A/N: Ch 9 is here! The explanation behind the blonde slut has finally arrived. Enjoy!
Nothing's mine.
---
Ch 9: George Michael Knows His Shit
Sleep hadn't come easily the night that Rosalie verbally abused—and Emmett guilt-tripped—me into giving Jasper a second chance. I wanted to blame Edward and Bella for allowing them into the house, but they, like me, had no idea I would nearly lose facial structure in the name of a supposed misunderstanding.
"You don't owe him anything, especially an apology," Bella had said to me after Edward had left for the day. Maybe she was right; maybe I didn't owe Jasper anything. But Rosalie and Emmett tried to convince me otherwise. Your loved ones wouldn't push so hard for your second chance in they knew you didn't deserve it, right?
At one o'clock in the afternoon, I decided it was finally time to get out of bed and get ready for what was sure to be an unproductive day. I felt so heavy with unanswered questions as I brushed my teeth. How should I talk to Jasper? Do I call him or just go to his house? What does he need to tell me? What about the audition? Will we still dance together? Will I dance at all?
My head was still swimming with questions when I got back to my room. I was just about to change the sheets on my bed when I heard something hit my window. I screamed at the sound. I jumped the second time I heard the noise. I was watching my window when I saw something hit it, making the noise yet again. I reached the sill before the possibility of a crack in the glass significantly increased.
And there he was—blond hair being hit by the sun in just the right places, right arm cocked to throw a fourth time, revealing skin where his shirt had previously been. Perfect.
Upon seeing me, he dropped what I assumed was a pebble and pulled his cell phone from the shoulder strap of his laptop case. A minute later, my phone began to ring. I let three of them pass before I decided to answer.
"If you were going to pull a Say Anything, you really should have considered your sound system."
"Alice!" He seemed so thrilled to hear me that what I was saying to him didn't seem to matter. "You answered."
"What do you want?"
His voice became serious. "I need to show you something. It will help me explain what you saw the other day."
Truth—the ever-prevailing winner in the battle between good and evil. It will set you free—or so I've been told. Yet why are we so slow to accept it? No, you don't look fat in that dress. You don't look a day over twenty-nine. Of course I love you. That is what we believe to be true. So when it is time for the truth, how can we decide whose side to be on?
"Please," he continued. "Let me explain everything and if you still wish not to see me again, I swear I will walk away. I just need five minutes."
"Stay there," I said before hanging up the phone. I didn't know what motivated me, but I made my way outside, trying to create as little noise as possible. Who knew what might happen to Jasper if Bella knew he was here.
"Follow me," I ordered, trying to sound as angry as possible once I got within one hundred feet of him. But his smile upon seeing me was so genuine and beautiful that I couldn't be angry. And that pissed me off.
I led Jasper to a hammock at the far corner of my backyard. I was met with equal forces of elation and dread at sitting this close to him again, but it almost guaranteed the privacy of our meeting, and thus Jasper's safety.
"Do you remember the conversation that we had on the swing at Jessica Stanley's party?" he began as he logged into his computer and started pulling up files. I nodded. "My dance partner, Lauren, abandoned me for her druggie boyfriend. But this is what she looked like before that happened." I saw a whirlwind of color—red, purple, blue, green. And blonde. His blonde, her blonde, her profile, her arms. And it clicked. It made sense but I couldn't—didn't want to—accept it. I had too many questions.
"Lauren is blonde."
"Yes."
"She was at your house when I came over."
"Yes."
"She had her arms around you."
He sighed, but he had no choice but to confirm it. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Lauren, she's…she's much better to handle when she thinks she's in control."
"Was she?" I stared at his face then, daring him to say him to say yes.
"Of course not, darlin'." I winced at the sound of my pet name. I didn't want to hear him call me that. I didn't want to fall victim to that again. "I would never risk what we have like that." He put his hand over mine then, trying to soothe me, comfort me, but his statement did anything but. I rose from the hammock, needing to put some distance between us.
"What we have? What is it that we have, Jasper? An almost kiss and you using me to get into Brookhaven while you're sneaking around with your ex-dance partner?"
"It's not like that at all."
"Then what's it like?"
He inhaled, preparing what I guessed was going to be a long story. "Much like you, I lost interest in dancing once I no longer had a partner. But I started picking it up again in March, just for the fun of it. I'd go to studios on weekends, spend my free time there. That night we met, I started thinking about auditioning.
"After your sister called you, I realized that we couldn't jump right into anything. You needed time to heal. I wanted to be the one to heal you, to dance with you.
"I had no idea that Lauren was coming back. She showed up at my house and said that she needed to talk to me. She and her boyfriend got busted for possession three months ago. Since then, she'd been trying to get her life back together and figured that I should take her back. 'It won't be like last time, I promise,' she said. That's when I saw you. You looked so broken; it nearly killed me." My heart came close to breaking as his expression changed from seriousness to anguish. I almost moved to comfort him, but he continued speaking before I could.
"After you left, I told Lauren that I never wanted to see her again. I was in my room a few minutes later when I heard my sister threaten her life if she ever came to my house again. I haven't heard from her since."
Silence can be one of two things: comfortable or tense. And what followed the conclusion to Jasper's story was definitely the latter. Digesting all this information at once was a bit more than I could take. He doesn't want Lauren. He wants me, wants to be with me. Then why am I hesitating?
"So what now?" I asked. Jasper had since put his computer away. What he had in his lap now were a notebook and a homemade CD.
"We do what feels right," he said, handing those items over to me before he started walking home.
---
What I found was astonishing.
The CD was a compilation of all the songs he played for me under his tree. The last song was "Father Figure"—just like in his concerts. Hearing the song brought tears to my eyes for the third time in the past five days. And I hated crying. But this time was different—I felt lighter, calmer.
In my first glance of the small brown leather notebook, I had wondered why Jasper had given it to me. I was almost afraid to open it, in case I might see something too personal. He wouldn't let me see any more than I could handle, right? So I took a long, steady breath and began reading.
I didn't like the first page—or the next fifteen after that. They all had a theme to them: Lauren. From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, she was "the one." Reading this made me think I was watching a train wreck—I didn't want to see it but I couldn't look away. Why do I have this book? What could have possessed him into thinking I should read this? Just as I was closing the book, something in bold caught my eye. It was my name. I had my own section.
The next page was dated the night of Jessica Stanley's party.
Alice: dancer, timid, caring, vulnerable, BEAUTIFUL
The pages that followed were a mixture of lists—song titles, dances, dance steps, and costume ideas—and notes about me and the time we spent together. They always ended the same way:
Alice: BEAUTIFUL
The last page was written the day I saw Lauren.
I broke her. She won't give me the chance to tell her everything. I need her to listen almost as much as I need to put her back together again.
Lauren, who I once thought the world of, I now find tainted and grotesque. She is the Rosaline to my reborn Romeo. Her previous hold on me has long ago loosened, making way for Alice, my Juliet in every way.
Alice: I'm sorry; still BEAUTIFUL
---
"Alice? Alice, are you okay?"
---
A/N: Who expected Lauren the ex-dance partner to be the blonde slut? Let me know who you are and what you think in a review!
