stay right here, rocketeer
chapter eight

Through my bedroom window, I could see the Monday sun rising over the horizon and the forest of evergreens lit at an angle in the most brilliant greens. Across the entire Pacific Standard time zone, everyone was waking up, among which is that peculiar little sprite who clogs my every thought and the reason why some parts of my body were still sore.

I can't get her out of my head. She's like a freakin' virus.

I figured now would be a good time to jam out that essay that's due in English today. I went downstairs into the living room, turned on my laptop, and waited for it to load. We were reading Wuthering Heights and were supposed to write a short paper on the themes. Five minutes later (three of the minutes of which was waiting for Microsoft Word to load), a perfect, finished paper was sent to the printer. Technically speaking, I had no incentive to even try in high school other than the fact that failing the eleventh grade at Forks High would be the embarrassment of the century.

As I got up to retrieve my paper, Alice came bounding down the stairs with my essay in her hands.

"Here you go." She handed it to me. "And yes, you can use the car."

"Huh?"

She only smiled. "Go give Bella a ride to school. Rosalie can drive the rest of us."

The thought hadn't even crossed my mind, yet.

"Shoo." Alice pushed me in the direction of the garage. "You don't want to keep her waiting."

To say I was scared of driving to Bella's house was an understatement. I had to keep repeating to myself that I had driven to her house before, and that as long as I stayed in the car, on the road, and gave her driveway a wide berth, then I was safe.

As I rounded on her street, I slowed the Volvo to a bare crawl as it slowly made its way to Bella's door. I parked on the side of her sidewalk and waited. I tried to hear into the house, but the spell she had cast also seemed to distort any noise, blocking me out completely.

That girl really did think of everything.

I was parked in front of their house for about five minutes when Bella pulled apart the window curtains. She gazed over the cloudy day and then her eyes widened when she saw my car parked up front. I felt silly to sitting inside the car because I could see her, but she couldn't see me. I thought about getting out of the car then, but that seemed awkward too. Nevertheless, Bella smiled and rashly shut her curtains. She was out the front door in four minutes flat. Pretty impressive if you asked me.

I rolled down the window as she approached my car with her book bag in hand. She was wearing another scarf today, but a knitted one instead of a cloth. It was blue and white striped and thin so that part of the necklace showed through underneath. As usual, she adorned a pair of boots; this time they were a pair of short black boots made of a suede fabric.

"Good morning," I greeted. I felt awful for not going over to open the passenger door for her, but doing so would require setting foot on the sidewalk which I was certainly not going to do.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I figured you'd want a ride to school." Actually, this was Alice's idea, but shh.

She beamed and got in. Her closeness pushed a wave of burning sensations to my face but this subtle pain was almost pleasurable in comparison to the spell around her house. I was going to ask her about that when I realized she would get suspicious and then I would have to admit that I went to her house late Saturday night and that just brought weird and creepy to a whole new level.

"So how was Jacob?" I asked.

"Are we starting this already?" she complained.

"Starting what?"

"You know what."

I thought about it for a second. "…no, I really don't know what."

She played with a strand of hair. Why did she always leave her hair down? I mean her wavy, chestnut hair was pretty, yes, but it shielded her beautiful face. "I can't tell if you seriously have no clue or if you're purposely mocking me."

"Take my word, Bella. I'm absolutely clueless when it comes to you."

That seemed to satisfy her, for she settled into her seat and drew her legs up to sit cross-legged. I couldn't help thinking that the more areas she touched, the more my car will smell like her and I was unsure whether or not that was a bad thing.

The ride to school was peaceful and friendly, filled with our relentless bickering over the radio station. A steady downpour forced me to turn my windshield wipers to full blast. I pulled into the line of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot, all of their windshield wipers doing a frantic dance too.

Bella stared at the fat droplets of rain roll down her window. She groaned.

"You never told me why you didn't like water so much," I mentioned.

She clasped her hands together. "There's a lot I never told you."

I hated how everything about me was now exposed yet she kept herself half-way hidden. She had the advantage and I hated it. "Secrets don't make friends," I whined.

"Then we're not friends," she said flatly.

"We're not?" Then I realized that question made me sound like a desperate teenage boy fearing rejection so I quickly moved in to save my dignity. "That's too bad. Jessica will be disappointed."

There's that wonderful one-eyebrow up expression of hers again.

"She's so eager to hear all the juicy details about Saturday night," I explained. "I can hear her thoughts all the way out here."

"Oh man, what do I tell her?"

"That you are irrevocably in love with me."

"…?"

"No? Oh well, worth a shot."

Bella laughed. "I thought you were serious."

I laughed too. But a tiny part of me inside was broken because maybe (to some microscopic extent) I was serious.

"Let's not make Jessica too happy now," she said. "If we got together, I would never hear the end of it from her."

"I wonder what would happen if we put Jessica and Alice together in the same room."

"The world would explode."

"Yeah, probably."

I pulled into my normal parking spot. Rosalie's hey-everyone-look-at-me! convertible was parked beside me. Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, and Alice had gone to their first class to avoid this nasty rain, as did most of the high school body, except for the swarm of teenage boys who squealed like baby piglets at the sight of Rosalie's ostentatious car.

I turned off the ignition and Bella and I got out. The others stared as Bella and I walked towards the school together.

Are you kidding me? The Cullen douche is with Bella?

I chuckled at the epithet. The Cullen douche. Nice.

Forks finally gets a hot chick and Cullen just has to sweep in.

Well there goes my chance with Bella.

So Edward Cullen is not gay after all. Damn.

"Oh look, there's Jessica," Bella muttered.

Despite the heavy onslaught of rain, Jessica stood under the patio, semi-drenched, waiting for Bella. Bella stopped walking and I nearly collided into her, which would have caused many horrible consequences for me, indeed.

"What should I tell her?" she whispered. She stood close to me, perhaps too close for comfort, but the rain was helpful in alleviating the burning.

"Maybe you should just tell her we are dating. It would be easier than explain the truth, a truth that even I don't know the entirety of."

Her freckles on the corner of her eyes flickered from light to dark and she bit her bottom lip. "Fine. But I think you're just being bitter, Edward."

"I'll keep bugging you until you tell me!" I called after her as she hurried to meet Jessica.

"You have fun with that!" she called back.

I watched as she reached Jessica and the two talked animatedly while walking inside. To my dismay, Bella had been standing in all this rainwater yet she was still walking on two legs, no mermaid tail in sight. Well, my theory just went down the drain. Although, now that I look at it, Bella was a good head shorter than Jessica. Could Emmett possibly be correct? Bella Swan…is an elf?

We were taking a test in calculus and I finished mine before the teacher finished passing out all the tests. I got a 92%, definitely above average, but not so high that it will arouse attention. So as I stared over my test and pretended to be working on it, I listened far into the classroom where Jessica and Bella were currently having a heart-to-heart. Jessica made it clear that she would be ruthlessly interrogating Bella until she got some answers and personally, I was with Jessica on this. If Bella wasn't going to answer to me, maybe she will to her human best friend.

"Isabella Swan. You, Edward Cullen, start talking," she said.

"Okay, you really want to know?" Bella's voice was hushed and filled with excitement. She was a better actress than I thought. "Edward and I…are dating."

I KNEW IT! "That's so awesome! So what's he like?" She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively for good measure.

"Oh, you know. He's Edward Cullen."

"Yes, I do know," Jessica answered with frustration."But like…you like him then?"

Through Jessica's eyes, I watched Bella's freckles turn a deep ebony shade. "Yes."

I sighed in relief and a magnitude of weights was lifted from my shoulders. At the end of the day, even if all goes wrong and Bella happens to be a vampire slaying enchantress or something, well, at least I know she likes me.

"Aw…I'm so happy for you!" Jessica gushed.

"Yeah."

"So," Jessica lowered her voice, "has he kissed you yet?"

This question made me tense up. What would Bella say? What did she even feel? She knows that her presence alone is enough to cause me to become nauseous and the smallest touch is the worst agony I can imagine. It's nothing personal. It's not that I don't like her enough so I avoid contact. It's more of a self-preservation tactic. Surely she understands, right?

"It's not like that," Bella whispered. "Our relationship is…at odds."

"How come?"

"I'm different. He's different. We make a unique couple. It's complicated."

"But Bella, it's always complicated, even when it doesn't have to be."

I didn't even bother to keep up the pretentions and buy a lunch today. The only other person not ignorant enough to notice was Bella, and she already knew of my diet plans. I sat at the table we sat at before and Bella soon sat down to join me.

"Do people think I'm a slut?"

"Come again?" I heard exactly what Bella said, but the arbitrariness of her statement caught me off guard. The girl never failed to surprise me.

"You can read minds, right?" Bella said in a huff. "What are people thinking of me, right now?"

I scanned the cafeteria. "Well, your friends are thinking about how you were ditching them for me, but they forgive you because I'm so hot. Well, the girls forgive you. Mike and Eric want to pulverize me. The girls over there are jealous of you. The guys over there are jealous of me. And that girl…ooh, that's interesting, she was thinking about how it took a beautiful girl from sunny Phoenix to 'melt' the icy Cullens. That's pretty poetic."

I got Bella to smile a teensy bit. "I think you are filtering their thoughts too much."

"So maybe a few bitter girls are calling you names, why is that bothering you?" I asked. "You know they're only saying that stuff. Don't take it personally."

She lowered her eyes and her hair cast a shadow across her face. For a second, she actually looked human. "So no one is thinking about how I'm like my mother?" she whispered.

"No, I don't think the Forks High population made the connection yet. Even I hadn't made the connection yet."

"Well good." She leaned back in her seat, crossed her arms, and glared at some passing freshmen. Bella, bipolar as she already was, got extremely sullen whenever the topic of her mother came up. All this time I was trying to figure out what Bella was, I overlooked the entire back-story. I know nothing of Bella's childhood or history or family other than Charlie for that matter. It amazed me how long Bella's life could exist in the dark.

After you're a vampire for a while, you start to think that you know everything. And then some puzzle like Bella Swan walks into your life and suddenly you don't know anything at all.

"Bella," I said tentatively, "what happened to your mother?"

All I knew was what everyone else at Forks knew; young Charlie Swan took in a teenage girl who was lost and a few odd months later they were married and then, as sudden as she arrived, she was gone. No one even knew Charlie had a daughter until Bella showed up, seventeen years later.

At my question, her freckles immediately turned pitch black. Her face drained of color and her bottom lip quivered for a second before she bit down on it. Maybe I imagined it, but I felt the table and the chairs vibrating underneath me.

Concerned, I scooted across the table to the seat beside Bella. I saw that her hands were clenched in tight fists on her lap, her knuckles white as bones. I regretted ever bringing this sour topic up.

"Bella?"

She only shook her head and took a deep, shaky breath. She whimpered and my heart broke for her.

I reached over and put my hand over her clenched fist. Aching shocks scorched my entire arm but I ignored it the best I could.

The touch of my cold hand made Bella lift her head to stare at me in surprise. "What are you doing?" she whispered urgently. She tried to pull away but I refused to let go. "Aren't I hurting you?"

"Yes, this hurts so much that I can't think straight," I said. "But watching you suffer and not knowing what's wrong pains me even more."

After a few more failed attempts to pull her hand away, she sighed and opened up her hand palm up. I want to say that after we entwined our fingers, I felt sparks flying—but in reality, my arm was throbbing in matchless pain and threatening to fall off.

"I'm trying, Bella," I said. "You have to let me in. You have to give me some answers."

She looked at me with such a mix of emotions, but most of all, I saw fear. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I really want to trust you. I really want to let myself believe that you're different from the others. I'm trying, too. But certain memories won't fade and some secrets I'm not ready to share yet. You don't understand."

"You're right. I don't understand. That's because you refuse to tell me anything." Forget the intensive torture I was enduring, I scooted even closer to her. "I know that some other vampires have mistreated you before and I know that you were probably raised thinking that vampires were the bad guys, the enemies. And there is nothing wrong with that, actually, since it's true. But you must have seen something good in me, because you've stayed all this time. Look, I'm not forcing you to do anything. It's just that you've had ample time to get the hell away from me but you chose to stay. I need to know what that means. I need to know that you trust me enough to stay, because I don't think I can handle it if you left now."

Her eyes were wide and unblinking.

Don't be too forward, you idiot, Alice criticized. You're scaring her.

I knew holding her hand was a mistake. The pain was making me lose my common sense. Not only had I overwhelmed Bella with just exactly how I was feeling, I forgot my brothers and sisters were listening to the whole thing. Emmett and Rosalie were going to mock me for decades.

Just as I was about to open my mouth again to somehow take it all back, Bella spoke.

"Of course I'll stay."

…Didn't see that coming, Alice thought.

post script: next chapter is the dance and we find out bella is! thanks for reading :)