Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,201

I might be ruining Bella’s life.

“Something like that,” I admitted, and turned my face as if I were looking out the windows into the backyard. I didn’t want her to see how upset I was. I could feel her eyes on me, and doubted I was fooling her.

Forcing myself to fix the mood I’d created, I looked back to her and smiled as naturally as I could. “Is that any good?” I asked, gesturing to her cereal. “Honestly, it doesn’t look very appetizing.”

“Well, it’s no irritable grizzly.…” She trailed off when she processed my reaction, then focused on her food, eating quickly now.

She was thinking hard about something, too, staring into a middle distance as she chewed, but I doubted our thoughts were in sync at this moment.

I gazed out the windows again, letting her eat in peace. I looked at the small yard, remembering the sunny day I’d watched her there. Remembering the darkness of the clouds overtaking her. It was too easy to slip back into that despair, to second-guess all my good intentions and see them as nothing but selfishness.

I turned back to her in turmoil, only to find her watching me with fearless eyes. She trusted me, as she always had. I took a deep breath.

I would live up to her trust. I knew I could. When she looked at me that way, there was nothing I couldn’t do.

Well, so Alice would be proven right in this one minor, simple prophecy. That was no surprise. I wondered how much of Bella’s acceptance was just to please me? Probably the larger portion. There was something closely related that I very much wanted, but I worried that Bella would again agree just for my sake. Well, I could at least share my opinion, and see how she reacted.

“And you should introduce me to your father, too, I think,” I said casually.

She was taken aback. “He already knows you.”

“As your boyfriend, I mean.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Isn’t that customary?” I sounded at ease, but her resistance rattled me.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. Her voice was quieter—less sure—when she continued. “That’s not necessary, you know. I don’t expect you to… I mean, you don’t have to pretend for me.”

Did she think this was an unwelcome chore I was undertaking for her sake alone? “I’m not pretending,” I promised.

She looked down at her breakfast, stirring the remnants of her cereal listlessly.

Perhaps it was better to just get to the no.

“Are you going to tell Charlie I’m your boyfriend or not?”

Still looking down, she asked softly, “Is that what you are?”

This was not the rejection I had feared. Clearly, I was misunderstanding something. Was it because I wasn’t human that she didn’t think Charlie should know about me? Or was it something else?

“It’s a loose interpretation of the word boy, I’ll admit.”

“I was under the impression that you were something more, actually,” she whispered, face still lowered as if she were talking to the table.

Her expression reminded me again of that charged conversation at lunch, how she’d thought our feelings were unequal, that mine were lesser. I couldn’t understand how asking to meet her father had led her to this train of thought. Unless… was it the impermanence of the word boyfriend? It was a very human, fleeting sort of concept. Truly, the word didn’t encompass even the smallest fraction of what I wanted to be to her, but it was the word Charlie would understand.

“Well, I don’t know if we need to give him all the gory details,” I answered softly. I reached out with one finger to raise her face so that I could see her eyes. “But he will need some explanation for why I’m around here so much. I don’t want Chief Swan getting a restraining order put on me.”

“Will you be?” she asked anxiously, ignoring my mild joke. “Will you really be here?”

“As long as you want me.” Until she asked me to leave, I was hers.

She almost glared at me, so intense was her gaze. “I’ll always want you. Forever.”

I heard Alice’s certainty again: When have you ever said no to Bella?

I heard Rosalie’s questions: What will you do when she asks you to change her? And when she begs?

Rosalie was right about one thing, though. When Bella said the word forever, it didn’t mean the same thing to her as it meant to me. For her, it meant merely a very long time. It meant she couldn’t see the end yet. How could anyone who had