Chapter Text
New York - December 19th
Cold streaks of moonlight bend through the frosted window panes and fall in a dim pattern on the dark hardwood. Outside, snow falls in soft flakes that swirl in the wind.
Rosalie rubs lavender lotion on her hands and tries not to smile at the goofy reindeer on the front of Bella's ridiculous Christmas sweater. She's standing in the slant of light from the bathroom and talking animatedly, the bells sewn into her sleeves in endless chimes.
"I don't know whose idea it was to let kids jump on balloons- and for the prizes to be inside them. It was a disaster, but we made like three grand for new textbooks next fall."
A gymnasium full of hyper, screaming children jumping around to "Jingle Bell Rock" and spilling hot apple cider all over the place almost sounds better than her day at the construction site in Rochester. "I'm sorry I missed it."
"It's alright. Besides, I think you would've popped a blood vessel if you saw the size of the chocolate snowman Asi won at the ring toss booth."
"What snowman?" she asks, though now that she's thinking about it, Aster did have a suspicious amount of ripped foil falling from her pockets when they burst in from the cold earlier.
Bella holds her hands up, innocent. "I was working. Take it up with your brother. He was supposed to be watching her."
She shakes her head and glances over at the weather report on the TV glowing with icy blues. The sound is off in favor of the holiday album coming through the sound bar. "Are you packed?"
"Yes. Asi is too, I triple checked." Bella rests her head against her shoulder. Rose doesn't have to look to know she's smiling, brown eyes wide and playful in their pleading. "Are you sure you can't get out of work any earlier?"
"I was hoping to, but it really is a disaster." Lifting a hand, she brushes her fingertips across Bella's cheek. "I know it's not the best, but it's only a few days, and then you can show me your hokey little hometown."
"Whatever you're picturing, it's smaller and worse," she says with a laugh. "But it's really beautiful there. And quiet-"
Down the hall, Aster runs up the stairs and trips somewhere in the middle. Whatever she'd been carrying hits the ground with a loud plastic clatter and tumbles back down the steps.
"Are you alright?" Bella asks, crossing the room to poke her head out into the hall. They both hear an incomprehensible explanation shouted from the bottom of the stairs as she picks up the mess and stampedes up again, no lessons learned.
"Goodnight," Rose calls out to no response as she zips past the room. Only her bedroom door slamming shut a moment later. Rose sighs only partly for show and accepts Bella's hand squeezing her own in place of the words she's been saying a little too often lately. It's just a phase. She loves you.
She smiles faintly, but it's short-lived due to the truly grotesque sweater lighting up the bedroom with miniature red and green lights all wired to the battery pack tucked into her back pocket.
"Please, you've already won," she says, unable to look away even though it's actually starting to give her a headache. "Take that off."
Bella puts her hands on her hips, proudly displaying her first place ribbon pinned to the reindeer's floppy felt antlers protruding from her chest. "It was a crowd favorite."
"Go sleep with the crowd then," Rose says, slipping her hands onto her waist beneath the awful scratchy fabric. Bella dips her chin, red across her cheeks as Rose pulls her closer. She still flusters so easily to Rose's eternal adoration. Could she call it a hobby at this point? Torturing the blood to her pretty face?
"You can't keep getting away with this," Bella says as she tugs her arm from one of the sleeves. "It was stiff competition. I need you to recognize that."
"I'll have your ribbon framed," Rose says before she kisses her, smiling against her mouth as she feels her struggling with her arms trapped inside the sweater.
Bella pulls back an inch, an empty sleeve now dangling from the center of her chest and her arms rigidly stuck. "I'm…tangled in the wires."
A few minutes of tugging and accidental hair-pulling later, the offending ugly Christmas sweater lands across the room in a heap, and Bella- now red from laughing- finally takes her face in her hands and picks up where they left off with breathless confidence.
Rose can't help but sigh into her touch, so deeply in love with the messy way Bella kisses like she's about to fall into her.
Outside, the snow begins to stick and build on the sidewalks. The CD in the player downstairs loops back to the start.
It's that time of year when the world falls in love…
.
.
In the morning, Rose sends Bella downstairs with Aster's suitcase to load into the car the she called to take them to the airport. She's already halfway down the stairs when Rose realizes she forgot to repack Asi's toothbrush after breakfast.
She sees it in her mind. Bella's hand closing around the knob of the front door, about to open it to the snowy street outside. Rose lets out a breath, vision graying around the edges as her month-long headache wakes up again.
Behind her, Aster's door pops open, and Bella stops mid-step across the threshold. She looks around as if confused, but shrugs it off when Rose hands her the small tote.
"Thanks. So much for quadruple checking," she says before pressing a kiss to her cheek and heading out again.
Rose watches her go, a strand of guilt somewhere beneath the press of her pain. She pushes it aside and walks across the hall to get dressed.
.
.
Out in the cold, Rose holds out her arms for a goodbye hug that Aster allows for a total of two seconds before she squirms away, jazzed about the plane and little else. Before school let out for winter break, her teacher mentioned she'd been spending all her recess time in the library reading about airplanes with her cousin.
"I don't even think she'd stand still to hug Santa right now," Bella says, swooping in as always. She smiles against the backdrop of the house's new icy trim, her knit hat pulled down over her ears against the wind.
Rose thanks her for her effort, and Bella doesn't squirm an inch when she hugs her- definitely too tightly. She can't help it. Her two favorite people about to fly across the country while she glares at email correspondence and plays holiday phone tag with distributors on the long drive out to the job site.
"Call me when you land," Rose says, pulling away. "I love you."
"I almost fall over every time you say that," Bella admits with that silly grin that's always on her face when she brings her to mind.
"I know," Rose says, and then she kisses her one last time in a flurry of snowflakes on the metallic wind.
"I love you, too," Bella says quietly into the space between them. "Good luck with your project. Beat them over the head with your blueprints if you have to."
"I'm thinking about it."
She turns and knocks on the tinted glass. Aster rolls it down for her, already buckled and ready to go. "Stay with Bella no matter what, okay? Be good." Rose says as she hands her her purple backpack through the window.
"I will."
"Bye, honey." She kisses her fingers and bops her on the head with them. It earns about half a giggle. She'll take it. "Love you madly."
…
…
Aster's first pet was a senior Irish setter named Zara, which was coincidentally Bella's custom security question on the site she used to buy the plane tickets. Which Rose would've cracked immediately and slid all possible meters to max when upgrading their tickets. Which would explain the cushy recliners she and Asi find themselves in as the flight attendants talk them through emergency exits and flotation devices.
Looking down at her phone, she texts Rose that they're about to take off and then opens a message from Angela. Right away, she's greeted with a photo of Eric holding two thumbs up in front of a botched attempt at a hand-painted mural on the wall of their nursery. The trees are a little wonky and the rabbits ears are bent at painful angles, but the strangest thing is the ominous black triangle floating up in the lopsided clouds. There's a very familiar beam of light bending into a rainbow through it.
Pink Floyd?? For an infant!? Never get married, I'm going to KILL him!
She's typing out her sympathetic reply as the intercom beeps and the seatbelt sign turns on overhead. Tucking her phone away, she turns to help Aster with the lap belt.
"I'm not scared," Aster says quietly, in response to no question as the plane picks up speed on the runway.
"It's better when we get up there," Bella assures her. "It won't be so bumpy, and you can see everything."
She has the window covered, her pink-gloved hand still holding the shade down. Her voice is fraught. "It will be a blur."
"What?"
"Mia said you can't see anything out the window. It's too fast."
Bella holds her smile. Mia is her older cousin whose latest quirk is telling whoppers with such deadpan delivery you could almost believe everything she says. Though she probably didn't mean to scare her. "It's not a blur, I promise. In fact, it's clearer than looking out the train, but you don't have to look if you don't want to."
Her pink hand lifts the shade an inch, but the plane lifting off the pavement suddenly startles her into slamming it shut again. She holds onto the armrest between them with both hands.
"Just a few more seconds," Bella says over the roar of the engines.
"It's loud."
"Do you want my headphones?" she asks, already handing them over. She helps her slip them on, her music still playing. They're pretty heavy duty and noise-canceling- a gift from Rose's brother last Christmas after she'd mentioned in one of their few conversations just how loud the city was compared to her hometown or even Hanover when she'd been in school.
Aster puts her hands against the outside of the ear cups and listens for a minute before tapping her arm. "This is Mom's music."
Code for bad, especially lately when everything to do with her mother results in a huff. But she's right, it's one of the old albums Rose has playing at home. "We can change it."
She doesn't answer right away, just folds her hands in her lap as the plane evens out into smooth flight. "It's okay."
…
…
Hours later, in her office on the thirty-fifth floor, Rose replies to the third email this week from the project manager of her library renovation in Rochester. More materials lost on-site. In this case the individual glass panes of what will be- eventually- a skylight over the children's section. If it is possible to unload fifty plates of glass from a confirmed truck delivery and walk them twenty feet inside the library without completely losing track of them. A near impossible feat according to her email chain.
Down the glass hall, she sees Esme coming before she lifts her hand to knock. She has her coat buttoned up and her purse over her arm. "It's almost six, you should get out of here."
A thousand pounds of glass just vanishing across the threshold. She shakes the thought from her head and closes her inbox. Her eyes feel strained as she lifts her chin to acknowledge her boss.
"And go to my empty house?"
Esme smiles and walks further into her office. "Open a bottle of wine, and eat all your kid's snacks. That's what I used to do. I'm sure Bella made all kinds of goodies before she left."
"She did, you should see my kitchen." Nearly every square inch of counter space if covered with baked treats and homemade bread all wrapped up and ready to have delivered to family and friends.
"Are you excited?" Esme asks as she's turning off her computer and gathering her things. Her cell phone lights up with a text message from Bella, she's been sending pictures throughout the day of their airport adventures. "Meeting her father, that's big!"
"I do wonder what he'll think."
Esme gives her a kind look and touches the back of her hand on the glass desktop. "You're brilliant and successful, you've raised an angel of a little girl, and you treat his daughter like gold. I honestly don't think you have anything to worry about."
"You sound like Bella."
"We may have discussed this over lunch the other day," she admits with a very Alice-like smile. As if she could ever forget. Anything grating about Alice is actually a dilution of the original.
"Of course," Rose lets out on a sigh.
Esme starts to turn for the door, but stops short in clear hesitation. "I've been meaning to ask you, actually. Have you been feeling alright lately?"
Rose tilts her head, surprised. "Yes, why?"
"It's just that…" Esme looks over her shoulder at the group filing out of the glass conference room across the floor. She steps closer and leans over the front edge of her desk. "The designs you handed in for that facade rehabilitation on Bowery. They were a bit odd, Rose. Almost like…well, never mind that."
"I'm fine," she says, sliding her hand on top of the blueprint copy spread across her desk. "I'll give them another look."
After Esme leaves, she glances down at the plan she'd been sketching all afternoon after returning from the job site. She shakes her head against the faint headache behind her eyes. The drawing is clean and exactly to the client's specifications. No graphite dusting her fingerprints, no dizzying repetition, no concerning shapes. No black doors.
It feels ridiculous to give even inner voice to such a thought, but it is not- it cannot be- happening again.