CHAPTER FOUR
first glance

It was Mike's brilliant idea to wake up bright and early on Saturday morning to make our way up through the trees at the edge of Forks. For me, it was brilliant: I loved the early mornings, when the air was still laced with mist and the light lay low like a secret across the forest floor. The sky was a pewter sheet, soft and muted, the sun more suggestion than substance. These were the hours where the world felt half-formed, and I could walk through it like a ghost, unbothered and unbeheld.

The drizzle began as we pulled off the road, threading our way through wet gravel and pine. It clung to hair and eyelashes, settled into clothing with quiet insistence. Jessica groaned with every dampened footstep. She had worn suede boots. Lauren echoed her misery like a backup singer, her hood pulled low. I found their complaints oddly comforting, a chorus of human fuss. Erik and Tyler had bailed at the last minute, which Mike reported with a grin he didn't bother to hide. He seemed pleased by the smaller group, as if fewer voices meant more space for his own.

Angela, of course, was already ahead. She moved with a strange, contained elegance- not athletic, but steady, like someone used to being overlooked and therefore rarely tripped. I liked that about her. She seemed stitched from soft threads, but she was real, quiet, and kind. When I smiled at her, she smiled back with a sort of shy relief, as if I had handed her a language she thought no one else spoke.

Mike, by contrast, talked as though his words might build him a reputation faster than time ever could. By the time we'd been walking twenty minutes, I knew about his childhood in San Diego, his brief love for surfing, his hatred for humidity, and that he once sprained his ankle jumping off a swing when he was twelve. It was all mildly endearing in its own way. Human memories were often like that, ridiculous in scale, emotional in detail. They collected small moments like coins, not knowing which ones would end up mattering most.

We moved deeper into the trees. The canopy above closed in, pine boughs heavy with moisture, the light now a faint shimmer that broke into silver through the needles. Our shoes squelched and snapped over roots, the occasional crow breaking the silence with a hoarse cry. The higher we climbed, the less Mike talked. His breaths grew louder, harsher. We reached a switchback and he paused, hands braced on his knees.

"You aren't tired yet?" he called up to me.

I turned, leaning against the damp trunk of a fir. "No."

"So you do this often then?"

"I lived in Canada," I said, smiling. "Of course I did."

He grimaced in mock joy and forged ahead. "Great. Great."

I let him go in front, following at a more leisurely pace. The forest grew quieter the farther we rose, the air thinner, cleaner. The trees here were older. They had that ancient, watchful hush about them. Moss cloaked everything, rocks, fallen logs, the lower trunks of trees, as though time had slowed and softened its edges.

And then, without warning, the hunger bloomed.

It wasn't sharp. It wasn't even painful. It came like a memory, unwanted, unshakable. A warmth at the back of my throat, a tightening in my chest. The scent of him trailed in the air, faint but unmistakable. Even now, with space between us, I could still trace Mike through the trees by the shape of his breath, the pulse behind his ears, the salt on his skin.

I stopped walking.

Rain slipped from the needles above and landed with a soft patter on my coat. The sound of human voices had dimmed behind me, and Mike was far enough ahead that he hadn't noticed. I closed my eyes for just a moment.

It would be so easy.

Just one step forward. A lean. A breath. One second of closeness, and the heat of him would flood the hollows of me where the hunger lived. I could see it. Taste it. I could bury the memory after.

But I didn't.

I pressed my nails into the bark behind me until they bit skin. I let the burn anchor me. Hunger did not deserve poetry. It did not deserve longing. It was a fact. A danger. I would not romanticise it.

The trees watched. I could almost feel their judgment.

"You okay?"

Angela's voice broke gently through the haze. She had caught up without a sound. I blinked and found her there, hair tucked beneath a damp beanie, eyes wide with honest concern.

"Fine," I said. My voice sounded hoarse.

"Just spaced out," I added quickly.

She nodded, and to my surprise, said nothing more. She just stood beside me, sharing the silence like it was something sacred. Eventually, we walked again. Together.

The others had stopped ahead at a clearing, a break in the trees where the hill plateaued just enough to sit. Fog curled around the trunks like pale ribbons. Jessica complained about her boots. Lauren was trying to take a photo but cursed the low light. Mike had removed his coat and was fanning himself like it was the Sahara.

I sat beside Angela and tilted my head back. The sky had cleared just enough to reveal the faint disc of the sun. It shone like an old coin through the mist, tarnished and thin.

Forks was supposed to be quiet. A place to disappear. And in some ways, it was. But there was no true silence here, not for me. There was only the hush between instincts. The pause before decision. The weight of pretending.

"It's beautiful up here," Angela murmured.

"Yes."

Mike tossed me a protein bar. "You eat these in Canada too?"

"Only when we're not eating moose meat," I said, smiling.

He laughed, and Jessica rolled her eyes, and the moment passed like sunlight through mist. Just a flicker. Just enough.

We started back down the mountain an hour later. No one said much. The descent was quieter than the climb; our bodies worked and were weary. The forest folded behind us, fog and shadow, secrets and rain.

I did not know yet that something had shifted in me that day. Only that I had resisted. That I had wanted.

And that the wanting had not won.

Not yet.

On Monday, it seemed that Mike's interest in me had dropped as quickly as it had come. I wasn't the new girl anymore, to my quiet relief, and the spotlight of curiosity shifted from me to someone else: a pale girl from Arizona, according to the muttered gossip drifting through the halls. She arrived like a shadow caught in the wrong landscape, brown hair soaked by the Forks rain, and Mike was all too eager to scoop her up before third period and parade her to our lunch table like some strange specimen.

"Looks like you're the shiny new toy, Bella," Jessica said with a lopsided smirk, watching Mike with narrowed eyes as he hovered too close to the newcomer. "It was Elide last week. They get over it after a few days."

Bella said nothing to Jessica's biting tone. Her lips twitched into a faint, diplomatic smile, eyes lowering behind a curtain of damp hair. She was, indeed, as pale as the rumours had suggested- a ghost from the desert, transplanted into perpetual cloud. But my concerns about another hidden identity dissolved the moment I saw her. She was delicate and tightly-wound, like a thread pulled too taut. Human.

"How are you finding Forks?" I asked gently, curious despite myself.

"I don't like attention," she replied, shrugging one shoulder. "But it's... quiet. I like the trees."

She was lying, I could tell. The cold didn't suit her, nor the thick scent of moss that clung to everything here. But I respected the attempt. Lying about one's comfort was a universal survival tactic. It was one I'd long since mastered.

"Mr. Varner make you stand up and introduce yourself too?" I asked.

Bella gave a small groan of recognition and smiled in that sheepish, defeated way that always followed forced attention.

"I hated it," she admitted.

She gravitated toward me after that, as if pulled by some quiet recognition of shared discomfort. Angela joined in too, her presence calm and grounding, and the three of us talked about classes while the others spiralled into half-shouted gossip. I noticed Bella's eyes straying.

"Who are they?" she asked, a quiet frown forming.

I had already seen them.

They had entered the cafeteria like a scene from some mist-cloaked dream. Five of them. They moved like smoke, deliberate and graceful, and something about their presence twisted the air itself. They were too still when they sat, too quiet even in conversation, like actors pretending at the shape of human life.

There were three boys. The first, lean and golden-haired, perched stiffly in his chair as if enduring a long-held breath. His jaw was tight, his posture formal, rehearsed. The second was all bulk and shadow, dark curls framing a face that might have been carved from granite. The third had reddish-brown hair and long, elegant fingers, currently playing with a crimson apple like it was a living thing. He moved with the calculated grace of a predator disguised as a prince.

The two girls were dazzling. One tall, imperious, her golden hair a waterfall down her back, lips pursed like a question never answered. Her beauty was vicious, the kind that burned. And then there was the other girl- short, ethereal, with hair like charcoal dust and eyes that smiled even when her mouth did not. Her beauty was softer, stranger. Magnetic. I couldn't stop looking at her.

Bella couldn't either.

"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen," Jessica said, noticing our stares and sounding thrilled to be the authority. "And Rosalie and Jasper Hale. And Alice Cullen. They all live together. With Dr. Cullen and his wife."

Their names were old, names from a century past. And their eyes, all five of them, were the same gilded shade of topaz. A quiet signal to those who knew how to see. I had only ever heard whispers of covens who fed without killing, who wore the eyes of restraint instead of crimson. But here they were. Five of them. Vampires.

"They're... beautiful," Bella said, her voice slightly breathless, transfixed.

"Too beautiful," I murmured.

And yet, it was the last girl, Alice, who held my attention. She smiled like she meant it, unlike the others, whose expressions were masks too carefully chosen. Her eyes scanned the room but never landed on me. Still, I felt something. Like the echo of being seen.

"They all date each other too," Jessica continued with a mocking scoff. "Well, not Edward. He doesn't date. Thinks none of the girls here are good enough for him."

Bella flinched slightly, her eyes flickering back to the table where Edward now sat, statue-still and watching. He was staring. At her.

It was the first thing about him that startled me. Not his inhuman grace, nor his predatory elegance. But the way his expression fractured. A slight crease in the brow, the glint of confusion or disdain. She looked down, embarrassed.

Bella nodded. "Yeah, they don't look related."

"They're not. Dr Cullen is really young. Like really young. They're adopted," Jessica said, her voice dripping with condemnation, as if it was the most scandalous thing she could talk about.

"The blondes are the Hale twins. They're fostered."

"They look a little old for that," Bella said, and Jessica nodded.

"Now they are but they've been with the Cullens since they were eight. Mrs Cullen's their aunt or something."

"That's nice of them to look after them," Bella said.

Jessica shrugged, playing with the lid of her Pepsi can.

"I don't think Mrs Cullen can have kids."

"Have they always lived in Forks?"

"No. They moved down here two years ago from Alaska."

Alaska. Somewhere I'd never been.

"Which one is the boy with the reddish-brown hair?" Bella asked, too softly.

"Edward," Jessica snapped, not hiding her irritation. "He's gorgeous, but weird. Doesn't talk to anyone. Don't waste your time."

The whole conversation felt staged. I wondered how many times it had played out in Jessica's voice, to how many curious new girls.

Edward didn't look over again, but his posture had shifted. Still, stiller than anything natural. Listening. He could hear every word we said. His smirk was subtle, the kind that curled at the corners of a secret. Jessica didn't notice. Bella did.

The conversation drifted back to safer topics, tests, homework, the weather, but Bella stayed quiet. Her eyes flicked up every so often, always toward the table where the five of them sat, untouched and untouchedable.

And then, they stood.

It was too graceful to be normal. Too smooth. Too precise. They moved like predators done playing, rising as one and exiting the room without urgency, without hesitation. Like a single thought had passed among them and they'd answered in motion.

The cafeteria fell back into its usual rhythm. Noise, laughter, the clatter of trays. But the impression they left behind still clung to the edges of the room like mist.

I turned to Bella, nudging her with my elbow. "Caught your eye?"

She blinked, her cheeks flushing again as she shook her head. "No," she said quickly. "Just curious."

Her voice, her heartbeat, said otherwise.

But who was I to press her? Curiosity was how it always started.