“Of course I remember.”
I would never forget the first time I’d gone to his home, the huge white mansion buried deep in the forest beside the river, or the room where Carlisle—Edward’s father in so many real ways—kept a wall of paintings that illustrated his personal history. The most vivid, most wildly colorful canvas there, the largest, was from Carlisle’s time in Italy. Of course I remembered the calm quartet of men, each with the exquisite face of a seraph, painted into the highest balcony overlooking the swirling mayhem of color. Though the painting was centuries old, Carlisle—the blond angel—remained unchanged. And I remembered the three others, Carlisle’s early acquaintances. Edward had never used the name Volturi for the beautiful trio, two black-haired, one snow white. He’d called them Aro, Caius, and Marcus, nighttime patrons of the arts....
“Anyway, you don’t irritate the Volturi,” Edward went on, interrupting my reverie. “Not unless you want to die—or whatever it is we do.” His voice was so calm, it made him sound almost bored by the prospect.
My anger turned to horror. I took his marble face between my hands and held it very tightly.
“You must never, never, never think of anything like that again!” I said. “No matter what might ever happen to me, you are not allowed to hurt yourself!”
“I’ll never put you in danger again, so it’s a moot point.”
“Put me in danger! I thought we’d established that all the bad luck is my fault?” I was getting angrier. “How dare you even think like that?” The idea of Edward ceasing to exist, even if I were dead, was impossibly painful.
“What would you do, if the situation were reversed?” he asked.
“That’s not the same thing.”
He didn’t seem to understand the difference. He chuckled.
“What if something did happen to you?” I blanched at the thought. “Would you want me to go off myself?”
A trace of pain touched his perfect features.
“I guess I see your point...a little,” he admitted. “But what would I do without you?”
“Whatever you were doing before I came along and complicated your existence.”
He sighed. “You make that sound so easy.”
“It should be. I’m not really that interesting.”
He was about to argue, but then he let it go. “Moot point,” he reminded me. Abruptly, he pulled himself up into a more formal posture, shifting me to the side so that we were no longer touching.
“Charlie?” I guessed.
Edward smiled. After a moment, I heard the sound of the police cruiser pulling into the driveway. I reached out and took his hand firmly. My dad could deal with that much.
Charlie came in with a pizza box in his hands.
“Hey, kids.” He grinned at me. “I thought you’d like a break from cooking and washing dishes for your birthday. Hungry?”
“Sure. Thanks, Dad.”
Charlie didn’t comment on Edward’s apparent lack of appetite. He was used to Edward passing on dinner.
“Do you mind if I borrow Bella for the evening?” Edward asked when Charlie and I were done.
I looked at Charlie hopefully. Maybe he had some concept of birthdays as stay-at-home, family affairs—this was my first birthday with him, the first birthday since my mom, Renée, had remarried and gone to live in Florida, so I didn’t know what he would expect.
“That’s fine—the Mariners are playing the Sox tonight,” Charlie explained, and my hope disappeared. “So I won’t be any kind of company....Here.” He scooped up the camera he’d gotten me on Renée’s suggestion (because I would need pictures to fill up my scrapbook), and threw it to me.
He ought to know better than that—I’d always been coordinationally challenged. The camera glanced off the tip of my finger, and tumbled toward the floor. Edward snagged it before it could crash onto the linoleum.
“Nice save,” Charlie noted. “If they’re doing something fun at the Cullens’ tonight, Bella, you should take some pictures. You know how your mother gets—she’ll be wanting to see the pictures faster than you can take them.”
“Good idea, Charlie,” Edward said, handing me the camera.
I turned the camera on Edward, and snapped the first picture. “It works.”
“That’s good. Hey, say hi to Alice for me. She hasn’t been over in a while.” Charlie’s mouth pulled down at one corner.
“It’s been three days, Dad,” I reminded him. Charlie was crazy about Alice. He’d become attached last spring when she’d helped me through my awkward convalescence; Charlie would be forever grateful to her for saving him from the horror of an almost-adult daughter who needed help showering. “I’ll tell her.”