Unserious.
If Bella had to describe what she likes the most about Edward, it would be how unserious he is.
There is a silliness about him that makes her feel light as a feather. He is quick witted, charismatic, cultured, well-traveled. She feels herself already besotted by Edward.
She learns he is 44, a whooping 19 years older than her. When Edward started his first semester at Columbia, Bella was just entering the world. He is old. Well, not like old old, but old compared to her. She does some quick maths and he is actually closer in age to her parents than to her.
He tells her he is recently divorced, but that their relationship had been done long before that. He doesn't tell her too much about his ex-wife, he mentions her name and that she wanted kids and that he didn't. He doesn't dwell on his relationship too much and she tries to hold back all her questions. Save them for later, if there will be a later.
"So did you get a divorce just because you didn't agree on having kids?" She asks him.
Edward pauses to look at her, he ponders his answer. He does that often, takes a second to respond. Bella wishes she could be more introspective as well, instead of blurting out her thoughts.
"No, being together just stopped being fun. And what good is love if it's not bringing you joy?"
She doesn't really say much back.
But she ponders on his words a few times over the next few days.
Their age gap shows a few times over their time together.
He is so accomplished compared to her. He has his beautiful home, his art collection, his many accolades displayed in his spare room. He has traveled the world, met so many people of caliber and experienced so much. She has never felt quite so unaccomplished, with her silly degree and small career prospects.
Edward doesn't make her feel that way, he is so engaged whenever she tells a story or shares a fact. He wants to know more and more and Bella wonders how he could possibly find her remotely interesting.
Jake, her ex-boyfriend, wasn't half as interesting as Edward yet he could barely stay focused on anything she ever said to him. Her body physically cringes at the thought that she wasted 4 years of her life with that moron.
She learns more in 4 days spent with Edward than 4 years with Jacob.
They order take out from his local Chinese restaurant and Edward speaks to the person on the other side in fluent Cantonese, leaving her astounded.
"Did you just order our food in Chinese?" She asks once he hangs up the phone.
She is sitting on the cold marble island bench in his kitchen, her bum cold from being directly on the stone and one of Edward's shirts half buttoned up. She has taken to his wardrobe, mainly out of necessity, not wanting to wear her NYE dress for days, but she decides she loves wearing his clothes indefinitely.
"Actually, that was Cantonese." He explains, his arms going to rest on her hips, dragging her closer to the edge of the counter and closer to his lips. "I've known May for a while, she always tries to tell me I need to see her doctor for my back pain. Lovely lady though."
He kisses her. He does that a lot. She reckons they must have kissed a hundred times at least over the span of a couple of days. Her lips actually feel a little tender from it.
"So wait." She pulls back to look at him. "You speak Greek, Cantonese...what other languages are you going to whip out? If we order, I don't know, butter chicken, will that be in Hindi?"
Edward laughs and rolls his eyes at her.
"First of all, my Greek is very basic. I did study Mandarin at school and lived in Hong Kong for a while, so that's where I picked up Cantonese. I'm hardly a polyglot, but I do like picking up some phrases when I travel. It's a great way to impress the ladies." He tells her, wagging his eyebrows and poking her nose affectionately. "Is it working on you?"
Bella swats his chest jokingly in response.
"What about you? Do you speak any languages other than Australian? Sunnies, bikkies, g'day, cahh." He teases her constantly about her accent and slang, the Australian inability to not abbreviate every word and to roll their Rs. He particularly finds the way she says car amusing.
"Very funny. Not really, my Greek is super basic and my Italian even worse. I studied French in high school because, well, fashion, but it's pretty rusty."
"Okay, tell me something in French."
"No way, you're probably fluent in French as well. You said you spent summer in Provence as a kid. I bet my French is crap compared to yours."
"C'mon." He pushes. "It is the sexiest language in the world. Let me hear it."
Bella sits up tall and clears her throat a few times. He watches her, amused, his green eyes glitter with excitement as she prepares for her performance. Her hands clasp together in front of her and she closes her eyes.
"Okay, so, Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grace, le Seigneur est avec vous. Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni. Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort. Amen."
"Did you…just recite the Hail Mary in French?" Edward asks in a mix of entertainment, surprise and smidge of horror. "Why?"
"I went to a Catholic school, so we always started French class with the Hail Mary. I don't know why, but it really stuck with me." She shrugged, watching Edward staring at her wide-eyed.
She makes him laugh. It's belly deep and pure and she laughs along with him. During the days they spend locked up in his apartment, many are the times they laugh like that. She laughs so much that by the time she leaves the apartment her face hurts a little.
He fucks her right there on the kitchen counter. They have so much sex over those few days that whenever she puts on some of his clothes she wonders to herself what the point was, as she would probably take them off of her shortly after.
They've had sex in most places in his apartment. Something about having sex with Edward makes her feel incredibly sexy. Maybe it's the way he looks at her, his green eyes staring so deep into her, or the way he seems to find her completely irresistible, but over those days she feels like a vixen.
They basically live in his bathtub.
It sits grandly in his art deco bathroom, just below a window facing onto the tree lined street. They barely fit, sometimes he lies between her and other times she lies between him. Edward's feet usually stick out the top of the tub to make room for them. They drink champagne while they soak until the water becomes unbearably cold.
He has a collection of books in French, a clear sign his French was indeed as good as she expected, but he insists she read to him while they lie in the tub.
She picks out a book at random, Voltaire's Candide that Edward picked up from a market in Montmartre many years ago.
"What's it about?" She asks him, flipping through the yellowed pages of the paperback.
"It's about a very naive and innocent young fella who lives a sheltered life and, once out in the real world, suffers many awful misadventures that test his optimistic nature."
"That sounds…a little sad." She responds, not quite sure about wanting to read the novel.
"It's a satirical novella, quite funny actually. Voltaire is challenging the passive optimism of some of the philosophers of the era. Particularly, Leibniz who claimed that the world we live in must be the most perfect world because God created it this way and cannot be faulted for any of its shortcomings."
"Does anyone think we live in the most perfect version of the world? Bad shit happens all the time, but I guess that's just life. Things happen that are out of our control and we just accept them for what they are- good or bad."
"Well, that's exactly what Voltaire is challenging, the notion that everything is always how it should be and that people are ingrained to optimistically accept that because it's God's will. Essentially, the world is shit, will always be shit, and anyone that tries to put a positive spin on things is also full of shit."
She reads the book to him, at first a little awkwardly while towards the end of the novella much more confidently.
There's a reading nook in his living room, under one of those bay windows which looks so quintessentially New York, that Bella falls in love with. She reads to him there as well, wrapped up in one of his cozy jumpers, as the world goes by below them.
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden." She repeats the ending again to him. "What do you think Voltaire is trying to say?"
"That the world is great when we forget about everyone else and just worry about ourselves." He pauses for a second, looking out the window. "I mean, we just spent the last few days ignoring the rest of the world and look at how relaxed we are. I could spend the rest of my life like this."
"Me too."
There are some moments, when the laughter fades, when the sex stops, and snippets of the real world come back, they share intimate details about each other.
Her days with Edward feel like a dream. Time stops still and only the two of them seem to exist. They spend time exploring each other, physically and mentally.
She learns that Edward loves music. She had gathered that from their first encounter, when he seemed to recognise the music playing in the lift which to Bella sounded just like a mixture of notes. To Edward, music is fundamental.
His opulent German piano sits proudly in his living room like the star of the show.
He plays music every moment of the day, he plays soft music when he sleeps.
"Every moment deserves a soundtrack." He tells her, as he meticulously scrolls through his music archive before playing something for them.
He is right. He has the ability to select just the right song for their mood. Whether they're cooking, reading, dancing, having sex, Edward expertly selects music for them. It's almost like he cannot be fully in the moment unless the right song is playing.
"Our love is alive, and so we begin. Foolishly laying our hearts on the table, stumblin' in." Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman's voice engulf them from his expensive surround sound system.
When he played this song for the first time, Bella had never heard it before. At first, it seemed like an odd choice from Edward, whose music taste seemed so refined. He plays it for her a few times over those couple of days. He actually plays it so often she ends up learning picking up some of the lyrics.
They dance in his living room to the catchy notes of the song. The song choice, the exaggerated twists and turns as they danced, suddenly seemed very Edward. So unserious. So fun.
When they dance so happily, singing at the top of their lungs, it's easy not to think of what the future will bring for them. She wonders in the quiet moments of those days what would be of them outside of these walls. Will he call to see her again? Was she just a fun, young way to spend the holidays?
That was the downfall of being unserious. Sure, they had a great time, but was there more?
"You were so young, ahh, and I was so free." Edward had sung to her that first time, and many times after.
"I may have been young but baby that's not what I wanted to be." Suzi Quatro sang back.
The words of the song hadn't really resonated with Bella first, more focused on its upbeat sound than what was actually being said. But the way Edward sang along, the pointed way he would sing some of the lyrics to her, it had made her wonder if there was more he was trying to say.
"Foolishly laying our hearts on the table, stumblin' in."
By the 10th time she hears that song, she can't help but cling onto its words.