Dusk Till Dawn

Acceptance

I leaned back against the soft snowbank, letting the dry powder reshape itself around my weight. My skin had cooled to match the air around me, and the tiny pieces of ice felt like velvet under my skin.

The sky above me was clear, brilliant with stars, glowing blue in some places, yellow in others. The stars created majestic, swirling shapes against the black backdrop of the empty universe...a lovely sight.

I wonder if she would think it's beautiful too? I couldn't help but think.

My thoughts about the human only became more frequent over the six days. Her scent was embedded in my mind, it was one of the few things I could think of. I wasn't stupid, I knew who the girl was to me but I wasn't sure how to feel about it.

My head turned when I heard the approaching footsteps. The sound of movement was only a faint whisper against the powder.

I wasn't surprised that Ivan had followed me here. I figured he would be mulling over a conversation, putting it off for the last few days until he was sure on what to say.

He sprang into sight about sixty yards away, leaping onto the tip of an outcropping of black rock and balancing there on the balls of her bare feet.

Ivan's skin was silver in the starlight, and his long blond curls shone pale, almost pink with their strawberry tint. His amber eyes glinted as he spied me, half-buried in the snow and his full lips stretched slowly into a smile.

I rolled my eyes at the man but prepared myself for what his next action could be.

He hadn't dressed for human eyes; he wore only a thin wife beater and a pair of shorts.

Crouching down on a promontory of stone, he touched the rock with his fingertips, and his body coiled.

"Cannonball!" He called, disrupting the once quiet night.

He launched himself into the air, his shape becoming a dark, twisting shadow as he spun gracefully between the start and me. I was able to get out of the way just as he struck the piled snowbank beside me.

A blizzard of snow flew up around him, clouding my vision of the balled up man.

The glare that I sent him was once visible when his head poked up from the mountain of snow, and sent me a slight smile. I sat down at the place where I now stood and pulled my knees close to my chest, hearing the man shuffle toward me.

"Sorry," he muttered. "I was just trying to make you smile."

"Hilarious, Ivan."

His mouth twisted down.

"Tanya and Kate said I should leave you alone. They think I'm annoying you."

"You are," I assured, earning a careful shove. "But I'm the one who came to your place without any warning, so." I finished my sentence with a slight shrug.

Ivan sighed, glancing up at the stars with me. "Are you going home?"

"I have to. Coming here was only supposed to clear my mind...help me figure out some things," I told him.

"Well, have you?"

I was silent at first, digging my foot under the snow. Until I quietly muttered out the sentence that I've been asking myself for almost the past century. "I'm a lesbian."

I quickly earned Ivan's shocked gaze but I still avoided his eyes. "And I think I've found my mate."

When I heard a scoff come from the man, I prepared myself for what he would say. "And here I was thinking you just liked rejecting me! You know I'm not used to rejection, Rose."

Unlike Carlisle, Ivan and his sisters had discovered their consciences slowly. In the end, it was their fondness for humans that turned them against slaughter. Now the ones they loved...lived.

"Yeah, the original incubus," I teased.

Ivan's voice grew serious when he asked, "Am I the only one who knows?"

As I was about to answer, a chime from my phone stopped me. When I opened the messages, I realized it was Alice. She only sent me a simple text, no words involved but it brought a smile to my face; one of the emojis was a red heart while the one next to it was the rainbow flag emoji.

"Alice now knows," I answered, standing from my seat. "And since she knows, Edward probably does as well."

"Thank you for trusting me, Rose," Ivan said, placing his hand on my shoulder. "I'm not going to lie, when you came here I thought..."

"You thought that I changed my mind?"

"Yeah. But now I see that I was wrong." Ivan pulled me into a tight hug, his lips placing themselves on the crown of my head. "You're welcome back anytime, okay. Go get your girl. Goodbye, Rosalie"

"Bye Ivan." I smiled at him as he was running away, ghosting across the snow so quickly that his feet had no time to sink in. It was obvious that the rejection hurt more than he let on but, I didn't care. The fact that he accepted me gave me more confidence and I couldn't help but wonder how the others would react when I would eventually tell them.

    If I ran, I would be back to Carlisle's car in less than an hour. In a hurry to see my family— and to very much 'go get my girl', as Ivan put it— I raced across the starlit snowfield, leaving no footprints.

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