More Bonding
(Part 2)
It was Saturday and Edward was still hunting. This was getting ridiculous! It shouldn't have taken him four day to go hunting. But, I was keeping busy, my day with Jasper and my new job at Newton's Outfitters. But nonetheless, it wasn't the same without him. It never would be.
"So what are you going to do today?" Charlie asked when I came down for breakfast. He was going fishing with Billy and a couple other guys, I couldn't remember exactly who.
"I'll probably just hang around here." I replied, pouring myself a bowl of cereal.
"What about Edward? Aren't you going to see him?"
"No dad, I told you. Edward went to visit some relatives out of state for a couple days."
"Oh, right. I forgot." He said, not really caring. "Well, I'll be back tonight sometime. You could make yourself dinner if you want. Billy and I are going to cook some of the catch for dinner. You're welcome to come if you want. Jake will be there."
"No thanks dad." I said. "Maybe I'll call Jessica Stanley and see if she wants to do something." That was a lie. I hadn't done anything with Jessica since the time we went to the Quileute Reservation.
"Suit yourself." He said and grabbed his coat and got in the cruiser to go to Billy's house.
After he left, I milled around the house for a while, straightening up anything I could find. Then, the phone rang.
"Hello?" I said into the receiver.
"Hi." Said a woman's voice on the other side. "Bella, I'm coming over, okay."
"Wait, who is this?" I asked.
"Who does it sound like?" said the voice hotly.
I thought for a moment. "Rosalie?" I asked.
"Good job." She said. "Now you'd better be ready when I get there."
"What's going on?" I asked, afraid that something might have happened to Edward.
"Before my brother left, he said I should spend some time getting to know you, so I am. I want to see what's so great about you. Why everyone likes you so much."
"Alright. Well, I'll be ready in ten minutes." I said slowly, looking at my pajamas and messy hair. I had just gotten out of bed when I had gone downstairs to say goodbye to Charlie.
"I'll be there." She said. "And you had better be ready for a long day."
I gulped. "All right, b-" but she hung up before I could finish.
I quickly went upstairs to my room and threw on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. Then, I brushed through my hair and went back downstairs to wait for Rosalie. She was already outside waiting for me though, in Emmett's Jeep.
"I thought because Emmett took my car when he spent the day with you, we'd take Emmett's this time."
"Sounds good." I said as confidently as I could. I clambered in and tried, without success, to buckle the harness-seatbelt.
"Here. Let me do it." She said, reaching over and locking my buckle into place with ease. Then, she started up the beast of a vehicle and drove off.
"So what are we going to do?" I asked.
"I thought we might go shopping and get you some real cloths." She said. "In Paris."
"We're going to Paris!" I shouted. "Just like that?"
"Yeah." She said, looking at me like I was a buffoon. "We can take the plane."
"You have a plane. I should have guessed." I said. "I mean, you've probably got your own country."
"Not quite." She said. "Though we probably could. So like I was saying, we'll go shopping in Paris and then go a little clubbing. There's nothing like a club in Europe."
She drove us to a small airport and we got on the small plane that the Cullens owned. In the inside, it had comfy chairs and a drink bar.
"Hi Chuck." Said Rosalie to the pilot. He couldn't have been older than twenty-five and was good looking for a human. "This is Bella. She's going with me today."
"Nice to meet you Bella." Said Chuck. He had British accent.
"Nice to meet you too." I said.
"Come on Chuck. We have to beat air traffic." Rosalie said and ushered me into the plane. I sat on one of the comfy chairs and as we took off, I clung to the chair so tight my knuckles turned white. Meanwhile, Rosalie just sat in her chair, looking at a magazine, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
"So how many times have you been to Paris?" I asked her when we were in the air.
"More than I can count. Emmett and I even lived there once." She replied.
"Really. That must have been exciting." I said, trying to sound interested.
"Not really." She said. "It was a long time ago and I hadn't quite grasped the language."
"Oh." I said. "I can't even imagine how hard it must be to learn another language, especially French."
"Yeah. But I'm pretty good at it now." She said. "I can ask for directions and order food, not that I've ever had to do either."
"Today you might." I said.
"Maybe." She agreed. "Hey Chuck. How much longer are we going to be up here?"
"Half hour." He replied. "I'm making good time."
"Yeah. That will be about an hour up here." She said. "That was pretty fast. Faster than I could get us there."
"Rosalie?" I asked. "Does he know what you are?"
"Yes." She said. "He is a vampire too. He belongs to the family in Alaska."
The rest of the way there, we looked at about 100 teen magazines from around the US and listening to the hottest music from around the world. I also learned a couple phrases I French I might need.
"Okay, say it again." Rosalie ordered.
"Bon jor." I said with a horrid French accent.
"No!" she shouted, trying to keep her temper. "You need to roll it on your tongue. It's one word, not two. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour."
"I'm sorry." I wined.
"It's fine." She said, struggling to compose herself. "Just, stick with me and I'll do all the talking. Kay?"
"Sounds like a plan." I said and relaxed in my chair, happy that there would be no more French lessons . . . for now.
"We'll land in about ten minutes." Chuck called back to us from the cockpit.
"Thanks Chuck." Rosalie called while I prepared myself for the plunge back to earth.
"You don't have to hold on like that." Rosalie said when she noticed what I was doing. "Chuck isn't going to crash the plane."
"Right." I said and hesitantly released the chair.
True to her word, 15 minutes later we were safely in the large airport in Paris.
"Wow. This place is huge."
"Oui." She said and quickly led me toward the door. "Si vous ètes aller à-"
"What are you saying?" I asked.
"If we are going to have enough time to do everything I want to, we had better start now."
We went out of the airport and down the street. We must have walked for about twenty minutes before she found the store she was looking for.
"Let's start here." She said and pulled me by the arm into the store.
She chatted with the clerk for a while and then grabbed many things for me to try on.
The first thing I squeezed into was a short black dress that would have made Charlie pass out if he'd seen me in it. It clung to me like plastic wrap. The back was completely bare. The sleeves went around the top of my arms.
"That looks awesome on you." Rosalie said when I came out of the dressing room. "We should get that one."
"As long as my dad never sees it, we'll be okay." I said and went back into the changing room to try the next thing on.
The next thing was a dark purple puffed out dress. The top had spaghetti straps and the neckline was skinny and went down to my bellybutton.
"That one doesn't look good on you." Rosalie informed me. "You don't have the right figure for it. We'll put that one back." And I ventured back to the changing room.
This continued for about another hour until I had tried everything on that she pulled off a rack for me. He decided to buy only three things and sent about 100 other back to the racks. She paid for them and we left.
"Thank you." I said to her as we walked to the next store. "You really don't have to do this."
"I know." she said. "But I want to. You maybe human, but you're also the only person who will be my Barbie doll."
"I'm finally getting to know you." I said happily. "And if being your Barbie is the only thing I have to do, then I'll gladly do it."
The next store we went to was less fancy and had more everyday cloths. There, I tried on a number of pant and shirt combinations. My favorite one was a pair of black silk pants and a dark red and black silk Japanese like shirt. And luckily Rosalie liked the way it looked on me, so we got it. We also got a short purple denim skirt and a black shirt that was solid fabric on the shoulders and then the rest of the sleeve was lace.
"Then, we went for lunch. We went to a little café that served lots of things I could read. But, I told Rosalie what I wanted and she ordered it.
I ate my salad in silence and thought about Edward. I missed him more than ever for some reason. It seemed like he had been gone for a year.
"What's the matter?" Rosalie asked me, noticing something was wrong.
"I miss Edward." I admitted.
"I know how you feel." She said. "I miss Emmett. We usually go hunting together but this time we didn't. It feels kind of weird being here while he's off hunting."
"That's exactly how I feel." I said. "We really aren't that different, are we? I mean in the way we feel about our guys."
"Yep." She agreed, smiling for the first time at me. "But I'm not going to let it get me down, and neither should you. We can still have fun without them."
"Definitely." I said. "I did have a life before I met him and I had fun. So him being gone for a couple days shouldn't a problem at all."
"Besides, they'll be back tonight." She said, looking at me to see what my reaction would be. "We can keep preoccupied until then."
I finished my lunch with new enthusiasm. Edward was coming back tonight. I could find something to keep myself busy with until then, after all, I was bonding with Rosalie, in Paris!