Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,75

though she was whispering them to me.

It wasn’t my unreliable morality that held me back—it was the thought of myself in the sun’s glare. Bad enough that my skin was stone and inhuman in shadow; I didn’t want to look at Bella and myself side by side in the sunlight. The difference between us was already insurmountable, painful enough without that image also in my head. Could I be any more grotesque? I imagined her terror if she opened her eyes and saw me there beside her.

“Mmm…,” she moaned.

I leaned back against the tree trunk, deeper into shadow.

She sighed. “Mmm.”

I did not fear that she had woken. Her voice was just a low, wistful murmur.

“Edmund. Ahh.”

Edmund? I thought again of where she’d quit reading. Just as Edmund Bertram had been named for the first time.

Ha! She wasn’t dreaming of me at all, I realized blackly. The self-loathing returned in force. She was dreaming of fictional characters. Perhaps that had always been the case, and all along her dreams had been filled with Hugh Grant in a cravat. So much for my conceit.

She said nothing more that was intelligible. The afternoon passed and I watched, feeling helpless again, as the sun slowly sank in the sky and the shadows crawled across the lawn toward her. I wanted to push them back, but of course the darkness was inevitable; the shadows took her. When the light was gone, her skin looked too pale—ghostly. Her hair was dark again, almost black against her face.

It was a frightening thing to watch—like witnessing Alice’s visions come to fruition. Bella’s steady, strong heartbeat was the only reassurance, the sound that kept this moment from feeling like a nightmare.

I was relieved when her father arrived home.

I could hear little from him as he drove down the street toward the house. Some vague annoyance… in the past, something from his day at work. Expectation mixed with hunger—I guessed that he was looking forward to dinner. But his thoughts were so quiet and contained that I could not be sure I was right. I only got the gist of them.

I wondered what her mother sounded like—what the genetic combination had been that had formed her so uniquely.

Bella started awake, jerking up to a sitting position when the tires of her father’s car hit the brick driveway. She stared around herself, seeming confused by the unexpected darkness. For one brief moment, her eyes touched the shadows where I hid, but then flickered quickly away.

“Charlie?” she asked in a low voice, still peering into the trees surrounding the small yard.

The door of his car slammed shut, and she looked to the sound. She got to her feet quickly and gathered her things, casting one more look back toward the woods.

I moved into a tree closer to the back window near the small kitchen, and listened to their evening. It was interesting to compare Charlie’s words to his muffled thoughts. His love and concern for his only child were nearly overwhelming, and yet his words were always terse and casual. Most of the time, they sat in companionable silence.

I heard her discuss her plans to go shopping the following evening in Port Angeles with Jessica and Angela, and I refined my own plans as I listened. Jasper had not warned Peter and Charlotte to stay clear of Port Angeles. Though I knew that they had fed recently and had no intention of hunting anywhere in the vicinity of our home, I would watch her, just in case. After all, there were always others of my kind out there. And, of course, all those human dangers that I had never much considered before now.

I heard her worry aloud about leaving her father to prepare dinner alone, and smiled at this proof to my theory—yes, she was the caretaker here, too.

And then I left, knowing I would return while she was asleep, ignoring every ethical and moral argument against my behavior.

But I certainly would not trespass on her privacy the way the peeping tom would have. I was here for her protection, not to leer at her in the way Mike Newton no doubt would, were he agile enough to move through the treetops. I would not treat her so crassly.

My house was empty when I returned, which was fine by me. I didn’t miss the confused or disparaging thoughts, questioning my sanity. Emmett had left a note stuck to the newel post.

Football at the Rainier field—c’mon! Please?

I found a pen and scrawled the