Chapter 6

I hated this. I hated having to keep my emotions in check around Jasper, he would read into everything. He wouldn't question it though; he'd just look at me with the smoldering topaz eyes of his. He's been here for a month so far. He wasn't living with me per se, but he did spend a lot of time at my house. Danny is still on end with him, he doesn't know what to think. I mean ever since I lived here Danny has been my only guy friend, the over protective big brother if you will. And here comes Jasper, disrupting the flow of our friendship. I think though, that Danny knows Jasper isn't a brother figure. I don't really know what to make of him anymore to be honest. We can just sit in my library and talk about history or books that we've read.

It's not good, I'm getting too close, I need to distance myself. This is exactly what happened the last time I was tangled up with the Cullen's. And let us not forget how that ended.

"Bella? What are you doing?" I looked down from the tree branch I was currently occupying to see Jasper staring up at me, one eye brow raised.

"Oh, just branching out. Get it?" I said.

Jasper chuckled and shook his head, "ever so clever, Bella." I watched as he crouched down and jumped up to the same branch. I railed in my emotions so not to tip him off.

I watched him for a moment, as the sun came out from behind the trees and he sparkled.

"Jasper?" I called out, he turned to look at me, it's the way he always looks at me, the way that if I were human I would go weak in the knees and my cheeks would flush.

"What happened?" I asked, it's something that I've been dying to know ever since he showed up here, I just never had the heart to ask him.

"Nothing yet, but it's still early in the day." He grinned.

"That's not what I mean, and you know it. Come on, Jasper, something happened. It must have had to. You're alone. Where are the Cullen's? Where's Alice?"

He sighed and looked back at the sun for a moment then met my gaze. "I guess I should have known that question was coming. I figured it would have been asked weeks ago."

"That wasn't an answer that was avoidance." I call him out. He smiled again at me, this time it went right through me, igniting things inside me that I thought I lost decades ago. I watched as his eye brows creased, trying to figure out my new emotions, so I quickly thought of something else.

"You're amazing you know that, how you can feel that your emotions are affecting me and then change them in a split second." He mused.

"Still avoiding."

"Things were different after we left you. Carlisle and Esme acted as if their child had died, which in some case isn't far off, we did leave you and cut off all ties. I guess thinking that you were dead was better than obsessing over how your life was. That sounds really awful, and I'm sorry for that. But it's the truth. Emmett," he paused, searching for the right words, "it really hit Emmett hard. It hit all of us, even Rose, believe it or not." He chuckled a bit.

"With Emmett he lost his exuberance, his humor. It was like he left his playful side with you. Rose was broken too because Emmett was broken. But, and she'll probably never admit this, she missed you. You were one of the few people who would take all her snide remarks and then shoot them right back to her. Besides, she lived vicariously through you, you had the one thing she will always want, mortality." He explained.

"And Edward? Alice?" I'm not gonna lie, for the first few years after they had left I couldn't bring myself to even say his name, much less think about him. But after awhile I got over it and brushed it up to a good ridden kind of thing. Sure, I became the exact thing he was trying to prevent, but when all is said and done, it's his loss. Not mine.

"Well, their stories kind of go together. I knew that Alice and I had been drifting apart; it started before we left, so don't blame yourself. Things just, I'm not sure, we stopped clicking. We were good at hiding it from everyone. About ten years after we left, I went on my own little mini vacation if you will. I had a lot of things going on my head, as did Alice, so we figured time apart would do us some good. We'd both be able to figure everything out. I didn't expect to be gone for that long, maybe a couple months top. I went and visited Peter and Charlotte for a little over a year. I've known Peter for a long time and he knows me very well. They both said that even though they loved Alice dearly, they knew that she wasn't the one for me. I had seen it myself, maybe I was just too scared to admit it, I mean, Alice and the Cullen's were all I knew, aside from Peter and Charlotte. Without them, I didn't really know who I was.

"So I went back. In our case, absence didn't make the heart grow fonder. Turns out Alice and Edward were, well, involved." Sure as shit did not see that coming. He met my eyes for a second, seeing how I was taking this new information. I stayed neutral, naturally.

"They sat me down and explained to me what was going on. They just started their relationship a month before my return, and I knew they were being honest, I could feel the truth in their words. After seeing them together, they way they acted and how they looked at each other I knew that their love was the best kind of love. The kind that is slow, steady, that creeps up on you when you least expect it. Then one day you realize it like a ton of bricks hitting your chest, knocking the wind right out of you." He said, matter of fact.

My emotions turned slightly bitter because I heard Jasper take a sharp inhale of breath at the sudden change. "Love is a fallacy. I stopped believing in it a long time ago."

"It takes someone who has had their heartbroken to know what true loss feels like." Jasper spoke.

"Did Alice break your heart? Because if she didn't then you have no idea what I went through." I hissed.

"There are different kind of heartbreaks, Bella, the ones that hurt you so badly that you carry with you all your life, like yours. And the kind that sting but you accept them and move on cause it's for the best, like mine."

"So you're okay with your brother and your wife being together? I don't buy it." I shook my head.

"Ex-wife. Edward and her are married now. I'm not saying that it wasn't…weird to be around them. I mean, after I returned I only stayed with them for another five years. I left because I needed to find out who I was without them. Another thing, Bella, you were irrevocably in love with Edward. As I look back on my relationship with Alice, I don't think I was in love with her. Yes, I loved her dearly, but it never got to the point of being in love. She knew that, and she felt the same way."

"And you're optimistic that you'll fall in love with someone?" I asked.

"Yeah. I'm sure of it." He nodded, then cocked his head to one side, "will you fall in love again?"

"Love can kiss my ass for all I care." I jumped off the tree before Jasper could say something back. He followed me which didn't surprise me.

"I have to go, Emmetts visiting. We'll talk later, okay?" he asked.

"Emmett?" I questioned.

"Don't worry, Bella," he took a step closer, "your secret's safe with me." he whispered.