She was dreaming of me.

109

She was dreaming of me.
Could a dead, frozen heart beat again?  It felt like 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 that I had become a vampire, trading my soul and my mortality for
immortality in the searing pain of transformation, I had truly been frozen.  My body had
turned into something more like rock than flesh, enduring and unchanging.  My self, also,
had frozen as it was—my personality, my likes and my dislikes, my moods and my
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 never faded.  More than eighty years had passed since Carlisle
had found Esme, and yet he still looked at her with the incredulous eyes of first love.  It
would always be that way for them.
It would always be that way 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 this love for her settle into every portion
of my stone body.
She slept more peacefully now, a slight smile on her lips.
Always watching her, 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.
? 2008 Stephenie Meyer