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Most of the smells that stood out to Alice these days smelled like something else. Bella's shampoo smelled like strawberries. Her room smelled like clean laundry and old books. Her blood smelled like metal, clinging to the air and burning Alice's throat. But this…. This was different. There were no words, no combination of other scents that could ever amount to this.
Alice had smelled similar things before, of course. This wasn't her first time with a woman. It was, however, her first time with a human woman, and that changed things. Never had Alice smelled anything so raw, so powerful, so alive as when she knelt in that soft bed, her head between Bella's thighs.
She felt Bella's pulse dance under her gentle tongue and she smelled the blood swirling through the flesh. It was so close, across the most delicate barrier of skin. Not needing to breathe had its perks, but Alice relished the quiet pauses where she could steal a lungful of her girlfriend's thick, rich scent.
“Alice,” Bella moaned. When she opened her mouth to speak, her sweet breath swirled around the room. It swept Alice back to a scene only a few hours before, in the kitchen of Charlie’s home.
Bella was washing dishes in the sink. Charlie was back in the living room, watching the baseball game on the couch. Alice dried and put away the dishes almost faster than Bella could wash them. She stopped between each dish to wrap her arms around Bella’s waist and plant cold, gentle kisses on the back of her neck. The moment smelled like dish soap, leftover pasta, and strawberry shampoo. Alice heard Charlie’s breathing begin to even out and she listened as he drifted off in front of the game. While Bella pulled the stopper and watched the water rush down the drain, Alice pulled a box from her own purse.
“Chocolates?” She held out the box, still wrapped in a velvet ribbon.
“Oh Alice, you shouldn’t have. Really.” Bella blushed, the pooling blood sending waves of thirst into Alice’s throat and lungs before she could think to stop breathing. Why hadn’t she seen that coming? Bella made her too distracted. She’d have to get more focused if she wanted to maintain control.
“They’re imported. French.” Alice caught a glimpse of her own mischievous expression in Bella’s eyes before the human blushed an even deeper red and looked away. “But more importantly, mon cheri, they remind me of your eyes. The color of them. Their sweetness.”
“What, you tasted these?”
“No, but I saw you liking them.” Her smirk shone with an almost predatory glint as Bella looked back up at her.
Bella huffed. “It is so unfair how good you’re allowed to be at buying gifts. I’m pretty sure that counts as cheating.”
“I’m good at a lot of things.” They both paused in a powerful flash of eye contact, the meaning behind Alice’s words electric. “Anyway, you should try one! I didn’t go all the way to Paris for you to stand around holding the pretty box.”
Bella looked at Alice reproachfully and began to unwrap the box. She untied the ribbon and lifted the cushioned, heart-shaped lid. A wave of that chocolate scent washed over Alice. It held no sensory appeal for her, but that didn’t stop her from being aware of it. Half a dozen chocolates sat nestled in gold foil wrappers, gleaming under the kitchen lights. A flash of the scene to come shot through Alice’s mind, and she tried not to smile. Tonight was the night.
Bella gingerly unwrapped one of the chocolates. When she bit into it, cherry cordial oozed out, surprising her. It dripped down her chin and onto her green shirt before she could stop it. Alice grinned.
“You saw that coming. You know you’re supposed to warn me before I do something clumsy.” Bella glared at her girlfriend, who giggled at her serious expression.
“Oops.”
Bella caved and laughed along. Before she could reach for a paper towel, Alice was already holding one, dampened slightly at the corner. She darted into Bella’s arms and traced her delicate fingertip down the smear of cherry cordial.
“You know, you almost look like me. When I’m hunting.”
“How would I know? I’ve never seen it.”
“Soon, Bella. Enjoy the present. Soon I’ll be able to take you everywhere with me, anywhere you want to go. Just wait until graduation. For appearance’s sake.”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it.”
Alice tasted the cherry cordial on her fingertip. It tasted bad. Part of her wished she could enjoy the human foods Bella liked, but most of them were pretty awful. Bella looked amused at her disgusted wince.
“Just give me that.” Bella snatched the paper towel and wiped her mouth. “Look, you got in on my shirt. I’m going to run out of clean laundry.”
“Here, can I?” Alice waited for Bella’s nod and lifted the shirt above her head. Bella looked away, feeling modest in her bra. Her girlfriend looked at her tenderly and kissed her, wrapping her cold arms around Bella’s bare waist. The smell of chocolates still clung to the air, her skin, her lips.
Alice was brought back to the present by Bella’s gasping breath. Before Forks, before Bella, she hadn’t spent a lot of time dwelling on the past. Her gift was always pushing her forward into the future. Now, every moment she was alone was spent in her memories of her girlfriend, recounting their most recent date, or something funny Bella had said. Alice Cullen was getting a little obsessed.
She dipped her icy tongue deeper into Bella’s core. What she had said in the kitchen was true--her gift did give her an advantage in a lot of things, this being no exception. She could see Bella’s reaction to every movement before she took it, so she knew exactly which buttons to push to make Bella’s hands twist tighter around the sheets. The pulse of Bella’s blood, the muscles slowly clenching tighter throughout her body, the sweat beading against her skin; Alice was starting to get overwhelmed in the hottest way possible. Bella was getting closer to the edge. She turned loose the sheets and knotted her hands in Alice’s hair. Alice was again thrown back in time, this time by the perfume on Bella’s delicate wrist as it brushed past her cheek.
They were sitting upstairs in Bella’s bedroom. Bella had changed into a clean t-shirt after putting stain remover onto the other one and leaving it to soak. She was reclined in the bed, silently rereading a tattered paperback. Alice lay next to her, sketching in her design notebook. She had been thinking about this dress for a while now, and the details and visions were starting to come together. It hadn’t been that long ago that Bella’s room smelled unfamiliar to her, but now she was as used to it as her own home. She glanced up from her work to watch as her girlfriend turned a page. Bella noticed her staring.
“Babe, what is it?”
“Do you want to see what else I brought you from France?”
Bella groaned.
“Honey, I know it must be pure torture, getting expensive imported gifts from your lover all the time, but would you please endure? Just for me?” Alice saw Bella’s lips twitch into a small smile. “I’m gonna take that as a yes.” She flounced over to her bag and pulled out another small box. This one was plain, with intertwined gold letters on the box. Yves Saint Laurent, Parisienne.
“Alice,” Bella gasped. She tried to calculate in her head how expensive this had to have been, but she didn’t know much about perfume. Her expression turned sour. “Is this because I’ve been hanging out with Jacob lately? I don’t see why you think he stinks, Alice. He smells fine to me.”
Alice laughed. “If it makes you feel any better, think of it as a gift for me. You’re just the conduit.”
Bella opened the box and uncapped the glass bottle. She dabbed a few drops onto her wrists and inhaled deeply, appreciating the notes of flowers and fruit. “Well, if this is just a favor I’m doing for you, I guess I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
“Of course you don’t!”
“That’s good. Someday I might get used to doing you favors like this.”
“Babe, I’ll do you some favors later, to make it up to you.”
Bella froze, immediately hearing the proposition behind Alice’s words. “Do… do you mean-”
“If that’s what you want me to mean.”
“You know it is.”
“Then I do.” The glance they shared in that moment would last in Alice’s memory forever. Bella’s blushing face, shocked, but full of anticipation. Her eyebrows were slightly raised and she was holding back a giddy smile. Tonight was the night.
Alice was in the present again. This time, coming back to reality was sudden, but not unexpected. Bella was going to cum any second now. She panted unevenly and her heart raced in Alice’s ears. The vampire was able to steal one more lungful of air before her girlfriend fell over the edge. That smell turned Alice on more than anything else in the past century. She was aching to be touched. Nothing on this Earth had ever compared to this, not in a hundred years of her razor-sharp vampire senses. The moment of hesitation passed, and Bella’s thighs clamped around Alice’s head with all the force she had in her soft, human body. Her hands clutched at choppy black hair and her toes curled against her lover’s back. Alice let herself be enveloped in the warmth and pressure of her girlfriend’s orgasm, her tongue still gently lapping at the heat before it. Bella moaned loudly, but Alice could barely hear the cries of her name.
Bella rode out her release like that, calling her love’s name in ecstasy. Eventually, she came down, slowly opening her legs to allow Alice to breathe again. A cool breeze from the open window flowed through the room, drying Bella’s sweat from both of them. As they lay there intertwined, breathing heavily as one in the candlelit room, the early spring wind blew Alice back to one more moment from the evening behind them.
The same wind was blowing then, too, whipping past her face as she ran to the Cullen house. She had taken her car back earlier, when she had pretended to go home for the night, so they had to traverse the Forks wilderness on foot. Alice knew for a fact this was faster, but it had been hard to convince her girlfriend that it was a good idea. Bella clung tightly to Alice’s back in a death grip that would bruise a human.
The sprint only lasted a minute before Bella was on her feet again, still gripping Alice’s shoulders for balance. Alice laughed and swung her into a bridal carry, walking her across the threshold with a flourish. Before Bella could look around the living room, Alice bolted up the stairs and into her bedroom, still carrying the shaken human.
“Alice! Hey! Please, let me take a second.”
Alice laughed at how white Bella looked. She gently set her girlfriend down on the giant four-poster bed and opened a window to let the breeze in.
“This is… new?” Bella finally caught her breath and noticed how drastically different the bedroom was than the last time she had visited. Not that Alice’s room ever stayed the same for long, with her sleepless nights and penchant for redecorating, but the same sleepless nights had excluded a real bed from the equation until now.
“Oh, that old thing? Picked it up last week,” Alice said, a little too casually.
“Alice…”
“Hm?”
“How long have you… nevermind.”
“I’ve known about tonight as a possibility for a while, Bella. If you feel pressured at all… I don’t want you to feel like I’m making these decisions for you. Or like we have to do anything just because I saw it.”
Bella didn’t hesitate. “I want you. Tonight. Now.” She realized how demanding that had sounded and laughed. “I mean if you want to, of course.”
Alice laughed too. “Of course.” In less than a second her lips were at Bella’s throat, kissing her fiercely. Bella moaned in surprise and pleasure.
The vampire once again made a mental note to thank Edward next time she saw him. If he hadn’t seen this in her mind’s tangled knot of possible outcomes, the entire Cullen family would likely be a short dozen yards away, hearing every rough human breath. Edward’s face when he saw his sister’s thoughts, half premonition and half fantasy, was priceless; Carlisle, Esme, and Rosalie’s wouldn’t be. So Edward had rolled his eyes and offered a fun alternative to get everyone out of the house for the evening. Alice wasn’t sure whether any of the other Cullens had actually bought Edward’s story about how good the hunting was supposed to be tonight, but she was grateful nonetheless.
Alice slowly undressed Bella as she continued to warm her up with kisses to the neck, the chest, stomach. She carefully took each of Bella’s perky nipples between her teeth. She left a few hickeys as she trailed downwards. Bella smelled heavenly, like blood and perfume and arousal. Before she could get to where she really wanted to be, Alice stopped.
“I have one more present for you.”
“Now?” Bella was so cute when she got frustrated.
“Don’t be impatient, silly. This won’t take long.” Alice darted into her walk-in closet with a mischievous grin, and came back out in Bella’s present: navy blue lace lingerie.
The intricate bra and panty set, decorated with outrageously expensive lace and cream bows, exposed more of Alice’s skin than her girlfriend had ever seen before. Her dainty, angular body glowed faintly in the moonlight that shone in. Her legs and underarms were covered in soft black hair, and it trailed slightly up her stomach as well. Bones jutted out in her hips and clavicle. She stood still in a long moment of vulnerability. How long had it been since anyone had seen her like this? If her heart were more than a cold, aching stone in her chest, it would have been beating rapidly. If her stomach had known food or drink in as long as she could remember, it would have been filled with butterflies. The one question on her mind was so human, so normal, but its answer was outside the reach of her prophetic vision: will I be enough for her?
Bella didn’t say anything for a while. It may have been an inappropriately long pause, or maybe the time was just frozen for Alice, stretching the air between them. The silence broke as Bella stumbled out of the bed and bounded across the room. She stopped just short of physically touching Alice.
“May I?”
“Anything.” The knowledge of the next few seconds filled Alice with overwhelming bliss, and they played out exactly as they were supposed to. Bella pulled her hungrily into a kiss, running her passionate hands over her girlfriend’s body. She was desperate to know every inch of the cold, white skin glinting before her. Then, the kiss ended, and she pulled away.
“I thought this was supposed to be a present for me,” Bella teased.
“You’re enjoying it, aren’t you?”
“I think this is the best one yet.”
“I’ll admit that it was a little selfish, but something told me you might like it better this way. I brought back a few for you, if you’d like.”
“Maybe I’ll just let you be the fashion model tonight.”
“If you insist.” Alice knew the effect vampires had on mortals, but that didn’t make her any less giddy to hear Bella compliment her appearance. She always felt pretty, but tonight, with her beautiful girlfriend in her arms and sex ahead of her, Alice Cullen felt a confidence beyond that. Tonight was about healing and growing and building a stronger bond with the woman she loved.
Alice and Bella spent the rest of the night like that. They took turns giving and receiving to each other, exploring whatever they wanted. When Bella grew too tired to continue, she fell asleep against Alice’s cool breasts, the lace leaving patterned lines on her cheek. Alice didn’t sleep, of course, but she did rest in her own way, slowly stroking Bella’s forehead for hours in the dark. She knew a peace she never had before.