Jasper sits in his beat-up Honda Civic, staring down at the big red D- scrawled across the upper right corner of his midterm for Psych 300.

So much for that grade. The professor surely won't let him retake it a third time.

He pushes his hair back and rubs his eyes tiredly. He needs to go home and work on the essay he has due tomorrow. He also needs a drink.

Turning the key in the ignition, he pulls out of the student parking lot and drives towards South Lake Union. He doesn't bother turning the radio on, opting to make the trip in silence. His speaker system isn't great, and the added noise will only give him a headache.

The oil light isn't lit up on the dash anymore. He didn't notice it when he dropped her off at work that morning, but Rosalie must have changed it at some point.

It's beginning to rain heavily outside. The sky is an endless expanse of grey clouds, and he has to turn the windshield wipers up to their maximum speed setting to see the road.

While summer in Seattle was exceedingly pleasant and a nice reprieve from the blaring sun and heat down south, fall is an entirely different story. It's a lot cooler than it would be back in Houston this time of year.

He pulls up to his apartment and there isn't any street parking for two blocks. It would have been nice if he remembered to bring a jacket.

Grabbing his books and locking the car behind him, he walks towards his building.

By the time he gets inside, he's soaked. He sets his things down in his room and cleans the dishes piled up in the sink from last night. Little droplets of water trail behind him as he moves about the kitchen.

When he's finished, he goes to his room, changes, turns on his laptop, and starts on his essay for Philosophy 302.

He needs to write eight pages on the trolley problem.

The professor asked them all to explain and analyze how morality and ethics factor into choosing who lives and dies in a variety of no-win situations. They were told there isn't a right or wrong answer.

It's hard for him to believe there's a potential for morality in sacrificing one life for the greater good of a group. He wonders if things change when that lone person is somehow more important and vital to society than the entire group combined. If that person is a friend.

His hands are shaking.

He goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of leftover red wine from the fridge before popping a Xanax tablet into his mouth.

Jasper sits back down at his laptop and stares at the blank page on his screen. He types his name at the top and fills in a working title while he thinks.

He doubts he would be any happier if he passed the class than if he failed. He wonders if it even matters how well he does on the paper.

Taking a gulp of his drink, he scrolls through the photo reel on his phone.

Pictures from last spring are the first thing he sees. Peter, Charlotte, Nettie, and Lucy make regular appearances, posing with drinks, smiling, laughing, and wreaking havoc. He taps through photo after photo of Maria and himself in a variety of different sunny locations ranging from LA to Vegas to Mexico City.

Though the photos were taken only a few months ago, it feels like he is looking at memories from another life.

There are some new text messages from Maria as well, asking to make plans. I want to see you and what are you doing this weekend?

He's not sure what he's going to do yet, but he knows it can't have anything to do with her.

Peter and Charlotte are having such a great time in Seattle. It appears that all of their problems ended as soon as they left Texas.

He's the squeaky third wheel who's still having trouble.

Jasper wants to talk with Alice again, but he doesn't want to be the guy who always calls her up drunk, high, or at odd hours of the night.

She won't want to speak to him again if she knows how entirely fucked up he is, and he enjoys their conversations.

He feels the calming buzz of alcohol and Xanax starts to fall over him, quieting his melancholic sulking.

The front door slams.

"Jazz! Guess what!" Peter's home.

Jasper shuts his laptop and goes into the living room where Peter and Charlotte are holding a stack of take-out boxes and a six-pack of Modelo.

"My teaching internship was just approved! I'm going to be helping out at an elementary in Ballard next quarter!" Charlotte cheers. "I'm so excited!"

"And we brought tacos to celebrate! Woo!" Peter exclaims, handing Jasper one of the boxes.

"Thanks," Jasper takes the food and sits down on the couch. "Congratulations, Char. That's great."

...

"If you knew I was coming to help you move this afternoon, why is nothing packed?" Edward asks, looking around at the mess scattered across Emmett's room.

"Because I knew you were coming to help me," Emmett answers frankly.

Of course.

Edward huffs and picks up a stack of books and papers off the desk to place in one of the empty cardboard boxes. He grimaces when he feels something sticky.

Upon further inspection, the source of the stickiness appears to be a nearby bag of Sour Patch Kidz. The sour candy sugar spilled onto the desk and coated the bottom of Emmett's Intro to Geology textbook.

He looks over and sees Emmett carelessly tossing a mixture of clean and dirty laundry into his hamper and carrying it out of the room.

Luckily for Edward, his returning housemate doesn't have much furniture to speak of. The room came pre-furnished, so the contents Emmett was taking with him could easily be fit in maybe five boxes, plus the large flat-screen TV sitting on the dresser.

He picks up a sweatshirt off the desk chair and a roll of foil-wrapped condoms falls onto the floor. He quickly shoves them both into the moving box.

If Emmett has a girlfriend, Edward's never met her. Nor has he heard anything about her.

"I appreciate you helping me out with moving. It would be a real pain if I had to make multiple drives across the water to get everything back home," Emmett says as he comes back into the room. "I'll buy you dinner later."

"You don't have to do that, Em. Really, it's fine."

He doesn't have the money for that. That's the whole reason why he's moving back in.

Emmett shoves more of his clothes and books into a box without rhyme or reason. "Bella seems nice."

"She's more than that." Edward follows him out to their cars, each of them carrying a box. "I've never met anyone like her."

"That's good. I'm happy for you, man. Are you guys getting pretty serious?"

Edward's brows knit together. "What do you mean?"

"Did she let you touch her boob yet?" Emmett laughs.

"No. She's not like that."

"Like what? You guys made out, didn't you? Or were you up in your room playing chess and discussing literary canon together the other night?"

"Never mind," he sighs, grabbing the last of the boxes before they make yet another trip outside.

It's been raining all day, so they have to act quickly if they don't want the boxes getting mushy in the downpour. The clouds blocking out the sun make the city look prematurely closer to sunset than it is.

As they make their final trip out, Emmett drops off his keys with his now-ex-roommate Diego. They set the flat-screen wrapped in a comforter in the backseat of Edward's Tesla along with a bag of sports gear.

He thinks over what Emmett said with increasing anxiety. What does touching a girl's chest have to do with relationship legitimacy or seriousness? If anything, he assumes that's a sign of an immature, meaningless fling at this stage of their relationship.

Edward isn't like other twenty-year-olds who just want to waste time and experiment. He wants someone he can spend the rest of his life with.

Bella deserves someone who's going to treat her with the utmost respect. Someone who can care for her and give her a ring, not grope her and make uncouth passes the second they're alone.

Emmett's loud voice cuts into his internal monologue. "I'll meet you back at the house!"

"Okay, see you there," Edward says before getting in his car.

He believes with confidence that Emmett doesn't know anything about relationships.

...

Bella walks the halls of the old brick building looking for the room where office hours for her Multimedia Journalism course are held.

She has to double back twice to reference the map of rooms in the hallway before she locates her destination on the third floor.

Her class TA, a sandy-haired graduate student named James, is sitting in the small, cluttered room working on his laptop. He's wearing an old blue t-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees. For a moment, she thinks she hears the quiet sound of Midnight Sun playing in the background, but he mutes his speaker as soon as he notices her standing at the door.

"Here for office hours?" James asks.

"Yeah, I have some questions about my midterm grade," she says, digging through her backpack for her paper.

They were tasked with writing a three-page personal essay about something that's recently happened in their lives. They were also expected to illustrate it with photos, drawings, graphics, or whatever else they could print on a page.

Bella spent all of Sunday afternoon gathering up snapshots from Jessica and Angela's Instagram stories to add to her project. Naturally, she was shocked when she got back her paper with a big, fat C+ written across the front. Bella is a straight-A student. She's never gotten anything below ninety-two percent.

"The only notes I got were to work on my storytelling and engagement. I wrote what happened, so I'm not sure what that means," she says, flipping through the pages to the scribbled commentary at the end.

"Remind me of your name," James says, pulling up the class roster on his computer. "There are so many of you, it's hard to keep up."

"Bella Swan." She chews her thumbnail out of habit, waiting for her feedback.

"Bella, right. I don't believe I've properly introduced myself. I'm James," he says as he types. "You wrote about moving from Forks."

"Yes."

"Right, so my advice would be to work on making your reader feel excited. Make them care. Your essay, while accurate, was boring to read."

Her face goes hot. Boring? Moving to Seattle was the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her. She's living with two of her best friends in an amazing city, and the hottest guy she's ever met likes her.

She chews her lip. "I guess...I thought it was interesting."

"Your essay was about going hiking in Forks versus hiking in Seattle. There was no plot and no point in the writing. What am I supposed to gain from this knowledge? That somehow the flowers are better on this side of Washington?"

"Well, it was supposed to be about a first date."

"A first date?" This caught his attention.

"I was trying to, well, talk about how things that aren't normally fun can be made fun. If you're with someone you like, I mean. Edward—my kind of boyfriend, I guess—he likes hiking. I don't."

Verbalizing her love life to her TA is beyond embarrassing. It was hard enough writing about it.

"Edward...Edward Masen?" he asks. There's a glint to his eyes like he's hungry for more information.

"Yeah, do you know him?"

"Everyone does," James says casually. "He hosts Midnight Sun. He's a popular guy."

"Oh, right."

"If you want to try rewriting your little romance essay by Friday's quiz section, I can raise your grade." He flashes her a smile. "Since I'm such a big fan of your boyfriend's podcast."

"Sure, thanks." Bella shoves her paper back into her backpack and stumbles towards the door. "See you in class Friday."

"Have a good rest of your afternoon, Miss Swan."

Once in the hallway, Bella quickly hurries out of the building. Something about James makes her uneasy, but it could just be that she's not used to having to fight for her grades.

She's ashamed of having to name-drop her not-yet-boyfriend to sway her grades.

Her mediocre essay drove a nail in the coffin of her self-esteem. She was never particularly special or extraordinary, but she was smart and could do well in school. That was always her thing.

Now her thing is becoming even less interesting while somehow simultaneously spending time with a guy a million miles outside of her league. It's anxiety-inducing.

After a few dates with Edward and getting to see his amazing car, his incredible home, and his ridiculously fabulous room full of memories of fantastic trips to faraway places, Bella is left feeling like she doesn't have much of a life at all.

What did she even do for the past nineteen years?

She's stuck in an internal fight against time, waiting for the inevitable to happen. People like Edward—with their bright futures, good looks, and enormous trust funds—don't continue to date people like Bella. They go on to settle down with celebrities, socialites, philanthropists...

Boring. She's boring.

Even her TA thinks so.

As much as she wants to tell herself it'll be better to not get her hopes up, she can't. Her hopes have already soared to unprecedented heights.

Edward's everything she's ever wanted. He's charming, intelligent, and his room was well-kept. He's not overly aggressive and he's a good conversationalist.

He's a great kisser. She would kiss him all day long if she could.

She can see herself having a happy life with him. If he doesn't break up with her and find someone better, that is.

...

Edward rewinds the backyard security camera footage for the dozenth time and plays it back at half speed.

"There. Do you see them?" he pauses, pointing to a shadow in the tree line.

He's sitting in the downstairs library with Alice. It's after dinner now, and he's been trying for hours to figure out a way to track down whoever was creeping around their property watching them while they played baseball the night of the dinner party.

"Kind of?" She squints at the overly grainy, dark video clip. "I don't think you're going to identify anyone from this."

He lets out a sharp exhale and rubs his temple irritably. "You're right. I don't want people snooping around our house like that, though. You didn't see any visions that night?"

Alice's eyes go wide. He knows from the look on her face that she isn't telling him something.

"You did. What did you see?" he demands.

"I don't know who it is, but I think they've been following me around."

"Like you have a stalker?"

"I don't know. I was hoping it would just go away."

He gives her a disapproving look. "You were hoping it would just go away? You're kidding."

"No. It happens sometimes," she says, fiddling with the tennis bracelet on her wrist.

"How serious is it? They're just following you?" Edward asks, continuing to scrub through the surveillance clip.

"No, I saw more. Whoever it is has been taking photos of me." She sinks back into her chair. "And, I don't know if it's related, but the other night when I was at the gym I had a vision that someone had tied me up and blindfolded me."

Goosebumps rise on his skin and his mind goes in a million different directions.

Some sick freak has been following around Alice for who-knows-how-long, and he was oblivious to it.

"You didn't see any identifiable features on this person?" he asks. "Hair color? Height? Weight?"

"No, the perspective was all off. It was dark."

"Have you wondered if maybe it has something to do with that weird guy you keep hanging out with?"

She blinks, a look of confusion crossing her face.

Edward rolls his eyes. He knows for a fact that she only spends time with one other guy besides Emmett, Carlisle, and himself.

The lightbulb goes off in her head. "No, it has nothing to do with Jasper!"

"You don't know that. How long ago did you meet him and when did the visions start happening?"

"It's not Jasper, Edward. That's as ridiculous as me accusing Bella of being a murderous stalker."

"Not really. Bella doesn't show up to family dinners wasted," he retorts.

Alice is being naive if thinks no one will notice something as glaring as her bringing some hungover loser to dinner without explanation. Her overly optimistic outlook needs a reality check. Her taste in men is awful.

She gives him what he imagines is the meanest look she can muster, but given her size and natural happy-go-lucky disposition, she's about as threatening as a chihuahua.

"Be nice, Edward," she reprimands.

Edward pays her light, sing-song caution no mind. "It's not mean to tell a child not to hop in a stranger's van when they're promised candy. It's called being responsible."

"Good thing I'm not a kid, and I prefer fruit salad," she says, jumping up from her seat. She promptly grabs her tablet she had been doodling on off of the tabletop and exits the room.

"Your analogy makes no sense," he shouts after her.

Edward goes back through the camera footage one last time before Googling better home security systems. They're going to need a higher resolution camera if he's going to catch this person on tape.

He'll deal with Alice and the Jasper situation later. If she's going to flippantly disregard safety precautions when her visions are telling her otherwise, he isn't going to sit by and watch it play out like a slow-motion car crash.

He wouldn't know what to do if one of his closest friends met an untimely end.