Once Alice had swapped out my broken Blahniks with a scolding about how fragile the heels were, she and Edward tried to convince me it was time to hunt. I wanted to see my baby, mostly because I didn't believe their reassurances of her beauty. I mean, what if she looked like my Aunt Louise? That unfortunate woman, bless her heart, looked like Charlie on a hungover day before he'd had a chance to shave. I really had to see for myself or I'd go insane with the anxiety.
Edward cut in smoothly, with a long-suffering expression. "You have to hunt before you meet her, Bella. Her scent…"
And though the thought of his super secret fartsniffing power again made me want to clock him, I suddenly noticed that I could in fact distinguish a wet, juicy, thumping coming from downstairs that made my mouth water: an all too human heartbeat. Esme was in front of me in one sixteenth of a second with an embroidered hanky for the drool.
"Alright, you're right. We can hunt first," I grumbled.
The family smiled as one, and I looked to Edward for guidance… and noticed he was giving me that dazzling, crooked smile of his. The one that had always made my heart skip and my blood rush. Robbed of living heart and blood on which to work its dastardly magic, it instead settled for shocking my newly supercharged limbs and libido into betrayal.
Before I even knew what was happening, I had launched myself at him – "OH, EDWARD!"-- and my teeth and fingernails screeched against his perfect skin as we slid across the glass-littered floor, crashed into a previously unscathed wall and dropped to the lawn again in a shower of sheetrock.
Edward's shrieks of "Bella, that's attached!" and Emmett's and Jasper's roaring laughter from above brought to my senses. Sheepishly, I got to my feet , smoothed my hair, offered Edward a hand up, and offered him his pants back. Well, most of them.
"Yeah, sorry about that."