Inspired by a banner (ht tp : / / twificpics. com/ ? p = 9120) by Frozen Soldier, who took 2nd Place in the Swing Life Away TwiFicPic challenge!

Replace the Unwritten

A/N: The contest entry had to be 1000 words or less. This is the story I had before I had to cut it back to fit the requirements. ;-) And yes, I am still on hiatus. I was just...inspired. :)


"Will you marry me?" I asked her, my heart beating hard in my chest as I waited for her to answer that so-important question on an August afternoon.

Her shy smile made me so happy. "Yeth," she whispered, pushing a lock of hair from her eye. Then, she blinked and grew very serious. "But we have to be grown-upth firtht."

She was missing a front tooth, just like I was; but at six years old, we didn't care. We were happy. I grinned at her. "Now I get to kiss you," I reminded her. "That's what they do when they say they're gonna get married."

Her cheeks got all rosy. "Oh! Okay." She leaned in to kiss me instead and our lips met in a sweet, gentle caress. That childlike innocence never left...not for years. The sunshine of that day seemed to fall generously into our lives, warming our hands as they held each other, heating the air between us as childhood slipped away.

. . .

I confess. I freaked out after we graduated. Seeing the wider world in front of our feet, hers and mine...we'd always traveled our path together. Everyone assumed we always would. I started to get a raw, edged irritation in my chest whenever someone would call us "Alsper." Alice and Jasper. Like Brad and Angelina, we were the couple that would be together always, everyone said.

And we weren't married, either. "I'm not adopting any kids," I joked with Alice one day as she was writing in her notebook – she had always been whimsical and was trying her hand at submitting a story to a magazine the summer after we graduated.

She blinked out of her fantasy world and smiled a little at me. "No one said we had to."

We. We. We were a "we" to her, too. Part of me felt supremely confident and happy knowing I was as much a part of her forever as she was of mine, but part of me wasn't.

That angrier, resentful Jasper took the stage at Open Mic Night at Emmett's. Alice was there, in the back of the bar that night. I knew she was.

"Something's off," she had murmured as she fingered through my hair before we went inside the darkly lit establishment. Emmett's Open Mic Night's were carded for the college crowd, but we – Alice and I – were legal and Emm knew we were coming. "I'll sit in the back, tonight. You'll – you'll do better, I think."

I shrugged, my mind on the set I was going to play. Rehearsing a bit of banter in my head, I didn't even see exactly when she left my side. My body started buzzing with nerves, giving me a peculiar high as the minutes ticked past and my turn at the mic approached.

Holding my guitar, I blinked into the lights that shone on center stage of the small bar. Emmett gave me a nod after a brief introduction. I was nervous and felt sweat run down my spine. But I was also exhilarated – this was my very first time performing in front of a live audience that wasn't entirely comprised of friends and family.

And there were girls in the front...women. Older women. College women, maybe, who were looking me up and down with admiration, anticipation...

Yeah, I got excited. I played for those girls in front of me, sang to them and flirted with my fingers on the neck of my guitar. I grinned and threw their sexual invitations right back at them, thrilling to the experience of knowing that I could do that, that I could affect them like that.

That I would be affected as well was inevitable. I never saw Alice leave that night.

Alsper was, apparently, history.

. . .

She wrote a romance novel, Alice Swan did. She named the heroine "Bella," after her big sister, Isabella, who got engaged to my big brother, Edward, when they were in their mid-twenties. Alice had just finished college and I had finally got a band together and we were playing local gigs and opening for some bigger bands who had local engagements when Edward and I got together for our parents' anniversary in Forks, Washington.

"You oughta read it, it's good," Edward told me, tossing a paperback in my direction. He shrugged sheepishly. "Issa made me read it," he admitted.

My heart thudded in my chest – not in a good way – as I tried to casually peruse the back cover notes. "Unwritten" by Alice Swan was a story about a woman who had had her heart broken by her childhood sweetheart. A handsome, lanky cowboy – were cowboys always lanky? – was fixing it right back up, though, and Bella was going to be just fine.

My mouth went dry and my throat worked and a huge, powerful ache just about doubled me over all at once. "Wow. A book," I managed to rasp.

"You all right, bro?"

I waved off his concern. "Yeah."

"Whatever happened to you two, anyway?"

I tried to put a mask over a shame that suddenly crashed over me. Tried to put the pieces of my face together into something that didn't expose my desperate emotional nakedness. "She couldn't handle the public stuff," I mumbled, keeping my eyes on the cover of her book. Sad eyes, a Stetson hat and a wedding ring featured on the cover of it. "And I couldn't handle her not handling it, I guess."

Edward was silent. Too silent. I felt another Big Brother Knows Best lecture coming on, so I puffed out a breath and turned away –

And there she was. Older, heart-breakingly beautiful, with large sad eyes and a winsome half-smile. "Hi, Jasper," she said, sounding just as she had years ago, when Alsper was still a happening thing.

"Alice, hey." I scrambled, chest tight, to find something to say. I had to - to do something about that look on her face. The expression that said she knew way too much about me to trust me ever again. "Congratulations," I offered, holding the book up a little. "It's come highly recommended." I gestured to Edward, but he'd disappeared while I was getting a grip on myself, I guessed.

"Did you, did you read it yet?"

"Not yet – just got it."

She swallowed and I took a few steps toward her. She did the same as a summer breeze blew in through the screen on the front door. The light warm fragrance of innocence swept between us, as it had when we were kids.

Her mouth opened and shut. Mine did, too.

She might have been the published novelist, but my words were the first that came after. "I don't know what words you wrote, Alice," I whispered, not trusting my usual voice not to crack, "but – hell, I – I – can we unwrite them, maybe? Replace them?"

A slow light came to her eyes. With a tentative smile she reached up to brush my chin with the tips of her fingers. "Y- Yes."


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