Chapter 1
Bella sat on the counter, kicking her feet as Edward constructed a sandwich on the opposite counter. Constructed was the only appropriate word; he was still learning about this whole cooking thing, and apparently thought perfect symmetry would be important to a growling stomach.
"Edward," Bella whined, drawing out the 'r' , "Do I get to eat that thing or what?"
He turned back to his work and answered, "Almost . . . all right." Quickly the plate was set on the dining room table and he helped her jump down from the counter. "Now you may eat."
"I don't know. Now I feel guilty biting into your masterpie—"
"Just eat," he ordered, collapsing gracefully into the chair beside her. It was still always a bit unsettling to eat in front of him, but at the same time unavoidable. The options were to suck it up and pretend he couldn't hear the saliva smacking in her mouth or to be around him less, and no amount of embarrassment could make her wish for the latter.
"Is it any good?" he asked after a few silent minutes.
"It's very possible that this is the single most amazing turkey sandwich I have ever—"
"Just eat," he repeated, once again interrupting her with an eyeroll. She laughed and took a particularly large bite only to choke and wince as she swallowed a lump much larger than her throat wished to accommodate. "I've seen six-month-olds handle solid foods for the first time better than that."
"Please. You've never been around a six-month-old."
"I've seen a baby before, Bella."
Bella gulped down milk to smooth the scratches the crust had left inside her throat before teasing, "So that's what you do in your free time? You watch babies eat?"
"I watch one sleep, too."
"I'm not a baby, jerk."
He snickered, "You're right, Bella. I'm sorry. Because clearly you are an adult woman perfectly capable of articulating an eloquent—"
"Oh shut up already. Let me eat my sandwich in peace."
"Yes, ma'am!" he joked, rising to refill her milk glass. Both knew his close attention to every aspect of her care frequently made her uncomfortable, but she couldn't really complain about it, and until she told him to stop he didn't plan on it. Probably not even then. He had been human once too, of course, but so much time had elapsed since then, and he had become so entirely entrenched in his current way of life, that basic human needs fascinated him. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, temperature – all so rudimentary to Bella's life, and it delighted Edward each time it was in his power to alleviate a need. He was getting better at cooking. He could refill her milk glass. He could tuck her in at night and grin at her innocent mumblings as she slept. He could make sure she had a jacket when the weather turned or now, with the onset of summer, he could press his cool fingers to her neck when her cheeks flushed after being outdoors for too long. She was so fragile, and in the grand scheme of things he felt helpless to keep her happy and safe, but these things he could do. These things he wanted to do.
Bella simply couldn't tell him no with any force at all. And she couldn't help but feel delight at his warm grin whenever he did something that pleased her. Besides, she could let him care for her now if it would leave him more open to the whole becoming-a-vampire plan . . .
Edward was in the middle of saying something about osteoporosis and bone fragility when Esme suddenly flounced into the kitchen and tossed a heavy binder onto the table beside Bella. Her sandwich, which had been momentarily set down, toppled over and Edward frowned. Maybe he should stick a toothpick in it next – god, no, Bella would impale herself on it. The girl had an eye for the things she shouldn't notice, but when it came to the obvious, such as a toothpick jutting out of her sandwich, it was like she just closed her eyes and hoped for the best. Honestly, it was miracle the girl had survived as long as she had.
"What's this?" Bella asked as Esme claimed the chair Edward had been in. He grinned at the delighted monologue running through Esme's mind. There was no doubt as to her role in the family, but it was rare she got to do much in the way of typical mothering. But now one of her children had brought a girlfriend home and the requested package had finally arrived from the Denalis, who had been keeping it hidden safely away until the Cullens were settled.
"This," Esme beamed, leaning forward and running her fingers over the Cullen crest stenciled onto the cover, "is our family photo album." Bella sat up straighter and sent Edward an excited smile before leaning in closer to Esme. He shook his head and set her glass of milk down. If she thought there would be embarrassing photos, she was going to be disappointed. But perhaps she was simply curious.
"I didn't know you had a family photo album. I didn't know you even kept any pictures . . ." She remembered when school photo packages had been passed out. Alice had giggled that Edward's expression hadn't changed in them since 1954, and probably she was right. Even knowing Edward had been seventeen since 1918, that he had been a teenager during the Great Depression, during World War II, during the sixties and the seventies and the god-awful eighties – well, she couldn't imagine that having any effect on his appearance. Edward in a bomber jacket? Edward in round rose-colored glasses? Edward with a ponytail or a tie-dye shirt? No, she could only see Edward as he was now, timeless, anachronistic to a degree.
"We don't keep many," Esme explained, opening to the first page as Edward took a seat on Bella's other side and glanced at the album with minimal interest. "None of us really think or care to remember a camera, of course, and photography has advanced so much . . . And it wouldn't do to have a bunch of black and white photos that are clearly from the fifties showing the children at their current ages. But sometimes someone will remember a camera, and sometimes we decide to keep one."
"So these are the select few," Bella summarized to sound like she was listening. Really her mind had already left the kitchen and she could only focus on the photo dominating the first page, one of the parents of this wonderful family. Carlisle and Esme's wedding photo. It had yellowed and faded to a fuzzy, soft focus, so much so that Bella could almost convince herself it wasn't them. They weren't smiling, but still somehow happiness exuded from bright faces, Esme's eyes as dark as Carlisle's were light.
"1921," Esme explained. "I had just been changed but we couldn't wait any longer."
"You're beautiful," Bella whispered, awestruck. Esme was always happy, but Esme on the day Carlisle took her as his wife was ethereal.
The next page had three photos. Emmett and Rosalie smiling, arms around each other in the middle of the Roman Forum. Carlisle and Esme in St. Peter's Square. Carlise, Esme, Edward, and Rosalie standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. In this last one, Carlisle and Esme were grinning, but Edward and Rosalie both looked like pissed teenagers annoyed at their parents for dragging them along. It was such a typical tourist photo –except that the photo was black and white and faded, the edges scalloped like in the photos from Renee's childhood albums.
"You look furious," Bella teased.
Edward made a face, "Emmett was being obnoxious. He had never been to Italy and about drove us all crazy. This was . . . 1948?"
Esme nodded, then added, "Carlisle and that fountain are about the same age."
"Wow." Bella leaned closer. 1948. She was looking at a photo of Edward, Rosalie, Esme, and Carlisle, taken by Emmett, in Italy only a few years after the second world war had ended, and they looked exactly the same as they did now. Edward's hair defied the decades. It was all surreal.
The next page had five small snapshots, still with the scalloped edges, still black and white and fuzzy. Alice and Jasper holding hands and standing in the surf of some beach. Emmett, Rosalie, Jasper, Alice, and Edward standing in between the columns of the Parthenon. Esme and Carlisle behind the wheel of a boat. Emmett, Jasper, and Edward crouched on the bow of the boat, all shirtless. Rosalie and Alice wearing broad-rimmed sunhats and lounging on a porch.
"Greece, 1977," Esme explained.
There didn't seem to be any chronological order, though at least photos taken in the same place were on the same page –rarely were there more than three photos from any single trip. Prague, Paris, London, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Monaco, Glasgow, Warsaw, Cape Town. Except for changing clothing styles and backdrops, the pictures looked like they could have been taken over the span of a couple days. It was one thing to be told that the Cullens didn't age; it was another entirely to look closely at a photo of Edward writing on a colorful wall in the eighties and not see any physical difference in him at all, though almost twenty years had passed.
"The Lennon Wall," Edward explained when Bella pointed to the photo. "It's in Prague. That was – well, students wrote complaints about Gustav Husak's communist regime on it in the beginning. It's been repainted a couple times but still people write on it, even once communism ended there. It's actually more impressive now than it was when this photo was taken. Languages and images and quotes and lyrics from all around the world, and just . . . the goodness of humanity is on that wall."
"What did you write?"
"Noisy neighbors make quiet corpses." Bella gave him a hard look and he laughed, "All right. I put a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire."
"Who was he?" Bella bit her lip at Edward's amused grin and tried not to let it hurt her feelings. After all, everyone couldn't be a know-it-all vampire. Yet.
"He, Bella, was a French poet and writer who spent a good deal of time with the artists of Montparnasse in Paris. Maybe you've heard of some of his friends –Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso . . ." Esme and Bella both rolled their eyes at his condescending but he just laughed. "He was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. Coined the word 'surrealism.'" He paused, his face hardening just the slightest bit. "He died of the Spanish influenza in 1918."
The same year and the same disease as Edward and his parents. That wasn't lost on Bella, but she wasn't sure how to respond. What are the odds? Small world? I'm sorry about that whole influenza epidemic thing?
Instead she pressed, "What was the poem?"
"'Come to the edge.'
'We can't. We're afraid.'
'Come to the edge.'
'We can't. We will fall!'
'Come to the edge.'
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew."
"It was 1987," Esme added, pointing again at the picture, and this time it was Bella's turn to give Edward a teasing smile.
"You know that's the year I was born, don't you, old man? I was a baby and you were off protesting communist regimes in Eastern Europe . . ."
And it suddenly occurred to Bella how odd it was that this didn't seem odd to her at all. Surreal, yes. Impressive and enviable, all that Edward had lived through. But she just accepted that because, hey, he was a vampire, and they live forever. No wonder he thought she was strange!
The same thought occurred to Edward, who watched her face as she returned to the album, leaning in to study the pictures on the next page of Alice and Jasper in California in the seventies. But really, Bella reasoned, it made sense. Now having Edward in her life, she couldn't imagine a world without him. Life before she was born was hard to fathom anyways, and in some ways she felt as though life hadn't really begun until she met him. It was easier to just think of him as having always existed than to try and equate his 1901 birthdate with her 1987 one. "One hundred and four years old" was harder to wrap her fingers around than "has always existed." It naturally followed then that there had been no life before him, for anyone. Maybe in the history of mankind 1918 wasn't that long ago, but to her it felt like the beginning of time because that's when Edward had become what he was, thus beginning the cycle of events that, inevitably, led her to be seated right now between him and his adopted mother, flipping through the pages of an album that spanned eighty years with the same unchanging faces.
Unfortunately, there weren't half as many photos as Bella had expected by the size of the album. Midway through, the vacation photos ended, and from there began the catalogue of wedding photos. Alice and Jasper had only been married once, and Bella thought she looked surprisingly normal in her wedding photo from 1952. Beaming and buried beneath a mountain of a dress, of course; even in the black and white photo, she seemed ready to burst from the frame while Jasper sat happily but calmly beside her. Next came the stream of Rosalie and Emmett's photos, one from each of their weddings, which even now made Edward and Esme shake their heads. Seven in all – actually, Bella didn't think that was too ridiculous, considering they had been together for:
"Seventy years now," Esme mused while Edward quickly insisted, "Don't let Rose hear you say that. She'll want an anniversary party and another wedding."
Well, and actually, Bella couldn't really imagine even going through all the fuss for one wedding, much less seven . . . The idea made her shudder. Edward didn't understand it, but took it as distaste for the idea of attending any sort of big party. He smiled and kissed her shoulder as Esme turned to the next page, his brain already skipping ahead to the blank pages following the last two photos.
Edward, circa 1932, turned sideways on the bench of an upright piano to smile at the camera in a way most uncharacteristic for photography of that time period. Still, he looked happy and beautiful and Bella felt her breath catch in her throat. Ageless, timeless, flawless . . . really, was he hers?
"What?" he pressed, his chin resting on her shoulder. She had remained silent, but he heard the jump and then flutter of her heart. His cool breath wrapped around her neck as the rumble of his voice vibrated in her chest. Or perhaps that was her humming heart. Bella really wasn't sure.
Telling him how breathtakingly beautiful he was, though, seemed ridiculous. She couldn't find the right words to adequately explain what the smile did to her, even from a fuzzy old photo. In all the other photos he had looked sad or lonely, bored or dejected. But here was the crooked grin caught on film, immortalized right before her very eyes. If she tried to describe what that photo did to her, the words were going to catch in her throat and he'd make some joke about baby's first words, probably
"It's just kind of strange to actually see you smiling," she teased, taking the safe route. "What was so special about that day that you would actually demonstrate happiness?"
Edward took the teasing in stride, though, and answered coolly, leaning forward to look more closely at himself, "That, Bella, was my first day playing my first piano. Esme bought it for our parlor on a whim and I just sat down and started playing around."
"Were you good right away?"
"No, not right away," he insisted, though Esme argued that he hadn't been bad at all. "But it just felt right." He bit his tongue before his next thought slipped out. Bella could tease him about never smiling in photos, but the truth was that he didn't really give another smile like that until seventy-three years later when an accident-prone angel fell asleep in his arms. That, too, just felt right.
Esme took it upon herself, however, to pat Bella's hand and confide, "No one was exaggerating, Bella, when we told you what a change you've brought about in—"
"Mom," Edward whined. Esme and Bella both laughed, the blood rushing to Bella's cheeks as she turned the page to avoid the real-life version of Edward's dazzling smile. He quickly leaned in to kiss her cheek and she was forced to face him, blushing and grinning like a fool. Surely she couldn't be the cause for so much happiness in him. The piano made sense, but her?
Edward tapped the photo that stood alone in the center of this page, and Bella followed his finger only to groan and cover her face. Prom.
"What? Why are you groaning?" he laughed, poking her playfully in the side. It was a beautiful photo, he thought. Alice had taken it of the two of them, Bella the very image of perfection, her cheeks rosy and her eyes glazed over from the overwhelming preparation process. All Bella could focus on was the boot encasing her leg. Granted, that had been a result of a vampire stomping on her and not of her own clumsiness, but still. Her one contribution to the Cullen Family Album and she was an invalid.
"I think it's a sweet photo," Esme cooed, her hand resting lightly on Bella's arm.
"Anyone looking at this album would see you beautiful Cullens with your exotic travel destinations, and then they come upon clumsy Bella Swan with her leg in a boot," Bella pointed out with a sad shake of her head. It was a toned down explanation of the despair she felt. Edward's beauty dominated the photo. She looked even plainer than usual beside him – but that was okay, because no one would notice her anyways, unless to snicker at her boot.
"You were absolutely perfect," Edward insisted, his lips again pressing to her shoulder. Esme had tucked the photo in there that very morning, and watching her add his Bella to the album had given him an intoxicating thrill. Each action that cemented her further in his life did that to him, sending his world turning over in ways he had never expected, ways he couldn't begin to fully comprehend. The idea that once a piano had brought him joy was laughable because it paled in comparison; it served now as a distraction and an outlet for his overwhelming love for this silly girl beside him. He loved his piano. But he loved Bella far more. And now she was in the family album, another way in which she had joined the Cullen family.
He watched her face fall in disappointment when the rest of the pages proved blank, but her frown made him smile. Esme, too, glowed and matched Edward's thoughts completely.
Your wedding photos, she sighed internally, smiling at him over Bella's head. He nodded. It would be difficult to get Bella through a single wedding with her distaste for the spotlight, he knew. But it would happen, of that he was more sure of than anything except his love for her, and when that happened he personally would see to it that every single blank space in the family album was filled with pictures of her. Rosalie could cry all she wanted over it; his Bella deserved the tribute.
"I wish there were more," Bella bemoaned, gently closing the book and running her fingers over the Cullen crest much as Esme had done. "I mean, think of all the things you've lived through . . ."
Esme agreed, "I know. Granted, we have to be careful not to keep proof lying around of our inability to age, and at the time we always think to ourselves that it won't matter, not having paper photographs."
"Photographic memory," Edward reminded, tapping his forehead, just in case Bella had forgotten it from their long list of unfair abilities.
"Still, it is such a wonderful walk down memory lane," Esme mused. "And the photos we do have are invaluable to me. Just think, years from now, when you look back at the prom photo—"
"I will still groan and hang my head in shame," Bella laughed. Even as she said it, though, she felt a part of her heart lift simply at the fact that such a photo existed: physical proof of her and Edward. She didn't care so much that she was in it, and actually the photo would probably be much improved if she had simply ducked out of the frame. But the idea of having a photo of Edward positioned on her nightstand that could watch her fall asleep on nights he was away hunting . . . she thought momentarily about asking if she could make a copy of the piano photo, but then got an even better idea.
Esme wanted more photos.
Bella didn't want to be in the photos.
She could take the photos.
There was always at least one Cullen missing from the photos, the one standing behind the camera. She could be that Cullen. She hadn't ever really been into photography before, but she'd never really tried either, and anyways, no one could take a bad photo of the Cullens. Maybe she'd even actually be good at it. That could be her thing! She would be the photographer Cullen.
Labeling herself a Cullen, even in such a flippant mental way, brought the heat back into her cheeks. Edward noticed this and traced the blush lightly with his fingertips.
"What are you thinking, love?"
What if she was awful? She didn't want to tell him her idea just yet because the idea of failing in front of him was mortifying, even if she wouldn't be able to hide her idea from him for long. Angela was into photography, though. Maybe she could see if Angela would help her out a bit, teach her the basics, show her the ropes. She could wait until he went hunting again and test the waters to see if she showed any talent at all . . .
Biting her lip, Bella teased, "I was thinking how lovely all the wedding photos are. Esme and Carlisle. Jasper and Alice. Rosalie and Emmett." Edward felt his chest swell and held his breath at where this was going. "You and your piano."
He had her pinned against the wall, tickling her sides mercilessly before she even knew what hit her.
