Midnight Sun(37)

look in her eyes. Just to see if I could read the answers there...
No. I could not allow myself even that. Not if I was going to change the future. I'd moved my chin an inch
in her direction without looking away from the front of the room. I'd nodded once, and then turned my
face straight forward.
She did not speak to me again.
That afternoon, as soon as school was finished, my role played, I ran to Seattle as I had the day before. It
seemed that I could handle the aching just slightly better when I was flying over the ground, turning
everything around me into a green blur. This run became my daily habit.
Did I love her? I did not think so. Not yet. Alice's glimpses of that future had stuck with me, though, and I
could see how easy it would be to fall into loving Bella. It would be exactly like falling: effortless. Not
letting myself love her was the opposite of falling-it was pulling myself up a cliff-face, hand over hand,
the task as grueling as if I had no more than mortal strength.
More than a month passed, and every day it got harder. That made no sense to me-I kept waiting to get
over it, to have it get easier. This must be what Alice had meant when she'd predicted that I would not
be able to stay away from the girl. She had seen the escalation of the pain. But I could handle pain.
I would not destroy Bella's future. If I was destined to love her, then wasn't avoiding her the very least I
could do?
Avoiding her was about the limit of what I could bear, though. I could pretend to ignore her, and never
look her way. I could pretend that she was of no interest to me.
But that was the extent, just pretense and not reality.
I still hung on every breath she took, every word she said.
I lumped my torments into four categories.
The first two were familiar. Her scent and her silence. Or, rather-to take the responsibility on myself
where it belonged-my thirst and my curiosity.
The thirst was the most primal of my torments. It was my habit now to simply not breathe at all in
Biology. Of course, there were always the exceptions-when I had to answer a question or something of
the sort, and I would need my breath to speak. Each time I tasted the air around the girl, it was the same
as the first day-fire and need and brutal violence desperate to break free. It was hard to cling even
slightly to reason or restraint in those moments. And, just like that first day, the monster in me would
roar, so close to the surface...
The curiosity was the most constant of my torments. The question was never out of my mind: What is
she thinking now? When I heard her quietly sigh. When she twisted a lock of hair absently around her
finger. When she threw her books down with more force than usual. When she rushed to class late.
When she tapped her foot impatiently against the floor. Each movement caught in my peripheral vision
was a maddening mystery. When she spoke to the other human students, I analyzed her every word and
tone. Was she speaking her thoughts, or what she thought she should say? It often sounded to me like
she was trying to say what her audience expected, and this reminded me of my family and our daily life
of illusion-we were better at it than she was. Unless I wrong about that, just imagining things. Why
would she have to play a role? She was one of them-a human teenager.
Mike Newton was the most surprising of my torments. Who would have ever dreamed that such a
generic, boring mortal could be so infuriating? To be fair, I should have felt some gratitude to the
annoying boy; more than the others, he kept the girl talking. I learned so much about her through these
conversations-I was still compiling my list-but, contrarily, Mike's assistance with this project only
aggravated me more. I didn't want Mike to be the one that unlocked her secrets. I wanted to do that.
It helped that he never noticed her small revelations, her little slips. He knew nothing about her. He'd
created a Bella in his head that didn't exist-a girl just as generic as he was. He hadn't observed the
unselfishness and bravery that set her apart from other humans, he didn't hear the abnormal maturity
of her spoken thoughts. He didn't perceive that when she spoke of her mother, she sounded like a
parent speaking of a child rather than the other way around-loving, indulgent, slightly amused, and
fiercely protective. He didn't hear the patience in her voice when she feigned interest in his rambling
stories, and didn't guess at the kindness behind that patience.
Through her conversations with Mike, I was able to add the most important quality to my list, the most
revealing of them all, as simple as it was rare. Bella was good . All the other things added up to that
whole-kind and self-effacing and unselfish and loving and brave-she was good through and through.
These helpful discoveries did not warm me to the boy, however. The possessive way he viewed Bella-as
if she were an acquisition to be made-provoked me almost as much as his crude fantasies about her. He