"Music From Another Room"
Bella's POV
"Hey, you two," Rosalie ground out angrily, storming into the house and kicking off her heels.
Alice and I looked at one another. "Are we in trouble?" Alice asked.
Rosalie shrugged. "No, you're fine. But some idiot driver just about hit me a second ago and then laid on their horn like it was my fault. God, moving people are complete idiots." She stomped off, grumbling, as she went to change clothes.
"How was work?" I called, setting down my coke and muting Gilmore Girls.
"Hey!" Alice whined, her eyes still on the screen.
"Chill, Alice," I laughed. "Blonde guy's gonna kiss Rory and then she freaks out. You've seen this episode like five million times."
"Not the point," Alice mumbled, crossing her arms and waiting for Rose to answer my question.
"Pretty good," she yelled back at us. "The shoot didn't take as long as I thought it would and they finally fired that makeup artist that botched the last show. The new girl is really nice and actually listened to me when I told her that orange eye shadow looks horrible on me."
Alice visibly shuddered. "Why on earth would they put orange eye shadow on you? You're a model, not a cartoon character."
"Go figure..." Rosalie answered just as she came out in a pair of tight-fitting yoga pants and a tank top. "Did we decide what we're doing for dinner?" She asked, wandering into the kitchen.
"We thought we'd just order a pizza or chinese food or something," I said absently, looking through our movies for one that we might all want to watch.
"Wait a second," Rose stood, arms akimbo, in the front of the kitchen. "You're telling me that you spent God knows how long baking enough cookies to bring down Santa's Sleigh but it didn't occur to you to just whip up something easy that we could eat for dinner?"
I stopped and thought about it for a second. "That sounds about right," I said before going back to my movie selection process.
"Chinese food it is," Rosalie sighed as she hunted around in one of our drawers for the take-out menus. "Do we all want the usual, ladies?" She asked.
Edward's POV
Three hours later, we had just about sorted through all of the boxes, putting each one in the room where it belonged. Of course, we first had to break it to Emmett that his fort was going to have to come down. Since it was a supremely excellent one and since we might as well have told him he was going to have to choose between food and sex for the rest of his life, we promised him that he could have all of the empty boxes in order to re-construct the wall. He spent the next phase of the unpacking process sprinting back and forth between Jasper and me trying to prevent us from unnecessarily damaging the boxes as we opened them.
Sitting, completely exhausted, on the couch that was floating in the middle of the room since we hadn't bothered trying to figure out where to put it yet, we opened our third round of beers. Jasper had volunteered to go to the nearest grocery store for some essentials so we didn't have to survive on take-out food until we straightened out our current decorating predicament.
"Well, gents," Emmett said, stretching and eyeing the X Box. "I say we throw in the towel for the night and work on our high scores for Call of Duty."
"I've got to get some stuff straightened out for work next week but then I'm game," I said, getting up slowly and popping my back.
The recording studio where I had been hired, originally based in Los Angeles, saw a need for an extra branch and the winning city had been Seattle. I was brought on to handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff and was also the resident pianist. Since alot of our recording artists required accompaniment, we were expected to be able to provide it. That was where I came in. Already I had received six different scores that were to be played and recorded next week for a singer who was working on getting a new album out by the first of the year.
"You aren't going to go play right now, are you?" Emmett asked, looking at me in exasperation.
"Of course not," I answered. "Just lining stuff up and looking over some sheet music to figure out which needs the most attention. I will be playing tomorrow though so you pansies better be ready to enjoy some instrumental music to go along with unpacking the rest of your stuff." Emmett groaned but didn't say anything else as I left the room.
Bella's POV
"Good morning!" Alice sang happily when I stumbled down the stairs in my pajamas, which consisted of nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear. Having lived around these girls for so long, it would have hardly fazed them if I had come down completely naked and done a dance...
"Hurmphmnnn," I mumbled, reaching for the mug of coffee that Rosalie was holding out to me with an absent expression on her face as she took a bite of her toast.
"So are you staying in today?" Alice asked me, knowing full well that I had absolutely no intention of going into the office two days in a row if I could help it.
I nodded vaguely at her, focussing on my coffee and trying to clear the fuzziness of sleep from my thinking. If I concentrated and got thirty pages done today, I should be in pretty good shape for the rest of the week.
Alice and Rosalie ran around getting ready for work and, after listening to their heels click rapidly out the front door and hearing a final shout of goodbye, they were gone. I sighed contentedly and washed my breakfast dishes before grabbing another cup of coffee and my work file, trying to figure out where, exactly, to settle down and be productive. I was still in my pajamas and had no intention of getting dressed, so that automatically ruled out anywhere public.
Since it was a nice day outside and the forecast didn't expect bad weather until afternoon, I decided to take advantage of the sunshine and sit outside on our back porch. Throwing some shorts on and sweeping my hair up into a ponytail, I quickly situated myself in the most comfortable lounge chair we had and got to work.
God! Some people were just bad writers. That's really all there was to it. People use commas way too often, people forget to capitalize important things, people don't know where to divide their paragraphs... Why didn't everyone who was trying to break into the business of novel-writing take a basic grammar course? It should be required or something. Granted, I had been given a low-priority book to edit since I was on the bottom rung of the ladder at the company, but they could have at least given me something half-way decent! J.K. Freakin' Rowling herself wouldn't have sold a single book if she had written like this, no matter how good the stupid plot was.
I had been out on the porch for three or four hours by now and had gotten a huge chunk of my work done which immediately put me in a better mood, even if the author absolutely sucked at being an author. Having gone in intermittenly to get one thing or another, I had collected a large quantity of things that surrounded me on the lounge chair including a tube of sunscreen, a Diet Coke bottle, a beach towel, a plate of gingerbread cookies, a glass of ice water, a half-eaten apple, my computer, my cell phone, and a pad with various notes scribbled on it.
Glancing around, I sighed and began gathering up the trash and things that I didn't need anymore. As I did so, I became aware of the fact that there was piano music floating vaguely from an unknown source. Straightening, I listened to it for a while, appreciating the subtle melodies and simply enjoying it. It wasn't until the song abruptly stopped and started up again after a few moments that I realized that it was being played live and not on a radio. Scanning the general area to figure out the origins of the music, I eventually decided that it was coming from the house directly on the other side of our backyard fence. This was surprising since the old owners had moved out two months ago and we had figured it was still empty.
Leaving the back door open so that I could listen, I went back into the house and banged around in the kitchen for a while making some lunch. The constant stream of piano music drifting in was idyllic, almost like I was in some sort of a movie. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. It would be nice to have a musician living nearby because that meant that this wasn't going to be a one-time thing. I could just open my window any time I wanted and enjoy.
Eventually, to my disappointment, the rain set in and I was forced to vacate the porch and shut the door. Pouting slightly, I did the rest of my day's work in the living room, winding down with the final pages sometime around four o'clock at which point the rain was practically dumping buckets. The rest of the day was spent productively cleaning, cooking something simple for dinner, and generally re-organizing my life since it had gotten so screwed up in the last couple of weeks with random craziness at work.
"Bella?" I heard Rose's voice call from the living room.
Running out, I saw her shaking out her umbrella as she stepped into the house. "What's going on Rose?" I asked. "Who- ha ha ha!" I burst into laughter, seeing her hair and make-up. She had clearly been doing some sort of weird shoot today and her hair, plastered in hairspray, stood in every which direction while her make-up made her look like something out of a gothic porn movie.
She looked at me with tight lips. "I need help."
I doubled over in laughter. "I'll say!" I gasped for air. "Wh- What did they do- do to you?" I grated out between bursts of giggles, circling her and seeing that the back was every bit as crazy as the front.
She crossed her arms. "It was for a shoot with one of the urban clothing stores we're marketting. Are you going to help me or not?"
Composing myself with difficulty, I nodded without saying anything else, not trusting myself to keep the laughter at bay once my mouth opened. I followed her back to her bedroom, the only one of the three on the bottom floor. Keeping my eyes on the ground and off of her head, I wondered out loud. "What could I help you with Rose? I'm not exactly signing on to get in the shower with you, here."
She sighed, annoyed more at the situation than at my reaction. "I need to get all of the bobby pins out but I can't find a single one of them with all of this stupid hair spray."
"Gocha," I said matter-of-factly. "Sit down, then, and let's start hunting."
An hour later, Rose stepped gratefully into the shower, leaving a pile of forty-seven bobby pins sitting on her counter. I stepped out and wandered back into the living room, hungry but wanting to wait until everyone was present and not made up like an emo street walker. Glancing at the clock, it displayed quite clearly that Alice was almost forty-five minutes later than she normally was. Getting worried, I called her just to check. The phone barely rang once before she picked it up.
"Hey! Sorry I'm a bit behind. Work was crazy today," she said right off the bat. The sound of the car running in the background hummed through the phone.
"You're on your way, then?" I asked.
"Yep. I'm actually pulling into the driveway now," she said. Her headlights shone through the front curtains as she said this.
"Okay. See you in a second." I hung up the phone.
Alice skipped inside and immediately deposited her raincoat on one of the hooks before twirling around and throwing her thin arms around my neck, pulling me close. "Thanks for worrying about me," she said happily.
"Not a problem," I laughed. "Anything interesting at work or was it just a bunch of business crap that had to get taken care of?"
She sailed into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water. "Um... well the reason I'm late is because we got a new shipment in this afternoon that I wanted to get on the shelves before closing. But, since you asked, something very interesting happened this morning." Her eyes were sparkling.
I sat at one of the bar stools. "What?"
"Rosalie and I met the cutest guy," she started, before cutting herself off. "Where is Rosalie, anyway? I need her here so that I can actually tell the full story."
I smirked. "She's in the shower. The agency went completely crazy with her hair and make-up."
Alice glanced back down the hallway toward Rose's room in interest. "Are we talking minor like the collar necklaces shoot in 2006 or are we talking about a disaster like the denim vest shoot last fall?"
I thought for a moment. "We're talking a whole new scale of horrible, here, Alice. Vampire prostitute shoot of 2008."
Alice snorted. "Seriously?"
"Seriously."
Edward's POV
Jasper and Emmett vacated the apartment for the morning to run errands, leaving me free to practice the new music without their constant interruptions. And, by "their," I mean "Emmett." This worked out perfectly since we had a ridiculous amount of things that we hadn't thought to pack in the process of moving. They would be productive and buy the eight million items on our list and I wouldn't bother them with my incessant music.
Settling down at the piano in my room, the one piece of furniture that was in its permanent place, I selected the hardest piece of music I would need to learn and began to play. With the open window in front of me allowing a refreshing breeze and a bottle of water next to me, there was no reason that I couldn't play straight through the morning and get as much done as possible before my roommates got home.
After a few hours, I got sick of playing the generic background music to what would ultimately end up being some one hit wonder pop song and tossed the sheet music aside. Placing my fingers delicately back on the keys, I began playing my own compositions, allowing the music to flow and echo throughout the room before escaping outside to be lost in the oblivion.
I glanced up and out the window to see a girl on the back porch of the house across the fence. She was standing there with her eyes closed, unmoving. She seemed average enough, with a heart-shaped, very pale face and dark brown hair. Her build was small. I normally wouldn't have picked her out of a crowd but, as I looked at her, I realized that there was something else about her that wasn't blatantly obvious. Something... different. Something more. It was almost as if there was an air of mystery that hung about her.
I stopped playing as I realized the train of thought my mind was pursuing. Shaking my head and trying to rid myself of the nonesense, I tore my eyes away from her and took a sip of water before picking back up where I'd left off. Sneaking one more peek at the girl on the other side of the fence, I saw her glancing around, looking for something. It wasn't until she turned in my direction that I understood that she had been standing there listening to me play. I ducked down out of her line of sight but didn't break the song as I continued, unexpectedly happy that she seemed to enjoy my music.
I'd played for people before and certainly at concerts and competitions when I was younger, but I'd never been so pleased that someone found pleasure in something I had created. How strange this was, since she was a complete stranger. It would make more sense for me to value the opinion of a well-respected teacher or that of my parent's. But, then again, maybe it was the fact that I didn't know her. She didn't have a bias in my favor, but liked my music for what it was without knowing who had produced it.
I continued to watch her surreptitiously as she tripped back inside with an armload of things, leaving only a pile of papers and a computer sitting out on the lounge chair she had clearly just vacated. The back door was left open and she didn't immediately return back to whatever it was that she was working on. I wondered if she left the door open because of the breeze or because she wanted to listen to the piano music. Hoping it was the later but deciding to err on the side of modesty, I convinced myself she was simply enjoying the nice day outside and would have left the door open regardless of the music.
It started raining around two, which is what time I glanced at the clock and realized I had played right through lunch. Reluctantly pulling away from the black and white keys, I reached up and shut the window just in time to see the girl dash inside with her things, sliding the glass door shut as she went. I grinned unexpectedly without even entirely knowing why.
Slapping a peanut butter sandwich together, I was just looking through some of the notes I had made about the pieces I was expected to know for work when my roommates burst through the front door with their arms loaded down with shopping bags filled with hammers, extra wall screws, paint cans, and everything else we had decided last night to buy.
"I'm not going, man," Jasper ground out angrily as he dropped his half of the bags on the couch, rounding on Emmett. "It was stupid of you to promise and I won't go along with it."
"What's going on?" I asked cautiously, wondering what Emmett could have possibly done this time.
"Seriously, Japser! I wouldn't be asking you unless it was super important!" He whined, also depositing his bags on the couch.
Jasper turned to me impatiently. "Asshole here set me up on a blind date without my permission!" I muffled a laugh into a cough, trying to keep a straight face. Jasper scowled.
Emmett stood with his arms crossed. "Come on, man. You'll really like her! She's hott and she's got alot more energy than that last girlfriend. What was her name? Joan?"
"Jane," Jasper said pointedly, miffed over the dig at his ex-girlfriend.
"Right," Emmett agreed. "Plain Jane. You know, I heard she's dating some tool who's studying to be a chef. Is that really who's beating you to the punch? A guy who makes pastries for a living?"
"Fine!" Jasper snarled. "But you owe me big. We got it?"
Emmett looked like a little kid who had just been let loose in a candy factory. "Sure thing, man. Who knows? She might be the girl of your dreams. You'll be thanking me before this is all said and done."
"Don't push your luck," Jasper muttered, storming into the living room and turning on the television.
"So... Do you want to start from the beginning now?" I prompted Emmett, knowing Jasper was in too foul a mood to do the story any sort of justice.