A/N: New story. This will be updated much less frequently as I am coming into finals soon. I just really needed to get this out of my head as soon as possible.

Summary: Best friends at five. Dating at fourteen. Lovers at eighteen. Married at twenty-three. Bella's life has always been comfortable and safe. Changes are always hard to make when all you've ever known is stability.

Note: Stephenie Meyer owns everything. I just borrow the characters. If I owned them, I'd never let Edward come out and play. Edward Cullen does, however, own me.

Comfortable

Prologue

The soft tick, tick, tick of the clock over the dresser counted off time in painfully steady beats. The crickets outside sang their spring cadence. The light mist outside the window reminded me where I was.

I was here.

Not stuck, just here.

In this bedroom.

With this man.

To whom I was married.

I'll admit, it wasn't my brightest idea. Nor was it my dumbest either though. At the time, it had seemed like the right thing to do. Thinking back, it still was the right thing to do.

But now …

Eh.

I'm not sure I felt any different.

Maybe it was more like this felt different.

Where I was then wasn't where I was now, mind and soul.

I had gone into it knowing somehow it would be like this, but still I moved forward. There was no small voice in the back of my head that told me to run away, but neither was there a voice that said to run forward.

I was simply moving.

Moving with the natural flow of things.

The natural world order that had seemingly graced me with something I wasn't sure was me anymore.

But had it really ever even been me?

Had I ever really wanted this?

Had time changed me somehow? Had time changed us?

It wasn't necessarily that I didn't love him.

No, that wasn't the issue.

I certainly loved him.

Perhaps my life had come too easily for me. I had never had to fight for anything. I had never had to make any hard choices. I had let others make those choices for me. I had always just existed.

Floated through life on the backs of butterflies, unaware that life was slowly changing into something I didn't recognize anymore.

We were best friends at five.

Dating at fourteen.

Lovers at eighteen.

Married at twenty-three.

He had lived next door to me growing up.

We had gone to high school together.

College together.

Barely old enough to decide what we wanted to do the rest of our lives, we had agreed one night that, hell, why not get married.

It only seemed natural.

There was no big proposal. No doves. No get down on one knee and make me cry. No fancy ring that made all the other women jealous.

We were sitting on a couch watching cartoons, vestiges of our childhood, and sharing a bowl of plain chips.

Because that's what we were.

Plain.

There was a commercial for some bridal store.

Smiling women in white dresses and giggling little girls carrying bundles of flowers.

He turned to me and said, "So you want to get married?"

I had picked up another chip and casually replied, "Yeah, sure."

Such was the story of our romance.

It had never swept me off my feet, never made me lose my breath, never stopped my heart with emotion.

It simply was.

Like we were.

Like we were always going to be.

His back twitched in the night and I saw him scoot further away from me on the bed.

He always slept like that, curled up in a ball as far from me as he could manage.

Maybe it was self-preservation. Maybe it was normality.

And maybe it was because that's how we always had slept.

I had never gone to sleep wrapped up in his arms only to wake up curled in his side.

We just didn't operate like that.

I sighed into the blackness of the night.

What had we come to?

My husband twitched again.

He was dreaming.

I wondered what he was dreaming about. He never told me his dreams.

Maybe tomorrow would be different. Maybe tomorrow he'd wake up and be a new man, refreshed and revived and ready to conquer life as we knew it.

The seconds continued to tick off on the clock.

Who was I kidding?

This was how it was always going to be.

Me on one side, him on the other.

Maybe my first mistake was saying yes.

But here we were.

Bella and Jasper.

Comfortably ever after.