Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,177

wrist to steady herself. “I can’t be sure,” she teased. “I’m still woozy. I think it’s some of both, though.” Her body swayed closer to mine. It seemed intentional rather than vertiginous.

“Maybe you should let me drive.”

All disequilibrium seemed to vanish. Her shoulders squared. “Are you insane?”

If she were driving, I would need her to keep both hands on the wheel and I could do nothing to distract her. If I were driving, however, there would be much more leeway.

“I can drive better than you on your best day. You have much slower reflexes.” I smiled so that she would know I was teasing. Mostly.

She didn’t argue with the facts. “I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t think my nerves, or my truck, could take it.”

I tried to do the dazzling thing she’d accused me of before. I still wasn’t exactly sure what qualified. “Some trust, please, Bella?”

It didn’t work, perhaps because she was looking down. She patted her jeans pocket, then pulled out her key and wrapped her fingers into a fist around it. She looked up again, and shook her head.

“Nope,” she told me. “Not a chance.”

She started toward the road, stepping around me. Whether she was actually still dizzy or just moved clumsily, I didn’t know. But she staggered on the second step and I caught her before she could fall. I pulled her against my chest.

“Bella,” I breathed. All the jocularity vanished from her eyes, and she leaned into me, her face tilted up toward mine. Kissing her immediately seemed like both a fantastic and a terrible idea. I forced myself to err on the side of caution.

“I’ve already expended a great deal of personal effort at this point to keep you alive,” I reminded her in a playful tone. “I’m not about to let you behind the wheel of a vehicle when you can’t even walk straight. Besides, friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” I concluded, quoting the Ad Council slogan. It was a dated reference for her; she’d been only three when the campaign was launched.

“Drunk?” she protested.

I grinned a crooked smile at her. “You’re intoxicated by my very presence.”

She sighed, accepting defeat. “I can’t argue with that.” Holding her fist up, she let the key drop from her hand and fall into mine.

“Take it easy,” she cautioned. “My truck is a senior citizen.”

“Very sensible.”

Her lips pursed into a frown. “And are you not affected at all? By my presence?”

Affected? She’d utterly transformed every part of me. I barely recognized myself.

For the first time in a hundred years, I was grateful to be what I was. Every aspect of being a vampire—all but the danger to her—was suddenly acceptable to me, because it was what had let me live long enough to find Bella.

The decades I had endured would not have been so difficult had I known what was waiting for me, that my existence was advancing toward something better than I could have imagined. It had not been years of killing time, as I had thought; it had been years of progress. Refining, preparing, mastering myself so that I could have this now.

I wasn’t entirely sure of this new self yet; the violent ecstasy suffusing my every cell seemed unsustainable in the long term. Still, I never wanted to go back to the old me. That Edward seemed unfinished now, incomplete. As though half of him was missing.

It would have been impossible for him to do this—I leaned down and pressed my lips to the corner of her jaw, just above her pulsing artery. I let my lips brush softly along her jawline to her chin, and then kissed my way back to her ear, feeling the velvet give of her warm skin under the faint pressure. I returned slowly to her chin, so close to her lips. She shivered in my arms, reminding me that what was unprecedented warmth for me was icy winter to her. I loosed my hold.

“Regardless,” I whispered in her ear. “I have better reflexes.”

18. MIND OVER MATTER

INSISTING UPON DRIVING HAD BEEN A VERY GOOD IDEA.

There were all those things, of course, that would be out of the question if she needed to concentrate her human senses on the road—hand-holding, eye-gazing, general joy-radiating. But more than this, the feeling of being filled to the point of bursting with pure light hadn’t dimmed at all. I knew how overwhelming it was for me; I wasn’t sure how much it would compromise a human system. Much safer to let my