Hello everybody! Three days ago I watched Billy Wilder's "The Apartment". A brilliant movie! And I got an idea for an all-human story with Edward and Jasper. Here it is!
Please note: No native speaker here! Errors may occur!
Disclaimer: Neither do I own Twilight, nor do I own "The Apartment".
Special thanks go out to l'marie wilson and Ithilien Archer for reviewing "Last One Standing" so enthusiastically. Also, I would like to dedicate my story to Livia09. Love you!
Special note: This is the enhanced version of the story, beautifully betaed by Kristen618. I hope you know that I owe you big time for your great work. Thank you again and again!
The Apartment
Prelude
It's plain crazy. There are approximately 8,400,000 people living in New York City. That is more than the whole population of Switzerland. And 1.6 million of these people are living in Manhattan. 67 thousand per square mile! I – Edward Masen – am one of them. I still can't picture that… not the huge amount of human beings in Manhattan, nor the fact that I'm actually one of them.
Maybe my lack of imagination regarding the population of New York has something to do with the place that I come from. You see, I'm kind of a country bumpkin. I was born and raised in a one-horse town called Forks, somewhere in the depths of Washington State. We have a lot of beautiful and breath-taking landscape, but we don't have a lot of people. Even less since my elder sister and I have moved to New York. The population of Forks was 3,275, now it's 3,273. Kind of sad when you think about it.
You'll probably ask yourself why I'm so obsessed with numbers. That's because of my job. I work as a project coordinator for the City University of New York, Central Office. My net pay is $3300 per month. I coordinate a program which provides funding to colleges and universities for research equipment purchases. On the one hand that means I am calculating, shifting and distributing money. And I also prepare periodic budget reports. On the other hand I act as a liaison to the CUNY administrative offices. So basically I'm an advanced accountant. I've been working for the university for six months. I get along well with the other employees. It's not my dream job, but at least I'm working for the university.
To be honest, I always had a fondness for numbers, far before I had my job. Ever since I can remember, I liked to play with numbers. I was kind of nerdy. I calculated the average rainfall in Forks, the average age of the inhabitants of the town and tried to work out the probability of seeing a deer. The idea that you can almost calculate everything as long as you have the variables has always put my mind at ease. It makes contingency not seem so… well… contingent. Later I discovered my fascination for economics. So I studied Mathematics with a concentration in the Mathematics of Finance at Baruch College, New York City. Afterward I obtained a Master of Science degree in Financial Engineering. I would have liked to conduct research and teaching at Baruch College, but the opportunity hasn't arisen yet. But I haven't abandoned hope.
You may ask: Why New York? On the one hand, New York has a lot of culture, nightlife and science to offer. On the other hand, I wanted to experience something totally different and new. You know, I'm a little bit of a nerd, but I'm also very curious about the world. I get bored very quickly. And Forks can be quite boring! And so, when my sister Mary announced that she intended to move to New York in order to live with her boyfriend, I decided to go with her.
Mary is now 31, six years older than me. She studied law in New York – probably for the same reasons I have followed her – but came back after she gloriously passed her bar exam. However, she soon discovered that there is not much to do for a lawyer in Forks. Particularly for a lawyer who is specialized in international law. And furthermore, she found out that she couldn't do without Simon. She met him over operaloversdotnet during her studies and surprisingly enough they discovered that they were both living in New York. Creepy coincidence, don't you agree? Anyway… They attended the Met, fell in love, had four fulfilled years in New York and then broke up, because my sister had decided to go back to Forks. She thought she could get along without him. But she was wrong. Hence the decision to return to the Big Apple.
Simon makes good money as an engineer. And she got lucky and obtained a well-paying job at the UN. So they moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side. Which brings me to my current… well… situation.
See, I lived in a tiny double room in a student dorm on the Lower East Side while I did my bachelors and masters. Subsequently, I stayed at my sister's while I was searching for a job. And when I had found one, I decided to get a place of my own.
Above, I mentioned the beautiful landscape around Forks. Imagine an endless ocean of trees, peppered with waves of mountains, completed with lakes of varying sizes. Yes, that's it! And now imagine the skyline of Manhattan. See the difference? And the problem is: I actually like woods, mountains and lakes. I need nature around me to be content. So, when I was looking for apartments, I concentrated my search on the area around Central Park, the only place in Manhattan with at least a little bit of green. The problem is that the apartments near Central Park are either ugly, uncomfortable, absolutely unaffordable or inhabited. It was an exhausting, tedious search.
But then I found the perfect apartment at the Upper West Side, low West 69th street. Two steps away from Central Park. The street is tree-lined and surprisingly quiet. It's on the second floor of a brownstone, pre-war building, light-flooded, has one big living room with a expansive window bay, two small bedrooms, a bath with a tub and a tiny separate kitchen. But okay, there was one flaw to the apartment. It was $3100 a month. I couldn't afford it on my own so I thought I had to do without my dream apartment.
However, coincidence had something in store for me. One evening – still brooding about a way to get the apartment – I had dinner with four of my co-workers, three of them male, one female. I'm a decent looking guy – blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, nice jaw line – and I think that Rosalie Hale – the female – had a crush on me. She gave me the eye during the whole time. And it was blatant eye. I tried to ignore it as politely as I could since I wasn't interested. But I admit, at the end of dinner I was both desperate and annoyed. Then, however, I got a chance to escape her, because one of my male co-workers – Jasper Whitlock – asked me if I could help him with a mathematical problem. We hadn't talked much till this moment and I didn't know him well, but I gladly agreed.
So we went to his place – a depressing one-room apartment with leaking faucets, a broken heater and mildew on the walls – and discussed the problem for over an hour. It was very interesting and satisfying, because he has a complete different approach to mathematics than me. Mine is composed and strictly logical, his is passionate and intuitive. But he has the tendency to get frustrated to the point where he yells inarticulately and gets ready to throw stuff about his room. However, one minute later, he starts laughing, shakes his blond head and makes jokes about his behavior. You might call it unbalanced, but it's kind of fascinating. Anyway, after the hour had passed, I made a comment about the horrid state of his apartment. He agreed and told me that he was looking for a different place to stay.
One week later, we moved in the apartment. That was two months ago. The arrangement seemed perfect and we indeed got along well. Though he's slovenly, he manages to limit the chaos to his room. I do the cleaning, he gets the groceries. And because he's always very busy, we don't see each other that often. There is just one problem.
On Tuesday and Thursday evening I have to leave the apartment for at least two hours, sometimes even longer. That's because he's meeting someone in our apartment and he doesn't want me to know who it is. So I roam the streets of New York, read books in coffeehouses, attend my favorite twenties-style bar, watch birds at Central Park and freeze my arse off, because currently it's December. And today, on December the 5th, the story really begins.