School resumed a few days after I returned, and by then I was chafing to go back among normal people. I changed my tune about ten minutes after I pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine on the Thing. As Chief Swan's daughter and Jake's close friend, I was considered by all to be a veritable font of information—never mind that I refused to say a word about it to anyone. Even if it hadn't been a big Volturi no-no, I would never have turned Jake's heartbreak into some kind of gossip-fest.
What was surprising was that Jessica, usually one of the gossipiest people at school, came quickly to my defense.
"Give it a rest," she'd say to whoever had turned into my path just to chat. "Can't you see we're busy?"
She and Angela noticed instantly that Edward and I were in the middle of some sort of fight. Although he continued to sit with us at lunch, he mostly talked to the other guys. Every now and then I would catch him staring morosely at me. Neither of us could put on a happy facade. But we weren't entirely willing to drift apart, either. I was still furious at him, but my fury felt strange and alien to me. It had to be my anxiety about Jake.
All I could tell my friends was that I'd gone to Jacksonville to visit my mom over break, and Edward had left the whole rez-under-attack thing out of our phone sex sessions. Putting it like that, my anger seemed even less rational, and I began to feel ashamed of how crazy I was acting. But whatever they really thought about my sanity, Jessica and Angela never did anything but nod sympathetically when I tried to explain my feelings.
On my lunch breaks I would call Jake. Then call him again as soon as I got home. Spend the afternoon doing busywork around the house, call Jake. Wait for my dad to come home and tell me they hadn't located Jake yet, make a dinner that neither of us did more than fiddle with, go to bed. Call Jake three times before I could fall asleep. On day two my dad and I attended Billy's funeral. Jake's absence was conspicuous. Leah was there, but she left before I could give her a hug. It was probably just as well. Even if she didn't specifically know it was my fault her entire support network had just been murdered, I was probably the wrong person to comfort her.
To complicate matters, all this time my stomach couldn't make up its mind between hunger and nausea. I'd obviously picked something up in Brazil. As much as I'd tried to avoid drinking or eating anything Edward didn't certify was okay, I had succumbed to some incredibly appetizing pork thingies at a street cart on our way to the airport. They hadn't disagreed with me at the time, but I was wondering if I'd caught a mild case of food poisoning. The only thing I could reliably keep down was dry toast or plain oatmeal made with water and no raisins. Even when the nausea wasn't troubling me, I had constant acid reflux. I kept all this from my dad, though. He didn't need one more thing to worry about. Angela informed me sagely it was probably stress heartburn. Edward and I had never had a fight last so long before. I fugured she was probably right.
I knew I was being irrational—he'd done what he thought was best, and deep down I knew it wasn't because he thought me too simple to handle difficult things. But I had convinced myself that if only I'd known about all of this, I could have reached out to Jake, somehow kept him from bolting. I had a feeling that I would forgive Edward the minute I saw Jake again, but until I at least knew he was safe, I couldn't stop mentally replaying all the could-have-beens that Edward had kept from me. Every night while I lay alone in my bed, I would feel an upswell of love for Edward and go almost numb with my longing to hold him again. But as soon as I picked up my phone, I found myself calling Jake's house instead, and then the inexplicable anger would be back.
On Saturday, ten days after my return, I couldn't take it anymore. I was doing the dishes from the night before, and a glass slipped in the soapy water. It broke, and one of the shards pierced my middle finger, drawing blood. Without thinking I stuck it in my mouth. Instead of the nausea that blood usually instilled in me, it tasted...sort of delicious. Actually, really delicious. When I finally noticed what I was doing, I pulled my finger slowly out of my mouth and stared at it like it had personally offended me. This is it, I thought. I've lost my mind. My worry about Jake, my traitorous longing for Edward, my sorrow over Billy, and Leah, and that poor little girl—they'd all gotten to me, and now I was finally cracking. Astonishing that it had taken all of ten days, really. Very carefully, I carried the broken glass over to the garbage and dropped it in. Then I went back to the sink, deliberately broke another glass, then another. One by one, I shattered every single dish in the sink, and I was turning past the window to begin on the dishes in the cupboards when a movement in the woods behind the house caught my notice. Whatever it was looked furtive. Ignoring my now-shredded hands, I stomped out the back door and started yelling at the woods.
"What now, Edward?" I screamed, an insane note in my voice. "What, are you skulking around my house, now? You know what to do to get me to stop ignoring you, right? Bring me back my Jake and I'll start returning your fucking phone calls! BRING HIM BACK, BRING—HIM—BACK!"
Out of breath, I collapsed on the frostbitten lawn, mere yards away from the trees, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Jake, Jake, goddammit, Jake, come back," I moaned into my bloody hands.
That was when I heard the growl.
My head whipped up. It had come from the trees. It was an overcast day, of course, and I couldn't see a thing in there, but was that an ominous rustle coming from between those two cedars?
"...Edward?" I said hesitantly. "Is that you?" I stood and walked shakily through the treeline. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, and my heart was pounding erratically from fear. I'd heard vampires make a variety of predatory sounds; they were capable of anything from hissing to low growls, but nothing as low as this. I peered through the gloom, and caught a moving shadow a few yards away. I made my way determinedly toward it, heedless of the unbelievable stupidity of what I was doing.
"Victoria," I said as evenly as my shaking voice could manage, "if that's you, I'd like you to know that you really, really suck. If you two'd just died when you were supposed to…" I trailed off, my throat too dry to continue.
There it was again, the growl. It couldn't be Victoria. It was utterly spine-chilling, and very, very deep, too deep to come from human-sized lungs. I pushed aside some ferns and my eyes finally adjusted. And then I saw it.
A massive creature, grey-furred and shaped like a wolf, but the size of a small horse, was staring at me through the gloom. Something buried deep in my belly gave a backflip, and I felt a thrill of terror and inexplicable joy, staring into the creature's eyes.
I remembered the conversation I had had with Jake almost a year ago, when I'd first heard of the Cold Ones. There had been another half to that story: the werewolves, the ancient enemies of the Cold Ones, who had signed a treaty with the Cullens. Just how true was that story? Which was less likely, that this massive thing was an ordinary wolf, or that werewolves were real?
And did it even matter? This thing was dangerous, that much was plain. I was in mortal danger. I was more scared than I'd been the first time Edward confirmed his vampirism to me. I was more scared than I'd been the time he'd almost cannibalized me, in Alice's sewing room. There is something deeply-rooted, something primal and inexorable, an instinct which tells a human being that it must never ever ever come within striking distance of fur and claws and teeth like this. It was all I could do not to faint. My heart was beating way too fast, and my vision went hazy for several seconds while my mind tried to blot out what it was seeing, replace it with something I could at least understand.
Just as the adrenaline was reaching my limbs—pumping through them, preparing them to flee and save me from this nightmare creature—a shaft of light broke through the treetops and struck the creature's face, and I saw its eyes more clearly. Black, unnervingly human in that inhuman face, but somehow warm, almond-shaped and widely set. I knew those eyes. I would know those eyes anywhere.
"Jake," I breathed. Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to run, but I couldn't do it. I took one step forward, and then another. The wolf let out a growl that shook the ground under my feet. I took another step.
Jake Jake Jake, I thought while my feet carried me closer and closer. The wolf bared its teeth and snarled. I had never been a dog person, but even I knew what this meant: Stay away, you are not welcome.
I took two more steps, and the wolf was within reach, growling and vibrating so that fur and pine needles drifted down from its hide. I reached out one hand, slowly, slowly, and rested my fingers along the crest of its head.
"Jake," I whispered, looking into its eyes, those black eyes which had always crinkled with delight to see me, and which now glared more fiercely than the midday sun in Phoenix. I had never in my life been more afraid than I was in this moment, confronted by this monster so powerful it looked like it could snap me in its jaws without thinking. But I couldn't turn away.
The wolf was vibrating, really vibrating, harder and harder, a triple-time version of a dog shaking off water, and it shook so hard it shook me right away from it. I fell backward, landing with a painful thud on my butt. The wolf went on shaking until somehow it shook itself right out of its fur, shook itself down to skin and bones and human muscles and a head of black hair and two almond-shaped eyes that had seen far too much death, and Jake was curled up moaning on the forest floor, his arms around his knees, his head tucked between them.
"Jake!" I yelped, scrambling forward to throw my body over his. He was naked and steaming; his flesh almost burned me where I touched it, so different from Edward's smooth coldness, but I didn't let go, I just wrapped myself around him and held him as hard as I could.
"Bella," he moaned, his voice a symphony of pain. "I saw him get killed, his blood was still on his face when I, I tasted his blood when it—"
"Ssh," I hushed him, stroking his hair and the back of his neck with my fingers. "Jake, sweetpea, you did so good, you were so brave…" Sweetpea, I called him, over and over again. The name my mother used for me when I was sick, or sad, or hurting, back when our age gap was wide enough for her to attempt to mother me instead of the other way around. After a moment he twisted in my arms and reached around my neck, clinging to me for dear life. We crouched there on the forest floor for a long time, wrapped up in each other, both of us shuddering with almost-sobs.
"Hey," I said, tilting my face back to look at him. He looked older, the childish plumpness fallen from his face, his features more chiseled and defined. And his body took up an enormous amount of space in my arms, all the stringy skinniness replaced with thick hard muscles that would have put Emmett to shame. He had become massive, and he didn't look at all as young as he ought. "Hey, Jake," I said softly. "I—"
"You don't understand," he whimpered, cutting me off. "Everything's so fucked up, I don't know how I'm ever going to go back, everything's just, he's dead and it all my fault, I wasn't there in time, if I'd just been there sooner—"
"I know," I said, even though I didn't. I went on stroking his hair. It was a little shorter than last time I'd seen him, but not by much. There were twigs in it. "I know, sweetpea, I know…"
"Bella," he whimpered, looking at me, "what am I supposed to do?"
"I don't know, Jake," I said. "Just...do what you always do, I guess."
"What I always do?" he gulped. "I always take care of him. What else is there?"
"Come see me," I suggested. "Come have dinner with me and Charlie. Go to school. Where are you living now? I mean…where are you going to live?"
"Leah thinks I should move in with her," he said morosely. "And I have some...other family now, too."
"You should," I said decisively. "Leah's good. You know she's good. You should stay with her. Maybe she needs you as much as you need her, you know? After what happened to Sam…"
"Yeah, Sam," he said. "Right. Sam."
I was about to ask what his tone was all about, but something interrupted me.
"Are you lost, Jacob?" hollered an unfamiliar male voice. I looked up to see a stranger, tanned and massive, striding through the trees toward us. "You run off on me again like that and I'll thump you," he said, advancing on Jake. My eyes narrowed.
"Hey, now," I said defensively, "he just—"
"Don't tell me what he just," the man said cruelly, turning to glare daggers at me. "You know nothing of this world you live in, little girl. Come, Jake." As intimidating as his physique was, nothing could scare me as much as the vitriol in the strange giant's words. He really, really hated me.
"Come with me now, my brother," he murmured tenderly to Jake, and I was so startled to hear the softness in his voice that I didn't fight him as he led my friend away from me, covering his nakedness from view with his body.
Jake practically went limp, let the stranger guide him away without even a backward glance. But the giant wasn't quite done with me—not yet.
"Oh, little girl?" he said, turning one last time to glare at me. "You are aware you have two heartbeats?" Then he turned away, and he and Jake were out of sight within seconds.
"Two heartbeats…?" I echoed cluelessly.
Huh?
My discomfiture over the big guy's weird behavior and even weirder parting blow (was that supposed to be an insult? Or had seeing Jake again really thrown my heartbeat off to the point where it sounded like two? That I could believe) didn't last long. Jake was alive! He'd come home! I felt a thrill of relief flooding my body as I ran back through the trees to my house. I snatched my cell phone out of my pocket and called Edward with trembling fingers.
"Bella?" he answered on the first ring, his voice tense with worry. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong!" I exclaimed jubilantly. "Jake's back, Edward! He came back! He's alive! I'm probably going to give you hell pretty soon for keeping the existence of real live werewolves from me, but right now I am just so so happy!"
Even knowing that he'd gone on hiding things from me after I specifically requested the truth wasn't quite enough to burst my bubble of relieved joy. Time for all that later. "Edward, listen, I'm sorry I was so...I'm sorry I shut you out like that. I was just so worried. I don't know, I haven't really been feeling like myself lately, I've been acting weird about everything, not just you. I think it's this stupid bug I picked up in Brazil—"
"Bug?" Edward asked sharply. "What bug?"
"Oh, just some food poisoning," I sighed. "I think I got it off that cart where I got those crunchy pork things. It's not a big deal, but I think with that on top of Jake going missing...I don't know."
"Bella," said Edward urgently, "If you're sick you need to have my dad check you out. It could be serious. Can I come pick you up in half an hour?"
"It's a longer drive than that to my house," I laughed, gay and light as a feather now that Jake was safe.
"I'll drive fast," he promised. "Just don't go anywhere."
"Okay," I said happily. "Love you, Edward. See you soon!"
After I hung up, I texted my dad to let him know I was going over to the Cullens' house. Then I took a perfunctory shower, dressed and bandaged my hands as best I could, and then waited on the porch for Edward.
He pulled into my driveway only twenty-seven minutes after we'd hung up, and sprinted to my side without even attempting to make it look human.
"Bella," he murmured, embracing me closely. I nuzzled against him, parked my nose right under his chin and just breathed as deeply as I could. He smelled so good, felt so right in my arms. I couldn't believe I'd gone ten whole days without seeing him. Right now I felt like I had a grasshopper doing somersaults in my stomach, I was so happy to see him again.
"Ow," I said, jerking away for a second and covering my abdomen with my hand. There it was again, that twinge, like a grasshopper doing a backflip in my belly.
"What is it?" Edward asked, guiding me carefully over to the passenger seat of his Beemer.
"Oh, nothing," I said. "Just the usual. I swear, this bug cannot possibly go away fast enough. I'm totally functional, but I am hungry all the time because I can't keep anything down. Right now I feel like I literally have bugs in there. Sizeable ones."
"You sound like you have bugs in there," said Edward, looking worriedly at my belly. "If you picked up a parasite in South America I'll never forgive myself—"
"Relax, Edward," I giggled. "Your dad can fix anything! 'Just take one of these, three times a day,' I said, trying to copy Carlisle's calm, slow voice. 'Tincture of mercury for the nausea, and suckling pig's milk for the reflux. Toe of newt and eye of slug, tooth of nail and hair of dog!'"
Edward laughed at my goofy impersonation. "I think my dad's medical degree is a little more up-to-date than that," he said, smiling fondly at me.
We drove to the hospital, joking and laughing the whole way. It felt right, being with Edward again. No wonder I'd been all freaked-out and paranoid, without him around to keep me sane. Edward was very good for my anxiety levels.
He brought me straight back into Carlisle's office without even pausing to knock. He steered me to the couch in the corner and hovered anxiously over me while Carlisle walked around the desk to sit beside me.
"So," said Carlisle, smiling as if this were a social visit. "I hear you've been suffering from some heartburn and nausea since returning from Brazil. Is that right?" I nodded. "How else would you characterize your recent state of health?" he asked. "Now's the time to tell me about anything that feels different. Any new patterns or routines that might be affecting you?"
I shrugged. "I mean," I said, "I actually think it was mostly nerves. I feel great right now. I was really freaking out about Jake, and the funeral was really tough… Let's see. I've been really hungry, but if I even try to eat anything other than toast or oatmeal it comes back up in about two minutes, and I've lost like five pounds since we got back. I can sort of keep the heartburn under control with a lot of water. I was taking Tums but I just yakked them back up. Um, I've been sleeping really restlessly, but again, I think that's just the anxiety…" I struggled to remember anything pertinent. I wanted to get this horse-and-pony show over, so Carlisle could prescribe me something for my daily puke-a-thon and Edward and I could go have makeup sex, and then fight about werewolves, and then have more makeup sex. "Oh," I added, "there is one more thing. I don't know if it's important—"
"Go ahead and tell me," said Carlisle with a smile. "Anything you can think of will be helpful."
"Well," I said, feeling silly, "I sort of tore up my hands earlier—" I held up the Band-Aid-covered appendages and made a face. They still smelled like blood, and I still sort of wanted to lick them like a couple of giant lollipops. That was...odd. "I usually get really sick at the smell of blood, but this time...oh god, this is so embarrassing…"
"You can tell me anything," said Carlisle. "Would you prefer that Edward leave the room?"
I shook my head. "No, he can stay," I said. "It's just...the blood smells really good to me right now. It...it sort of smells savory, and...well, I put my hand in my mouth when I first cut it, and it tasted really good and buttery or something. I mean, it didn't taste like butter per se, it tasted more the way butter smells when it's melting, if a smell could be a taste. That's not normal, right? Well...for a human that's not normal."
"That would seem to fall under the category of 'unusual developments'," said Carlisle. "I'll just take your temperature and have a peek at your pulse, if you don't mind." While Carlisle gathered the apperati he needed—thankfully stopping just short of calipers—Edward sat next to me and squeezed my hand, very gently so as not to hurt it. He gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek and smiled reassuringly.
"Here we go," said Carlisle, returning. He placed the thermometer under my tongue and held my wrist loosely, listening for my pulse with his bare ears. Something seemed to trouble him; he shook his head a couple of times like he was trying to clear his ears, and then finally took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it over my heart.
"That's better," he said. "Ordinarily this is only a prop, but even my ears aren't perfect and I'm getting a lot of background noise—"
He stopped, listened in silence, shook his head again. He looked baffled.
"Dad?" said Edward tentatively. "What is it?"
Carlisle put his finger to his lips and Edward fell silent. Then, almost as if he couldn't believe what he was doing, Carlisle lowered the stethoscope from my ribcage to my lower abdomen. His eyes shot up to meet mine. I felt Edward stiffen beside me as his sensitive ears apparently picked up whatever Carlisle's did.
"Dad?" he whispered. "Is that—?"
"Bella," said Carlisle with a studied evenness. "Is there any chance you could be pregnant?"
I let out an incredulous laugh. "Hell no!" I exclaimed. I turned to Edward, but he wasn't laughing as much as I thought he should be. He looked a little worried. Good lord, what was going on in my torso that was freaking them both out so much? "Edward, come on," I said, jabbing him in the ribs with my elbow. "You can't possibly think I've been with anyone other than you—tell me you don't actually think that."
"I don't think that," said Edward faintly, his eyes wide.
"Well, good, because I was about to—" I cut off abruptly. The stethoscope. The nausea. The heartburn. Two heartbeats.
"But...I haven't been with anyone else," I said a little hysterically. "I really haven't, and besides, we were only apart for ten days—"
"Bella," said Edward, putting his hand over mine, "I really don't think that."
"But you two have been...sexually active?" asked Carlisle. I stared up at the ceiling, feeling unbelievably embarrassed. Great, now I had to fess up to my boyfriend's doctor father about our elicit rolls in the hay.
"Yeah," I said, not making eye contact with anyone in the room. "Everyone said vampires can't get pregnant, though, so..."
"Vampires can't get pregnant," said Carlisle certainly. I felt a little slump of relief. "Then again," he said, "you're not a vampire, are you?" I stared at him.
"Oh god," I whispered. "Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh—"
"But Dad," said Edward, "Rosalie did all those tests, she said it's definitely not compatible DNA—"
"Rosalie didn't control for every single outside factor," said Carlisle. "For example, she never tested compatibility between a vampire and a cantante…"
"What's a cantante?" I asked, looking between them, trying to focus on small things before my brain had to give in and accept this big thing.
"A singer," said Edward curtly.
"Oh."
"Well," said Carlisle briskly, standing up. "First thing before we become fixated on this diagnosis, you should take a simple pregnancy test."
"Dad..." said Edward helplessly, looking at his father.
"No reason we shouldn't be absolutely sure," said Carlisle. I got the feeling they were having a conversation to which I wasn't privy, not being a mind-reader or, for that matter, a person with a readable mind.
Ten minutes later, no one could even feign uncertainty. The three of us sat there on the couch, staring at that unholy pink plus sign on the pee-covered stick in my hand. No one breathed.
Just under my stomach, a grasshopper did backflips.
I'm sure most of you realized this was coming, after all the sex on Isle Esme and then the puking. Not to mention all my philosophizing about vampire pregnancy in an earlier A/N. In a lot of ways, I sort of loved Smeyer's description of Bella's feelings toward the fetus. When she describes the "love" between Bella and Edward, it tends to feel formulaic and forced, not backed up by anything substantial. But the feelings Bella has for her unborn child feel incredibly real and grounded; those parts feel like they were written from experience, and it shows. However, there are some huge, glaring problems with the way Smeyer handles the pregnancy. I'll get to them as I get to them, but for now I just want to say how silly all the foreshadowing was, with the dreams about eggs or whatever. Am I to believe that the girl who can't tell when she's crying, the girl who doesn't even notice pain (thanks for drawing my attention to that, DracyGiuliana!) is somehow so in tune with her body that she notices she's pregnant long before she has any solid reason for doing so? That's silly. As far as Bella knows, vampires and humans can't breed together. And it's not unusual to experience gastrointestinal upset when you're visiting a foreign country. If Smeyer's Bella had been written to be more self-aware (more than zero, I mean) or if she hadn't made such a point of loudly ruling out the possibility of interbreeding, then maybe it wouldn't have stretched belief so much for Bella to figure it out just because she's dreaming about eggs and has a tummy ache. In the end, it just feels like one more way that Bella is The Speciallest: she doesn't even need a test to tell her she's two minutes pregnant! Pregnant, not pregnant—she's still the same Bella. Merely incubating a fertilized egg does not automatically transform her from clumsy, unobservant dweeb to Intuitive Earth Mother.