Nervous that Jasper will display an untimely promptness, Bella puts the pedal to the metal once she's cleared Charlie's house. Hey, what's the good of being a cop's daughter if she can't abuse the privilege?

Edward would be appalled. She smiles at the thought. He's so easily scandalized whenever she says or does anything the least bit outside the established guidelines of what he perceives as "normal Bella." When really the secret is that no such creature exists.

She used to be such a nice girl. Never spoke much - she was bad at taking compliments and little better at giving them - had her nose buried in a book even at lunch; generally had the right answers in class but wouldn't volunteer the information unless forced to it; she helped her mother out without asking and dutifully phoned her father once a week. Those conversations were relatively painless, as Charlie had seemed about as enthusiastic as she did with the appointments.

Predictable as a B-movie script, Bella can perceive her life as it would have been if she'd remained in Arizona. Series of mediocre days, gradual distancing from her father more unreachable than a few states; her mother's scatterbrained tendencies finally taking their toll and Bella leaving for college, probably for good, but to nowhere in particular. Here the images get a little muddy. She's never really contemplated a career for herself. Just getting through the day has felt like achievement enough, anything else an overly ambitious pipedream.

Then she came to Forks and everything changed. People were practically falling over themselves to be friends with her. It seems a waste, when there are plenty of people who would be happy to receive such positive attention. Mostly Bella just wishes to return to the wall where she can observe the world uninhibited. Safer that way, for her and for them.

Jasper always meets her on the other side of the city limits sign. His reasons for doing so remain unexplained, though if Bella were to guess it has less to do with avoiding the Cullens or the wolves and more with Jasper's need for structure. His Forks life is over, to his way of thinking, therefore there's no reason for him to enter that world again, physically or otherwise. It's Bella who displays flippant disregard for the niceties of psychological hyperbole.

She slows as her headlights flash against the sign, population 3,175, minus one girl and exiled Confederate soldier vamp. Searching for him amidst the trees and fog steaming up from the road (Good Lord, even the ground rains here), she mentally crosses her fingers and pushes the top of her dress a little lower. Delusions of grandeur.

She gives an undignified shriek when a sharp knuckle-rap comes from the passenger side of her truck.

Jasper's teeth are the first thing she notes. His eyes the second.

"You!" she gasps-scolds. Reaching over to manually roll down the window, Jasper ignores the invitation to open the door and leans against it instead.

"Sorry, goose," he says, not sounding the least bit. "Just trying to keep you on your toes. Don't know what suspicious characters you might find around here."

Unamused, she gives him the full force of her glare. The mock anger helps level her head, even as her heart starts to race at double-time. Oh, who is she kidding? Did she really think she could go through with this, that anyone as beautiful and hostilely defensive as Jasper Whitlock-Hale would look twice at a girl like her? The best she can hope for is that he'll get a good laugh out of it.

But maybe that's worth the humiliation she's prepared to subject herself to. Jasper has always struck Bella as a person in desperate need of some good old-fashioned silliness.

Bella hadn't noticed it until his absence, how precisely conscious Alice's manic cheerfulness was. Bella labors under no misconceptions that at least part, indeed most, of Alice's pleasure with him was genuine, that if nothing else Jasper would have buoyed her up. There's no denying that Alice was happy with Jasper, and Jasper with her, or had been for a time. By the same hand Bella can't ignore the feeling that Alice put in a great deal of emotional work to keep Jasper on the straight and narrow.

All of it to waste. Jasper stands before her with red eyes and a disturbing, cat-flinch readiness that only seems to occur in vampires who partake of human blood. He must feed before coming to her. He must, or else how could he stand it?

That means Bella is complicit in no less than six murders, counting tonight. The actual participation in Jasper's degradation is not what disturbs her, rather the knowledge that it does not disturb her nearly enough.

She must take too long in a response because Jasper's smile begins to slip. Immediately, Bella straightens from her slouch over the wheel and smiles. Jeez, she can't blame Alice for getting a little crazy on him. Bella doesn't require preternatural powers of empathy to sense the gnawing sense of isolation Jasper's enveloped in. That it's a self-purgation of his own making does not make it less hurtful to witness.

"How are you?" she asks, rather more primly than she intended as her arms automatically fold across her chest. She's suddenly hyperaware of the chill in the air and it occurs to her that her dress is possibly cut too low in the bosom. Why didn't she bring a shawl or a scarf or something?

"Fine," Jasper says, still watching her too closely. "You want to come out of there?"

She breathes in deeply through her nose and holds it. Wet pine and cedar, rain, a notion of blood. But of course that last is in her head only. Jasper is pristine.

"Or do you want to drive tonight?" Jaspers asks, theorizing wrongly on her hesitation.

"No," Bella says. She climbs out of her truck. There is no possible way for her to do so with any chance of elegance and she concentrates on simply not flashing the squirrels.

Jasper is by her side before her feet touch the ground. She looks up to find his red eyes appraising her openly, and she flushes.

"Look at you all dolled up," he says. "Got a hot date?"

Gratified at his teasing, if a little disappointed that he hasn't collapsed in dazed amazement at the ravishing figure she makes, she says, "Of course! He's my eleven o'clock. So don't keep me up too late."

"Should I be flattered that I'm first? Or do you save the best for last?" Jasper's smile is back, smooth and sweet like poison in her mouth; his eyes stay the same. Analytical and uninvolved, like a banker counting coins.

Bella is not adept when it comes to this sort of casual friendly flirting. People engage in it without pausing for breath between the word 'suck' and asking for last night's homework assignment, while Bella struggles to identify an authentic expression of interest and what is merely a bored plea for entertainment. She discounts the first as wishful thinking and hopes like hell it's not the latter. Jasper has been, as best as she can tell, nothing but honest with her.

Reassured by this fact, the growing knot of wires in her stomach loosen enough for her to breathe.

Gathering the hem of her dress, she makes her arms into an arc so that the bottom half of organza flares out like an upside-down daffodil. "Don't you like it?" she says. She means to sound saucy and uncaring, but it comes out a little too eager for approval.

"Sure." Jasper slides his hands into his pockets and takes a step back, cocking his head at an angle as though he were looking at a particularly eccentric piece of art.

Before Bella can get her hopes up, he says, "Don't rightly know if it's your color, though."

Despite her pessimism, in face of Jasper's summary brutalization of her hopes, she deflates. Her preparedness for anything less than unequivocal acceptance proves lacking. "Well, it's all they had," she says desperately.

He smiles indulgently at her. A gentlemen would never call a lady out on a lie, that smile says.

"I'm afraid I'm not fit to be seen with you." His hands sweep out to indicate his own person.

Bella can't see what he's talking about. Granted, of all the Cullen men, Jasper would appear to be the least diligent in perusing GQ magazine, but he's not without his own self-conscious style. He likes ties and proper button-ups, usually more than one layer. They suit him as they never would Emmett, who likes to romp and tussle Bella's hair as though she were a beloved if underfoot little sister. Bella cannot imagine Jasper tussling anyone's hair. He is far too tightlipped and straight-backed for that. Such irreverence would seem almost an offense to his dignity.

In a way Jasper reminds Bella of Edward. They both have a length between their years that seems far longer than that of the others, with the exception of Carlisle. The one who looks like he's in pain. That was how Jess had characterized him, accurate in the way girls of her social standing in the hierarchy always seem to be. They must have a better view from the top.

She couldn't have known quite how literal that statement was. But neither had Bella, until recently. She still doesn't comprehend the full extremity of it, but at least now she's aware of her ignorance, of how much she doesn't know.

"You look as good as you always do," Bella offers.

"A backwards compliment if ever there was," Jasper says.

"I meant -" Bella says.

Jasper gives a dry huff, his version of a laugh. "You make it too easy for me, Bella."

Her brow knits. Heat suffuses her cheeks, sensing she's become a source of unintentional entertainment.

"Oh, don't," Jasper says, clapping his hands softly between them in an almost shamanistic manner of banishing her thoughts. "You are just very young to me sometimes, that's all I meant."

No, no! That is the last impression she wants to leave him with, especially tonight. Unable to conceal her impatience, she says with a mighty chest heave, "I am so sick of hearing that."

"Well, stop hanging out with old men and maybe you won't anymore."

In appraisal of how ridiculous she is - standing out on a backwoods road in Podunk, USA, in a borrowed homecoming queen's dress, talking to a vampire - she has to fight to stifle a hysterical fit of giggles. Salvaging the situation with self-parody, she clenches her hands into fists and stamps one foot on the ground like a toddler. "I won't and you can't make me!"

Though Jasper's expression does not change, Bella experiences a tangible sense of warmth unfurl in her belly and to her limbs, like sneaking a sip of brown liquor from her dad's hidey cabinet in the garage. Why do forbidden things always taste better? Since Adam and Eve, no other grade will do.

"I fear that is only too true." With exaggerated southern dandy charm, Jasper offers her his arm. "Shall we?"

She looks into his eyes. He always asks, always leaves her an exit. She never takes it.