So this was a little last-minute addition to the story, inspired by a random Tumblr post. Thank you for the encouragement, Jessica314 :)

These characters and ideas all belong to Stephanie Meyer

E-POV

Around three in the morning, I was set up and ready to bake for my sweetheart. Bella was fast asleep in her room, and her father was working the night shift at the police station, so he would not be back home until late the next morning. I had searched through the cabinets and pulled out the appropriate pans, bowls and equipment called out on the recipe I had pulled up on Bella's laptop. I was about to set to work when the familiar metal voices of my brother and sister approached the house.

Alice appeared in the back door. I knew there was a chance I would regret the decision to encourage Bella to invite Alice into her home in a small attempt to ignite their friendship. Although, I did expect it to be fashion-related.

"I saw you were going to need my help," she declared.

"And him?" I pointed at Emmett breaking the lock on the Swan's kitchen window.

"He was bored."

Emmett slid open the window and squeezed through. He didn't think using a door would be appropriate for breaking into someone's house at night. Is that what he thought they were doing? Great.

I glared at Emmett. "How can you get in here?"

His favorite shit-eating grin was plastered on his face. "Bella forgot her English homework one day, and wrote out an invitation for me so I could run here and get it for her."

He replayed the memory for my benefit. I sighed. My sweet girl didn't realize the horrors she would be releasing by inviting Emmett into her home.

"Fine. We're making a lemon and basil cake."

"For Bella?" he asked.

"...Yes?"

"Don't human girls usually prefer chocolate?".

"Lemon is her favorite flavor—it reminds her of the sun."

"Ah, makes perfect sense," Emmett said sarcastically. He couldn't understand how a fruit would remind her of a star. They were both yellow, he supposed.

Alice and Emmett made themselves comfortable around them small dining table and watched me work. Making the sponge was simple. I dumped the butter and sugar into a bowl, and whisked vigorously—there was no need for an electric mixer when vampire strength and speed were available. Once the mixture was pale and fluffy, I beat in the eggs one at a time. Then, I lightly folded in the flour and baking powder.

This was going to be easy. I idly wondered what all the fuss was about on the show. Surely, the experienced bakers couldn't actually face all of the hardships on the show; they must have writers add them in to stir up some drama.

I asked Emmett to fetch me the next ingredient. He peeked into her spice cabinet, "Nope."

I frowned, "She doesn't have any basil?"

Alice's thoughts were disappointed, but not surprised. "Edward, you didn't do any grocery shopping?"

"I just assumed humans already have all this stuff…"

Emmett riffled around in the cabinet, "No basil… but there's this Italian season blend. It has basil. Would that work?"

"I didn't see why not. If anything, more spices would make it taste better, right?"

Alice glanced into the near future, we both saw my darling taking a large bite of cake and smiling. "It looks like she's enjoying it."

I took that as a confirmation and dumped the Italian seasoning into the cake batter. Fortunately, Bella did have fresh lemons. I wanted to make it extra lemony since it was her favorite flavor, so I zested six of them and squeezed the juice in the bowl.

"Limoncello…" I hesitated at the next ingredient on the list. I wasn't sure what it was.

"Dude, you are such a dork." Emmett scoffed. "It's a lemon cocktail mix thing."

"How do you know that? You can't drink."

"Know your bro's hoes, man." He repeated his stupid mantra. "Limoncello gin was Vinny's girlfriend's favorite drink."

I brought us back to the task at hand. "Does Bella have Limoncello?"

Emmett riffled through the fridge, "Here's a Mike's Hard Lemonade. That's a lemon alcohol thing."

We both looked over at Alice.

Alice double-checked her vision. "Still eating it."

I measured out the drink and poured it into the batter. Next, I poured the mixture into the three baking tins and set them in the preheated oven.

Emmett clapped his hands, "Done! That was easy."

"No." I scrolled down to the rest of the recipe, "We still need to make the frosting and the glaze,"

Alice peaked under my arm to read the screen, "Oh it says to decorate with dried rose petals! Jasper and I have some extra in one of our little nests nearby. I'll be back!"

She was off before I could beg her not to bring any of her love nest petals into the sanctity of Bella's home.

"What inspired you to become America's Next Top Baker?" Emmett asked while he watched me whip together butter, milk, powdered sugar, and more of the Mike's Hard Lemonade.

"Bella had a rough day." I frowned. Today was our last day of finals; mine ended after hers, but she wanted to wait for me to finish. When she was not in our agreed meeting spot, I almost had a heart attack. The relief I felt when I found her sitting in her truck was short-lived, because I could tell she had been crying. Despite my best efforts, she refused to say anything; she only repeated over and over that she wanted to go home. She said nothing on the entire drive home or throughout her entire tedious dinner preparations. The only remark she made the entire night was when we were settled in her twin bed watching her favorite baking show on her laptop.

"That looks good." She murmured into my chest as the baker on the show displayed their creation to the judges.

And so, I was going to make that very cake tonight and surprise her with it in the morning. It had only been a few hours since I last saw her smile, and I was desperate to see it again.

"Do you know why?" Emmett asked, almost cryptically.

"No. I'm worried that she failed her test and won't tell me." I glared at him; his grin was back. "Do you?"

He was pleased that he had the gossip before Alice or me for once. "It happened during English unless something worse happened to her afterward. Which, you gotta admit, is very likely when it comes to Bella."

Emmett showed me the memory of the final presentations from their shared English class. From Emmett's angle in the back of the class, I watched my Bella walk up towards the front of the class. When she passed the front row of desks, she bumped into one and spilled her classmate's water down the front of her pants.

"We don't have all day, Miss Swan." I heard the professor drone in Emmett's mind.

And so my sweet Bella—flushing, soaking, and stammering—spoke in front of her entire class on the symbolism in The Sirens of Titan.

I stood absolutely still, dumbfounded. It was difficult not to laugh. Nothing that makes her cry is funny, nothing that makes her cry is funny, I chanted to myself. Meanwhile, Emmett was shaking from his poorly concealed giggles.

"I love that you love this girl, Ed," he chuckled shaking his head. "I hope she stays this awkward when she turns. Maybe she'll get a special ability like you, Alice, and Jazz that would allow her to keep her clumsiness. She could be a super klutz!" I cringed at the heaps of destruction Emmett envisioned.

Alice appeared by my side. "Back!" she announced and threw a fistful of her petals at me. I deftly avoided getting hit in the face with a love petal.

"Don't worry," she chirped, "there's more." She emptied her pockets and dumped several handfuls of petals on the table.

"Great," I muttered.

The frosting was light and fluffy like the instructions described, and I put the bowl in the fridge for the mixture to stay cool.

"What now?" She asked.

"Glaze."

"Ooh lemme try that one!"

I read out the instructions for her and she followed suit. She let the small pan of sugar and lemon juice sit over low heat. She kept deciding to turn off the heat at different intervals, to see which amount of time would give her the best result. When she saw that deciding on two minutes and twenty-one seconds left us with the perfect, syrupy consistency, she began counting. When it got to that moment, she turned off the heat.

I was impressed. "In your next life, maybe you should be a baker," I suggested. "You could do wedding cakes."

Her thoughts brightened at the idea. She turned to smile at me and thank me for the suggestion, but something behind me distracted her.

"The sweater!" she gasped. She darted past me and into Bella's laundry room and grabbed one of Bella's tops off of the rack it was drying on. It was a bright, red sweater with knit ruffles all along the front. On its own, it was pretty hard to look at, but once it was actually on Bella, it looked great. Alice's deft little hands went over the sweater, searching. She was trying to locate the end of the yarn so she could give it a gentle tug and ruin it.

I ran over and snatched the sweater from her. "You will not be destroying anything of hers, Alice!"

"Oh, Edward come on! You know I'll buy her new clothes to replace it! Better clothes! Pretty clothes! You have to be sick of her hideous sweaters."

"They're cute!"

"There comes a point where love can turn into delusion, you know."

I pointed towards the kitchen, "Out."

I turned to hang it back up when a large groan in Alice's thoughts stopped me. "You're just going to leave it there? Taunting me? That's torture, Edward!"

I rolled my eyes and threw the sweater at Emmett. "Please put this in Bella's room. Closed door on the right."

I realized my mistake a fraction of a second later.

"Eddie!" Emmett whispered from upstairs. Good god, what now? I zipped up to her bedroom immediately.

Emmett was holding his cell phone over Bella's sleeping face. "She's drooling!"

Bella did not want me to watch her sleep; she was too embarrassed by the idea. However, she did want me there while she fell asleep and when she woke up, posing a confusing contradiction that romantic relationships seemed to be riddled with. To concede the conflicting desires, after she fell asleep I spent the nights hunting in the woods nearby, cleaning the parts of the house she missed, or reading in her living room until I heard the soft sounds that she was beginning to wake up. Then, I would go back up to her room and gather her into my arms once more.

If Bella awoke to see Emmett filming her, she would dump me before this cake finished baking. "Emmett!" I hissed

"This is adorable, man."

"Emmett!" I begged. "Please don't wake her up!"

Alice was now in the room with us. "If you think that's cute Em, just watch her for fourteen more seconds."

They stood over her. Bella sighed sweetly in her sleep, squeezed the blanket in her fist, and murmured, "Edward."

Emmett tilted his head back with his hand on his forehead, "That's. So. Cute." When he looked back at me, he smiled the biggest, goofiest grin. I couldn't stop myself from smiling back. No one had to tell me that everything about my human love was pure and precious.

He held the phone over her face again, "Esme's going to love this."

My smile faded. I ripped the phone out of this hand, "Leave."

He turned to leave at human speed, hamming up his disappointment. Before he was fully out the door, he got distracted by Bella's bra hanging on the doorknob.

He raised an eyebrow at me, "Nice, man."

I rolled my eyes; Emmett was such a child. "Please. Like you haven't been married for seventy-five years."

"No. You got me beat in this area. I've never seen a girl's bra before," he told me seriously. "Rosie doesn't need to wear one."

I looked at Alice.

She shrugged, "We're naturally perky."

I shook my head and blinked. "Wow, I did not need to know that."

After a while, I was able to corral my siblings back down to the kitchen. I recounted the minutes in my mind and realized it was just about time to take out the cake.

I frowned into the oven. "I think it needs more time."

Emmett tilted the computer screen up so he could read the recipe, "I don't know man. It says here to bake the cake for fifty-five minutes. Do you really want to play god like that?"

Alice moved the screen back down to her level, "It also says it should be golden brown."

Emmett peered into the oven, "I have never seen anything so golden brown in my entire goddamn life."

"Fine. Take it out."

Alice crossed her arms, "And now we wait for it to cool before decorating."

We all watched the cake for a few seconds.

"This is taking forever!" Emmett groaned. "Put it in the freezer; speed this shit up."

It wasn't a terrible idea. I moved aside the heaps of frozen fish in Swan's freezer to make room for the tins.

Several moments later, Emmett removed the cakes from the freezer. They were miserable looking things. Both sponges had concaved on themselves and cracked in some places. They looked like Emmett sat on them.

"That doesn't look anything like the picture." Emmett gestured to the computer.

"I know," I agreed, frustrated. What went wrong? We followed every instruction to the letter.

"Well, that's because it doesn't have any frosting yet!" Alice encouraged. "Frosting makes everything better!"

Emmett and I left Alice to her own devices. She reconstructed the broken cakes using frosting and glaze as the glue and filled in the divots. The cake looked straight and flat once it was fully covered.

I nodded in approval, "Baking is definitely in your future."

She smiled at that, "You sound like me!"

Alice went to throw the love nest petals over the cake, but I grabbed her wrist, "Not a chance."

She grumbled and thought along the lines of never wants to have any fun. Emmett and Alice left through the window, Emmett gushing about how excited he was to tell Esme that he baked a cake.

Not much later, Bella began to stir upstairs. I wedged myself into my spot on the bed and circled my arms around her. Her body reacted to my embrace.

I kissed her forehead, "Good morning."

She nuzzled her face into my neck and murmured something unintelligible, even to my sensitive ears. Eventually, I was able to pick out the word "coffee". I kissed her once more and promised there would be a pot ready for her when she got downstairs.

Bella padded into the kitchen, still groggy and mussed from sleep.

"Oh!" she breathed when she saw the cake centered on the kitchen table.

"Surprise!"

She smiled widely, and the entire kitchen brightened. "Did you make this for me?"

I nodded, smiling back.

She circled around the table to where I was standing and wrapped her arms around me. I returned the gesture. She pulled back slightly to look up at me.

"I love you," she said, her chocolate eyes warm. She was too beautiful. if I were human, my knees would have buckled, and I would have crashed to the ground under such a gaze. But my vampire strength allowed me to stay upright, and stare back into the glorious eyes of an angel.

I kissed her delicately, "I love you, too. So, so much."

She basked in the knowledge for a moment, before she turned away to fetch her breakfast. She skipped over to the cabinets and eagerly reached for a plate and fished some serving utensils out from a drawer. I sat at the kitchen table and pulled her onto my lap. She served herself a slice and frowned. The middle of the cake looked dense and wet; nothing like the fluffy sponge the judges praised on the show.

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"No, no." She waved her delicate little hand in the air. "It just means it will be moist."

She took a large bite and smiled up at me, just like in Alice's vision.

Then, her eyes widened, and she started coughing.

"Bella?" I took the fork from her hand and replaced it with a glass of water. She gulped down the entire glass of water before speaking again.

"That's really sour." She croaked.

"I wanted to make sure it tasted lemony. Is that bad?"

"No!" she said a little too loudly, "It's just really sour." She coughed again. "And… is that oregano?"

"You didn't have basil, so I used Italian seasoning."

Her beautiful eyes widened in horror for a moment before she controlled her expression.

"And why does it taste like beer?" She had an excellent pallet.

I winced. "That might be the Mike's Hard Lemonade in the cake. And the glaze. And the frosting."

She gaped.

"You didn't have Limoncello; are they not the same?"

"Definitely not," she scoffed.

I took her beautiful face into my hands. "Bella, my love. If you don't like it, you don't have to eat the rest."

She shook her head; I dropped my hands, "You made this for me so I love it."

She went to take another bite and hesitated. "Although, you know who would love this more? Charlie's squad." She nodded, presumably pleased with herself that she came up with such a "good" excuse.

"Oh?"

Another quick nod. "Mmhmm. They've been working on an—um—intense case and would appreciate some sweet encouragement."

She jumped up from my lap and began reckless searching through the cabinets for something. After a few moments of crashing and banging, she pulled out a plastic cake carrier.

"I can take it to them and meet Charlie right after his shift." She nodded to herself while she put away the cake.

"Not because you don't love it, but because they would love it more?" I pressed.

"Mmhmm," she agreed, her voice high and tight.

I suppressed a laugh. I always seemed to discover something new to love about Bella each and every day. Today, it was how bad of a liar she was, and how cute she was when she tried. "Alright my darling." I stood up from my seat and lightly kissed her forehead. "Let's go."