Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,192

to stay?

“If I don’t want to sleep…?” she echoed.

“What do you want to do then?” Would she tell me if she was exhausted? Or would she pretend she was fine?

It took her a long moment to answer. “I’m not sure,” she said at last, and I couldn’t help but wonder what options she had run through in her deliberations. I’d been very forward in joining her like this, but it felt oddly natural. Did it feel that way to her? Or just presumptuous? Did it make her, like me, imagine more? Is that what she’d thought through for so long?

“Tell me when you decide.” I would make no suggestions. I would let her lead.

Easier said than done. In her silence, I found myself leaning closer to her, letting my face brush along the length of her jaw, breathing in both her scent and her warmth. The fire was such a part of me now that it was easy to notice other things. I’d always thought of her scent with fear and desire. But there were so many layers to its beauty that I hadn’t been able to appreciate before.

“I thought you were desensitized,” she murmured.

I returned to my earlier metaphor to explain. “Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet. You have a very floral smell, like lavender… or freesia.” I laughed once. “It’s mouthwatering.”

She swallowed loudly, then spoke with an assumed nonchalance. “Yeah, it’s an off day when I don’t get somebody telling me how edible I smell.”

I laughed again, and then sighed. I would always regret this part of my response to her, but it wasn’t such a weighty thing anymore. One small thorn, so irrelevant in the face of the rose’s beauty.

“I’ve decided what I want to do,” she announced.

I waited eagerly.

“I want to hear more about you.”

Well, not as interesting for me, but she could have whatever she wanted. “Ask me anything.”

“Why do you do it?” she breathed, quieter than before. “I still don’t understand how you can work so hard to resist what you… are. Please don’t misunderstand, of course I’m glad that you do. I just don’t see why you would bother in the first place.”

I was glad she asked this. It was important. I tried to find the best way to explain, but my words faltered in a few places. “That’s a good question, and you are not the first one to ask it. The others—the majority of our kind who are quite content with our lot—they, too, wonder at how we live. But you see, just because we’ve been… dealt a certain hand… it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above—to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted. To try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.”

Was that clear? Would she understand what I meant?

She didn’t comment, and she didn’t move.

“Did you fall asleep?” I whispered so quietly that it couldn’t possibly wake her if that were the case.

“No,” she said quickly. And added nothing more.

It was frustrating and hilarious how much nothing had changed despite everything changing. I would always be driven frantic by her silent thoughts.

“Is that all you were curious about?” I encouraged.

“Not quite.” I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was smiling.

“What else do you want to know?”

“Why can you read minds—why only you?” she demanded. “And Alice, seeing the future… why does that happen?”

I wished I had a better answer. I shrugged and admitted, “We don’t really know. Carlisle has a theory—he believes that we all bring something of our strongest human traits with us into the next life, where they are intensified, like our minds, and our senses. He thinks that I must have already been very sensitive to the thoughts of those around me. And that Alice had some precognition, wherever she was.”

“What did he bring into the next life, and the others?”

This was an easier answer; I’d considered it many times before. “Carlisle brought his compassion. Esme brought her ability to love passionately. Emmett brought his strength, Rosalie…” Well, Rose had brought her beauty. But that seemed a less than tactful answer in light of our earlier discussion. If Bella’s jealousy was even a tiny bit as painful as my own, I didn’t want her to have a reason to feel it again. “Her… tenacity. Or you could call it pigheadedness.” Surely this was true as well. I laughed quietly, imagining how she must have been as a human girl. “Jasper