Jasper watches the television screen playing the news overhead in the cafeteria of the student union building.
The closed captions detail a growing issue of student overdoses and injuries related to mysterious concoctions masquerading as popular party drugs. The main draw appears to be that they're sold at below-market prices and come with loyalty punch cards. What a concept.
Footage of the outside of one of the sorority houses is being shown. At least two cars were broken into during a party last night, shortly preceding an emergency trip to the hospital for a half dozen of the partygoers. An unidentified pair of shoes and backpack were left at the site but are being taken in for examining.
It's messy. Whoever's trying to make a quick buck off of unsuspecting students is very messy. They're going to get themselves caught in no time at the rate they're going. The only way they could be more conspicuous is if they film and post their crimes on social media for marketing exposure.
He's not proud of being more discreet in his prior illicit dealings. He was still caught in a corner eventually, but he's glad it was never televised. His parents made sure of that.
"Jazz!" Alice's voice comes from behind his elbow. She hops around to stand in front of him. "I have to pick up a couple of books from the Ave bookstore, then we can head back."
He grabs his backpack off the floor and gets up from the plastic dining chair. "Sure, sounds good to me."
His phone buzzes at the same time Alice's dings. He checks his messages and sees a campus alert. It's another daytime car break-in for an off-campus student housing building two blocks from the university—the fifth this week.
"I didn't realize how common car prowlers were here. Is it normal to get so many campus alerts?" he asks as they exit the building and head out toward the quad.
"Mm, yeah, especially once we get closer to summer," Alice answers distractedly, watching a crowd of excitable high schoolers on a tour pass by. "Just one more quarter and you're done with undergrad! How do you feel?"
"Pretty alright."
"You're supposed to say amazing! I'm not even graduating yet and I'm excited for you!" Her arms stretch out over her head, emphasizing her words.
He smiles. "Well aren't you a ray of sunshine on a gloomy day."
She spins around suddenly, halting his steps and causing him to narrowly avoid stepping on her toes. She giggles at this and grabs his arm to reorient them down a different path still headed in the general direction of the bookstore. She bumps into his side playfully.
"What?" he asks, laughing with her.
"I really like this sweater." Her walk becomes more of a skip, her newfound pep propelling her across the brick pavement.
"Yeah, you got me it. I like it, too. It's my favorite sweater."
She smiles, teeth sparkling, humming happily. She's in high spirits for no apparent reason, but he won't complain.
The late afternoon sun glints off her tiny gold hoop earrings and makes her skin gleam. Her cream-colored skirt swishes as he lets her pull him along.
There isn't a single thing in existence prettier than Alice when she's smiling. He's sure of it.
"Hey, I've been thinking about what you said the other day. About what I want and where we're going," she begins. "I have a two-week internship in Paris this July that I absolutely have to go to. I'll be assisting one of the most amazing up-and-coming couture designers in Europe. I know you just started doing that part-time thing at the research center, but do you think you'll still be doing that by then? Will they let you work remotely?"
"I don't know. I'll find out," he replies. That wasn't exactly what he'd been asking before, but it is technically an answer to future plans.
"Good, okay. Esme was supposed to come with, but she can't now because of the baby—not that I wouldn't want you to come with anyway! But I have an extra ticket. It'll be a lot of fun having you there," she continues. "This summer feels like it's going to be good. Busy, but good."
"And you'll be a senior next year."
"And then I get to do design full time! I like living at the house with everyone—it's convenient to have others around cooking and stuff—but I'll probably need more space for a studio once that's in full gear. Plus it'll be a lot noisier once Esme and Carlisle have the baby. Right now, none of us are ever really home, so it's nice. It feels more spacious than it is," she says. "We should get one of those cute little three-story townhouses. I saw one in a dream a few weeks ago that had a really nice office for you. There was a downstairs studio area for me, and I think a rooftop patio. What do you think?"
He feels unexpected but much-needed relief. She wants him to officially move in with her, and she's asking for his input.
Alice has been consistent for the duration of their relationship, so it's not that he doubted her for any reason, but it's incredibly satisfying getting to settle in more. He's never gotten to participate in things that come from being in a long-term, serious relationship. "I get an office?"
"Yeah, and it wasn't full of clothing racks, so I assume that means the closet space is adequate. Do you have good credit?"
"As of right now, I'm in a lot of debt."
"Oh, right. More or less than a hundred thousand?"
"Less. A lot less."
"Okay, I can work with that. Luckily I know a good financial manager."
"Let me guess: it's you."
She grins. "Yes. How familiar with investing and the stock market are you?"
He isn't—at all. He wasn't particularly interested in finances ever, much to his father's dismay. He has a feeling that's about to change pretty quickly, though.
...
"Hey, babe. You're probs still sleeping because you're a super hardworking nurse and everything, but I was wondering if you still wanted to go out for dinner tonight," Emmett recites to Rosalie's voicemail. "Haven't heard from you in like a week...and a half. Miss you and love you and stuff."
He flops down on his bed and sighs. She's been in a pretty bad mood lately, and with not much to do besides scroll through memes online and play Xbox, Emmett's resorted to actually attending all of his lectures for once out of sheer boredom.
They need to do something fun together, so he planned a night out for them.
The last few times they hung out, she was pretty pissy and on edge. He wonders if she's still mad or if she'd be down to go eat food, play games, and make out.
Once he starts thinking about kissing her, he loses his previous train of thought about plans for the night and the reading homework he's supposed to be doing in the meantime.
"If anyone out there is listening," he says up at the ceiling. "Please let me get laid soon."
His phone rings and the screen says it's Rosalie.
"Sorry, I was drying my hair. I'll be ready in an hour," she says.
"Sweet! I'll come pick you up!"
The drive over to Rosalie's place in Magnolia and back over to the east side to their destination—his favorite sports bar arcade—is traffic-logged and filled with asks of are we almost there? and where are we going?
When they finally arrive and get inside, though, Rosalie looks even less content. In the multicolor glow of the arcade interior, he can fully see her in all of her glory. She's wearing a suede jacket, some kind of satin-y camisole, jeans, and heels.
"You look really nice," he thinks aloud.
Her reply is dry. "And you've taken me to a children's play place."
"Nah, they kick all of them out at eleven."
"It's seven-thirty. I thought we were going to dinner."
"They have food and drinks. It's fun. I used to come here all the time."
She sighs. "With your little flings?"
"Nah, with my boys! Come on, we can sit at the bar. They have pretzel dogs."
Somewhat convinced, she follows him over and sits, grabbing the drink menu. "A vodka soda," she says to the bartender.
"And a strawberry watermelon margarita for me," Emmett adds.
Rosalie gives him a judgey look.
"What? They're good!" He skims through the food menu. "Can we also get pretzel dogs, fries, cheese sticks..."
"I want a burger."
"Yeah, same. I think that's good. Wait, no, also edamame. For health."
The bartender leaves with their order and returns shortly after with drinks.
Rosalie sips down half of hers before speaking. "I hate Fridays. I had to stay late at work and didn't get home until after eight this morning."
"Damn. Hey, try this." He holds out his margarita.
She takes a sip and gives a pleasant nod.
"Not bad. Did I tell you that one of my coworkers just got engaged? She's so annoying. She keeps showing up to work with this giant binder of venues and color schemes and shit. Like we get it, you're engaged, you don't need a community vote on which napkins to get," she grumbles. "I had to stay late because she was supposed to come in and cover me when my shift ended, but she was out all night celebrating and forgot to set her alarm."
"Did she get in trouble?"
"Hardly." She slumps over a little toward him, so he hugs her. "What did you do today?"
"So I got fired from my new job for getting into a Twitter fight with a dozen local businesses over cryptocurrency and pineapple on pizza. There's good news, though. When I went to the gym this morning, one of the managers said I could work the front desk part-time until I found something better. Their last guy quit to go backpacking through South America."
"I'm going to pretend like I didn't hear you say that," she says, kissing him.
It's more than fine by him to keep kissing.
He isn't sure how much time has passed before he notices some of their food's been placed on the bar beside them.
"Babe, look, cheese sticks," he says.
"Hm? Oh." She grabs one. "Do they have skee ball here?"
"They have everything here."
...
Alice scrolls through her text message log with Bella, rereading all the one-sided messages she was sent over the three months Edward was gone.
Are you free later today?
I think Edward and I just broke up.
Are we still friends?
Alice, I really hope we can still be friends. I'm sorry that I made things worse with Edward and Jasper. I was trying to help.
You're my best friend. I don't have anyone else to talk to.
They're as difficult to read now as they were when she first received them. She could have been a better friend—more supportive—but once she was forced to choose between Edward and Bella, it felt like there was no right decision. Edward asked her to stay out of it, and she did. Up until things got out of control.
Alice taps into her internet browser and looks at the cart full of items she picked out earlier that morning. She has a few watches, but none of them are smart watches. She swipes through the options, adding a diamond and 18k gold Lagos Smart Caviar watch band priced at $29,500.
Is that too much? Maybe that's too much.
She feels Jasper sit next to her on the couch. He rests his chin on top of her head and wraps his arms around her shoulders.
She removes the Lagos band and adds a $539 Hermes leather band and a $99 gold Milanese loop instead. There. She's being sensible.
Jasper isn't though. His clinging is making it almost impossible to finish checking out.
"Give me a second, this is important!" she whines, thrashing side to side in an attempt to shake him off. She doesn't even make him budge.
He lets up so she can move her arms freely again. "It looks like you're shopping."
"Because I am."
"What are you getting?"
"Pretty shinies. Look, they're so cute. I can't wait to wear them in...five to seven business days. Hm...maybe expedited is better..." She changes the shipment speed, finishes typing in her mailing address, credit card info, and confirms the purchase in a few more taps. "Okay, what did you find?"
"Do you wanna play chess?" he asks, pointing to the board he dug out of the game closet.
"Yeah! Should we see if Edward and Bella want to play? There's another set."
"Sure."
She doesn't bother texting or going upstairs to get them. Shouting will suffice. "EDWARD! BELLA!"
It takes several minutes, but eventually, they appear at the top of the stairs all dazed and flushed looking. Bella's hair's tucked into the collar of her hoodie like she just put it on again, while Edward's cardigan has been removed, leaving him in just a rumpled, dark green button-down.
Alice isn't going to think too hard about that.
"Let's play chess! Grab the other board on your way down," she calls up at them.
"You only need two people to play chess," Edward balks.
"But you need four for a tournament!"
He and Bella stand there awkwardly whispering back and forth before agreeing to play, grabbing the requested second chessboard from the hallway and sitting on the opposite side of the coffee table.
"Standard rules or take-all?" Edward asks.
"Alice chess."
"We're not playing Alice chess with four people. That would take forever."
"Do you have somewhere to be?"
He gives her an irritated look. Apparently, he does.
"Is that like Alice in Wonderland chess? Where the pieces switch boards every turn?" Bella asks.
"Yes, and it's really fun, but we'll just play standard today," Alice answers as she takes one of the boards and starts to set it up. "I'll play Bella first, and Edward can play Jasper."
Between the two of them, it only takes a few moves before they're stuck in a standoff. Both of their queens are at risk, and she's trying to box in his king, but he has a rook that could be an issue if she doesn't get it out of the way.
"Check," Jasper announces.
Bella sighs. "You win."
Edward glances over at their board. "What do you mean? If you move your knight back that way and your bishop over here..." He begins walking her through a lengthy means to get out of the check even though it's too late.
Alice grabs one of his rooks off the board while he's distracted and swaps around a pawn and his queen.
"I already gave up," Bella complains.
"You didn't have to."
When Edward finally ceases his coaching, he looks down at his own board with a concerning level of suspicion. "Did you change something?"
"I've been sitting right in front of you, how would I do that?"
"Where's my rook?"
"I'm pretty sure you only had one..."
Bella's staring at the pile of claimed pieces sitting on Alice's side of the table with a curious, amused look on her face.
Maybe it's better if she lets Edward win. If both he and Bella lose, surely they'll retreat back upstairs to continue whatever it was they were doing.
"If you want your rook back, here. You can have both," Alice concedes.
Edward isn't convinced. "No, I don't want them. I'll beat you even without them."
"Okay, then it's your move."
"I know, I'm thinking."
"What's that like?"
"I could try to explain, but I don't know that you'd understand it."
Bella and Jasper laugh. Alice winks at them.
"Hey, Bella, so which Anne of Green Gables adaptation were you talking about when you said you liked the dresses?" Alice asks.
"The original book...I guess..."
Alice tilts her head in consideration. She watched a half dozen movies and TV versions of the series throughout the week, but forgot to consider she might mean a historically accurate version."You want an Edwardian-era-style wedding dress? From 1908?"
Bella stutters and stammers incoherently. "Well, I...um. Maybe. Yes? Is that weird?"
Edward starts to move his queen but puts it back down. He goes for one of the bishops but sets it back down. "You moved my queen."
"I did not!" Alice denies.
"How would it even get over here? That makes no sense strategically."
"You can't blame me for your questionable strategy."
Ignoring her, he switches his queen and pawn back around, still visibly thinking.
Bella's getting a kick out of them bickering. "Maybe we should have gone for speed chess," she teases.
Edward quickly moves his queen across the board and Alice takes it with a rook. He sighs aggressively.
"Thanks, B," Alice says, holding her hand up. Bella high-fives it.
"Don't high-five her!" Edward whines.
"I'd high five you, too, if you took her queen," Bella says lightheartedly, spurring him to focus even harder on the board.
Just for fun, Alice lets him win.
...
Emmett ambles through the door to his room, miscalculating his path and hitting the frame with a thunk.
Rosalie laughs, shutting the door behind her. "You had too much."
"Nah, I'm good. I meant to do that. I'm only maybe fifty percent drunk." He sits on his bed and struggles to yank his hoodie off over his head, choking himself in the process. "Maybe sixty percent. I've defs been a lot more sloshed."
"That was fun. We need to play games and eat chicken wings and...get whatever that flaming drink with the color-changing straws was more often."
"You're going to be so hungover in the morning."
Their night out was a success and the two ended up ordering drinks, laughing, kissing, and playing through just about every game they had before being kicked out at the 2 am closing time.
He tosses the sweatshirt to the ground and is startled by Rosalie standing directly in front of him, her blue eyes watching him carefully, darker than usual.
Her lips find his and his hands find her hips, their passion turning into a disorganized frenzy of him losing all his clothes but his boxers and Rosalie ending up with her jeans and jacket off, but her top still on.
She stops abruptly, pushing herself up from his chest. "I feel weird. The entire room's moving."
"The entire room's still, you're the one moving," he reassures her.
"I don't like it. It's stressing me out." She rolls off him onto her back, leaving the two of them laying side-by-side. "Sorry."
Emmett gets the urge to punch Royce in the face. He refrains from voicing that desire out loud, though, because he doesn't want to upset Rosalie when they're both shit-faced. "No worries."
"You know, I didn't want to be a nurse when I was little," Rosalie says out of nowhere. "I wanted to be a princess, which sounds stupid, but at the time it seemed like the perfect gig."
Emmett laughs. "Until a witch turns you into an old shoe."
"Even if that did happen, everything always works out in the end," she says wistfully. "It doesn't matter if she's poor and becomes ugly and messes everything up. Even if no one's on her side, the princess always gets her happily ever after."
That's a pretty good moral for a story.
"I wanted to be a train," he says.
"You mean a conductor?"
"No, like a steam engine. I wanted to be Thomas the Train."
Rosalie starts to laugh. She's more giggly than he's ever heard her before tonight. He likes this side of her. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"
"Yeah, I know." He grins. "Yours is much more realistic. All you need is a crown."
They fall into a silence and the warm, fuzzy buzz he's still feeling is making sleep very appealing.
He closes his eyes.
Last night was rough. He hates seeing her stressing over dumb things like her parents, Edward's spontaneous marriage, and her coworkers not liking her.
This must be what people mean when people say that relationships are hard.
"I wish I was married," Rosalie says softly. "That's what I want more than anything. A big wedding with the works, a house with a fenced yard, and then two or three really cute kids to look after. I used to think that would be easy to have, but now that I'm older, it doesn't seem so simple."
She sounds so sad.
"I'm drunk," she says. "Sorry."
"You'll get married. There's plenty of time left for that. You don't need to give up so early."
"Says the one who wanted to go from playing professional sports to preparing taxes for a living."
"Hey! At least I'm not the one trying to trade in a BMW for a Chevy Traverse."
"Oh, no, that's gross. I'm keeping my coupe."
"Yeah, you should. It's a nice car." He reaches over and grabs her hand.
There's another long pause, and this time he really does almost fall asleep, but Rosalie isn't finished talking.
"Hey, Em? Do you still like me?" she asks.
He can't fathom how that's even a question. "I'm obsessed with you. Did I not tell you that I love you a million times today?"
"My parents don't even know you exist." She sighs.
"We haven't been together that long."
"Almost six months." Her statement comes out like a rejection of his.
It doesn't feel like it's been half a year. It still feels like they've barely had any time at all. He always thought a long-term, serious relationship would go stale or fizzle and become too much work as time went on, but there are still so many things he wants to do with her.
"Do you really not see yourself getting married for another ten years?" she asks.
"I don't know. It still feels so far off from now."
Her voice softens. "There it is. That's the problem. It's like some cruel joke."
"What do you mean?"
"We have conflicting priorities."
She isn't making much sense. He wonders if it's because she's drunk or it's his own inebriation making things not add up.
"You're my priority. I thought you wanted to take it slow," he says, turning onto his side to face her. "You said Edward and Bella were being stupid for rushing in, right?"
She keeps her eyes on the ceiling, just lying there breathing.
Waiting on a reply that doesn't come, Emmett falls asleep.