Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,62

was. But I craved her time in a way that I’d never really wanted anything else before. Not immediate and demanding like thirst, this was something different, a different kind of want, and different kind of pain.

She shivered.

I rolled the passenger-side window down and leaned toward her. “Please get in, Bella.”

Her eyes narrowed, and I guessed that she was debating whether or not to make a run for it.

“I could drag you back…,” I joked, wondering if my guess was correct. The consternation on her face told me it was.

Her chin held stiffly in the air, she opened her door and climbed in. Her hair dripped on the leather, and her boots squeaked against each other.

“This is completely unnecessary,” she said.

I thought she looked more embarrassed than really angry. Was my behavior entirely offside? I thought I was teasing, that I was acting like the average besotted teenage boy, but what if I’d gotten it wrong? Did she feel coerced? I realized she had every reason to.

I didn’t know how to do this. How to court her as a normal, human, modern man in the year two thousand and five. As a human, I’d only learned the customs of my time. Thanks to my strange gift, I knew quite well how people thought now, what they did, how they acted, but when I tried to act casual and modern it seemed all wrong. Probably because I wasn’t normal or modern or human. And it wasn’t as if I’d learned anything usable from my family. None of them had had anything near a normal courtship, even excepting the two other qualifications.

Rosalie and Emmett had been the cliché, the classic love-at-first-sight story. There had never been a moment when either one had questioned what they were to each other. In the first second Rosalie saw Emmett, she’d been drawn to the innocence and honesty that had evaded her in life, and she wanted him. In the first second that Emmett saw Rosalie, he saw a goddess whom he had worshiped without cease ever since. There had never been an awkward first conversation full of doubt, never a fingernail-biting moment of waiting for a yes or no.

Alice and Jasper’s union had been even less normal. For all the twenty-eight years up to their first meeting, Alice had known she would love Jasper. She’d seen years, decades, centuries, of their future lives together. And Jasper, feeling all her emotions in that long-awaited moment, the purity and certainty and depth of her love, couldn’t help but be overwhelmed. It must have felt like a tsunami to him.

Carlisle and Esme had been slightly more typical than the others, I supposed. Esme had already been in love with Carlisle—much to his shock—but not through any mystical, magical means. She’d met Carlisle as a girl and, drawn to his gentleness, wit, and otherworldly beauty, formed an attachment that had haunted her for the rest of her human years. Life had not been kind to Esme, and so it was not surprising that this golden memory of a good man had never been supplanted in her heart. After the burning torment of transformation, when she’d awakened to the face of her long-cherished dream, her affections were entirely his.

I’d been on hand to caution Carlisle about her unforeseen reaction. He’d expected that she would be shocked by her transformation, traumatized by the pain, horrified by what she’d become, much as I had been. He’d expected to have to explain and apologize, to soothe and to atone. He knew there was a good chance that she would have preferred death, that she would despise him for the choice made without her knowledge or consent. So the fact that she had been immediately prepared to join this life—not really the life, but to join him—was not something he was ready for.

He’d never seen himself as a possible object of romantic love before that moment. It seemed contrary to what he was—a vampire, a monster. The knowledge I gave him changed the way he looked at Esme, the way he looked at himself.

More than that, it was very a powerful thing, choosing to save someone. It was not a decision any sane individual made lightly. When Carlisle chose me, he’d already felt a dozen binding emotions toward me before I’d even awakened to what was happening. Responsibility, anxiety, tenderness, pity, hope, compassion… there was a natural ownership to the act that I’d never experienced, only heard about through his thoughts and Rosalie’s. He