Hii there. Here's another update. I figured the last chapter was long enough to make up for this one being a bit shorter, but... I'm posting more frequently! Hooray! Thank you all for your wonderful, kind words. A few of you guys made me teary-eyed. Please forgive me for not responding to reviews but know that they (and you) are appreciated more than words.
Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight.
I wanted to be a bitch.
Really.
That grudge-holding part of me that remembered the dozens of times Mr. Cullen had wielded his Sword of Asshole-ness in my presence. If there were ranks of expertise for being a dick, he would be an expert. He could teach classes in the art of being a plain bastard.
But when I'd turn to look at him on that chair during Christmas night, I saw a man who ate his burger with care. A man who had never seen A Christmas Story. A man made with the same blood and tissue that I was. And a man who took fifteen minutes to eat a piece of cake he'd ordered from room service.
I would've swallowed that slice in three bites. Five minutes tops.
But Mr. Cullen, the asshole, wasn't the same one in the hotel room with me. He'd stayed back at the conference room on MSC business. The Mr. Cullen who had sacrificed his Christmas to stay with me had admitted that he'd never seen The Grinch with Jim Carrey either, and kept shooting me these little, itty bitty smiles when I'd stare too long.
Who the hell was this man?
I'd passed out for a while, and when I'd woken up, he was still in the same chair, watching It's a Wonderful Life really quietly.
The good half of me, the one who realized and appreciated the Mr. Cullen who was present, felt terrible. I knew that I needed to make him feel more welcome instead of just staring and looking like I was contemplating murder. Needless to say, it took me a really long time to think of what to talk to him about. We'd never had a real conversation before.
Usually, he told me what he wanted me to do, and I agreed. He yelled, I nodded. He bitched, I rolled my eyes. He moved the world, and I made sure his schedule was in order. Mr. Cullen was kind of like Batman, and I was Alfred.
With my inner bitch screaming in protest, I looked at him after a while and sighed. "What does your family usually do for Christmas?" I asked.
He didn't turn to look at me, instead, he stayed focused on the movie playing. His answer took far longer than I would've assumed but it shouldn't have been surprising. Mr. Cullen was a private person. "We usually have breakfast at my parent's house, and then open gifts in the afternoon." It wasn't until then that he glanced over at me. "And your family, Isabella?"
I thought about them and sighed. If I tried hard enough, I could smell my Mom's fresh cinnamon rolls and the honeyed ham she made every Christmas. "We usually open one present Christmas Eve, and on Christmas morning we open the rest. Then we eat a huge lunch."
The dozen presents wrapped beneath my little, Douglas fir tree appeared in my memory. Damn it.
"Do you—," he hesitated, "have any siblings?"
His answer from me was a nod. "One brother. He's older than me, but he's in the military."
"Is he deployed?" Mr. Cullen asked.
"Yeah, he's in Afghanistan," I sighed again. Looking over in his direction, I caught his eyes still on me. "Do you have any brothers or sister?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Oh."
Those dark green eyes trailed upward onto the ceiling while his jaw twitched. "I always wanted a brother or a sister," he said wistfully.
The admission threw me off guard.
"But my mother had a difficult pregnancy with me, and the doctors didn't recommend that she go through that again," Mr. Cullen offered with a wary, one-shoulder shrug.
"I'm sure your parents loved you more than enough for a dozen kids," I told him.
He smiled, still a distant, tiny thing. "They do."
There was something about the look on his face that showed me a different man than the one I knew so well. It made me forget, at least in this room, all of the negative things my boss had said and done. The innumerable times I'd wanted to murder him. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when my mouth developed dysentery. "I think my parents like my brother more than me," I admitted to him dumbly, regretting my words almost immediately. That was something I don't think I'd ever even told Angela before. It was my dirty secret. "Maybe not."
Mr. Cullen's eyes darted over to mine with a blank expression. "You really believe that?"
I shrugged, embarrassed by the fact that I'd told him something deeply personal to me. Something I'd been so ashamed of for years. Who wants to think that their parents feel that way? No one.
"You have to think that for a reason," he said softly.
I shrugged again, looking at the television like it was something brand new that I hadn't seen a hundred times before.
Minutes later, Mr. Cullen sighed loudly. "I used to wish that my parents had another child so that they wouldn't focus on me so much. I didn't want the responsibility of being the sole heir to the Masen line."
We had officially over-shared. Too much information. Too personal.
I knew without confirmation that the words he had just spoken were his own dirty, deep secret that he'd held in the chambers of his heart for years. I couldn't imagine the pressure he'd been under. Finishing high school early. Knowing that he had to work for a major company. The heir and majority owner of Masen Super Markets couldn't have just been an accountant in the company. They'd probably expect him to take over as director of the board like his father some day. CEO. COO.
The pressure.
The expectations.
It made my chest constrict. I'd never been perfect and my parents had never expected that from me, but maybe that was the problem in my family. Emmett had always been the best at everything. I wasn't and never would be. That knowledge right there was stinging and painful in its own right.
Good lord.
This wasn't what I was expecting on Christmas.
Over sharing with Mr. Cullen.
I looked over at him, and there was a knowing feel between us. What was said in this room, stayed in this room.
After a moment, he picked up the remote and asked, "What movie would you like to watch now?"
December 28th
It'd been three days and we hadn't had a single argument.
Well, he hadn't argued with me.
The day after Christmas, Mr. Cullen had gone back to work using his laptop and Blackberry for communication. I don't know what exactly he'd done, or who he'd gotten to do my job while I was pretty much invalid on the bed. The pain wasn't anywhere near as bad as it had been on Christmas. I could walk around slower than usual just fine with only an ache in my stomach, but my boss' doppleganger—the nice, quiet one—insisted that I stay in bed as much as possible.
Doctor's orders.
I sure as hell wasn't going to argue with that.
Mr. Cullen on the other hand, was bitching at whatever poor person was handling his scheduling and little tasks. "That wasn't what I'd asked for!" he screamed two days before. "If I wanted that, I would've told you to do it," he said another day. All things and words I'd been subjected to plenty of times.
Poor bitch.
He'd come into my room late in the evening, after working all day and running back and forth downstairs to use their business office for printouts and faxes, and who knows what else. I didn't ask questions because I didn't want to bring more attention to my disabled status.
We would eat dinner together, silently. Every hour, he'd ask me something about whatever we were watching, or I'd ask him. That would go on until nearly eleven when Mr. Cullen would tell me goodnight and leave the door between our rooms cracked.
That night, he came in red-faced and tense. I could practically see the steam coming out of his ears after the verbal beat-down he'd given the assistant helping him. From what my detective, also known as nosey, skills discovered was that the assistant had sent the wrong file to the chief operating office for a presentation. The wrath in his voice when he'd found out was tangible even in a different room.
Mr. Cullen plopped down onto the chair he'd taken over, shaking his head while running both hands through his hair. That was my boss. The one who took everything so seriously. The man who vibrated with frustration when things weren't perfect.
"I think every other assistant in this company, besides you, is completely incompetent, Isabella," he huffed. "I don't know what I'm going to do when you leave in a couple of months."
Say… what?
It took us both a second to process what he'd just said. What he'd admitted.
Mr. Cullen had never actually brought up the fact that I'd put in my transfer, that he knew I was trying to get the hell away from him. And it was a sad kind of warped compliment that he'd just paid me.
And then he blinked before looking toward the television with a straight spine. "But I still have time."
I love this guy.
Anyway, just my last reminder. If you want to help out a great charity AND get Soccerward, I'm pretty sure midnight on June 14th is the last night to donate and get that one-shot along with the Bella POV. Mainly, what I have written so far, is pure lemony goodness. We'll see where it goes over the next day. Will I be posting Soccerward on here in the future? Yeah, sure. It won't be for at least two or three months though to be fair to those who donated. Please visit fandoms4specialolympics . blogspot . com if you're interested, and then forward me your receipt if you donate marianazapata at live . com
xo-Mariana