A/N: Thanks so much for all your wonderful thoughts.
Most characters belong to S. Meyer. The rest belong to me. All mistakes are mine.
We're almost done. :)
Chapter 21 – Stretch Marks
One Year Later…Saturday, September 13, 2025: St. George, Staten Island, New York – 7:45 a.m.
BELLA
Sunlight filtered through my closed eyelids. Cozy and comfortable, I snuggled deeper into the blankets and hugged my pillow tighter, burying my face into its yielding cushion. Meanwhile, my hand skimmed the cool sheets, searching for his solid warmth.
"Edward, let's not get up just-"
My hand came up empty.
"Edward?"
Eyes popping open, I raised my head off the pillow and turned sideways to a view of rumpled sheets and nothing more.
"Zeus?"
In the next moment, I realized what a senseless endeavor it was to call out that name. Were the surrounding silence insufficient confirmation that neither man nor dog was afoot, our German Shepherd would've sensed me waking even before I realized I was. Right now, Zeus would've been sitting back on his hind legs at my bedside, panting and waiting for me to pat the space between Edward and me in invitation. And Edward would've pretended to groan in long-suffering complaint. This had become one of our morning rituals over the past few months.
I sat up to a bright morning that cast late summer sunshine through the large bedroom windows. The sun hung high over a calm blue sky, crowning the high-rises across the river and streaming sun beams across their silver sidings like golden reams of confetti, then sparkling like diamonds in the waterway separating us here in Staten Island from Manhattan Island. It was a glorious view, no matter the weather, and I sighed in wondrous appreciation as I did every morning since moving in a few months-
Clamping a hand over my mouth, I jumped out of bed naked and sprinted to the bathroom.
Five minutes later, I'd thoroughly brushed my teeth and washed my face. That had never happened before, and for a second, I was grateful Edward wasn't home. With a smile and shrug at my blotchy and tired reflection, I returned to the bedroom, again sighing at the view through the windows.
Still, fantastic view notwithstanding, there was the ongoing question of the empty space I awoke to beside me. Again, I peeked over at Edward's side of the bed, this time, spotting a note that lay more or less where Edward's muscular calves would've been had he been where he was supposed to be when I opened my eyes. My inquisitive hands apparently missed that spot. With a frown, I plucked up the note and read:
Iz, I took Zeus for a run. Be back soon, birthday girl. Love you.
Rather than clearing anything up, my brow furrowed further. It was no shocker that Zeus was eager for an early morning run. Still, I loved jogging with them around the eclectic neighborhood streets or parallel to the river with the skyline as its majestic backdrop. What's more, what was a shocker was that Zeus himself hadn't nuzzled me awake in invitation. Then there was the fact that I'd apparently slept so soundly I hadn't heard either of them stir.
Then again, we had a late night, and Edward may have thought I wanted to sleep in.
We celebrated my birthday last night with another enjoyable and successful gig at The Last Call. Edward surprised me with a wonderful pre-birthday celebration, booking a performance by one of my all-time favorite bands, who'd broken up years earlier. Afterward, Edward and I performed together to a new song he wrote for us. just for us – and, of course, for TLC's loyal and adoring crowd. To top it off, most of our friends were there, as well as his parents and mine. We all laughed, joked, and toasted together to me – well, Edward and the rest toasted to me while I nursed my drinks and smiled, watching my favorite people enjoy themselves in an underground, dark, narrow, and fantastic venue.
Quil and Embry came, of course. The couple were now as close to Edward and me as if we'd known them for decades. Rose and Emmett, who'd resumed their friendship with Edward, flew in from Seattle to celebrate with us. Diego and Sam, a couple of Edward's good friends from the neighborhood, and their wives, Bree and Emily, who'd become my friends, also joined us. My little "stepsister" Leah managed to take a few days off from the newspaper to fly in, though she'd had to fly back early this morning.
It was, in all, an amazing forty-first birthday party.
Alice hadn't come. She and I still spoke, but our friendship hadn't been the same since finding out she'd kept her run-in with Edward from me. She apologized, and I forgave her. And I believed she hadn't withheld the information out of malice. I also understood her claim that it was more concern for how it would affect me to know she'd seen Edward.
Still, even if she didn't admit to it, I realized that a touch of thoughtlessness and lack of consideration were also involved. She'd been on her honeymoon, and wrong or right, Alice's primary concern had always been Alice. Putting significant thought into what to do over a ninety-second encounter hadn't been her priority during that trip. So she dismissed it.
Either way, our dwindling friendship was owed to more than just my learning of that incident. The truth was that Alice and I had been growing apart for years. For a long while, habit, ennui, and our mutual friendship with Rose bound us. The incident merely opened my eyes to a friendship we maintained more out of nostalgia than commonality.
Setting Edward's letter back on the bed, I pushed away thoughts of Alice and reached for the robe across the upholstered corner chair – one of my contributions to our decor. I caught sight of my naked self in the bedroom's full-length mirror – also one of my contributions, and I would've missed the nearly imperceptible changes on my breasts and stomach had I not known to look for them. However, the love bites marking them from last night's lovemaking were more conspicuous. I flushed and grinned all at once, wondering which encounter had left them behind.
OOOOO
Halfway through the night's celebration, Edward silently took my hand and led me into TLC's small office. Leaving the lights off, he pushed me against the doorframe, cradling me in his arms. At the same time, the music outside pulsed temptingly and teasingly through the sound system and against the door and my heated body. Edward lifted me as I braced myself on his shoulders, and our mouths crashed together. He smelled of soap and mint, a scent I'd never forgotten in almost twenty years apart. His tongue tasted of popcorn and whiskey, and something uniquely him made my mouth run dry and wet all at once. It was a taste heightened by the lack of light, deprivation of one sense strengthening the other so that as the music drowned out sound, his inaudible grunts reverberated to the base of my stomach. In this state of heightened sensation, I felt him fumbling between us, my heart hammering, muscles tense and clenched until he finally pushed himself inside.
"Izzy…" he groaned against my mouth, and I threw back my head, exhaling long and deep through the heart-pounding fullness, the completeness I felt whenever we were together like this. Wrapping my legs tightly around his rhythmically rolling hips, I allowed them to transport me to a place where only Edward and I existed. His mouth alternated between consuming mine, licking my neck, suckling the top swells of my breasts because Edward made love to me how he made music: from his soul, gritty, powerful, sometimes as guttural as a shout, sometimes as tender as a caress. Always with a mind-blowing lyrical flow, with a tempo that built…built…built to a crescendo until I muffled my cries against his mouth. With the music pulsing at my back and Edward keeping time with it, his lips skimmed to my ear.
"Scream if you want to, my love. They won't hear, and if they do, who-"
I threw back my head, and we cried out repeatedly while the music camouflaged us, framed our love, and served as our backdrop since our beginning.
Afterward, he buried his face in my hair and chuckled. "I love getting drunk with you."
I'd smiled in the dark. "I love you."
"I love you, too," he'd replied much more soberly.
Since reuniting, we'd made love a thousand times, at least. Each time felt like our first time back together. It was a quixotic admixture of the known with the unknown, of what we first learned with one another combined with all we still had to learn.
We'd made love again after arriving home in the early hours of this morning. This time, the musical accompaniment was the never-ending cadenced noise in this always-awake city I'd come to love. I rode Edward slowly, my hips rising and falling while moonlight streamed through the bedroom windows of the home Edward welcomed me to share with him and Zeus right before Christmas – three months after our reunion, which was as long as we'd been able to deal with flying back and forth to be with one another. The silver glow outside reflected in Edward's searing emerald gaze as he held my eyes and my hips, guiding me back and forth, lifting me and easing me down – sometimes languidly so I could feel every last inch, sometimes so quick and deep I felt him in my very soul. All the while, Zeus snored quietly in his bed in the corner. The river's breeze seeped through the open sash, cooling the dampness off our aching bodies as I arched, and Edward sat up under me, holding me prone as I chased the incomparable high to its last shudder. Then I held him tightly against my breasts as he gripped my waist and rolled his hips, grunting and groaning through his own release.
"Happy birthday, Izzy," he breathed afterward, a smile in his voice.
I rested on top of him, my ear over his heart, remembering how I'd once told him I loved the sound of our hearts beating in sync – two halves of a whole. It was the sweetest thing I'd ever said to him back then.
"The best one ever, Edward," I whispered back, "in many ways." And drawing whimsical patterns across his firm chest, I shut my eyes.
OOOOO
Again, I smiled at my reflection, noting somewhat wistfully that it was no longer the reflection of a twenty-one-year-old or even of a young woman in her thirties. I was forty-one years old today and found my first gray buried deep in my curls a few days ago. Horrific, but Edward swore he'd let me know the second he spotted the next one, and his vows tended to carry a lot more weight nowadays.
Now, I held up a ringlet and examined it through the mirror. It hit me that my curl pattern had changed over the past few years. It wasn't as tight as when twenty-two-year-old Edward Cullen would wind the spirals around his fingers as he pushed himself inside. Nowadays, my hair demanded more work and product to maintain its curly luster. What's more, whereas a rough night of partying went unnoticed in my twenties, now such nights left darker circles and blotchier skin that necessitated emergency gel masks and creams. Likewise, the stronger northeast sun highlighted fine lines I'd never noticed. I'd had to up my SPF factor to prevent or delay the appearance of more. As for my body…well, I worked out, but my stomach was no longer as flat as it once was. Nor my skin as tight. Those last two would probably grow worse before they got better.
Time had left its stretch marks – physically and emotionally – changes that were sometimes hard pills to swallow.
Still, after months, weeks, hours, and long talks with Edward, with Rose, Charlie, Quil, and Embry, and so many of the wonderful people that filled my life nowadays, Edward and I had come to a soul-cleansing conclusion:
There was nothing we would change about the past twenty years. Time, experiences, mistakes, joys, and losses had all marked me and turned me into who I was today. In the same way, Edward's experiences made him who he was. And if there was one thing the past few months had shown me, it was that as much as I'd loved Edward when I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and yes, beyond our breakup, that love paled in comparison to what I felt today for the man who had evolved from that young boy.
Twenty years of whys, hows, should'ves, and maybes could've left us bitter. But then all we had to do was look at the here and now, and it all made sense.
'Isabella, we've come a long way in maternal healthcare, and forty-one isn't what it used to be,' my obstetrician reassured me yesterday morning. 'You're healthy, and you're strong.'
Because, as it turned out, the here and now still had so much left to offer Edward and me.
A/N: Thoughts?
One more chapter. :)
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