“Wait, ” I said, gripping his shoulders and hugging myself close to him. I kicked one leg free and wrapped it around his waist.

“Practice makes perfect.”

He chuckled. “Well, we should be fairly close to perfection by this point, then, shouldn’t we? Have you slept at all in the last month?”

“But this is the dress rehearsal, ” I reminded him, “and we’ve only practiced certain scenes. It’s no time for playing safe.”

I thought he would laugh, but he didn’t answer, and his body was motionless with sudden stress. The gold in his eyes seemed to harden from a liquid to a solid.

I thought over my words, realized what he would have heard in them.

“Bella…, ” he whispered.

“Don’t start this again, ” I said. “A deal’s a deal.”

Breaking Dawn