Chapter 11: It was Loaded

"It's perfect, Bella. Thank you." Charlie grins down at the new lure and sounds like he really means it. When he looks back up at me, I think he might not just be thanking me for the Christmas present. Maybe it's too hopeful to think that he's recognizing that I'm seeing him through rock bottom and how fucking hard it's been, but he's doing so well here. It's hard not to hope.

Especially on Christmas.

"You're welcome, Charlie," I murmur, feeling self-conscious and hating myself a bit for this hope that will in all likelihood bite me in the ass when Charlie gets out of here and goes back to the booze.

I fiddle with the new locket hanging on a long chain around my neck, thinking of the picture that resides inside with both Charlie and I smiling, me missing my two front teeth, his mustache free of grey.

"And you like it? Like the necklace?"

I nod because it's true. I really like it. I like it too much.

"How did you manage to find the perfect thing?" I ask, trying to lighten the mood. "There is no way Jake and Billy could have pulled this off."

"I have my ways. And actually, I had my eye on that long before... well." He looks around at the bright but sterile room where several other families are gathered around several other patients. The Christmas decorations are somewhat depressing, but this place seems to be so good for my father, I won't speak a word against it.

"Thanks, Dad." I say again.

"I love you, Bells."

Not crying is a real struggle for both of us, and I get out of my chair to give him a quick hug. Each embrace and each visit gets a little bit less awkward. Each time he apologizes I believe him a bit more.

Overall, it's been a good month.

"So," Charlie says, wiping at his own eyes when I sit back down in the chair facing his position on a love seat. "You headed to the Black's?"

I nod. "Going straight from here: I promised Rachel and Leah I'd help cook."

"Rachel's in town? With the whole brood? That ridiculous surfer husband of hers?"

I nod again.

"And Leah? That would be Leah Clearwater?"

"Yeah."

"Why will she be there?"

"Well, her mom is working. And Seth went to Seattle to stay with their dad but Leah hates his new, hot young wife so she's staying in town," I reply, offering the same explanation Jacob gave me when he asked my permission to invite his girlfriend to Christmas Dinner, a meal that is traditionally a strictly Black/Swan affair. It was rather nice of him to get my blessing and although the afternoon will probably be weird as hell, I'm glad she'll be there. It's not like I don't have someone too, and Edward is already planning on sneaking out after the Stanley's go to sleep. It shouldn't be long, if the alcohol rumored to be involved in their own traditional celebration is to be believed.

"Her mom works here now," says Charlie, fiddling with the ends of his mustache.

"Really," I ask, looking around. "Mrs. Clearwater? I thought she was a nurse in Forks?"

"Not anymore. And she's not Mrs. Clearwater anymore."

Why Charlie feels it necessary to remind me of the end of that marriage after I've already mentioned Mr. Clearwater's hot new wife is a mystery, one I can begin to solve after the holiday. Right now everything is too good and my hope is too big for me to go out seeking out anything that might disturb the fragile peace created by Charlie's decision to do rehab over jail.

"We three Kings of oar in are," sings Lead Clearwater. Her head lolls onto my shoulder and I can't stop giggling.

"Those are definitely not the words," state the reasonable voice of Jacob Black from the front seat of the Rabbit where he carefully navigates through rain and darkness towards my empty house.

"Smoking on a rotten cigar," I sing in reply.

"What the fuck?" interrupts Jake.

"It was loaded..." sings Leah.

"It exploded!"

"That is the end of our song!" we sing together, holding out the last note long past the point of moderation until Jake is yelling at us to "shut the fuck up." We do so but can't manage to stop laughing.

"He's such a Scrooge," I inform Leah, feeling much drunker than I actually am. This is the first time I've had any booze since Charlie went away and normally three glasses of wine wouldn't have this effect on me, but Leah's intoxication is infectious.

"Scrooge!" she shrieks.

"What a Scrooge," I say, shaking my head sadly.

"We are full of the Christmas spirit back here. Back the fuck off, Ebenezer."

"And here I was worried you two wouldn't get along," mutters Jake with his entire cranky sobriety. "Oh, what a fool I was."

"Ebenezer," I repeat. "I like that word. Ebenezer. Ebenezer. Ebenezer. The more you say it the less it sounds like a real word."

Leah and I then progress to repeat the name Ebenezer over and over until we pull into my driveway.

"Okay. Okay," says Jake. "We're here. Out you get, Swan. I want my girlfriend back."

Leah takes my face between her hands, her dark eyes glassy from booze and laughter. "I like you," she says.

"Aw," I reply, completely pleased and flattered. Despite knowing each other for years, we never quite bonded until tonight. I think we both came into this thing with an intense desire to prove Jake's worry ridiculous. "I like you too."

Leah then gives me a smacking kiss, right on the lips.

"Hey!" shouts Jake. "I stayed sober to drive you two on home and this is how you repay my sacrifice?"

Laughing hysterically, I pull away from Leah to kiss her boyfriend on the cheek. Leah crawls into the front seat while I go about the arduous task of figuring out how the doors handle works.

"Thanks for a lovely night," I say as I step out into the rain. "Merry Christmas!"

"And a happy New Year!" replies Leah just before I shut the door and sprint up my front steps. I turn the door handle and don't think about how it opened without being unlocked. I flick on the lights and have to blink eighteen times until I'm sure that I'm really seeing what I think I'm seeing.

"Merry Christmas, babe," says Edward. He is sprawled out on the stairs in only a pair of green boxer briefs and a red box stuck to his forehead. "Wanna unwrap your present?" he asks with an inexplicable American accent that is remarkably spot on.

I stare at him for another few seconds, frozen with shock, until I double over with laughter. It rips through my gut and hurts my chest in that most delightful way, making breathing impossible in that way that is so unique and too pure with complete hilarity.

"Really, Bella," Edward says, huffing. The mostly-English, sorta-Argentine accent is back and he is annoyed.

I glance up to see him still lounging on the stairs, arms crossed over his lovely, bare chest.

"Don't you like your present?" he asks with an over exaggerated pout.

His facial expression sends me back into hysterics.

"I'm going to put a shirt on!" he threatens without making any move to get up.

Somehow, despite the big, deep, full body laughter, I manage to find my phone in the pocket of my coat.

"You can't laugh and take a picture!" he sputters, incensed.

"Hold still," I manage. "You are going to look even more ridiculous than you already are if you keep scowling at me." I keep taking pictures as I speak and chuckle. "Oh, that was a good one."

"Bella!"

"You are perfect, Edward," I say, grinning at him as I fill my iPhone with more pictures. "Ridiculous and beautiful and perfect. Now give me your best sexy face."

He glares at me and then sticks his tongue out and contorts his face into something truly weird.

I lose it all over again.

"Bella!" he yells again. "If I give you an actual sexy face will you promise to stop laughing?"

"I will promise to try."

And in response Edward smiles at me. The curve of his lips is subtle and his eyes light up. I wouldn't characterize the expression as particularly sexy, but all that inexplicable love he has for me is so obvious.

I take ten more pictures because that look is by far the sexiest one he could make.

The phone goes back in my pocket and quick as I can manage it; I am crossing the foyer and straddling his lap on the stairs.

"Beautiful," I say kissing him gently, chastely. "Perfect." I snap the elastic of his underwear and Edward laughs. "Ridiculous," I murmur, running my fingers through his hair and stealing his big red bow.

He opens his mouth to protest but I cover it with my hand before he can get a word out. I press my lips to the back of my own hand, feeling his lips move against my palm, just like that strange kiss we shared all those months ago when I was attempting to live by some sort of moral code.

With my free hand I place the bow on my head.

"Wanna unwrap your present?" I say in my best English accent. It is a much worse effort than Edward's but he doesn't seem to mind. From behind my hand his eyes are smiling.

Edward pushing my coat from my shoulders and I release his lips so I can kiss him for real.

The kiss is wonderful, the very best present, but I only get to enjoy it for a few seconds before we are very rudely interrupted.

"Holy shit!" I failed to notice the sound of the front door opening behind us, but Jake's booming exclamation certainly gets my attention. I scramble around, my elbow nearly catching Edward in the jaw as I frantically remove myself from his lap. On unsteady legs I stand between Edward motionless, mostly naked, on the stairs, and Jacob motionless in the doorway.

"What the hell, Jacob?" I snap, deciding to go with my inclination to be annoyed rather than guilty and embarrassed and so totally fucked.

Jake doesn't know Edward, doesn't know he's just walked in on me dry humping a student currently enrolled at the high school where I am a teacher. I owe Jacob no explanations; although at some later date I will give him one.

A highly abridged one that includes my history with Edward in South America: but not his current status as student.

Yes. This is going to be okay. This can work. No one is going to be fired, even if Edward is panting and half naked on the stairs while I have a big red bow in my hair.

What a picture we must make.

"Uh." My former boyfriend continues to stand frozen and god smacked in the doorway. I put my hands on my hips, trying to take up as much space as possible to block Jake's view of a mostly naked Edward, who very wisely has thus far elected to remain seated on the stairs. "What the hell is this? Everything okay, Bella? Who is this guy?"

"A surprise Christmas present," I reply. "Was there something you needed?"

Jake's face is bright red. He won't look me in the eye. "You left your purse in my car."

"Oh," I say, feeling like an ass. "Right. Well, thanks for returning it. I'll, uh, talk to you later."

"Right. Yeah. You two... whatever." He drops the purse in the hallway and leaves, pulling the front door closed behind him.

"Oh, fuck," I mutter, collapsing on the stairs beside Edward. I press the heel of my hand to my chest. My heart is flying and I didn't notice how terrified I was until the moment ended.

Beside me, Edward laughs.

"It is so not funny!" I reply. "You do understand what happens if we get caught, right?"

"So that was the ex, huh? He's monstrous. Whatever were you thinking?" Edward asks, scowling at the closed front door now.

"Don't you do the jealous thing! I just spent a lovely day with his girlfriend and she made a real effort to befriend me and if Leah is capable of that then you really should find it in you to not be jealous at the very least," I say, closing my eyes as I will my heart to calm the hell down. Beneath me the stairs are uncomfortable, but I simply do not have the energy to move at this moment.

"What will you tell him?" Edward asks, reaching out to hold my hand. "Surely, there will be questions."

"Well he knows about you, sorta. He at least knows I was with someone in Chile. I'll just tell him you flew to town to surprise me. We'll just leave out the whole part where you live here and you're a student."

Given my exhausted, freaked out, slightly intoxicated state, this seems highly feasible.

"And if he sees me in town and puts it all together?"

"We'll deal with that if and when it happens: Which is hopefully never."

Edward laughs. "Excellent plan. I approve."

"Which means it's probably a terrible, reckless plan."

"What else could we possible do?" Edward pauses, his grip on my hand tightening for a moment. "Stop?" he whispers.

"No," I reply too quickly. "No, not that. We'll just deal when we have to."

Several moments later, we have to.

While Edward and I lounge on the stairs, attempting to recover from the trauma of nearly being discovered, the front door slams open.

"Holy shit, Bella!" Jake says again, pointing a shaky finger at Edward. "I recognize this kid! He's the exchange student! Care to explain why you are making out with your exchange student on Christmas?"

"Oh fuck," I reply, letting my head fall back to the stairs.

"How long do you have off?" Edward demands the moment his face appears on my laptop screen. "For Christmas, how much time?"

"Little over a month, why?" I ask, grinning. Whenever Edward asks me that we end up going on some amazing adventure.

"I'm coming there. For the holiday. Can I? Please, Bella. Can I?"

I stare at him, trying to figure out what his expression means through the not so great internet connection. Even pixilated and grainy, he looks desperate, pained, and decidedly not Edward-like. His tone is equally troublesome.

"Yeah," I say, slowly. "I mean, yeah! Of course! Definitely come for Christmas. We are just hanging out here. No plans."

Edward takes a big breath and his shoulders fall. I can practically feel the tension leave him from across the continent. "Good," he says, utterly relieved.

"Is everything okay?" I ask, wishing I could hold his hand.

"Yeah, yeah. It's just… Carlisle is coming. For Christmas. And I just can't be here, Bella. I can't do it." His voice is so small and I want to crawl through the computer screen.

"Oh, right. Well, I'm really glad that you'll be here. Your mom is okay with this?" I ask.

"Probably not. I best go tell her now. Sorry to cut our chat short, but I want to get it over with," he murmurs, hands running through his hair. On my screen, his face freezes, making his features look distressed. Frozen on my laptop, Edward has aged decades.

"Okay," I whisper.

"I love you, Bella."

"I love you, too."

Technically, Rosalie lives with me. She's on the lease, pays the bills, and has a key, but all her nights are spent with Emmett in the apartment next door and her ever-expanding wardrobe now occupies her spare room over there.

Three days before Christmas she finally gives up the game and lets me have the big room, turning my much smaller room into a closet.

"Merry Christmas, Swan," she says as the four of us eat breakfast. "And Edward, your present to me can be to help with the moving."

"Is this what we are doing today?" asks Emmett. "I thought we were going to the beach."

"After," insists Rose.

Edward grumbles about spending his holiday doing hard labor without really meaning it and Rosalie has to smack him upside the head several times when he "accidentally" ends up with a handful of her panties.

No cooking is done at the apartment next door, mostly because Rose has sweaters stored in Emmett's oven, so at the end of a long day spent shuffling around our belongings, Rose and I work shoulder to shoulder in my kitchen, going simple with pasta and red sauce.

We pile into my living room, Edward sitting on the floor at my feet for lack of other options with Rose and Emmett squeezed onto the loveseat.

"Too bad we don't have a door connecting these two apartments," says Emmett.

I roll my eyes. "Yeah, walking outside is a real struggle."

"I'm just saying," he replies, shrugging. "We basically share these two apartments. It would be nice."

"But it's only for the rest of the school year. I think we'll survive," Rose says.

I stare at my bowl of linguini with great determination. Edward loves me, I love him, and thinking about next year, when he flies off to England and my contract ends is just not something I'm prepared to do, especially on Christmas.

Next year is this dreaded thing, a faraway dark cloud that I'm refusing to acknowledge, even though time is running out.

I'm supposed to go home.

I absolutely don't want to go home.

"You don't want to stay here next year?" Emmett says, breaking my unexpressed vow not to think about it. Against my legs Edward goes still and wonders if he is just now considering the horrible next year for the first time. It's a very Edward thing to do, living in the moment, and I've been trying to be more like him recently, but Emmett, with his fucking questions, is ruining it.

"Hell no," says Rose, grimacing. "I love Chile, I do. But I can't do another year at this rich as all fuck school where the principal essentially parades around her 'gringas' with our white skin as some sort of status symbol and we get reprimanded for befriending anyone considered lower class than us. It's weird and I am over it."

"Oh," says Emmett looking a little stunned.

"I'm thinking China. Vietnam. South Korea. Have you ever done Asia?" she asks. Emmett perks right up now that it seems likely that he'll be included in whatever future Rosalie decides on, if he wants it.

"No," he replies, all excited now. "I want, to though. You want to keep teaching English?"

"Totally," she replies, nodding. "Just need a different continent after this school year."

"And I'm invited?"

For maybe the first time since I met Rose over a year and a half ago, she blushes. "Yeah, you are invited. I mean, I don't know how it would work. If you could get a work visa or something, but, yeah. If you want to come, you are invited."

They look at each other and it very much feels like we are intruding on too intimate of a moment. The whole situation is made that much more uncomfortable by the sudden tension in both Edward and I. We don't look at each other, don't acknowledge it, but I can feel it curling around us. We are so new, so fragile, and this looming future where continents will separate us is not something we are capable of withstanding.

So I go back to pretending it doesn't exist, that we will go on indefinitely the way we are, seeing each other over every holiday and every break.

I reach out, running my fingers through Edward's messy, too long hair, and he relaxes back against my touch.

Christmas morning is just Edward and I. We don't bother getting dressed as we sit facing each other on my bed. Behind my back is his wrapped present and suddenly I'm feeling shy, thinking of where we were last year, our four day sexathon followed by my first trip to Argentina where I found out that he was seventeen.

Never in my most farfetched dreams did I conceive such a future with the boy from the beach.

I tell him I'm terrible at gift giving and watch as he opens his gift of books. He says he's great at gift giving and he watches me unwrap books also.

I love him a little more, somehow.

We feast on empanadas and drink eggnog, a delicacy I'm amazed Rosalie even managed to find. We watch A Christmas Story in Spanish and it doesn't matter that I can't speak the language because I have so much of this movie memorized. Edward laughs as I quote all my favorite parts.

It might be the best Christmas I've ever had because it's quiet and this is a family I made.

"Hey, one last present," says Edward as Rose and Emmett get up to trek back to their own apartment.

Rosalie crosses her arms over her chest, impatient to get Emmett alone now that she's decided she wants to do him. Emmett looks around for some gift left still wrapped.

"What are your plans for the next couple weeks?" he asks.

"Nothing," says Emmett, shrugging. This is nearly always his answer.

"Nothing," I agree, my skin tingling in anticipation of the latest adventure Edward is undoubtedly on the verge of suggesting.

"I was going to do some lesson planning," says Rosalie.

"Rose!" shouts Emmett.

"Oh come on!" I groan.

Rose laughs. "Fine, what am I doing next week, Edward."

The boy I love grins and it's so easy to forget that he couldn't stand to spend a few days home with his father.

"Patagonia," he whispers like it's something sacred.

"Patagonia," we whisper back.