Chapter Text
Edward Cullen’s house was beautiful—sleek, modern architecture nestled on a small cliff in the woods. As he parked the Volvo in the driveway, I let the reason for the seclusion of their forest mansion sink in, but not too much. I had learned a lot about him and his family in the past few days, but that didn’t mean I was completely comfortable with it yet. Edward put out his arm, motioning me up the front porch ahead of him. Now that I knew how old he really was, it was stunningly hard to miss. He was way too formal to be 17. “I need to start paying more attention," I mumbled to myself.
"Paying attention to what?" Edward asked as he swung the door of his chosen family's home open. I had forgotten about the super vampire hearing.
"I don't know. Just talking to myself,” I responded, distracted by the grand foyer we were stepping into. And the smell of, "Is that...tomato sauce? I thought you didn't eat."
"Smells like we’re eating today,” Edward rolled his eyes at the thought, and then stopped short. “No shoes in the house. Carlisle is a neat freak."
I slipped my shoes off, hesitated, and then pulled my socks off as well. The tile was looking ominously slippery. Edward followed suit and led me into the kitchen. He somehow moved even more gracefully in his own home, without the threat of outside eyes. I felt a warmth at knowing I was an insider.
"Isabella!" a cheerful voice greeted me from behind the kitchen island. Edward introduced the small woman with caramel-colored hair as Esme, his mother. I knew he was using “mother” in a much less biological way. He had told me before that she was only technically about 6 years older than he was, but since their looks were frozen in time, she had to play the part her body fit best. Edward continued to formally introduce me to his "siblings”. I nodded, pretending Angela hadn't already fully briefed me on each of the immortal teenagers now crowding into the kitchen, having heard our arrival. I was lucky I had already memorized their names. Lucky because as soon as Esme had drawn my attention into the room, my focus was completely derailed.
She was there. The blonde. And she was the only thing I could focus on from the moment we entered the kitchen.
"Rose, we have a guest," Edward scolded.
Her voice cut through the chatter of her siblings like an expertly aimed arrow, "Yes, Edward, I'm aware. I could smell her from the driveway." Rosalie Hale finished washing her hands, flicking away the water so quickly that I never would have seen it had I not been hyper focused on her movements—my body frozen in place by the sound of her voice. She turned, painfully, purposefully slowly to face us.
"Hello, Isabella.” My ears burned red hot as the blood rushed to my face, embarrassingly visible under my pale skin. Edward took a sharp step away from me. Could he...smell it when I blushed?
"It'sBellaactuallyEveryonecallsmeBella,” I blurted out so fast it was almost unintelligible. Rosalie Hale was going to be a problem.
She looked like a Barbie and spoke like a CEO. It was more than mildly intimidating. Even worse, I was starting to get the impression that although Edward couldn't read my mind, maybe his hot, tall, scary sister could. She just stared back at me, long manicured fingers taping on the crystal salad bowl in her hands. Calculating. But calculating what, I had no idea.
Esme must have sensed the tension and attempted to salvage the mood, "As I'm sure you've guessed from the wonderful smell, Rose made Italian for lunch."
"Yes! It smells so gre..." Edward cut me off.
“She already ate," he deadpanned making direct eye contact with Rosalie.
The next moment felt like it happened in slow motion, even though I knew it was, in fact, inhumanly fast. Their eyes locked for the briefest moment, and before the words were fully out of her brother's mouth, a single one of Rosalie's fingers twitched. A normal person would have regained composure without anyone noticing, but, as I had learned after the parking lot incident at school, vampires were stronger than they looked. That slightest twitch of her finger and the crystal bowl Rosalie Hale had been holding shattered into a fine mess of twinkling glass shards. I watched them plink off the counter as all heads turned toward the sound.
“Fuck, Edward! That was a nice bowl," she lamented briefly before turning to get a dustpan from the pantry.
Edward, one step ahead (presumably reading her mind), beat her to it lightning fast. It looked as if he disappeared from one end of the room and reappeared behind the counter with the dust pan. If I didn’t know what was happening I wouldn't have believed it.
"Oh, of course it's my fault you popped it like a balloon. After all this time, you still don’t know your own strength, do you?" he teased as he swept tiny bits of crystal into the dust pan with his bare hand. I winced and felt a strong hand land on my shoulder. Emmet.
"Ed, you forget to tell her about the marble skin?" Edward ignored him and he leaned down to my ear in a dramatic aside, keeping his eyes on his fighting siblings in the kitchen, “Vampire skin is like, super hard. Normal stuff can't cut through it like human skin. Comes in handy in a house where everyone's always breaking priceless family heirlooms." As if on cue, another dish shattered. This time it looked like Rosalie had purposely lobbed it at Edward's head. She didn't miss, but he also didn’t move an inch when it collided with his face. "See, head as hard as a rock," Emmet said with a chuckle.
"I heard that, Em." Edward spat back.
"Oh, for Pete's sake. Can't you three be civil?"
Alice.
"Bella's our first guest since…I don't know…a long time! And you're fighting over bowls,” she turned to the fifth and final Cullen “sibling” standing next to her. “Jaz, can you?," she waved her hand around to finish her thought.
“I don't know if I want to," her other half, a boy with sandy blonde hair and the slightest hint of a Southern accent, replied.
The smallest Cullen closed her eyes and carefully responded, "Jasper Hale, if you don't calm them down, it will be more than just bowls that are broken today." She opened her eyes and shot him a meaningful look.
“You’re no fun, Alice, you know that?" he said as he shifted his stance slightly and focused on his now verging-on-feral vampire siblings.
"Someone has to be reasonable here," she said as she slipped a dainty arm around his waist.
Rosalie and Edward both stopped and whipped around to shout at Jasper in unison, "SERIOUSLY?"
"Am I missing something?” I asked Emmet who was still by my side, leaning against the doorframe, enjoying the spectacle.
“Oh, um, yeah. Jasper like, can control vibes. Rose and Ed hate it when he uses it on them, though. They don't really like anyone telling them what to do, honestly, vampire powers or not…" He trailed off at the end, as if he wasn't really talking to me anymore but just kind of talking to talk.
I took that as my chance to try again with Rosalie. It seemed like they had been pretty thorough in cleaning up the glass, so I padded further into the kitchen and rounded the island. “I'm sorry about lunch, Rosalie. If I had known you were cooking I wouldn't have eaten ahead of time. I just... Edward told me you don't eat." That was pretty good. I mentally congratulated myself and wondered if Jasper’s calming energy might be affecting me as well.
Rose eyed me again. "We eat. Just not pasta," she grinned, flashing her perfect, dangerous teeth.
Then her face went blank, and she stiffened.
"Get him!" I heard Alice scream to Emmet before she and Jasper blinked out of the room. The following sequence of events was a blur. There was a loud crash behind me as Emmet slammed into Edward and pinned him to the kitchen floor. Everything went cold and I had the vague realization that my feet were no longer on the ground before my head collided with something solid. I began to see stars as the room quickly spun out of view.
Then, black.
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"Hey, Bella. Bella. Are you okay?” I slowly began to resurface, regaining awareness of my surroundings but only slightly. “I'm so sorry. I think I picked you up too quickly. Fuck."
I was in a small room. A Bathroom. And the chair was cold on the back of my legs. No, not a chair, a sink. I was sitting on the sink in a bathroom with…
"Shit!" Rosalie swore again as she rummaged around in the cabinet under the sink, my toes dangling above her head. "What good is living with a fucking ER doctor if there aren’t even any bandaids in this tomb of a house?!"
“Why are we in a bathroom?" I asked quietly, hesitantly.
She sat back on her heels and peered up at me from the floor. Looking down at her between my bare knees, I tried not to blush again. She pretended not to notice.
"I thought we cleaned it all up, but I guess not. Stupid 'no shoes' rule," she wasn’t really talking to me but mumbling to herself instead, trying to piece together what had happened.
“Rosalie." Hearing me say her name snapped her out of it. She let herself plop all the way onto the floor and spread out her long legs a bit more before she spoke.
“You stepped on some glass, and Edward smelled the blood. I don't think he was ready for it. The other times, like after the car…" she waved her hand around "thing, he had had time to compose himself before confronting it. We talked about it after. It was still difficult, but he had seen it coming. This time it was a surprise." She scrubbed her hands through her shiny blonde hair and rested her elbows on the knees of her tight black jeans. "Are you okay?" she asked again, earnestly, no longer making eye contact. It caught me off guard.
"Yeah, I'm fine. I think the cut is dried up already," I said taking my foot into my hand, forgetting for a moment that I was sitting on a counter in a short dress. From her vantage point on the floor, it would have been Rosalie’s turn to blush now. If vampires could blush.
"My head hurts though. Did I fall?"
I caught her gaze snap up to meet my eyes, and I tried to discreetly close my legs. I didn't want to embarrass her—or myself, frankly. She responded, hand back in her hair, a twinge of guilt in her voice, "I think I may have smacked your head with my shoulder on the way out of the kitchen."
I laughed, "Good to know I'm not the only clumsy one here."
She was about to protest when we both heard a car door slam outside followed by the chirp of its lock. Tension rolled off of Rosalie in a palpable wave.
"Oh, thank God. Carlisle's home."