When You Love Someone
Chapter Two
"And how do you know this chick again, Bella?" Mason, my twin brother, asks me as we climb the s-shaped driveway to get to the mansion matching the address scribbled prettily across the paper in my hand.
"I told you!" I roll my eyes at him as he made me repeat the story for the umpteenth time. As usual, he doesn't trust me to make a sensible decision which is heinous. Absolutely heinous. My judgment is so perfect, I'm more infallible than the pope himself!
"Her name is Alice Cullen, okay?" I go over the story again just to get him off my back. "We met during Mr. Lombard's class and, when we got talking, she invited me over for dinner. Just me, by the way. She never said anything about you tagging along."
"Why were you talking during a class?"
"Oh, my God! You are such a prude!"
"I'm not the one failing Calculus."
"I'm not failing Mr. Lombard's Calculus class," I pointedly correct him, withering him with my stare until he physically shivers from the poison of it. "I'm getting a C minus, far from failing."
"Far from success, too."
"Well, who can be successful with a twin brother who is perfect at everything? Can't you slack off just once? Please? There has got to be something I'm better at than you."
"Don't hold your breath."
We exchange smirks at that because we both know we can hold our breaths for a good hour each, far longer than anyone else we know and freakish if ever said aloud. So, we've kept the secret to ourselves along with all the other disturbing traits we share such as the way everyone thinks we use special shimmer lotion in the summertime when, really, the crystal-like glow is somehow embedded in our skin. Oopsies. We never mention that or the way I can text messages in people's minds, or the way Mason can erase them.
And we never under any circumstances confess to anyone, not even each other, the real reason our pets continuously die on us, and of the same mysterious illness, too. Whatever it is, it drains them somehow of blood.
"It's supposed to rain today," Mason is saying, "so tell your friend we can't stay long."
"Her name is Alice, and I'll stay as long as she wants me to. If you don't like it, tough. Nobody invited you in the first place."
"Bella, do you not see that these people live on top of a creek? If it rains over here, the street below us will flood in seconds, we won't be able to get home, and then I'll be the one who has to explain it to Jennifer the way I always have to explain your messes to Jennifer."
"Jennifer is our fairy godmother; she never gets mad at us. You need to chill, Mason."
"Bella, I mean it. We'll stay here an hour. That's it. Bella, do you hear me?"
"Hi, Alice!" I squeal and wrap the girl who answers the door in a tight hug as if we're the best of friends. I did it only to shut my brother up, knowing I could because of the positive way people have been responding to me my whole life –eager to be my friend and overly receptive of any attention I throw their way –but the way Alice grips me makes me freeze, caught off guard. For a second, I can swear she knows me…but that's impossible, so I let go and step inside her house the way she invites me to do.
"This is my brother," I motion to Mason just as he is in the middle of running his fingers through his fluffy bronze hair the same color as mine, nothing that can come out of a bottle though plenty of our friends (and enemies) have tried.
"It's a pleasure to meet you," he coats on the charm as he takes the hand Alice extends to him. She doesn't swoon at the sweep of his dark brown eyes or fall into a fit of giggles at his manners, and I am impressed. I have never until now see a girl endure my brother this way or look at him the way Alice is. Her face is the expression of someone reunited with a long lost brother…or son…Actually, I can't place it at all. I don't know what is going on with Alice.
"Ah, well, this is my mother, Esme," Alice introduces us to the woman standing in the entrance to what I guess is the kitchen judging by the direction of the chicken Alfredo scent. The woman looks fit to cry as she takes in the sight of Mason and me. She has a hand to her mouth and her lips are trembling.
What is with these people?
"This is my father, Carlisle."
"Hello," the man is the first one to speak to us though he, too, looks at us strangely, unprepared. "How do you do?"
Better than you.
"Fine, thanks," Mason takes the responsibility of replying even as he shoots me a triumphant look because he was right. The Cullens are total weirdoes.
"This is my sister Rosalie," Alice continues the introductions, landing now on the most gorgeous girl I have ever seen though her eyes on Mason and I are large and disbelieving; another unexplainably weird reaction.
Okay…
"No frigging way," exhales the guy next to her. "No way, Man. No way!"
"My brother," Alice explains his significance, "Emmett, my boyfriend/foster brother, Jasper, and, last but certainly not least, my brother Edward."
I jump when my eyes land on Edward.
Because he looks just like the boy holding the hand I don't realize I have reached out toward him…
…the boy also known as my twin brother, Mason.
"No way!" I find myself whispering the same phrase as Emmett, staring first at Edward then at Mason and back again.
And I'm not the only one.
I realize with a jolt that everyone in the room is doing it, too, and jumping with a start once they realize that the only thing truly distinguishing the two apart is the fact that Mason is a little smaller than Edward (Edward must be a little older than us). That's it. Other than that, Mason and I look startlingly identical to this man, right down to the yellowish colored eyes.
"Hum!" Mason clears his throat to end the spell we all seem to have fallen under. "I'm Mason Charles Swan, and this is my sister," he nods to me and I smile of cue, "Isabella Renee Swan. Thanks for inviting us for dinner. We should probably get started with the evening now, if you don't mind. I think there is going to be some rain, and neither Bella nor I want to give our godmother any reason to worry about us."
"Of course not," Alice nods. "We'll eat in the living room where we can all relax while we talk. You can go in there now. Jasper? Take them please."
"This way," her boyfriend/foster brother (remind me to gag over this later) speaks for the first time, and walks away into another room.
"You first," Mason chuckles, apparently refusing to move until I do, and only winced when I punch him in the ribs for sacrificing me.
Edward
I don't know what to think.
In fifteen seconds, everything I have been running from has come back to haunt me in the form of two children: Mason Charles…and Isabella.
Isabella. Isabella. Isabella.
The name runs rampant through my mind. The girl is such a carbon copy of my Bella, I know there is no mistaking her origins. This is Bella's daughter, making Mason Bella's son, and if that hair color doesn't lie…
"Please tell me that you did not leave that girl knowing she was pregnant," Carlisle begs me the moment we have all (minus Jasper, naturally) gathered in the kitchen to assemble the plates. One look at him tells me immediately he knows it, too.
These are my children.
Mason Charles is my son, and Isabella Renee is my daughter.
I am a father. I am something I have always wanted to be yet have never once dared hope to be, and it is all because of my Bella. Here she goes again, saving my life.
"Edward, please answer me!" Carlisle looks to be on the verge of hysteria. "Did you know anything about this?"
"Nothing," I answer and my family breathes a collective sigh of relief. No one wants to think badly of me, but I can't help but think badly of myself the longer I take in what has happened.
My children are around fifteen years old –they must be. That means they have gone fifteen years without their father; fifteen years without my love and my support. How have they been getting along? They mentioned something about a godmother, but who would that be? I cannot even begin to guess.
"They don't know about…anything," Alice assures us softly, guiltily because this is her fault. She found them first, has known about them for heaven knows how long, yet we all got to find out like this. How did I miss this? Something this huge must have been on her mind constantly, yet I haven't been bothering to use my gift for years, haven't been concerned about anyone other than myself and my self-inflicted exile.
"I met them on my first day of school, the day all of you ditched. They are both incredibly smart. Isabella Renee was breezing through her freshman algebra class so now she's in AP Calculus with me…but it isn't going so well. She could use a tutor. What do you say, Edward? You could tutor her easily."
"And where is their mother, I wonder?" I silence them all with my question, the one I can hear them all thinking yet they're too afraid to voice it. "If the stories are true about things like this, about births such as Mason and Isabella's…."
"If the stories are true, Bella is gone from us," Carlisle finished the difficult sentence for me. "Quite gone from us, in fact."
"Do you think she suffered, Carlisle?" Esme looks helpless as she clutches at his shoulder, and he looks helpless as he answers her in honesty.
"Inevitably so, I'm afraid –if the stories are true, that is. Keep an open mind, Everyone. We don't know what's been going on here. Remember that. Bella could be alive or, even, not alive. We do not know."
"But we should find out," Emmett's words are more of a command than a suggestion. Whatever we decide, he himself has already made up his mind about the matter. "Seriously, you guys. The kids are here right now. I say, we pump them for all the information we can get."
"And at what point," Rosalie contradicts him, "do we tell them that the seventeen year old vampire named Edward is their father? Come on, Emmett. Be serious. Simply inviting them here was a mistake."
"Don't say that!" Alice hisses, furious. "The mistake was leaving Bella in the first place! These kids may be the only piece of her we have left, and I will not lose them. I…I can't lose them. Can't we try to work all this out? Please?"
"Say something, Edward," Carlisle finally remembers me. "You're their father. You decide."
"I want to tell them everything," I confess, and my family gapes at me in shock. This is not what I am supposed to be saying. "I want to tell them the truth about whom and what I am and all that was between Bella and me. I want to be honest starting right now."