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Chapter 15

Playboy

Bella

After I was in the shower, rinsed the salty seawater from my body and got dressed, the doorbell rang.

"Come in!", I called down.

I didn't even hear the door open or close before he was already standing in my room.

"Hi Bella!", he said cheerfully and hugged me. "How was it at the doggie?", he asked.

What did they have against werewolves?

"Great, have it cleared up for now. Thanks for letting me go." I stood on my tiptoes and gave him a kiss. "I said I was at your free disposal today. So, what do you want to do?", I asked him.

"We could go to my place for a bit. The others have already missed you and you've never seen my room," he suggested.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived in my car in the Cullens' driveway.

We climbed the small porch stairs and went into the house. I wasn't in the house a second before Esmé and Alice were already hugging me together.

"Oh Bella, it's good to see you again!", Esmé said and kissed my forehead.

Carlisle also came over to me and gave me a quick hug.

"We are so sorry about Rosalie and Edward! Someone like that doesn't deserve to be part of our family," Carlisle said.

I looked at him in confusion.

"Edward and Rose are no longer family?"

I didn't think Carlisle would be so hard on them. Not that I wasn't happy about never having to see them again ... but still.

Jasper nodded and said, "What they did was unforgivable. Carlisle made the right decision as the head of our family."

And now Jasper also came to me and hugged me.

I noticed Alice taking something out of the back of a cabinet.

"Alice, what do you need all those candles for?"

Did she perhaps foresee a power outage?

"Oh nothing, I'm just looking for something ..."

She laughed at Emmett and scurried away. Jasper, too, had a wry grin on his lips as he looked to Emmett.

"Did I miss something?"

I looked from Emmett to Jasper, but they both shook their heads. Emmett took me by the hand and pulled me toward the stairs.

"Come on, Bella, let's go to my room."

He opened the door and let me go ahead.

In the middle of the room there was a white king size bed with a frame made of dark, strong wood. On the wall on the opposite side of the bed was a huge flat screen TV, including a PS3 and X-Box 360, and the shelves were overflowing with games, CDs and DVDs. The wall across from the door was all glass, with long blue curtains hanging down to the left and right. And directly to my left, next to the door, hung a one meter by one meter Playboy calendar.

That kind of thing was to be expected.

The room was very large and spacious and perfectly square. There was a desk by the wall with the TV.

I walked further into the center of the room and looked around.

"Wow ... nice room, E ..."

But I tripped over a sandbag on the floor and fell straight down.

I stared under the bed and could not believe what I saw there.

Emmett

I had just not paid attention to Bella and exactly then she had to fall down. Oh ... and it seemed she had just discovered my collection.

"Do you like what you see?", I asked her teasingly as she still stared under my bed.

She sat up and looked at me in amazement.

"That ... that's a whole Playboy library!" she reproached me in shock.

Downstairs I heard the laughter of the others.

"Have had the subscription since the first issue," I said proudly.

Bella looked at me as if a world had just collapsed. With that look, I just had to start laughing.

"Now come on, Bella. Every man has one of these under the bed. Even Carlisle!"

I sat down on the bed and turned on the TV.

She crawled onto the bed with me.

"Do you feel like playing 'FIFA'?", I asked her, leaving my PS3 on and tossing her the one controller.

"You're going to win anyway," she said.

"Don't worry. I'll take one of the worst teams, the one with only half a star. And you take one of the teams that have all the stars, okay?"

She agreed and so we spent the afternoon gambling. I let her win sometimes, because even with the unequal teams she didn't have much of a chance against me. When she didn't feel like it anymore, we watched a little TV.

At six o'clock in the evening, her stomach growled.

Oh ... that's right, she had to eat a lot more often than we did.

"Come, let's go down and find something to eat."

I took her by the hand and pulled her down to the kitchen.

I heard Esmé in the kitchen and already smelled the food.

"Ah ... Bella, I was just about to call you. I made dinner for you. You like fish, don't you?", Esmé asked, turning to Bella.

"Yes, of course, it smells heavenly. Thank you, Esmé!"

She ran to the table and began to eat.

Bah ... fish, I couldn't stand it even as a human. But Bella seemed to like it. Esmé had also made rice and salad.

Bella ate it all.

She probably hadn't had lunch yet.

I heard Alice scurrying around the house. I rolled my eyes.

Esmé now turned to me.

"And you sure you don't want to come hunting today, Emmett?", she asked.

Bella raised her head and looked at Esmé.

"You're going hunting? But Emmett, then you should go," she said anxiously.

"I just had a grizzly bear a few days ago and a big wapiti this morning. Don't worry about it," I answered them both.

Bella finished and put her plate and cutlery in the dishwasher. She thanked Esmé again, then we all went into the living room. Alice, Jasper and Carlisle joined us as well.

"Good, then we can leave when everyone is ready," Carlisle said.

They nodded and then jumped away after a few seconds.

Alice stopped at the door, turned to us and called out, "Have fun!"

And then she was gone, too.

"We're really alone?", Bella asked me.

"Yep ..."

Already she wrapped her arms around my neck, stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.

I grabbed her by the thighs and lifted her up to me. She wrapped her legs around my hips, and I carried her up to the door of my room. I told her to stop kissing for a moment.

"Alice has prepared something small for us. Do you want to see it?", I whispered in her ear.

She nodded and I opened the door.