Disclaimer: I don't own anything Twilight but I do own a Marvin the Martian bag that claims to be very very angry.

Chapter 9 – Edward

When Bella Rounds the Bases

Masturbation is my friend. I was doing it pretty much every moment I was alone. When I woke up in the morning my hand was already on my dick.

It was bordering on unhealthy.

Hell, it was way past unhealthy and sprinting into therapy territory.

I ached for Bella, for her touches and kisses and unintentional eye fucking. Everything about her turned me on and sent me into a heightened state of arousal. It was almost painful.

But I was willing to take the pain because it was juxtaposed with the absolute joy of being in her company and being the person she was choosing to spend her time with.

Why she had chosen me I would never fathom, obviously impregnating her was a factor but even before that when we met that night in the club I don't what had set me apart from any other man in there. A long line of guys had been building up their courage to speak to her and had eyed me with total hatred when I bought her a drink and she flicked her long dark hair over her shoulder, exposing the soft white skin of her neck as she laughed at some lame comment I had made.

She had obviously been a fan of my bad jokes and stuttering attempts at conversation.

Our ice skating date had started rocky because I am an asshole. Sitting outside the rink all of my old desires had flooded back and I was left with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, still feeling the guilt of dropping Kate, in more ways than one, all those years ago. Things had since worked out for the better for both of us, but I could never quite shake that guilty feeling and the thought that I had quit.

I wasn't a quitter and I certainly was not brought up to be a quitter. The children of Carlisle Cullen did not quit. Failure was not an option. Yet I dropped skating like a hot brick once I realised that I wanted to be a doctor. I think that was why my Dad hadn't gone completely fucking postal, I was going to be following in his footsteps. I didn't tell him then that it was never my intention to be a surgeon like him. That painful conversation came much later.

Once I realised Bella was thinking that I wasn't ecstatic with the date I shook my idiotic head and focused on her for the rest of the night. The way she was pinned tight to my side by my own hand, the girl is an accident waiting to happen, was one of the highlights, much like the making out against her car like we were teenagers.

This is why I was jacking off in the shower only minutes after she drove away.

I finally achieved my release under the warm rain of water and let the steam build in the room, my forehead resting against the cool tile as I tried to bring my breathing under control.

I wasn't going to be able to hold out much longer.

She had no idea how much I wanted her again, to feel her body flush against mine without the barriers of clothing, to be between her legs and to lose myself in the sensation of her surrounding me. I groaned and my dick twitched again but thankfully didn't demand attention again so soon. I've never been so happy for the refractory period in my life, without it I'd have cock burn.

I wrapped a towel around my waist and padded through to my room. It was sparse, I'm a guy who doesn't really give a shit about decoration. Whatever design flair was evident in my apartment was there because my Mom had insisted she decorate before I move in. I placed a few restrictions on her but beyond that she had free reign and because of this I lived in a place with walls painted colours like wheat and barley. She thought it made it warm, but I had seen warmth in the decoration of Bella's house and all my place said to me was that Mom didn't really know me well enough, probably due to my own pulling away from them over the past few years to stand on my own two feet.

My answering machine blinked at me when I passed so I pressed the button and listened while I dried off.

"Hi honey." Think of the devil. "Your Father and I were talking and we realised that we haven't seen you for a while. I know that work is hard, but you are past due a visit to the homestead and some maternal TLC. Give us a call back darling, we miss you."

World's Worst Son Award goes to...

It had been too long since I saw my parents and I really did want to make the twenty minute drive to see them and indulge in some of my Mom's oatmeal raisin cookies. My mouth salivated at the thought of them alone. I don't know what she puts in them but they are addictive.

There was a risk involved in seeing them. My Mom has some sort of supernatural sense when something major is going on in my life, I know she would pick up on the baby in some way or another in an instant. If I were to visit them I would need a buffer. Once again I would need my little sister.

X~X~X

"Please Alice." I wasn't above begging, if I was in front of her right now I wouldn't feel any hesitation in dropping to my knees and clasping her hands in mine, giving her the look she patented as a child that I can't pull off half as well.

"This has got to be worth something." She's evil.

"I have nothing to offer, and you know that."

"Bella."

"You've met her already, and from the sounds of it you talk to her more than I do." I sniped, a little put out at the speed with which Alice had made Bella a friend.

"Don't be snarky, Edward, otherwise it's a definite no."

"Please?" I drew the word out and rolled my eyes at myself.

"I want you to meet her people."

"What?" I heard Jasper ask the same question with the same tone in the background.

"You need to get to know her people, her friends who are her family, because if it all goes well you'll be in their lives for, well, life."

"Slow down there Alice, we've just started dating."

"You can lie to yourself, but don't you dare lie to me big brother." We were both silent for a beat before a sigh from my end let her know I was submitting.

"Fine."

"Did you know it's her birthday in just over a week?"

"No, how do you?"

"I asked her, to put it in my planner." She informed me in a voice designed precisely to make me feel deficient.

"Alice, I'm growing tired of this conversation now, will you and Jasper come to Mom and Dad's with me or not?" There was rushed whispering at the other end of the phone and I started hitting the back of my head against the pillow under it in frustration. "Yes or No?"

"Fine, yes, we will. But you owe us."

I hung up and smacked my head back into the pillow again. It never used to be like this, it never used to be a military operation of underhanded deals when arranging to visit our parents, but in the years since our fairly idyllic childhoods something had shifted in Dad and it made him difficult to be around. We loved him, he loved us, but there was a perpetual look of disappointment he wore whenever he saw us that made us not want to be around him, which made things worse of course. Mom tried to compensate, but she knew that as we pulled away from him we had to pull away from her too, as much as it killed all of us.

X~X~X

Alice and Jasper were already at the house when my taxi pulled up. I wasn't late on purpose, my shift had run over and I had called Bella after. We talked for half an hour, she was upset about some guy called Royce but I couldn't spend as much time as I would have liked on the subject because she changed it abruptly. I could feel my chest tightening and my fists clenching when she talked, but she quickly explained he was something to do with Rosalie, who sounded terrifying, and her wedding. I rolled my neck to try to release some of the tension that had settled there when I thought she was actually talking to me about some other guy.

I made a mental note to make the exclusive talk with her happen pretty fucking quickly. I had assumed that we were, but she perhaps wasn't clear on the issue. The emotions that assaulted me just thinking about her with some other guy frightened me because it made me aware that I would be capable of murder. It made me sick too, that someone else could realise that her hip was perfectly sized for their hand to fit around.

The tension came back and I had to walk into my parent's house in need of some sort of outlet for it.

Not the best start.

My Mom greeted me as soon as I passed the threshold with a hug, her warmth going some way to releasing me from my thunderous mood. Her hands paused on my back, feeling the tension, before gripping my shoulders and pushing me away to appraise me. I tried to smooth my face, to make it free of any emotion other than happiness at seeing her but she saw it at once.

"What's wrong?" She asked in a whisper, conscious that my Dad would be aware of my presence soon and we wouldn't get a chance to talk.

"Rough shift at work." I half lied, because it had been a beast. There had been more failures than successes and that left a mark on a person's psyche, that's why I had to call Bella as soon as I was done. I had wanted her voice to soothe me, but our conversation had done anything but.

"I'm sorry." She hugged me again, not buying a word of it but knowing that I needed some sort of comfort. "Alice and Jasper are in the kitchen with your Dad." She led the way after giving me another searching look, one of the ones Moms perfect when you are little and you think can see right down to your soul.

Jasper looked like a rabbit trapped in headlights when I walked into the kitchen. Dad was obviously asking either an inappropriate or awkward question. Alice laughed and I saw immediately that it was fake because her nose didn't do that crinkle thing.

"Don't be silly Dad, Jasper is more than capable of providing for me, not that I need it, because he's a successful writer and not a beatnik, as you so charmingly phrased it."

Dad stood up and greeted me with a handshake and a nod, the soft odour of whiskey drifted across the space between us and I understood what the evening held in store for us. We were going to be subjected to the what are you doing with your life? line of questioning. It didn't matter that I was rounding on thirty and nearing the end of my residency, that Alice had a financially and personally rewarding livelihood in her boutique and that Jasper was not only a published writer with a three book deal but had been a practicing lawyer up until that point.

If you add that on top of the trust funds that Alice and I had thanks to Nana and Gramps Cullen then we were downright spoiled by life.

Most of the evening passed in the same vein. Dad continued to drink whiskey, Scottish, while Jasper and I guzzled glass after glass of Jack. I kept pretty quiet, preferring to listen as Alice ran argumentative circles around our increasingly wasted Father. For someone who appears a complete ditz she is actually pretty damn clever. When I hit eighteen I had to do an IQ test, when I say had to I mean I was pretty much forced to sit it because he insisted. Then when Alice hit eighteen she had to do it too. He took great pleasure in telling me that she had a higher IQ than I did, expecting it to cause some sort of petty rift between us, but it just made me proud of her.

Sometimes I tried to pinpoint when this monumental change in him had happened. I think it was around my eighteenth birthday, but I could never be sure. In my head it seemed he went to bed one night as the loving and supportive father he had always been and woke up changed, he woke up bitter. To his credit he mainly chose to focus this on me and I was happy to let him so long as Alice came away relatively unscathed, but she saw it, she resented it and as a result she began to resent him.

"So, Edward, what's new in your life?" Dad rounded on me as I stuffed another cookie into my mouth.

"Not much, don't have much time for anything except work really." I don't lie a lot, I don't like liars, so I reasoned this was merely an omission of information rather than a flat out lie.

"I can still make you a surgeon." This was a well worn argument.

"I don't want to be a surgeon, and I don't want your help."

"Don't be proud, the Cullen name can open doors for you."

"I don't want doors to open for me, I want to be the one to open them for myself." I retorted, only to be ignored once again.

"You are being pig headed, boy." I bristled at being called boy but before I could react I felt a hand tugging on my arm to distract me.

"I'm going back into law." Jasper slurred in a move to change the subject. He must have felt the grateful I was projecting at him because he winked quickly and braced himself for the onslaught of opinions Carlisle Cullen held on lawyers. Jasper was usually drunk when we were here, it was the only way he could cope with the conflict. He never told me explicitly what he felt coming from my parents but I knew it took him a couple of days to recuperate after the visits.

X~X~X

"Have you and Bella had sex again yet?" Jasper asked me in a deceptively innocent voice. I eyed him suspiciously and gulped down my drink before pouring out a new one. We had managed to escape from my Father fully intact and to celebrate we decided to continue boozing.

"You tell me." I replied. He pretended to concentrate on me but Alice slapped his arm lightly and laughed, her nose crinkle finally making an appearance.

"Oh please, even I can feel the pent up sexual frustration rolling off Edward. Which totally skeeves me out, FYI." She had abandoned her notion of a "proper grown up woman's drink" to take shots with us, leaving her with a slightly pink face and an even more pronounced inability to sit still.

"It isn't something I'm doing on purpose." I retort, unable to stop the impulse to stick my tongue out at her.

"Well, it is, you made the conscious decision to not sleep with the poor girl."

"Poor girl?"

"You have no idea." She cryptically replied, leaving me thinking about how much, exactly, do they talk about when I'm not around.

"Aren't you a little weirded out?" Jasper drew my attention back and I was nonplussed.

"About what?"

"Well, your kid is in there. So when you have sex your dick is gonna be, like, right there."

"There's all sorts of wrong in that statement."

"Exactly! It is all sorts of wrong. Don't you worry that it'll be a little like…?" He reached over and started poking me in the forehead with his index finger. It really fucking hurt.

"Jesus!" I backed away.

"Jasper Whitlock!" Alice was sitting staring at him shocked. I probably had the same expression on my face, not once had I thought about it but now that Jasper had put it in my mind I knew I wouldn't be able to get it out of my head. "Edward, please be rational and do not listen to my fucktard of a husband."

"Um, but, I don't want to hit my kid on the head with my dick." My eyes widened and I shook my head as Jasper copied my movements. Alice's head dropped down into her hands and she shook it slowly at us both.

"Right, well, unless you're King Dong and Bella's cervix is the Holland Tunnel I don't think you have to worry about it. You are a doctor, for Christ's sake."

X~X~X

Sun tried to force its way through my eyelids seconds before the word fell away from me and I crashed down, my head cracking on something hard and unforgiving.

This most definitely isn't my bed.

"Edward?" The sweetest voice broke through my hangover and I cracked open one eye, wincing against the bright light and barely able to focus on the face haloed by brown hair above me.

"Morning." I croaked, my hand rubbing at the spot that had cracked off what I know knew to be the tiling in Bella's vestibule.

"Um, morning. So, whatcha doin'?" She asked me in a sing-song voice, barely able to keep the amusement from seeping into her tone.

"I don't know." I told her honestly, trying valiantly to stop my brain from exploding as I tried to right myself and stand up. "The last thing I remember is doing shots with Alice and Jasper to try to forget about seeing my father." I finally managed to open both eyes and focus on her properly. She was looking beautiful, from the tip of her quiff to the soles of her shoes, she was impeccably put together and obviously on her way to work. A small frown ghosted over her face at the mention of needing to get drunk to get over my father and I remembered that she wasn't aware of the shitty relationship we had with him.

"I thought, I mean, from what you said before he seemed like a good guy."

"I have two fathers, Bella, the one who supported and loved me through childhood and the one who I have to deal with in the present day."

"Oh." Her arms slipped around my body underneath my shoulders and she pulled me into a hug that told me everything I needed to know. She would never push for the details and she would wait patiently for the stories to come, because I would do the same for her with her Mom. I would wait my entire life to earn her favour. "Edward?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry, but you need to throw your ass in the shower." She pulled back and grinned up at me, her hands settling at my waist. I lifted my arm and sniffed, immediately recoiling from the smell of stale alcohol and sleep sweat. She laughed at me, her fresh minty breath teasing me and igniting the desire to kiss her. "I need to go to work."

"I guess I'll head home." I yawned, turning my head to make sure my morning breath didn't wilt her impressively stacked hair.

"Why don't you have a sleep and shower here?"

"You're sure?" I wanted nothing more to sink into her bed again and I'm sure she saw it in my face because she smirked.

"I trust you." She kissed the corner of my mouth, pulled her body away from mine and gave me a little wave. The front door had been left open for me, I moved into the doorway and leaned against the frame to watch her walk to her car and drive off. I couldn't help the thought that it seemed natural. I could see myself waving Bella off to work every morning.

It was strange being in Bella's house without her being here. I felt like an intruder once I closed the big front door behind me and walked through the silence. As always I looked at the pictures as I passed, my mind making up stories behind the moment captured on film. I wondered if any had been her boyfriend. I wondered if any had been someone she handed her firsts to. Her first kiss, her first grope, her first orgasm, her first time, her first love. Any of the guys in these pictures could have been the recipient of any of those firsts and it made me want to smash them into a million pieces because I would give anything to have been one of her firsts.

I sprinted up the stairs, away from the photographs and the urge to destroy them. My head was throbbing in time to my heart beat. For the first time since I had known Bella I wasn't desperate to find myself alone to jack off. I was too hungover to masturbate. A sad state of affairs.

Besides, it would be majorly creepy of me to stroke my dick and come all over her shower.

I was more than a little happy that she trusted me enough to be alone in her house. It meant more to me than she could have imagined because I was fiercely private and would never dream of leaving someone alone in my apartment. Even when my Mom was decorating I made sure I was there at almost all times and my most personal of possessions were locked away. I don't know what triggered my trust issues but they were most definitely there.

The thought of leaving Bella in my place alone didn't fill me with the same dread that I felt when I thought of someone else in there, because there was a level of intrinsic trust that had formed. I had left Irina alone in my apartment once, she and I met in college and I had thought I could trust her, only to come home to her rifling through my closet and reading the journals I had been keeping since I was nine. She was already up to when I was seventeen when I found her, she had obviously been reading them for a long time prior. The irony being that she merely had to ask and I would have told her almost anything. Our relationship disintegrated soon after that.

Bella's shower was one of the fancy ones with a hundred different buttons and levers that all did something different and you needed to be a safe cracker to figure out how to use it correctly. After fiddling with some levers I finally managed to get water spraying down. I finger brushed my teeth and gargled with some mouthwash as steam filled the room quickly and I stripped even quicker than that, stepping under the cleansing water I allowed myself to succumb to my hangover.

Stupid Jasper and his drinking games. No one can say how much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood four times after drinking like we did.

What the fuck is a woodchuck anyway?

I washed my hair with her shampoo, the honey and oat smell making my stomach churn happily as it had before. Then I smothered my hair in her conditioner just for shits and giggles, leaving it in as I decided against using the white puff thing to clean my body and poured some lemon body wash into my hands and soaping myself up, deliberately avoiding any untoward thoughts because I knew how wrong it was to jack off in here.

I don't know how long I stayed in the shower but by the time I worked out how to switch it off again and step out of the cubicle the room was thick with swirling steam. My head had cleared a little and an almost overwhelming tiredness threatened to consume me. I had no idea how much sleep I had managed to get but whatever the amount was it was apparently propped up against Bella's front door and that makes a man's muscles ache.

I had no clean clothes and I really did not want to rifle through Bella's drawers to retrieve something to wear. Most likely I'd only find flimsy girl nightwear and I wasn't the kind of guy to try on his girlfriend's underwear. That thought reminded me that I still wanted to talk to Bella about the exclusive part of our relationship. I really wanted to be able to call her my girlfriend and be sure that she was actually mine, in a non-caveman sense.

Who are you trying to kid?

My subconscious scoffed at me but I ignored it and tried to convince myself that by tucking myself into her bed naked was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

The combination of Bella's smells surrounding me made me wish she was here with me, wrapped up in my arms and pressed up against my body. Her bed smelled sexy, smelled of her without any artificial scents, as awesome as they may be on her skin. The sheets were cool on my shower heated skin and I soon fell into a deep sleep with her scent in my nose.

X~X~X

Soft skin brushed against mine, making me leave the haze of the dream world and become vaguely aware that the world wasn't actually made of liquorice and bubble wrap. My fingers automatically curled around the soft skin being offered to them, the unconscious need to touch was too powerful to resist. A body pressed against mine, scraps of fabric scratched against my skin and I pulled it closer to me. Fingers that didn't belong to me came to rest on my chest and hair undulated softly under my nose in the rhythm of my breath.

"Hi." She whispered when I kissed her head with a happy little groan.

"Have I slept all day?" I asked through a yawn. I did not feel rested at all.

"I skipped out of work early." She admitted quietly. "I couldn't concentrate when I knew you were in my bed."

"I'm naked." I stupidly stated.

"I noticed." She giggled against my bare chest. "What were you dreaming about?"

"Liquorice."

"Is that some sort of fetish?"

"What do you mean?" I looked down at her amused face until she quirked an eyebrow and nodded her head towards my quite obvious erection. My head thumped back on the pillow and I closed my eyes. "That's because I'm in your bed." I lifted the quilt quickly and let it settle back down. "And you are almost completely naked."

She was trying to kill me. She was wearing matching bra and panties in a deep blue colour that made her skin look luminescent. My fingers tightened around her hip when she pushed her body into mine.

"Yeah, about that…well, I'm not going to apologise." She sniggered at me.

"Well, I'm not going to do anything about it." I sniggered back at her, refusing to allow my third date rule to be thrown to the side. Even though I wanted to throw it to the side, beat it into a billion pieces with a baseball bat, melt it down with the heat from the sun, flip it off and call it a motherfucker.

"Really?" Her hands strayed dangerously low, my stomach tensed at her light touch while my mind almost ripped in half trying to decide whether to stop her or let her have at it. Her fingers curled around the shaft of my dick and I had to use every ounce of willpower I still possessed to no thrust into her touch.

"Bella." My tone was warning but my hands had decided to take a holiday from the control of my brain and cupped her breasts, running my thumbs across her nipples over the fabric. "You're leading me astray." I groaned. Her fingers tensed around me before beginning a teasingly slow ascent.

"You said we can't have sex, but we aren't even rounding the bases. You've gotta relent on the bases." She kissed my chest, punctuating her well reasoned argument. "There's still a couple to go before we can slide in for home again. We can have a lot of fun with 2nd and 3rd." Her hand twisted over the head of my dick before travelling back down to the base, her body stretching up until her face was level with me and her mouth covered mine before I could answer.

My mouth opened automatically and my tongue sought hers immediately, my breathing was heavy because her hand was still moving. Up, twist and down. My hips weren't controlled by me anymore, they were thrusting into her grip and I felt her smile against my lips before she sat up and let me go.

My jaw dropped.

"What?" She smirked.

"You started it, you'll finish it."

"So, you agree that there's a whole load of fun to be had with the bases?"

"Yes." I sat up, drinking in the smugness of her smile and the desire in her eyes. I leaned toward her until I was on my hands and knees, my body looming over hers and I continued forward until she was forced back by my actions. She was finally on her back before my mouth dropped to her skin, trailing teasing kisses across her collar bone and following the line of her bra. I brought my lips to her ear. "It has been years since I've had a dry hump." I whispered and she laughed, loud and booming it bounced off every corner of the room.

"Same."

"Take off your bra."

"No please?"

"Do it." I told her, backing off and allowing her room to move. Her hands shook and I revelled in the change. It fascinated me how she could be so confident and self assured to take me in hand and negotiate what she wanted sexually, yet when it came down to exposing herself to me there was hesitance and a shyness that contradicted her actions of only moments ago.

"I quite like you commanding." She smiled, unhooking the bra and tossing it aside no longer shy. My hands cupped her breasts, ever since I touched my first pair of boobs it fascinated me how heavy they felt in my hands.

"I like watching you orgasm." I replied, remembering her face as she writhed and came undone above and below me. My fingers rolled her nipples and her back arched to push them into my hands. "I've been fantasising about being inside you again." My mouth descended and pulled her right nipple into my mouths, holding it gently between my teeth and my tongue flicking back and forth across it until she moaned and pushed her chest harder into my face.

"You don't know how crazy you make me." She groaned, her hands delving into my hair as I pulled her left nipple into my mouth and repeated the process, my other hand massaging her left breast.

"There's a way I can check." I said against the skin that lived in the valley between her breasts. My hand disappeared under the elastic of her panties, my fingers dancing across her slit and getting covered in her silky moisture immediately. I pushed a finger inside her, making her hands clench tighter in my hair causing me to nip at her skin in a growl as fresh blood made its way to my dick.

"Oh god." She groaned as I pushed a second finger inside her, feeling her tighten around me made me remember how tight she felt when I was inside her, how she had clenched and pulsed and felt like nothing I had ever experienced before in my life.

"Take your panties off." I pulled my fingers out, letting them slide up to her clit and circling it before removing my hand completely and wrapping my hand around my painfully hard cock, stroking myself as I watched her wriggle her hips and peel off the blue fabric to reveal herself completely to me. "You're so fucking beautiful." Her skin flushed at the compliment and a small smile appeared.

I had to kiss that smile.

We collided in an explosion of pent up sexual frustration. Teeth clashed. Tongues duelled. Fingers and hips thrust. Thumbs circled and teased.

Our pulses raced in tandem but our grunts and moans escaped at random.

It felt like I belonged in her and it didn't matter which part of me was. Whether it was my tongue my fingers or my dick I felt like it was my one purpose in life. Being a doctor was secondary to bringing Bella pleasure through whatever means possible. To feel her pussy with my fingers was to be as close to perfection as I could be at that moment.

The bullshit I had dismissed my entire life about soul mates and being made for one person was beginning to make sense for some reason. I didn't ever expect to fit one person so completely. Imagine spending a lifetime thinking that you are skeleton key when in actuality you were made specifically for one of those ornate boxes made by blind Tibetan nuns.

My fingers curled and pumped inside her, bringing her ever closer to the edge as she pumped her fist tightly around my dick leaving me seconds away from coming all over her hand.

"Bella." I grunted. "I'm almost there."

"Me too." She gasped, riding my hand. I watched her other hand move to her clit to give her that last push over the edge. I saw her orgasm explode in her eyes. I was used to women closing their eyes when they came but she locked hers onto mine. Seeing the pleasure etched across her face and the release in her eyes I came all over her hand. My groan lost in her mouth just as her moan was lost in mine when we collapsed lips first against each other.

"Fuck." I gasped as she giggled still riding the last tremors making her body shake.

"Third base for the win." Bella said against my lips.

"For the win indeed."

X~X~X

A/N: Bella finally got some naughty touching!

Firstly, thanks to my pre-reader ladyeire3...she knows how awesome I think she is.

Secondly, thank you to all of you who read this, love it and review it...and those who recommend it too :D xx

Lastly, I hope you enjoy this because I am loving writing it.