Chapter 37, in which Edward and Bella give their best impression of crazed rabbits
The next day at school I discovered that I could make Bella start giggling and turning pink just by looking at her, which was pretty fucking cute.
After Chemistry I leaned against the lockers next to hers while she swapped books in and out.
"When can I come over again? Or, why don't you come over this weekend. Alice can have you sleep over…"
"I can't. Charlie planned all this quality-time stuff for this weekend since I was away over Christmas."
"What about tonight?"
"I don't think I can. Some folks are coming over for dinner. Sue Clearwater…and Billy." She glanced at me.
"Billy….Black?" Fuck. I have to tell her about that business with Jacob.
She nodded. "I don't know if Jacob's coming. I kind of think not, because I haven't heard he is." From Bella's perspective there hadn't seemed to be any ramifications from that run-in at the theater, but I hated to think what might happen if Jacob came over to her house and got in a quarrel with Bella about it.
I sighed. "I forgot to tell you…" Riiight. "I ran into Jacob."
"What?"
"Come on, let's sit outside today for lunch and I'll tell you." That would give me a few minutes to figure out what I was going to say, exactly. And also some privacy, since it was lightly drizzling and no one in his right mind was sitting outside. There were a couple of lunch tables under an awning, however, so we sat there bundled up in our raincoats and I gave her an edited version of my conversations with Jacob and then with Carlisle. I skipped the part about Carlisle's considering the possibility of our leaving Forks. No point in getting her all freaked out if that turned out to be idle horrifying speculation. Plus, Bella was already plenty riled up about the Jacob thing.
"I cannot fucking believe this. He is totally out of control. I am going to call him right now." She got up and stalked away, phone in hand.
"Bella, I don't know if that's a good idea…" She ignored me and started pacing a few yards away from me, phone to ear, and apparently got his voicemail because she just said a few words into the phone and angrily punched a button to hang up.
At the end of school I tried again to persuade her to spend the night out, and she said she couldn't, but that Jacob was not responding to her and she got the feeling he was not coming over to her house. As it turned out, he didn't show that night, nor did he call her back, though she said she left a number of messages over the weekend, voice and text.
Meanwhile, I was climbing the walls all weekend while she went fishing with Charlie on Saturday and spent Sunday in Seattle with him reliving some of their favorite activities from when she was younger—doing the underground tour of Pioneer Square and checking out the spawning salmon at the Ballard locks. She was texting me surreptitious updates all day. Now she was e-mailing me a picture of herself in front of the Ballard troll.
-is he going to make u ride the ducks, I texted her in response.
-god I hope not it is pouring down rain
-that's perfect cuz tmrw morn u r going to wake up w a sore throat *w*
-k
-pls delete
The next morning instead of going to school I drove over to Bella's and parked down the street. We spent the entire day in her room, trying out different positions, just breaking for ham-and-pickle sandwiches at lunchtime. We did it with her on top, and then with me on top, and then side by side with me behind her, and then her sitting on top again because that way gave me really great visuals. She had recovered from the other night, obviously, but by the end of the day she was complaining that I was making her sore again.
Over the next couple of weeks I spent some time pondering the fact that I had this visceral, almost animal, physical reaction to Bella that I hadn't ever experienced with any other girl I'd found physically attractive. Unsurprisingly—since it had distinguished itself as a theme in the fantasies I had been entertaining all fall—I found I especially liked to take her from behind, either with her lying flat on the bed and me on top of her, or with her on all fours, a couple of times with me standing on the floor behind her on the couch, which felt particularly naughty, let me get so deep, and always made me come really hard. I didn't delve too far into the psychology behind that one. Bella continued to get especially turned on by my cum and would still sometimes urge me to come on her, which since she was good with I certainly had no objections to, but mostly she liked for me to come inside her, which seemed to give her some deep feeling of satisfaction that we also did not delve into.
Since there were always so many people at my house, the only way to hope for being alone was to go to her house after school, but between my practice and her library volunteering and the possibility some days that Charlie might arrive home around four this was not panning out very well. Bella's devious brain was working overtime, though, and she hit on a scheme whereby I could come visit her at night. She told Charlie that she wanted to paint her room, moved her essentials downstairs into the guest room, pushed all her furniture into the center of her bedroom and covered it with a drop cloth, and proceeded to start bringing home endless paint samples from the hardware store, painting swatches on the walls and then changing her mind. (She told me she was drawing inspiration from Odysseus' wife, Penelope.) This way she spent some weeks in a ground-floor room, the farthest possible point in the house from Charlie's upstairs bedroom, and where I could just climb in through a window that faced the backyard.
We both found the furtiveness of it, the fact that Charlie was usually in the house, extremely exciting, like when things seem especially funny because you're in church or class and you're not supposed to laugh and you're suppressing it. On those nights I would sneak out of my house and sneak into her bed and would tease her, work her up to the point where she could not be any more wet and was rubbing her thighs together and begging for it, and then we would fuck so hard the box springs would squeak or sometimes the bedframe would even thump the wall and she would be so far gone she wouldn't even tell me to keep it down.
We had a close call one time when Charlie woke up and heard something, and light from the stairway spilled under her door, making me spring up and duck into the closet, and then he knocked on her door. He poked his head in the room and asked Bella if she hadn't just heard something banging. She propped herself up on her elbows, squinting at the light from the hallway, and said she thought there had been a little earthquake, she thought she felt her bed shaking but was not sure if she had been dreaming. I had to cover my mouth with my hand and breath deeply to avoid busting up. Luckily I had not bothered taking Bella's t-shirt off her that time, but I'm sure she would have come up with a logical explanation for that if Charlie had noticed she was naked. After he did leave, I found that my boxers were lying on the floor in plain sight, but he had not noticed them. After that I was careful to always throw my clothes on the side of the bed closer to the window than the door.
I guess she felt bad about going behind her dad's back so much, or maybe she just liked to court danger, because she asked me to come pick her up one afternoon when he was home, reintroducing me as Edward but not reiterating the Alice's brother part or specifying that I was her Chemistry class lab partner or her English class small group partner, and telling him we were going to the library to work on a project together. We were actually going to the library to work on an English presentation about loyalty, betrayal, and the tales of Lancelot and Tristan in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I gave her a ride on the back of Alice's scooter, because I figured better not to give Charlie a gratuitous gander at my car.
On the painting-the-room front, eventually Charlie put his foot down and made her pick a color because his sister was coming to visit from New Hampshire. Bella painted her room periwinkle blue and moved back upstairs, and then my nighttime visits became more erratic because it was much harder to get into her room, though we managed it occasionally using her fire ladder, which was nylon except for the metal top that fit over the windowsill and therefore did not clank too much.
With each day that passed, with each time that we made love, I wanted more. I could not get enough of Bella Swan.