A/N: I've been wanting to write this for ages and I finally got around to it. I had a lot of fun with this, and maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of the Bigfoot Trope...
XOXO, Helix.
Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight or Party City.
"Hey, Edward?"
"Yeah?"
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure, angel."
Bella shifted her head in his lap. Her hair was curtained on his knees and fiddled idly with it. A baseball game playing on the living room flat-screen, so nobody else was really paying attention to them except Alice, who had looked up with mild interest; she couldn't see her question, and anything Bella ever asked them was bound to be markedly inflective or fascinating at the very least.
But she didn't say anything.
"Bella? What was your question?"
"Er-it's kind of stupid. Don't worry about it."
"No, really, what is it?" Edward pressed curiously.
Bella grimaced.
"Whenever you guys have been out, hunting, have you ever seen a...Bigfoot?"
Genuine surprise saturated the room instantly. Jasper tamped down on it, but not before everybody else noticed. It was hard not to.
Carlisle chose this moment to walk in from the kitchen with a bowl of ruffle chips for Bella. "You alright, Jasper?"
"I...yeah." Jasper murmured, sort of stunned.
"What's going on?"
"The human thinks that sasquatches exist," Rosalie informed Carlisle, rolling her eyes with a certain degree of expertise.
"Well," Bella rushed to defend herself, "apparently, Washington state's a major hot spot for Bigfoot sightings...I figured since you guys spend so much time in the woods that there was a chance that you might have seen something unusual."
"Like, a human watching a Mariner's game in a house full of vampires, unusual?" Emmett commented lightly, and winked at her.
"Yeah," she grinned back at him.
"Why don't you ask the dog?" Rosalie asked. "He spends more time in the woods than we do. If anybody would have seen something unnatural, it would be him." Then she corrected herself, her curiosity stiff, but still there, "if such a thing did exist, after all."
Bella sat up. "But that's the thing, Rose! He wouldn't tell me anything. He just...changed the subject."
"Then he's smarter than I took him for."
"Careful, Rose," Jasper drawled. "That sounds an awful lot like a compliment."
"Hardly," Rose sniffed, turning back to the game, and it was quiet.
Edward made sure Bella was distracted with munching on chips and texting Angela about something trivial before he deliberately catching Jasper and Emmett's dark eyes.
Together, they all remembered the panic and confusion of that one insane moment in the woods: where they all agreed that they thought they had just scented a gorilla...but it wasn't, because they hadn't visited Africa in years but the scent was just as familiar as it was unfamiliar...and then they saw it and it-sure as anything-wasn't a gorilla and the smell was just over-powering and wow, was that really what they thought it was? And then just like it had been there, it was gone. And honestly, after that, they were done hunting for the day.
"Edward? Are you okay?"
He broke his glance with his brothers, and nodded.
She raised her eyebrows.
"Yes, I'm fine," he clarified patiently.
"So, no sasquatches?" Bella frowned up at him laughingly.
Edward smiled tightly.
"Anything's possible."
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