Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight.
Thanks to MeteorOnAMoonlessNight for being my beta and Sara aka Nikki Black for pre-reading! You both help me make this so much better!
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I had been driving around for a while when I finally pulled out my phone, pressing the speed dial to call Jasper. It rang for a few moments before his voice came through my speakers loudly.
"Hey, man! What's going on?" Jasper said happily.
"I told her, Jas. I told her everything," I said, not bothering to even say 'Hello'.
"You told who, what, Edward? Oh shit, you told Emily about Bella?" His voice was laced with concern.
"Bella came by, and we… fought or whatever you want to fucking call it, and then Emily came home and we fought, and I just couldn't take it anymore. Can I come stay with you for a while, man?"
"There's more to this than you're telling me, Ed. But, yeah, you can crash here," he said.
"Thanks man, I'll be by in a bit," I said as I hung up. At least I still had my best friend, and a place to sleep.
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I pulled up in front of Jasper's house about a half hour later. I jumped down out of my truck, dragging myself and my bag up the steps of his porch. I felt like I had been run over repeatedly. The sad part of it was, though, I wasn't even that heartbroken over my marriage. I felt bad that I had hurt Emily, but when I thought it over, it was a long time coming. What really was killing me was Bella and the pain I knew I had caused her, and the thought of never seeing her again.
I knocked on the door and it almost instantly swung open.
"You look like like a fucking train wreck, man," Jasper greeted me.
"Thanks. You're looking good there yourself, princess." I glared and walked past him into the house.
"So, are you going to tell me the whole story now, or did you want to just chill out for a bit?" he asked, following behind me.
"Fuck it, I'll just tell you now. It's not going to get any easier if I tell you later," I said with a sigh and threw myself down on his leather couch. I then spent the good part of the next hour telling him everything, including almost all of the gory details. I knew that it wasn't polite to kiss and tell, but I had to get it all off my chest and I knew anything I said to Jasper would go to his grave with him.
"Oh fuck, I can't believe… she actually let you take pictures? Christ. Do you still have them?" he asked with a shit-eating grin.
"Of course I do, but you can go fuck yourself before I'd ever show you or anyone else on this fucking planet."
He raised his hands in defense. "Calm down, man, I'm not asking to see them. But seriously, you've gotten yourself into some shit, what are you going to do now?"
"Fuck if I know," I said, leaning my head back and closing my eyes.
"Well, you can stay here for as long as you need; I know you'd do it for me," he said, clapping me on the shoulder and glancing down at my phone on the couch next to me before he left me to get settled in for the night. I needed to make sure that I changed the password on that thing and didn't let it out of my sight.
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I had been at Jasper's for two weeks when I was served with divorce papers. It seemed as if Emily wasn't wasting any time, not that I blamed her. I read over the papers, agreeing to the terms: she'd keep the house, the truck was mine, all of my tools and such were mine, things like that. I knew I should probably have a lawyer look it all over, but I just didn't care. So I signed the papers and mailed them in. Thankfully in Oregon it took almost no time to get divorced as long as neither person contested anything, so in a few weeks, I'd be a free man. Not that it fucking mattered, though.
It wasn't like I hadn't expected it to happen, and if I was being honest, there was a part of me that was kind of relieved. The other part of me, well, I felt as if I had just wasted 10 years of my life, and I found myself wondering what could have been if this had happened just a few months sooner.
I had been convinced that I had loved Emily, and I was sure that at one point it had been true, but somewhere over the past 10 years something had changed drastically and I had just been too scared to admit it. It wasn't until I met Bella that I had begun to let myself see that Emily and I just didn't fit anymore.
I sighed deeply as thoughts of Bella flooded my mind. I tried as hard as I could most days to stay busy and not think about her. By now she was a hundred miles away starting a new life, and hopefully she was finding it easier to move on than I was.
Somehow, even when it felt like the days just dragged, time still flew by, and now we were in the middle of November. I was dreading Thanksgiving with my family; my divorce was just another reason for them to look down on me.
There was no getting around the fact that I was the black sheep of the family. Instead of going to college to be a doctor, a lawyer, or really any other career that needed a degree, I had chosen to work with my hands. It was something that I loved, something that I had pride in. I also knew that it didn't make me any less smart than someone with a piece of paper with their name on it. The foundations and frames of peoples homes rested in my hands, so if I made mistakes, if I did just one thing wrong, everything would come crashing down. I was as meticulous as any surgeon was, but my parents and my sister just didn't see it that way. They never would.
I couldn't even imagine what they would think or say if they knew the real reason as to why Emily and I were no longer together. If they knew that I cheated on her, especially who I had cheated on her with, I wasn't sure that they wouldn't disown me on the spot.
Thinking about my family and how they'd react if I told them the truth, just led to me think about Bella. God, did I miss that girl.
Somedays it felt like the ache in my heart lessened, that maybe I would survive this whole thing, but most other days I still felt as if I had been beaten within an inch of my life. I knew I had no one else to blame but myself. I could have manned up, taken a look at my marriage and realized that I simply wasn't happy, that we could never be truly happy together. If I could have just waited, held off on doing anything with Bella, maybe we could have… I shook my head, trying to break myself from my thoughts. It was no use. Regardless of the timing, I still would have never stopped her from leaving. She was going to do amazing things in this world.
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I had just gotten back into town from a 3 hour drive home from Salem where I had spent Thanksgiving with my family, receiving backhanded compliments and snarky remarks from my sister Victoria and my mother. My favorite part of the visit, however, was when my father 'jokingly' asked if Emily left because 'she finally realized that this was as good as I was going to get.' So on my way back to Jasper's place, I decided to stop at Safeway to pick up a case of beer. If anyone deserved to drink themselves into a stupor right now, it was me.
I was standing in line waiting for my turn to pay when a voice that I had only heard one time caught my attention. Standing just a few feet away from me was Bella's mother. I tried as hard as I could not to eavesdrop, but in the end I couldn't bring myself not to.
"So, how is Bella doing up in Eugene, is she liking school?" the woman standing next to her questioned.
"She's doing really well. She's enjoying all of her classes. Oh, and I just recently found out when she was home for Thanksgiving that she's started seeing someone! Garrett, I think she said his name was." She shot a pointed look towards me, knowing exactly who and what I was to her daughter. I hadn't even realized I had been staring.
"Sir? Can I help you?" I heard the cashier call to me, knocking me out of my daze.
"Oh, yeah, right," I said as I placed the case of beer on the counter and threw a wad of bills at her. I had to get out of there as quickly as I could.
I made my way back to my truck, slamming the door shut and throwing my head back against the seat. Bella was happy. Bella was dating. I had wanted that for her, I wanted her to go off and have every experience a normal college student should have. That didn't mean that my heart wasn't shattering all over again. It hurt so much I felt like I couldn't breathe, like I would never be able to breathe again because she was the air I needed.
I took a deep, shaky breath, realizing that I had a choice to make. I could let her carry on with Garrett, or I could be selfish and drive the 2 hours up to Eugene, bare my soul to her, tell her that every word I said to her in that garage was a lie and that I was insanely in love with her. Of course, that was if she would even speak to me, which if she was smart, she wouldn't.
But before I made any decisions on what I was going to do, I was going home and drowning all of my feelings in the case of beer I'd just bought.
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Chapter 9 Songs:
Please Remember Me – Scotty McCreery
Goodbye Back – Justin Moore