New Moon

have destroyed his own happiness any more thoroughly?'

I sighed. 'Do you want me to watch this alone?'

'No, I'll mostly be watching you, anyway.' His fingers traced patterns across the skin of my arm, raising goose bumps. 'Will you cry?'

'Probably,' I admitted, 'if I'm paying attention.'

'I won't distract you then.' But I felt his lips on my hair, and it was very distracting.

The movie eventually captured my interest, thanks in large part to Edward whispering Romeo's lines in my ear—his irresistible, velvet voice made the actor's voice sound weak and coarse by comparison. And I did cry, to his amusement, when Juliet woke and found her new husband dead.

'I'll admit, I do sort of envy him here,' Edward said, drying the tears with a lock of my hair.

'She's very pretty.'

He made a disgusted sound. 'I don't envy him the girl—just the ease of the suicide,' he clarified in a teasing tone. 'You humans have it so easy! All you have to do is throw down one tiny vial of plant extracts…'

'What?' I gasped.

'It's something I had to think about once, and I knew from Carlisle's experience that it wouldn't be simple. I'm not even sure how many ways Carlisle tried to kill himself in the beginning… after he realized what he'd become…' His voice, which had grown serious, turned light again. 'And he's clearly still in excellent health.'

I twisted around so that I could read his face. 'What are you talking about?' I demanded. 'What do you mean, this something you had to think about once?'

'Last spring, when you were… nearly killed…' He paused to take a deep breath, snuggling to return to his teasing tone. 'Of course I was trying to focus on finding you alive, but part of my mind was making contingency plans. Like I said, it's not as easy for me as it is for a human.'

For one second, the memory of my last trip to Phoenix washed through my head and made me feel dizzy. I could see it all so clearly—the blinding sun, the heat waves coming off the concrete as I ran with desperate haste to find the sadistic vampire who wanted to torture me to death. James, waiting in the mirrored room with my mother as his hostage—or so I'd thought. I hadn't known it was all a ruse. Just as James hadn't known that Edward was racing to save me; Edward made it in time, but it had been a close one. Unthinkingly, my fingers traced the crescent-shaped scar on my hand that was always just a few degrees cooler than the rest of my skin.

I shook my head—as if I could shake away the bad memories—and tried to grasp what Edward meant. My stomach plunged uncomfortably. 'Contingency plans?' I repeated.

'Well, I wasn't going to live without you.' He rolled his eyes as if that fact were childishly obvious. 'But I wasn't sure how to do it—I knew Emmett and Jasper would never help… so I was thinking maybe I would go to Italy and do something to provoke the Volturi.'

I didn't want to believe he was serious, but his golden eyes were brooding, focused on something far away in the distance as he contemplated ways to end his own life. Abruptly, I was furious.

'What is a Volturi?' I demanded.

'The Volturi are a family,' he explained, his eyes still remote. 'A very old, very powerful family of our kind. They are the closest thing our world has to a royal family, I suppose. Carlisle lived with them briefly in his early years, in Italy, before he settled in America—do you remember the story?'

'Of course I remember.'

I would never forget the first time I'd gone to his home, the huge white mansion buried deep in the forest beside the river, or the room where Carlisle—Edward's father in so many real ways—kept a wall of paintings that illustrated his personal history. The most vivid, most wildly colorful canvas there, the largest, was from Carlisle's time in Italy. Of course I remembered the calm quartet of men, each with the exquisite face of a seraph, painted into the highest balcony overlooking the swirling mayhem of color. Though the painting was centuries old, Carlisle —the blond angel—remained unchanged. And I remembered the three others, Carlisle's early acquaintances. Edward had never used the name Volturi for the beautiful trio, two black-haired, one snow white. He'd called them Aro, Caius, and Marcus, nighttime patrons of the arts…

'Anyway, you don't irritate the Volturi,' Edward went on, interrupting ray reverie. 'Not unless you want to die—or whatever it is we do.' His voice was so calm, it made him sound almost bored by the prospect.

My anger turned to horror. I took his marble face between my hands and held it very tightly.

'You must never, never, never think of anything like that again!' I said. 'No matter what might ever happen to me, you are not allowed to hurt yourself!'

'I'll never put you in danger again, so it's a moot point.'

'Put me in danger! I thought we'd established that all the bad luck is my fault?' I was getting angrier. 'How dare you even think like that?' The idea of Edward ceasing to exist, even if I were dead, was impossibly painful.

'What would you do, if the situation were reversed?' he asked.

'That's not the same thing.'

He didn't seem to understand the difference. He chuckled.

'What if something did happen to you?' I blanched at the thought. 'Would you want me to go off myself?'

A trace of pain touched his perfect features.

'I guess I see your point… a little,' he admitted. 'But what would I do without you?'

'Whatever you were doing before I came along and complicated your existence.'

He sighed. 'You make that sound so easy.'

'It should be. I'm not really that interesting.'

He was about to argue, but then he let it go. 'Moot point,' he reminded me. Abruptly, he pulled himself up into a more formal posture, shifting me to the side so that we were no longer touching.

'Charlie?' I guessed.

Edward smiled. After a moment, I heard the sound of the police cruiser pulling into the driveway. I reached out and took his hand firmly. My dad could deal with that much.

Charlie came in with a pizza box in his hands.

'Hey, kids.' He grinned at me. 'I thought you'd like a break from cooking and washing dishes for your birthday. Hungry?'

'Sure. Thanks, Dad.'

Charlie didn't comment on Edward's apparent lack of appetite. He was used to Edward passing on dinner.

'Do you mind if I borrow Bella for the evening?' Edward asked when Charlie and I were done.

I looked at Charlie hopefully. Maybe he had some concept of birthdays as stay-at-home, family affairs—this was my first birthday with him, the first birthday since my mom, Renee, had remarried and gone to live in Florida, so I didn't know what he would expect.

'That's fine—the Mariners are playing the Sox tonight,' Charlie explained, and my hope disappeared. 'So I won't be any kind of company… Here.' He scooped up the camera he'd gotten me on Renee's suggestion (because I would need pictures to fill up my scrap-book), and threw it to me.

He ought to know better than that—I'd always been coordinationally challenged. The camera glanced off the tip of my finger, and tumbled toward the floor. Edward snagged it before it could crash onto the linoleum.

'Nice save,' Charlie noted. 'If they're doing something fun at the Cullens' tonight, Bella, you should take some pictures. You know how your mother gets—she'll be wanting to see the pictures faster than you can take them.'

'Good idea, Charlie,' Edward said, handing me the camera.

I turned the camera on Edward, and snapped the first picture. 'It works.'

'That's good. Hey, say hi to Alice for me. She hasn't been over in a while.' Charlie's mouth pulled down at one corner.

'It's been three days, Dad,' I reminded him. Charlie was crazy about Alice. He'd become attached last spring when she'd helped me through my awkward convalescence; Charlie would be fore'ter grateful to her for saving him from the horror of an almost-adult daughter who needed help showering. 'I'll tell her.'

'Okay. You kids have fun tonight.' It was clearly a dismissal. Charlie was already edging toward the living