Midday Clouds - The Charlie Swan Story

Chapter 50 (Eclipse 9)

Like a puppy still startled and frantic at the sound of someone at the door, Bella scrambled into the hallway with the speed and determination of a recreational basketball player. She nearly slammed into the door before wrenching it open, revealing the sullen boy who had caused her – and me – so much stress over the past year.

Edward Cullen stood there, looking all the world like a pale white statue. He smiled at Bella in the curious way he always did, baring teeth so white I could only assume were veneers, without a hint of warmth reaching the eyes that he and his entire foster family insisted on covering with gold-coloured contact lenses.

I saw Bella melt into him, a teen girl entirely enraptured by her first love.

I didn't necessarily blame her – I'd been just as wholeheartedly in love with my highschool sweetheart, Sue Uley, back when I was her age, but for all sorts of reasons that relationship just felt different than the one I was witnessing on my front stoop. We had both been head over heels for each other in the childish, immature ways that teens usually are; sneaking off for walks together in the woods, scrounging up what money we could find for a date at the local diner, hanging around each other's friend groups for parties, hikes, fires at the beach. Yeah, we might have been 16 going on 17 at the time, so a little younger than Bella and Edward are now, but I couldn't help but notice that they carried themselves with a faux maturity that I can't ever remember having.

It was likely just a class thing, I thought to myself as the kids murmured sweet nothings to each other at the door. Edward was being bankrolled by an adoptive father with ties to some sort of criminal enterprise that I was slowly unraveling. He drove a new car, wore designer clothes, turned his nose up at takeout food, and carried himself in a way – even sometimes spoke in a way – that reminded me not of a teenage kid, but of my grandpa, a man who had been born in the earlier part of the 1900s. Maybe that's what made my skin crawl whenever I saw them together: it was like watching a teen girl try to put on the airs of someone decades her senior.

"Good evening, Charlie," Edward said as he hung up his wool coat, shocking me out of my reverie. It wouldn't have seemed out of place for Edward to tip an old-timey fedora in my direction, the way he said it, only cementing the sick picture of a wildly inappropriate age gap between himself and my daughter. I shook my head. The kid was 17. He probably just acts weird from being homeschooled up in Alaska by a grandparent or something.

The kids headed into the living room, Edward saying something about college applications, Bella groaning in his wake. I figured this was my chance to find out what Bella had been tight-lipped about just before her beau arrived.

"Speaking of college applications, Edward," I asked, injecting myself into the conversation. "Bella and I were just talking about next year. Have you decided where you're going to school?"

The boy smiled up at me, like he was laughing at a joke no one else was in on. "Not yet. I've received a few acceptance letters, but I'm still weighing my options."

"Where have you been accepted?" I asked, wondering exactly what kind of privileged connections his rich father had in the country's admissions departments.

"Syracuse... Harvard... Dartmouth... and I just got accepted to the University of Alaska Southeast today."

"Harvard? Dartmouth?" Well, that just confirmed my suspicions – even a kid as weird and unsettling as Edward would have the world open to him by the shining golden key of nepotism. "Well that's pretty... that's something. Yeah, but the University of Alaska... you wouldn't really consider that when you could go Ivy League. I mean, your father would want you to..."

"Carlisle's always fine with whatever I choose to do," Edward said, smugly. Of course he was. The man gave his kids the world, assumingly in exchange for their silence on whatever dirty deals he dealt in.