Wow its another update!
You guys are rocking my world with your reviews, seriously!
I am feeling all the Carlisle and Tanya hate! Poor Tanya, she's a skank but she doesn't deserve the hate. And please rest assured that you won't be seeing any more of her. She was just an illustration of Edward's lonliness and lets face it... he's an 18-year-old hottie with needs, people!
The Carlisle hate can continue, and I'll be adding another to the list of people we DO NOT LIKE in this second part.
So go ahead and read, enjoy and review!
Don't forget Stripped by punkfarie and This Sort Of Thing Just Doesn't Exist by .!
To answer one particular question, I have not seen Kyle XY, but it looks awesome and it is kinda similar. Downloading - I mean purchasing it right now!
The party was already in swing when we found ourselves in the living room. The foosball was set up with Jasper and Alice locked in a furious battle – much cussing ensued, but Esme pretended not to hear it. She stood chatting animatedly with Rosalie about decorations and interior design regarding the grand opening of their new bar, recently named The Grizzly, while Carlisle stood beside Esme sipping on a martini and listening intently.
"Bella!" called Emmett from across the room.
"Apipoulai!" Bella responded, raising one hand in a small wave. He dropped his hotdog at the precise moment his jaw hit the floor. Even Rosalie stopped her conversation and whipped her head around to face Bella, who just kept smiling.
"What did you say?" Emmett asked, his voice matching mine the very first night I'd heard her speak. He inched towards her, and then darted at her at full speed when she repeated herself. "I love you so freakin' much! You are the best little Supreme Being ever!" He spun her around effortlessly and she squealed and giggled, bubbles and chimes at full volume, while I struggled to figure out what the hell was going on.
"It's a move quote. Three guesses which one," said a voice in my ear, I turned my head slightly to find Jacob standing there and rolling his eyes fondly as Emmett continued to praise Bella for successfully quoting The Fifth Element.
"You even got the little wave right and everything!" he cried, mussing up her hair, much to her disapproval.
"Don't touch it!" she protested, shaking free of him and smoothing her hair down. Apparently somewhere along the line she'd learned a certain amount of vanity. Alice probably had something to do with that. Not that it was a bad thing – she ought to care about her appearance and want to enhance her natural beauty. I groaned at myself inwardly. Enhance her natural beauty? My inner monologue was starting to sound like some metrosexual douchebag.
The party continued in a kind of blur for me. I couldn't tear my eyes away from Bella. She was more graceful, more verbose, more confident and... Happier. She was happy. I watched her as Jacob stood behind her and taught her how to work the foosball handles, continued to watch as she took Emmett on in a burger-eating contest and lost, clutching her stomach in a comical manner and struggling to breathe. She flopped down on the lounge beside me and as she laid her head in my lap I played with the loose tendrils of her long brown hair. Jacob approached us, and as much as I appreciated him keeping her company I just wanted him to fuck off for a while. She must have shared this sentiment because she outright told him to go away.
"Ouch, baby Bells," he laughed, pretending to be hurt but being that infuriating kind of understanding about it all. I didn't want him to understand. I wanted him to be mad and I wanted him to walk away without an intention of coming back. Because I was back now, and there was no need for him to take care of her anymore.
"I'm just tired!" she reasoned, and the thought of her reasoning at all brought a smile to my face. It was like watching a child grow and learn. Jacob just mumbled something or other and rejoined the crowd. "Missed you," she whispered, and when I looked down at her, she had tilted her head back to see my face better.
"I missed you too. I missed you the most out of everything," I told her, reaching down and caressing her soft little cheek. She shut her eyes and leaned into my hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jacob watching us with a peculiar expression. By this time the parents had gone to bed, warning us not to stay up too late and to keep it to a reasonable noise level – as if that really mattered in a house this size, we could scream bloody murder and they wouldn't hear – and the girls were dancing while Jasper and Emmett dominated the foosball and Jacob pretended to referee even though I could see him watching us. She sensed my unease and turned to Jacob, but ignored his gaze and promptly turned her attention to Alice and Rosalie who were bumping and grinding away to some Beyonce song.
"What are they doing?" she asked me, and a part of me rejoiced because it was moments like this – that had been few and far between tonight – that assured me that she was still my little girl. My sweet, innocent and naive little Bella.
"Dancing. People move their bodies along with the music," I explained, swaying along with the beat just to illustrate my point. Honestly, I hated this song. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to encourage women to badger men about putting rings on their fingers ought to be shot.
"It looks hard," she frowned, her lips pursing as she concentrated on their bodies popping and locking and whatever the hell they were trying to do. "I don't think I like it."
"I bet you would if you knew how," I contradicted, nudging her gently and smiling encouragingly.
"Will you teach me?" she asked, sitting up and straightening her shirt.
"I don't think so... I'm not a good dancer. I wouldn't be able to teach you."
"But you're the best teacher I ever had!" she argued, pouting a little. And thank fuck Alice interrupted us because that girl had me so tightly wrapped around her finger that I would have gotten up and made an ass of myself just to see her happy.
"Bella your hair is ruined!" she cried in dismay, hurrying over and starting to fix it. Bella shot Emmett an angry look that he didn't see, but Jasper did.
"She's not happy with you, dude."
"Well now that makes two of us, huh?" Emmett chuckled, shaking his head. I was about to ask what they meant when Jacob came over and enticed me to go outside with the prospect of a cigarette. Oh how I needed one...
***
"She's really something, huh?" was Jacob's conversation-starter. I took a long pull and nodded my head. "She missed you so much. She cried for a little while, but then your emails started coming. Made her feel better to have that contact, you know?" I nodded again, not particularly wanting to discuss Bella with him, but going along just to keep the peace. "She's like... the best little sister in the world, isn't she?" he said, and I agreed, but the second the words left my mouth I knew they weren't right.
I turned my gaze to the window and peered inside, where Bella was being shown how to dance by Alice and Rosalie. They both looked so encouraging, and I felt a kind of relief at the fact that Rosalie seemed to be warming up to her. Probably made it easier now that she could hold conversations and Rosalie could plainly see that she wasn't any threat to us. But looking at Bella, I knew that I didn't think of her as a sister. She was more than that. She was more than anything. She was everything to me.
"Cause, I dunno she's cute and shit. She's like a little kid stuck in a teenage body and she's got this ultimate adorableness about her..."
"See its words like adorableness that makes me want to ban you from being around her," I joked, throwing a pebble at him. We laughed, but in the back of my mind I knew I'd just come to a crossroads. I could be her friend, her protector, her big brother – just like Jacob was doing – or I could try to be her everything. Would she ever feel that way about me? Would she understand it even if she did one day feel something for me? "Dude, are you even here?"
"Yeah, sorry. I think I see Emmett feeding her some kind of drink... we should go inside," I said distractedly, passing my deep thought off as concern for Bella. In truth, I did see him take a cup to her, but there wasn't any way he would be giving her alcohol. That would be just plain stupid.
"Was that VODKA?!" Rosalie screeched just as we reached the living room. Both of our heads snapped around to Bella, who was pulling a face that no one could deny was a post-vodka face. "We don't even know if that's legal!"
"She's clearly our age, Rose!" Emmett justified, but Jacob just scoffed beside me.
"You don't know that! You don't know anything about her! She could be sixteen! She could be fourteen for all you know!"
I rushed to her side, she was holding her head.
"Bella are you alright?" I asked, cupping her face in my hands.
"Room is moving," she rasped, throat still raw from the drink. I kind of wanted to kick Emmett's ass. And from the looks in Jasper and Jacob's eyes, it would be a team effort. "Edward, you're pretty," she grinned after a time. Everyone cracked up. "Well he IS!" she huffed, crossing her arms in an exaggerated pout. "You can let go of my face now, I want to dance to this song," she slurred, and then I knew she was definitely drunk because she closed her eyes and swayed with a goofy smile on her lips. Jacob evidently decided just to go with it, because he waltzed on over and lifted her from the couch, dancing with her. I watched them dance and it came to me that Jacob never had any intention of being anything to her but a good friend. Not from what I could see tonight. It made a weight lift from my shoulders, because the last thing I wanted was to toss Bella into some sort of twisted love triangle. I just wanted her to know that if she wanted me, I would be hers in an instant.
But how would I explain something like that to a girl who didn't even know what dancing was?
"I'll be telling Carlisle about this," Jasper said in my ear as he sat beside me. I didn't look away from Bella and Jacob, but I nodded. "He's not going to be happy, you know. Rose and Jacob are right. I might stay with her tonight and keep an eye on her."
"You don't have to do that Jasper, I can look after her," I told him, finally turning to face him, but he wasn't looking at me. He was watching Bella waltz drunkenly.
"I've got the training to deal with it if she's got alcohol poisoning," he challenged, raising an eyebrow at me. And that just fucking pissed me off. As if it wasn't enough that my own father liked him better because he was going to be a doctor now he was going to use that shit against me to steal my time with Bella.
"Yeah well if she doesn't fucking like you, dude, she's not going to be very responsive to you is she?" I countered. "What did you do to make her upset?"
"I don't know," he answered, but I knew this was a lie. In fact, I knew Jasper's lying faces so well that I knew that it wasn't a complete lie. He had an idea why she was upset with him, but didn't know definitively.
"Right," I muttered with a roll of my eyes, but I let it go for now. "I'll look after her. If she starts throwing up I know exactly where to find you, alright?"
"Why are you so insistent, Edward? It's not as if you're gonna get some and you don't want to miss the opportunity. This is Bella, not one of your Seattle skanks."
"Okay there was only one girl in Seattle and I've fucking missed her. I'm her best friend. I know she'll want me. She's always been attached to me."
"Unhealthily attached."
For some reason, those two words just really got to me. Who the fuck was he to say how healthy or unhealthy our relationship was?
"Alright Mr. I-Come-From-A-Fucking-Perfect-Background... why don't you tell your perfect fucking girlfriend that the way she used to be attached to Esme was unhealthy then? Why don't you tell Carlisle, your closest buddy, that he let his three kids grow up unhealthily attached to each other? You might know how to fix someone after a physical trauma but you haven't got a fucking clue how to deal with anything emotional, do you? I thought you did because you were so good with her in the beginning, but you can get fucked Jasper if you think I'm going about this the wrong way. Bella's done just fine-"
"Without you," he interrupted, holding his hands up as though he knew I wanted to fucking shoot him for saying that. "No offence, Edward, but she progressed a lot further while you were gone."
"That was a timing issue, Jasper."
"If you say so... look whatever, you take care of her tonight because its obviously a big deal to you."
"Good," I grumbled, standing and making my way over to the table under the pretence of grabbing some food. I wasn't hungry. I just needed to get away from that moron. I stood at that table for the rest of the night, letting Bella's carefree nature calm my seething mood, munching absently on long-forgotten snacks and reminding myself that it had been a timing issue, nothing more. I would never hold her back. After all, it was me who she spoke to in secret when she wasn't confident enough to let anyone else hear. It was me who she trusted enough to carry her back her from the forest. And it was me – of this I was absolutely certain – who was meant to find her. Because she was my Bella, she was everything, and nothing was going to tear us apart.