PUT DOWN THE SHARP OBJECTS
PUT DOWN THE SHARP OBJECTS!! If you kill me there will be no other person to finish the story and if I'm dead I can't even give someone else permission to finish it! You can kill my school…and my teachers…and my homework…you just can't kill me. I'm warning you ahead of time…this will be the last chapter for a while…WAIT! What I'm going to do is finish the story, or at least a few chapters before I post anything else so that I can be more punctual with the updates!! By finishing everything you can get a new chapter everyday, maybe 2 or 3 a day if you review quickly. This is what I'm going with and hopefully you don't hate me enough to stop reading.
HA-LOCO: If I haven't already read all the chapters of your story I haven't read yet and reviewed every single one and apologized thoroughly enough…I'M SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SORRY FOR TOTALLY IGNORING YOU!! IT WASN'T INTENTIONAL!!
DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN ANYTHING AFFILIATED WITH THE TWILIGHT SAGA OR STEPHENIE MEYER!!
Bella POV:
"So?" I was in the kitchen mixing waffle batter. Edward had his hands resting lightly on my waist, his face in my hair.
"Yes, love?" he kissed my neck.
"What did you talk to Carlisle about?" I was kind of reluctant to ask, in case it was none of my business.
"Nothing important," if he was lying I couldn't tell, and something made me think he didn't want to talk about it anymore. I nodded. "Though he did want something," now he sounded reluctant.
"What?"
"He said that he has no problem with me being here all the time but…"
"But?"
"I do have to go into work every so often, not as much as before, but still. It's starting to look suspicious," I completely forgot! Of course he had to go to work! The Cullen's had to keep up pretenses; they couldn't afford to draw suspicion to themselves.
"Oh. Well, I guess…" how could I finish that sentence? I didn't want him to go, but I wouldn't cause them problems, not just for Edward, but for all of them.
"If you don't want me to go I'll tell Carlisle I can't. I'll pretend I transferred to a different hospital or something."
"Edward," I turned to face him, "I won't be the cause of any problems with your family. If people are getting suspicious then you should go back to work. I need to catch up on my writing anyway," I looked at him sternly, hoping that maybe for once he'd listen to me.
"Love-,"
"No, Edward. If your father wants you at work then you're going," hoping the use of the word father would make him listen.
"Okay, but the second you want me back home tell me. If you need me here I'll be here, no matter what Carlisle says. Don't think you have to put up with my absence should you not want to. You're far more important than suspicious humans could ever be," now it was his turn to look stern.
"I'm human, too, you know," I joked. He smiled.
"Yes, you are. The most inhuman human I've ever met in my life."
"Hey!" I shrieked laughingly.
"You know what I mean," he smiled and briefly pressed his lips to mine.
"MMMMMYYYYY!!" Antoinette, I smiled. She was quite loud for such a little girl.
"I'll get her," Edward let go of me and went to get her out of her playpen. I looked out into the living room and watched as Edward went to pick her up.
"DDDAAAAADDDDEEEEEEE!!" she squealed happily. I froze. She said daddy! She said daddy! Edward turned to look at me.
"Did she say…?" he looked stunned.
"DDDAAAADDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!" Antoinette was screaming now. I nodded at him, I'm sure I wore the same expression. Suddenly his face lit up with the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen. He turned to pick her up and threw her in the air, she laughed. When he turned to me I could feel the huge ear-to-ear smile on my face.
"She said daddy," I whispered.
Grrrrr!! In the last month I'd been in more romantic situations than any other woman in history, fiction and reality alike and yet I couldn't write a freaking romance novel?! What the hell?! It made no sense! Maybe I was having Edward withdraws. There was no other explanation. Sigh. I was sitting on my bed with my laptop in my lap, go figure, with the worse case of writers block in history. I was trying to figure out how to word Darian's, the poor blacksmith, suggestion of elopement to Audrey, the rich Lord Mallery's only daughter. Only I couldn't figure out how, all I knew was that she was going to say yes and in their attempt Audrey was going to be found by the Lord's guard and Darian was barely going to escape with his life. I was still undecided about the ending.
Another thing I knew, I had about a month to finish. The deadline was January 2. I'd finally gotten my editor to lighten up on the deadline. This gave me about a month. December 2 was next week. I wanted to finish before Christmas, though. Alice was insisting on throwing a huge birthday party for Rora. She was going all out. Alice was inviting all of the kids from Rora's old pre-school, all of my friends from high school and college, Edward and Carlisle's colleagues from the hospital, and some writers I'd made good friends with over the years. We were having it at their house, because even if I wanted to have it at my house, its size simply did not accommodate.
She was going to be four. Four. My baby was going to be four! I found out I was pregnant just yesterday and all of a sudden she was four! I couldn't believe how big she was getting. She had saved me. My getting pregnant with her was the best thing that ever happened to me. She gave me a reason to go on. When I found out I was going to have her I had already been far from the hard floor I had fallen on when I met Jake. We hadn't been in love since we got married, well, I hadn't, I'm not sure if he ever loved me. At that point I had been giving up on my dreams of writing, it just didn't seem possible anymore, I can't even remember how many publishing companies turned me down. I was going to give up, and then when I knew…knew I was going to be a mother…to be in charge of another life…everything came into perspective for me. That baby was the most important thing in the world. I lived for her. She gave me a reason to keep trying, so that I could be a role model for her, teach her to never give up. To be the strong, yet loving mother she needed. Renee had never been much of a mother, don't get me wrong, I loved her, we were close, but I had always been the adult in that relationship. She never had been, she's better now, but still not past her twenties mentally. I didn't want my daughter to have to be my mother, the way I had been. So in that lay the reason I was where I was. Aurora. My baby.
Edward had been working night shifts at the hospital for about a month and a half now. He worked as little as possible, but he still couldn't stay with me every night. Not to mention the hunting trips. Rora had been on her treatment for about a month, things were steady, but I couldn't see any real improvement. The doctor said it take a while to be noticeable. Her recovery that is. Edward assured me of this to the best of his abilities, he didn't specialize in cancer after all. Nor did Carlisle.
Rora was looking forward to the party. We had been over to the Cullen's place a lot more since the first visit and Alice couldn't help but bombard my daughter with talk of a grand party fit for a princess. Emmett and Rora got along well, both extremely childish. Esme was a wonderful grandmother; Rora had even come to call her grandma. Though she once commented to me on how Esme seemed to young to be a grandma, that had made me laugh.
Rose. There hadn't been much progress with Rosalie. She hadn't spoken directly to me since we first met. I caught her looking at the girls and me, though. Edward didn't like to give away to much about the minds of people he could read, he knew he had no right to the information, that it wasn't his, he didn't like sharing, he felt it wasn't his to share. The little he did tell me though seemed to allude to my being human…that Rosalie wanted to be human more than anything else in the world, maybe even more than she wanted Emmett. Though thinking about the two of them without each other was like thinking of me without Edward. Unimaginable. They were made for each other, just like Edward and me. The way they looked at each other, I caught that look in Edward's eyes sometimes…when he was looking at me. And I knew I looked at him that way, too. Whatever Rosalie's story was it must have been tragic, for her to want mortality that bad.
Antoinette had learned to walk. She could walk around without holding onto things now. She would be one in February, February 26 to be exact. She had learned to say Jasper. It sounded more like "Jisper", though. It was adorable. He was quite taken to her. At first Edward had been uneasy about him being around the girls, he was so new to their way of life. But for some reason in the time we'd been around his control seemed to have doubled. She liked him, too. She had even added "Unncllle" to the beginning of "Jisper". She liked Alice. Though the constant wardrobe changes really got on her nerves, and it seemed to be the only thing that Jasper would stand up to Alice about, because she sure as hell didn't listen to me or Edward. And who doesn't love Carlisle and Esme? The perfect parents, or, in my children's case, grandparents. Emmett, of course, absolutely adored her and was trying to fashion her into a pawn for his future diabolical, extremely evil practical jokes. Which I am sorry to say I have fallen victim to.
At some point in this string of thoughts I dozed off to sleep. Dreaming of giant cakes and eloping blacksmiths named Darian dancing around the back yard of the Cullen's house in the snow. Most normal dream I'd had in awhile. At least I didn't wake up screaming.
Edward's POV:
When I got home from work everyone was asleep. Well I'd hope so; it was four in the morning. Antoinette was mumbling. And Rora was breathing in and out evenly in a deep sleep. When I found Bella in her room she was slouched over her laptop with her head on the keyboard and the screen flipped all the way open so that the computer looked flat. I took it from her and placed it on the desk. There were about eight pages of j's on the word document, judging by that she'd fallen asleep at around 2:00am. I was going to have to talk to her about going to sleep earlier, this was the third time this week I'd found her asleep over her laptop with random letters littering the screen.
I laid her down in more normal position for sleeping hoping she didn't wake up with a crick in her neck. I didn't want her in any sort of pain, no matter how minor. She'd had enough of it watching her daughter sick. Thank God she was getting better. When the results of Rora's third test came back in all of us had been absolutely euphoric. I'd never been so happy. Except for perhaps when God sent me my angels in the first place. Things were finally getting better.