.

Alice had seen only two futures for Bella, and now I understood them both.

Loving her would not keep me from killing her if I let myself make mistakes.

Yet I could not feel the monster now, could not find him anywhere in me. Perhaps love had silenced him forever. If I killed her now, it would not be intentional, only a