Luminosity

by Alicorn

  He took me out to lunch most weekends. He knew I wanted to be home to cook dinner for Charlie more days than not, but when I consented to be whisked away in the evenings, whisked I was. He lingered at my house after taking me home from these outings. Charlie approved quietly of Edward, who called him "sir" and behaved very deferentially. There were fewer flagrant displays of couplehood when we were there, but Edward did an excellent job of making it look as though he wished there were more. That might have been for Charlie's benefit - or not.

  Whenever I was within arm's reach, he touched me, with or without an audience. I went about dressed more warmly than the weather called for to be comfortable with the chilly caresses. He was always gentle, always cautious, forever moving my hair out of my face or stroking my cheek or kissing the back of my neck. He acted as though he was taking advantage of a rare, prized opportunity every time, but he did it so often that it didn't feel that way to me. I felt like half of a comfortable, longstanding couple - and Iliked it, far more than I'd have expected if I had been polled in the fall. It was easy, it was soothing. My parents were neither of them very cuddly people - and Charlie less so than Renée. I wasn't used to much physical contact beyond handshakes and, sometimes, hugs on special occasions. But it was nice to have - to have without having to awkwardly say, "Hug?" to a relative before he or she got on an airplane or any similarly forced direct request. I could just sit next to Edward and lean on him if I felt like it, and get a kiss in the part of my hair as a bonus.

  Not all of the shivering I did had to do with the winter or Edward's low body temperature.

  Valentine's Day was a Monday. Edward managed to leave a small item at my seat in every one of my classes, including the mat in the corner of the gym where I did my yoga - he must have ducked into the classrooms between bells to leave them. By lunch, I'd acquired two thematically appropriate packets of candy, a sparkly bracelet that...probably wasn't covered in rhinestones... and a CD accompanied by a note stating that it contained recordings of Edward's compositions. I slipped the bracelet over my left hand. When I arrived at the vampire table for lunch, Edward's eyes rested on it for a moment, and he had a look of satisfaction on his face when he looked up at me. "I wasn't sure if that was going to be too much," he said.

  "It's beautiful," I said. "It's entirely too much, I would have told you not to buy it, but I'm not planning to give it back." I jangled it on my wrist a little. "No more jewelry, though, or Jessica will have a stroke. The candy was delicious and I can't wait to listen to the music. Thank you."

  "No more jewelry ever?" he asked, like he was asking permission to do something far more self-indulgent than shower me with gifts. My right hand was occupied with stabbing a fork into my meatloaf, but he took my left hand and clasped it in both of his.

  "Nothing remotely this nice for the next two months," I said, "at least." I tilted my head to one side and quickly looked at Alice's and Rosalie's ears: neither had them pierced. "If I get my ears pierced, will they heal closed when I turn?" I asked.

  "If you're not wearing earrings at the time, they will," Rosalie said. "If you have earrings in, they might stay. But then you have to count on that being in fashion for hundreds and hundreds of years."

  "True. I've done without this long. And there are clips and magnets - I guess magnets would rely less on the earlobe being easily compressible."

  "I have loads of magnet earrings," Alice said. "I just don't wear them to school much because once about twelve years ago I got into a very annoying conversation with someone who thought that if I liked earrings enough to wear them every day, I ought to go get my ears pierced at her aunt's parlor, and she wouldn't leave me be. It's not that hard to fix up a regular earring to attach with magnets, if you know how. I'll show you sometime."

  * * *

  After lunch, Edward did not run ahead of me to biology in order to leave a gift at my table - he must have done it before lunch. I unwrapped it; it was a hair clip. It was very nice, but made mostly of wood, so I supposed it might not technically count as jewelry (and at any rate he'd put it there before I'd said to hold off on more.) I gathered my hair together and pinned it back; Edward heard the clip snap closed with a soft tok, and looked around to smile at me.

  At gym, it was just a note: it said that, as I read it, he was installing a stereo in my truck. I laughed softly and put the note into my bag. His last class was Spanish, and the teacher knew perfectly well that he was fluent (in fact, better than she was); he had de facto permission to cut whenever he pleased.

  The stereo, which was so perfectly installed that it looked like it had come with the truck apart from being a hundred times newer than everything around it, was well equipped to play my new CD. Edward readily played whatever songs I liked whenever we were at his house, but it was nice to have them in a portable form.

  A disturbing thought occurred to me, as I drove home - to do my schoolwork without Edward's distracting presence before meeting him at the Cullen house, as had become my habit.

  With as little history experiencing and labeling romantic emotions as I had, I might not even be able to tell when I stopped pretending.

  * * *

  I was not able to start my homework as soon as I'd expected. When I got home, Billy Black - and his son, a teenager now, whose name I couldn't quite call to mind - were there. I thought at first that it was simply a visit to Charlie. If Billy couldn't drive, it would only make sense that he'd enlist his son to cart him about occasionally - was the boy old enough to drive? I knew he was younger than me, but wasn't sure how much. He looked about fourteen or fifteen, but might be sixteen. I didn't play with boys as a ten-year-old girl, whatever their ages, when there were girls like his sisters handy, so the fact that I didn't recall him clearly was no clue. With Billy in the passenger seat, perhaps still licensed to drive even if no longer physically capable of it, the kid could probably play chauffeur with only a learner's permit.

  Billy and Charlie were watching a game on TV, but whatever it was didn't interest the younger Black, who was sitting in the kitchen and appeared to be doing his own homework. He looked up and offered a friendly smile when I walked in. "Hi, Bella!" he said.

  Well, that made it awkward that I didn't know his name. "Hi," I replied cheerfully, dumping my bookbag on the kitchen table and sitting down to be sociable. "I'm afraid I don't..."

  "I'm Jacob," he supplied, interrupting me; I gritted my teeth, told myself that if he'd known me well enough to avoid that, I would have known his name and he wouldn't have needed to do it.

  "Hi, Jacob," I said. "Sorry about that. I know who you are, but I mostly remember Rachel and Rebecca." And even them, I hadn't seen much after I managed to make my distaste for fishing sufficiently clear. That was Charlie's primary reason for bringing me to visit, was to instill his love for yanking ichthyoids out of the water into his child on large joint excursions.

  "Yeah, it's okay," Jacob said amiably. I hoped suddenly that Edward would not approach the house, looking to see where I'd gotten to. I wasn't sure if I could politely excuse myself now that I'd gotten into a conversation with Jacob. If I didn't turn up after a reasonable homework-doing period of time had elapsed, Edward might wonder what had happened. I didn't have a plan yet for safely dealing with Quileute wolves, which Jacob could quite likely become if he hung out with vampires at all. "Billy was hoping to talk to you," the maybe-future-werewolf went on. "I think he's really invested in this game, now, though, so would you mind hanging out until it's over? I don't know if you were planning to go anywhere."

  "Usually I come home, do my work," I gestured at Jacob's own textbooks, "and then hang out at my boyfriend's house for a few hours before dinner." I unzipped my knapsack and retrieved the brick that was my Trig book. "I don't know how long the game's going to be, but I can hang back a little. Might want to call my boyfriend, though, so he knows what's up." I said the word "boyfriend" twice quite deliberately. I didn't want to have to play matchmaker again. There was no reason to expect Jacob
in particular to need deflecting, but since he didn't go to my school and hadn't seen the flagrant display of the last couple weeks, it seemed prudent.

  "Okay," Jacob said.

  I took out all the other materials I'd need to do my homework, then got up and dialed the phone. Jasper picked it up; I recognized his low, controlled voice. The Southern accent he employed privately was practiced away in case I was someone else. "Cullen residence," he said.

  "Hi, Jasper," I said. "It's me. Can I talk to Edward?"

  Edward's voice replaced Jasper's immediately. "Hello, Bella. What is it?"

  "Ch- Dad has some guests over," I said, remembering half a syllable into Charlie's name that he preferred I not call him that, and that he was within earshot. "Remember I told you about Billy? It's him and his son Jacob. I'm going to stay and be sociable, and make sure they eat a nice dinner. I might not be over today at all. So please don't be alarmed and come wondering what the holdup is." Please don't come and activate the wolves, I meant, and hoped he'd understand.

  "Do you think you'll be able to come over at all today?" he asked. "It is Valentine's day..."

  "I know it's Valentine's day, I really wanted to come over," I said, sounding too clingy even to myself - I saw Jacob make a face out of the corner of my eye. "You didn't have anything planned that depends on me being there today in particular, did you? Chocolates taste just as good on the fifteenth."

  "It's all right," Edward said, soothing even over the phone - there might or might not be reservations or plans in place, but he clearly didn't want me to fret over them. "Oh, and Bella - Billy may well know about us, and about Quileute wolves. If he hints about it enough that you think he does, and you're talking to him alone, it won't put anyone in additional danger for you to speak freely."

  "Do you think that's likely?" I asked. I wondered suddenly what Billy was even doing here - usually Charlie went to the reservation. Jacob had said he wanted to talk to me. Was he going to say something about the vampires?

  "Possibly," Edward said. "Will you call me after they've gone and let me know what, if anything, happens?"

  "Of course," I said.

  "I'll see you tomorrow, at the latest, then," Edward said.

  There was a pause, where it sounded like he was thinking the words I love you very hard and not saying them because Alice had said to go slow - and I said, "Yes, tomorrow. Happy Valentine's Day!" and hung up.

  Had Alice been specific about the meaning of "slow"?

  "His name is "Edward"?" Jacob asked, sounding like he didn't much care for the name.

  "Yes," I said, flipping my math notebook open and finding the assigned problem set in the text. "Do you or Billy have any food issues I should know about?"

  "I'm not sure if we're staying for dinner, actually," Jacob said. "If we do, Billy's diabetic, don't feed him anything too loaded up on carbs but otherwise he's not that careful about it. I'm not picky."

  The game ended, and I heard the TV power off.

  * * *

  "Bella," said Billy, rolling into the kitchen. "It's good to see you again. Could I trouble you to join me for a walk, or are you very busy?" He looked at my homework.

  "I've barely started," I said. "I'd be happy to go with you."

  Charlie and Jacob got Billy's wheelchair over the single front step with some effort, and then I stepped out after him. "If you could just push me around the block," Billy asked politely; the roads were in poor repair and couldn't be easy to navigate for him on his own.

  I took hold of the handles sticking out of the back of the chair and propelled him down the driveway at a steady pace. "So," I said, "what did you want to talk to me about?"

  "Charlie tells me you've been spending a lot of time with the Cullens," he said without further preamble.

  I maneuvered him around a pothole. "That's correct," I said.

  "You probably don't know this," Billy continued, "but the Cullen family has an unpleasant reputation on the reservation."

  "I'd heard something about that, in fact," I said. "It seems to me that more than enough time has passed and it really should have died down by now." If Billy didn't know the details, if he were just warning me away from an outcast family, this would sound like I was siding with Charlie and thought they'd proven themselves worthy. If he did, he'd know I was talking about the seventy years since the vampires had last come to Forks.

  "You seem well-informed," Billy said slowly. I wasn't positioned to see his face, but he sounded like he was speaking too deliberately - trying not to mess something important up.

  "Oh, I'm sure Charlie talks all the time about how I will poke and poke at an unanswered question that happens to strike my fancy, until I know the answer," I said lightly. "I know allkinds of things."

  "Mmm. Does Charlie know all kinds of things?" Billy asked, probing.

  "I find he doesn't have at all the same attitude towards mysteries," I said. "I also find that he finds me trustworthy in general and has respect for my judgment. And I find that some people are very, very attached to their secrets, and might not care for the people who stumble across them."

  Billy was silent for a minute; I pushed him around a car parked on the street, undercorrected for the slope, and narrowly avoided steering him into the gutter. "Sorry," I said.

  "Don't worry about it," Billy said. Ironically, I was less clumsy piloting the chair than I was walking about in its absence - it gave me something to hang onto. "You're probably right about Charlie," he said after another pause. "What are you going to do about the... secret-keepers?"

  "If you can't beat 'em," I said cheerfully, "join 'em."

  Billy went rigid where he sat. "Bella," he said warningly.

  "I know the details. Believe me, I do. And I know about the treaty," I went on, after checking for neighbors out strolling - there were none. "It's got some very specific language in it, which leaves a handy loophole for me to hop through. I'll be just fine, Billy."

  He was gripping his armrests and his knuckles were white. "Bella Swan," he said again. "You have no idea -"

  I bit my lip, fighting the urge to cut in and tell him that I had a very good idea indeed, but words failed him and after a few seconds I said it aloud. "I've been filled in to my own satisfaction on the important parts. I'm not sure how much you know," I said. "Edward said you might know about his family, and about, well, yours - but didn't specify the level of detail. Anything I can fill you in on, to put you at ease?"

  Billy swiveled his head to look at me, incredulity on his face. He turned back around without saying anything.

  "I'd actually like to talk to you about... your own sort," I said. We had somehow gotten into the pattern of using indirect words and it was difficult to be the first to break it. "It sounds like there've been some old skills lost. I think that's sad - I'd like to help you get them back, if you're willing."

  "I'm too old," Billy murmured, and I couldn't make out the emotion behind it - did he want to be a wolf, as I thought sane, and feel sad that he couldn't? Was he glad to be safe from my machinations? Perhaps he'd been a wolf, seventy years ago, and kept it long enough to look only a little past fifty now - and now either regretted it or felt he'd had good reasons to quit.

  "Not everyone is. Jacob," I suggested.

  "You don't know what you're playing with, Bella," Billy said warningly.

  "I've told you several times that I know quite a bit. But I'm not planning to do anything very soon that directly concerns you," I said. "Or anything that involves uninformed parties ever. I'm not going to show up in the night and restore all the old Quileute traditions unexpectedly. Everyone needs to make their own choices. I've picked out one for myself, and I hope you understand that."

  We'd gone full circle around the block. I pushed Billy up the driveway and then opened the door so less accident-prone persons could haul him over the step.

  The Blacks stayed for dinner; Billy kept giving me strange looks, but didn't say anything else hinting while Charlie and Jacob watched. I
baked fish, and then made small talk with Jacob over our respective homeworks for about an hour, before I finished my work, decided I'd put in enough of an appearance, and escaped to visit my boyfriend.

  Chapter 10: Coven

  The next month was nearly uneventful.

  On the first Thursday in March, Edward and I cut Biology together: he warned me that the lesson plan involved blood typing. Although he remarked that hanging around me as much as he did, he had probably developed the ability to tolerateother blood just fine even if it were exposed to the air, there was no sense in taking the risk with as much of a pass to skip as he had. And I would likely have passed out - which I explained to the teacher the next day, in apologetic tones that avoided me detention.

  The subsequent Saturday, my human friends and I took our planned trip to the beach. I wanted to invite Edward along - with Mike and Jessica finally having declared themselves mutual significant others, and Eric and Lauren vaguely wending that way, it looked a little couple-y apart from Angela. But Edward wasn't allowed on Quileute land, and First Beach was in the relevant area.

  Some Quileute kids turned up while we were there; Jacob, among them, made a beeline for me. I complained conspicuously about Edward's absence after greeting him. This prompted Jacob to tell me "scary stories" about the Cullens, once he realized that it was that particular Edward whom I was dating. They added no factual data to my supply, except for the tidbit that it remained against tribal law to kill wolves. I did get him to flesh out the cast of characters a little: Jacob was descended from tribal elders, and pointed out others on the beach who also had interesting ancestry. I was pretty sure they could all become wolves under the right conditions, assuming the genes had stuck around. What I didn't know was whether this was a good sampling of young-enough Quileutes - it was possible that potential wolves hung around together more often and that was why this group had arrived together.