Somewhere between the scratchy sheet rubbed against her naked body and her eyes set onto the paint-flaked ceilings, she thinks how much Alice would freak out at the sight of this room. A far cry from the luxury they're used, he murmurs into her ears, her pale neck.
And how easily they get use to the stink of dogs after a while. It's better than the stench of sin anyway.
Rosalie Hale rolls out from the bed. Her lover groans into the musty darkness. She can't help but to smile.
She slides the polyester tank top—something that Alice wouldn't let them touch within a foot radius—over her head. She crinkles her nose at the fresh ketchup stains blotted on white cardigan. Rummages through discarded clothes piling on the floor, she snags a berry red windbreaker and holds it high up in the air.
A perfectly sculptured brow arches at her companion. "Really?"
He shrugs. "If I'm pretending to be an emotionally compromised teenager, I'd be wearing that."
"To prove that you're a rebel without a cause?" Her lips split into a broad grin. Rosalie tosses the windbreaker with a flick of her wrist.
He catches the windbreaker with his foot, and set it against the mouldy armchair. Tugging the corner of his rosy lips is a mirror of her smirk. "You got me," he says, tone laden with sarcasm. He wiggles his hips into a pair of tight faded blue jeans, eliciting a snort from her.
She bends over the pile, tossing aside anything belongs to a man. At the sight of her black lingerie, she releases "Aha!"
She's down to fixing her belt around her waist. Him with his white holed-ridden sock set on one ashen foot. What a quaint pair they make. Picturesque even, despite the terrible clothes they draped themselves in.
Someone bangs their fist against the door behind her. Rosalie quickly slips into her lingerie, tawny eyes fleetingly gaze at her lover's golden irises. There's a brief silence that stretches between them. She breaks their locked silent gaze, and says, "I'll get it."
She picks up the sling bag off from the floor, heads for the door. Rosalie cracks the wooden door wide enough for some sunlight to venture into the room.
Amused golden gaze meets widening chestnut eyes.
"What weird shit you two leeches are into now?" Leah raises an inquiring brow, lips pressed into a smirk.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Rosalie purrs, leaning her head against the door. She's about to reply when Leah Clearwater raises a hand and shakes her short raven locks.
"On the second thought, I don't want to know."
"It's none of your business, mutt," she retorts, the malice in her tone absent. Instead her rosy lips curving into a sly grin.
Leah's taller, by an inch at most, tiptoes on her feet anyway—catching glimpse of the room. No doubt the dark-haired wolf could easily spotted Rosalie's lover. Still Leah couldn't resist to grace them with an insult any more than Rosalie could fake politeness at Bella or Edward.
"It's always pseudo-incest with you guys," Leah decides, with a non-committal shrug.
Rosalie fishes out a set of spare parts from her sling bag. "Here. These parts aren't easily available. Tell that giant mutt to take extra care."
Leah absentmindedly nods, setting the spare parts into a worn-out duffel bag. "Same time, same place?"
"Nothing is set in stone yet, lassie."
"Nice dealing with ya, leech," Leah retorts, as genuine as she could anyway. The perpetually bitter she-wolf slugs the duffel bag over her shoulder. She throws the duffel bag into a basket affixed to a rusted bicycle.
Rosalie closes the door, raises a brow at him. "What do you think? Do I have to snuff the life of her?"
"Nah, she finds us amusing, but she won't tattle. She doesn't want to stick her feet in where she doesn't belong."
"That's good. I was rather fond of her, to be honest."
She's tempted to run her long fingers through his long locks. But their time has run out. They always have next week.
"Our stone-cold hearted Rosalie finally allows herself to admit that she likes the mutt."
"Better the bitter bitch than the stupid gigantic Clifford."
"Well said." He smiles, heading for her. His lips hover just above hers, strong hands coiling around her waist.
Rosalie presses a finger against his lips. The end of her mouth curling into a coy smile. "Next week, Jasper."
"You're right," he relents, puts on the windbreaker. "Next week," Jasper murmurs, running a hand through his messy hair.
They don't fall into each other's embrace so whimsically like the teenagers they pretended to be. It feels like they're skirting around the hell-licking flames most of the time.
Even with the plans they devised—fool-proofed against the special ones—he can't help to notice the many flaws in their plans. Flaws that lead to inevitable cracks.
The first time they're nearly caught, hands in the cookie jars proverbially, Emmett's too dumb to notice.
His leather jacket hung over Rose's shoulders. Her scarf wrapped around his neck. Dirt clung onto Jasper's combat boots. Leaves stuck to Rose's loose ponytail. That they just had a rough tumble in the green forest behind their latest school.
But all Emmett cared was the sousaphone Jasper brought home after marching band practice. That big oaf always made it a point to call it a 'sausage-phone'. Or his own flaxen-haired mate was saddled with a French horn.
Carlisle and Esme. So called patriarch and matriarch of the family. Well, they turn a blind eye. "Adultery it seems ain't life threatening disease," he once whispers lovingly into Rosalie's ear. Her lobe in between his white gleaming teeth.
Alice's cheery face hides a cunning mind. If Jasper's to be honest. His mate knows the right words to get her desires across. Never ever having to spell it out for them in plain words. With a flick of her hair. With a curve on her lips.
She's pixie-dust and cotton candy. Forms a bond with prude Edward that none of them could understand. Jasper isn't included in. His gift doesn't merit the same level as theirs. They don't need to say it. Alice makes it clear in those private conversations she has with Edward. Edward holds her opinion higher than Rose ever garners.
Alice makes plans. Edward carries it out. But their plans never bore any fruits.
(Rose makes sure it. Jasper helps. Together, they're the dream team. The Hale Twins, after all.)
Suspicion creeps into his mate's being, breeds mistrust and denial together. The thing about Alice is—she rather deny, than accept that sunshines don't last forever. Even the sun has to set sometime.
The great misconception of his gift is that he feels them. Jasper Whitlock sees emotions in vivid colours. Transparent haloes colour each person. It changes—wild, erratic and never lies.
Edward's emotions are painted with red gashes and damnation of lost souls. It's bleak. It's black. Suffocates Jasper once in a while.
Blue is Esme's colour. Her calmness. Her desolation. Two opposite emotions forever tangled in a knot of profound lost and escapism of relief. Jasper knows she suffered in her human life. That's why she always looked sad to his eyes.
Carlisle's emotions often change. Like night and day. His colours are strictly based on the sun's position. He wears the colours of compassion as he makes his rounds in the hospital. By night, he wallows in dark emotions. Jasper suspects that's when he's standing—or kneeling on his knees—in front of that hideous cross in their living room.
Emmett and Alice—they're both are cut from the same cloth. Bright emotions—orange and yellow, like the sun. When their moods take a hit, it never fails to return back to the eternal optimism they both share. Sometimes it hurts his eyes, to see them both—burning bright and sears headaches into his eye sockets. Figuratively, of course.
Rosalie Hale carries with her, watercolour emotions. It's pastel palette when she's with Emmett. It's a different landscape when she's all alone. A portrait of cracked dried mud underneath orange-speckled dark blue skies. It's the closest description he can provide about her.
(Her emotions are always funereal, when the 'family' convenes in the living room. Seven immortals enclosed in a castle made of glass riches and picture-perfect furnishings.)
The whole Hale Affair begins like a slow sensation of centipede crawling over skin. Many legs only touching the skin so brief—but the body shudders at the mere remembrance of that centipede.
It wasn't immediate attraction. Nothing like that. It took stealth glances. Assessing each other. Alone, sitting across from each other. Him with his Marxism text-books. Her with her mechanical engineering manuals.
Sure, they could pass off as a sibling, a twin. They're strangers. That's the non-sugar coated truth. They're not family—even if Alice told him that they are now.
Her fingers are forever stained with dead fiancée and his rapist friends. His scars remind him of a great nation once divided and a man who killed for a living. They're two immortals with ghosts chained to their backs and wrists.
There's a little game suddenly they found themselves playing. The first to break the silence, loses. If this was a game Jasper has with Alice, his pixie mate smiles and sweetly sings, "But you and I both know that I win. I saw it in my vision." And the argument ends before it begins.
Rose's unpredictable. There's so many times Jasper thinks she's close to caving in. And their silence was shattered by Emmett's boisterous laugh. Or Alice's chirpy tune pulls him away from their game.
Soon, his mouth parts to the words he held for so long. "Why aren't you happy?"
Her red-lined lips upturn, coquettishly. "The same reason you looked so constipated all the time."
Rosalie doesn't mince her words. He appreciates that. Reminds him of southern black hair and Basque eyes. And maybe that's why Jasper liked her the best.
The next few years, as they posed as siblings, Jasper knows all there is to know about Rosalie. Vice-versa. Bit by bit, they fall into each other's embrace. They're not destroying everything like Rosalie with Emmett. Or everything was too careful and precise, such as his coupling with Alice.
It was easy and cool. No pressure. The knowledge of this utterly forbidden relationship was dizzyingly addictive.
It's not that he doesn't love Alice. He does. With all his beating dead heart. Just like Rosalie would raise hell on earth if Emmett perishes before her eyes. Jasper only knows that sometimes—most of the time—their mates' love for two golden-haired immortals isn't enough to keep the darkness away from them.
Alice doesn't know she's damaged. She believes in fairy-tale endings and optimism will win at the end. Emmett is a boy of twenty with the mind of a teenage boy, whose interests are sex and fun. Not so damaged.
(Rosalie thinks they're attracted to each other because they're damaged goods and they know it. Jasper doesn't refute. Sounds about right.)
"Do you want to talk what's on your mind? Or do you want to ignore the problem the Carlisle and Esme's way?" Rosalie fastens her brassiere, exposing marbled skin. Slips into a mini-skirt that he remembers seeing on a she-wolf before.
"There's nothing to talk about."
"So, we're going with the St. Carlisle route. Okay." She pivots on her heels, hands on her hips. Black brassiere on, with a polka dot mini-skirt. "But that's not how you and I roll. So, care to enlighten me?"
"I'm just thinking. That's all," he says, then deepens his voice and drawls in southern twang, "Not trying to be melodramatic like Edward."
She snorts. Jasper likes it when she's not purposely being hostile.
She releases a sigh into the silent room. Runs slim fingers through her daffodil locks. "If you want to stop, I can. Just give me the word. Don't give me the bullcrap of 'it's not you, it's me' speech. You and I lived long enough."
Jasper's answer is immediate. Final. "No. I don't want to stop."