At no sign I could see, she whirled and dashed back to where I paused.
"Don"t attack me," she warned, and sprang at me.
"What are you doing?" I demanded, squirming as she scrambled onto my back and wrapped her hands around my face. I felt the urge to throw her off, but I controlled it.
"Making sure you can"t see."
"I could take care of that without the theatrics," Edward offered.
"You might let her cheat. Take her hand and lead her forward."
"Alice, I-"
"Don"t bother, Bella. We"re doing this my way."
I felt Edward"s fingers weave through mine. "Just a few seconds more, Bella. Then she"ll go annoy someone else." He pulled me forward. I kept up easily. I wasn"t afraid of hitting a tree; the tree would be the only one getting hurt in that scenario.
"You might be a little more appreciative," Alice chided him. "This is as much for you as it is for her."
"True. Thank you again, Alice."
"Yeah, yeah. Okay." Alice"s voice suddenly shot up with excitement. "Stop there. Turn her just a little to the right. Yes, like that. Okay. Are you ready?" she squeaked.
"I"m ready." There were new scents here, piquing my interest, increasing my curiosity.
Scents that didn"t belong in the deep woods. Honeysuckle. Smoke. Roses. Sawdust?
Something metallic, too. The richness of deep earth, dug up and exposed. I leaned toward the mystery.
Alice hopped down from my back, releasing her grip on my eyes.I stared into the violet dark. There, nestled into a small clearing in the forest, was a tiny stone cottage, lavender gray in the light of the stars.
It belonged here so absolutely that it seemed as if it must have grown from the rock, a natural formation. Honeysuckle climbed up one wall like a lattice, winding all the way up and over the thick wooden shingles. Late summer roses bloomed in a handkerchief- sized garden under the dark, deep-set windows. There was a little path of flat stones, amethyst in the night, that led up to the quaint arched wooden door.
I curled my hand around the key I held, shocked.
"What do you think?" Alice"s voice was soft now; it fit with the perfect quiet of the storybook scene.
I opened my mouth but said nothing.
"Esme thought we might like a place of our own for a while, but she didn"t want us too far away," Edward murmured. "And she loves any excuse to renovate. This little place has been crumbling away out here for at least a hundred years."
I continued staring, mouth gaping like a fish.
"Don"t you like it?" Alice"s face fell. "I mean, I"m sure we could fix it up differently, if you want. Emmett was all for adding a few thousand square feet, a second story, columns, and a tower, but Esme thought you would like it best the way it was meant to look." Her voice started to climb, to go faster. "If she was wrong, we can get back to work. It won"t take long to-"
"Shh!" I managed.
She pressed her lips together and waited. It took me a few seconds to recover.
"You"re giving me a house for my birthday?" I whispered.
"Us," Edward corrected. "And it"s no more than a cottage. I think the word house implies more legroom."
"No knocking my house," I whispered to him.
Alice beamed. "You like it."
I shook my head.
"Love it?"
I nodded.
"I can"t wait to tell Esme!"
"Why didn"t she come?"Alice"s smile faded a little, twisted just off what it had been, like my question was hard to answer. "Oh, you know... they all remember how you are about presents. They didn"t want to put you under too much pressure to like it."
"But of course I love it. How could I not?"
"They"ll like that." She patted my arm. "Anyhoo, your closet is stocked. Use it wisely.
And... I guess that"s everything."
"Aren"t you going to come inside?"
She strolled casually a few feet back. "Edward knows his way around. I"ll stop by...
later. Call me if you can"t match your clothes right." She threw me a doubtful look and then smiled. "Jazz wants to hunt. See you."
She shot off into the trees like the most graceful bullet.
"That was weird," I said when the sound of her flight had vanished completely. "Am I really that bad? They didn"t have to stay away. Now I feel guilty. I didn"t even thank her right. We should go back, tell Esme-"
"Bella, don"t be silly. No one thinks you"re that unreasonable."
"Then what-"
"Alone time is their other gift. Alice was trying to be subtle about it."
"Oh."
That was all it took to make the house disappear. We could have been anywhere. I didn"t see the trees or the stones or the stars. It was just Edward.
"Let me show you what they"ve done," he said, pulling my hand. Was he oblivious to the fact that an electric current was pulsing through my body like adrenaline-spiked blood?
Once again I felt oddly off balance, waiting for reactions my body wasn"t capable of anymore. My heart should have been thundering like a steam engine about to hit us.
Deafening. My cheeks should have been brilliant red.
For that matter, I ought to have been exhausted. This had been the longest day of my life.
I laughed out loud-just one quiet little laugh of shock-when I realized that this day would never end.
"Do I get to hear the joke?""It"s not a very good one," I told him as he led the way to the little rounded door. "I was just thinking-today is the first and last day of forever. It"s kind of hard to wrap my head around it. Even with all this extra room for wrapping." I laughed again.
He chuckled with me. He held his hand out toward the doork.n.o.b, waiting for me to do the honors. I stuck the key in the lock and turned it.
"You"re such a natural at this, Bella; I forget how very strange this all must be for you. I wish I could hear it." He ducked down and yanked me up into his arms so fast that I didn"t see it coming-and that was really something.
"Hey!"
"Thresholds are part of my job description," he reminded me. "But I"m curious. Tell me what you"re thinking about right now."
He opened the door-it fell back with a barely audible creak-and stepped through into the little stone living room.
"Everything," I told him. "All at the same time, you know. Good things and things to worry about and things that are new. How I keep using too many superlatives in my head. Right now, I"m thinking that Esme is an artist. It"s so perfect!"
The cottage room was something from a fairy tale. The floor was a crazy quilt of smooth, flat stones. The low ceiling had long exposed beams that someone as tall as Jacob would surely knock his head on. The walls were warm wood in some places, stone mosaics in others. The beehive fireplace in the corner held the remains of a slow flickering fire. It was driftwood burning there-the low flames were blue and green from the salt.
It was furnished in eclectic pieces, not one of them matching another, but harmonious just the same. One chair seemed vaguely medieval, while a low ottoman by the fire was more contemporary and the stocked bookshelf against the far window reminded me of movies set in Italy. Somehow each piece fit together with the others like a big three- dimensional puzzle. There were a few paintings on the walls that I recognized-some of my very favorites from the big house. Priceless originals, no doubt, but they seemed to belong here, too, like all the rest.
It was a place where anyone could believe magic existed. A place where you just expected Snow White to walk right in with her apple in hand, or a unicorn to stop and nibble at the rosebushes.
Edward had always thought that he belonged to the world of horror stories. Of course, I"d known he was dead wrong. It was obvious that he belonged here. In a fairy tale.
And now I was in the story with him.
I was about to take advantage of the fact that he hadn"t gotten around to setting me back on my feet and that his wits-scramblingly beautiful face was only inches away when he said, "We"re lucky Esme thought to add an extra room. No one was planning for Ness- Renesmee."
I frowned at him, my thoughts channeled down a less pleasant path.
"Not you, too," I complained.
"Sorry, love. I hear it in their thoughts all the time, you know. It"s rubbing off on me."
I sighed. My baby, the sea serpent. Maybe there was no help for it. Well, I wasn"t giving in.
"I"m sure you"re dying to see the closet. Or, at least I"ll tell Alice that you were, to make her feel good."
"Should I be afraid?"
"Terrified."
He carried me down a narrow stone hallway with tiny arches in the ceiling, like it was our own miniature castle.
"That will be Renesmee"s room," he said, nodding to an empty room with a pale wooden floor. "They didn"t have time to do much with it, what with the angry werewolves..."
I laughed quietly, amazed at how quickly everything had turned right when it had all had looked so nightmarish just a week ago.
Drat Jacob for making everything perfect this way.
"Here"s our room. Esme tried to bring some of her island back here for us. She guessed that we would get attached."
The bed was huge and white, with clouds of gossamer floating down from the canopy to the floor. The pale wood floor matched the other room, and now I grasped that it was precisely the color of a pristine beach. The walls were that almost-white-blue of a brilliant sunny day, and the back wall had big gla.s.s doors that opened into a little hidden garden. Climbing roses and a small round pond, smooth as a mirror and edged with shiny stones. A tiny, calm ocean for us.
"Oh" was all I could say.
"I know," he whispered.
We stood there for a minute, remembering. Though the memories were human and clouded, they took over my mind completely.
He smiled a wide, gleaming smile and then laughed. "The closet is through those double doors. I should warn you-it"s bigger than this room."I didn"t even glance at the doors. There was nothing else in the world but him again- his arms curled under me, his sweet breath on my face, his lips just inches from mine- and there was nothing that could distract me now, newborn vampire or not.
"We"re going to tell Alice that I ran right to the clothes," I whispered, twisting my fingers into his hair and pulling my face closer to his. "We"re going to tell her I spent hours in there playing dress-up. We"re going to lie."
He caught up to my mood in an instant, or maybe he"d already been there, and he was just trying to let me fully appreciate my birthday present, like a gentleman. He pulled my face to his with a sudden fierceness, a low moan in his throat. The sound sent the electric current running through my body into a near-frenzy, like I couldn"t get close enough to him fast enough.
I heard the fabric tearing under our hands, and I was glad my clothes, at least, were already destroyed. It was too late for his. It felt almost rude to ignore the pretty white bed, but we just weren"t going to make it that far.
This second honeymoon wasn"t like our first.
Our time on the island had been the epitome of my human life. The very best of it. I"d been so ready to string along my human time, just to hold on to what I had with him for a little while longer. Because the physical part wasn"t going to be the same ever again.
I should have guessed, after a day like today, that it would be better.
I could really appreciate him now-could properly see every beautiful line of his perfect face, of his long, flawless body with my strong new eyes, every angle and every plane of him. I could taste his pure, vivid scent on my tongue and feel the unbelievable silkiness of his marble skin under my sensitive fingertips.
My skin was so sensitive under his hands, too.
He was all new, a different person as our bodies tangled gracefully into one on the sand- pale floor. No caution, no restraint. No fear-especially not that. We could love together-both active partic.i.p.ants now. Finally equals.
Like our kisses before, every touch was more than I was used to. So much of himself he"d been holding back. Necessary at the time, but I couldn"t believe how much I"d been missing.
I tried to keep in mind that I was stronger than he was, but it was hard to focus on anything with sensations so intense, pulling my attention to a million different places in my body every second; if I hurt him, he didn"t complain.
A very, very small part of my head considered the interesting conundrum presented in this situation. I was never going to get tired, and neither was he. We didn"t have to catch our breath or rest or eat or even use the bathroom; we had no more mundane human needs. He had the most beautiful, perfect body in the world and I had him all to myself, and it didn"t feel like I was ever going to find a point where I would think, Now I"ve had enough for one day. I was always going to want more. And the day was never going to end. So, in such a situation, how did we ever stop?
It didn"t bother me at all that I had no answer.
I sort of noticed when the sky began to lighten. The tiny ocean outside turned from black to gray, and a lark started to sing somewhere very close by-maybe she had a nest in the roses.
"Do you miss it?" I asked him when her song was done.
It wasn"t the first time we"d spoken, but we weren"t exactly keeping up a conversation, either.
"Miss what?" he murmured.
"All of it-the warmth, the soft skin, the tasty smell... I"m not losing anything at all, and I just wondered if it was a little bit sad for you that you were."