The rain hadn't stopped in days. It drummed against the school windows like the heartbeat of something buried alive. I found Edward where he always was when he thought no one was watching—alone, staring out at the forest as if it whispered to him in some forgotten language.
He turned as if he'd been expecting me.
"You shouldn't follow me." he said.
"I wasn't following," I replied. "I was observing. Following requires interest, observing requires intent."
He almost smiled, but the edges of it trembled, as if the expression risked cracking something brittle inside him.
"You noticed things you shouldn't have."
"I notice everything." I said. "Including the fact that you don't breathe when you think no one's looking."
Silence. The wind clawed at the trees outside, leaving streaks of motion across the glass like skeletal fingers dragging down a coffin lid.
Finally, he spoke.
"You're not wrong. I'm not… like you."
"I would hope not." I said. "Normalcy is contagious."
He looked up. His eyes—usually gray—glowed faintly, silver in the dim light. It wasn't a color eyes should be unless something unnatural was burning behind them.
"You should be afraid."
"I tried." I told him. "It didn't stick."
He hesitated, then stepped closer. The air grew colder, as if the temperature was recoiling from him.
"My family hides what we are. We survive on secrecy."
"Secrecy," I said, "is just honesty waiting for an invitation."
Edward exhaled, and for a moment his breath hung white in the air though the room wasn't cold enough for it.
"I'm a revenant." he said quietly. "A remnant of someone who died long ago. I need… life. Borrowed life. To stay."
I tilted my head. "So you're undead with manners."
"Something like that."
His gaze flickered toward the hallway, as though he could hear footsteps approaching from hundreds of feet away. No one was there. But he listened the way prey listens— or predators.
Instead of retreating, I moved nearer until the chill from him brushed my skin. It prickled, like standing near a grave recently disturbed.
"And the van?" I asked.
"I couldn't let you die." he said.
"How sentimental. Or was I simply an experiment you didn't want wasted?"
His laugh was soft, almost human. "Maybe both."
Clouds pressed against the sky outside, swallowing the weak daylight whole. The room dimmed, and with it, Edward. Shadows clung to him as if they recognized one of their own.
"You're remarkably calm about all this." he said.
"I once spent a summer dissecting roadkill to determine which organs decomposed slowest." I told him. "You rank lower on the disturbing scale."
He blinked. "That's… impressive."
"That's subjective."
He told me fragments, about waking in a burned-out church, about the hunger that replaced his heartbeat, about cold centuries stretching like a punishment he couldn't remember deserving. About learning restraint one decade at a time, making deals with the darkness inside him the way one teaches a rabid animal to sit.
I listened the way one listens to a ghost story, with interest sharpened by disappointment each time it didn't end in bloodshed.
When he finished, I asked, "Does it hurt?"
"Existing?" he said.
"No. Resisting."
His jaw tightened. That was answer enough.
"You're not the first monster I've met." I added.
"And you?" he asked. "What are you?"
"Curious,l." I said. "That's usually fatal."
For a moment he simply looked at me, studying me with the same caution a scientist uses when handling a specimen they suspect might bite.
He smiled then, faint but real. "For both of us, probably."
A bell rang somewhere distant, but neither of us moved. The rain thickened outside until it blurred the world into abstract shapes—trees, sky, earth dissolving like ink in water.
Edward stepped back first.
"You should go." he said. "Being near me… it's dangerous."
I shrugged. "So is living. Yet people do it every day."
His expression faltered somewhere between amusement and despair, and then he was gone, moving too fast for footsteps to make sense, leaving the air behind him colder than before.
That night I wrote only one sentence in my journal; "Edward Cullen; proof that the dead can still make life complicated."
After a pause, I added another; "Tomorrow, I'll ask him what it's like to die twice."
And beneath that, in smaller writing; "If he answers honestly, he might live long enough to regret it."