The Twilight Twenty-Five
Prompt: Earnest
Pen name: LightStarDusting
Character POV: Bella
Rating: M

Chapter 9 – I'll Get You
1999

"So, what'd you get?" Jasper leaned over and tried to peer at the small piece of paper that I quickly slid into my jacket pocket.

Attempting to divert his attention, I asked, "What'd you get?"

Diversion tactics didn't work.

"I asked you first. Come on, what is it?"

Jasper and I were walking across campus, headed back to the dorm from our Public Speaking class after getting our speech assignments. We'd already given introductory speeches and now the professor had thrown a little twist in for our next assignment. Each of us had drawn a tiny slip of paper with a word on it and we had to give a five to seven minute speech on that prompt. Whether we knew about the topic or not, we needed to become experts.

The word flirting mocked me from the tiny paper and I checked it a few times, thinking if maybe I had misread the word. I hadn't. I wondered if I could get one of the people in my class to trade with me. Considering I wasn't much of an expert when it came to the particular topic, I was pretty sure my speech was going to be abysmal and I really wanted to start my first semester in college with a strong grade point average.

Jasper walked next to me, looking at me expectantly. He tried to reach into my pocket to grab the paper but he was thwarted when I slapped his hand away. When he realized that I wasn't going to be forthcoming with the information, he offered up his topic. "Fishing. I got fishing."

Fishing? Why the hell couldn't I have gotten fishing? At least I knew about fishing.

"Fishing isn't bad."

"I don't know anything about fishing."

"I grew up fishing with my dad and a close family friend who acts like an uncle to me. He has a small boat and would take me along every Sunday when I was young. Of course, I didn't go as much once I got older but still… I know fishing. I can help you… or we can switch?" I threw the question in, wishful, at the end.

"Well you still haven't told me what topic you pulled."

I sighed. "I'm going to embarrass the hell out of myself. I got flirting."

The smile that spread across his face could have lit the sky.

"Oh, you look excited!" I plowed ahead, hopeful. "Does that mean you want to switch with me?"

His grin only got wider. "Oh, hell no, Swan. I might not know a flying fig about fishing but I'll deal. I want to watch what you do with flirting." He draped an arm over my shoulder.

Pouting, I slipped out from underneath his arm. "You're not very nice."

"I never claimed to be." His arm somehow wound up back over my shoulder again. Once again, I pulled away, giving him the patented Bella Swan death glare.

He didn't fold.

We arrived at the dorm a few minutes later. Jasper tried to tug me over to his side of the building with him, but once again, I slipped from his grasp. Then he was the one pouting.

"You're not coming over?"

Shaking my head, I pointed my stairwell door. "Nope. Since you won't switch with me," I figured a little guilt trip never hurt anyone, "I have to go consult with the experts so that I too can be an expert on flirting. Or at least, pretend to be an expert on flirting." I turned to see him at his door, holding it open for two girls passing through, and gave a little wave. "Call me later."

I heard chatter coming from the community lounge and I swung the door open to find Lucy and Makenna draped across the couches there, radio playing and notebooks open.

"Luuuuuucy, I'm ho-ome." Ricky Ricardo really had nothing on me.

"Why do people always SAY that to me?" Lucy whined, a genuinely confused expression on her face. I stared at her, flabbergasted, and she stared back at me expectantly waiting for an answer. She waited a beat longer before her face broke into a grin. "Just messing with you, B."

After filling the girls in on my class assignment, they were more than happy to give me their best flirting tips. I took my notebook out of my bag, figuring that with their vast wisdom in the area of flirting, I should take notes, otherwise I might miss something of vital importance.

Makenna pulled her curly into a high ponytail while pursing her lips in serious thought. "Bella, it's all about body language. For example, take Marilyn. Marilyn knew what she was doing."

As always, I was a bit lost when talking to Makenna. I'd come to expect it during our conversations. I asked, "Marilyn? Is that your sister?"

Makenna looked more than disappointed in me and exhaled an exasperated sigh. "Marilyn Monroe," she stated while emphasizing her last name, as though I should have clearly known who she was speaking of by first name alone. "She did this thing with her eyes and then in combination with her mouth, it just made men forget their own names!" Lucy sat next to her, bobbing her head in agreement while they both attempted to show me what they were talking about.

I was scribbling in my notebook, trying to keep up with everything Makenna was throwing at me and draw diagrams simultaneously. "So, eyes plus mouth thing equals men forgetting names?"

Lucy chimed in at that point. "Yes! Haven't you seen Clueless? Anything that draws attention to the mouth is good!"

"The mouth. Got it. Check."

"Right. Like how you were eating that lollipop at the party the other night? Guys like lollipops. Didn't you see how much of a fan club you had the other night? Anything that reminds them of sucking," Lucy giggled and she and Makenna exchanged knowing glances before both looking at me. I could feel the blush rising up my neck and across my face. There were guys watching me at the party? Watching me eat a lollipop? "Aren't you going to write that down?" They both noticed that I hadn't written down their last tidbit of advice and raised their eyebrows expectantly.

I blanched. "Um, I can't say that in my speech."

"Well, okay. But you might want to write it down anyway. Consider it personal knowledge."

"Allllright-y then.." I drew out the phrase as I began to stand from where I was resting on the arm of the couch. "I think that I got everything that I--"

Lucy cut me off from my escape and tugged on my arm so I sat back down. "And you need to be coy. A little bit mysterious. Like you've got a secret that they NEED to know, that they must talk to you to find out about."

I wrote down a few more nuggets of flirting wisdom they shared with me before I had what I considered to be enough and finally made my escape to the room.

Later in the afternoon, Lucy came into our room to find me sitting on my bed and poring over the notes that I had taken. I was starting to freak out about the speech and it was days away. I had to give a speech; not only did I have to speak coherently for five to seven minutes in front of a group of people I did not know all that well, I had to talk about flirting, of all things. What did I ever do to Professor Cope to make her hate me?

"Hey, you want to have pizza for dinner tonight? I'm feeling lazy and don't want to walk to the Student Union. Plus I already ordered from Makenna's room."

With my pen in my mouth, I hummed my pizza approval without raising my eyes.

"Great! I'm going to call my mom to check in real quick and the pizza should be here soon." Our school had an agreement with the local pizza place so that we could use our meal plan and have the food delivered to the dorms. Everybody wins.

After hanging up the phone with her mom, she looked at me again and came over to join me on my bed. She gently closed my notebook and placed it on the bed before taking the pen from my mouth and setting it down on the top of the notebook.

"Listen Bella," she said, earnestly. "I can tell that this assignment has got you worried. Hon, you are totally over-thinking this."

I opened my mouth to say something but she stopped me by putting her hand up in the air between us.

"You don't give yourself enough credit. You're a flirt. You just don't even know you're doing it most of the time. That's what makes it so great." She threw her hands up in the air to emphasis her point.

"Is that what you were talking about when you said I had a fan club?" I was still embarrassed that I'd publicly embarrassed myself with a dum-dum, but I needed to know what they were talking about.

"That's exactly what I mean. Why do you think the guy who gave you the first lollipop made sure you got a replacement when I took it from you? He liked watching you… and your lollipop." Lucy was looking at me as if she had just been forced to explain the birds and the bees to me. Honestly, I was such an idiot with this stuff, it was humiliating.

"How does any of that help me with my speech?" I asked, trying to figure out how I could get my unintentional flirting to work to my advantage since it was… unintentional and all.

"I don't know, B, but you'll think of something. Just bring Jasper up there with you." She elbowed me slightly in the ribs.

I needed that red wall to stand near again. "I do not flirt with Jasper." I thought about and amended my statement by tacking on, "a lot."

"Yeah, okay. I hate to break it to you Bella, but that's all you and Jasper do! The two of you emit a crazy amount of sexual tension."

I sighed again while thinking about my interactions with Jasper. "I don't think it's the same for him as it is for me. He's… him. He seems to have that with a lot of girls."

"Bella, you're blind. He doesn't hang out 24-7 with 'a lot of girls.'" She even went so far as to do the air-quotes around 'a lot of girls.' She continued, "He hangs out with you."

"Of course he does, we have that cleanse pact." Not many people knew about our pact but Lucy did.

"Right, Bella, he only hangs out with you because of the pact. You just keep telling yourself that."

I picked up the pen and started twirling it in my fingers. I could feel her shift on the bed.

"Hold up a second. Bella…" she trailed off and I could tell exactly where her mind was going. It was where my mind had wandered, finally taking up residence more and more often as of late.

"Do you-" she stopped herself again before just flat out stating the fact. "You like him, don't you? Like, REALLY like him?"

I thought about denying it, but this was Lucy and she was more observant than most people gave her credit for. She might have played the part of a complete flake well but she had some keen observation skills when it came down to it.

"I like him. I don't think I'll do anything about it. But I like him. And that's really all I want to say right now, Luce."

"Okay, I get it. You don't want to talk about the feeling things right now. But Bella, these feelings? They aren't just going to go away. You're going to have to deal with them at some point. Think about it."

And with that, our serious conversation was over. Lucy looked out the window and saw the delivery guy standing in the courtyard with his cell phone, ready to ring the room. "OH! It's Cute Pizza Delivery Guy tonight." Raising the window, she called out to him that she'd be down in a jiffy (yes, she used that word) before he got a chance to ring our room. She threw in a little Marilyn pout and sexy lowered lids before bouncing out of the room.

Looking out the window, I saw movement from within Jasper and Peter's room. He must have felt my eyes on him because he looked out the window and gave me a curious look before pretending that he was casting a fishing pole. Doing my very best Marilyn impression, I brought my hand to my mouth and blew him a kiss while fluttering my eyelashes. I'm pretty sure I looked like a fish, and I thought perhaps he'd catch me with his pole. Then I realized just how dirty that thought was.

Shaking his head, he looked down for a moment before raising his eyes to meet mine once more. I tried to look away, but I couldn't. Lucy's words rattled around in my head and I knew that she had just expressed out loud what I was trying to ignore.

Still, I tried to rationalize. It had been easy to fall into a close relationship with Jasper. I had liked him from the start, from the moment that he rescued me with the pencil. But I feared saying anything or doing anything more than dropping small hints here and there because, well, what if that feeling wasn't reciprocated? I would never want to do anything that would take away the friendship that we had established in the first month of school; it was something that was too precious to me.

So I did what I did best, which was saying nothing at all.

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