Cracked! Chapter 18: My Right Hand Man
It's that time again!
You know the drill: I don't claim to own the characters of Twilight, I'm not making money from this so there's no point in suing me, blah blah blah.
Previous chapter can be found on L J here and on FFn here.
Current chapter can be found on FFn here.
From Twilight Chapter 8 and Midnight Sun Chapter 9: “Port Angeles”
Previously: Bella Swan decided to do a little shopping. Edward decided to do a little bird-watching. Get it?
My Right Hand Man
Bella was kicking herself for getting lost. She almost never got lost in Phoenix, but then, she’d grown up there. She’d been to Port Angeles before for Shabbat service, but only a couple of times, and never to this particular part of town. Wandering around in search of a book store without Jess or Angela seemed like a pretty stupid idea now-she should have just ordered books online like a normal person instead of trying to navigate through what appeared to be a warehouse district. If only Jessica hadn’t started spouting off about Lauren and Tyler-just hearing Lauren’s name got Bella’s temper flaring up, to say nothing of the report that she’d tried to start a rumor that Tyler caught the new girl snorting Ajax. Bella was in need of a walk to cool down, got careless, and now here she was, in the middle of nowhere.
Just when she was thinking to herself serves me right for taking off without a map, she realized she wasn’t alone. Four intoxicated men slowly surrounded her. But they weren’t so slow or uncoordinated that running seemed like it would do much good.
Great. Just what I needed.
When Bella was fifteen, Lama Gyatso tried to impress upon her that aggressive displays would have negative results. Her response at the time was to reassure him that, while this made perfect sense when dealing with reasonable people who were friendly or even neutral, a person who was already hostile (or worse, power-hungry and inebriated, as was the case with the very worst of Renee’s old boyfriends) did not respond to meekness or subservience by behaving in a way that was less threatening. His desire was to exercise dominance. The monks, whose beliefs originated from a culture that emphasized acceptance of fate rather than actively changing it, desired to maintain internal and external peace and harmony with the chaotic universe. Bella’s desire was to protect herself.
At the present moment, she knew exactly where her pepper spray was: in her pocket. She also knew that with the way the wind was blowing, she was just as likely to get pepper all over her own eyes. Still, waving the bottle around might at least make them think twice.
Sadly, it didn’t. The meanest-looking one even laughed as he advanced on her.
Shit.
Bella managed to knee one guy in the balls and elbow another in the face before they shoved her to the ground, the useless pepper spray rolling across the pavement. And was she scared? HELL YEAH she was scared! But that didn’t mean she was helpless.
Not for nothing had Bella enrolled in self-defense classes at the Jewish Community Center as opposed to the YMCA. While all the goyim at the Y were learning specific karate forms that only worked against other specific forms, Bella and Renee were learning krav maga. This particular martial art taught defensive principles, adaptable moves instead of fixed stances, and how to use an opponent’s weight and motion against him. But most importantly, it specifically taught how to continue fighting from a lying-down position. Bella, knowing she was prone to falling even without being attacked, had found a large partner with whom to practice ground-fighting in her free time. Her father even mailed Bella extra checks for a year to pay for as many lessons as she wanted. So while she knew she was out of practice and wasn’t strong enough to give four grown men a world class butt-whuppin’, she wasn’t by any means going to just lie there and take it, either.
Buddha forgive me, but I’m gonna kick your ass!
When a frantic Edward finally showed up and saw things from his own perspective rather than the ring-leader’s mind, he noticed that a) only one man was actively trying to hurt Bella-the other three were standing back with their jaws dropped; b) Bella could cuss even better than Rosalie, and c) Bella seemed to have executed a rollover. She was now straddling her attacker and beating the living shit out of his face and throat with both of her bony little fists. The other men scattered the moment the Volvo screeched to a halt in front of them, but Edward had to jump out of his car and physically pull Bella off the last man. He almost hated to do it; it was kind of awesome to watch. But this wasn’t a video game, a Bruce Lee movie, or a fight on TV with a referee, so he plucked her off the ground, whispering in her ear to calm her even as she continued kicking at her assailant’s groin.
“Shit-sucking, cock-nibbling, ben sharmuta-”
“Bella!” Edward hissed in her ear. “It’s me. I’ve got you.”
She struggled a few seconds more, not hearing him, determined to destroy that evil man by sheer will. It wasn’t until she felt the cool skin of Edward’s fingers on her face that she stilled and inhaled, understanding who was with her.
Lonnie, the asshole with a fresh black eye and bloody nose, shook his head and got to his feet, thinking his buddies had pulled the girl off him. Goddamn it, that upstart little ninja bitch was going to pay. But when he looked up and saw two pale, murderous faces, one with fierce, red-rimmed brown eyes and the other with terrifying yellow ones, and no allies in sight, he turned and ran.
“Get in the car,” Edward told Bella. “Leave him to me.”
“The others,” Bella said, looking around now and forming new fists. “Are they coming back?”
Silently swearing, Edward realized that Bella was not going to sit quietly in the car like a good girl while he killed someone-she was going to try and kill right alongside him, and she was probably going to get hurt in the process.
“Let’s get out of here,” Edward told her, helping her into his Volvo before sliding into the driver’s seat. “Let’s go,” he repeated, hand on the stick shift, trying to make himself fly out of there rather than chase that ugly bastard down. A glance at Bella, who sat with her legs drawn up close to her chest, her body still shaking from the adrenaline, was all he needed to keep him from exacting justice. Bella didn’t need an avenger right now-she needed him to be there for her. That meant not being here, where he could still hear the disgusting son of a bitch’s thoughts.
“Do you need to go to the hospital?” he asked, already beginning to point the car in that general direction.
“No,” Bella answered softly, unaware of the car’s movements or her own. She was trying to process what happened, or at the very least to shove it into a mental box that she could open later.
“Talk to me,” Edward quietly ordered after a minute. “Are you injured?” His voice, deep and dark, was enough to snap Bella back to the present. She placed her feet on the floor.
“I’m not hurt.” She would have some bruising on her arms and legs from her fall, and probably some more on her knuckles, but at the moment, she couldn’t feel a thing.
“Good.” He opened his glove box and pulled out a package of anti-bacterial wipes. “Here, clean the blood off your hands and throw the tissue out.” He paused, trying not to look as she immediately scrubbed away her assailant’s blood like it was poison. “And keep talking.”
Opening the window and hastily tossing out the bloody paper (litterbug), Bella asked, “Why?”
“So I won’t go back and finish those men.”
Bella made another fist, trying to conceal her slight tremor by grinding her knuckles into her other hand. “If you want to go back and run their asses over, you won’t get any arguments from me.”
This made the corner of Edward’s mouth twitch. “I didn’t think I would, but it’s still not a good idea. Talk about something else.”
Right, Bella wanted to say. Because right now, it’s all about you. “Four dudes just jumped me. I can’t think about anything else.”
“Neither can I,” Edward replied menacingly. “But please try.”
“Fine,” Bella sighed, trying to come up with something. “I’m going to bitch-slap Lauren and Tyler.”
Edward started to laugh. Vicious, aren’t you? “Why?”
“Tyler told everyone he’s taking me to prom,” Bella explained. “Everyone except me, apparently. I think that’s why Lauren’s been acting like such a jerk the last few days.”
“Is that why you want to…bitch-slap her, was it?” It wasn’t quite the perfect distraction-obviously violence was still in the forefront of both their minds-but Edward found it funny nonetheless.
“Something like that,” Bella said evasively. “She’s always goading me, and now she’s inventing defamatory stories about me. I generally have a hard time resisting the urge to tell her to get bent.”
After seeing Bella defend herself, Edward felt justified in saying, “I have no doubt.”
“Shit,” Bella sighed, remembering where she heard that particular piece of gossip: at the department store with her friends an hour ago. “I was supposed to meet Ange and Jess at the restaurant.”
Understanding without having to be told (for a change), Edward turned the car back toward La Bella Italia.
xXxXx
“So I can ask you any questions I want?” Bella asked after the waitress had gone away, no doubt to swoon like a giddy thirteen-year-old. It might seem like an overreaction on her part, but she worked at the kind of Italian place that decorated its tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths unironically. There weren’t a whole lot of good-looking rich guys coming in for dinner on a regular basis.
Edward was finding himself ‘weirded out’ (as they say) by Bella’s quick recovery. He assumed she must be in shock-after all, it didn’t seem to faze her in the least when he pulled up to the correct eatery without so much as asking for the name, and she managed to pull off a decent façade when she saw Jessica and Angela exiting the restaurant. Even now, she was carrying on a perfectly normal conversation (well, normal for her). He had already asked her several times if she felt herself going into shock. Which was a stupid question, because people don’t know they’re in shock while they’re in it-that’s kind of the point. If anything, his insistence that she should be dazed and zombified by now was just annoying; Bella assured him that she was fine.
It was too good to be true, Edward decided. Any minute now she’s going to start crying.
“You can certainly ask,” he clarified, still using a calm voice, “but I reserve the right not to answer.” Any second now. Tears and sobs. I hope she’s not a loud crier.
In fact, Bella was going to freak out. But not yet. In the recesses of her mind, she found the will to control herself long enough to publicly behave as though nothing had happened. For a while. Once she got home and went to bed, all bets were off. In the meantime…
“What are you doing in Port Angeles?” Bella felt she already knew the answer to this question, but she still wondered what Edward would say.
“Not that,” Edward said immediately-he didn’t want her to think he was creepy, and there was no way to make the truth not sound creepy. As if she didn’t already think this of him anyway. “Ask me something else.”
“Seriously?” At his firm expression, she said, “Okay…why do you dress like a Mormon?”
“A…what?” The conversation had barely begun, and already Bella was taking him past the road less traveled and straight into the Twilight Zone.
“Your clothes,” Bella said, pausing to sip at her soda. “Nearly every single day since January, you’ve worn a white Oxford shirt and black slacks to school. You don’t even wear jeans. Some Mormon missionary guys used to cruise my neighborhood on their bikes trying to convert people, and they wore that exact same thing you do every day, only with cheap-looking ties.” She smiled to herself, remembering how freaked out the two nineteen-year-old boys had been when they knocked on her door to find two Jews who supported gay rights and refused to acknowledge a gentile-depicted Jesus as Lord and/or Savior. “I get that you like button-up shirts, but why are they all white?”
“They’re not all white,” Edward protested. “Some of them are light blue. And why is it that when I tell you ‘ask me anything you want,’ that is your question?”
Bella shrugged. “What’s the point in asking you anything I want if you’re not going to answer legitimate questions about the things I actually want to know?”
Edward stopped to consider this. Bella could very well ask him any number of questions that were difficult, if not entirely inappropriate, to answer in public. Had he not chosen a private table specifically so that he could speak a little more freely?
Her innocuous question about his clothing might actually require him to reveal a good deal more than he was prepared to do, unless he was going to lie. How could he explain his wardrobe choices without admitting that Alice chose his clothes, and that it had taken the better part of half a century to make his sister understand that this was how boys were expected to dress at his prep school when he was a young man, and he didn’t believe school was the place for making any fashion statement stronger than ‘preppy’? By saying “this never goes out of style,” wouldn’t he be setting himself up to reveal that he’d been wearing the same basic outfit for the last hundred years, and that part of the reason for that was that it made the occasional photograph less dated if he wasn’t dressed in whatever the latest trend happened to be? And really, were his clothes even in style at all?
Am I really so desperate to protect my secret that I’m sitting here trying to justify lying about my clothing, not half an hour after offering to kill a man for this girl? Priorities, Edward!
“This is how I used to dress at another school, and I got used to it,” he finally admitted. “Maybe I should think about a wardrobe adjustment. And you can ask me something harder.”
“Good,” Bella nodded. Asking him stupid questions seemed make him rethink his silence on the simple ones; would asking more deeply probing questions have the same effect? “How’d you know exactly where I was tonight?”
Edward thought about this, too. He looked at Bella’s expression: not curious, but sure. In any other human, he would have dismissed it as the misplaced confidence of someone who has reached the wrong conclusion. But this wasn’t just any human. She’d been giving him clues all this time, and only now he’d finally begun to understand.
“Somehow, I think you already know.”
Bella smiled in response. “Does this mean you’re going to come clean?”
Edward almost insisted that Bella tell him what she already knew so he could confirm only that much and leave it at that. But a swift glance at her swelling hand wrapped around a glass of Coke stayed his tongue. Now was not the time to interrogate her; she’d been through more than enough for one night.
“Yes,” he said, quietly pleased at the way this answer made her eyes light up. “But…there are some things we can’t discuss in public.”
“Agreed,” Bella said, focusing on something past Edward’s shoulder and frowning at it.
Two seconds later, that damned irritating waitress showed up again. And not with Bella’s meal or any breadsticks. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything, sir?” Lobster? My number? My bare breasts in your face?
Bella, who had spent the previous summer as a short-order cook at a Waffle House in Phoenix, knew better than to get snarky-she didn’t particularly want to contract hepatitis from waitstaff-revenge-spit. Instead she sucked on her straw and watched Edward…who, though he could obviously read the waitress’s mind, did not pay her the slightest bit of attention.
Well, maybe a little attention. Negative attention. His voice was a shade curt when he said, “Another drink for my girlfriend, please?”
Subdued, the waitress slunk off. Edward was too distracted to read her mind, though, by the sight of Bella blushing furiously.
“Did I offend you?” he wondered. He hadn’t meant to take such liberties (indeed, his liberty-taking was of a far different kind), but indicating he was out with his girlfriend seemed the simplest way to ensure he would not have to put up with a slew of untimely interruptions from the man-hungry waitress coming over to eye-fuck him every five minutes.
Bella shook her head no. Rather than stew (or bask) in the feeling of Edward referring to her, even in jest, as his girlfriend, she said, “Now that Flirty McTightPants is gone, what were you going to say that can be discussed here?”
Edward’s mouth curved down.
I drink blood to survive.
I killed a bunch of people a long time ago.
I’ve been stalking you.
You smell delicious.
Emmett says the stereo in your truck sucks donkey balls.
“I can read minds.” It seemed the easiest thing to start with.
“No kidding,” Bella said, obviously unimpressed.
Her reaction bothered Edward. “No, seriously. I can read every mind in this building, apart from yours.” Pausing to widen his mental receiver, he said, “That guy by the door we passed on the way in? Pervert.”
“If you’re going to impress me with your clairvoyant skills,” Bella sighed, “pick something I can’t already tell by observation. That dude checked out every ass that walked past him.” Looking down at the table cloth, she added, “Including yours.”
“Don’t remind me,” Edward groaned. He did not enjoy hearing another man think about his ‘bodacious, bite-worthy ass.’ Casting his mental net for something good, Edward tried, “The manager on duty is behind the building, purchasing marijuana from the dish washer. He knows he’s being shorted, but he thinks it’s good weed, so he’s not saying anything.” Listening for a moment, he said, “The dish washer is happy because he not only rolled the joints extra thin, he used terribly inferior product.”
“I believe you,” Bella said. “But why can’t you read my mind?”
Edward shrugged. “I’ve been wishing I knew the answer to that question for months.”
At this, Bella perked up a little. He’s been thinking about me for months? But out loud, she said, “So your ability. Is that how you knew where to find me?”
“In a way, yes,” Edward answered. “I was trying to track you, but you seemed to have gotten yourself turned around, so I had to scan random people’s thoughts. My range is limited to shorter distances when it comes to unfamiliar minds.” With an apologetic look on his face, he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t arrive sooner.”
Bella blinked rapidly, jerking her head to the side a little, trying not to remember it. Not now. Tonight, when I’m alone. “Tell me something else.”
Worried about her twitchiness but feeling it was better to do as she asked, Edward said, “I followed you to Port Angeles. Not to spy or anything. I just wanted to keep you safe. But it seems I’m not particularly good at it.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Bella teased, not quite managing the playful tone she wanted. She wasn’t sure she was in a teasing mood, but she forced herself to try, hoping for a distraction from an unpleasant topic.
“No,” Edward said gently, waiting for the waitress to approach, place Bella’s drink and food on the table, and leave before he continued. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Day late and a dollar short,” Bella sighed, stabbing ravioli with her fork. “Some stalker you are.”
Edward’s eyes popped; he had to remain silent just to keep his composure.
“I could laugh and play it off like I was kidding you,” Bella told him, “or I could sit here and pretend to concoct some stupid ‘hypothetical’ situation, but…no. I’m calling you out on this one. You weren’t just following me this evening, were you?”
Edward could not remember the last time he felt so small. “All day long.”
Bella did not look satisfied with this answer.
“But not over the weekend,” he assured her, his light eyes hopeful. “I was away with Emmett from Thursday until Sunday night.”
“Right,” Bella nodded after swallowing more food. “Goat Rocks.”
Edward gave her a small smile.
“I wish you had called me to let me know you were okay,” Bella chided him gently.
Though touched by her concern, Edward chuckled at the irony. “I spent the entire time away worried about you.” Nodding at her hands, he asked, “Did you fall at First Beach? Your palms look a little rough.”
“This?” Bella looked at her healing palms. She was actually a quick healer-she had to be, or she would never have survived childhood. “This is nothing.” Unfortunately, the backs of her hands had finally started to hurt, but she would just have to ice her knuckles later. Looking back at Edward, she said, “What about you? Get caught in any snowdrifts?”
Edward frowned. In fact, he had fallen into a deep snow drift more than once. So had Emmett. Part of the reason hunting in the winter was such a challenge was because their dense bodies were too heavy to step directly onto snow without sinking into it. They either had to hunt from the trees or wear snow shoes. And no self-respecting vampire would be caught dead (or undead) hunting with lacrosse rackets on his feet.
The real problem here was: “How did you know about that?”
Bella took another bite of her dinner before she answered him. Edward noticed her having a little more trouble holding her fork. “It just so happens,” she said, “that I know how to use the internet.” When Edward didn’t respond, she sipped her soda and went on. “You can find just about anything online. National park websites, weather reports…paranormal research.”
Edward sat perfectly still. He didn’t even appear to be breathing.
She knows!
“More theories?” he finally managed to say.
“Let’s cut the crap, shall we?” Bella sighed. This wasn’t how she’d rehearsed this conversation-it wasn’t gentle or non-judgmental, it wasn’t coaxing or coddling. She was not in the mood to treat Edward like a shy kindergartener right now. “I know everything. I know what you are. I know what you eat. I know why your eyes change color, although you may need to explain the bio-chemical process to me later. I know your body feels different than mine because it is different than mine. I know that you could have killed those men tonight.”
“Then you know it’s not safe for you to be with me,” Edward said.
“No,” Bella corrected him swiftly. “I was almost gang-raped less than an hour ago. That guy would have overpowered me eventually, or his friends would have snapped out of their daze and held me down. You’ve saved my life twice already. Do not tell me I’m not safe with you-it’s a damn lie.”
“If you genuinely believe that,” Edward told her straight, “then you don’t know quite as much as you think you do. I am not a cuddly teddy bear. I am not a cat without claws. My feelings for you do not make me less than what I am. Appreciate the danger.”
Bella stared at his unflinching eyes for several moments before she looked down at her meal and sighed. “Understood.”
“Do you really?” Edward insisted, maybe a little too harshly. “Because tonight you were wandering around by yourself in a city you don’t know. You need to-”
“I said I understand,” Bella said sharply. “Although I wonder if you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Edward demanded.
“Oh come off it,” Bella said scornfully. “You were in my room. While I slept, goddamn you. I was in my house where I should be safe, minding my own damn business, and when I was at my most vulnerable, you just shimmied up the wall and climbed right in. You’ve been following me all day, not the other way around. Now you have the nerve to sit here and lecture me about the risk I’m taking by coming around you?”
She tried to lift her fork, but this time she found she couldn’t. Her hands hurt too much, and the fork clattered on her plate.
Edward was silent for a few seconds, waiting for something-tears, anger, anything. All he could really see, though, was that Bella’s hands hurt, and that there was a sadness to her he hadn’t seen in a long while. Not since the car accident, when he deliberately hurt her feelings in an attempt to push her away.
“Let me see your hands,” Edward whispered. It pleased him that she didn’t hesitate, even though he had clearly just warned her that he was potentially harmful to her existence, even though he’d angered her. Pushing that thought aside, he gingerly took her hands in his, first one, then the other, checking for breaks or fractures. When he was satisfied that she had neither, Edward laid her hands on the tabletop and ever so gently covered them with his own.
Bella closed her eyes. “That feels so good,” she breathed, sounding relieved.
Edward studied her face, watched as the strain slowly began to melt away. “I thought the coolness might help.”
She smiled a little and looked at him again. “I didn’t mean that, although that’s nice, too.”
It was a full second before Edward understood. “Oh.”
He didn’t take his hands away.
xXxXx
“Do you mind if we just sit and talk?” Bella asked as Edward helped her into the car. Not that she needed help, but it was nice, having the door held open for her. Different. “Before we leave, I mean.”
Edward smiled. “Sure.”
“I feel ridiculous asking you this,” she said after he’d climbed into the car and rolled down the windows, “but how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Edward replied automatically.
“No, seriously,” Bella tried again. “How old?”
“Don’t I look seventeen?”
“Yes, obviously,” she concurred, “but how long have you been seventeen?”
Reluctantly, Edward answered, “A while.”
Sighing, Bella asked, “How long is a while?”
“My birthday was in June.”
“Yes, but how many birthdays have you had?”
“Well, I stopped letting my family throw me parties years ago.”
“Listen here, smart aleck-”
“Since before you were born.” At her delightfully impatient stare, he added, “and probably before your great-grandparents were born. I didn’t want to say because I was afraid it would upset you.”
Bella reflected on this. Her brain couldn’t quite process that much time in a living person. “Charlie said my great-great-grandmother on his side was married at nearly sixteen to a twenty-eight-year-old man.”
“That did happen in my parents’ youth,” Edward nodded, “although it was more common on the frontier and among people with…er…limited educational opportunities.” Pondering her comment, he remarked, “Is that enough for you to reconcile our age difference?”
“Maybe.” It helped that she didn’t think of him as her intellectual or emotional superior. If anything, he occasionally seemed younger than she did. “I’m confused about something else, too. You said earlier that you were tracking me, but apparently not through my thoughts. How…?”
“Ah, that,” Edward sighed. “This is going to sound really strange, but I can smell you.”
Bella failed miserably at hiding her smile. “The same way I can smell blood and body odor?”
“You could say that,” Edward grinned. “Though I imagine the same smell is perceived differently to someone with my condition.”
Vampirism is a condition now. Cute. “So where I smell someone’s sweat, you smell what, candy?”
“Something like that,” Edward agreed.
“What does…um, never mind,” Bella faltered. She had been about to ask him what sex smelled like, but thankfully decided against that impulse. For one thing, you don’t ask the guy you’re interested in about sex too soon, or he’ll think you’re a slut. For another, what if he said that smelled like candy, too? “So my scent is strong enough to track?”
“Everyone’s is,” Edward said carefully, so as not to offend her. “I’m just not a particularly efficient tracker, and you seemed to have been going in circles.” After a moment, he realized, “That’s how you knew I was in your room, wasn’t it?” Bella the Bloodhound…
“From the moment I woke up. Your smell is very distinctive,” Bella confirmed. “You completely freaked me out the first time.”
“I’m sorry,” Edward said, perfectly sincere. “I won’t do that again.”
“I know,” Bella answered. “I heard you tell me last night.”
“You heard that?”
“Of course I did,” Bella replied. He’s kind of oblivious sometimes. “One of the reasons it’s so hard for me to sleep in Forks is because it’s always raining at night, and I’m a light sleeper. So I set up some homemade alarms and glue traps for you.”
“You set glue traps…for a vampire.” Edward sighed. “Your sense of self-preservation is extremely hit-or-miss, are you aware of that?”
“I wasn’t planning on capturing you.” Bella rolled her eyes. “I wanted to know when you came in.”
“Why?”
Unable to give him a good answer, Bella said, “I just wanted to know.”
Edward quietly started his car. After what he thought was an appropriate number of seconds, he asked, “What do I smell like?”
“I’m never going to tell you that,” Bella swore. Telling him he smelled like the most famous whore in all of Phoenix would have been terribly rude. “Can’t you just tell?”
“I know what my family thinks I smell like,” Edward explained, “and I can generally tell when I find something of mine that has my scent on it, but after all these years, I’ve lost perspective.”
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you,” Bella hedged. “But not tonight.”
“Does this mean you’re not banning me from your life forever for breaking and entering?” Edward wondered.
“No, not as long as you stop doing that without my permission. But while I’ve caught you in an honest mood,” she changed the subject, “would you mind telling me why you care so much about what I’m doing on the day of the dance?”
“What on earth made you think of the dance?”
“Only the fact that you were harping on it so hard last week,” Bella remembered. “I’m assuming you still care; I just want to know why.”
“I should think that was obvious,” Edward answered, knitting his eyebrows together.
“It’s not.”
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
Bella tapped her fingernail on her jeans.
Edward closed his fist around the gear shift. “Because I’d like to be with you.”
He didn’t just mean for the day, and Bella knew it.
“That’s all you had to say,” she told him.
“So…” Edward prompted.
“So,” Bella answered gently, “I’ll be with you.”
Edward decided there was nothing more pleasant in the world than the feeling of Bella’s hands wrapped around his.
However, he couldn’t help but ask, “So what’s the Mardi Gras mask for?”
---------------------------------------------------
*Credit for the line “Buddha forgive me, but I’m gonna kick your ass!” goes to my favorite angsty alien show, Roswell.