Chapter Text
Bella started awake, cold and disoriented.
She blinked for a moment before shaking off the last vestiges of a somewhat bittersweet dream of travelling somewhere with Grandma Marie.
Well—it still was infinitely preferable to one of her recurring nightmares about James.
Shivering, she sat up and realized that she was still naked except for the towel around her middle, her hair damp. That explained the cold.
Rubbing her bare arms, she got up from the bed. From a glance at the clock, she could see that she hadn’t been out long, but it had been long enough that she had to start dinner soon. She had sworn she just laid down for a minute after her shower to scroll through her old text messages but apparently had fallen asleep. She wasn’t surprised, though—she had just gotten back from yoga class, and holding some of the weirder poses did tend to tire her out a bit.
She’d been going to classes with Renée for two months now. Continuing the theme of her somewhat upside-down life these days, after wrapping up school in Forks with her dad, she’d flown down to spend the summer with her mother in her new, and what looked to be permanent, location of Florida.
She hung her towel over the back of her closet door and went over to her dresser to dig out some clothes.
Her summer flight had been even longer than usual, now that she was literally flying from one corner of the US to the other, with the corresponding increase in boredom. Still, once she had finally gotten home, she had to admit that her summer so far had been great.
Bella had spent most of her life living with her outgoing and slightly dotty mother during the school year and her stolid homebody father during the summer. That particular switching of roles, it turned out, actually improved her situation more than she thought it would. Charlie’s tendency to leave her alone was immensely helpful when she had to study and prepare for the various AP tests she’d had at the end of the year. Now that school was over, Renée and her constant hovering and wacky hijinks were a lot more tolerable. Case in point, the yoga. It was Renée’s latest mania. She’d started telling Bella all about it over dinner the very first night she’d arrived home—how great it was, how great she felt, and how great it would be if Bella tried it out.
That was not typically Bella’s idea of a good time. If it had been during the school year itself, she would have used class as an excuse to get out of it just like she had Renée’s other various exercise manias that she’d sporadically gone through over the years. But this time she hadn’t had that excuse, and when faced with Renée’s eager enthusiasm for something they could do together over the summer, Bella had caved.
Imagine her surprise to find that she actually kinda liked it.
Bella may not have been naturally athletic in the traditional sense, but she always had been quite flexible, and so the yoga was actually working for her. As such, she’d kept up with it, going to classes with Renée three times a week. Renée was thrilled that they were actually doing something together for a change, which made Bella happy, and assuaged the niggling bit of guilt she felt for not doing something like that sooner.
But yoga wasn’t the only change this summer. For the first time in her life, Bella found herself trying to accustom herself to living with someone new. Because now Renée was living with Phil.
Bella knew him, of course, after a fashion. When he and Renée had gotten together in Arizona, she had obviously been his primary focus. Bella had deliberately absented herself as much as possible from her mother’s latest romance, as she'd done in the past. Phil had seemed decent, he was always nice when she spoke to him, and that had been that. But then her mother had gone and married the guy. Bella’s subsequent move to Forks had kept him kind of out of sight, out of mind for the rest of the school year. But now she was in Florida, and they were all sharing a house. Even though he was gone every other week for away games, he had still been around all summer. Absenting herself was no longer an option.
She had to admit that initially, Phil had made her the most uncomfortable of all of her mother’s boyfriends. It wasn’t because of anything he did, but simply because of the fact that he was technically closer to her age than her mother’s. It was kind of weird. But now that he was a permanent fixture, there was nothing to do but to try to get along with him.
He had a lot in common with Renée, so there was that—but honestly, Bella didn’t have too much in common with Renée, so it didn’t help much. He was eager, excited, outgoing, and active—all of those things that Bella wasn’t, so she didn’t have much to go on. She supposed she eased their relationship along with her cooking at first—through the stomach, like with any man. He wasn’t much of a cook either, so for the summer she was perfectly happy to settle into making meals as usual, even packing lunches when she could—albeit with a modified, healthier menu.
The thing was, though, that Phil had clearly been trying to connect with her too, always wanting to bring her into conversations on the days when he was home. After a bit of thought about it, Bella had privately conceded that having a stepdaughter closer to his age than his wife was probably just as weird for him as the inverse had been for her. So she’d done her best to play along with his conversational gambits, tried (in vain) to understand his baseball talk, and gone to his home games and cheered the Jacksonville Suns along with Renée.
Eventually they’d managed to find some common ground when he’d thrown out a Monty Python quote over dinner one evening. Bella immediately fired back with the appropriate response about African or European swallows, much to his obvious delight (and Renée’s eye-rolling), and that had sparked a genuine back-and-forth between them. Turned out that like most people he’d only ever seen Holy Grail, and so after Bella had extolled the brilliance of “Flying Circus,” he’d gone and purchased the complete set, and they’d spent several evenings watching episodes much like she and Charlie used to do with “Bewitched.” She supposed in hindsight that she had just needed to stop looking at him as a distant, adult authority figure, and more like just a guy. That helped, just being friendly instead of daughterly. And he helped that along too, really, with the surprise trip to Disney World that he sprung on them in July when he was playing in Orlando.
Bella had never been to a big theme park before. It definitely wasn’t Charlie’s thing, and while Renée always had longed to go to Disney Land, it wasn’t the kind of thing she’d ever had the time or money for as a single mom when Bella was growing up. The trip had obviously been with Renée in mind, but Bella found herself seriously stoked too. Her past summers with Charlie had typically involved either relaxing at home in Forks or road trips to western national parks like Glacier, Crater Lake, or Redwood Forest. Getting to go on rides and eating park food and having her picture taken with Mickey and Maleficent had been a blast. Phil had been there the whole time; he’d bought romantic souvenirs for Renée and all, but it had been Bella who had been his buddy on Splash Mountain and the Tower of Terror.
Much like the mushroom in the bar, Bella had come to appreciate that Phil was a fun guy.
Dried and clothed, Bella sat down at the little dressing table that was in her room rather than the desk she was used to and started to brush her wet hair. Renée and Phil had set her up with her own room in their new house—she even had her own bathroom!—with all of her childhood knickknacks and things set up in place of the books and schoolwork that her room in Forks now held—the lengths they seemed to have gone to for her when she would be staying with them had taken her aback a bit. Renée’s new teaching job would not have been able to cover Disney trips or the new Florida wardrobe she’d gotten or all of her new yoga accessories or all of the fancy ingredients for the equally fancy recipes that she’d been encouraged to try for lunches and dinners. Rather uncomfortably, she’d realized that Phil was comparatively better off than she and Renée and Charlie had been when she was growing up.
Bella clipped her hair up—it was getting long, she might need to cut it soon—and headed toward the kitchen, dropping her towel back on the rack in her bathroom as she went.
It was salad night tonight—which was four times a week rather than just the one back with Charlie. Of course, there needed to be a lot of it, with lots of protein for Phil, but it was still green food. Between that and the yoga, not only did Bella feel good, but she thought she might actually look good—that she might have been losing a bit of weight over the summer. She could admit the latter was probably part of her continued interest in yoga. As with all of Renée’s manias, she went all out—and with her obviously more expansive budget, Bella was now kitted out with books and straps and blocks and mats and fingerless gloves and toeless socks and leggings and even aromatherapy paraphernalia. She felt a bit hippy-dippy about it sometimes, but despite all of that, she was seriously thinking that she might use all her new toys to stick with it on her own when she went back to Forks. She liked it well enough, yeah, but the fact that it might be helping her look better was even more of a reason to keep it up. It wasn’t something that she had ever been hugely preoccupied with, granted, but…well, these days she had slightly more incentive than usual to want to look nice.
Since she had a boyfriend, and all.
Not that she’d know it much these days, she frowned to herself as she dug around in the fridge for the chicken thighs she planned to chunk up to put on the salad. That’s what she’d been doing when she fell asleep: looking through her old texts with Edward. Because she’d hadn’t heard a peep from him since she left for Florida this summer.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She just hadn’t heard from him through her phone. Instead, he’d actually sent her letters.
Only three over the months she’d been gone. Still, there was something embarrassingly thrilling about getting a love letter.
Well, it wasn’t really. It was more just a general update on life and hoping that she’d been doing well. But the creamy, unlined paper, his copperplate penmanship, and Edward’s remarkably eloquent way of wording things when he was able to write it rather than try to speak it sure made it feel like a love letter right out of a romance novel.
Renée had certainly seen it as such.
Bella huffed through her nose as she dropped the chopped chicken in the skillet.
No letters, romantic or otherwise, were worth the trouble she’d been getting from her mother over the summer about finally having a boyfriend.
Bella had not had any particular success (meaning: none) in the field of romantic entanglements while she was living with Renée. Boys in general weren’t interested in her, and Bella certainly wasn’t the type to approach the boys who had caught her eye in school. Despite this, Renée had been very in-your-face on the subject. Bella had gotten an extremely thorough Talk at a relatively early age, had been sent along to all the school classes and lessons on the subject, and Renée had been very vocal on the topic of birth control. And all of this was because, as Bella had heard about her entire life, her own conception had not been planned. In point of fact, her imminent arrival had been the reason her parents had gotten married in the first place.
Yeah—Bella had been very aware for as long as she could remember that the 1986 Forks Highschool girls track star had gotten herself knocked up by her boyfriend. That in and of itself wasn’t the most comfortable thing to know about her parents, but it was made all the worse by the typical-Renée tactless delivery of life-lessons on the subject. As far back as Bella could remember, her mother had been carrying on a one-woman campaign against teenage pregnancy, always forceful about sex ed and protection and safety, all of it because she didn’t want Bella to ruin her life.
The obvious implication being that Bella herself had ruined Renée’s.
Bella shook her head as she peeled and sliced some fresh mango to go on top of the salad (Charlie hated sweet-with-meat, but Renée and Phil were fine with it, which added considerable variety to their green food). She knew Renée didn’t mean it that way, not really. But it got to be a bit grating over time, hearing it again and again.
Still, she’d have taken that any day over what happened when Bella had been forced to confess that yeah, Edward had been interested in her after all.
She’d found herself in the gynecologist’s stirrups before she could blink for her first full checkup, which had been awful, and it was made even worse by Renée demanding a birth control prescription. And when they’d taken it to the drugstore to be filled, Renée had bought her condoms as well, launching into one of her well-worn lectures about the efficacy of the different methods and the statistics of failure and to not let Edward pressure her into anything.
It had been mortifying. Bella had shoved both forms of protection deep into the recesses of her travel bag and had done her best to forget that they were even there. She had been dating Edward for less than a month before the summer, for crying out loud—and now her boyfriend was a continent away! Besides, she had no intention of needing either at any point in the immediate future, thank you very much. The only reason she’d even given the slightest thought to taking the pill had been the prospect of more regular periods with fewer cramps—but honestly, the yoga had been doing a remarkable job of straightening both of those issues out for her anyway, so she had no need for them at all.
Bella snorted to herself as she heard the sound of the garage door signaling that Phil was home. Yeah—she wanted her mother as far away from her love life as possible. And very little of that had to do with that fact that her boyfriend was a vampire.
She wondered how Renée would take that particular tidbit of information. She probably would have spun it into some kind of STD metaphor or something.
“Hey, there, Beautiful!”
Bella turned to roll her eyes at Phil, who grinned unrepentantly at her from where he’d poked his head into the kitchen. Renée had long since apologized for the bout of youthful idiocy that had prompted her to name her daughter “Beautiful Swan,” and Bella had come to terms with it, but for Phil it was entirely new and entirely hilarious. “Smells good,” he continued. “What’s cookin’?”
“Spinach salad with chicken, avocado, and mango,” she said, turning back to the stove to turn off the heat from said meat.
“Mmm—sounds tasty,” he said. “Need me to set the table?”
“Nah, Mom got it,” she replied. “You just need to eat it.”
“Hey—I’m great at that!” he said, reaching up to drum on the lintel above him, and then disappeared from the doorway. He really was, Bella reflected, as she portioned out a modest amount of chicken onto her and Renée’s salads—and dumped all the rest onto the acres of spinach that made up Phil’s meal (including setting some back with the remaining toppings for when he would invariably want seconds). The only person she knew who could compete with Phil for the sheer volume he could consume in one sitting was Jacob Black. Jacob would probably win, though, she thought, despite Phil being a pro athlete. He tended to cut down on carbs most of the time, while Jacob could and would eat anything.
Bella carried two plates into the dining room, studiously avoiding the sight of Renée and Phil making out in the living room, and waiting until her back was turned as she went back into the kitchen to loudly clear her throat and announce that “Soup’s on!” By the time she got back out with Phil’s big bowl of salad and the dressing, the party had broken up, and Renée was filling up everyone’s glasses.
Bella smiled and accepted all of the usual rounds of enthusiastic thanks for the home-cooked meal, and then everyone settled down for the early dinner silence that was filled only with the sounds of chewing. However, unlike living with Charlie, where that tended to be the bulk of the dinner conversation, it only lasted a minute or two to take the edge off everyone’s appetites before Renée and Phil started talking.
“You gals are gonna love what happened to Hawkins today,” Phil said around a mouthful of salad.
Thankfully, with two such eager conversationalists at the table, Bella really only had to fall into her familiar role of listening attentively with all the usual sounds of enthusiasm as Phil gave his recap of any shenanigans that went down at practice that day. And it wasn’t hard to listen; he could tell a good story, and had both her and her mother giggling over the tale of the third baseman and his failed attempts to chase away a squirrel that had wandered onto the field, and the apparently very aggressive squirrel’s objections to being chased. Not to be outdone, of course, it was then Renée’s turn to go on about any stories from the summer classes she was teaching.
To Phil’s credit, while Renée was generally used to Bella just being an audience, he always seemed to want to make sure that she got her share of the conversation too. “How about you, Bella?” he asked, pointing a forkful of spinach toward her. “Anything earth-shattering happen today?”
Bella smiled, looking down at her plate and chasing around a pine nut with her fork. “Well…actually, kinda,” she admitted, making Renée look up in surprise. “Not super-exciting, I guess—but I got my AP test results back today.” She couldn’t help grinning. “I passed both.”
“All right!” Phil hooted, pumping his fist.
“Oh, sweetie, that’s great!” Renée squealed. “What did you get?”
“Fours on both, English and US History,” Bella told them.
Phil stuck his fingers in his mouth and gave a much-too-loud stadium whistle. “Far out, Bella—that’s college credit, yeah?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding happily.
“Hot damn,” said Phil, beaming at her.
Bella was particularly pleased about English—that had been a bit of a gamble, since she’d been in pre-AP for two years but only had the one semester of full AP English in Phoenix before moving to Forks. She went ahead and had gone for it anyway, since it was worth at least one semester if she could scrape by with a three—but a four meant that she had just tested out of English all together.
Renée reached around the table to squeeze her arm. “Bella, you should have said something—we’d have celebrated tonight!”
She shrugged, still too happy to worry about anything like that. “Eh, it was kind of short notice,” she demurred, stabbing a slice of avocado to go with the red onion on her fork. “And I had all the salad stuff ready anyway.”
“Well, it’s not short notice now,” Phil said. “Tomorrow after my game we’re going out, in honor of the real-live genius in our midst!” When Bella scoffed at him, he just retorted jokingly, “Hey—you’re definitely a genius compared to a jock like me!”
“And me,” Renée said, smiling. “I don’t know where she gets it from, really. Her dad wasn’t any kind of super-student either.”
She squirmed a little in her seat, although she couldn’t help but be pleased. Between that and the SAT that she took just before she left Forks, her collective test scores were looking good enough to help land her in all four of the colleges she’d applied for. “I’m not either, not really,” she finally insisted. “But I am excited. That’s nine hours of college credit at Washington State or U Dub up north or Florida or Florida State down here.”
“That’s awesome,” Phil said, and Renée agreed, looking slightly misty as she beamed at her.
Bella found herself fielding questions about her academics for the rest of dinner; they were questions that she was pretty sure they’d asked before, but she didn’t mind. She’d been on pins and needles when she saw the envelope in the stack of today’s mail, and the thrill over her scores had been genuine, especially her Hail Mary in English. Dinner wrapped up with Phil and Renée barring her from doing any dishes, and she was sent out to the living room to bask in her own glory with a (healthy, sugar-free) coconut popsicle, along with a decree that they would be going out for dinner the following evening to the Dockside Seafood place on Jax Beach that Bella loved.
Renée and Phil had just come out from the kitchen, both wondering what they were going to watch tonight, when Bella’s pocket started ringing. She tugged her cellphone out and looked at the screen, and felt a shy, happy jolt when she saw that it was Edward.
She quickly excused herself (her face heated horribly when she heard Renée loudly whisper to Phil that “I think it’s her boyfriend”) and ran toward the back of the house and the safety of her room before she picked up.
“Hello?” she said, sounding breathless even to herself, leaning back against the closed door.
“Hey, Sweetheart!”
She blinked. “…Emmett?”
“Right in one, doll,” Emmett said back, the grin clear in his voice.
In the background, she heard a high voice trill, “Hello, Bella!”
“Alice says hi,” he added unnecessarily.
“Um—hi, Alice. And you too, Emmett. What—what’s going on?”
“Not a thing,” he said, his voice easy. “What’s up with you? You having a good summer?”
“Uh, yeah—fine,” she said, still a little nonplussed (and disappointed) that Emmett was calling her from Edward’s phone.
“What have you been up to? You do anything fun for your vacation?”
“Yeah—yeah, I did, we—we went to Disney World, actually.”
There was a thump on the other end of the line. “Aw, man!” Emmett moaned. “I’m super jealous—we’ve never actually done that!” There was the sound of Alice saying something again; this time she didn’t catch it, but Emmett immediately translated. “You’re gonna have to tell Alice all about it.”
“Well, I bought her a souvenir, actually,” she admitted, sitting down on her bed. Alice’s squeal came through the phone loud and clear.
Emmett just laughed. “You just made yourself a friend for life right there. What’d you see?”
And so Bella found herself recounting her trip to Emmett with Alice offering commentary in the background. After telling them about going through “Pirates of the Caribbean” with the brand-new Captain Jack Sparrow figure, Bella finally had to ask, “So, why—why’d you call? Really?”
“I just wanted to hear what you were up to,” he said. “All our AP scores came in today, and we thought of you when we figured yours must have too, so I thought I’d just call you up and see how things were going.”
There was a pause, and then when he spoke again, his voice was louder, and his words deliberate. “Since Edward won’t, and all.”
She couldn’t help herself—she pounced. “Why not?”
Someone said something in the background that she couldn’t make out, but it was Emmett who answered, and she could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Oh, someone has it in his head that he needs to ‘give you space’ or some crap,” he said, his air-quotes more than audible. “So since he’s being a complete wuss about it and would rather spend the summer pining away instead of, you know, just calling his girlfriend, I considered it my civic duty to call you for him so I can relay everything back to him. And gloat that I got to talk to you and he didn’t, since he won’t do it himself.”
Bella didn’t know whether she should laugh or be offended on Edward’s behalf (or her own). “He’s written to me,” she said, dredging that up in his defense, even as she thought she heard someone else snapping at Emmett on the other end of the line. She kind of felt like she needed to defend Edward since she had no excuse for the fact that she hadn’t really called him either, having spent the summer waiting for him to make the first move.
Emmett just made a disgusted noise. “This isn’t 1917,” he sneered. “He can in fact pick up the new-fangled telly-oh-fone and talk to his girl without scandalizing the neighbors. But no, he’d rather just mope around the house with a face like a wet weekend, listening to a bunch of Alice’s angstful Eighties power ballads and crossing off the days until you get back on the calendar with little hearts and—”
But whatever else he was going to tell her that Edward was doing was cut off with a yell and the sound of a short but ferocious scuffle and some angry snarling, before Edward’s slightly out-of-breath-sounding voice was suddenly on the line. “Bella?!”
“Yeah?” she said, feeling her belly flutter just a little at hearing his voice for the first time in months.
“I am not sitting around listening to stupid Eighties power ballads!”
“They aren’t stupid, Edward!”
“Alice, this is my conversation, not yours!”
“Uh, dude?” Emmett’s rumbling voice was clear even having been kicked off the phone. “That was my conversation—you stole it.”
There was a furious noise and a flurry of angry footsteps, which gave Bella time to get her giggles under control. At least, until after the sound of a slamming door the next words from the phone were, “I swear, I am living with a gaggle of children!”
She couldn’t help but laugh then. “Edward—did you stage this?”
“What? No! I had nothing to do with Emmett’s—with Emmett!” he seethed.
She was still giggling. “Aw—so no counting down on the calendar either?”
There was silence, but then Edward said stiffly, “I am not using hearts.”
Bella’s giggles died as she felt herself starting to melt a little. “So—so you are marking down the days till I come home?”
Edward coughed. “It—it was something my mother taught me. When I—had something that—that I was really looking forward to, she said it would make the days go faster.”
She was melting a lot now. “That’s…I—”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” he said in a rush. “I know that you’ve always lived with your mother, but you’d been away from her all semester, and I thought you’d want to spend time with her. I didn’t want to butt in.”
“You wouldn’t have been,” she said. “She’s teaching summer school right now, and Phil’s busy too, so I’m on my own during most of the day. I wouldn’t have minded a call.”
“I’ll call. Whenever you want.”
Bella sat there stupidly, listening to the silence on the end of the phone like an idiot, before she finally cleared her throat. “So—uh—how—how has your summer been?” she asked, leaning back against the pillows propped up on the headboard.
“What? Oh—good! The, uh, the usual, and all, you know,” he said.
She didn’t know, not exactly, but she had had it impressed upon her that she really shouldn’t discuss certain things over the phone, so she couldn’t ask for any more details. “Um—Emmett said you got your AP scores back?” she threw out.
All the Cullens, Bella knew, had taken a disproportionately high number of AP tests, many of which were for classes that were not offered at Forks High. Having had decades of experience, sleepless nights for studying, and many years of previous schooling was a bit of a leg-up on a high school education. Edward and Alice had been the only other Forks students there with her for the English AP Language test.
“Oh—uh, yeah, we did.” Edward didn’t offer any more information, but Bella could recognize the sheepish tone of his voice by now, the one he got whenever it came up that he sometimes kind of cheated in school, one way or another.
“Fives all around?” she prompted, sounding only a little dry about it.
He coughed uncomfortably again. “Uh, yeah. I did. Alice—she got some fours, since she’s only been to school once before and hadn’t had advanced classes then, but…yeah.”
Bella only begrudged them a little. “I passed with fours on both that I took,” she told him, refusing to be anything but proud of it.
“That’s great!” His sincerity was obvious even over the phone. “Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” she said. “I was really nervous about English.”
“I knew you’d do great.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Sure you did.”
“I did! You’d already read a lot of the books on the free response section, and of course you could write a good essay on them.”
Bella huffed through her nose, but couldn’t think of a good answer to this. So she just went on, “Well, anyway, that’s a good nine hours of credit that I won’t have to take in college.”
“Oh, definitely,” Edward said. “If you think high school general classes are bad, just wait until you have to take some 500-hundred student 101 class in college. You have definitely dodged a bullet not having to do Freshman English.”
It was strange, sometimes, the way Edward could seem both so young and yet so old. After throwing his little temper fit over Emmett’s teasing, here he was now reminding her that he’d already been to college—multiple times, in fact. He had degrees in chemistry, biology, literature, math, music, and history, and had even attended the first few years of medical school. Between that and his grades and test scores, cheating or no, it was enough to make Bella feel a bit inadequate at times.
But she pushed that aside. No point in dwelling on it, when it wasn’t a fair comparison anyway. “Yeah,” she continued. “And more importantly, it’s nine hours I won’t have to pay for.”
Apparently it was now Edward’s turn to be a bit uncomfortable again. He cleared his throat a little and said, “Ah, well—yes, there is that.”
And Bella smiled again, hearing him lapse back into his awkward, young-sounding self.
When it came to attending college, Bella knew that Charlie and Renée had set up a little fund for her when she’d been born. However, she doubted it would be enough to cover a full four years. Shaving off some time would help there. And she was already thinking about getting a part-time job this year to stack up a little more by way of savings. But that was something that Edward didn’t have to worry about; the movies were right about immortals being able to save up a lot of money over their long lives. The first time she’d visited the Cullens, she’d been able to see that their big, sprawling house spoke of obvious wealth beyond what she was used to (and that despite the fact that she’d been terrified out of her mind at the time). Getting closer to them, though, she’d found out that they actually had amassed an even more significant hidden fortune that they had stashed away for emergencies and to pay for all the ever-increasing costs they incurred to blend into human society.
But even that, she’d learned, wasn’t what made Edward suddenly uncomfortable about the fact that he hadn’t considered that Bella might have trouble paying for school. No, in speaking to him over the months since learning his secret, she’d discovered that he’d just been born that way, the pampered only child of well-to-do parents living in a wealthy suburb of Chicago (and it was also yet another thing that Emmett, who had been raised on a farm, made fun of him for).
But it did remind her of something, a bit of a scheme that she’d hatched on her flight home. She’d managed to only have to deal with one layover on her way, in Chicago O’Hare. While she had been waiting to board her next flight, studying the skyline, she’d of course thought of Edward, and that he used to live there. But that had led to recalling his somewhat halting admission that he’d tainted his memories of living there, since that was also the place where he had first…gone bad, many years ago.
Bella had been bolstered by her success in getting him to open up about it after their visits in the hospital last spring, and so had made some encouraging noises about him going back, to put all that to rest—and had impulsively and impractically said that she would go with him, if he wanted company. He’d gone all soft and dewy-eyed, as he’d tended to do in those days after his confession when she said things like that, but since they hadn’t been going out then, Bella had gotten flustered and quickly changed the subject, and they hadn’t mentioned it since. But now…
“Well, anyway, I’m actually glad you called—well, that Emmett called,” she teased, and heard him huff on the other end of the line. “Because I—well, I had an idea, and I wanted to run it by you, to see if you might want to—it’s fine if you don’t, but I just thought of it—” She realized she was babbling and made herself get to the point. “Anyway, I got to thinking that maybe if you wanted to, and if I can get my parents to agree, I could schedule my flight home so that I have a long layover in Chicago, if you…if you wanted to meet me there. So you could…show me around. And I could be there if you wanted to…go somewhere in particular.”
Silence. She fidgeted, giving Edward time to answer, since he sometimes needed a moment to gather his thoughts, but it was nearly to the point of going past that when he finally spoke, his voice hoarse. “Bella, I…that’s…”
“We don’t have to!” she blurted. “It was just an idea, I thought of it when I was there for my layover on my flight here, but it’s fine if you can’t, or if you don’t want to—”
“I do.”
Her words cut off abruptly, and she had to swallow before asking, “Really?”
“Really. I—really.” She heard him swallow too. “I haven’t…I haven’t been back to Chicago since…a long time ago.”
“I—yeah, and I thought—I just thought maybe you’d…like some company.”
“I would.” Another pause. “And I—I’d like to show you the good things. Where I used to live, and places I used to go…”
“I’d love to see them.” She fiddled with the little tufts of embroidery poking out of her bedspread. “I still have to clear it with my parents,” she warned. She was pretty sure she could get Renée to go along with it—just so long as she had her condoms with her, she thought with an eyeroll. Charlie would be a different story, but since she wasn’t technically under his watch until she got back to Forks, she was pretty sure she could finagle it. “But if they’ll go for it, then yeah, we can spend the day together.”
“I’d like that.” Edward’s voice was rough. “I miss you.”
Bella felt warmth spreading through her cheeks and her middle. “I miss you too.”