Breaking Dawn   ::   Meyer Stephenie

“Oh!” I squeaked again.

I lurched to my feet, slipping out of Edward’s unmoving hands. I’d never changed out of the little silk shorts and camisole I’d worn to bed. I yanked the blue fabric out of the way and stared at my stomach.

“Impossible,” I whispered.

I had absolutely no experience with pregnancy or babies or any part of that world, but I wasn’t an idiot. I’d seen enough movies and TV shows to know that this wasn’t how it worked. I was only five days late. If I was pregnant, my body wouldn’t even have registered that fact. I would not have morning sickness. I would not have changed my eating or sleeping habits.

And I most definitely would not have a small but defined bump sticking out between my hips.

I twisted my torso back and forth, examining it from every angle, as if it would disappear in exactly the right light. I ran my fingers over the subtle bulge, surprised by how rock hard it felt under my skin.

“Impossible,” I said again, because, bulge or no bulge, period or no period (and there was definitely no period, though I’d never been late a day in my life), there was no way I could be pregnant . The only person I’d ever had sex with was a vampire, for crying out loud.

A vampire who was still frozen on the floor with no sign of ever moving again.

So there had to be some other explanation, then. Something wrong with me. A strange South American disease with all the signs of pregnancy, only accelerated…

And then I remembered something—a morning of internet research that seemed a lifetime ago now. Sitting at the old desk in my room at Charlie’s house with gray light glowing dully through the window, staring at my ancient, wheezing computer, reading avidly through a web-site called “Vampires A–Z.” It had been less than twenty-four hours since Jacob Black, trying to entertain me with the Quileute legends he didn’t believe in yet, had told me that Edward was a vampire. I’d scanned anxiously through the first entries on the site, which was dedicated to vampire myths around the world. The Filipino Danag , the Hebrew Estrie, the Romanian Varacolaci, the Italian Stregoni benefici (a legend actually based on my new father-in-law’s early exploits with the Volturi, not that I’d known anything about that at the time)… I’d paid less and less attention as the stories had grown more and more implausible. I only remembered vague bits of the later entries. They mostly seemed like excuses dreamed up to explain things like infant mortality rates—and infidelity.