February 17, 2012

Hello, Twilight community,

I love that I still receive notifications that people are following my story. It makes my day to find new names in my inbox from time to time. You all are the best.

For those of you that are sticking around long enough for the sequel, rest assured that I am not discontinuing the story. I just happen to be a double major and double minor with two on-campus jobs and three labs a week, so right now it's easiest to do touch-ups on ADKoL than it is to write RSM from scratch. I also have an AU Jake/Nessie story in the works, which I hope to send into transit as soon as I finish these edits.

Anyways, enjoy the read, and please leave me happy messages or recruit your friends!

~ evelyn-shaye

Special thanks to EvilPumpkin and Kate for being such great temporary betas for this chapter. You made it magical!

Chapter Nine: Love and Hate

"So tell me," Tamara said as she sidled up next to me. We were in line for lunch with Jake, her friend Garet – short for Margaret – and Garet's boyfriend, Jonathan. "You moved here at the end of summer, right? Where are you from?"

"We lived in Forks, Washington," I replied. Momma and Daddy had reassured me that, so long as I was vague about the details of my birth and my connection with the La Push pack, it wasn't too dangerous to tell the truth. "It's just outside of Seattle. A really small town."

"Is that why you moved here?" Garet asked.

"That's part of the reason." I smiled. "Our family is pretty big, plus Gran—Dad got a really good job with the practice here." I mentally slapped myself. It was so hard to think of my grandfather as my adoptive father when I had, officially, the greatest dad ever.

Then again, I thought, lightly brushing my hand against Jacob's, Grandfather tends to be more understanding than Daddy sometimes.

Jacob barked a short laugh and quickly coughed to cover it up. I pounded him on the back with the hand that wasn't holding my tray.

"You alright, Jake?" Tamara asked worriedly.

"Never better," Jake assured her, but he sent me a sideways glance. It wasn't hard to interpret his look. Tamara hadn't seemed that interested in Jacob when we talked this morning, but the moment I introduced them, she had started paying very close attention to "the new guy." It reminded me of Momma's complaints about her first time through high school, how she had been invisible in Phoenix and then suddenly become the beautiful new girl at Forks High School her junior year.

I understood Tamara's fixation, but I couldn't bring myself to like it. Jake was my…well, whatever we were these days.

"What about you, Jake?" Garet asked, thankfully returning to the topic. "Where did you move from?"

"I'm from a Quileute reservation not far from where Nessie used to live, actually," he answered. We had both decided that it would be impossible to hide the fact that we were from the same area of Washington. "But the rez is pretty separate from the town. Not too much interaction between them." He shrugged casually.

I reached for two slices of pepperoni pizza with bated breath, but fortunately, no one asked the obvious question. I was worried that Tamara would jump on any piece of information about Jacob, but she seemed uninterested in the fact that we were both from Washington…and had moved here around the exact same time.

Everyone else grabbed their lunch—Tamara and Jonathan wanted pizza, as well, but Jake and Garet went for the cheeseburgers—and we migrated to an empty table.

"It's a good thing we got here first. You have to claim your table the first few days until everyone settles into a routine," Tamara informed us.

I believed her. Alice and the gang were sitting at the same table that they had chosen yesterday. I felt a twinge of guilt that I wasn't sitting with them, but I figured that it would be good for our image if at least one of us mingled easily with the humans.

Daddy confirmed this when he came over with Momma. "We're going to sit with the rest of the family, Nessie," he told me. "Are you alright here?"

"I'm great…Edward." I had to make sure that I didn't accidentally call him "Daddy." He nodded at my thoughts. "I'll see you and Bella after school."

He smiled and gave me a light hug, while Momma lightly kissed my forehead, earning a few confused glances from my friends. The two of them danced away hand in hand, their full lunch trays perfectly balanced in one hand. Their trays would be just as full at the end of lunch hour.

Tamara redirected her attention to me. "How does that work, anyway? Your family, I mean." Her eyes betrayed curiosity and a hint of wariness. I understood; how many adoptive sisters would so casually display affection in the middle of a school cafeteria?

"It's actually kinda crazy," I admitted. Crazy didn't even come close to the complexities that defined the Cullen clan. "We're all adopted, but we each have at least one biological sibling."

"Is Edward your brother?" Jonathan asked. "You two look crazy alike."

I nodded. "He and I are twins."

"I can tell," Jake said, pretending not to know this part about me. "You two have the exact same hair."

"Different eyes, though," Tamara commented. "I had never seen eyes like Edward's gold ones, but it seems like your entire family has them."

"Yeah, it's kinda weird how that panned out," I muttered. Please don't ask, please don't ask…

"What about Bella, though?" Garet wondered. "Are she and Edward…dating?" Her face wrinkled in disgust.

I grimaced as well. My parents' love life was always a fun topic. "I guess you could call it that." I sighed. "It's really not anything to worry about. Carlisle keeps very strict rules"—and he did: don't expose our nature to anyone else—"so there's absolutely nothing sketchy about it."

The girls seemed to relax. "So who is Bella related to?" Garet asked, coming back to her previous question.

"Well, Emmett and Alice are both juniors—not twins, just in the same grade – and Bella is their younger sister," I explained. Grandfather decided that it would've been too suspicious for all of us to be twins. "Then Rosalie and Jasper are twins."

"Such cool names," Tamara commented. "But yours is the most unique, by far."

I smiled. "Yeah, I'm told that I was named for my two grandmothers and that Edward was named for his father."

"You don't know?" Jonathan asked.

I breathed in. "Edward and I were adopted earliest. I never knew anyone outside of Esme and Carlisle – well, Mom and Dad." This part was harder for me to tell, because it seemed a much more blatant lie than anything else I had said so far. "The others were adopted later in their lives."

"Why did your mom adopt all of you instead of having her own children?" Garet asked.

This question was easier to answer in terms of facts, but difficult to think about because of Grandmother's pain. "Mom lost her first child," I said slowly. "It nearly killed her, losing the baby." Literally. "She soon found out that she could never bear children again."

The girls gasped quietly, Jake looked as troubled as I felt, and Jonathan seemed unsure of how to react, settling for scratching his head awkwardly. Hoping to alleviate the tension, I hurriedly continued. "She and Dad decided to adopt. Because she had gone through so much loss, she didn't want any of her children to experience what she had, so she adopted siblings that would otherwise have been separated."

My voice broke slightly at the end. I couldn't imagine losing a child or ever being separated from my family, like the Volturi had nearly done to us. Across the cafeteria, Daddy nodded solemnly and leaned in close to share my thoughts with the rest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Momma scoot closer to him.

We all sat in silence. No one wanted to speak, so Jake saved me by asking, "Should you have shared all of this with us? We've only just met, and that was very personal." I could hear the warning in his voice. It would be careless to share my "life story" with humans that I had just met.

I opened my arms, trying to hide the frantic pounding of my heart. "I don't mind, since you are all new friends of mine. But please don't tell anyone else. I don't want our family to be the source of gossip."

"No, of course not!" Tamara hastily assured me. The other couple nodded in assent.

I glanced over at Daddy; he was staring at our table with open concern. I flipped my hair slightly to catch his attention and sent him a nonverbal reassurance. These humans won't say anything. I have a good feeling about them.

Daddy eyed me skeptically. Momma noticed our silent debate and laid her hand gently on his arm. He glanced at her and sighed, turning back to me with grudging acceptance. I gave him a small thumbs-up.

"Hey, so, Nessie." Tamara regained my attention. "We girls should definitely hang out and get to know each other better. What do you say to hanging out at my house after school tomorrow?"

I inhaled and winced to show my regret. "I'm sorry, but I can't," I apologized. "My family is having company tomorrow night, and they'll want me home to…straighten up and stuff." Of course, nothing needed to be "straightened up" to prepare for our visit from the other coven, not with Alice living with us. I supposed, though, that I would have to make dinner so that Grandmother could focus on strategic planning with the other vampires.

Tamara didn't seem fazed at all. "That's okay. Maybe we can all do something this weekend." She focused primarily on Jacob. "See a movie or something. And then maybe we girls can go shopping."

It wasn't ideal for me personally—I had inherited Momma's distaste for excessive shopping—but it would be a good chance to bond with the humans and prove that I was only half-vampire. Garet, at least, seemed all for it. "There's this action movie that Jonathan and I were gonna see this weekend anyway," she suggested. "You don't mind if these guys tag along, do you?" she asked her boyfriend.

Jonathan shrugged. "It's fine with me," he replied. He probably knew that the "right" answer was yes.

Tamara beamed and turned to me expectantly. "How about you, Nessie?" she asked.

I nodded. "That sounds great!" I smiled. "I'll have to ask my parents, but I'm sure they'll go for it."

"And you, Jacob?" she continued quickly.

Jake glanced up at her, giving me a good look at the complex emotions warring under his skin. He smiled just enough to seem content with the scenario but not enough to give the impression of interest. In his eyes, I could see more than a flicker of annoyance at Tamara's enthusiasm, but also a complete disinterest. I wanted to sigh with relief, but that would've drawn unnecessary questions.

He shrugged as Jonathan had. "If the whole group is going, then I'll be there," he answered.

The lunch bell rang then. We all scurried to dump our trays and head to our next classes. Tamara had English with Jacob and me, so she stood next to me, opposite Jacob, and chattered incessantly about our plans for the weekend. I cursed my luck for the first time that day that I had another class with my new friend. I desperately wanted to talk to Jacob about her.

I thought that, after school, I would finally have a chance to discuss our new friends with Jacob. Unfortunately, Daddy intercepted us. "Not on your life, Nessie," he growled softly. "You're not spending any alone time with Jacob until we've had our talk."

I sighed heavily. "Daddy, that's not fair!" I struggled to keep my voice low. I didn't have quite the gift that vampires did for subtlety. "Jake is my friend, and I need to talk to him."

"You can talk to him when we get home," he answered in a clipped tone. Momma nodded sadly beside him. She understood my desire to be with Jacob better than anyone but was forced to side with Daddy on this issue.

I allowed myself a side-arm squeeze with Jacob for appearance's sake. "See you at home," I whispered. He nodded but eyed Daddy with suspicion.

"Don't worry about a thing, mongrel," Daddy growled again. I jumped; it had been a long time since Daddy applied such a Rosalie-esque word to my Jacob. "I won't hurt her."

Jacob winced painfully, as did Momma. "Edward, that's not fair," Momma protested quietly, though the repetition of my words carried a different meaning on her lips. I looked between the three of them in confusion. Was I missing an important portion of our family history? I racked my brain, searching for anything beyond the vague explanation of the love triangle they'd had before my birth and the fact that Jacob and Momma had kissed – strangely, even with my new feelings for Jake, I wasn't upset by the past – but no explanation was forthcoming.

Jacob seemed to recover. "If I remember correctly, bloodsucker," he retorted; I flinched again at the expletive, "you weren't always concerned for anyone's wellbeing besides your own."

Daddy balled his hand into a fist. "If you value my trust, dog, you won't question my concern for Bella," he hissed. What story was I missing here? And why were Jacob and Daddy acting so hostile toward each other, when Jacob had been part of our family for years?

"Your trust!" Jake barked. "I never had it! You still watch me like I'm going to steal something from you—"

"Jacob, this is neither the time nor place," Momma interrupted quietly. There were a number of humans whispering amongst themselves as they watched the standoff, including Tamara and Garet. They moved toward me, their eyes concerned, but I motioned them to stop. Later, I mouthed.

Jacob inhaled with a shudder. His form, which had taken on the faintest blur, settled into the human body that was all our classmates knew. "We'll continue this later," he conceded flatly.

"When we arrive home. I need to speak with Renesmee first." Daddy grabbed my arm and led me toward the family Volvo.

"Daddy, wait," I protested, but he ignored me. Jacob stepped in front of us, his face inscrutable as he stared desperately into my eyes. I nearly gasped at the intensity.

"Jacob…" Momma warned. He reluctantly met my mother's gaze and saw something there that seemed to appease him. He assumed a more relaxed stance.

Daddy moved with renewed urgency. I was forced to walk quickly alongside him while Momma followed closely but quietly. I could feel her shield wrapped like a bubble around my mind.

When we climbed into the car, I let Daddy have it. "What is your problem?" I cried. "What did Jacob ever do to you?"

"I agree, Edward," Momma added softly but firmly. "Jacob has been nothing but helpful in all the years that we've known him. You know that I there was a time that I needed him like humans need air." I felt her shield release its protective hold on me and realized that she was sharing something with Edward—the memory that hadn't been included in my family history?

Whether it was or not, a glance in the rearview mirror confirmed that it was at least a painful memory. Daddy's eyes filled with immeasurable sadness and remorse.

"There was a time that I would've killed Jacob for forcing those memories upon you," Momma said lowly. "But you have allowed yourself the freedom to assume that Jacob will treat Renesmee the way you treated me…and to throw his words back in his face at the first opportunity. It isn't fair. If this is a matter of vampire-werewolf prejudice, I will intervene!"

I had never heard my mother speak so forcefully to her mate. I was more than grateful that she had defended my Jacob so eloquently, but I didn't want to harm their relationship for our sake.

Her shield encompassed me once more. "You are very prone to overreaction, love, so go ahead if this is a fatherly concern, but I can assure you, Nessie and Jacob have done nothing wrong."

This was her invitation but also her warning. I could see Daddy warring with indecision—lecture me and anger Momma further, or appease Momma and admit that his little girl didn't need any help.

Apparently, with all eternity ahead, Daddy decided that he would have time to win Momma back if he upset her today. "I do not approve of a relationship with Jacob any time soon," he began.

"Um, Daddy," I interjected. "You're kinda late, because Jake and I have been close since the day I was born."

"The day you were born, neither of you was thinking about a dating relationship," he countered.

"If you didn't approve of Jacob when we first met, you wouldn't have let us get as close as we have," I argued. "You know better than anyone that Jacob is my perfect match. You've freaking seen into his head!"

"And lately, his thoughts his thoughts have not been that innocent!" Daddy exclaimed.

This startled me. Honestly, I didn't know whether to feel insulted or flattered that Jake might be entertaining naughty thoughts about me. All I managed to say in response was, "Really?"

"Nessie, you can't be oblivious to the fact that you're growing up more than just mentally," Daddy said more calmly. "Your physical development is happening so quickly. Jake's attraction to you is going to change just as quickly as you are."

Oh.

I hadn't thought of it that way. Was that why my attraction to Jake had skyrocketed right as we moved here? Had I gone through a sort of middle school to high school transition like any other teenager?

It made sense. Growing up with the La Push pack, the concept of "cooties" had never bothered me. Running around with a bunch of shirtless boys – sometimes shirtless, myself – was bound to make me comfortable around boys in general. But I had never been attracted to them, never really noticed the abs that I was now certain were very present. What I liked about them was the way they protected me and cared about me. They never treated me like Jake's tag-along girl friend, but one of their own, like Claire.

Something occurred to me. "Well, Jake is going to think like any teenage guy, right?" I asked Daddy. "I don't know the guy mentality that well, but it seems like it's a pretty constant thing for a guy to notice and appreciate girls."

"I won't have him ogling at you like some sick dog!" Daddy hissed.

Ogling? Again, that was an interesting development that resulted in mixed emotions on my end. "Well, hormonal teenage guy thoughts aside…" Daddy glared at my reflection, but I continued undeterred. "As long as he doesn't act on his thoughts, that means that he's controlling himself, right?"

Daddy frowned. "Yes, he is showing a surprising amount of restraint," he admitted grudgingly. "He cares enough about you that he's willing to put his desires aside for your own."

"Ha!" I cried triumphantly. "So you admit that Jacob is mature enough to not be the typical teenage guy and wait for me to be ready."

His chin jutted out. "Which you won't be anytime soon!" he reiterated.

"Don't worry, Daddy. Momma beat you to it ten hours ago." I saw Momma smile; apparently there was a memory here, as well.

We pulled into the driveway. I could tell that Daddy wanted to continue, but I slung my bag onto my shoulder and slid out through the small space between my seat and Momma's.

"This conversation isn't over, young lady," Daddy warned.

"Save it, Daddy. We have bigger things to worry about than the werewolf best friend falling in love." I was referring to the strategy meeting tomorrow, which Daddy could not possibly ignore.

I ran inside as quickly as possible. Jake met me at the door, catching me immediately in his strong arms. "What happened?" he asked urgently, searching my face.

"I'll explain everything," I promised, grabbing his hand. "Come with me."

He followed me willingly up to my room, and we plopped onto the bed to continue our conversation. When I faced him, his eyes held the same intensity that they had in the parking lot, though his demeanor was more relaxed. I attributed it to the fact that we were together again.

Jacob sighed with what sounded like relief and extended one hand to trace my jaw line. "That was excruciating," he admitted. "Being away from you. When Edward pulled you away from me…"

I smiled slightly, hoping to reassure him. "Daddy would never hurt me. He's just a little over-protective of his only daughter."

Jake snorted. "That's the understatement of the century. I thought he was going to kill me in the parking lot, or worse, forbid you from ever seeing me again."

I had to laugh. "That will never happen," I promised. I reached out and squeezed his hand. "You and I have an inexplicable friendship. No one would dare try to come between us."

"The Volturi did," he reminded me. I winced, an unfortunate reflex to the mention of their name. Jake's shoulders sagged. "I'm sorry, Ness. That was the wrong thing to say."

"It's fine," I muttered.

For the first time since Jacob and I established ourselves as best friends, we fell into an awkward silence. The tension was too much to handle, so I settled for the first thought that popped into my head. "So, Daddy mentioned that you were, um, attracted to me…."

I trailed off, instantly horrified. How thick was I to bring up the one topic that would make our conversation exponentially more awkward? Oh, please let him change the subject!

Much to my surprise, Jacob smirked. "Oh, did he?" His voice was interested and somewhat smug.

I flushed. "Yeah. He…'tverypurelately," I muttered quickly.

Jake frowned. "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that."

I sighed. "Daddy said that – gosh, this is embarrassing! He told me that you had been ogling at me and that your thoughts weren't very pure lately." I watched him cautiously, waiting for a response.

His countenance darkened. "Manipulative bloodsucker," he spat. He glanced at me apologetically. "He would search through my thoughts and jump to conclusions."

My brow furrowed. "I'm not sure what you mean."

Jacob lowered his gaze to our intertwined hands and began playing with my fingers. "It's true that I've been entertaining certain…thoughts about you lately," he said slowly. "I mean, like I told you last night, I've loved you since the day you were born. I figured that I might consider you as more than just a friend one day."

He smiled. "I've been falling for you since you turned five, Ness. The thoughts that run through my head are what any guy would have for the girl he loves: holding your hand, sitting together with you tucked under my arm, your smile in the morning. Sure, I have flashes when I'm really attracted to your body and just want to touch you" – he blushed, but I nodded at him to continue – "but I never think about violating you in any way. If my eyes linger, it's because you are insanely hot and I love that, soon, I'll be able to call you my girlfriend."

I smiled appreciatively, loving the little dance my heart was performing at his words. I moved closer to Jake and hugged him. "Thanks, Jakey," I whispered.

He chuckled at the use of my childhood nickname. "Of course, Nessie."

I savored the feeling of being in his arms. My conversation with Daddy suddenly made much more sense, and I felt significantly less worried about Jake's intentions and my own daydreams since realizing I was falling for my best friend. This was normal. I was normal.

I could live with a normal but astoundingly beautiful love story.