Chapter 1
Edward
"Oh my gosh, this is incredible!" exclaimed a glowing Renesmee as she gingerly inspected the tome, a first-edition book of Emily Dickinson poems that had to be older than I was. Her deep brown eyes were wide and bright with excitement, and her cheeks were the exact shade of pink that her mother's used to get when she was around the same...er…mental age.
"Thank you so much, Grandpa! Grandma," she cried, throwing her arms around Esme and giving Carlisle a kiss on the cheek. "I have been trying to hunt down this book since I was a little kid," she began, only to be interrupted by my brother, Emmett.
"So like six months?" Emmett chortled, only to earn a scowl from his favorite (and only) niece. I had to smile. It was nice not to be on the receiving end of that scowl for once. As the mind-reading father of a teenage (sort of) girl, I knew it well.
"Happy birthday, my darling girl," Carlisle crooned affectionately. "We are just so proud of you and the young lady you've become," he beamed as Esme smiled and nodded in agreement.
My favorite sister Alice had outdone herself, as usual, though all of the Cullen women (not including the guest of honor) had contributed to the festivities in some meaningful way. There were balloon garlands and crepe paper streamers, floral arrangements, pink and purple party lighting, and a photo booth. But the pièce de résistance was the cake table. A dozen different clear glass jars of varying sizes were filled with brightly colored candy and artfully placed around an expertly decorated cake. It was two tiers of purple ombre buttercream piped in satiny ribbons around the sides with lavender and purple rosettes decorating the top.
Out of respect for Renesmee's wishes, her chronological age was not denoted anywhere on the cake or on the balloons. Not on the "Happy Birthday, Nessie!" banner that hung across the archway separating the foyer from the living room, nor on the gift wrap that concealed the generous stack of gifts she'd received. Gift bags, I should say. Alice had banned the use of traditional wrapping paper ever since my Bella's disastrous 18th birthday, almost eight years ago exactly. I shook the bitter memory away, unwilling to let it sully my mood on my daughter's special day.
Alice, Bella, Esme, and Rosalie went to a lot of trouble to make this party elegant enough for an adult while adding enough youthful touches to make it, well, age-appropriate.
"Open ours next, Monster," Emmett encouraged, pressing a bright pink envelope into her hands.
As Nessie pulled the card out of the envelope, my brother rubbed his hands together in a way that made me immediately suspicious. My wariness only intensified when Emmett began mentally singing the tune, "99 bottles of beer on the wall." He was trying not to think of something else.
Renesmee held up a garishly pink Barbie card with a prominent "7" stamped in pink glitter.
Rosalie gasped and turned to Emmett. "What happened to the other card I gave you to sign?" she asked, the accusation clear in her tone.
"You mean the boring one? It didn't even have any glitter!" he chuckled, his mountainous shoulders shuddering gently as he laughed. Then to his niece, with a dimple in his cheek and a twinkle in his tawny eyes, he teased "Why in such a hurry to grow up? Nobody lets you have any fun when you're a grownup."
"Emmett…you're a grown man…with a treehouse," Bella reminded him, never missing an opportunity to bust his chops, as was the jocular nature of their relationship.
"Nobody who hasn't seen the 'Swiss Family Robinson' gets to have an opinion on my treehouse," Emmett rebutted with a smirk.
In a pointed tone, Esme interjected, "What did they get you, sweetheart?", clearly trying to return the focus to her granddaughter, the birthday girl.
Opening the card, two narrow strips of paper fell into the palm of her hand. Renesmee gasped and then squealed with delight, "Are you serious? Two tickets to Coachella! Ahhh! I can't believe it! Thank you, thank you, thank you!" She threw her willowy arms around her aunt and uncle, thanking them over and over. She then bounded over to Jacob to show him. No, to invite him.
I grit my teeth. An unchaperoned trip to California? It was out of the question. What the hell were Emmett and Rosalie thinking? I seethed.
Emmett's gloating thoughts filled my head. Look at his face! Ahahaha he's so pissed. Ness thinks ol' Uncle Em is a hero and Edward looks like he wants to set me on fire. Double whammy," he guffawed with amusement.
I opened my mouth to say something but Bella's thoughts broke into my concentration as she lifted her shield. Her mental tone was cautioning. Edward… I didn't know about the tickets either, but this isn't something you need to freak out about right this second. Coachella isn't for months. Let's just let her have her day. There's plenty of time to figure it all out later. She shot me a pleading glance.
Bella, of course, hadn't aged a day since Renesmee's birth. A birth so traumatic I'd been forced to change her before the violent labor of our half-vampire child could kill her. Frozen for all of eternity at the age of eighteen, Bella's alabaster skin was smooth and poreless, her rich auburn hair cascaded in glossy waves down her back, and her disarming smile still took my breath away like it did the very first day. The only difference was, now the scent of her didn't make me want to murder her in cold blood in front of a classroom of her peers.
Bella laced her fingers between mine and gave my hand a soft squeeze. Did it occur to you that if Renesmee left for a weekend, we could spend that time…alone? Bella waggled her eyebrows at me conspiratorially.
Alone time wasn't something we'd had an abundance of since Renesmee came along. It wasn't for lack of childcare, of course. Our family was only too willing to babysit so that Bella and I could get away. But the one time that we did leave her in the capable hands of Rosalie (who, of course, was forced to share her with Jacob), we returned just a few days later to a significantly different child, both in cognition and appearance. Bella had felt terribly guilty that in just a few days she missed a growth spurt that had amounted to a year's worth of development in any normal child, After that, the only time alone we got to spend together was the evening hours in which Renesmee slept.
I could hardly blame Bella for not wanting to miss a moment of our child's accelerated childhood. I didn't either. So for the moment, we were just like any other parents who greatly looked forward to the brief windows of alone time that we got with a child in the home, who, like us, also had a supernatural sense of hearing.
I dipped down a few inches to teasingly growl "Evil temptress," into her ear. "I know what you're doing," I chided. She was trying to divert my attention away from the fact that my seven-year-old teenager wanted to take Jacob on an overnight excursion to a music festival in California, a thousand miles away from the watchful eyes (and ears) of her family.
Renesmee sidled up to her mother next, who slipped her hand from mine so that she could wrap both of her arms around our daughter's slight build. My breath caught in my throat at the realization that my little girl, with thick mahogany hair that fell in loose ringlets to her waist and the gentle curves of a young woman, looked like she was Bella's sister rather than her daughter. And at just seven years of age, I internally lamented.
Her childhood had elapsed in a dizzying blink of an eye. For the love of all that was holy, I owned shoes that were older than she was, and now I was just supposed to accept she was an adult capable of making her own decisions. It was unfathomable. And it was unfair. When you have a child, you have the expectation that you'll get almost twenty years to get used to the idea that your child had grown into an adult, and for most humans, it still wasn't enough time. Bella and I didn't get that by half.
As Bella and Renesmee chatted animatedly, my father-in-law stepped up to my other side.
Nudging me on the shoulder, he muttered somewhat smugly under his breath. "I've seen that look…I invented that look," he barked out in laughter. "How's it feel?" he chuckled and took a swig from the bottle of beer in his hands.
I grunted unintelligibly as I observed Jacob surreptitiously watching my daughter from across the room where he was chatting with my brother-in-law, Seth, and his wife, Sarah, who had their newborn daughter, Harriet strapped to her chest in an infant carrier. Jacob's presence in Renesmee's life was one that I would always have mixed feelings about.
It wasn't that long ago when he and I were competing for the heart and affection of my Bella. And now, for better or for worse, he was attached at the hip to my daughter because of some weird wolfy magic that had bonded them in a way I couldn't adequately describe. He loved her. She was the first person she thought about when he woke up in the morning and the last person he thought about before going to bed. And over time (and not much of it), Renesmee had morphed from a precocious child (to the extreme) into a young woman, and his feelings for her had evolved from that of her protector to…well…something else entirely.
Wolf imprinting was as permanent and irreversible as was the bond of a mated vampire couple. Put simply, he would always want my daughter, always love her, and cherish her. His devotion to Renesmee could only be rivaled by mine and Bella's. It was the kind of selfless love any parent could only dream of for their child.
But why did it have to be Jacob f*ing Black?!
Jacob Black had been the price I paid not only for my mistakes but for my happiness. I owed my entire world to him and the pack. If not for the wolves Bella would be rotting in the ground, me along with her. If not for Jacob imprinting on my newborn daughter, Sam's pack would've mauled my family, no doubt killing some of us and some of them in their relentless desire to destroy my daughter whose very existence was considered an abomination.
I owed Jacob Black my entire world, and the universe had repaid that debt by bonding him to my only child. Fate had a cruel sense of humor.
"If you were human, I'd offer you a beer. Helps wash down the taste of bile in your mouth," Charlie offered, taking another swig of the frosty Rainier that Esme kept around for Charlie's visits.
Surprising the older (in appearance) man, I slipped the longneck bottle out of his grasp and took a long gulp. As usual, the cold, frothy, bitter liquid tasted like carbonated piss as it slid down my throat. Charlie's bushy eyebrows, dark with a few wisps of gray raised halfway off his forehead in astonishment.
"You're right. That is better," I muttered. Charlie threw his head back and barked out in laughter. Slapping me on the shoulder, he advised with a wry grin, "Just wait until the first time she runs away. That's when you switch to whiskey."
I watched Jacob pull my daughter into his tanned, sinewy arms, as she reached up to touch his beaming face. She was showing him an image of her sitting on his shoulders at a music festival a thousand miles away, wearing a fringed top that covered next to nothing and barely-there-shorts. I swallowed loudly at the bitter taste that coated my tongue that had nothing to do with the beer I'd just consumed.
"Duly noted."
Author's Note: Hey y'all! Thanks so much for checking out my new fic. I've had this idea floating around in my head for a while now, and I'm happy to finally be writing it down. I will try to update as often as I can, but I'm also in the middle of adapting my other fics "She's My Blackberry Pie" and "Blood & Edward" into an original series. So if you'd like updates on my writing, please be sure to follow me. Thanks again for reading! And I know you already know this, but nothing motivates me to crank out another chapter faster than reading the kind words from my readers, so please drop me a line! It will make my whole day. Til next time, lovelies!
