Secrets
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Maria.
I grow to hate that name, and everything it stands for.
He mentions her name many times that first night, casually, but each time I hear those three simple syllables it's like a slap in the face. The meeting at the roadside. The excruciating pain of his change. Newborn battles, newborn training. Monterrey, Reynosa, Houston. I clench my teeth together when he explains seeing Maria for the first time, and details her exceptional beauty. I imagine this perfect, goddess-like woman who is everything I am not, this woman who Jasper's life revolved around for as many years as I have been alive. I know they must have been romantically involved — I can hear it in his voice and read it between the context of his careful words. He uses plural form often in regards to her: "we held Monterrey" , "we built up the army" , "we lost all the newborns at once."
I despise her.
When he finishes his long, heartbreaking story, the one that overshadows mine like an ocean of blood in comparison to a droplet — when I sit there seething with a raging, gut-wrenching hatred for a demon I've never met, he looks at me with hollow, deadened eyes.
"You're angry with me," he says flatly, and presses his lips together for a long moment. His quiet voice is steady and grim, even though his hands are shaking. "Do you want me to leave?"
His simple question shocks me. Terrifies me. "No!" I burst out before I can help it. "Why would I want you to leave?"
He just stares at me for a moment, and then, wordlessly, gestures at himself, at his red-tinged eyes, at the scars that cover his jaw and his neck, as if this explains everything. And I realize in horror that he had felt my hatred and wrongly assigned it to himself. He actually thought that I hated him for this — for what he was forced by Maria and by nature to do. I breathe out in regret, and my stomach tightens with grief and compassion at the wounded, walking-dead look in his eyes.
"Jasper," I whisper softly. "Jasper, no. That's not it— not at all. I'm not angry with you." Because the words don't feel like enough, I reach for his hand. He flinches when I touch him, but I swallow the hurt and brush a thumb along his scarred skin. "And I don't want you to leave." Not ever.
He is confused. "Then... what?"
"I hate..." I trail off, unable to even speak her name. "I hate what happened to you."
And I hate her, I think silently, for everything she made you into, and for the years she kept you and loved you and touched you, while I was on my own, alone.
In the days that follow that first night, It's hard for me to think of anything else. Maria, my mind repeats endlessly, jealous to a fault. Maria. I wonder if she's the reason why Jasper so carefully avoids touching me, and why he always seems to freeze when I put my hand on his. I wonder if she is the one who taught him everything he knows: the history of the Volturi, the inner-workings of a coven, the marked behaviors of our kind. I wonder if she once spent an evening showing him how to forge papers and pick locks, long before he ever managed to show me. And when he stares at me sometimes, for just a fraction of a second too long, I wonder if he's wishing that I were someone else — the beautiful, scarlet-eyed woman he left behind in Mexico.
Do you miss her? I long to ask, but feel too afraid to. Did you love her?
Instead I let the questions burn inside of me, along with all the feelings I can't feel anymore the words I won't allow myself to speak. In the shadow of Maria, I feel more uncertain than ever; a weak, plain little entity in comparison to the one who changed him and owned him for decades before I'd even seen his face.
For the those first few months in Middlebury, we stay mostly to ourselves.
Jasper isn't eager to test himself with the human population yet, and the visions I do see are not favorable. We hunt every day instead, and though he doesn't like the taste of animal blood in any way shape or form, I begin to see a difference in him. At first it's just his eyes — I feel a slight pang of regret as the familiar ruby-red color I have seen for years in visions fades into the same honey gold of mine own. But I find I am prouder of this new shade; I know what it costs him and what it means to his heart.
When his eyes finally warm into a steady amber, his demeanor begins to change as well. His movements become less restrained and his speech becomes less hesitant. The habitual frown and sad smile are gone, replaced with a look of contentment and the occasional full-fledged grin. He begins to take a bright-eyed interest in the world around him, and talks to me with a greater freedom about everything, including his human life before change.
I am fascinated that he remembers. "Tell me everything," I say to him, and I mean it. Did he sleep? Did he dream? What does a broken bone feel like? What does human food taste like? Did he ever get tired? How fast could he run? Did he have a family? What were they like? Does he miss them? Does he think of them? Where did they live and what was their house like and what did they do for a living and for fun?
He answers my onslaught of questions the best that he can, but sometimes has to struggle to remember. Like me, there are blank spots in his memories, parts that have faded grey with age and time. The few things he does remember though, he remembers well, and recounts with a young, affectionate expression that I grow to love more than any other.
He teaches me how to sing his favorite silly Christmas Carols and how to make a snowman, how to sled down a white-covered hill. I learn snow angels and snowball fights, and how to skate over the rough ice of a frozen lake. When he recalls baking we spend an eventful night trying to figure out my oven, eventually producing six dozen batches of blackened chocolate chip cookies. And when the weather clears and the snow melts into spring, he teaches me how to shoot a shotgun and how to track the ground for animals, how to paddle a canoe and how to steer a boat. I learn how to make flower chains and how to whistle on a blade of grass, how to carve little figures out of pine. And on a warm sunny day with not a single human in sight, we make fishing poles out of two fine saplings head out to Ripton Creek with a bucket full of nightcrawlers.
"This is disgusting, you know," I say petulantly, as I pierce my sharpened hook through a live, wriggling worm. "Positively barbaric."
Jasper laughs, and I love the sound of it echoing off the water. "I just saw you tackle and eat a black bear less than twenty minutes ago, and now you're getting squeamish about a worm?"
"I didn't have to shove a hook through the bear's eye."
"Women," he mutters with a shake of his head. The sunlight beaming through the leafy trees speckles over his skin and makes it shine, distorted by the ridges of his crescent-shaped scars. "As I recall, my sister had a soft spot for the worms too. She used to cry and cover her eyes when I took her down to Mercer Creek to fish for dinner."
"In Houston?"
He nods. "In the woods behind the house." He pauses for a moment, remembering. "I used to love it there, especially in the summer months. The hotter and brighter, the better, as far as I was concerned. God I used to love the sunshine." A strange look crosses his expression, and he bends his head down, concentrating on the silvery fishing line that disappears into the water. "I passed by those woods with Maria once, when we took Houston. We actually crossed the part of Mercer Creek where I used to fish. It was dark, though... and colder than I remembered."
I clench my hands tight around my fishing pole, a sick ball of jealousy and pain in my stomach. Maria had seen the place where he'd grown up, the place where he'd spent his happiest human years. Did he teach her how to fish too? Did he help her thread a sapling and show her how to cast? Rage, sick curiosity, and jealousy battle within me like fiends, and a completely unrelated question bursts out of me before I can help it:
"If you were so miserably unhappy, why did it take you so long to leave her?"
Jasper looks surprised and even a little angry at this question, but the fury melts away when he sees the desperate look on my face. His golden eyes soften. "She was all I had," he says simply, after a long silence. "However dark and miserable, she was all I knew."
Did you love her? I want to ask, and almost do. It is a stone-weighted mystery on my heart, outbalanced only by the one other question, the most important question, the one that lies beneath everything I say and do: do you love me?
But my line tugs and the sapling dips toward the water, and suddenly we are both laughing and yelling and splashing around in the creek — as if the conversation had never taken place, as if I hadn't come dangerously close to asking the question that could either send him running or bring him straight into my arms. Instead it is only a sparkling afternoon with jokes and laughs and fishing, and talk of lighter brighter things that aren't attached to hurt. Our demons are momentarily pinned back to the shadows, where they watch with steely-eyed waiting as we catch fish after fish, soak each other with splashing, and lay out on the green grass to dry.
We come back with over fifteen trout that day, and Margaret and William eat nothing but fish for the next month and a half.
I find my days are louder now, filled of the sound of Jasper's typewriter and Jasper's showering and Jasper's hand as he turns the page of an old book. I learn to listen for the sound of him pacing above me as I sew a new piece in the parlor, and wait in giddy anticipation for his footsteps on the stairs when he comes to ask me a question. I come to recognize each tone of his voice; even as stoic as he is, there is always an undercurrent of intense feeling hidden beneath. I learn and identify each one of his laughs: from polite to mischievous to booming hysterics, and each one of his unique little noises — a growl of frustration when he doesn't understand something, a silent little sigh when he's content. And after he discovers a toolbox in the abandoned shed behind the house, I become familiar with yet another, more prevailing noise:
Thwack.
It startles me so badly the first time that I prick myself with my sewing needle and nearly fall out of my chair.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. It shatters the still quiet of early morning as loud as church bells, as loud as exploding glass. Utterly confused, I stalk downstairs and throw the front door open, where I find Jasper crouched over the porch railing with a hammer, nailing a piece of fresh wood to the side of the house. He is wearing his old leather cowboy boots, faded jeans and an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and looks so inhumanely sexy that my stomach drops about ten feet at the sight of him.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack-thwack-thwack.
"What in God's name are you doing?"
Jasper pauses in mid hammer-stroke. "Being useful?"
"It is four o'clock in the morning," I hiss, unsure whether I'm irritated by the noise or by my own horrendously inappropriate thoughts.
He seems to find my observation exceptionally amusing, and points the hammer at me. "You know, you're awfully sensitive about hours for someone who doesn't sleep."
"I'm used to being quiet at night," I say imperiously. "Everyone else is sleeping."
"Well, we're not asleep. So I might as well find something constructive to do. I can't manipulate the stock market or design a new line of fall jackets, like some people—" He gives me a devastating smile. "—so I'm falling back on the things I know."
"Hammering," I say flatly.
"And sawing, and sanding, and nailing, and other very manly pursuits. You can help if you'd like, I have another hammer in the toolbox. As soon as I get this last piece in place, I'm going to prime it and paint it. And then I thought I'd head on up to the roof and do some repairs on that slope over the attic. There were some damp spots up there when I checked, and that can lead to trouble." He hooks the back of the hammer on his belt and takes in my blank, bewildered expression. "What?"
"I didn't know you were so... versatile," I say archly, even as my heart twists fondness at the sight of his sideways smile. He just looks so damn handsome standing there with his hair all a mess and dirt smudged across cheeks and nose. I incline my head when he makes a face at me, and raise a delicate brow. "Shouldn't you be in the study somewhere, stoop-shouldered and learning about algorithms?"
He walks by me toward the shed, easing one shoulder up into a shrug. "The study won't be very comfortable when the roof caves in, now will it?"
Not only does he fix the roof, but he builds an entirely new porch, re-grouts the bricks near the foundation, paints the shed, and puts up a sturdier mailbox. I walk into my bedroom at one point to find him half-hanging out the window with a level and a tape measurer, drawing up plans for a balcony I couldn't possibly need or use. And just when I think it's all over with and he's finally satisfied with the expansions and the fixtures, and the flooring, he heads out to the far reaches of the property with talk of fences and landscape.
"That boy sure is eager to please," Margaret observes one cloudy afternoon, as we drink sweet tea on Jasper's newly built porch swing, watching as he strides across the yard with a shovel in one hand and a bag of cement in the other. "I bet he'd build you a castle if you asked for it." We watch as he jogs back for the first half of what looks to be a wooden archway. "Probably even if you didn't."
"Please," I mutter darkly. "Don't give him any ideas." I feel unnaturally hot at the way his muscles stand out when he picks up the shovel and starts digging a hole near the front walk.
Margaret turns a keen gaze on me. "You know why he's doing this, don't you?"
I'd assumed it was restlessness: his frustration at being stuck in boring Middlebury for so long after a life of constant excitement and movement, but I don't say that to Margaret. I don't know how. Instead, I only shake my head.
She sniffs out a humorless laugh. "Thirty years of taking in strays, and I've learned a thing or two about atonement," she says, watching Jasper work. "He's feverishly trying to make up for something— probably some ancient sin that wasn't even his, some awful atrocity that likely wasn't even his fault. And this... all the repairing and building and helping and teaching... this is the only way he knows how to atone. He isn't just saying 'I'm sorry' on one count, honey. He's trying to apologize for even existing."
I turn back to Jasper with a new ache, and think of his face the night he told me about his past, about Maria. The hollow tone in his voice when he asked me if I wanted him to leave. I think of the times when he stares at me sometimes, with an emotion like longing in his eyes, even as blurry visions of him walking away filter through my mind. "I can't decide," I say softly, "whether he actually wants to leave, or whether he thinks he doesn't deserve to stay."
Margaret raises an eyebrow. "If you don't know that, Angel, you're blinder than I thought."
I look down and take another pretend sip of tea. Margaret seems much more relaxed about my personal life these days — as if she can see the future better than even I can.
Jasper joins me on the porch after she leaves, freshly showered and carrying A Tale of Two Cities. As the sunlight fades and the summer insects buzz around the amber porch light, he reads out loud in his slow, wonderful drawl. I curl on the porch swing beside him, not quite touching him, but close enough to feel the current between us. I look out at the silhouetted sugar maples, feathered black against a creamsicle sky, and realize that I've never been happier than I am in this moment. Never more quietly content, never more at peace, never more at home. Jasper moves to turn the page and glances down at me with a smile, his eyes warm. My chest aches deliciously, on fire with something hot and unbearable, but I stifle the emotion and hold it back, a secret I dare not speak.
I don't yet know how to love without a governing fear. Fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of the scarlet-eyed woman who held him so long and so tightly, before me. And most of all, worst of all, is the blank terror that at any moment now, any heartbeat of a second, I will wake up in the mirror room again, lost, scared, and alone.
I close my eyes as Jasper reads on, and search for it — the vision that anchors me to sanity and to the earth. The sunset, the porch swing, and Jasper's smooth voice all disappear in a blur of lightheaded emptying, pouring out beneath me as I move into the most certain future I know:
Jasper's eyes, now brilliant gold and tender, stare into me with such tenderness, such love, that I can scarcely catch my breath. I feel the soft touch of his thumb in the hollow beneath my ear, his cool fingers on my neck.
"Alice," he says, nothing more.
This simple vision, this one snapshot of a moment, is all I will ever need. The future fades away into the glow of amber light, and I am back on the porch swing again, my head somehow cradled in Jasper's lap. He doesn't touch me back, but he doesn't push me away either, and for me, for now, it seems enough. He reads without pause and I listen, clutching the secret held tight against my heart. I am waiting, simply waiting, with a quiet, burning hope. It flickers there in silence, bathed in amber light, warmed by the gentle cadence of his voice.
***
Secrets.
I keep many of them over the next six months, hidden behind a towering wall of fear and pessimism. The days I spend with Alice are the brightest, purest, most beautiful days I've ever spent. It feels like someone else's life, someone else's perfect existence. I laugh more than I've ever laughed. I talk more than I've ever talked. I smile so much that it becomes automatic — a twitch at the corner of my mouth whenever Alice enters the room. I begin to believe in things I never thought possible. I begin to believe in things I know I shouldn't. And yet, even in the face of such happiness, these perfect days are also filled with the things we don't say.
Our respective talents terrify each other. I am hesitant to make any decision, and Alice is uncommonly guarded and impassive. There are moments, brilliant moments, when both of us slip — times when we're laughing or running and get too close or too open. And then, as skittish as a pair of deer, both of us pull away.
The things we don't say build and build, until it begins to feel like this terrible storm that's just waiting to break.
But despite my resistance, and despite my guarded warnings, Alice becomes my best and dearest friend. I share things with her that I've never shared with anyone, not even Peter, not even my family so long ago. Because her eyes are so understanding and so alive, I even dare to voice my dreams, and wait in terror as she considers them. But she takes my desire to write Civil War history and attend an Ivy League university in stride.
"Of course," she says, as if these are the simplest things in the world for a bloodthirsty vampire with no credentials and no formal education. "Why do you think I bought you the typewriter? Get writing, and I'll make some phone calls and get us both enrolled for fall curriculum. Harvard? Dartmouth? Brown? Princeton?"
My head spins. "Maybe we should think about this first—"
"Come on, Jazz," she says with a laugh over her shoulder. "Live a little."
She calls me 'Jazz,' and I love it. The first time she says it, so casually and naturally, my heart very nearly melts. Had I ever had a nickname before? Had anyone ever felt comfortable enough, affectionate enough, to call me something like that? She uses the nickname the most when she's excited about something, and I begin to associate it with her bright golden eyes and quick hands, the shape of warm red lips that never stop moving.
I watch her often, out of the corner of my eye as she makes even the simplest tasks seem like magic. I love the way her eyes skim the pages of the glossy magazine she loves, and the way she dances while she dusts around me in the study. Because of her, I spend more days outside in the sunshine than I have in my entire vampire existence — just to watch the glittering of her white skin beneath her shock of soft black hair. I pretend to read while she lies on her stomach and sketches in the yard, her eyes riveted on the paper. I love her intent, narrowed expression, and wait in knowing anticipation for the moment when her lips begin to curve, because she's managed to create perfection.
She is perfection, in a way that I never have been and never will be.
And it isn't just her outrageous beauty, or the melody of her voice — it's the way she cares. About Margaret, about William, about the townspeople, about her mysterious coven of amber-eyed vampires, about everyone... about me. She wants to be good, she wants to make a difference, and she does it all just as effortlessly as breathing, simply by just being herself. It's in the way she smiles and in the way she determinedly takes up the tasks and problems of others. The way she so seriously listens, even when she doesn't have to. Before Alice, I never knew what it meant to be generous and loving. Before Alice, I never what it meant to live.
I allow her to take me on as a makeover project, outfitting me in stylish new jackets, suits, fedoras, suspenders, and slacks. I insist on cowboy boots instead of loafers, to which she rolls her eyes, but obliges. Days later a shipment of alligator boots arrives from Texas, in enough varying shades and styles to stock a small department store.
"You think you might be overdoing it, darlin'?" I ask, holding up a lone red boot I know I'll never wear.
Alice raises an eyebrow. "Have you seen how many shoes I have?"
I only laugh. She has a point.
I haul my tools up to the attic that day and start building shelves. For weeks on end, I hammer and saw, tear up old floorboards, and put up mirrors. It feels almost like a penance, what I'm doing — like somehow building her the most beautiful closet ever seen by man will make up for all I am and all I'll never be able to be. At first, Alice is puzzled by my strange determination, but then she takes the project on as her own and joins me. We throw the windows open to let the sunlight in, and Alice sings as she follows me with a tape measurer and a dustpan. We laugh about nothing and talk about everything, taking occasional breaks to watch the sunset or go over sketches and plans.
She brings up the radio on a warm August day when yellow light spills in and filters through the dust motes. We listen to Frank Sinatra and Billie Holliday, both of us covered in white paint and sawdust, Alice swaying on the spot while I try not to drip paint on my red cowboy boots.
"Do you know how to dance?" she asks me, spinning around in a shaft of light, her eyes glowing.
I try not to think of how my arms ache to hold her around the waist. I try not to imagine how her slim body would feel pressed up against my own, her graceful hand in mine. "I do, yes."
"Teach me?"
This is dangerous, I know, very dangerous. But she is just so incomparably beautiful standing there with her arms held out and her head slightly tilted, all aglow in summer light. Everything around us seems to grow very, very still, and suddenly, before I even realize what I'm doing, I have her in my arms. I place my palm on her waist, and hold my hand out for hers, shuddering when her cool fingers brush against my shoulder and my neck. Her soft hand wraps around mine, our palms fitted perfectly together. My entire body feels afire, burning with some wild thing that is half-fear and half-joy as she stares at me expectantly. It takes me a full five seconds to realize that she is waiting for me to move. I do, numbly, leading her in an easy waltz. Alice looks down at our feet, copying my movements and exposing the silky white curve of her neck.
My mouth goes dry. "See, it's simple," I rasp out, though it's anything but.
Hesitancy and fear surround her a few minutes before she asks, "Who taught you how to dance?"
I hear the question behind the question, and my hand tightens on hers. "My mother."
"Oh," she says, surprised. "So..." But she doesn't finish that sentence and I don't finish it for her. Maria is the last thing I want to think about right now. Because every time I think about Maria, I think about how I need to leave. And right now, dancing with Alice in my arms, leaving seems like a darker hell than I'd ever imagined.
And this is nothing like my last dance with Maria in the ballroom of the Monterrey mansion, when she was dressed in red velvet and black lace, glittering with malice and sensuality. This was simple. This was good. This was Alice. I instruct her with quiet one-two-three, one-two-three's, encouraging her and laughing at the look on her face when I bend her back into a dip. It doesn't matter that there are streaks of white paint in her hair, or that she is wearing a simple cotton dress and flats. This dance with her is suddenly the only dance, the only one that ever mattered, and the warm attic air suddenly feels crowded with words that I cannot say.
I've been searching for you for years.
You are more beautiful to me each and every day.
I have never been so happy.
I...
I...
Secrets.
I keep them from myself, and I keep them from her too. Every day I tell myself to leave. Every day I tell myself to walk away before I get in too deep, before I fall and she falls and we end up in something we'll never be able to escape from. But then she smiles at me, and she laughs, and she shows me something new, and suddenly I find I can't move — not anywhere, not in any capacity, except in this perfect sunlit dance with her.
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A/N: It all seems so wonderful, doesn't it? Things are going so well that nothing bad could possibly happen to them now, right? Right? Right?? ....
