Previously: Bella didn’t handle the imprinting bullshit so well. Shocker.
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Kirsti: Let’s start off with a little warning, because this chapter is fucking disgusting, y’all.
We pick up literally exactly where we left off because it’s been like 2000 freaking pages and Stephenie Meyer still doesn’t understand how chapters work.
But whatever.
Bella insists that she stopped aging three days ago and is therefore 18 forever. Alice gives zero fucks and says they’re celebrating anyway. She wants Bella to open her present. Edward insists that there are presents, plural, and pulls a car key out of his pocket. Apparently now that she’s indestructible, she can get rid of the Humvee and drive a sports car. Bella continues to not understand the appeal.
Alice and Edward bicker over which present Bella gets first and it’s literally completely pointless because she can see the future and he can read minds why are we wasting time on this shit oh my God.
Marines: Wow. They already know what’s going to happen but bicker anyway because they are committed to their dick behavior.
K: What a charming family.
Pointless bickering resolved, Edward wins. Renesmee gets handballed to Rosalie and Alice drags Bella outside. She’s surprised to see that the rest of the family aren’t following, and Rosalie says “We’ll give you a chance to appreciate it alone,” which causes Emmett to snort laugh, which makes Bella “feel like blushing.” But obviously, she doesn’t blush because she’s a vampire and she can’t.
Catherine: What? How?……What?
K: AKA every damn chapter of this book.
We’re treated to a page and a half of Bella being dragged through the woods by Edward and Alice, which culminates in Alice LITERALLY CLIMBING ONTO BELLA’S BACK TO MAKE SURE HER EYES ARE COVERED SO THAT THE SURPRISE IS SUITABLY SURPRISING??? This is fucking weird. What’s wrong with a blindfold, Alice you weirdo??
Mari: Makes that whole “appreciate it alone” comment take on a whole new meaning.
Annie: This is a good time to bring up our theory that Meyer was paid by the word, because there is no fucking reason for this. None. Is she trying to build suspense again? This is not how you do this!
K: SRSLY. Like, Dickens was paid by the word, and my boy used those words to create some of the best characters and most interesting subplots in literature. Stephenie Meyer… did the opposite of that.
Anyway, they get to wherever the fuck they’re going and it turns out to be a tiny stone cottage in the middle of nowhere. Edward says that Esme “thought we might like a place of our own for a little while“, which is basically code for “I don’t want to hear you two having crazy married vampire sex every five minutes, so go fuck in the woods.” Bella stares at it with her mouth hanging open. Alice freaks that this means she doesn’t like it, but really it’s just that Bella’s still shit at processing things despite her advanced vampire brain power that lets her pause for “a sixty fourth of a second” or whatever the hell it was she did in the last chapter I recapped.
Catherine: Hopefully this cabin in the woods comes with a serial killer as well.
K: We can but hope.
Eventually, she tells Alice that she’s super thrilled with her cottage, it’s amazing and gorgeous and blah blah whatever. Alice says that the closet is stuffed full of clothes and she goes to leave. Bella’s all “Sooo…you’re not coming in?” and Alice is like “LOL NOPE” and bails.
Bella’s confused by this and by the family not coming with them to see her reaction to the cottage, seeing as Esme was the one who put the whole thing together. Edward tells her that “Alone time is their other gift” and I throw up in my mouth a little bit because I already know what’s coming (that…was an unfortunate choice of words, but I’m not changing it now.)
Mari: Probably everyone does and the fact that Bella is still like, “what could a married couple possibly do alone???” is… well, actually it’s kind of legit. Sex has been traumatic for Bella. She’s probably erased it from her memory.
Annie: There is something to be said that Bella has no idea what married couples do or want to do, because her life experience is that of a 18-year-old kid. And Bella is in no way a mature 18-year-old. She is spoiled, sheltered, immature. So the fact that her in-laws gave her a sex house? No wonder she’s so confused. Her only adult life-experience has been super traumatic and awful. I hate everything about this book.
K: Also, she LITERALLY JUST HAD A BABY. I know she’s been through a magical vampire transformation and all that shit. But OMG NOOOOOOOOOO.
Edward grabs Bella’s hand and leads her up to the cottage and she informs us that she feels super weird because touching Edward should mean blushing and a pounding heart and all kinds of other human shit, but she’s not human any more so she has none of that. There’s some terrible line about today being “the first and last day of forever” and then Edward carries her over the threshold because he’s such a good old fashioned gentleman. Ugh.
We get a full page of description of the living room which I’m just going to skip right over because it’s boring and I don’t care. It culminates in Bella saying that it looks like something out of a fairytale, which is exactly the place where Edward belongs. And now she’s “in the story with him”. Girl. No. This is gross and I don’t care.
Bella’s about to take advantage of the fact that he’s still carrying her to do some making out, but he says that it’s a good thing Esme thought to add an extra room because that means Ness has somewhere to sleep. Bella gets frowny over him not using Renesmee’s full name and I have literally no idea where this “YOU NAMED MY DAUGHTER AFTER THE LOCH NESS MONSTER” bullshit is coming from, because I know multiple people named Vanessa who abbreviate their name to Ness. But whatever, Bella. You have your little tantrum.
Catherine: It’s a stupid fucking name, Bella. No one wants to use it because it’s stupid.
K: EXACTLY.
Edward carries Bella down the hallway like a child to show off Renesmee’s empty room and then their bedroom. There’s a giant bed with floaty curtains and I just don’t give a fuck. Edward says something about the closet being bigger than the bedroom but Bella doesn’t care about the closet. She says that they’re going to lie to Alice and say that she ran straight for the clothes. And then they literally rip each other’s clothes off.
She refers to it as “This second honeymoon” and informs us that it feels rude to ignore the bed but that they couldn’t make it that far. This is the face I’m making right now:
Annie: Proof that Bella has little-to-no sex experience? Fucking have sex in the bed! Floor sex sucks. Maybe because they’re vampires they don’t experience discomfort? But like, come on. I think you can hit pause for five seconds to make it to the damn bed.
K: PFF NO DON’T BE SILLY ANNIE.
Bella tells us that boinking Edward was the best experience she had as a human, but boinking Edward as a vampire is EVEN BETTER BECAUSE THEY’RE SO GOOD AT THE SEX OMG. We get lots of horrible crap about how sensitive her skin is under his hands and how she can taste his scent on her tongue and apparently it’s SO MUCH BETTER than before because they can “both [be] active participants now.” Does… does this mean that their magical honeymoon sex was Edward lying there like a surfboard while Bella bounced up and down on his marble dick for a hot minute before he nutted venom into her? #HAWT (You’re all welcome for that mental image. If I have to suffer, you do too.)
Mari: 
Annie: Or, did she have to lay there and just take it while Edward tried not to break her with his vampire sparkle penis? Like, these are both horrible images. No thank you, please.
Catherine: I’m never getting these mental images out of my head.
K: I did warn you about the need for Brain Bleach…
And apparently while they’re having all this magical vampire sex, she’s thinking about the fact that because neither of them are human and therefore no one needs to eat or sleep or pee or breathe, they can literally just fuck forever. So…that’s a thing that happens in this YOUNG ADULT NOVEL. (A: Fantastic.)
We’re treated to a paragraph break, and the new paragraph starts with “I sort of noticed when the sky began to lighten.” Yeah. They literally had hot vampire sex all night.
So, like….?????
Right?
Anywho.
She asks Edward if he misses the possibly being able to murder her face off, saying “I’m not losing anything at all, and I just wondered if it was a little bit sad for you that you were.” (C: Not losing anything? BITCH, WHAT?!) He laughs and says he’s the unsaddest person on the planet because to him, she’s still warm and soft and now he doesn’t have to deal with her smelling like food all the time. He reminds her of the scent of the hikers they came across and tells her to imagine killing that. “My throat ripped into flames like pulling the cord on a hot-air balloon” may be the funniest shit I’ve had the pleasure of recapping.
They make out some more, and eventually Bella’s like “So does this thirst for dick ever go away? Because the rest of your family are, like, wearing clothes and walking around and shit, so??” He says it’s hard to say and everyone is different and God bless the fact that we’re recapping this terrible book when we are because 2016-17 lexicon puts a whole different spin on this: “The average young vampire is too obsessed with thirst to notice much else for a while. That doesn’t seem to apply to you.” OH BUT IT DOES, EDDIE. IT DOES.
Mari:
K: He goes on to say that after a while, you just get better at prioritising and managing both kinds of thirst. Bella asks how long it’ll take, and Edward says that Rosalie and Emmett were intolerable for an entire decade. She’s all “Okay, so after a decade I’ll be able to not have a lady boner 24/7?” because clearly the rest of his family is “normal.” She literally says “normal” as though having sex at all ever is abnormal?? I hate this book.
Mari: Look, I’m just hung up on the fact that their family sent them into the woods to have sex for a long time. I’m really grossed out by this entire weird cult and I was happy when I thought that Stephenie Meyer hated sex so much she would never show it to us again. Now I know that Stephenie Meyer hates humans so much, she was determined to show it to us again.
Annie: Yep, she clearly hates us. We get it, sex is bad. You don’t have to traumatize us all with this.
K: Indeed.
Edward informs her that “You’ve seen my family going about life in a fairly human way, but you’ve been sleeping nights.” That’s followed up by the horrifying line “He winked at me.” So, like, the house turns into a crazy vampire sex den the second Bella passes out for the night? Ugh. Gross. (M: WEIRD VAMPIRE SEX CULT.) (A: CABIN IN THE WOODS 2: SEX HOUSE IN THE WOODS.) (C: Vampire orgy? Vam…porgy?) (K: Inevitable Hollywood tagline: “these vampires suck more than just blood…”)
He tells her that the reason he’s read the most books and is the best musician in the family and has studied the most and learnt the most languages isn’t because he’s interested in that shit. It’s because everyone else in the house was off fucking the night away and he didn’t have anyone to fuck. This is so bad, you guys. It’s so effing bad.
Catherine: I KNEW IT! So if he’d just spent that time jerking off he’d be less insufferable right now?
K: Apparently so.
Exhibit LMNOP of the badness: “We laughed together, and the motion of our laughter did interesting things to the way our bodies were connected, effectively ending that conversation.” So yeah. They had that entire three page conversation about his family and their vampire sex schedule while he was balls deep in her lady garden. (M: WHO ON EARTH WOULD ALLOW THIS.) (A: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.) Thanks for that, Steph.
And with that horrifying thought, this horrifically awful chapter is over. Halle-fuckin’-lujah.
Next time on Breaking Dawn: Charlie returns in Chapter 25.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
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I am a 30-something year-old human woman who lives in Maine. I'm a freelance writer who mostly spends time that I should be doing that, watching T.V. I also love reading and comic books way too much.