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I flew through the woods as soon as I was sure he wasn't following me. My heart was beating in huge galloping leaps—I thought my chest would explode. A wolf's howl rang out joyfully far behind me. I couldn't keep myself from grinning. Once I got back to the clearing where my parents' cottage lay, I stopped, collecting myself. My father would hear all about it in my thoughts, but at least I could appear composed to my mother when I came in.
The moon was high; it was a clear night for once, and I stood for a moment listening. Another summer had just died; an early-autumn whisper brushed through the trees. The temperature was beginning to drop; the insects were quiet. For a few moments I watched the stars move very slowly, noting their color and brightness. A bright blue one commanded my attention—Sirius was just rising above the trees in the East. I took a deep breath, the smell of mossy pines and wet clay filling my lungs. I loved it. I loved my home. I loved my family and my life. I loved him.
I sighed. I didn't relish the thought of my father being audience to my thoughts tonight. I trusted him completely, yet even though I doubted he would say anything about what he heard, I would still feel awkward knowing that he could see what I felt. And then after tonight—oh! I sighed again and went into the house, wiping my muddy feet on the mat as I passed.
Mother was reading in front of the fireplace. There appeared to have been a small fire burning in the grate, not for warmth, but "for the principle of it," as she liked to say. But it was now a few glowing cinders. She looked up from her book when I came in.
"Hello, love. Have a nice evening with Jacob?"
"Yes, I did," I said quickly. I felt a slight rush of blood to my cheeks. If Mother saw it, she didn't react. She didn't question me further either, which left me half-relieved and half-frustrated. I wasn't sure if I wanted to bury this night deep in my heart where no one else could see it, or shout about it from the housetop.
I walked back toward my room, passing the den where Father was sitting at the piano, flipping though a book of music. He looked up. Ugh.
Images swirled in front of my eyes before I could sweep them away with a scrap of a song or a bit of poetry. Jacob's eyes, dark and soft, very close to me. His warm hand in mine. A trill of a soft tune he had hummed as he held me.
Dad smiled.
"Would you like to come in and play with me, Renesmee? I found a duet that I'd like to try."
Not especially, though I would on any other night, Dad. I sighed. Maybe it would be better to get this over with on my own terms than to suffer the prolonged awkwardness of having it picked piece by piece from my mind over the next few days. He smiled even more broadly.
My father's "duets" weren't really meant for two people to play on a piano. This particular music was an orchestral score by some flowery Romantic composer. But we liked to take pieces like these and adapt them, transposing the all the keys to concert in our heads as we went along and playing the whole score at once—we had fast fingers. Dad took all the low brass and woodwinds, with the cello and bass parts, and I decided to play the higher instruments. Side by side, our fingers flew across the keyboard as our eyes darted across the score. Dad was fastest, sometimes hitting dozens of notes simultaneously, and even occasionally reaching over to strike one of my keys if it looked like I was going to miss it. Though we played it accurately, the music sounded nothing like it was supposed to; we were more interested in the challenge.
If a stranger had passed by us playing together, he would have thought my father and I were brother and sister. Twins, even. I was a little under seven years old, and looked as a human would look at seventeen. We had very similar features, yet there was something in his eyes that attested to his true age, and I always felt very young compared to him.
As we finished the piece, I stayed quiet.
"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want me to hear, dear heart. I always try to stay out of your thoughts," he began.
But I knew it was no use.
I reached toward his face, putting my palm on his cheek. He could already see and hear my mind, but it gave me more control and made my thoughts clearer for him if we were connected this way.
I ran through the memories of that evening, putting selective emphasis on the parts I thought suitable for paternal eyes.
The race we ran as the sun was still shooting shafts of red light through the trees—the gentle stream we stopped at—the ensuing water fight—Jacob disappearing for a moment, and then running back and almost tackling me with his huge wolf paws-his sloppy pink tongue licking the drips of mud off my face and hands. I skimmed through his silly antics until the last minutes before sunset, when we ran to a favorite grassy knoll to watch the sun fall below the horizon. I remembered how I buried my hands in his soft fur as I leaned against his massive flank. He touched my knee with his wet nose. As it grew dark, I put my head down on his warm shoulder and watched the familiar stars come out one by one. He hummed contentedly for an hour or so, and then with a playful warning bark, he asked me not to look as he phased and dressed behind me.
"But you're a softer pillow when you're a wolf," I complained. He laughed. I loved that laugh.
"I'll change back in a few minutes, Ness. I just wanted to talk to you for a little while."
"About what?"
"About us," he replied serenely. A little too nonchalant not to arouse suspicion. I waited for him to continue, but he outlasted my patience.
"What about us?"
He was quiet for a moment, thinking. A far-away owl hooted softly. When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
"How old do you think you are, Ness, in human years?"
"Probably about seventeen or so physically," I replied.
"Did you know your mom met your dad when she was seventeen?"
"Yes, I did know that, come to think of it."
"Well, you know I've always loved you, Ness. When you were still young, I felt like I had another sister. It made me happy to watch you learn and grow. You were such a freakishly smart kid, I was always proud of you.
"But you've changed. Especially this last year. You look at me differently than you did then, and that's changing me."
It was true. The summer before this one, I had suddenly grown out of Jacob as a playmate, and he immediately turned into a best friend. He had already finished his degree at Washington State—Geospatial Intelligence, with a minor in Arabic. He told me he was training to be a CIA agent, but I knew he was joking, even when I was four years old. Jacob would never leave me, even to pursue a thrilling life of intrigue. This past year he had been taking online classes in comparative literature, the same classes I was taking for my first degree. I couldn't go to school in person yet, because I was still maturing too quickly. So Jacob became my classmate, and he enjoyed it because I did.
"Nessie, I've always wanted to be with you, to be your best friend. But lately…I…could I ever be more than that to you, do you think?" He looked at me with his dark eyes, waiting for a response.
Yes, he could. Dad, he could be so much more to me. My father looked at me as we returned to the den, searching through the things I had shown him. I don't know what I was asking from him. His permission? His blessing? To do what? I already knew Jacob so well, asking if I could go out with him seemed ridiculous. I knew I was free to make choices like that on my own anyway. But Jacob was still quite a bit older than I was, even though he hadn't aged a day since I was born. I wasn't sure what was appropriate in our situation.
"What should I do, Dad?" He had a faraway look in his eyes as he turned back to the music on the piano, apparently to turn the pages absently, but I knew better.
"Well, as far as custom goes, this isn't a normal case to begin with, Ness. You are older in some ways than your mother was when we met, though you haven't seen much of the world."
This wasn't entirely true. I'd visited every continent by the time I was five. But I could see what he meant. I had only lived seven years, and most of those were away from people—I would have caused trouble for our family if anyone had discovered my accelerated development. I felt like Miranda in Shakespeare's Tempest, growing up isolated and innocent on an island.
"Do you love him?" my father asked.
"Yes." It scared me how much I loved him.
"Then don't worry. I think you should hold off on marrying him for at least another year—" he tweaked one of my ears as I made a face at him, "But I trust you both. Jacob is wonderful for you; I've always supposed you would end up together."
The memories I had kept back from my father swirled in my mind as I got out of my street clothes and took a shower. As I tucked myself in for the night, in my head I was back on the knoll.
"You don't have to worry about it being weird, Ness. I can wait forever for you," he told me, after I had paused to consider the question he had posed, "Or, it doesn't have to be like that at all, if you don't want that."
There was a palpable mask around those last words—very controlled, as if his world depended on saying them believably. But I knew my Jacob. It would probably kill him if I ever didn't want to be with him.
"Jacob, I do want it to be like that," I said, very quietly, "I want to be closer to you. I just…I'm not quite sure how to go about it…" Has anyone ever been sure how to go about it? How does it work, moving from friendship to love? I was used to being honest with Jacob; I could tell him anything, and he never thought I was silly. "Would you help me figure it out?"
He stood up, beaming one of his Jacob smiles, offered me his hand, and gently pulled me to my feet. He didn't let go of my hand as he looked up.
"It's so clear tonight," he said, his eyes reflecting the gleaming stars, but I wasn't sure he was talking about the sky above us.
He looked back down at me, and I suddenly felt like I had never seen him before. His eyes sparkled as if they had caught the stars he had been looking at. I was so lost in them, it took me a moment to register when he let go of my hand and gathered me gently in his strong arms.
"Renesmee Cullen, I will love you forever."
I dreamed about our first kiss that night. It was softer than the grass on which we had been standing. It was inevitable, like the fated beauty of the final lines of a sonnet. It rang through us like cathedral bells. Joy resounded stronger and stronger, until I had opened my eyes thinking I had felt the earth move beneath my feet. But everything had been still. Surely this joy, silent mover of heaven and earth, was what set my mind reeling; was what first set the earth wheeling—back in the beginning—when even the stars were new.