Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise, I just use their creations to have my wicked way with them. No copyright infringement is intended.
Thank you to my kickass beta-team, Jadsmama and LadySharkey1 for whipping this chapter into shape.
Lesson learned: never go bike-shopping with a bunch of guys
6. Bike
A couple of weeks later and I was holding my own on the track, not exactly running around like a pro yet, but not getting breathless embarrassingly soon either. I was improving. And in the wake of my improving stamina, I was finding it easier and easier to spend my time with Edward. Sure, things were still a bit awkward at times, and I really didn't like the waking up at the ass crack of dawn or the running until I felt like puking part of our friendship but the more I hung out with him, I was beginning to find that he wasn't so bad after all.
Besides, hanging out with him was proving to be very beneficial for my general health and fitness.
And I liked it.
Even the spinning was starting to become slightly less torturous, though it still left me a panting, sweaty mess after every session and begging for mercy throughout. It was just that I didn't think I was going to die anymore.
Which was progress.
But my improving stamina wasn't the reason for my good mood that day – well not the only reason. I would finally be buying my first racing bike, which meant I would take one huge leap closer to the Alp. I was quite ridiculously excited, even if it meant I had to sit through dinner with my sister, her boyfriend and Cullen first. Guess who came up with that plan?
Not me.
The only saving grace in this scheme of Alice's was that mom had been unable to tag along, what with she and her husband being too busy sucking up to the rich people of Seattle to be bothered with her offspring buying bikes to pay their respect to the man she pretty much hated.
As I slowly started to get used to the idea of dad no longer being there to talk to whenever something funny or really shitty happened in my life, I found that I still felt no big inclination to get in touch my either my mom or my sister; which was kind of strange and not what I would have expected to happen.
It's not like we had ever been close or anything. Apart from the mandatory visits I'd been forced to put up with until I turned eighteen, we didn't really keep I touch all that much. Alice and I had always been fire and water – neither two would ever mix without the one destroying the other. My mom had tried to love me like she did Alice but I don't think either one of us had been fooled. She was like Alice in pretty much every aspect of her character and what's more she hated my dad and the easy way of living in small town Forks which I'd come to know and love so well, which pretty much meant that she and I had nothing to talk about.
When mom and dad got divorced, she somehow managed to get custody of both Alice and me – though I guess with dad's job and the irregular hours that came with it, I couldn't really blame the judge for ruling in her favor, even if I'd come to really resent the verdict.
Who I did blame, though, was mom, for taking me all the way to Seattle with her, and away from dad, which was something that happened completely out of the blue for me. One day I was coming home from school, a tentative play date with one of my friends penciled in for the afternoon, the next I was starting first grade in a different school in a large city that seemed to swallow me whole.
And dad was nowhere around to smile at me, pat me on the head, and tell me everything was going to turn out just fine, like always, every time I'd felt so completely freaked out in the past.
Looking back on it I suspect mom believed that as long as she got me away from my dad's influence, she might still somehow succeed in brainwashing the tom-boy out of me or something, because as soon as we moved into our new home, she started to slowly but surely, take all the stuff I loved away from me.
Lego's and toy cars were replaced by dolls with huge eyes that scared the crap out of me when I got home after that disastrous first day at school.
My comfy clothes suddenly all developed holes or something else that made her throw them out and she would then buy me all these dresses and skirts in colors that hurt my eyes, which felt like sandpaper and made running and playing an even more arduous undertaking for an accident-prone girl like me.
When, one black day, she decided to also take away my fishing rod – the one dad had given me for my sixth birthday when he finally deemed me old enough to sit next to him on the dock and shut up for long enough to actually catch a fish – I'd had enough.
It took two weeks before mom finally ceded and let me go back to my dad. Two weeks of screaming fights, destroying all the clothes and scary toys she'd bought for me and threatening to take my rampage to school and really make a spectacle out of myself.
I never looked back.
Well, apart from the required holidays and summer visits which mandatory in the new custody arrangement.
Mom and Alice…they just weren't my kind of people, I guess. And the fact that they were my family didn't mean so much to me that I felt I had to endure them just for the sake of appearances. Besides, dad and Grammy Swan had always been more than enough for me when it came time to giving me the love and attention a child deserves.
Thinking of them made me miss the both of them even more.
I could remember coming back from school to find Grammy Swan hunched over the stove in our little house, the fragrant smell of whatever stew she was cooking in a huge pot on the fire greeting me even before I'd opened the backdoor, only slightly overpowered by the scent of freshly baked soda bread coming from the oven underneath it. We'd sit and drink tea, her listening while I prattled on about insignificant stuff that had happened at school until dad came home, his eyes crinkling as he spotted us and his body still smelling of cigars and the outdoors as he hugged me.
Those were the best days of my life.
The good mood I'd started my day out with dampened as the melancholy of so many happy childhood memories with my dad started to take post; the remembrance bittersweet as I thought about how amazing my dad had been, taking care of me and the town, at the same time.
He really was a superhero to me – though without the cape and the weird spandex outfit.
But remembering was a bittersweet thing, of course, since at the end I always ended up getting hit by that big old hammer again as I realized no more happy memories would be added.
They were both gone.
All that remained of those happy memories was little ole me. And I was barely holding on as it was, with school, work, training and a void so huge it seemed to suck all the happiness away weighing me down like Atlas' burden.
I was a wreck by the time I was supposed to meet the rest of the gang for dinner at some rib house not far from campus; my mood shifting from grief to determination about every five minutes as I held onto the promise I'd made to dad on his deathbed.
I was worn out, both emotionally and physically from my run with Cullen earlier that day, which didn't exactly make for good company. Still, no Swan ever backed out of an agreement. So seven thirty found me strutting into the restaurant, dressed in clothes comfortable enough to go shopping in while still dressy enough to not make it look like I'd crawled out of a dumpster or something.
I could barely resist the urge to duck down into some other booth as I finally spotted my sister, almost straddling her boyfriend as she fed him peanuts like he were some sort of trained monkey, while Emmett and Rose looked on with thinly veiled fascination.
Poor guy! To be emasculated like that in front of a whole room of people who'd probably went to the same school as you did! If it had been me, I would have slowly garroted her with my belt, cramming what remained of the bowl of peanuts into her mouth as she slowly chocked to death. Did I mention I was in a foul mood?
Alice only looked up as I slid into the booth, her brow arching in distaste as she cast a glance at what I was wearing while muttering the coolest of 'hellos' before going back to what she was doing before I joined them.
Alice had never cared much for the way I was dressed, not that she was the one to talk. I mean, look at her! She was dressed in some horrible Pepto Bismol-colored thing that was probably supposed to pass for a dress but simply lacked the fabric to be labeled as such, and that appeared to be painted on her body.
On Rose an outfit like that would have looked great because she wore it with the attitude to match. On my sister it just screamed 'please take advantage of me', which Jasper seemed to be doing to the fullest.
"Do you know that the average peanut dish in a bar is covered in fecal germs?" I casually remarked after putting in my order for a beer. "So while the two of you are engaging in your foreplay over there, you're actually feeding your boyfriend peanuts with a side order of raw sewage, sis."
Alice glared, getting off of Jasper's lap as her boyfriend's face started to take on a slightly greenish hue. Yep, that's me, sis: mood killer extraordinaire. Try to see it as payback for when you kissed the boy I had the hots for, back in the summer of 2006, just to prove that guys are more into girly girls.
"Charming as ever, I see!" I jumped a little at the sudden sound of Cullen's voice right by my ear, the big smirk on his face telling me that was exactly the effect he'd been going for when he snuck up on me.
Glaring quietly I scooted down, biting back some bitchy comment about why he had to sit on my side of the booth when there was plenty of room next to the love birds. Then again, who wanted to sit next to people when you knew that at some point during the evening they were bound to start feeling each other up under the table?
"Did you get Ben to let us in?" Jasper wanted to know after he and Cullen had bumped fists in greeting.
Cullen nodded, ordering a drink when the waitress came by with my beer. "Actually, he was pretty eager to help when I told him why we were coming."
"He'd better be!" Rose snorted, sipping some concoction that had half a fruit bowl sticking out of it. "From what I gather you're about to spend a fortune in his store. If it were me, I'd bend over backwards to accommodate you."
"It's a bit more complicated than that," Jasper answered quietly. It was only then that I noticed how he and Cullen hadn't laughed at Rose's remark like the rest of us had. "Ben actually lost his oldest daughter to cancer three years ago."
"I met him at a Livestrong event a couple of years ago," Cullen took over, his voice as sad as all of us were feeling; sad and embarrassed for making fun of something so serious. "He's been my go-to man for all my cycling gear ever since."
"I'm sorry, Cullen," Rose muttered, her hand clenching around mine in support as my mind was jolted back to dad and the way he looked on that last day.
"You didn't know," Cullen spoke, the waitress dropping by our table again with his beer just in time to chase the awkwardness away, especially when Emmett decided to start ordering ribs since apparently he was 'ready to start eating the table' if he didn't get fed soon.
The atmosphere only mellowed out again by the time our food was put on the table; everyone, apart from Alice, digging into to the ribs and fries without worrying about getting their hands dirty while my sister looked completely out of place, eating her salad with a face like she'd just swallowed a spider.
If that's what it takes to be a skinny bitch, I'd rather stick to my size ten, thank you very much! I just shook my head, crunching down on another bite of meat that just seemed to fall from the bone the minute your teeth made contact with it, a bit of barbecue sauce trickling down to my chin.
"Here, let me get that." Cullen chuckled, his hand ducking underneath mine – which were still holding onto my ribs for dear life – as he wiped the sauce away with a napkin. Over our weeks of training together, we'd grown into something dangerously close to friends.
I hadn't forgotten the aftermath of gay-gate yet but through working out side by side, I had started to trust his judgment and even looked forward to our sessions, even if our conversations remained far too safely superficial to ever start calling him my friend.
"Thanks!" I chuckled, looking up to find the whole booth staring at the two of us. "What?" I scowled, my cheeks heating up in embarrassment as I realized what they were all thinking. "I had fucking barbecue sauce on my chin. Mind your own damn business!"
"O-kay," Emmett sang, waggling his eyebrows at me as he snatched the last of the ribs from the plate.
Throughout the rest of dinner I tried to stay as far away from Cullen as our close quarters allowed me, feeling not as triumphant as I would have thought when he appeared to be doing the same. Strange.
We said goodbye to Rose, who had a birthday party to get to after dinner and headed over to Ben's bike store, which turned out to be huge. He did just sell bikes but about everything that went with riding them.
I smiled, watching Cullen and Ben greet each other with big smiles and friendly pats on the back; Cullen's attitude immediately shifting from the slight tenseness I'd noted at the diner and even before when they were having coffee to the laidback person that spent almost every morning running side by side with her. I guess sports looks good on him, huh?
My eyes wandered around the store, taking in all sorts of bikes as Cullen made his introductions and only focusing back on the group when my ear started picking up all sorts of jargon. And the worst thing about it was that all the guys – including Emmett – started looking really serious, like they were curing cancer or something, as they sprouted off one ridiculously incomprehensible word after another.
I wandered off after about five minutes, when their discussion about the right sort of 'crank set' to tackle the Alp started to look more and more like some sort of pissing contest, with everyone – again, including Emmett who, as far as I knew, had never even touched a racing bike – claiming their opinion was the only sane one to go with.
After about fifteen more minutes of waiting for them to be done comparing dicks, I was really starting to grow from merely frustrated to angry. And in my rage I found one very unlikely ally.
Alice.
She'd tried to melt into the little huddle of amateur bike technicians but after about twenty minutes of acting like she had a fucking clue about what they were saying, she finally gave up and started wandering through the haphazardly displayed bikes, doing that thing where someone pretends to know exactly what all the stuff can do, when, in truth, I doubted she even knew which end of the bike to sit on.
After a solid fifteen minutes of sheer entertainment, watching my sister bluff her way through a bicycle store, she started to looked more bored by the second, her eyes narrowing as they flashed to the little huddle of puffed up idiots at regular intervals until, finally, they connected with mine.
I gave her a little understanding nod, rolling my eyes at the guys as I made my way over to her. "Are you as sick of this as I am?"
"God, yes!" she groaned. "We've been in here for almost an hour by now and so far I haven't even parked my ass on a bike yet! They never told me that buying one didn't actually include touching one."
"Do you think that if I pushed this one,-" My fingers gingerly closed around the handle bar of the first bike in a lineup that looked an awful lot like a game of dominos, "one of them will finally pull their head out of their ass long enough to see what's going on?"
"Don't even think about it!" And just like that, the Alice I knew and didn't love was back, looking at me like I was some kind of slimy slug stuck underneath her shoes. "If you make a spectacle out of us, I swear I'll get Mom to yank your funding for this trip."
Did she just actually threaten to have me thrown out of a trip that was supposed to be just me and dad's ashes? "Like I need Mom's fucking money anyway!" I sneered, fighting the urge to strangle her. Or better yet: throw a bike at her head. "This isn't some kind of road trip, Alice, even though God only knows you apparently think it is since you started to randomly invite people to tag along. This is about Dad; about doing what he always dreamed of doing with me but never got round to because that fucking disease killed him!" I drew breath, my whole frame shaking with anger as tears started to pool in the corners of my eyes. "You may have shanghaied yourself into this trip but that doesn't make you our fucking leader, Alice. You'd do good to remember that."
"Okay," the still foreign voice of Ben Cheney, owner of the store we'd been hanging out in for the past hour, spoke behind me. "I think this would be a great time to start looking at some bikes."
We split up into two teams; Alice and Jasper following Ben's assistant to the back of the store while Emmett and I trudged on after Ben and Cullen to the side to look at some options.
After that, we were outside again in half an hour, all four of us in possession of a bike that would be custom made to our own size and specifications and having learned a very valuable lesson – well I did, anyway.
Never go bike shopping with a group of guys ever again.
Thoughts?