Disclaimer: Characters belong to Stephanie Meyers. Aside from a few obvious parallels to the Twilight universe, this plot belongs to me.
"The body's needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs." – Seneca the Younger, Consolation to Helvia translated by C. D. N. Costa
Chapter 29
For the three days following the death of Bella's father, Bella spent most of her time operating on automatic pilot. She didn't force Edward to have sex with her again—and that was just how she saw that night, too, as if she'd forced him to have sex with her, and she felt horrible for it after what he'd told her about his addiction. But, since she wasn't having sex to relieve her anxiety, she was only managing to get by because she was intentionally pushing herself to the point of exhaustion and beyond. She was simply too tired to be anxious.
Oh, she was out-of-sorts. She was hovering on the edge of black abyss with a lurking shadow right on the edge of her vision. Yet she was too tired to do more than realize it was there.
People noticed that she seemed off.
She told them that she was just working hard.
Which was true. They thought that she meant that she was working hard on her dissertation. But she couldn't focus well enough to even go near it. She was throwing herself into a myriad number of side projects—she cleaned Edward's apartment from top to bottom, she helped one of her advisors rearrange his office, she took over one of Angela's discussions, she organized books for the history department book sale, she walked when she normally took the bus, she photocopied tests for the department secretary, and every time someone asked her if she was ok, she said that she was just tired.
Her father was none of their fucking business. He belonged to her, not them.
And just the thought of mentioning him pushed Bella to the brink—
In fact, it was the only time Bella even thought of crying.
Bella picked up extra shifts at the library and at the data entry center. She was too mentally exhausted to pick up any more tutoring gigs—she wasn't an idiot—but she let it be known that she was on the lookout for more dog-walking assignments.
She was shelving books the day after her father's death, when it suddenly occurred to her that it was all a waste of time. She had been working herself to death to pay for her father's new treatment. And now that he was—
She nearly threw up.
But she didn't go home. The thought of sitting alone in her apartment with nothing but those four walls to distract her made her want to start screaming.
Meanwhile, Edward was nothing but attentive. He would text her several times a day, just to say that he hoped her day was going well.
Bella would stare at his texts, at a loss for what she should say. At first, she had replied with a "Fine, thx," but that was a lie, wasn't it? And repetitive. So she stopped replying altogether.
She was, however, spending every night at his apartment.
Bella would argue that she needed to go back to her place. Terrified though she was of the prospect of being alone, she hated the way she was imposing on Edward. Finally, Edward—fed up with arguing with her on the subject—said that he didn't want to be on his own. He said that it was easier, with his condition, if she was there to distract him.
It was true.
And yet not true.
With Bella by his side, it was usually hard to think of anything but sex.
With everything she was going through, though, it was the easiest thing in the world.
The part of the dutiful boyfriend was something of a revelation for Edward. He'd never been solicitous of anyone else's needs. He was surprised to discover how easy it was.
The day after Bella's father died, Edward took Bella to the funeral home. He stood quietly by her side as she picked out a simple urn. And the look of absolute fury that crossed Bella's face when Edward offered to pay for embalming services and burial—because he was worried that finances were the reason behind Bella's decision to have her father cremated—told Edward to hold his tongue from there on out.
But when the funeral director told Bella that she'd have to identify her father's body, and Bella burst into tears—the first and only time, to Edward's knowledge, that she had really broken down since her father's death—Edward turned protective. Pulling Bella into his arms, he even felt a surge of anger towards the funeral director, though it wasn't his fault.
"I just—I didn't think that I'd have to see him again," Bella explained when she could talk.
Realizing that Bella had been more affected by viewing her father's body than she'd let on, Edward tightened his grip around her frame.
Bella's resolve returned in good time. Edward could almost hear the click as her shield came back up.
She apologized to the director for "losing it," and said that she would be alright. Edward wondered about that.
Unfortunately, Edward had a surgery scheduled during Bella's appointment to identify the body. He tried to get her to wait, then tried to get out of the surgery when she refused (saying that she wanted to get it over with). But Bella told him that she would be just fine, and that she couldn't keep pulling him away from work.
That night, with the body identified and the cremation scheduled, Bella was very quiet. She'd been quiet ever since her father's death. But Edward didn't push her. Psycho-babble aside, he didn't really believe in talking about feelings. Sometimes, it was better to just shove all that shit down until you got through the gauntlet. Later, when you had the time, you could go back and examine everything until you were blue in the face. But sometimes, you just had to keep your eyes on the finish line.
Edward accompanied Bella to the funeral home to pick up the ashes. This time, Bella's mask of indifference remained coolly in place. Her face showed not a flicker of emotion as she accepted the urn and the funeral director apologized once again for her father's passing.
Not until they had returned to the car and Edward had started the long drive to Forks did Bella snap.
"Did you hear him?" Bella hissed.
She was positively seething inside. Angry and hurt all at once.
"The funeral director saying how sorry he was for my father's passing. He didn't pass. He died."
Furious though she obviously was, Edward couldn't help noticing how Bella's voice broke on the word "died."
"I hate all of the euphemisms that people use," she continued. "People don't pass. They don't go anywhere. They just disappear. The end."
Edward knew better than to say anything on that subject. He changed the topic.
"Are you sure that you don't want to have some sort of memorial service?" Edward asked, not wanting to rile Bella up any further but wanting to make sure that she was absolutely certain about her decision. "You don't have to do anything formal. You could just call the station and tell them that you're scattering the ashes this afternoon. I could call them for you."
It was the wrong thing to say. Spinning around to glare at Edward, Bella snorted. "Call the station? Fuck them. Where the hell've they been the last ten years? If they gave a shit, they would've been in my father's hospital room. A bunch of goddamned hypocrites. I'm not giving them the chance to pat themselves on the back, thinking they're such good Christians, for showing up when I scatter their beloved Chief's ashes."
Edward didn't argue with her, in part because he thought that she was correct. The good people of Forks, their deputies included, were a bunch of sanctimonious pricks. He didn't think that Bella should have to be subjected to their bullshit.
Bella had put together a playlist for the drive. 70s classic rock. "My dad's music," she said, her voice cracking when she got to "dad."
And as the opening bars of Kansas' Carry On Wayward Son came out of the speakers, Bella turned to look out the window, grateful that Edward wasn't pushing her to talk. She knew that she owed him—she knew that he had been nothing less than a rock, and that she didn't deserve it.
I'll make it up to him, she thought, as she drifted off to sleep.
Edward was happy to see Bella getting some rest. He knew that she'd been having difficulty sleeping.
So he turned the music down a notch, and settled in for the long drive.
Three hours later, they reached the outskirts of Forks. He thought Bella was still sleeping, and she surprised him with her sudden movement, as she pulled up the hood of her jacket and slid low in her seat.
"What are you doing?" Edward asked.
"I don't want these fuckers to see me. I hate this fucking town."
He was taken aback by the venom in her voice. "We're just passing through. And they're not all assholes. My parents still live here, remember."
Bella hmphed.
Edward didn't argue the issue, but he did reach over to squeeze Bella's hand. Unbeknownst to her, he had already decided that Bella was going to join him and his family in Forks for Thanksgiving. It would be his first Thanksgiving with the family in five years and he had no intention of facing his relatives on his own.
"Do you want to go past your old place?" Edward asked, eyeing the turnoff.
"Absolutely not. I want to go straight to the tree."
Obediently, Edward navigated out of town and took the first turn onto the mountain road.
Unfortunately, Bella's recall wasn't as good as she thought it was. It took her a couple of u-turns to identify the tree that, for all intents and purposes, had ended her father's life.
Edward pulled his car as far onto the shoulder as possible.
"This is it," Bella said, staring at the tree line. "I'm sure of it."
But her certainty seemed to flag a few minutes later, as she came to stand on the leafy verge, the urn held oh so gingerly in her hands.
"You don't have to leave him here if you don't want to," Edward reminded her.
"This is the tree that killed him," she said. The anger was back, beating the grief away. "My father died ten years ago. A puppet was living in his place."
Edward decided to hold his tongue.
She reached out and ran a hand over the tree. "See that, right there?" She pointed at a horizontal scar running along the trunk. "That's from my dad's car. It hardly left a scratch." There was a note of awe in her voice.
"Look at the size of the trunk. It's fucking huge." Bella leaned backwards, trying to see the top. Most of the other trees in the area had already lost their leaves, but she still couldn't make out the top of the tree in the canopy of inky black branches and scraggly foliage.
"It should take a monster like this to kill my dad. It wouldn't be right otherwise."
She smiled weakly. "I took a sledge hammer to the car. Did you know that?"
Edward shook his head.
"They hauled it to one of those places—a wrecking yard or whatever it's called. I found out which one and Alice paid the guy to let me take a sledge hammer to it. They'd already started to strip it. I was so pissed when I realized that they'd already started. I didn't think it was right—passing on those parts like it was nothing. I got the brakes though. Those fucking, useless brakes." Bella dashed a tear away from face. "I never paid Alice back for that. I'm sure it cost her a couple of hundred."
"So that's what she wanted that money for? She hit me and Emmett up. But she never told us what she was going to do with it."
Bella shook her head. "I'm glad that I didn't know that. I was so fucking angry at you then."
Edward's eyes widened. "What for?" He thought about it. "I mean—yeah, we fought all of the time, but this was before—" He didn't want to mention Bella's mother out loud.
"You were being nice to me," Bella explained.
Edward gave her a quizzical look.
"I was so angry about my father—all I wanted to do was fight—and here you were, the person I always fought with, and you were being so fucking nice," Bella elaborated. "I was just so angry that you'd stopped picking on me. I was living in your fucking house and you were just ignoring me. Like I didn't matter. Or worse, like you actually felt sorry for me. Like you thought that I couldn't stand up for myself. I wanted to fight with you so badly, but no matter what I did, you pretended like I wasn't even there."
"I was under strict orders to be nice," Edward explained. "And I would've left you alone regardless. I wasn't that big of an asshole. But if I'd known how much you wanted a fight, I would've been happy to oblige."
Bella smiled grimly and then sighed. "My tattoo—the trident—it's for my dad."
"What?" Edward blinked. He had studied the tattoo on Bella's hip at great length, and had even tried to tease her into telling him what it signified, but he had yet to have any success in finding out what it meant to her.
"It stands for Poseidon. You know—the Greek god of the sea. Not that I think my dad was a god. And Poseidon was kind of a fuck up. My dad wasn't perfect either, but he was still my dad."
Edward didn't respond—because what was there to say?
Unscrewing the lid of the urn, Bella poured the ashes slowly, going around the base of the tree so that they were scattered evenly.
When she was done, she didn't tarry. It was done. It was over.
Whispering a goodbye, she turned back to the car.
CI – CI – CI – CI – CI – CI
"I should have quit school," Bella huffed, as Edward reached the turnoff back into town. "I shouldn't have been working so hard these last couple of months. I should have been spending more time with him."
"He wouldn't have wanted you to quit school," Edward said. He had never known Bella's father very well, but he was fairly certain that the Chief wouldn't have wanted his daughter to jeopardize her future.
"Why not? I could have gotten a leave of absence. If I'd known that he was going to die—"
"But you didn't. He was sick, yes. But you had no way of knowing that this was the end."
"It doesn't matter. Even if he was still alive today, that doesn't change the fact that I barely saw him over the last few months. He deserved better than that."
"You were doing the best you could," Edward argued.
Bella scoffed at the cliché. "You don't know that."
"I know that he was suffering," Edward argued. "And he isn't anymore. You should concentrate on that."
She wasn't buying it. "Just because it makes me feel better? Bullshit."
"What could you have possibly done to make it better? Bella, I talked to his doctors."
She hadn't realized that.
Edward sighed. "He was so sick in the end that he wasn't even lucid. He wouldn't have known that you were there."
"I would have known. I would have known that I was there. And he deserved that much. He deserved someone to sit there with him."
"If the situation was reversed, would you want him there? Watching you slip away?"
Bella didn't answer. She wouldn't have wanted that. But she couldn't help feeling like her father would have been there. He would've sat by her side.
No, they didn't gush over each other. But when she needed him after her mother, he was there for her.
"I'm sure that he knew you cared," Edward said.
"I don't need platitudes," Bella replied, but the bite had left her voice.
And Edward decided to let it rest, knowing that he'd made as much progress as he was probably going to make that day.
Noticing the gas station coming up on the right, Edward glanced at the fuel gauge just to check, then cursed. He'd forgotten to fill up in Seattle.
"What are you doing?" Bella asked as he pulled off, a note of panic in her voice.
"We need some gas," Edward explained. "I'll just be a minute."
Bella didn't reply, but she pulled her hood lower over her face and hunkered down in her seat.
Rolling his eyes, Edward climbed out of the car. This town had put Bella through hell. But all that was all the more reason not to hide. Bella had nothing to be ashamed of, or so Edward thought.
On the other hand, she had just scattered her father's ashes. Edward was going to cut her some slack. For now.
Unfortunately, the pump didn't seem to like any of Edward's credit cards. Edward headed inside to pay.
"Fifteen on pump 1," Edward told the cashier, grabbing a local paper. "And the paper."
"Edward Cullen?"
It took him a few seconds to recognize the woman behind the register. "Lauren Mallory?"
Fucking one gas station town, Edward thought, hoping his annoyance didn't show on his face.
Lauren Mallory was grinning back at him cheekily. "Fancy seeing you here."
"Yeah. Well, you know how things are."
Glancing down at herself, Lauren blushed. "I know it probably seems pretty sad, me working the gas station here."
Edward shrugged. He really just wanted to get his gas and go.
"I'm going to community college though," Lauren explained, perking up.
"That's great," Edward replied. And it was great. Edward wasn't a complete asshole. He just didn't give a fuck. "Good for you."
"I heard you're a doctor." Lauren's eyes had widened.
Edward shrugged again.
"You're probably the most successful person to graduate from Forks High in both of our years combined."
"I don't think that's true," Edward argued.
There was at least one other doctor, as well as a few lawyers. And really, how did a person measure success? Up until a few months ago, Edward was struggling just to make it through the day.
He shook his head. "Anyhow, my girlfriend's waiting for me in the car. We have to get back to Seattle tonight."
It still felt weird using the word "girlfriend." He and Bella had yet to discuss the issue, and she probably didn't notice when he mentioned it on the call with the clinic about her father. But Edward liked to think that she was onboard with the idea.
He was only too pleased to be able to use the title to fend off Lauren Mallory.
"Your girlfriend?" Lauren was craning her head to make out Bella's form through the window.
"Yep. Girlfriend. We're very happy together. Just need to get back to Seattle. Long drive ahead of us."
Looking disappointed, Lauren finally—finally—rung up the gas and the newspaper.
"Well, if you're ever back in town, maybe you—and your girlfriend—would like to go out for drinks," Lauren said, returning Edward's card.
"Sounds great," Edward lied, then fled.
He pumped the gas as quickly as he could and climbed back into the car, taking care not to glance back towards the shop.
"Ready to go?" he asked, starting the engine.
"You were in there a long time," Bella complained.
"Uh yeah, the cashier knew me." Edward pulled onto the main road.
"Who was it?"
"Lauren."
Bella sat up suddenly. "Who?"
"Lauren Mallory."
Bella suddenly started rolling the window down.
"What're you doing?" Edward asked.
"What do you think?" Bella stuck her hand out the window.
Edward couldn't see the gesture Bella was making, but it wasn't hard to guess what it was.
"It's not like she can see," he pointed out. The gas station was steadily receding in the distance.
"I can see."
And even though it was out of place, even though Edward had spent the last three days walking a tightrope—what with Bella's grief and his own revelations about his own feelings—the sight of Bella leaning out the window to try and flick off a woman who wouldn't see (or perhaps understand) was so absurd that Edward couldn't help laughing.
"What are you laughing about?" Bella demanded, rolling the window up again. "I hate that bitch. She made my life a living hell."
"Well you've got your revenge now. She's a pump jockey and you're getting your doctorate."
Bella hissed. "You don't really think that, do you?"
Edward just laughed again.
"Fucking elitist," Bella cursed. She wasn't really angry—not at Edward at least. But she felt slightly better after flicking Lauren fucking Mallory off. The bitch probably didn't even see the gesture, but some of the tension had left Bella's body. She had been trying to hold her anger at bay—her anger at the tree that killed her father, her anger over his death, and her anger at that whole fucking town—and (almost) coming face to face with Lauren fucking Mallory had pushed her over the edge. She felt better now that she'd expressed herself.
"I'm just surprised to see you so angry."
"Forgiveness is for Christians. I live by the Roman code."
"The Roman code?" Edward asked.
"Pretend you don't care until you find a way to fuck 'em over." This was an exaggeration. Bella didn't believe in revenge. She did, however, believe in cutting people off so that they couldn't hurt her again.
But Edward was laughing again. He knew that it was probably fucked up to be taking so much pleasure in the spectacle of Bella's rage, but he was just so happy to see her animated again. It was like she had spent the last three days sleepwalking.
"You seem awfully merry," Bella observed. "What were you talking about in there?"
"My girlfriend."
"Your girlfriend?! Who the fuck is your girlfriend?!"
Edward outright guffawed. "You."
It took Bella a moment to understand what he had said. "Oh." She settled back down. "Alright then."
But after thinking about it for a minute, Bella realized that another matter needed to be cleared up. "Did you tell her who I was?"
Edward glanced at Bella's profile. "No. I thought that you didn't want anyone to know that you were back in town."
"Hmph."
Edward smiled. "You want me to go back?"
"Of course not. That would be stupid." Bella hmphed again.
"You're not jealous are you?" Edward chided Bella, jokingly.
It was a mistake.
"Why would I be jealous?" Bella asked.
Edward, realizing that he'd gone too far, tried to backtrack. "Oh nothing. Just because, you know."
"I know what?" She didn't sound pissed. Yet.
"You know."
"What do I know?" A hard tone had entered Bella's voice.
Edward shrugged. "About me and Lauren."
"I know that she was obsessed with you."
Edward nodded. "Yeah, that."
A beat passed. "Was there more to it?"
Edward shrugged again. "It was a long time ago."
"You fucked her didn't you?"
There was no point in trying to deny it. "It was high school."
"Turn this fucking car around, right now!" Bella was clearly in a high rage.
"What're you going to do?"
"Claw her fucking eyes out!"
Edward tried to calm Bella down. "It wasn't even that good."
That was an even stupider thing to say.
"It wasn't that good? It. Wasn't. That. Good? Is that how you fucking talk about your conquests?"
In Edward's defense, Bella was kind of all over the map with her emotions.
"She wasn't a conquest," Edward prevaricated. "If anything, it was the other way around."
Edward was maybe, sort of, perhaps lying.
Bella wasn't having it. "Bullshit."
"She came onto me."
"I don't doubt that."
Edward sighed. "Tell me what to say and I'll say it."
"Are you fucking kidding me right now?"
"Bella, I'm trying here."
And Bella, whose mouth had been opening to deliver another torrent of angry words, stopped dead in her tracks. He was trying. And she was being a bitch.
The past was the past. He was with her now. He had even told Lauren that she was his girlfriend.
His. Girlfriend.
What the fuck?
Bella swallowed. She didn't know how to be a girlfriend.
But dammit, she wanted it.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It's ok," Edward said quickly, surprised to find her giving in so easily.
"I'm being such a bitch right now. I'm just so—" She sighed. "With everything the last few days."
"You're not being a bitch," Edward argued, because he didn't like hearing her put herself down. And the truth was, Edward liked arguing with Bella. That part of their relationship hadn't changed.
"We haven't even—" Bella trailed off. It hadn't escaped her notice that she was sleeping in his bed every night but they weren't having sex. She knew that was her fault.
Edward had explained that he had a sex addiction. But as far as Bella could tell, he was clearly well into his recovery, because he wasn't trying to pressure her.
She was the one who'd pushed him into having sex the other night.
Was he holding off because of her? Because of what she was going through?
She understood that his recovery meant that he needed to dial back the amount of sex he was having. But she didn't think that going cold turkey could possibly be healthy.
And she had put him through hell the last few days. She knew that.
There was something she could do to try to make up for it.
Just when Edward thought she was going to spend the rest of the trip brooding, he felt her hand on his thigh.
"What are you doing?" he asked, glancing down quickly.
"What do you think I'm doing?" Bella taunted him, squeezing him through his pants.
"Fuck, Bella. We can't do this now."
"Why not?"
The next thing Edward knew, Bella had undone his zipper and was pulling him out of his pants.
Cursing, Edward pulled the car over to the side of the road. Fortunately, evening had fallen and it was dark enough.
And even though Edward could tell that Bella was probably just using sex to deal with her stress, the fact was that he was stressed too. The last three days had been hard on him, too.
And even though he knew that getting a blow job on the side of a highway probably wasn't the "healthy" thing to do, Edward decided to let himself just enjoy it.
With his head thrown back on the chair and his fingers tangled in Bella's hair, Edward didn't even notice the cop car until he heard that "woop woop" thing that cops do with their sirens to scare the shit out of people.
The cop couldn't possibly have missed the way that Bella's head flew out of Edward's lap.
But Edward had his pants zipped and Bella was back in her seat (with the seatbelt back on) by the time the cop made it to the window.
"License and registration," the cop barked, shining a flashlight around the car, clearly looking for empty bottles and/or paraphernalia related to the use of certain illicit substances.
"Right." Edward leaned across and opened the glove compartment.
The flashlight suddenly sought out Bella's face. She reared back, a hand up to try to block the glare.
"Isabella Swan?" the cop asked, his tone suddenly changing.
"Yeah?"
"You in town for your father?"
"My father?" Someone who didn't know Bella very well wouldn't have noticed the menace implied in her low tone.
Edward knew Bella. He shoved his license and registration towards the cop, trying to distract him.
The cop ignored the papers. "We were all real sorry to hear about your dad passing down at the station. He was like a father to us, you know."
Bella didn't reply.
"If you're going to be in town a while, we'd sure like to have you come down to the station."
"Come down?" Bella asked, in a strange high voice. "To the station?"
"We could have a service at the church. I know the whole town'd like to pay their respects."
"The whole town?" Bella's voice dropped awfully low again.
"Officer, I have my insurance card, too," Edward tried to interrupt. "If you need that."
But the cop seemed to have lost interest, returning Edward's license and registration. "You just get back on the road. Coming around the corner here, it's easy to miss a person sitting on the shoulder. You could get clipped."
"Sure thing officer," Edward said manically. "I think that we're ready to get back on the road."
"Wait a minute." Bella leaned over the center console. "How did you find out about my father—about his passing?"
"Obituary of course. It was in today's paper."
And before things could deteriorate further, Edward bid adieu for both of them, and pulled away from the shoulder, driving slowly lest he be pulled over for speeding.
"Bella, I—"
"Shut the fuck up," Bella snapped.
And Edward shut the fuck up.
She waited until they were back at his apartment to start in.
"You did it, didn't you?" She was pacing back and forth.
Edward tried to explain. "I didn't want you to look back on this one day and wish that you'd done something more. This way, it's taken care of."
"It wasn't your fucking decision."
"Your father deserved to be remembered. That town owed him."
"That town shit all over him. All over his daughter."
"Is this about you father," Edward couldn't help asking. "Or about you?"
"Fuck you," Bella rounded on him. "My father chose to be cremated. He knew it would be cheaper and easier for me, yeah, but he chose it. He didn't say anything about a funeral, but I can't imagine he would want to see those fuckers in their faux-mourning, pretending that they actually gave a damn what happened to him."
"Funerals aren't for the dead. They're for the living."
"Well, I'm living. And I didn't want it."
"There are other people who would've wanted to say goodbye." Edward's parents would've wanted to say goodbye, for instance. But he didn't want to bring them into this by name.
"So what? So what? He was my father, not theirs." Bella glared. "'He was just like a daddy to us good ole boys,'" she simpered. Bella paused in her pacing to punch a sofa cushion. "My father would've kicked their asses if he knew what they did to me."
Edward didn't understand where this hostility was coming from. He'd been told that the deputies had kept an eye out for Bella. They'd run her mother out of town for one. "What did they do to you that was so awful?"
"What did they do?" Bella cried. "What did they do?" Her face went blank. "Not a damn thing. That's what they did. Not a goddamn thing. They just sat there and watched while the good people of Forks made me the town pariah."
"What were they supposed to do?" Edward asked. He knew how Bella had treated offers of assistance back then. He knew how she'd ignored Esme.
"Our house was vandalized. Did you know that? What did the cops do then?"
Edward didn't know that. But he wasn't going to just give in, either. "Did you call them?"
"Ha!" Bella couldn't believe Edward's stupidity. "Of course not."
"Then what were they supposed to do?"
"Oh, give me a break."
"Two cops pulled me over," he said. "Did you know that? When I came home from college one weekend. They told me not to anywhere near you. I know that I wasn't the only one."
Bella looked at Edward, blinking. But a minute later, she was shaking her head. "Well it wasn't good enough."
"I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying that maybe they cared more about your dad—and you—than you realized."
Bella just stood there, clearly confused about what to do with the information she'd just been given.
After a moment of silence, she held out her hand. "Let me see the paper. Don't think I didn't notice how you picked it up at the gas station."
When Edward handed it over, Bella sat down to read. Edward cautiously sat down next to her, observing her response.
She had to dash away a few tears as her eyes ran over the first few paragraphs, but her face had hardened again by the time that she finished.
"So the fuckers will get to feel better about themselves after all," Bella complained.
Edward had inserted a request that donations be made in Charlie Swan's memory to a local policeman's charity.
"At least it's going to a good cause."
"Fuck them," Bella snapped, carefully refolding the newspaper and putting it down on the coffee table. She decided that she was in fact grateful to Edward for his efforts on her father's behalf. But she wasn't going to give an inch on the damnation awaiting the "good" people of Forks. "I mean, fuck the people who think that giving to charity makes up for being assholes," she clarified.
Edward was going to answer, but Bella pulled him in for a kiss.
She knew that she was probably confusing him, the way that she kept ricocheting back and forth with her emotions. But she didn't have the energy to keep pretending that everything was normal. She'd spent three days on lockdown. And she needed a break.
"I never got to finish making you forget all about that Lauren slut earlier," Bella reminded him when she pulled away.
"Lauren who?"
Bella nodded. "Exactly."
Edward knew that he and Bella still had a ways to go. They hadn't even begun to address his addiction, and she was clearly struggling with her father's death.
But for once, Edward felt like being irrationally optimistic.
AN: Thank you for reading.
