Twelve: Historian
Following our now-customary pattern of hunting interspersed with lovemaking, instead of directing us home as I expect, Bella points south-eastward.
"Let's visit Olympia on our way home," she suggests, a hesitance in her tone and expression that I've not seen since her transformation—it's subtle, but I think I'm getting better at reading her.
"I like the sound of that," I reply, enjoying our new reality—that a roughly 70-mile detour (because we're already 30 miles in the right direction) is on our way home.
"Race or 'fun run'?" she asks.
"Both?"
She laughs. "Okay; let's go slower on the way there. Lead the way?"
I nod, then set off at a 'relaxed' sprint. It takes less than fifteen minutes to reach the western outskirts, where there's a pleasant little loop track in Grass Lake Nature Park. Although the sun has not long risen, there are already half a dozen runners and walkers in the area—hopefully not too many to be overwhelming for my newborn mate.
Most of the trail is too narrow for a human couple to comfortably walk side by side, but skirting the vegetated edges doesn't bother us. Before we cross paths with the first person (a runner), we step off to the side and wait. The woman stares at us as she comes close, but her thoughts catch me a little by surprise. She is struck by our beauty, but the fixed expression on Bella's face and the "obvious" distance between us make her presume she's interrupting an argument, which makes her instinctively uneasy—yet she's also concerned enough about the anticipated damage to the vegetation that she almost speaks up to tell us to keep to the path.
I hold Bella's gaze as the woman passes us. Despite the heightened burn of thirst she must be feeling—made worse by the running woman's naturally elevated pulse—I see no hint that her control is slipping.
After the woman disappears around the bend, we return to the trail and start walking again. Bella takes a small breath, then reaches over and carefully hooks a finger through the buttoned-up opening of my shirt cuff, holding my clothing in lieu of holding my hand. I want to reciprocate—no, I want to rotate my wrist and curl my fingers around hers so we can walk hand in hand—but I resist, knowing I couldn't stop at that. When I smile, her firm expression softens and the stress fades from her eyes—and then she smiles, too. One of the two people who next pass us (in a much wider clearing by the little lake, so we don't need to vacate the path to keep our distance) actually stops walking. I know how he feels; if my perfect brain couldn't manage walking on its own, I'd stall, too.
And then Bella laughs—tentatively, but it still makes their thoughts fade into the background. "I thought we'd be free of physical complications now," she explains, ending on a sigh.
I sigh, too, sharing her exasperation.
"How long have the others been able to touch without… wanting more?" she asks.
"After Emmett's first decade, I thought he and Rosalie still struggled with controlling themselves, but they actually did well." She chuckles. "I learned Arabic, Japanese, and Greek to drown out their thoughts—although opera is the best thing I've found for tuning out thoughts."
"Did you figure that out during the decade or after?"
"During, but sadly several years in."
She chuckles again, then nods. "What about Carlisle and Esme?"
"They never really struggled with it—holding hands makes them happy. They got more adventurous in the years while I was away, and they certainly feel much the same passions we feel, but their sense of… duty, perhaps, makes it easy for them temper their feelings and focus on other things."
"And… Alice and Jasper?" she asks hesitantly, pressing her teeth into her bottom lip in a familiar gesture of nerves; I assume she appreciates the risk of asking questions Alice will be all too willing to answer.
"Their relationship has always been as much metaphysical as physical…"
"Why doesn't that make it worse for them?" she bursts out. "Their gifts must make it even more real—" she breaks off, and then, as I'm trying (and failing) not to speculate on what she's not saying, she gives an exasperated huff, which is distractingly adorable. "I even get this crazy burst of jealousy whenever anyone touches you—except Renesmee, of course."
I shouldn't laugh, but my relief at this unexpected and yet totally natural newborn reaction comes out as a breathless chuckle; fortunately, she chuckles with me. "So it's not about Seth?"
She laughs at that, a full, genuine laugh of amusement that makes my heart sing. "I can share you with Seth," she reassures me. "And with Esme, and Alice, and Jasper, and Rose, and of course Carlisle—and Emmett, just barely," she jokes. "I just wish I could touch you so casually."
I nod, understanding. "And the newborn effect turns that longing into jealousy."
Her expression sharpens, and then she grins. "You don't feel jealous when someone touches me?"
"No." She quirks an eyebrow, challenging the embarrassingly obvious insecurity in my voice. "It's hard to explain," I say, obfuscating the real issue—because the truth is that it's hard to admit: Jacob doesn't need to touch her to stir up feelings of jealousy inside me.
She searches my face for a moment, then looks away, clearly letting me off the hook. Another runner is approaching; although he is further away than the woman had been when we paused to let her pass, Bella veers a little further toward the lake and then stops. This time, she focuses her gaze across the water, following a little fish as it darts through an open patch of water to reach the rest of its little school. I fix my gaze on her face as the man nears, though it's less about watching for signs of imminent threat and more about staring at my beautiful, extraordinary mate. There is no hint of pain in her expression, and it gives me hope she will soon defeat the bloodlust as thoroughly as Carlisle and I have managed to.
My hope fades a little when she doesn't move even after the man is fifty yards distant. But then she asks, "Did you think about what it would be like for us?"—so perhaps our conversation is what's holding her attention.
"I tried not to." My wild fantasies had only ever been that—impossible fantasies that filled me with fear at the merest thought of enacting any while Bella was still a fragile human. "I didn't want to pre-empt anything."
She smiles, then purses her lips. "Did any of the others think about it?"
"We were a hot topic of conversation last month," I say, rolling my eyes. "There was no consensus. The debate was that there'd be no difference—we'd be as we were, though whether out of necessity or nature was a secondary debate—or we'd be as bad as Rosalie and Emmett."
"Which camp was Esme in?"
"The latter—same as you."
She laughs. "I remember," she says, much to my delight—if she remembers a little conversation in the middle of one random night, maybe she remembers all of our happy times. "I'm surprised she let us have her island."
"Don't tell Emmett, but she honestly didn't care—and she used teasing me about damaging the house beyond repair to lighten the conversation after giving me 'the talk'." I emphasize the last two words with air quotes.
"The talk?" When I nod, she grins. "Of course she did." Then she cocks her head. "Why didn't you get 'the talk' sooner?"
"What would have been the point?"
"To talk through all the thoughts you hear—and she knew about Tanya's interest in you, didn't she?" She sees my telltale squirm and quirks an eyebrow. "What did she say?"
"Nothing," I insist. "I made it very clear I wasn't interested in Tanya."
"In response to what thoughts?" she asks astutely. "Was she pleased because you would've gone to live with Tanya's family, or sad that you were still alone?"
"I suppose a little of both," I concede. "She was concerned that Tanya's feelings might lead me to accede despite my personal ambivalence. But what she kept from me at the time was that she worried I'd been too young when Carlisle changed me, that I wasn't fully mature—which meant my reaction could be anything from never feeling sexual attraction to being utterly obsessed with sex."
She ponders my answer for a long second (to manage my impatience, I tell myself that Esme's multifaceted concerns warrant such contemplation), then says, "What did you think—about Tanya's feelings?"
"You've asked me that before," I say, buying myself a little time to shake off the automatic embarrassment. "If it weren't so uncomfortable hearing her thoughts, I probably would've been flattered, but mostly, I felt embarrassed on her behalf, even though she didn't mind."
"Because she hoped to win you over."
I nod. "You remember?"
She chuckles. "Not completely. But I know how I'd feel if I were her." Then she sighs, smiles, and gestures for me to start walking again.
Before we reach a narrower stretch of trail, we meet a couple with a small dog (in violation of the park's 'no pets' rule). Bella doesn't look away this time, and her warm smile makes both people falter a little. The dog bares its teeth but doesn't growl, so its owners only notice when it starts pulling on the leash to hurry them past us. And then Bella turns her smile on me, and all I want to do is take her into my arms—but I don't wish to diminish her achievement, or risk undermining her self-control.
To refocus my thoughts, I ask if she remembers anything from our one and only visit to Olympia last summer, before her fateful eighteenth birthday, and my tale soon morphs into a mini history lesson as I find myself sharing some of the history of the area and historic events, such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
When we reach the point of the trail where we'd joined it, Bella doesn't hesitate to veer back into the forest, retracing our steps toward home. She maintains a walking pace, carefully leading me through the denser vegetation, and I want to ask how she's feeling—but it seems premature when we're still within earshot of four people's beating hearts.
Half a mile in, she releases her hold on my shirt cuff, grins at me, and then leaps into a sprint. Her grin was warning enough, so I manage to stay within a couple of yards of her closest foot as she accelerates through the trees before settling at 540 miles an hour—but we're barely one minute into the race when she points ahead, designating a recently fallen tree as the finish line.
Instead of stopping on the other side of the trunk as I expect, she leaps up onto it, so my own leap carries me past her at the last instant.
"You win," she murmurs approvingly, stripping off her top and then dropping down into my arms.
As we make love, it suddenly starts pouring with rain, adding an unexpected thrill with its gentle massage. Barely breaking our rhythm, Bella rolls us over so that she is on top and then sits up. She leans back, arching her spine and giving me a glorious view of her body as she giggles at—I assume—the sensation of the raindrops teasing her nipples. I can't help groaning at the sight, and the pleasure of the rain's teasing caress across my own skin creates a new dimension to the connection between us. She flexes her hips, playing my body with exquisite skill.
The rain quickly saturates our hair, but Bella simply laughs and bends over me, letting her hair fall like a curtain around my head, blocking out the rain and claiming my whole world. She hums and every cell in my body answers the call, cresting the heights of pleasure over and over.
When she eventually shifts aside, turning from me to seek out her clothing, it is a moment before I notice that the rain has eased. Perhaps I have it to thank for our extended lovemaking.
As we're getting dressed—a task Bella completes long before me, and I can't even blame that on my shirt, because most of its buttons didn't survive our urgent passions—she suddenly gestures at her inner thigh. "These new pants are already wearing through. Now I get why you don't wear the same thing more than once. The speed you run, I'm surprised your pants last the day."
I would roll my eyes if I weren't still focused on the curve of the fabric around her thigh, where the threads have indeed thinned. She waves a hand in front of herself, and my eyes automatically follow its movement all the way up to her face. She taps her lips, smirking at my obvious distraction.
"Do I need to repeat myself?" she teases.
"I heard you," I mutter—but the indignation is so faint and, coupled with my lingering desires, my voice comes out more breathless than gruff.
"Have you ever worn through anything?"
"Not since Alice," I admit, giving our sister the credit she deserves. "She may seem obsessive—and she is—but, yes, there's a practical element to it, too."
Bella laughs, and then waits patiently while I finish doing up the few surviving buttons on my shirt. Feeling her eyes on my inner thigh makes my skin prickle, but I beat back the need to have every inch of her pressed against me. We have already been away longer than usual. I turn my uppermost thoughts to Bella's successful experiment instead.
"I expected you to cope with being around people as well as you did, but it's still impressive."
She gives a little self-deprecating shrug, but her lips curve up at the corners. "Let's do that again before we go any place more crowded."
"Of course. Can I ask how it felt?"
She purses her lips. "Tolerable," she murmurs—then abruptly grins. "But not handsome enough to tempt me."
I have to laugh at the sudden Pride and Prejudice quote. "Is the hardest part the burn itself or the distraction it creates?"
"Definitely the distraction. I hate feeling it cloud my thoughts."
I nod, in full agreement. "After my first few days and weeks, once I was a little more used to the burn and I began trying to focus on other things, I found the mental haze incredibly frustrating. But it gets easier."
She nods determinedly, and I assume she's thinking of Charlie. "When you were hunting human monsters," she says unexpectedly, "did it get worse?"
"No—but it certainly didn't improve, and my willpower lessened considerably over those four short years."
"So you felt a big difference going back to animals?"
"Yes, pretty much immediately. It was very satisfying—I felt more deserving of returning to Carlisle."
"How quickly did you go back?"
"As soon I decided not to hunt any more humans, I wanted to go back to him—I knew he'd help me cope with resetting my diet, and I believed he would welcome me back. But after hunting various animals on my way back to him, I knew I didn't need his help, that I would be myself again—the Edward he knew—by the time I reached him. Apart from the eyes, of course."
She shudders minutely, then smiles. "It would've been easy to see that you hadn't lost yourself to the monster."
I smile, too. "He thought so—he never doubted me."
We share a moment of silent appreciation for our beloved 'father'—at least, that's how I interpret it—then set off once more. Bella doesn't stop accelerating until we're sprinting through the forest at over six hundred miles an hour. Retracing our exact course makes it easier to go even faster; being second reduces the advantage for me, but it's no less fun. Bella seems to particularly enjoy stepping in her earlier footprints, making barely an impression.
"It's better going faster on the way back—following our steps is practically effortless!" she gushes, delighting me with the confirmation as much as the insight into her thoughts—another in an ongoing series of deliberate explanations she has given me.
The contrast with her wishes on the matter of my telepathy brings into sharp relief that my wishes are and always will be diametrically opposed—she would never feel comfortable sharing her every thought with me—and I would rather her wishes be met than mine in every instance. In the wake of this revelation, the disappointment falls away. I will always wonder what she's thinking, will always long for her thoughts, but I'll no longer grieve at being excluded from them.
I follow her through the dense forest, feeling as light as a Sitka spruce seed. In just over seven minutes, we come within range of Rey's thoughts. She is still asleep, dreaming in fluent Portuguese—much to her attendants' delight. Whenever she doesn't know a word, her brain makes it up without skipping a beat, but her grammar is flawless.
Bella listens to my description with a smile—then catches me completely off guard when she slows right down. "Before we get home," she says, her tone abruptly serious, "I think we need to talk."
"Anything," I blurt, hoping she'll enlighten me quickly.
"I want you to tell me how you feel about Jacob." Her lips twitch with amusement at the shock that must have flooded my expression. "Let's start with Renesmee," she clarifies. "How do you really feel about Jake being in her life?"
I honestly don't know what to say; knowing how much Bella cares for him, it feels selfish to say that I'd rather we never saw him again—and even for myself, it might not be that simple anymore. Seth and the other wolves care for him, too, and so does Rey. "I think we both agree he needs to stop thinking of her as his mate—" thankfully, Bella concurs vehemently—"but I don't hate that he's hanging around."
"Really?"
"Really."
She smiles. "Thank you. I know that's a low bar, and I know you've seen him at his worst, but you haven't seen him at his best yet. He's my best friend for a reason." Her smile widens, and I want to ask which happy human memories she is recalling, even as the guilt pierces my heart like a thousand swords.
Yes, Jacob is her best friend because I forced Alice—her original best friend (because a person's mother doesn't really count)—to abandon her.
"He's happy," Bella goes on, hopefully as oblivious to my distress as she appears, "and sweet and kind and thoughtful—he was a good kid until I took advantage of his feelings."
"His flaws aren't your fault!"
She purses her lips. "I definitely made them worse."
"Bella—" I pause. Can I really tell her just how cruel her dear friend had been to me? That, despite not believing my feelings were "real", he'd deliberately filled his thoughts with memories of her grief after I abandoned her and then with his fantasies of touching her, of her begging him to make love to her, and all the other lustful thoughts he'd indulged in. No, she'll only blame herself. "I worry that if we don't regularly remind him that Rey isn't destined to be his mate, he will come to expect it to the point that he reacts exactly the same way to any rejection from her that he did when you repeatedly and politely rejected him." Bella flinches, but I don't trust that she fully grasps my meaning. "The thought of him forcing a kiss on our daughter in a twisted attempt to show her that she has romantic feelings for him—" I break off with a growl.
"He wouldn't do that to Rey. He couldn't hurt her like that."
"I think the only reason he might restrain himself is if he thought Rey could be physically injured the way you were—and he doesn't think she's that fragile."
Bella frowns. "He understands that it was wrong regardless of me injuring myself, doesn't he?"
Her phrasing sets my teeth on edge. "Firstly, he caused that injury, not you; and secondly, that's not how he remembers it."
"How does he remember it?"
I hesitate for a split second, torn between sanitizing his thoughts or giving her the worst example of his outrageous thoughts about the time he deliberately assaulted the woman he claimed to love—but I can't bring myself to say that, so I settle for a middle-of-the-road example. "As the time he showed you how much better it is to kiss a living, breathing man as opposed to a freezing lump of cursed rock."
Despite my censorship, she still flinches. "I'm so sorry!"
"His thoughts aren't your fault."
She shakes her head. "I'm sorry for making you spend time with him." Her guilt-ridden expression doubles in intensity. "That's why you stopped hanging out with us—because he was still using his thoughts to insult you."
The last thing I want to do is increase her guilt, so I take the opportunity to focus on a positive. "I saw how much you enjoyed his company—and I assumed he'd be closer to being the Jacob you missed without me there."
She sighs. "You've every right not to like him, but he is a genuinely good person, and I do believe he'd accept Rey's decision more quickly than he accepted mine—he was driven by the belief that becoming a vampire is worse than death, and it's not like you can't sympathize with that. He was there for me when I needed him, and I know he'll be there for Rey, as a friend if that's all she wants."
"Remember how guilty that made you feel—knowing he had feelings for you that you couldn't reciprocate. And it's going to be so much worse for Rey, knowing that he imprinted on her, that he'll never have a romantic relationship with any other girl because he is so bound to her."
Bella exhales sharply. "Imprinting really does suck—I mean, I knew that, because of what happened to Leah… But Sam and Emily are happy. Surely they are meant to be together, and Paul and Rachel, and Jared and Kim, and I know there's someone for Leah, too. I didn't think she was right about not wanting to imprint, because I thought of it as a perfect sign, an infallible thing in a fallible world. But it still takes their choice away. My love for you feels just as binding, but I chose you—and I chose the Bella that belonged with you. I chose this life. Kim might be the only one who did choose, but she didn't know that choosing Jared would draw her into a secret supernatural world." She pauses, then blurts, "You 'imprinted' on me, didn't you?"
To avoid the conclusion she's drawing, I say, "I chose to. I could have ignored you. If I'd stayed away from Forks—" my thoughts run away on me and I flinch, but I force the words out. "If I'd stayed away, and you died when Tyler lost control of his van—or if you were only injured, you might've gone back to live with your mother—then I would've been able to go home to my family without seeing you again." But it's impossible to picture any such reality without feeling like I would have felt a gap in my existence. A specifically Bella-shaped gap.
Remembering how fully Bella had dominated my every thought during that week of self-enforced exile from Forks, I suddenly feel like I'm outright lying—there is no way I would've had the willpower to stay away from her, whether she'd stayed in Forks or moved to Antarctica—but I don't know how to express it in a way that doesn't play into the idea that my 'choice' to love her wasn't a choice after all. Even though Alice hadn't seen me fall in love until after I'd saved her life, Bella had already changed me. My sense of self had already started to shift. Then again, doesn't Alice's gift prove that 'choice' is a subtle thing?
"I chose you," I repeat, feeling renewed certainty. "Just like Alice chose Jasper, and Jasper chose Alice—"
"Alice had to wait, didn't she? I remember her saying that if she'd found him sooner, he would've killed her."
I nod, amused by her smile, which brightens moment by moment, as she fully grasps this quirky similarity in our two love stories. It takes another second for the true significance of her words to sink in. "I don't remember Alice telling you that…"
She chuckles. "I guess you weren't there."
I try not to think about the few times the two of them have been alone—until I remember the night they'd spent together while I'd been away on my bachelor party with my brothers. That had been a happy time, and it makes perfect sense for Alice to have shared stories about her and Jasper's history on the night before our wedding. Thinking about our wedding brings an automatic smile to my lips. "If Alice weren't psychic, I might've been able to ignore you."
Bella nods. "Carlisle's willpower, Esme's devotion, Rosalie's vanity—" we share a laugh at that. "And Renesmee," she says conclusively. "You and I are meant to be together. Soulmates…"
I shudder at the sudden and unexpected return to our original topic. Rey's dream-thoughts are an extra stab at my nerves as she pictures playing in the river with wolf Jacob at her side. "Please don't say it—even if you believe—" a slightly hysterical chuckle breaks through my lips as I realize I'm glad I can't hear Bella's thoughts if she feels the same way as Jacob and Embry, if she sees Rey and Jacob as being destined to be together. "I don't—I can't deal with it."
"I get it," Bella agrees. "I do feel the same way…"
"But you see the other side, too," I murmur, finishing the unspoken thought.
"Yeah."
The confirmation is unsurprising and yet overwhelming; I can't really process it—and then Rey's thoughts catch my attention. There's an edge to them that suggests she's starting to wake up: she's becoming conscious of Jacob's warm fur against her cheek and clutched in her little hands. "Rey's waking up."
Bella immediately accelerates—but only for an instant, catching herself before she gets more than four yards ahead of me. "Are you okay with going home now? Or we could discuss…?"
"I'm okay," I assure her, willing it to be true. "Even if we're not quite on the same page, we agree on how to handle it."
She smiles. "World's greatest dad."
"Thank you, world's greatest mom."
She laughs and stretches out her stride, rapidly accelerating once more, and gets us home just as our daughter wakes. Rey immediately leaps into her mother's arms and presses a hand to her cheek to say good morning to us both, then holds out her other hand for the rest of our family (without Carlisle and Esme, there's just enough room). Once the greetings are complete and the conversation turns to the morning's notable events, I recount Bella's achievements in Olympia in minute detail.
Naturally, Bella downplays the marvel of a five-day-old newborn walking past one person let alone half a dozen. "It helped that we were outside, and I could prepare myself by anticipating how they were going to move."
Jasper shakes his head in disbelief; if he didn't know we're telling the truth, he would challenge her to go back with him as witness.
Rey asks for more of her mother's perspective, but Bella insists there isn't anything more to say.
"It was easier than I expected," she offers. "But I wouldn't want to go anywhere more crowded just yet."
Rosalie laughs. "Easier than I expected," she quotes. "I don't know what that means anymore—what is difficult for you?"
Bella's eyes flash to my face, giving her away, but thanks to Jasper's insight into the flare of lust mingled with frustration that accompanies her reaction, I'm confident she is thinking only of our ongoing physical complications.
Rosalie doesn't need that extra insight to interpret it the same way. Her lips twist into a knowing smirk. "He doesn't count," she teases.
My mate cringes subtly, concern and guilt momentarily trumping her other emotions before she sees my smile and relaxes. "No," she agrees, fully earnest, "he doesn't count."
Alice, who saw our discussion about Jacob and wants to give us some direct support (but still can't resist mentally expressing her enjoyment of the "highlight" of our trip—our post-race "festivities"), nods. "Olympia has plenty of good places to visit."
"Now?" Emmett says hopefully, but Rey immediately reminds him of our promise from last night to knit the remaining five dresses. He grumbles, playing up his objections because Rey's efforts to convince him otherwise are absolutely adorable—and somehow Rey ends up convincing him to help with the knitting this time.
When Esme arrives home to find all of her children knitting, she is beyond thrilled. Rey is quick to enlist another helper, and the two of them are soon making plans for all kinds of knitting projects, from accessories for Rey's xylophone to toys for toddlers.
Unexpectedly, Charlie calls mid-morning. Esme answered the phone, so she isn't sure whether to say that Bella is or isn't here, but Bella barely hesitates before holding out her hand for the handset.
"Hi, Dad," she says, speaking slowly but otherwise seeming not to be trying to 'roughen' her voice.
"Bella!" he exclaims. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Sorry I disappeared on you yesterday."
"When you gotta go, you gotta go," he jokes (Rey, who is close enough to hear him from her position on Bella's lap, giggles). But the forced 'cheery' tone turns serious when he says, "I was just wondering if Sue and I could visit this afternoon…"
Bella feels a momentary panic that she quickly quashes, replaced by firm resolve. "Sure—what time?"
"Four-thirty?"
"Great—see you then."
"Great! See you later, Bell."
After he hangs up, Bella passes the handset back to Esme, who pats her hand encouragingly.
"There's nothing to worry about," she says. "He'll be okay if you need to leave again."
Bella's smile looks a little forced, but she appreciates the sentiment, and Jacob's brisk nod and generally serious mien seem to settle the remainder of her unease. Having almost injured his own father, he empathizes deeply with Bella's horror.
When he offers to leave before Charlie arrives, Bella's visible shock makes him chuckle. "Charlie might make that face when he sees me," he jokes, "so I'll go if you'd rather—" He breaks off when she shakes her head, grinning in relief and elation at this generous reward for his sensitivity.
She smiles back, and her confidence rises higher—amplifying the simmering jealousy inside me into a spike of rage that makes Jasper twitch. And yet, right when my temper might inspire me to say or do something I'd regret, I'm reminded just how much I love my incredible wife: she is usually such a realist, but her bursts of optimism could beat out the most hopeful person in the world. So I'm smiling, too, when she looks at me, and the swell of love and self-assurance and tranquility she feels silences the last of my lingering irritation.