Cracked! Chap 20: Welcome To Your Life
Sorry for the delay! I had to write a 24 page paper for school. I shit you not. I'm exhausted.
On with the show!
Disclamer: The characters aren't mine...except for, like, the Vietnamese lady and the butcher, one of the doctors, the rabbis...basically, only the people you don't recognize at all belong to me. I think I should give them their own show.
You can also find a copy of this chapter on FFn.
Previously: Bella kicked the ass, Edward took the names. And somewhere in all of that, they realized their feelings for each other were mutual.
Welcome to Your Life
Bella groaned when she woke up Tuesday morning. She’d been having the strangest dream. Something about annoying waitresses and drunken assholes and race-car-driving nude vampires…
“Damn it,” she sighed, looking at her clock. Running late already. For a brief moment she considered just saying ‘screw it’ and taking the day off. What was the big deal about missing one day? She knew people who’d already missed nearly two weeks-
Edward.
Her fatigue forgotten, Bella hurried into some clothes (mental note: unpack these suitcases later), brushed her teeth and hair, and tore into an apple. Charlie was already gone for the day, thank god. Locking the door behind her, she was just thinking of her truck’s glacial pace when she turned and saw a silver Volvo parked on her curb. A familiar shock of brassy hair waved at her.
She has a beautiful smile, Edward decided. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”
Bella flexed her fingers. They were still sore and bruised, which meant she was going to have to spend her entire day wearing fingerless gloves. Her back was a little achy from being pushed onto the concrete, but the bruising was no worse than if she’d fallen by accident. Considering how things could have turned out last night, she wasn’t going to utter one syllable of complaint. “I’m good.”
“Would you like a ride today?”
“I’d love one,” she replied. “Would you like another sock?”
Edward held the passenger door open. His jacket was on the seat-he’d remembered that she didn’t have hers. “The sock I stole is looking a little lonely.”
“So,” Bella said the minute Edward slid into the driver’s seat, “I’ve got some questions for you today.”
“I would imagine so. Just please, keep in mind that we’ll have an audience today.”
“Got it,” Bella nodded, snuggling into Edward’s coat. “So does that mean I should ask you the question about necrophilia now or after school?” Making Edward do a double take was so much fun.
“Why Bella, I had no idea I fulfilled that particular fantasy of yours.”
Bella scrunched up her nose. “Nice one.”
“Do you have a real question?”
“Yes. Why did you break into my house?”
Edward’s mouth twisted. “Technically I didn’t break in. Your window doesn’t have a lock.”
“Semantics,” Bella frowned. “Why were you trespassing? I need a reason, or I’m not letting you back in the house.”
Edward kept his eyes on the road. “The first night I came, it was meant to be as a farewell. I thought it would be best to leave Forks, start over somewhere else, and not stand in your way.”
“But you didn’t go,” Bella pointed out.
“I realized that I couldn’t leave you behind.” Edward risked a quick look at Bella’s face. “And since I decided to stay…I wasn’t kidding last night when I said it’s helpful to have your scent around me.”
Bella looked at him for a moment, then looked away at the passing trees, swallowing the next question in her throat: why? The only way she could keep riding in this car was if she didn’t ask that question today. Really, she already knew the answer; she just wasn’t ready to discuss it. Not that she knew it, but Edward wasn’t, either.
Instead she asked him, “Why did you come back to Forks?”
Edward lifted an eyebrow. “Back? Do you mean when I missed a week in January?”
“Um.” Bella considered lying about Jacob’s story-the boy made it clear he wasn’t supposed to share it with her. But since she expected Edward to be honest with her, it seemed only fair that she do the same. Obviously Edward knew the original story-he was in it. Still, no need to get specific about who said what. “Someone at the reservation said your family doesn’t go to there. I managed to talk a kid into explaining why, although that person believes it’s just a tall tale about a beef with your great-grandfather. The story is you lived here before, a long time ago.”
“Not in Forks,” Edward clarified with a sigh. Everybody always got that part wrong. “We lived near Hoquiam. It’s over a hundred miles away, which is nothing nowadays, but back then it was quite a bit of distance.”
“You say that like you lived here back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it can’t have been that long. There were cars four generations ago. Aren’t some of the people who knew you back then alive and kicking?”
“Some,” Edward nodded, pulling into a parking space. “Most of my graduating class died in World War II or passed away from age-related deaths. All Carlisle’s colleagues from back then are dead now, but the children he treated are alive and probably scattered all over the country. That’s part of the reason why we didn’t settle in Seattle or Portland-we figured most of those people migrated to larger cities to find work.”
“What if someone here recognizes you?” Bella asked him, though in the back of her head she was thinking: did he just say World War Two?
“That was my number one objection to settling here,” Edward assured her. “I was overruled because Forks is even smaller than Hoquiam. Carlisle’s logic was that nobody moves to Forks.”
“Except me, apparently,” Bella chuckled.
“You’ve made quite the habit of being the exception to the rule,” Edward agreed.
“Not just me, though,” she protested. “The Newtons are from California, and Dr. Stein is from Tacoma. There’s a Vietnamese family in town, one of the hospital nurses is from Zimbabwe, and there’s a whole apartment complex full of Mexican migrant workers and their families. You mean to tell me you’ve never been to any of those places?”
In fact, he’d lived in California before, and had visited Tacoma and Zimbabwe back when it was Rhodesia, before the nurse was born. “Carlisle should really do more research next time we move,” Edward said absently, “rather than make assumptions about this kind of thing.”
Bella thought about this, about Edward moving so often and for so long that he was starting to run out of new places to go. It seemed like the kind of life that would be really exciting for about ten or twenty years, but not forever. She wondered if he ever felt sad. She also wondered how long he would stay in Forks; she hadn’t planned on staying here very long herself.
The pair walked slowly from the car to the school, not caring if they would be late. Bella happened to look off to her left and noticed a shiny red car she’d never seen before.
“What is that?”
Edward smirked. “Rosalie’s punishment.”
“Her punishment is a brand new car?” Confused, Bella stared at the strangely-shaped vehicle. “What did she do? I’m pretty well-behaved, and all I got was a rusty old truck.”
“She had an ostentatious M3,” Edward explained. At Bella’s quizzical expression, he added, “A really expensive sports car with a lot of customized aftermarket upgrades. One day she got upset with me and wrecked my hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollar special occasion car. Her punishment is a thirty-two-thousand dollar soccer mom hybrid. She hates driving it, but today she had no choice.” Carlisle hadn’t given her a choice-he refused to let her take his Mercedes, and Emmett’s Jeep was overdue for an inspection sticker. It was either the hybrid or Esme’s minivan with HOTMOM on the license plate.
Eyes bulging, Bella asked, “What happened to her M-whatever?”
“M3. Nobody else in the house wants it because she’d just start making an even bigger fuss, so Carlisle’s trying to find a buyer. So far, nobody in Washington seems to want to front that much cash.” Edward stopped and held open the door for Bella to pass through. “Something about an economic recession?”
Bella shook her head. “There’s something wrong with you people.”
“Bella!” Jessica called out. The couple looked up, mutually amused by Jessica Stanley’s slightly dropped jaw.
“Hi, Jess,” Bella answered.
“Uh…hey. You forgot your jacket in my car.” The jacket was held outward, though Jess was mostly staring up at Edward’s chin. Jesus, it’s like chin pornography. How did the plain jane get so damn lucky?
“Thanks.” Bella accepted the jacket with a smile.
“Good morning,” Edward nodded at the gaping human, attempting to be a gentleman.
Jess managed a wave, then snapped from her foolishness. “Um, hi. Bella, I need to borrow your Spanish notes. Give them to me in first period?” And fill me in on this hunk of man-flesh!
“Will do. See you in class.”
Edward watched Jessica walk away. “What are you going to tell her?”
Bella considered this as she handed Edward her coat. “I think I’m going to tell her we’re having an affair behind your married girlfriend’s back.”
“What?”
“It’s more plausible than the truth.” She removed Edward’s borrowed jacket and placed it on a nearby chair, along with her book bag.
“You can’t tell her the truth.” Edward automatically held Bella’s jacket open for her. “My house will be surrounded by an angry mob with torches and pitchforks!”
She turned around and slid her arms into the waiting sleeves, murmuring her thanks. Nobody had ever helped her into her coat before-it struck her has intimate, the way the movement closed part of the distance between them. “First of all, nobody around here has a pitchfork. This is Forks, not 19th century Europe. Second, that wasn’t actually the truth I was referring to. I’d never tell anyone about that.”
“What are you talking about, then? That’s the only secret I have that needs to be kept.” He lifted his suede coat and shrugged into it himself; from this, Bella gleaned that a woman wasn’t supposed to help a man with this kind of thing. She didn’t know whether to think of it as sexist or just quaint.
“I meant she won’t find it plausible that you and I are dating just because we like each other.”
“But we are. Why wouldn’t that be believable?”
“Because I’m not pretty,” Bella answered matter-of-factly.
Edward could certainly hear Jessica thinking as much, but as far as he was concerned it was a) untrue, and b) irrelevant. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“More than you might expect.”
“I didn’t think she was that shallow.”
“Actually,” Bella laughed, “it’s probably a little more complicated than that.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ll explain later. Right now I’d better get to class,” Bella said, highly amused.
“Right,” Edward agreed. “But really, what are you going to tell Jessica?”
“You’ll find out later, won’t you?” She snatched up her books. “Unless you’re not planning on listening in.”
“Of course I am. But is the married girlfriend bit really necessary?”
“No,” Bella winked, “but it might be worth saying it just to see the look on her face.”
Jessica, it so happened, didn’t need or want any Spanish notes. She only wanted to know one thing:
“How in the world did you snag Edward Cullen?”
This was less a question than a hiss-partly because Jessica was bewildered, but also because they were in the middle of class and weren’t supposed to be talking.
“I told you last night,” Bella assured her friend (who was currently re-evaluating her status on the Friend-O-Meter), “we ran into each other and got to talking.”
“Yeah, I buy that,” Jessica whispered sarcastically. “The Cullens don’t talk to anybody. They’ve been here two and a half years, and they’ve never spoken to anyone but a teacher and never dated anyone but their hot foster siblings. Nothing less than a wealthy, orphaned supermodel would be enough for Edward Freaking Cullen. Then last week he’s waving you over to his table so you two can have an argument, and now suddenly he’s holding doors open for you and taking you out to dinner? What the hell?”
“Is it really so far out of the realm of possibility,” Bella said tightly, “that Edward just likes me as a person?”
Jessica, realizing her Friend-O-Meter rating was rapidly sinking, tried to backtrack. “You’re a great friend,” she said quickly, although she mentally added in that less-cute-than-me kind of way, “but since when has he ever made an attempt to get to know anyone, let alone like them as a person?”
“Since right now, I guess.”
“Unbelievable,” Jessica declared. “If I’d known all it took to get those Cullens to stop acting like superficial jerks was to run into them by accident outside of school, I’d have faked engine trouble in front of their house a year ago.”
Bella had an unexpected, defensive urge to say that’s my boyfriend you’re talking about, assmuffin. “Excuse me,” she protested instead, “have you met Lauren?”
“That’s different,” Jessica explained. “She may be a bitch, but she’s our bitch. She at least makes the effort to talk to us. Do you realize that today is the very first time Edward has ever said anything to me that even resembled ‘hello’?” Jessica probably would have been a lot less charitable if she’d known that Lauren was the one who uploaded that embarrassing YouTube video of Jessica falling on her face at last year’s church picnic.
“I still wouldn’t call the Cullens superficial,” Bella insisted. “More like…closed off. Take that little remark about dating only each other-would you want to invite people into your home if you knew the whole school was talking shit about you like that?”
“No,” Jessica admitted. “But they don’t even attempt to socialize. Not even the mother! The only one in that whole family who ever talks to anyone is Dr. Cullen. I think most people would have been a lot more accepting of them from the beginning if they’d at least tried to meet us halfway. It’s hard to keep holding out a hand to someone when it feels like they’re looking down on you, you know?”
“That’s true,” Bella agreed. “I guess I’m hoping things with Edward will take a different path.”
“Good luck with that,” Jessica sighed, part of her worrying for her friend. Any girl in their school, probably even the lesbian, would give her right tit for a night with Edward Cullen, but Bella obviously had loftier expectations than meaningless sex. Jessica may not have been the most selfless person in the world, but that didn’t mean she wanted the girl who stuck up for her when Mike was being a dick to wind up getting hurt when the local spoiled rich boy decided he’d had his fill. Mike was a dick on occasion; Edward was a dick all the time and, much like Jessica’s asshole father, he would eventually revert back to default dickheadedness when the novelty of being nice to someone wore off. She was sure of it.
Bella, for her part, just hoped Edward was paying attention.
In fact, he was paying so much attention to Bella’s class that he didn’t notice his English teacher coming up behind him to smack him upside the back of his head for daydreaming in class until it was too late. If he’d been more present, he’d have moved his head forward in time with the instructor’s movement. Edward’s head didn’t budge, though, and Mr. Berty was making little ‘Ow, ow, ow!’ sounds and flapping his hand back and forth. He wouldn’t realize it for a full twenty-four hours, but John Berty actually gave himself a hairline fracture in two of his metacarpals, resulting in a $75 trip to the Urgent Care clinic, where Dr. Cullen would be on rotation and would ask “What did you hit your hand on, a boulder?” All because Edward was so damn hard-headed.
“Emmett.” Edward approached his brother casually between classes, but since he so rarely had casual chats at school, Emmett wasn’t fooled in the slightest.
“What did she do to blow your mind this time?” Emmett asked. He actually didn’t mind talking things over with Edward-he was a big believer in open communication-but he was glad Rosalie was in a different part of campus. She’d have been only too happy to turn whatever Edward was about to say into grounds for a hissy fit.
“Are we…” Edward hesitated, trying to phrase his answer carefully. Talking in code was a requirement in public, but unless they could get away with speaking Irish Gaelic or Italian, it wasn’t always a practical way to get meaning across. “Are we bad citizens?”
Emmett rolled his eyes. I’ve killed seven people. They don’t hand out the Nobel Peace Prize for that. Well, not unless you’re Henry Kissinger, but I’d have to kill a lot more people.
“No,” Edward sighed. “I mean our public personas. I know people think we’re haughty and snobbish, but do you feel like maybe we’ve taken it a little too far?” Had he really never said hello to Jessica in two and a half years? Hadn’t he thanked her once at Newton’s store, when she held a door open for him as he was carrying an armload of shopping bags for Esme?
“We’re not putting on airs for the sake of stroking our egos,” Emmett reminded his brother. “I don’t like being a pretentious asshole. It’s not who I am. The whole antisocial thing serves a purpose. Getting close isn’t good for us or them.”
“Then what’s the point of using good manners in class?” Edward asked (though mostly it was a self-directed question). He didn’t mind being thought of as clannish. He did mind the assumption that his mother didn’t raise him right. Or that he would use a girl until he was bored with her. Or that he always was and always would be a penishead.
Emmett rolled his eyes exactly the way his wife often did. “The point is to not attract attention by being problem children. We stand out enough as it is. Why are you acting like you suddenly don’t understand the rules?”
“Because they don’t make sense to me anymore,” Edward murmured. Was he going to be an aloof, condescending asshole, or was he going to be the gentleman Elizabeth Masen raised him to be, the good man Bella reminded him he could be?
“They used to…” Emmett trailed off. Until you decided to blow your cover.
Edward’s eyes widened. “Who knows?”
We all know. Rose is pissed.
“She’s always pissed,” Edward said with a roll of his eyes.
“She’s got her reasons, buddy,” Emmett countered. “I mean, shit…” We all knew this was coming eventually, but we shouldn’t have heard about it from Alice.
“How did Alice know?” Edward demanded.
She was watching last night. Between the dramatic rescue in Port Angeles, you appearing at Bella’s doorstep two seconds after she called you, and you running your mouth this morning about keeping your secret, the future went nuclear on her. She figured Bella must be in the know. I can’t believe you, Edward. You can tell a girl you’re a vampire, but you can’t be a man and tell your own family something this important?
“I didn’t tell Bella anything,” Edward whispered. “She deduced it on her own.”
Emmett frowned. That’s not good.
“Tell me about it,” Edward groaned. “Jasper and Alice predicted that one perfectly. They’ll never let me live it down.”
Yeah, Emmett thought sarcastically. The eyes of Texas are on us now that you’ve deigned to speak to someone outside of family, there’s a human who was able to guess what we are and also lives with a cop, but our brother and sis doing the Told-You-So dance is your biggest problem.
Edward wandered off, thinking about his family. In the fifties, they’d all participated in various academic, art, or performing art clubs, because in those days teachers worried about a family of foster children who looked like they weren’t trying to blend in or socialize, and nobody wanted a visit from a state social worker. By the nineties, school administrators had stopped caring as long as there weren’t gang fights, and a family of goody-two-shoes teenagers attracted attention from a generation of lazy bums, miscreants, and sluts. It became more convenient to fade into the background in public school settings and pursue their interests independently, until gradually they were only showing up at school because it was required by law, not to try new activities and certainly not to be social. Edward worried that in a new world of excessive reality shows, YouTube vloggers, and social media designed to encourage attention whores, his family’s social detachment was actually making them stand out even more than they already did. Clearly it made an impact on Jessica Stanley-she was fascinated by him, even though she didn’t think highly of him at all.
Fortunately, Bella didn’t introduce the topic when she met Edward for lunch. She was wildly curious, but she understood why it might be embarrassing, and heaven knew she’d embarrassed him plenty already. And he did buy her meal, again. So when he didn’t bring up the conversation with Jessica, she graciously avoided the subject and politely asked him another question that had been on her mind.
“Where does your scent come from?”
“Ex…cuse me?”
“You’re dead, aren’t you?” Bella asked bluntly.
“Technically.” She doesn’t mince words, does she? “But I’m not decomposing.”
“Any microscopic life on your skin or inside your body?”
“No!” Edward almost looked offended for a moment.
“Your skin feels distinctly non-porous, too, am I right?”
“You are, to an extent.” Edward hid his smile, enjoying watching Bella’s mind work out her new puzzle.
“Then I don’t understand how you have any scent, let alone such a strong one,” Bella said, staring at Edward’s forehead. “You don’t seem to sweat, you’re not releasing skin oils from your sebaceous glands, and even if you were, you don’t have any bacteria to break down the lipids into fatty acids and produce body odor. So where does your scent come from?”
“Erm…” Edward muttered, wishing she would lower her voice. Bella’s volume wasn’t so loud that other humans could hear. He was just a little embarrassed because Emmett was laughing at him from two tables down and three over. “Some of it comes from my hair.”
Bella’s eyes moved up to the wilderness atop Edward’s head. “Okay, I can see the case for that; obviously you’ve still got hair follicles, and whatever causes your scent could easily be released from there. Does your hair grow?”
“No.” Alice would definitely take advantage of hair growth if she could. “It’s dead.”
“Does it fall out?”
“I can’t even pull it out. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Especially since I met you.
After a few more seconds of appraisal, Bella said, “Can I touch it?”
“Maybe not here,” Edward dodged. They were, after all, in the middle of the cafeteria. And you’re not supposed to touch hair when you’re touching food, even undead hair.
Bella nodded, still thinking. “You’ve got split ends,” she said absently.
That was when Alice started choking back laughter.
“I’m not producing or secreting oil,” Edward explained quickly. “We produce something else.”
“Oh?” Fascinated, Bella urged Edward to continue.
“I don’t wish to frighten you,” he whispered carefully, “but we refer to it as venom. It’s an acidic compound that has, among other properties, a scent that’s unique to each individual. I’ve hypothesized that it can be secreted from hair follicles in microscopic amounts, but mostly it’s found in our mouths and tissues.”
“Is it in your veins?” Bella asked, excited now. A completely new biological system was the kind of thing that excites the right kind of nerd.
“It replaced all my bodily fluids.”
“Even the fluid inside your eyeballs?”
“Even the fluid in my synapses. Or at least I think so. I can’t exactly check.”
“Wow,” Bella gaped. “So does that mean your heart pumps it through your circulatory system?”
“No, it’s not like that,” Edward sighed. He wished his heart still beat-it would make passing required physicals that much easier. “When I have a…drink…it and the venom have a chemical reaction. Venom is a strong acid, and blood is a weak base. The neutralization spreads its way through the rest of the liquid in the body, and the byproduct is what gives me energy. It usually takes about two weeks for the process to be complete, depending on how much I consume or whether anything else stimulates my venom production, and then I need to feed again.”
“But how does the blood get from your digestive tract to the rest of your body,” Bella demanded, “if your organs aren’t porous anymore? Or is it just your skin that’s non-porous? Aren’t there like five or ten quarts of blood in a wild animal? Wouldn’t your tissue have to retain a spongy quality to soak it all up? How does your body dispose of the excess liquid-obviously you’re not walking around bloated, so I’m assuming the neutralized fluid has to have some way to exit. Do you pee it out, or does it evaporate somehow? How can you be producing and consuming so much energy but not produce any body heat? When you breathe in oxygen, what kind of gas do you breathe back out? How can you feel so rock solid on the outside but still be pliable enough to have motion? And how do you even know what happens inside your body? Can you even get through that skin with a scalpel to study a cadaver?” After a moment’s consideration (and taking a much-needed breath), she added, “How do you even know when you’re dead-dead, and not undead, if you don’t have a pulse?”
Edward rested his jaw on his palm and shook his head from side to side. “At some point, we run out of verifiable evidence about how our bodies work internally, and we just hit the imaginary ‘I Believe’ button.”
“That’s hardly scientific,” Bella frowned. She knew science hadn’t explained all of nature yet, but this was too much of a stretch. Neither science nor religion could make sense of this. Maybe if Mother Nature was out of the room and God was high on mushrooms and some lesser being snuck in armed with only the most rudimentary understanding of biology, biochemistry, or physics…
“If you’re looking for scientific evidence to support my existence,” Edward sighed happily, “I’d say either this relationship is doomed to failure or destined for unparalleled success.”
“No pressure or anything,” Bella replied, flippant but cheerful. “You know, I think this may be the most psychedelic conversation I’ve had since I moved here.”
Edward smirked. “And here I thought you were all about the locals having untapped intellectual potential.”
“There’s brain power, and then there’s subject matter.”
“Speaking of which,” Edward sighed, “we should talk about something else.”
“I’m sorry,” Bella said quickly. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“Not me,” Edward replied, jerking his head to one side. “My sister’s about two seconds away from marching over here and punching me square in the face.”
Bella looked toward the Cullen table automatically. All but one of Edward’s siblings studiously looked somewhere else.
“Ah,” Bella said, quickly turning away from Rosalie’s hateful glare. “The shiksa goddess. Figures.”
“The what?” Edward laughed.
“It’s what my grandfather used to call a beautiful woman with blonde hair and big tits,” Bella said (at a normal speaking volume).
Now pretty much everyone at the Cullen table was laughing. Even Rosalie smiled (she believed her tits were two of her greatest assets, the other two being her…assets).
“Does she have a problem with me?” Bella asked. She spoke casually, not wanting to sound frightened and weak but not wanting to oversell it with false bravado that any fool could see through.
“Not really,” Edward shrugged, going along with Bella’s blasé air. This was not the best idea for several reasons. First, ‘not really’ isn’t nearly the same as ‘no, absolutely not,’ and second, Bella was perfectly aware that while Rosalie looked like an overly-primped delicate female, she was every bit the predator Edward was. Except that she wasn’t relying on love to keep her blood thirst in check. Bella wasn’t entirely sure Rosalie bothered tempering her thirst at all.
“Her issue-everyone’s, actually-is with me,” Edward continued. “They don’t understand why I can’t leave you alone.”
This earned him a few scoffs from the family table. “Son of a bitch,” Emmett complained. “Now he’s misrepresenting us.”
“No, he’s not,” Alice disagreed. “You do have a problem with him, and you don’t understand why he can’t leave her alone.”
“Yes I can,” Emmett argued.
“I’m pretty sure most of us understand it better than he does,” Jasper chimed in. “It’s his expectations I don’t understand.”
“Love is stupid and it makes you do things that don’t make sense, especially in the beginning,” Alice explained. “You can’t expect him to be reasonable at this stage.”
“I get the ‘stupid’ part,” Emmett said. “What I don’t get is why he thinks being all cloak-and-dagger about it is the mature response.”
“Cut him some slack,” Alice told the family. “This is the first time he’s ever been even a little bit honest with a woman.”
“No it’s not,” Emmett snitted. “He was plenty honest with Tanya when he called her a-”
“Okay,” Alice interrupted, “so this is the first time he’s ever wanted to impress a girl and be honest at the same time.”
“Why didn’t he tell Carlisle?” Rose quietly exploded. “He ropes Carlisle into drugging and kidnapping a wanted felon, but he doesn’t say ‘Hey, by the way, my human knows our secret.’ What kind of bullshit is that?”
“We don’t know he didn’t tell Carlisle,” Emmett speculated. “It takes a long time to run all the way to Oregon and back, even when you’re not lugging a body, and he probably stopped to snag a bite to eat while he was out. Maybe Edward did tell Carlisle and we just haven’t heard about it.”
“No way.” Rose folder her arms defiantly. “News like that? Carlisle would have called us, or at least called Esme. Edward kept it under his hat, I guarantee it. Selfish, sniveling little shit!”
“He’s just a boy,” Jasper said, trying to comfort his sister with words before he had to use his gift on her in public, which she hated. “Remember, no one has actually taught him how to be a man, and clearly he hasn’t learned by example.”
“Well he’s hardly the only member of our family ever to behave like a child,” Alice defended her brother. “Or have you all forgotten the reason we rode here in Rosalie’s Nissan Leaf instead of an M3?”
“Adults have car accidents all the time,” Rosalie said uncomfortably.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Alice snorted indelicately. “You expect me to believe you had too many wine coolers?”
“Why doesn’t anyone believe me?” Rosalie whined. “It was a deer. It stepped out into the road. I was going too fast to swerve out of the way. Even if I had, I still would have wrecked the car trying to make a correction beyond the vehicle’s limitations. Not even Edward can hear the mind of a deer right before it’s about to cross the highway.”
“Which is why all the other cars have deer whistles attached,” Alice reminded her. “Except for the one car Edward never uses for joyriding on unlit back roads in the middle of nowhere.”
Emmett placed an arm around his wife. “It’s not that I don’t believe it’s possible,” he told her cautiously. “It’s that I have trouble understanding why it happened to you in Edward’s favorite car rather than your own.”
“I told you,” she grumbled, “I wanted to feel fancy.”
“And your BMW wasn’t fancy enough?” Alice said blandly. “We had just waxed it the day before. You even made me buy the Carnauba Wax.”
Edward paused in his conversation (Bella, who had accrued twenty-two volunteer hours at a Phoenix soup kitchen, was chastising him for wasting perfectly good people food all the time). He laughed silently to himself at Rosalie, though it was traitorous to do so. A man who owns a ‘special occasion car’ hardly has room to laugh at a woman who wants to borrow one; they both liked ‘feeling fancy’ now and again.
“For whose benefit are you playing innocent?” Jasper asked his sister mirthfully. “You totaled an Aston Martin. It is now a pile of parts beyond repair, taking up space in the garage. Nobody at this table believes it was an accident. Edward certainly knows it was intentional. Why do you always forget that we can all see through you when you trot out the innocent act?”
“I think we’re all missing the central point here,” Rosalie insisted, trying to change the subject. “Edward’s talking vampire anatomy in public with a human. Why am I the only one who finds that disturbing?”
“I told you it would happen eventually,” Alice said lightly. “You should be happy. Now he has to turn her. He’s not stupid enough to leave her human when she knows so much.”
“It’s fair to say,” Jasper corrected her, “that Edward’s stupidity knows no bounds. Just yesterday he was going on about keeping Bella in the dark while dating her so she can have a normal future. Maybe he can finally have some forward movement, now that he’s manned up and told her the truth.”
“He didn’t tell her,” Emmett said quietly. “He said she already knew.”
The absolute silence at the Cullen table belied the collective roar sounding off in Edward’s mind. Bella had no idea, other than the vague sensation that someone had just walked over her grave.
“We should get to class,” Edward suggested, rising from his seat and collecting Bella’s lunch tray. He spared a glance at his thunderstruck family. “Why don’t you wait for me at the door? I’ll just be a minute.”
Bella did as he asked, allowing Edward to dispose of her tray as his family converged on him.
“What in the hell-?” Rosalie spat, the first one to get any words out at all.
“She’s fine, by the way,” Edward cut her off before she could say anything further about the importance of secrecy. “Very minor injuries.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bella,” Edward said slowly. “She was almost sexually assaulted last night, remember? That’s why Carlisle’s out of town: so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. That’s why I spent all last night watching her house instead of calling another one of our famously productive and civilized family meetings.” He looked at his sister, the rape victim, at his brother, the man who had been so concerned for Bella’s ‘welfare and dignity’ last week, at his other sister who believed she would be Bella’s ‘BFF,’ and at his other brother, the one who claimed he didn’t like pretending to be an asshole. “Your take on that situation was illuminating. I like the part about how taking care of her instead of informing you immediately that she knows about vampires-which she knew all weekend and still didn’t repeat to her father, by the way-makes me both selfish and less of a man. Your concerns about our cars were all fascinating, too. Oh, and I love how it’s so important whether or not I’m the one who shared our secret with the girl you already thought was suspicious-more important than her actual survival, even. Especially when I consider that at least half of you believe Bella’s my mate. Your skills at prioritizing make me so proud to be part of this family.”
Edward’s family remained clustered together, watching with mixed emotions as their brother rejoined Bella at the door to escort her to biology. For his part, Edward wondered if it would really be such a terrible thing to start living alone.
On with the show!
Disclamer: The characters aren't mine...except for, like, the Vietnamese lady and the butcher, one of the doctors, the rabbis...basically, only the people you don't recognize at all belong to me. I think I should give them their own show.
You can also find a copy of this chapter on FFn.
Previously: Bella kicked the ass, Edward took the names. And somewhere in all of that, they realized their feelings for each other were mutual.
Welcome to Your Life
Bella groaned when she woke up Tuesday morning. She’d been having the strangest dream. Something about annoying waitresses and drunken assholes and race-car-driving nude vampires…
“Damn it,” she sighed, looking at her clock. Running late already. For a brief moment she considered just saying ‘screw it’ and taking the day off. What was the big deal about missing one day? She knew people who’d already missed nearly two weeks-
Edward.
Her fatigue forgotten, Bella hurried into some clothes (mental note: unpack these suitcases later), brushed her teeth and hair, and tore into an apple. Charlie was already gone for the day, thank god. Locking the door behind her, she was just thinking of her truck’s glacial pace when she turned and saw a silver Volvo parked on her curb. A familiar shock of brassy hair waved at her.
She has a beautiful smile, Edward decided. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”
Bella flexed her fingers. They were still sore and bruised, which meant she was going to have to spend her entire day wearing fingerless gloves. Her back was a little achy from being pushed onto the concrete, but the bruising was no worse than if she’d fallen by accident. Considering how things could have turned out last night, she wasn’t going to utter one syllable of complaint. “I’m good.”
“Would you like a ride today?”
“I’d love one,” she replied. “Would you like another sock?”
Edward held the passenger door open. His jacket was on the seat-he’d remembered that she didn’t have hers. “The sock I stole is looking a little lonely.”
“So,” Bella said the minute Edward slid into the driver’s seat, “I’ve got some questions for you today.”
“I would imagine so. Just please, keep in mind that we’ll have an audience today.”
“Got it,” Bella nodded, snuggling into Edward’s coat. “So does that mean I should ask you the question about necrophilia now or after school?” Making Edward do a double take was so much fun.
“Why Bella, I had no idea I fulfilled that particular fantasy of yours.”
Bella scrunched up her nose. “Nice one.”
“Do you have a real question?”
“Yes. Why did you break into my house?”
Edward’s mouth twisted. “Technically I didn’t break in. Your window doesn’t have a lock.”
“Semantics,” Bella frowned. “Why were you trespassing? I need a reason, or I’m not letting you back in the house.”
Edward kept his eyes on the road. “The first night I came, it was meant to be as a farewell. I thought it would be best to leave Forks, start over somewhere else, and not stand in your way.”
“But you didn’t go,” Bella pointed out.
“I realized that I couldn’t leave you behind.” Edward risked a quick look at Bella’s face. “And since I decided to stay…I wasn’t kidding last night when I said it’s helpful to have your scent around me.”
Bella looked at him for a moment, then looked away at the passing trees, swallowing the next question in her throat: why? The only way she could keep riding in this car was if she didn’t ask that question today. Really, she already knew the answer; she just wasn’t ready to discuss it. Not that she knew it, but Edward wasn’t, either.
Instead she asked him, “Why did you come back to Forks?”
Edward lifted an eyebrow. “Back? Do you mean when I missed a week in January?”
“Um.” Bella considered lying about Jacob’s story-the boy made it clear he wasn’t supposed to share it with her. But since she expected Edward to be honest with her, it seemed only fair that she do the same. Obviously Edward knew the original story-he was in it. Still, no need to get specific about who said what. “Someone at the reservation said your family doesn’t go to there. I managed to talk a kid into explaining why, although that person believes it’s just a tall tale about a beef with your great-grandfather. The story is you lived here before, a long time ago.”
“Not in Forks,” Edward clarified with a sigh. Everybody always got that part wrong. “We lived near Hoquiam. It’s over a hundred miles away, which is nothing nowadays, but back then it was quite a bit of distance.”
“You say that like you lived here back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it can’t have been that long. There were cars four generations ago. Aren’t some of the people who knew you back then alive and kicking?”
“Some,” Edward nodded, pulling into a parking space. “Most of my graduating class died in World War II or passed away from age-related deaths. All Carlisle’s colleagues from back then are dead now, but the children he treated are alive and probably scattered all over the country. That’s part of the reason why we didn’t settle in Seattle or Portland-we figured most of those people migrated to larger cities to find work.”
“What if someone here recognizes you?” Bella asked him, though in the back of her head she was thinking: did he just say World War Two?
“That was my number one objection to settling here,” Edward assured her. “I was overruled because Forks is even smaller than Hoquiam. Carlisle’s logic was that nobody moves to Forks.”
“Except me, apparently,” Bella chuckled.
“You’ve made quite the habit of being the exception to the rule,” Edward agreed.
“Not just me, though,” she protested. “The Newtons are from California, and Dr. Stein is from Tacoma. There’s a Vietnamese family in town, one of the hospital nurses is from Zimbabwe, and there’s a whole apartment complex full of Mexican migrant workers and their families. You mean to tell me you’ve never been to any of those places?”
In fact, he’d lived in California before, and had visited Tacoma and Zimbabwe back when it was Rhodesia, before the nurse was born. “Carlisle should really do more research next time we move,” Edward said absently, “rather than make assumptions about this kind of thing.”
Bella thought about this, about Edward moving so often and for so long that he was starting to run out of new places to go. It seemed like the kind of life that would be really exciting for about ten or twenty years, but not forever. She wondered if he ever felt sad. She also wondered how long he would stay in Forks; she hadn’t planned on staying here very long herself.
The pair walked slowly from the car to the school, not caring if they would be late. Bella happened to look off to her left and noticed a shiny red car she’d never seen before.
“What is that?”
Edward smirked. “Rosalie’s punishment.”
“Her punishment is a brand new car?” Confused, Bella stared at the strangely-shaped vehicle. “What did she do? I’m pretty well-behaved, and all I got was a rusty old truck.”
“She had an ostentatious M3,” Edward explained. At Bella’s quizzical expression, he added, “A really expensive sports car with a lot of customized aftermarket upgrades. One day she got upset with me and wrecked my hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollar special occasion car. Her punishment is a thirty-two-thousand dollar soccer mom hybrid. She hates driving it, but today she had no choice.” Carlisle hadn’t given her a choice-he refused to let her take his Mercedes, and Emmett’s Jeep was overdue for an inspection sticker. It was either the hybrid or Esme’s minivan with HOTMOM on the license plate.
Eyes bulging, Bella asked, “What happened to her M-whatever?”
“M3. Nobody else in the house wants it because she’d just start making an even bigger fuss, so Carlisle’s trying to find a buyer. So far, nobody in Washington seems to want to front that much cash.” Edward stopped and held open the door for Bella to pass through. “Something about an economic recession?”
Bella shook her head. “There’s something wrong with you people.”
“Bella!” Jessica called out. The couple looked up, mutually amused by Jessica Stanley’s slightly dropped jaw.
“Hi, Jess,” Bella answered.
“Uh…hey. You forgot your jacket in my car.” The jacket was held outward, though Jess was mostly staring up at Edward’s chin. Jesus, it’s like chin pornography. How did the plain jane get so damn lucky?
“Thanks.” Bella accepted the jacket with a smile.
“Good morning,” Edward nodded at the gaping human, attempting to be a gentleman.
Jess managed a wave, then snapped from her foolishness. “Um, hi. Bella, I need to borrow your Spanish notes. Give them to me in first period?” And fill me in on this hunk of man-flesh!
“Will do. See you in class.”
Edward watched Jessica walk away. “What are you going to tell her?”
Bella considered this as she handed Edward her coat. “I think I’m going to tell her we’re having an affair behind your married girlfriend’s back.”
“What?”
“It’s more plausible than the truth.” She removed Edward’s borrowed jacket and placed it on a nearby chair, along with her book bag.
“You can’t tell her the truth.” Edward automatically held Bella’s jacket open for her. “My house will be surrounded by an angry mob with torches and pitchforks!”
She turned around and slid her arms into the waiting sleeves, murmuring her thanks. Nobody had ever helped her into her coat before-it struck her has intimate, the way the movement closed part of the distance between them. “First of all, nobody around here has a pitchfork. This is Forks, not 19th century Europe. Second, that wasn’t actually the truth I was referring to. I’d never tell anyone about that.”
“What are you talking about, then? That’s the only secret I have that needs to be kept.” He lifted his suede coat and shrugged into it himself; from this, Bella gleaned that a woman wasn’t supposed to help a man with this kind of thing. She didn’t know whether to think of it as sexist or just quaint.
“I meant she won’t find it plausible that you and I are dating just because we like each other.”
“But we are. Why wouldn’t that be believable?”
“Because I’m not pretty,” Bella answered matter-of-factly.
Edward could certainly hear Jessica thinking as much, but as far as he was concerned it was a) untrue, and b) irrelevant. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“More than you might expect.”
“I didn’t think she was that shallow.”
“Actually,” Bella laughed, “it’s probably a little more complicated than that.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ll explain later. Right now I’d better get to class,” Bella said, highly amused.
“Right,” Edward agreed. “But really, what are you going to tell Jessica?”
“You’ll find out later, won’t you?” She snatched up her books. “Unless you’re not planning on listening in.”
“Of course I am. But is the married girlfriend bit really necessary?”
“No,” Bella winked, “but it might be worth saying it just to see the look on her face.”
Jessica, it so happened, didn’t need or want any Spanish notes. She only wanted to know one thing:
“How in the world did you snag Edward Cullen?”
This was less a question than a hiss-partly because Jessica was bewildered, but also because they were in the middle of class and weren’t supposed to be talking.
“I told you last night,” Bella assured her friend (who was currently re-evaluating her status on the Friend-O-Meter), “we ran into each other and got to talking.”
“Yeah, I buy that,” Jessica whispered sarcastically. “The Cullens don’t talk to anybody. They’ve been here two and a half years, and they’ve never spoken to anyone but a teacher and never dated anyone but their hot foster siblings. Nothing less than a wealthy, orphaned supermodel would be enough for Edward Freaking Cullen. Then last week he’s waving you over to his table so you two can have an argument, and now suddenly he’s holding doors open for you and taking you out to dinner? What the hell?”
“Is it really so far out of the realm of possibility,” Bella said tightly, “that Edward just likes me as a person?”
Jessica, realizing her Friend-O-Meter rating was rapidly sinking, tried to backtrack. “You’re a great friend,” she said quickly, although she mentally added in that less-cute-than-me kind of way, “but since when has he ever made an attempt to get to know anyone, let alone like them as a person?”
“Since right now, I guess.”
“Unbelievable,” Jessica declared. “If I’d known all it took to get those Cullens to stop acting like superficial jerks was to run into them by accident outside of school, I’d have faked engine trouble in front of their house a year ago.”
Bella had an unexpected, defensive urge to say that’s my boyfriend you’re talking about, assmuffin. “Excuse me,” she protested instead, “have you met Lauren?”
“That’s different,” Jessica explained. “She may be a bitch, but she’s our bitch. She at least makes the effort to talk to us. Do you realize that today is the very first time Edward has ever said anything to me that even resembled ‘hello’?” Jessica probably would have been a lot less charitable if she’d known that Lauren was the one who uploaded that embarrassing YouTube video of Jessica falling on her face at last year’s church picnic.
“I still wouldn’t call the Cullens superficial,” Bella insisted. “More like…closed off. Take that little remark about dating only each other-would you want to invite people into your home if you knew the whole school was talking shit about you like that?”
“No,” Jessica admitted. “But they don’t even attempt to socialize. Not even the mother! The only one in that whole family who ever talks to anyone is Dr. Cullen. I think most people would have been a lot more accepting of them from the beginning if they’d at least tried to meet us halfway. It’s hard to keep holding out a hand to someone when it feels like they’re looking down on you, you know?”
“That’s true,” Bella agreed. “I guess I’m hoping things with Edward will take a different path.”
“Good luck with that,” Jessica sighed, part of her worrying for her friend. Any girl in their school, probably even the lesbian, would give her right tit for a night with Edward Cullen, but Bella obviously had loftier expectations than meaningless sex. Jessica may not have been the most selfless person in the world, but that didn’t mean she wanted the girl who stuck up for her when Mike was being a dick to wind up getting hurt when the local spoiled rich boy decided he’d had his fill. Mike was a dick on occasion; Edward was a dick all the time and, much like Jessica’s asshole father, he would eventually revert back to default dickheadedness when the novelty of being nice to someone wore off. She was sure of it.
Bella, for her part, just hoped Edward was paying attention.
In fact, he was paying so much attention to Bella’s class that he didn’t notice his English teacher coming up behind him to smack him upside the back of his head for daydreaming in class until it was too late. If he’d been more present, he’d have moved his head forward in time with the instructor’s movement. Edward’s head didn’t budge, though, and Mr. Berty was making little ‘Ow, ow, ow!’ sounds and flapping his hand back and forth. He wouldn’t realize it for a full twenty-four hours, but John Berty actually gave himself a hairline fracture in two of his metacarpals, resulting in a $75 trip to the Urgent Care clinic, where Dr. Cullen would be on rotation and would ask “What did you hit your hand on, a boulder?” All because Edward was so damn hard-headed.
“Emmett.” Edward approached his brother casually between classes, but since he so rarely had casual chats at school, Emmett wasn’t fooled in the slightest.
“What did she do to blow your mind this time?” Emmett asked. He actually didn’t mind talking things over with Edward-he was a big believer in open communication-but he was glad Rosalie was in a different part of campus. She’d have been only too happy to turn whatever Edward was about to say into grounds for a hissy fit.
“Are we…” Edward hesitated, trying to phrase his answer carefully. Talking in code was a requirement in public, but unless they could get away with speaking Irish Gaelic or Italian, it wasn’t always a practical way to get meaning across. “Are we bad citizens?”
Emmett rolled his eyes. I’ve killed seven people. They don’t hand out the Nobel Peace Prize for that. Well, not unless you’re Henry Kissinger, but I’d have to kill a lot more people.
“No,” Edward sighed. “I mean our public personas. I know people think we’re haughty and snobbish, but do you feel like maybe we’ve taken it a little too far?” Had he really never said hello to Jessica in two and a half years? Hadn’t he thanked her once at Newton’s store, when she held a door open for him as he was carrying an armload of shopping bags for Esme?
“We’re not putting on airs for the sake of stroking our egos,” Emmett reminded his brother. “I don’t like being a pretentious asshole. It’s not who I am. The whole antisocial thing serves a purpose. Getting close isn’t good for us or them.”
“Then what’s the point of using good manners in class?” Edward asked (though mostly it was a self-directed question). He didn’t mind being thought of as clannish. He did mind the assumption that his mother didn’t raise him right. Or that he would use a girl until he was bored with her. Or that he always was and always would be a penishead.
Emmett rolled his eyes exactly the way his wife often did. “The point is to not attract attention by being problem children. We stand out enough as it is. Why are you acting like you suddenly don’t understand the rules?”
“Because they don’t make sense to me anymore,” Edward murmured. Was he going to be an aloof, condescending asshole, or was he going to be the gentleman Elizabeth Masen raised him to be, the good man Bella reminded him he could be?
“They used to…” Emmett trailed off. Until you decided to blow your cover.
Edward’s eyes widened. “Who knows?”
We all know. Rose is pissed.
“She’s always pissed,” Edward said with a roll of his eyes.
“She’s got her reasons, buddy,” Emmett countered. “I mean, shit…” We all knew this was coming eventually, but we shouldn’t have heard about it from Alice.
“How did Alice know?” Edward demanded.
She was watching last night. Between the dramatic rescue in Port Angeles, you appearing at Bella’s doorstep two seconds after she called you, and you running your mouth this morning about keeping your secret, the future went nuclear on her. She figured Bella must be in the know. I can’t believe you, Edward. You can tell a girl you’re a vampire, but you can’t be a man and tell your own family something this important?
“I didn’t tell Bella anything,” Edward whispered. “She deduced it on her own.”
Emmett frowned. That’s not good.
“Tell me about it,” Edward groaned. “Jasper and Alice predicted that one perfectly. They’ll never let me live it down.”
Yeah, Emmett thought sarcastically. The eyes of Texas are on us now that you’ve deigned to speak to someone outside of family, there’s a human who was able to guess what we are and also lives with a cop, but our brother and sis doing the Told-You-So dance is your biggest problem.
Edward wandered off, thinking about his family. In the fifties, they’d all participated in various academic, art, or performing art clubs, because in those days teachers worried about a family of foster children who looked like they weren’t trying to blend in or socialize, and nobody wanted a visit from a state social worker. By the nineties, school administrators had stopped caring as long as there weren’t gang fights, and a family of goody-two-shoes teenagers attracted attention from a generation of lazy bums, miscreants, and sluts. It became more convenient to fade into the background in public school settings and pursue their interests independently, until gradually they were only showing up at school because it was required by law, not to try new activities and certainly not to be social. Edward worried that in a new world of excessive reality shows, YouTube vloggers, and social media designed to encourage attention whores, his family’s social detachment was actually making them stand out even more than they already did. Clearly it made an impact on Jessica Stanley-she was fascinated by him, even though she didn’t think highly of him at all.
Fortunately, Bella didn’t introduce the topic when she met Edward for lunch. She was wildly curious, but she understood why it might be embarrassing, and heaven knew she’d embarrassed him plenty already. And he did buy her meal, again. So when he didn’t bring up the conversation with Jessica, she graciously avoided the subject and politely asked him another question that had been on her mind.
“Where does your scent come from?”
“Ex…cuse me?”
“You’re dead, aren’t you?” Bella asked bluntly.
“Technically.” She doesn’t mince words, does she? “But I’m not decomposing.”
“Any microscopic life on your skin or inside your body?”
“No!” Edward almost looked offended for a moment.
“Your skin feels distinctly non-porous, too, am I right?”
“You are, to an extent.” Edward hid his smile, enjoying watching Bella’s mind work out her new puzzle.
“Then I don’t understand how you have any scent, let alone such a strong one,” Bella said, staring at Edward’s forehead. “You don’t seem to sweat, you’re not releasing skin oils from your sebaceous glands, and even if you were, you don’t have any bacteria to break down the lipids into fatty acids and produce body odor. So where does your scent come from?”
“Erm…” Edward muttered, wishing she would lower her voice. Bella’s volume wasn’t so loud that other humans could hear. He was just a little embarrassed because Emmett was laughing at him from two tables down and three over. “Some of it comes from my hair.”
Bella’s eyes moved up to the wilderness atop Edward’s head. “Okay, I can see the case for that; obviously you’ve still got hair follicles, and whatever causes your scent could easily be released from there. Does your hair grow?”
“No.” Alice would definitely take advantage of hair growth if she could. “It’s dead.”
“Does it fall out?”
“I can’t even pull it out. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Especially since I met you.
After a few more seconds of appraisal, Bella said, “Can I touch it?”
“Maybe not here,” Edward dodged. They were, after all, in the middle of the cafeteria. And you’re not supposed to touch hair when you’re touching food, even undead hair.
Bella nodded, still thinking. “You’ve got split ends,” she said absently.
That was when Alice started choking back laughter.
“I’m not producing or secreting oil,” Edward explained quickly. “We produce something else.”
“Oh?” Fascinated, Bella urged Edward to continue.
“I don’t wish to frighten you,” he whispered carefully, “but we refer to it as venom. It’s an acidic compound that has, among other properties, a scent that’s unique to each individual. I’ve hypothesized that it can be secreted from hair follicles in microscopic amounts, but mostly it’s found in our mouths and tissues.”
“Is it in your veins?” Bella asked, excited now. A completely new biological system was the kind of thing that excites the right kind of nerd.
“It replaced all my bodily fluids.”
“Even the fluid inside your eyeballs?”
“Even the fluid in my synapses. Or at least I think so. I can’t exactly check.”
“Wow,” Bella gaped. “So does that mean your heart pumps it through your circulatory system?”
“No, it’s not like that,” Edward sighed. He wished his heart still beat-it would make passing required physicals that much easier. “When I have a…drink…it and the venom have a chemical reaction. Venom is a strong acid, and blood is a weak base. The neutralization spreads its way through the rest of the liquid in the body, and the byproduct is what gives me energy. It usually takes about two weeks for the process to be complete, depending on how much I consume or whether anything else stimulates my venom production, and then I need to feed again.”
“But how does the blood get from your digestive tract to the rest of your body,” Bella demanded, “if your organs aren’t porous anymore? Or is it just your skin that’s non-porous? Aren’t there like five or ten quarts of blood in a wild animal? Wouldn’t your tissue have to retain a spongy quality to soak it all up? How does your body dispose of the excess liquid-obviously you’re not walking around bloated, so I’m assuming the neutralized fluid has to have some way to exit. Do you pee it out, or does it evaporate somehow? How can you be producing and consuming so much energy but not produce any body heat? When you breathe in oxygen, what kind of gas do you breathe back out? How can you feel so rock solid on the outside but still be pliable enough to have motion? And how do you even know what happens inside your body? Can you even get through that skin with a scalpel to study a cadaver?” After a moment’s consideration (and taking a much-needed breath), she added, “How do you even know when you’re dead-dead, and not undead, if you don’t have a pulse?”
Edward rested his jaw on his palm and shook his head from side to side. “At some point, we run out of verifiable evidence about how our bodies work internally, and we just hit the imaginary ‘I Believe’ button.”
“That’s hardly scientific,” Bella frowned. She knew science hadn’t explained all of nature yet, but this was too much of a stretch. Neither science nor religion could make sense of this. Maybe if Mother Nature was out of the room and God was high on mushrooms and some lesser being snuck in armed with only the most rudimentary understanding of biology, biochemistry, or physics…
“If you’re looking for scientific evidence to support my existence,” Edward sighed happily, “I’d say either this relationship is doomed to failure or destined for unparalleled success.”
“No pressure or anything,” Bella replied, flippant but cheerful. “You know, I think this may be the most psychedelic conversation I’ve had since I moved here.”
Edward smirked. “And here I thought you were all about the locals having untapped intellectual potential.”
“There’s brain power, and then there’s subject matter.”
“Speaking of which,” Edward sighed, “we should talk about something else.”
“I’m sorry,” Bella said quickly. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“Not me,” Edward replied, jerking his head to one side. “My sister’s about two seconds away from marching over here and punching me square in the face.”
Bella looked toward the Cullen table automatically. All but one of Edward’s siblings studiously looked somewhere else.
“Ah,” Bella said, quickly turning away from Rosalie’s hateful glare. “The shiksa goddess. Figures.”
“The what?” Edward laughed.
“It’s what my grandfather used to call a beautiful woman with blonde hair and big tits,” Bella said (at a normal speaking volume).
Now pretty much everyone at the Cullen table was laughing. Even Rosalie smiled (she believed her tits were two of her greatest assets, the other two being her…assets).
“Does she have a problem with me?” Bella asked. She spoke casually, not wanting to sound frightened and weak but not wanting to oversell it with false bravado that any fool could see through.
“Not really,” Edward shrugged, going along with Bella’s blasé air. This was not the best idea for several reasons. First, ‘not really’ isn’t nearly the same as ‘no, absolutely not,’ and second, Bella was perfectly aware that while Rosalie looked like an overly-primped delicate female, she was every bit the predator Edward was. Except that she wasn’t relying on love to keep her blood thirst in check. Bella wasn’t entirely sure Rosalie bothered tempering her thirst at all.
“Her issue-everyone’s, actually-is with me,” Edward continued. “They don’t understand why I can’t leave you alone.”
This earned him a few scoffs from the family table. “Son of a bitch,” Emmett complained. “Now he’s misrepresenting us.”
“No, he’s not,” Alice disagreed. “You do have a problem with him, and you don’t understand why he can’t leave her alone.”
“Yes I can,” Emmett argued.
“I’m pretty sure most of us understand it better than he does,” Jasper chimed in. “It’s his expectations I don’t understand.”
“Love is stupid and it makes you do things that don’t make sense, especially in the beginning,” Alice explained. “You can’t expect him to be reasonable at this stage.”
“I get the ‘stupid’ part,” Emmett said. “What I don’t get is why he thinks being all cloak-and-dagger about it is the mature response.”
“Cut him some slack,” Alice told the family. “This is the first time he’s ever been even a little bit honest with a woman.”
“No it’s not,” Emmett snitted. “He was plenty honest with Tanya when he called her a-”
“Okay,” Alice interrupted, “so this is the first time he’s ever wanted to impress a girl and be honest at the same time.”
“Why didn’t he tell Carlisle?” Rose quietly exploded. “He ropes Carlisle into drugging and kidnapping a wanted felon, but he doesn’t say ‘Hey, by the way, my human knows our secret.’ What kind of bullshit is that?”
“We don’t know he didn’t tell Carlisle,” Emmett speculated. “It takes a long time to run all the way to Oregon and back, even when you’re not lugging a body, and he probably stopped to snag a bite to eat while he was out. Maybe Edward did tell Carlisle and we just haven’t heard about it.”
“No way.” Rose folder her arms defiantly. “News like that? Carlisle would have called us, or at least called Esme. Edward kept it under his hat, I guarantee it. Selfish, sniveling little shit!”
“He’s just a boy,” Jasper said, trying to comfort his sister with words before he had to use his gift on her in public, which she hated. “Remember, no one has actually taught him how to be a man, and clearly he hasn’t learned by example.”
“Well he’s hardly the only member of our family ever to behave like a child,” Alice defended her brother. “Or have you all forgotten the reason we rode here in Rosalie’s Nissan Leaf instead of an M3?”
“Adults have car accidents all the time,” Rosalie said uncomfortably.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Alice snorted indelicately. “You expect me to believe you had too many wine coolers?”
“Why doesn’t anyone believe me?” Rosalie whined. “It was a deer. It stepped out into the road. I was going too fast to swerve out of the way. Even if I had, I still would have wrecked the car trying to make a correction beyond the vehicle’s limitations. Not even Edward can hear the mind of a deer right before it’s about to cross the highway.”
“Which is why all the other cars have deer whistles attached,” Alice reminded her. “Except for the one car Edward never uses for joyriding on unlit back roads in the middle of nowhere.”
Emmett placed an arm around his wife. “It’s not that I don’t believe it’s possible,” he told her cautiously. “It’s that I have trouble understanding why it happened to you in Edward’s favorite car rather than your own.”
“I told you,” she grumbled, “I wanted to feel fancy.”
“And your BMW wasn’t fancy enough?” Alice said blandly. “We had just waxed it the day before. You even made me buy the Carnauba Wax.”
Edward paused in his conversation (Bella, who had accrued twenty-two volunteer hours at a Phoenix soup kitchen, was chastising him for wasting perfectly good people food all the time). He laughed silently to himself at Rosalie, though it was traitorous to do so. A man who owns a ‘special occasion car’ hardly has room to laugh at a woman who wants to borrow one; they both liked ‘feeling fancy’ now and again.
“For whose benefit are you playing innocent?” Jasper asked his sister mirthfully. “You totaled an Aston Martin. It is now a pile of parts beyond repair, taking up space in the garage. Nobody at this table believes it was an accident. Edward certainly knows it was intentional. Why do you always forget that we can all see through you when you trot out the innocent act?”
“I think we’re all missing the central point here,” Rosalie insisted, trying to change the subject. “Edward’s talking vampire anatomy in public with a human. Why am I the only one who finds that disturbing?”
“I told you it would happen eventually,” Alice said lightly. “You should be happy. Now he has to turn her. He’s not stupid enough to leave her human when she knows so much.”
“It’s fair to say,” Jasper corrected her, “that Edward’s stupidity knows no bounds. Just yesterday he was going on about keeping Bella in the dark while dating her so she can have a normal future. Maybe he can finally have some forward movement, now that he’s manned up and told her the truth.”
“He didn’t tell her,” Emmett said quietly. “He said she already knew.”
The absolute silence at the Cullen table belied the collective roar sounding off in Edward’s mind. Bella had no idea, other than the vague sensation that someone had just walked over her grave.
“We should get to class,” Edward suggested, rising from his seat and collecting Bella’s lunch tray. He spared a glance at his thunderstruck family. “Why don’t you wait for me at the door? I’ll just be a minute.”
Bella did as he asked, allowing Edward to dispose of her tray as his family converged on him.
“What in the hell-?” Rosalie spat, the first one to get any words out at all.
“She’s fine, by the way,” Edward cut her off before she could say anything further about the importance of secrecy. “Very minor injuries.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bella,” Edward said slowly. “She was almost sexually assaulted last night, remember? That’s why Carlisle’s out of town: so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. That’s why I spent all last night watching her house instead of calling another one of our famously productive and civilized family meetings.” He looked at his sister, the rape victim, at his brother, the man who had been so concerned for Bella’s ‘welfare and dignity’ last week, at his other sister who believed she would be Bella’s ‘BFF,’ and at his other brother, the one who claimed he didn’t like pretending to be an asshole. “Your take on that situation was illuminating. I like the part about how taking care of her instead of informing you immediately that she knows about vampires-which she knew all weekend and still didn’t repeat to her father, by the way-makes me both selfish and less of a man. Your concerns about our cars were all fascinating, too. Oh, and I love how it’s so important whether or not I’m the one who shared our secret with the girl you already thought was suspicious-more important than her actual survival, even. Especially when I consider that at least half of you believe Bella’s my mate. Your skills at prioritizing make me so proud to be part of this family.”
Edward’s family remained clustered together, watching with mixed emotions as their brother rejoined Bella at the door to escort her to biology. For his part, Edward wondered if it would really be such a terrible thing to start living alone.