A/N: Hey, Guys! Hope you like this chap and hope you have a nice weekend :)
3 – It's a beautiful day
"So what's your story?" Alice asked Edward. We were eating our sandwiches and coffees, and I was only half listening to their conversation and half concentrating on eating.
Edward raised his eyes to look at Alice, and I noticed that they were a really deep shade of green. Not that I cared though, but whatever.
"I haven't got one yet," Edward told her. "I'm writing it."
"Okay," Alice said. "So where do you live?"
"I used to live in Port Angeles," Edward replied and took another bite of his sandwich. "Now I don't know anymore."
"So you ran away?" Alice questioned.
"Kind of, I guess."
"Nice. That's what Bella did, didn't you?" Alice said, looking at me.
I put my sandwich down. "I didn't run away, Alice is just being dramatic," I explained to Edward. "I told my parents where I was going."
"Really? Because I was under the impression that we haven't decided where we're going," Alice said. "And you left them a note. That counts as running away."
"How did you get permission from your mom, by the way?" I asked.
"Well, she knows she can't control what I do. I'm a free spirit like that." Alice smiled.
"Your mom's nice." I sighed.
"Well, you can have her if you want," Alice joked.
"Thanks."
Edward looked from me to Alice and back. I had the feeling that he was trying to figure us out. Well, I was trying to figure him out too. Every now and then, I took quick sideways glances in his direction, taking notice of his bronze hair, green eyes, the way his lips curved when he smiled, his blue t-shirt.
"You two are fun," he said finally. "So what are you going to do in Seattle?"
I looked at Alice. "We never discussed that. Sightseeing?" I suggested. "What do people do on road trips?"
"Sightseeing, huh?" Edward said and seemed to be silently amused about something.
"What are you going to do?" Alice asked.
"Who knows? I'll find something interesting enough to do," Edward answered. "I've got couple of friends in Seattle. I might go visit them."
I struggled with myself a while, but then asked: "And then?" I was still curious about him even though I tried not to be. He was pretty mysterious with his backpack and worn-out jeans and green eyes. It was irritating, but suddenly I wanted to find out more about him.
Edward shrugged. "Las Vegas, San Francisco, maybe Phoenix... We'll see."
"Oooh," Alice gasped. "Las Vegas. Bella, we have to see Las Vegas."
I smiled. "Everything in time, Alice. Guess we can go to Las Vegas if you want to."
"You haven't said much about yourselves," Edward pointed out as we were walking back to the car. "Where are you from? What are you running away from?"
Alice unlocked the car doors and got inside. "We're not running away from anything. We're running toward something."
"Toward what?"
"Adventures," I answered before Alice, rolling my eyes.
"Cool," Edward said.
"And we're from Forks," Alice added.
"Small town girls," Edward said, half to himself, as he sat down in the back seat, "alone in the big world."
"Something like that," I muttered as Alice started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot.
Half an hour later, I was dozing off in the passenger seat, Alice was humming along to the song on the radio, and Edward was talking to someone on the phone. I didn't mean to, but I still listened to what he was saying.
"Yeah, I'll be there in an hour," Edward was saying. "No, with two girls. No, they're cool." Then he paused and chuckled a little. "Well, tell Emmett to calm down. You're both idiots. Yes, I already knew that… Yeah, fine." He tapped the window with his finger restlessly. "I said fine… Okay, see you. Bye."
"That sounded interesting," Alice commented. Guess I wasn't the only one listening.
"Just my friends" Edward explained. "They're being jerks as always."
"That's a nice thing to say about your friends," I remarked.
"Bella, you can be such an idiot sometimes, too, but I still love you," Alice pointed out.
"Thanks," I said, trying to decide whether to be offended or not. She had called me an idiot and said she loved me in the same sentence after all.
It was late afternoon when we arrived in Seattle. By that time, the sun was already hiding behind some dark clouds, and it would probably start raining before evening. It took us a while to find a place to park the car, but eventually we found a parking lot that seemed to be pretty close to the city center.
All three of us hopped out of the car and looked around at the busy shopping streets and big buildings. I had been in Seattle a few times before, but it still looked so different and exciting compared to Forks or Port Angeles, where we usually went to shop.
"So," Alice said, still looking around. "We're in Seattle."
"So my friends, Emmett and Jasper –" Edward started.
"The jerks?" I asked, a small smile playing on my lips.
"Yeah, the jerks." Edward grinned and looked me in the eyes. It was just a quick look, but somehow it made me feel a bit uneasy. I didn't know why, maybe it was the intimacy of looking someone in the eye who you had known for only an hour or two. I felt stupid, being intimidated by such a small thing and tried to concentrate on what Edward was saying.
"They offered to take you two around the city a bit," Edward said. "Show you the best places. And then, tonight, if you're not bored with us by then, you could come check out the party they're having. What do you say?"
Alice looked at me with a questioningly. She didn't say anything, but I knew that she wanted to go with them. And I knew that maybe it wasn't clever, but I kind of wanted to go, too. After all I wanted to find out more about him.
"I guess it's fine," I said. "Alice has the worst sense of direction ever. We would just get lost on our own."
"Oh, so now I have the worst sense of direction?" Alice rolled her eyes but sounded pleased all the same. "Leave it to Bella and we'd be lost in five minutes."
I shook my head but didn't say anything, because I knew that my sense of direction was just as bad as hers. I didn't even care to think about how many times we were going to get lost during this road trip. Oh well, at least we were going to get lost together.
"So, I'll call them, then," Edward said. "They'll come to pick us up."
Edward's friends arrived in fifteen minutes. The first one was a big and muscular guy with short hair. His size and huge muscles immediately made him look scary, even though he was smiling. The other one was skinnier and not as tall, with long hair. Their clothes were some kind of mixture of hippie and rock star style, kind of like Edward's.
Edward let out an excited yelp when he saw them and rushed to give them some kind of man hug, slapping on the back in greeting.
Both seemed to be equally excited to see him, and for a while, none of them paid any attention to me or Alice. Then, Edward pulled them toward us.
"These are my friends," Edward introduced the boys.
"Hi, I'm Jasper." The smaller one with long blonde hair grinned at us. I saw Alice looking at him with a mesmerized look in her eyes. I shook my head and made a mental note to warn Alice not to have a crush on some stranger.
"And I go by the name 'The Great Super Awesome Hot King Emmett,'" said the muscular guy as he took a small bow.
Alice and I couldn't help laughing as Jasper and Edward both shot impatient glances at each other as if to say 'here we go again.'
"Nice." I nodded approvingly. "That's quite a name. Your parents must really like you."
"If you think that's too much for you, you can always just call me Emmett," he added. "But not Emm – that sounds like a girl's name."
"Okay, Emm, let's go, if we want to show these ladies something in Seattle other than your oversized ego," Jasper said and turned around. We all followed him out of the parking lot.
"What are we going to do?" Alice asked as we walked down a street toward the city center. Or at least I thought we were going toward the center.
"Well, I think we first have to go through the usual tourist places," Jasper said. "All the boring must-see stuff, you know."
"And then," Emmett said with a mysterious grin, "When the sun's set, we can show you the interesting Seattle."
After few minutes' walk, Jasper finally stopped at what seemed to be a busy market street. "Here we are," Jasper said. "Welcome to the Pike Place Market, the biggest public market in Seattle,
containing about fifty annoying tourists per square foot."
"What could possibly be boring about this?" Alice said to me in a low voice, and I had to agree. It was so colorful, full of people and street musicians and interesting looking stalls.
"Let's go take a look around," Edward said.
"Yeah, to get to the interesting stuff as soon as possible," Emmett agreed.
"Everyone knows that by interesting stuff you mean girls and drugs, but we aren't all that shallow." Edward chuckled. Emmett tried to punch him on the arm, but Edward quickly leaped out of his reach, laughing.
"Behave, guys, or you're going to scare Bella and Alice here," Jasper said as we started to walk through the market street.
We wandered around the Pike Place Market for a while, and found out that it sold about everything from fish and vegetables to tourist t-shirts. Alice and I looked around in awe of everything, but Emmett and Jasper and even Edward looked like they had seen it a hundred times before. Mstly they just chatted about some people they all knew or cracked jokes. Especially Emmett, who seemed to add some kind of joke or snide remark to at least every third sentence he let out of his mouth. All in all, they were pretty fun to hang out with.
After about half an hour, we were still walking through the market streets, stopping every now and then to check out an interesting looking stall. Alice and Jasper walked a little ahead of the rest of us, talking about something and once in a while Alice giggled cheerfully. I let out a little worried sigh looking at them. I knew by experience exactly when my best friend was developing a crush on someone, and she was so falling for that guy. If I asked her about it, she would probably deny it. Well, maybe she didn't even know it herself.
"Don't worry," Edward said to me, looking at Alice and Jasper, too. He probably guessed what I was thinking about. "Jasper's a good guy - your friend's safe."
"And why should I believe you?" I asked, smiling a little.
"I'm a good guy, too," Edward said.
"Hah, you? A good guy?" Snorted Emmett sarcastically, walking to our side. "I'm sure your parents would agree."
"Depends on the definition of good," Edward said.
"Yeah, right. I would say we've had enough of this. I don't know about you, but I'm starving. So what do you say we grab some food and go for a picnic in one of the parks?" Emmett suggested, "As a tourist, I guess you have to see some parks."
Jasper turned around to look at us. "Did someone mention a picnic? I'm starving."
We bought some fried chicken, bread rolls, chips and strawberries, and Emmett – who was apparently over 21 or using a fake ID– bought us some beer, insisting that it wouldn't be a proper picnic without beer.
We walked to a nearby park with our food and sat on the grass. Emmett dug into the chicken as soon as we sat down, and Edward passed cans of beer to everyone.
"I'm driving, remember?" Alice pointed out as Edward held out a beer for her.
"Oh come on. One beer," Emmett said, his mouth full of chicken. "Besides, we're going to walk to my place for the party anyway, so you won't need a car anytime soon."
Alice thought for a while, then shrugged and took the beer from Edward. I opened my beer and a bag of chips and lay down on the grass. There were still clouds in the sky, and the wind was making the air pretty cold for a summer afternoon, so I zipped up my hoodie. Still, I liked the clouds; they were so dreamlike and so far away, their edges blurry, like they hadn't quite decided what kind of cloud they wanted to be yet. Just like me.
"What are you thinking about?" Edward laid down on the grass next to me. I felt a bit uneasy; it was weird for practically a stranger to ask that kind of personal question.
"Just the clouds," I said. "They are interesting."
Edward looked up at the sky, too. "Yeah, guess you could say that. But it's all in our heads, you know? We imagine that they resemble something, when really they don't. They don't look like anything but clouds. But we make them look how we want them to in our heads. It's all just psychology."
I looked at him, a bit surprised. He turned to look at me and smiled a little. I couldn't help smiling back.
"Hey, Edward, come get some chicken before Emmett eats everything," Jasper said. Edward gave me one more sideways look, sat up, and that odd little moment was over.
Alice and I weren't really hungry yet, so we mainly just sat, sipped our beers and wondered how guys could always eat so much and still be so skinny.
When almost all the food was eaten, Emmett looked at his watch. "I think we should start to get back to my place soon. We still have that party to keep," he said to Jasper.
"What time is it starting?" Edward asked.
"I don't know, I don't think I actually told anyone." Emmett shrugged. "Maybe it has already started."
"By the way, how long are you going to stay in Seattle?" Jasper asked Alice.
Alice looked at me. "I don't know."
"Not long, probably," I said. "What do you think?"
"Yeah," Alice said. "I guess we have to get going pretty soon. I mean, the road trip's just starting, and we have so much to see."
"How long are you going to stay?" I asked Edward to fill the silence.
"Not that long, either," Edward replied."Few days maybe."
"Well, we have to go," Emmett said and stood up. "Jasper and I have business to take care of. Care to join us, ladies?"
"I don't even want to know what you mean by business," Edward muttered. "And hey! Did you just call me lady?"
"No Edward, I meant that tree over there, because she's just dying to come to the party with us." Emmett rolled his eyes. "So Bella, Alice, are you coming?"
"Guess we are." Alice stood up and shook grass off her dress. "I need a party about now."
Emmett's apartment was only couple of blocks away from the park. It was on the third floor of a big, old-looking apartment building. Emmett opened the door, and we all stepped inside after him. The apartment was pretty small – two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen.
"So, there's the kitchen," Emmett introduced, pointing at the kitchen that was technically just a part of the living room and consisted of a small fridge, microwave, few kitchen cabinets and lots of pizza boxes in the sink. "And here's my bedroom, and the other one is my roommate's. Though, I haven't seen him in a while, actually. I hope he's still alive. Well, whatever, he's weird. And here's the living room."
In the living room area, there were a couch, a couple of pretty old looking armchairs and a table. It looked just as messy as you would have expected.
"Okay, so we have a party to prepare for. Let's get to work, everyone," Emmett said. "I'll go grab some more beer and some other stuff while Jasper and Edward clean the house, 'kay?"
"What do we do, then?" I asked.
"Well, you're the guests – relax, grab some beer from the fridge," Emmett suggested, grabbed his keys and disappeared out of the door again.
Alice and I sat on the couch. Edward and Jasper's cleaning up consisted mainly of tossing Emmett's clothes under his bed and throwing the pizza boxes down from the balcony.
I leaned my head against Alice who sat next to me. It had already been such a long day.
"We've been kind of stupid, you know?" I said to her. I still couldn't quite believe that all of this had really just happened. I wasn't usually this irresponsible. "We just went into some total stranger's home."
"I guess so," Alice said. "But I had a good feeling about this, you know. That Jasper, I kind of feel like I can trust him, you know what I mean?"
I sighed. "Yeah, I know what you mean. You're into him."
"No, I'm not! I mean yes, he's hot, but I'm certainly not into him." Alice laughed like the whole idea was ridiculous.
"Sure, sure. Just remember that we're only here for a while. Don't do anything stupid," I warned her.
"Bella, you know I wouldn't have sex with him," Alice looked at me, offended that I would have even though she would.
I shook my head amused. "I meant don't fall in love with him."
A/N: Reviews would be really, really nice. Just saying ;)