May 2014
Twenty-Four / Twenty-Six
"Did you meet my conditions?"
"No," Edward replied, in a voice so emotionless it was icy. There was a hint of disdain on his brow.
The winter before, Carlisle Cullen had gladly bequeathed the engagement ring he had given Elizabeth Masen – to their son. The ring was still tucked inside its velvet case, buried among Edward's socks. Dating back to the 1920s, it had a Marquise-shaped center diamond, with intricate craftsmanship making an adornment out of the gold band. Edward was the third Cullen to give it away.
Carlisle had given it away under two conditions.
"I think Isabella should know about the baby with Jane Ashcroft Voltaire, and I think she has should hear it from you."
Edward's lips clenched, and the burst of fear that shot up his spine iced into anger.
"That was no fucking baby," Edward spat, disgust still swirling in his stomach at the thought of parenting with Jane. "It was a fucking embryo. Not even that. It was a fucking zygote. Then we got rid of it. There was no baby."
WASPish, medical student Edward referred to the product of that sexual encounter as ejaculate. Southern Baptist Jane referred to it as "her baby." Aborting it had been a brutal blow.
The disappointment in Carlisle's face had been worn away, gradually replaced by emotionless weariness. "That you're so callous about it scares the shit out of me, son."
"I paid my dues. I paid for it," Edward replied smoothly, though his tone was still a whispered hiss. "I even paid for all the ridiculous bills Jane sent afterward. Towards the end, she was practically blackmailing me."
Carlisle shook his head. "You got a twenty-four-year-old pregnant and then made her have an abortion," Carlisle snapped. There was deeply-rooted weariness in Carlisle's tone, the byproduct of nearly three years of relentlessly and fruitlessly appealing to Edward's moral rectitude. "Isabella deserves to know."
Edward fiercely disagreed. There had been no point in telling her then. If anything, the reasons to tell her had faded with time. "I made sure it wouldn't matter," Edward said smoothly.
Edward cast an inquisitively pleading glance at his father, and Carlisle's eyes twinkled with compassion despite the grimace on his face. "Will it?"
"There's a non-zero chance somebody else will tell her," Carlisle muttered wearily, tired of issuing this warning ad nauseam. "Jane can share her story. She still can. It's best to hear it from you. If you don't tell Bella, somebody else will, and it will hurt more."
Edward had not mustered the courage to do it in three years. Only his father knew: It was Edward's most carefully guarded secret.
One day in mid-September 2011, Edward found a tear-streaked Jane outside the apartment he had once shared with Emmett. Jane claimed she was sixteen weeks pregnant. The timing and the optics were catastrophic. The pregnancy could look suspiciously like evidence of cheating. The truth was that Edward had possibly ejaculated into Jane with Isabella nearby. The falsehood - that Jane had conceived in August or July – was just as believable. Both had, and would, haunt Edward far longer than the cluster-
Besides, the relationship with Isabella was new and correspondingly shaky; they had been together for less than three months. Like the cells taking root inside Jane, the relationship with Bella felt fragile. There had been no choice to make, and Edward had begun a negotiation for an abortion. Edward had done his damnedest to convince Jane that she would raise that child alone, without his love or his support.
It was his greatest shame that he had fucked Jane in Wharton Bay. Knowing that Bella was sleeping under the same roof. Knowing that he loved her. In a world where everything was confusing, he knew that with resounding clarity. That he loved her.
In those heady summer weeks in Maine, he was certain that Isabella would not love him back. That she could. Bella found him "kind of pathetic" when he found her admirable, and he had hurt her. He had hurt her so deeply. You said I was nobody, and then – you laughed at the Telethon joke, like I'm … Like it's funny to be like this. Like you don't know how hard it is. And you're the one person in the world I trusted to not do that. Not anymore. And I feel so stupid, Edward, for ever thinking that you…
Edward had been burning with love he feared would be unrequited, and Jane was right there.
"The second condition," Carlisle continued evenly, keenly aware of Edward's reaction and keeping his voice low. "Isabella has a right to know about the investments with Felix Moss and Demetri Vandermuch."
"Felix Musgrave and Demetri Vanderboss," Edward corrected quietly.
Despite his subdued tone and his emotionless face, his eyes were filled with ice-cold disdain. "I don't see what's wrong with the Corvus investment. I've become far richer than you've ever been, and you're up my ass like it's a bad thing. I saved you from going into the red last year, and you're punishing me for it."
Outwardly, Carlisle seemed perfectly nonplussed, but Edward saw a flash of hurt in his father's crystalline blue eyes. "I would rather be in the red than associated with Felix Musgrave and Demetri Vanderboss," Carlisle said harshly. "Those boys seem…morally suspect, Edward. I don't care how tech-savvy they are."
Edward groaned. "They run a startup, and I've gotten crazy ROIs. I made 25 million off an early 5-million-dollar investment, and then I made that twice over in a second-round investment. Who gives a shit if they're not Mother Theresa?"
Carlisle smirked mirthlessly. "Bella, for one," he said somberly. "She deserves to know. I'm certain she knows what Corvus does, and I'm certain she'll think it's blood money."
Edward was quiet.
"You shouldn't keep secrets from your wife, Edward," Carlisle continued, twisting the knife now that he had cracked Edward's impenetrable façade.
"We're not even engaged yet," Edward countered. His face was impenetrably emotionless, suited for a world where compassion turned into carrion. For the first time in his life, he felt like Isabella – the best part of his life and his greatest vulnerability – was threatened by his father. "And I'm not keeping secrets."
Carlisle gave Edward a piercing stare, and Edward's steel façade cracked after two minutes under its scrutiny. Carlisle pursued his lips and leaned back, folding one knee. "I set those conditions for a reason," Carlisle said, and the ice in his eyes rivaled Edward's. "Not for my sake, but for yours, Edward. I don't want you to blow this."
"I won't," Edward swore hotly, not to his father but to himself. "I won't, because I love her."
"Then tell her," Carlisle said encouragingly. A spark of hope lit up Carlisle's face and demeanor. His eyes warmed with pride for his boy. "Tell her, before somebody else does. Start small."
Edward never did, and it eventually destroyed him.
Edward's complete medical school transcript was published in mid-May, three days before his graduation ceremony, and eight hours before a reception for the graduating class. With the same trepidation he had once felt at opening his college admissions letter, he entered his credentials into the intranet system. Edward had long since stopped showing any of the markers of physiological trepidation. Both his profession and his social circle had made his expression inscrutable.
Stomach twisting, he peeked at his final transcript. It was, he decided at first glance, a mediocre performance. Rather than grade its students, Harvard Medical School employed an Honors-Pass-Fail system. Edward's transcript was a sea of passes, without a single honorable mention. Anew, his stomach twisted with a punch of aggressive disappointment – and it spilled into his face, contorting his face into a grimace and burning his eyes. He was certain that if Isabella had hugged him, he would have cried.
Edward's results were the epitome of mediocrity.
The potent disdain and disgust he felt for others was rerouted towards himself. That meant his internship offers would suffer, and he would end up at a state school hospital. There were only a handful of hospitals worth considering – worth the effort. Edward would end up interning in a flyover state among a sea of equally mediocre doctors. Thousands of hours of soul-crushing, eye-burning work gone to waste. Thousands of hours finger-deep in blood, tissue and secretions gone to waste. Thousands of hours tearing through cadavers gone to waste.
It was devastatingly anticlimactic.
Edward slammed the lid to his laptop roughly. Tears he could not shed burned at his eyes again. He slammed his hands against his face. Inside his body, two competing urges waged battle. A part of him was itching to fight, to punch, to rage. Another part was overcome with lethargy, like lead-weight exhaustion. That was a familiar and hitherto vanquished companion, depression.
Isabella was away at the office, and for the first time, that was liberating.
Without Isabella to watch, Edward kicked the mattress where they slept. Edward kicked so violently that its wooden feet scratched against the wooden floors, creaking dissonantly. The bed shifted sideways, jostling Isabella's side of the bed. Pancake, napping in the crevice between their pillows and the comforter, yowled and hissed. The cat darted away in a mad dash.
The force of the kick knocked into Bella's bedside table – littered with things that he found enchanting. Things that made him feel a little less jaded. A pot of daffodils, a stack of books, a freshly printed copy of The New Yorker, a pill organizer. The pot wobbled, creating a miniature anvil of fresh dirt that stained the pinewood. The stack of books fell.
"Shit," he spat.
Edward could stand a lot of things. Hurting Isabella was not one of them. He felt a stab of guilt, and it muted his anger. Sighing, still pulsating with anger, he lifted the books from the ground. A whimsical bookmark, featuring a smiling cartoonish pig, fell from from All the Light We Cannot See. The Emperor of Alll Maladies had fallen, spine upwards, with a sprinkling of dirt.
With gentleness at odds with his rage, Edward lifted both books from the ground. He wiped Emperor against his pant legs, watching the dirt leave a streak. One of the daffodils had tilted. Guiltily, Edward restored order to Bella's night table. Still raging, he moved into their minuscule closet, slipping on a nylon sweatpants-and-shirt set.
Without stretching, he exited the apartment and ran. Knowing it would hurt his ears, he placed tiny earbuds blasting Eminem into his ears. It became a bad habit in his adult life – to run. To run until his thighs burned, until sweat was pouring down every crevice of his body, until breathing became shallow and difficult. Until he was sure he had injured a knee.
Running cleared his head, and it re-focused his anger. As he ran, his anger and his jealousy gathered clarity. There were people he was certain had received honors for different subjects. Emmett would be one of them, and Edward tried to feel joy when all he could feel was jealousy. Benjamin Al-Farouk – Emmett's new chum – was an Egyptian immigrant student who had graduated pre-med from a low-ranked college in a flyover state. That someone so brilliant could come out of fucking Wisconsin blew Edward's mind, but he did not doubt that Benny had graduated with all honors.
Edward would need to tame his emotions before the fucking reception that night.
His jealousy and his anger impelled him forward, powering through a circle that extended to the waterfront. He ran past dozens of yachts and back uphill, to the apartment complex where he lived with Bella. Still burning– out of jealousy, out of exertion, out of frustration – Edward returned home.
When he slammed the door open, Edward was red-faced with sweat, still breathing heavily.
"Baby?" Bella asked concernedly, tilting her head sideways, alarm marring her beautiful face. "Is everything OK?"
There she was, and she was so beautiful, and fucking lovely, and everything that was good.
It broke Edward's infuriated fever just to see her, just to hear her voice. Ever-so-slightly, Isabella's voice had deepened in her mid-twenties. She still spoke with a sweet, slightly squeaky lilt. Even after all this time, her voice was still one of those sounds that Edward found powerfully soothing – like acoustic guitar and the sounds of the depth of a forest.
Bella was already dressed for the reception, curled on the leather couch, mindlessly scrolling through television. She turned it off.
"You look beautiful," Edward said softly.
Jokingly, she stuck out the tip of her tongue, flipping her hair back in jest. "Obviously," she deadpanned, but at that moment, the tops of her cheekbones turned a lovely shade of pink.
Though almost instinctive, his words were true. Isabella had done something to her hair. It fell ramrod straight down her back. Her eyelashes were darker, accentuating the honeyed hues of her eyes. The dress she wore revealed the points of her shoulders and the bones of her clavicles. Edward suddenly gave less no fucks about the impending reception, laser-focused on touching her skin.
"Seriously, though," she repeated somberly. "Is everything OK?"
Edward managed the single sentence he had been practicing all day, and it came out as a strangled growl. "I got my grades back."
At the announcement, Isabella lit up and her doe eyes brightened. A smile spread across her face, from cheek to cheek, and she squealed her enthusiasm "Oh! Congratulations!"
His frustration welled afresh, and he shook his head emotionlessly. His words of explanation caught in his throat. Unable to explain, he marched to their bedroom and opened his laptop. Carefully, he handed her the laptop. As Bella read, her brow furrowed in concentration.
Her smile only grew, and her eyes watered with pride. "Congratulations, Dr. Cullen," she whispered reverently.
Edward shook his head. "No, Bella, look," he said, fighting to keep his impatience at bay.
"This says you passed all the courses, right?"
"Without honors," Edward growled snappishly because she was smart enough to get it and she was being dense.
"This is mediocre," Edward continued, growing agitated."This means I won't get into any of the internship programs I wanted. I'll end up in some fucking unknown hospital in the middle of nowhere."
Isabella had proofread all his internship applications and knew where he had applied. Perhaps foreseeing her partner's mediocrity, she had quietly suggested that he apply to some other hospitals beyond the top ten most prestigious ones. Begrudgingly, Edward had applied to the University of Washington and a handful of hospitals scattered across New England, some of them in rural settings.
Bella's voice was soft but stern. "We don't know that yet, Edward," she cautioned. "You're catastrophizing. And there'd be nothing wrong with ending up in Marlborough, or Portland, or back in Seattle."
Edward grimaced disgustedly. "There's no prestige in any of it."
Because Edward had memorized every crevice and line of her face, every pigment of honey in her irises, he saw his comment stung. Hurt flashed in the honey of her irises and her lips turned downwards; she curled into herself, hugged her waist. "There's no prestige in anything I've ever done," Bella murmured, and she snorted.
"Bee, I didn't mean – Sweetheart, I – " Edward sputtered dumbly. "It's different for me because I'm a man, and I should provide for us."
Bella's grimace only grew. Her expression was bone dry, with a hint of dark amusement. "You're just digging yourself into a hole," she sighed, exasperatedly. Then her tone changed, to the tone she used to tell him to clean the litterbox or take out the trash. "I think you should shower. We're running late to the reception."
Forty-five minutes after that instruction, Edward parked by the medical school building in downtown Cambridge. He slipped the Audi into the handicapped parking spot and hung the disability placard from the rearview mirror. Edward's hair was a shade darker and glistening wet.
"I'm sorry, angel," he said, and his voice was a low croon. Earnestly and genuinely, he was sorry to have hurt her feelings. Edward was still unsettled by the catastrophe of his grades – terrified that he would end up like his father, treating patients in an unknown suburban county hospital.
"Sorry for what, exactly?" Bella asked, and there was a spark of playfulness in her tone. Edward sighed with resignation because it was a game she liked to play. What are you sorry for?
"I didn't mean to hurt you, sweetheart. I'm very proud of you."
Every word of that was true. Though he adored her for her choices, Edward rarely understood them. There was something so profoundly good about the joy she found in what she did. Edward admired her choices because he did not understand them. Isabella was exactly like his mother that way – squandering genius and beauty by devoting it to educating children. Children likely destined to workaday lives, as certified public accountants.
"I'm proud of you," she said, and concern swirled in her doe eyes. "I worry. You're graduating from Harvard Medical School, and you're so unhappy about it, and I…I guess I don't understand."
Prestige was an ambition he had for himself, and he would never apologize for it. Family lore only added pascals to the pressure he put on himself. As much as it stung to admit it, his grandmother was right. The Cullen fortune was dwindling – Edward's father had done next to nothing to grow it. Fortunes were like plants – they wilted without nourishment. He and Isabella would end up entrapped in a middle-class lifestyle in suburban Milwaukee, and that seemed nightmarish.
"I want us to have the best of the best."
Bella leaned over to kiss his cheek, and a tremor ran through her arm. Even now, though the tremors were Edward's daily companions, they filled him with tenderness. "We already do," she whispered against his cheekbone.
Unwilling to concede, Edward helped Isabella descend the car, fetching her his hand protectively on her back, Edward escorted her to the reception hall.
The rumor that Edward was not only with, but deeply in love with, a girl with "severe disabilities" had circulated like wildfire – among professors, supervisors, and classmates. In response to them, Edward took Isabella to a holiday reception held at his academic advisor's place. Isabella had taken the Christmas theme to heart, wearing a woolly red sweater and buying mince pies for Dr. Taylor.
A scientist and clinician in her early sixties, Dr. Taylor wore her hair in a pixie cut. She had limited patience and light disdain for Edward. "Your girlfriend is enchanting, Cullen," Taylor decreed after the reception ended.
"Oh, there's Emmett," Bella cried, and Edward hesitantly followed suit. Bella rushed to Emmett McCarthy, bright-eyed and smiling goofily.
Edward hesitated after her, not in the least because Emmett was surrounded by people that Edward fucking hated. There was Benny Al Farouk, top of the fucking class, and a trio of upcoming doctors that would innovate in their fields. Unable to stomach Benny Al Farouk right now, Edward spun on his heel to fetch Isabella a glass of white wine. He could still hear their mutual enthusiasm. "Hiya, gorgeous," with an exaggerated smooch to the kiss that made Bella's laughter bubble.
Aggravatedly, Edward took the glass of white wine to Isabella. He acknowledged both Al Farouk and McCarthy with curt, amiable nods. Fucking Benny was making Isabella laugh. Edward's hand shot to cup her shoulder, reverently and yet possessively. She reached across her chest to intertwine their fingers.
"Hi, brother," Emmett said, lukewarm, with a subdued grin. He clapped Edward on the shoulder. Edward stumbled as he set the glass in Bella's hand, steading her wrist out of instinct.
"Hey, Em," Edward grunted.
They were still brothers. Emmett would always be his brother – but Emmett, like his father, had made no secret of his increasing disapproval. Emmett did not know about Jane's abortion; Emmett and Rosalie had turned into loving fuckbuddies whenever they were near each other. Telling Emmett would be tantamount to telling Isabella.
Emmett, like Carlisle, knew that Edward had become tremendously independently wealthy in the past three years. Just like Carlisle, Emmett disliked that so much of that wealth had come from investing in Felix Musgrave and Demetri Vanderboss.