Bella The Babysitter: Chapter 11

Bella the Babysitter

Chapter Eleven rewritten

Edward Cullen POV

"Mama."

The word rang loud and clear through the room. Lucas was clearly talking about Bella. He held his arms up and followed her with his eyes every where she went the second he was placed in my arms. My breath hitched and my palms started to sweat. I was frozen in shock.

"Mama."

There it was again, as he started to become more and more distressed. It was then that I realized I was gripping him tighter than intended. I loosened my hold on him and he kept crying out with that word.

"Mamamamama."

I couldn't talk. All I could think about was Vicky. It was only natural that Lucas would start calling Bella his mother. He was a smart baby and she was the permanent female figure in his life. She had been with him every day for over three months and he was just a baby.

Would Vicky be mad that her son was calling another woman momma?

Would she be pissed that the other woman was his nanny?

Where the hell had he picked that word up from?

Luke attempted to get down from my lap but I held onto him earning a few stubborn grunts of disproval. He continued to say the word over and over again growing more and more disgruntled by the minute. He thrashed wildly against me and I had to be careful because I didn't want to end up with a fat lip or a black eye from a flying baby limb.

"Shh, Lucas. Calm down." Bella said calmly as she exited the bathroom holding Luke's bottle in her shaking hands.

Her face held the most guilt ridden expression I had ever seen before and as she handed me the bottle, I could tell she was trying her hardest not to cry. She sat on the side of the bed farthest from where I sat with Luke at the table and refused to look our way. Lucas had stopped saying the word but continued to cry for Bella's attention so I decided to come out of my stunned silence.

"Bella he really wants you." I said softly holding him towards her.

She turned toward me but wouldn't look me in the face as she took him from me. As soon as Lucas was settled in her arms sucking on his bottle happily they both seemed to relax simultaneously. We remained quiet until my stomach decided to make itself known.

"We should order some room service before it gets too late." I said coughing nervously as I grabbed the menu off the table and leafed through it. "What do you feel like? It looks like they have a little bit of everything."

"I'm not hungry." Bella mumbled sadly.

"Bella you have to eat something." I pushed knowing that she hadn't eaten a very large breakfast and then downing the sedative couldn't be good for her.

"I'd like to be left alone Edward. Lucas is about to go to sleep for the night and I'd just like to be left alone." she sniffled. "Please."

"I can't do that." I said defiantly. "As much as we would both like to ignore the giant talking elephant in the room, we can't. I'd rather talk about this. Please."

"Are you mad? I'm sorry. I wasn't teaching him this. I wanted him to call you daddy. That was the goal. His first word was supposed to be daddy, or dadda. He just said that for the first time before you knocked on the door. That was supposed to be his first word and now. I'm so sorry Edward." she began to panic.


Lucas sensing her distress held his bottle in one hand and reached the other up to stroke her cheek with a lazy milk-drunk smile as if to comfort her. 


"I don't want you to think that I tried to sabotage this. I would never do this. I'm not a psycho or anything. Please don't fire me because I love Lucas with all my heart and I can't be away from you. I mean him. I can't be away from him."

The end of her rant caused my heart to seize and then drop into my gut all in a matter of seconds.

Over the time that had passed since I hired Bella to be Lucas's nanny I was falling somewhat in 'like' with her. I couldn't call it love…yet, because that would be ridiculous. Not one night had passed without saying goodnight to her, and not a morning spent without a good morning. Sometimes I questioned the feelings that I was beginning to have for her and it had been brought up in more than one or two conversations with my mother and sister in law.

When I argued that I was only feeling this way because Bella was helping me out with Lucas, Alice told me that she noticed a spark of something on Bella's first day. Whatever that means.

My mother told me to give it time and that if it was supposed to work out in the end, that it would. I can still picture the teary eyed expression she had on her face before she burst into tears over my actually being interested in the opposite sex. Shall we say awkward?

Alice told me to walk up to Bella one night after she'd put Lucas to bed and kiss the shit out of her. I'm pretty sure in her fucked up little brain of hers she already saw Bella and I in a serious relationship. It wouldn't surprise me if she had a spiral notebook filled with plans for the rest our lives.

Due to my morals and the way I was brought up to be a gentleman I decided to ignore Shorty and follow my mother's advice.

One night I was heading down the hall to get something from the kitchen when I stumbled on Lucas and Bella in the living room. Bella was feeding Lucas a bottle and talking to him quietly while the TV stayed off. I had felt like I was intruding and my assumptions were brought to fruition when Bella leaned down and kissed Lukes head whispering her love for him. Like a coward I ran back upstairs and away from the situation feeling guilty that I had allowed someone to get so close to Luke so soon and also feeling jealous that her feelings remained solely for him. After hearing her admission I started to feel a pull to her that I couldn't control but tried to bury deep inside for fear that I would ruin everything.

I tried to keep my emotions in check when she did anything remotely motherly for Luke and that happened often seeing as she was his caretaker. I found myself loving when she cooked dinner for the two of us and we would sit at the dinner table with Luke in between spooning baby food and soft edibles from our plates into his mouth. It was so family-like that it scared me. A small part of my mind was trying to warn me that I was acting irrationally, too fast if you will.

For a split second during Bella's rant I had thought that maybe she might have shared some of the feelings that I had for her but she shot them down to quickly breaking my heart in the process.

With a heavy heart I cleared my throat and put on my best sympathetic smile I could manage.

"Bella I would never, ever believe that you would do something like that. You have a pretty wild imagination eh?" I joked but neither one of us found any humor in my words. "It's obvious that Lucas has put two and two together. He sees me with my mother and has obviously put you in the place of his mother."

You don't even have to say it. That was a shitty excuse and I know it. It wasn't as if I followed my mother around calling my mom, momma over and over again in front of Luke. Or maybe I had without even realizing it.

"I know Edward." Bella snorted and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her shirt. "That's just it though. He's putting me in the placement as his mother. I'm just the nanny. I don't have the requirements to fill in that role."

"Do you love him?" I asked.

"Without a doubt more than my own life." she blushed. "And I'm slowly realizing that that isn't proper for a nanny."

"Than that's all that matters. We'll get him to stop somehow if it's making you uncomfortable."

"That's just it Edward." Bella sobbed ducking her head into Lucas. "It doesn't make me uncomfortable. It makes me proud, that he would think that I was his mother and that scares me."

"You don't think that it scares me?" I stood up and ran a hand through my hair. "I never asked for this. This wasn't how it was supposed to end up. I was supposed to take Luke off of their hands for a night every once and a while just to help them get some alone time, not take on the responsibility of raising him. I was supposed to be Uncle Edward not his dad. And now I am."

Bella remained quiet during my rant and Lucas had managed to fall asleep so she rested him between some pillows before turning to me and sighing.

"I never asked to become a nanny. Sometimes stuff happens for a reason and you have to play with the hand god dealt you." she shrugged.

"So what do we do?" I asked sitting back down. "About him calling you momma?"

"I think that's your decision to make Edward." Bella said sadly her eyes filling with tears yet again. She stood up and walked over to the window peering out. Texas was a hell of a lot sunnier than Forks. The way the rays of light streaming through the window were hitting her face as the sun was going down is something I will never forget. She had an angelic look to her, she turned to me and then looked away before speaking. "I'm just the nanny Edward. You need to think about what's going to happen when he gets older. How I will look to him, thinking that I'm his mother. When he goes to school and realizes that things are different for other children's families. What's going happen when you start dating and fall in love? It would confuse the hell out of him. My feelings have nothing to do with this Edward."

I watched her fall apart with her head rested against the window. Her sobs tore my heart in two so I did the only thing I could think of that would comfort her and get her to see reason.

Without so much as a second thought I stood up and walked over to her, pulling her into my arms in the first hug I had ever shared with a woman that wasn't related by blood or marriage to me. Even growing up I considered Vicky my sister so she didn't count. Bella fit in my arms in a different way that my mother, Alice or Vicky ever did. When she wrapped her arms around my torso it felt like we were two pieces of a puzzle that didn't look like they would fit but were perfect together. Her warm body pressed against me and I could smell the cocoa butter body wash she had mentioned she preferred.

"You mean everything Bella. To Lucas and to me." I hugged her a little tighter as I confessed my deepest secrets. "I feel drawn to you in a way I can't explain. I just know that it's totally different from anything I've ever experienced."

"What does that mean?" she sniffed.

Instead of answering her I did something that surprised the both of us. I leaned down and captured her lips with my own. It was awkward, our first kiss, my first kiss ever. It took a second for Bella to break out of the frozen state of shock I had evidentially put her in but once she came back to reality, she responded. Her lips were softer than they look and warm, they tasted like salt but I'm sure that it was from all of the tears shed previously.

When we finally pulled away for air, I leaned my forehead against hers. "Wow."

"Diddo." Bella breathed. "Why did you do that?"

"Because I wanted to. I've wanted to for quite a while now." I confessed pulling a strand of hair behind her ear.

"Hmm." she blushed pulling away and checking on Lucas. "How about that meal? I could go for some cinnamon pancakes and a fruit bowl."

"Let's see if they have those items on the menu." I said trying to hide my confusion. Her actions were as if she didn't want to talk about what had just transpired, when all I wanted to do was hold her close and maybe kiss her some more. My logical side told me to go with the flow for fear that I would ruin it. The everything that my motherhad been warning me about ruining.

Unfortunately the hotel's room service didn't serve breakfast at all hours of the day, so Bella settled on a grilled cheese with sliced tomatoes and her fruit bowl while I got a small black olive pizza and a bowl of mashed potatoes for Luke in case he woke up any time soon.

Bella wasn't exactly talkative while we waited for our food and once it arrived we sat on almost opposite sides of the room. Every now and then I would catch her eye as she munched on the slices of tomato or the strawberries from her fruit bowl. Each time she would flush scarlet and turn her attention back to her plate or stare at Luke while he slept.

For being absolutely starving before everything went down, I barely managed to down a slice of my pizza before excusing myself and going back over to my hotel room. Bella only nodded and offered to throw away my garbage for me but didn't even walk me to the door. I walked over to the bed and kissed Lucas's cheek before leaving fighting the strong urge to do the same for her at the same time.

My room was clean. Taking a peek inside one would think that the person staying in it was suffering from a severe case of OCD. There were no teething toys laying on the nightstand or diapers spilling out of a diaper bag sitting by the bathroom. No beautiful woman sitting and watching the perfect child sleeping in the middle of a mound of pillows on the bed that they would share.

My room felt lonely.

I laid out the clothes I planned on wearing for my meeting the following morning and sat on the plush bed not bothering with getting under the covers. My mind was racing with thoughts of how royally fucked up I had caused this situation to become. Bella was clearly uncomfortable with my advances. That was evident in the way she behaved after I practically mauled her. She probably just acted as a partner in the kiss to stick around for Lucas.

I was a monster.

A dickhead.

An asshole.

I had just started dozing off when there was a small timid knock on the door. I peered through the peep hole and was confused when I saw that it was Bella. I straightened myself up before opening the door.

"Bella? Is everything alright?" I asked taking in her nervous form.

"Yeah, umm no. I just wanted to." she paused and began to worryher bottom lip with her teeth.

"Is Luke okay?"

"He's fine. I just. I'm sorry I was acting so weird after the...you know." she blushed. "I was a little shocked and caught completely off-guard."

"I need to apologize." I started.

"No, no you don't. Because I've wanted to do that too, for a long time. You just beat me to it." she said before throwing her arms around me and pulling my face down to hers.

Our lips met with a loud smack.

It didn't go farther than that.

Bella pulled away, gasping for air and wiping her lips on the back of her hand before looking me dead in the eye.

"I quit."