“Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.”
       Alfred Lord Tennyson

Edward’s POV

The scent of tuberose wafted towards me just as violently as that first day I saw her. The muscles in my face were contracted but not from the long-time absence of that scent.
The expression on Bella’s face disturbed me.
There was zero color on her cheeks. Her skin, already pasty, paled excessively. Though, it could very well be due to the sudden shock that my appearance obviously provoked.
At first, her brown eyes widened when she raised her head to behold the face of the intruder. A second passed, during which the breath inside me got locked in my throat. Bella sealed her eyes shut, shaking her head. When she opened them again she found that I hadn’t moved.
I watched that process continue, wordlessly. She seemed to be trying to awaken from some dream….some nightmare.
“What more did I expect?” I realized, grimly.
I couldn’t do more than stand frozen in that position. Too afraid to reach out, to touch her was I. How would she react? It horrified me to even wonder about it.
What I only had the right to do was stare back.
Stare back at the mistake that I’d so cruelly made. While I stared back, the picture widened.
Those brown eyes, those bottomless wells, incredibly deep and secretive, gawked at me with a shallowness that I could never have imagined possible in them!
They looked empty.
Frank as if their lack of water seemed to be directly blaming me, pointing a finger and declaring, “See what you have done?!”
A shudder ran through my body.
Bella’s head stopped shaking.
Her eyes focused on my face and I wondered if she was only staring into my eyes. I could hear the frantic beating of her heartbeat which sped but was much quieter than I  remembered.

Bella took one hesitant step forward. Her eyes were so wary that it pained me.
What had I done to her? To me, she was still the delicate, lovely human girl that I’d so irrationally fallen in love with. Yet, her eyes held such a caution that I’d never seen before.
I should say, that this…suspicion should have been demonstrated a year ago when we’d met instead of now. Back then, Bella had been confident in her trust of me, despite my not believing how that could be so. And she’d known all along that I wasn’t human.
Bella took another step. And another. All the while she kept her gaze locked warily on mine, as if cautious in case I moved. I didn’t.
Her heartbeat picked up when she came to stand in front of me. Her hands lifted. I stood perfectly frozen as her fingers lightly touched my forearms. They trailed up to my shoulders, crossing over to my chest. Her eyes focused there. It confused me when her eyebrows pulled down, her mouth setting in a frown. But quickly, she shook her head again and her fingers continued their course up my throat to my face.