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Becas past now! Bit more serious than Jesse's, because well, she's Beca :Pi hope you guy enjoy and please let me know what you think!
Nobody had been that great before Jesse.
The first guy she liked at the age of 14 had been Gregory Fentle. She should have known then, really; what kind of name is Gregory Fentle? Maybe his name was the reason he was such a giant jerk at such a young age. But either way, he was horrific. He was grungy and moody and smoked already which automatically made him the mysterious cool kid. His only friend was this hulking great big senior from the high school across town that used to pick him up on his motorbike with its loud engine and sleek black body art. Gregory was all black hair and black eyes and black leather. He looked awesome on the back of that bike.
She thought he was perfect.
Of course, he didn't know who she was. He had probably never actually seen her – quite literally; he was already almost six foot and she was barely five – and she was too shy to attempt to talk to him.
That had been her problem back then. Shy and awkward and the perfect chameleon. She blended into the background and nobody ever bothered her. Nobody ever made the effort.
Maybe that was her problem, looking back.
A few months later she had her first kiss with some kid whose name she doesn't remember. He had thick rimmed glasses and long hair. She thinks he was Korean and painfully shy. It had been nothing special, actually it had been kind of gross; just a lot of spit and awkward fumbling. She doesn't remember why she kissed him either; maybe it was a dare. She does recall him following her around like a puppy afterwards, eager for her attention but too shy to try any harder.
But then her dad moved away and she lost all faith in just about everything.
Dr Mitchell. He was the next guy on the list. Yes, he was her father so technically he didn't count, but he did. Because he was her father. Because he ran away from his problems with her mother and it actually seemed to work for him.
She blames him for teaching her that running away was a great solution to all problems.
Her father had been great when she was a kid. He had been her everything while her mother just stayed locked away in her own little world. Beca didn't understand that at the time. She just thought her mother was boring and that her father was the greatest. He was the only one she wasn't shy around. He was her best and only friend.
Until she hit puberty at the tender age of twelve and became a bit of a douchebag.
She used to blame herself for his running at first, because she thought it was her grumpiness that drove him away. But she knows now why he ran. He had been the douchebag, the coward who hadn't been able to handle her mother's diagnosis.
That's when the sarcasm became her weapon. She didn't need anyone and it became increasingly easy to make her life solitary from everyone else around her.
On the night of her eighteenth birthday, Beca found her next guy. She was celebrating more than just her changing age and, high on the taste of freedom, she had gone out to a bar.
His name was Kyle. He had thrown every horrific chat up line in the book at her and she had quickly become tired of his weak personality and average looks. She had slept with him mainly to shut him up, but partly because the bar she had managed to get into sucked and it was him or some creepy guy who snarled at her from the corner.
The sex had been fast and unsatisfying and she had walked out of his hotel room bedraggled, in pain, and pissed off. More than she normally was. But the thought of going home cheered her up, because when she got home there would be no more nurses, no more mother; just her and an empty house and her mixing station.
That was how she liked it, and that was how she fully intended to spend the rest of her life.
After Kyle was Wayne Jones. The very definition of tall, dark and handsome. He owned the tattoo parlour across the road from the record shop she worked in over summer and had done all but one of her tattoos. They had met when he had done her roses on her shoulder, and the next day he had come into the store and offered to take her out.
Beca had no interest in getting to know people. So she went straight to his place instead.
This routine happened for each of the four inks she had done there that summer. After that she had felt the beginnings of an attachment and she had promptly cut all ties. She didn't have time for that.
Besides, her dad was forcing her to go to college.
And nothing good could possibly happen there.
Barden was supposed to be a very reluctant pit stop for Beca. A four year pit stop that she was supposed to hate every second of. It was her own fault she was there, really, she knew that. If she hadn't let slip about her tattoos to her aunt then her father would never have known, and then he would never have started to think she was falling off the wagon.
He thought Barden would be a chance for her get back on her feet despite it being his fault that she was like this in the first place.
His promise to send her to LA after a year had caught her attention. So she started paying it to other things.
In the equation she had come up with on how she would get through her years at Barden, Beca had never factored a guy into it. She was Beca; why would she? She had no intention of forming any relationships with either gender. All she had kept in mind was how to skip classes and how she could mix the latest Muse track into her current creation.
Jesse had been a complete shock to her system.
He wasn't like the other guys. He was happy and smiley and persistent. Warm and loyal and funny. He was everything she had never wanted but despite everything she did to stop him doing so, he worked his way right under her skin. And so she had compromised, because what harm could it be to have one friend here? Yeah, okay, so she was part of the Bella's, and some of them were actually nice to her, but being a Bella was just part of her agreement to get to LA. There was no real meaning behind the conversations she had with them. Really.
She allowed Jesse to be her only friend, the one she kept an arms length away. And it was okay, because he actually tried with her and he dodged every insult and wise crack she threw at him that would normally push anyone else away. She realised that he was actually quite sweet, and she liked that more than she should. She found the way he made her laugh pretty adorable.
But they were okay in their weird friend-like roles.
Until he tried to kiss her.
She had stopped it not because of some oath, not because she wasn't interested – because really, she was flattered that a guy like Jesse could be even remotely interested in a girl like her – but because he scared her. She had wanted to kiss him and that put everything in jeopardy – her friendship with him, her plan, her entire life. One kiss could blow it all to smithereens and Beca didn't want to lose it all. She was perfectly happy being just his friend.
Or so she convinced herself.
However, she then got arrested for smashing a window.
She got put in jail for protecting Jesse.
Yeah, okay, friends protect each other. But when she punched that guy and felt pain shoot up her wrist, she knew that it had not been a 'back away from my friend!' punch. It had been a 'get the hell away from my man' kind of punch. And when the officer was tightening the cuffs behind her back and Jesse was watching her in stunned disbelief, she knew he knew it too.
So she cut off that bond as soon as she could.
The amount she missed Jesse caught her off guard. Somehow, within the space of a few months, he had latched onto her mind and she couldn't shake him off. Her head screamed that this was stupid, that she didn't need him because she didn't need anyone. Her heart screamed the complete opposite.
Beca had never been one to listen to her heart.
And she did well at that for about four days, before she caved and slunk back to him, leaving a juice pack outside his dorm with a post it note attached, just one word written there:
Sorry.
It had been enough though, and their friendship had resumed much as it had been before regionals. Well, she had thought that anyway, at the time. She didn't notice how he subtly managed to work his way further in. He wasn't just under her skin now; he was right by her heart, ready to take it as his own whenever she was ready to give it up.
She didn't notice how close they had become until a week before the semi-finals, when she woke up from her nap during one of his movies and she found herself tucked against his side, his arm around her. This was by no means the first time this had happened, but it was the first time Beca actually noticed it, and that time when she woke up, she woke up and she really saw what he had done to her. How he had changed her and made her more outgoing, made her softer around the edges and made her open up to allow the Bella's in. Suddenly she was nothing like the girl she used to be, and that girl was pissed.
So in one fell swoop, she wiped her hands of all of them.
She was actually quite proud of herself - for about a week. Then spring break came. Then she decided there would be no harm in watching the Breakfast Club alone. The cover didn't look too bad and she had time to kill - how bad could it possibly be?
So she watched it, in her dorm, at night, alone.
She sobbed like a baby.
Because she was alone. She was horribly lonely and it was all her fault. She had spent her entire life blaming all of her problems on other people when actually, she so easily could have solved them on her own. Life didn't have to be this hard; it could be easy, it could be happy.
Happiness wasn't just her and her music anymore.
Happiness was her new family and all the joy they bought to her life.
Fixing things was easier than she thought it would be. With the Bella's, at least. After a little persuasion, they came around to the prospect of the family being back together again, and they worked hard. They had everything to prove and nothing to lose.
Apart from Beca. She had Jesse to lose.
She had banked everything she had on that performance and if it didn't work, she would lose him forever.
Luckily for her, she knew just how much of a romantic he was, and as she sang to him and waited for him to see it, to understand, she knew what he was going to do before he did it.
Because that's what Jesse was like. A classic nerd.
And by some miracle, that nerd was hers. He had tried with her and she had let him in, and Beca realised that actually, people could care. She had thought her whole life that no one had ever bothered to try with her, but she was wrong. They hadn't tried because she hadn't let them. And now she was, it was glorious. She had everything she had never dreamed of and as she kissed Jesse with all the pent up passion of their turbulent year together, she felt her heart soar.
Nobody had been that great before Jesse.
Because nobody was as perfect for her as him.
What did you guys think? Let me know!
Next chapter is their present and future :)