I want you to think of every conversation you've ever had with you bff about a crush.

Okay now this chapter is brought to you by those feelings. (But make it twilight)

Also this isn't edited I have a headache sorry.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

For all of her fuss, lack of sleep, and even the unprecedented emotional release upon one of the only friends she had….The first phone call with Taisiya was…easy. Wren found that even with both distance of space and time between them, it felt as if no time had passed at all.

Though she could practically feel her pulse skip in time with the dial tone, the moment she heard Tai's voice hundreds of conversations buried in her memories evened out whatever else she had been feeling. Though she hadn't known what to say or where to begin, Tai's immediate squeal was all the introduction either of them needed.

Those first seconds of awkwardness on her part were there, but a simple "Hey, Tai," had brought them back to the two little girls they had long since outgrown. It was almost as if she could picture the other girl with her, ever fidgety little fingers combing through her deep auburn hair. It made Wren wonder if Tai looked the same, her image forever frozen the same way in Wren's mind.

Tai's voice, once a whiney pitch, had smoothed into something that showed her maturity. It was a comfort, though, to still hear the mousey squeaks and cracks whenever she got particularly excited. Her voice was one of the things that had always bothered her, as others had often found her to be annoying… Hearing it now just made Wren smile.

Somewhere between hours of chatter about everything, and nothing, they fall back together. They started with the mundane; with stories of school and their arts. Taisiya didn't dance anymore, but Wren baked more than ever. Wren skated every day, but Tai had taken to longboarding. Tai hated her private school, Wren admitted… she didn't hate her high school.

That, of course, led into exactly why she didn't hate it.

Wren had found that in her life, all good things tended to come with a catch. It wasn't so much that she looked for the bad in everything, or even that she was particularly pessimistic… It was simply the way the dice had rolled for her. All good things must come to an end.

Still, with all that went on in her mind, she was often blindsided when those ends came. That was an absolute in her life… Just as one other constant was beginning.

"So how do you go from sitting on the benches at recess to actually wanting to go to school?" Tai had asked, laughter on her breath.

The question was light, but Wren had felt a heaviness settle over her body. At the time, she'd been halfway through frosting a batch of cupcakes she'd decided to bake while they talked. It had gotten late, and the excitement of reconnecting with her friend had kept her filled with restless energy.

"Ah, I don't think I really want to go to school-" she had answered without thinking, her current cupcake seemingly done too quickly in her hands.

"Then you're going for the people!" Tai had burst in, quick as a whip.

"Uh- I mean-" Wren stuttered, finding that after a few blissful hours free, her mind immediately snapped back to one place.

Jasper.

Wren felt her face heating, but could hardly figure out what else to say before Tai then released an entirely too dramatic gasp, followed by-

"Do you have a boyfriend!?"

Her reply this time was a firm, "No!"

"Then you like someone!" was Tai's rapid fire reply, the other girl knowing better than to let Wren start heading into the land of denial.

And that was the thing, Taisiya knew exactly where Wren was headed, even after all the time that had passed. Just from a phone call, it felt like she was 12 years old again running after Tai with a permanent blush on her face. Tai was quick witted, unabashed, and somehow always knew how to get away with it. She was also really fucking nosey.

"Okay, look-" Wren tried.

"You said 'Okay'! You admit it!"

"I didn't!"

"Girl you so did!"

"I did not!"

"You did!"

"Did not!"

They did, in fact, go back and forth like that for quite some time. To any onlookers, it probably seemed like a solid ten minutes of pointless back and forth. The reality was that in that time, Wren finished frosting her cupcakes, made herself a cup of tea, and then made herself comfortable on the floor before finally admitting-

"Okay fine. Maybe."

There were many times in her life where Wren felt older than she was. Most days, her tiredness ran soul deep and there was nothing she could do about that. Taisiya had always had the special talent of helping with that, though.

Sitting on her kitchen floor licking icing off of a spoon, bickering like a child with her girlfriend in the middle of the night and getting grilled about who she liked…. It made her feel like the teenager she was. It felt almost… Normal.

"So, am I gonna have to beat the details out of you, or are you gonna spill?" Tai asked.

Wrinkling her nose, Wren wished her friend was there so that she could throw her spoon at the other girl.

"You suck," she told her instead, followed with, " There isn't that much to tell…"

"Oh, but there is something to tell," Tai said.

Sighing, Wren rolled her eyes…. And told Tai about Jasper. She told her all about seeing him that first time, about being History partners, about being friends.

She told Tai about how hard it had been to make friends to begin with, about why. She told Tai everything, because lately, Jasper had been everything. She talked, and Tai listened, laughed, poked and prodded.

"Wait so they're like, a whole family of hot incest couples?"

"Uhhhhhh, maybe don't say it like that?"

Wren talked, and it felt good but it also felt… Odd.

"So they all wear the same colored contacts?"

"I mean I'm not a hundred percent sure? That sounds like cult shit so I've been hoping it's natural."

Tai had a habit of voicing the things Wren wouldn't.

"His sister seems like a psycho bitch."

"I think mostly she's just hurt about something, I dunno."

Wren had talked to Maria before, but never in depth about anything personal. While Wren cared for her, and she could tell Maria felt the same, they simply did not connect on a level where they wanted to be around each other all the time. They were more school friends and had not yet formed the level of trust she had with Tai… and also seemingly, Jasper.

So it was with Taisiya that Wren, for the first time, truly expressed how she felt about Jasper. She talked about the outings they'd been on, she talked about the things she noticed, she talked about her frustrations, and about how he drove her crazy and seemed to soothe her all at once.

Wren talked, and with every word it seemed Tai grew more and more silent. It was towards the end, after she told Tai about how Jasper had comforted her during her last breakdown, that the silence seemed to grow the loudest.

When she finished the story, for once Tai didn't have anything immediately to say, and it was then that Wren thought about everything she had said. It was weird, all of it.

"Girl…" Tai started," you let him into your house alone?"

Now at the time, it hadn't seemed like that big of a deal, but in hindsight…

"I totally could've gotten murdered," she said just as soon as Tai confirmed with-

"You totally could have gotten murdered."

While Tai hadn't been raised in the ghetto, she had spent enough time in and around it to know not to let random people into your home especially without backup. It wasn't a move anyone would normally expect Wren to pull, and yet she'd done it. Now her Aunty wouldn't mind Wren having people over, but the thing about that was that her Aunty expected Wren to use her best judgement with such people.

Wren hadn't used any judgement at all. She'd just been exhausted and sad, and had let him in.

"Well, at least now you know he's nice…," Tai allotted. This didn't make Wren feel much better about her decision making, but Tai's next statement did at least make her laugh.

"And he's hot, so if he had killed you at least it would have been sexy."

When they both finally stopped laughing, Wren felt a little better about her crush… and also a little worse. It was one thing to have private thoughts about something not being right, it was another to have someone else confirm them.

"Why do you think he's being so nice?" Wren finally asked, voicing the most important question of all. At the end of the day, even with all the inexplicable oddities around Jasper Hale, that was what haunted her the most.

She wasn't particularly beautiful or interesting, and she had no money or special skills. She was nothing, no one-

Tai's voice on the other end of the line was a welcome blanket over familiar thoughts.

"What, you don't think you deserve kindness just because?"

Wren found that she had began to twist the hairband on her opposite wrist, the skin pinked beneath.

"Everyone deserves kindness, just because," she deflected.

Somehow, someway, Wren could tell that neither of them quite believed the earnest words.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

There is an emotion Jasper has found he feels but has rarely felt.

He knows what it is to want something, to yearn for that which is just out of reach. Yes, Jasper knew what it was to want, but more importantly, he knew how to have. There were always the right words, the right actions, or the right feelings that could be crafted in order to get him what he wanted.

When all else failed, he'd also come to appreciate the merits of brute force.

With such a mind set, it was not so far a stretch to say that Jasper very rarely ever feels jealous. To be jealous, after all, implied that someone else had something he did not. In all of his years, there wasn't a single time he could recall not getting what he wanted, in the end.

Alice was the obvious exception there, but even her he'd enjoyed for years before she'd pulled back. Even now, he knew a piece of her heart was still his. He wanted more, sure, but what did he really have to be jealous of?

Once, Carlisle had told him 'Fate loves to humble the strongest of us'. At the time, he had filed it away as one of the man's odd bits of profound information. Their coven father was like that, often spreading bits of wisdom. Even if he couldn't necessarily understand what Carlisle was going on about at the moment, Jasper had found that the elder vampire usually had a point.

For him, that point came in the form of a young woman he'd never met.

After dealing with Rose, Jasper had been left unsettled. One part of him felt satisfied that Rose finally understood how serious he was about Wren, but the other part was upset that he'd had to go that far. He didn't relish in her trauma, but they both knew what the outcome of their game would be. Sometimes they toed the edge, and sometimes they went over.

This time they'd gone over, and as he stared at the ceiling and tried to hold his sister's terror at bay, he tried to distract himself with the person who had put him so out of sorts in the first place.

He'd messaged Wren the moment he had realized Rose had been near her, but had yet to receive a reply. Normally she was almost always quick to respond. Slightly concerned, he sent her another message.

'Wren?'

While her reply did come normally, it was not one he expected.

'Sorry! On the phone with Tai right now'

He read it once, then twice. The words didn't change, and while he was happy that it seemed she'd reconnected with her friend, he wasn't sure he understood. There had been times where she'd been busy or on the phone with her Aunt before, and she had always messaged him back. Still, he reasoned that she had just gotten her friend back. He understood that they needed time, though a few simple messages shouldn't have been so distracting…. And he couldn't help but wonder what they were talking about.

He'd have asked, except she had seemingly made it clear that she didn't have time to talk with him right then. Since he'd met her, every calculated push had been met with good return, and perhaps he'd gotten used to that. Her reactions were often unexpected, sure, but she reacted none the less.

He found that it had become a nice distraction whenever he was feeling particularly tense to just… focus on figuring out his little mate. Every word and question brought out something new, and it was a fun chase if nothing else. Jasper realized, then, that he liked her.

In the grand scheme of things, that wasn't so startling. What was far more unsettling was that he liked his little mate, and was missing her. It was the first time he truly felt that way because it was the first time he felt he couldn't immediately access her, and it was that thought that he remained focused on for the rest of the night.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

The next morning when he arrived at school, it is the swirling thoughts from the night previous that still cloud his mind so that he does not notice what he is truly feeling until it's too late.

Normally, he waited until their first class together to see Wren, but he found that the moment he stepped on campus he wanted to find her. She hadn't messaged him at all since the one, and he hadn't found a valid reason to say anything to her after sunrise without the risk of sounding more involved than she needed to know.

He couldn't stop himself, though. As usual, the general mass of the student body was overwhelming. He normally stuck close to his family, practically barricaded by their calming presences. That morning, however, it took one single look at Rose for them to simply let him go his own way in the parking lot.

Hundreds of scents assaulted him, but it was only one he really needed. He felt his fangs aching to drop as he sorted through veritable smorgasbord all around him. Every day was hell, the thrumming of life all around him calling to his darkest senses. That day was no different, but for once, his goal was.

If he snapped and started slaughtering the student body, Wren would probably hate him. Besides his current personal wish to avoid that, it would also put his entire family in danger. These things ran through his head, reinforcing every step. Same method, different day.

He found her by her locker, staring down at her phone with a soft smile on her face.

"Hey there, Darlin'" he called softly, delighting in the way she jumped and her cheeks immediately colored.

He watched her brows furrow and her plush lips part, preparing to hear her tell him off for the nickname he knew she only hated because of how much she liked it. It was another thing he expected from her, the response the same but just as fun every time.

"Don't-" she was cut off by the sudden beep of her phone, and all at once Jasper felt the most peculiar thing happen.

At first, he'd felt the happiness at his arrival radiate off of her, then the slivers of lust and embarrassment had shown through. Then, before she could finish her original sentence her gaze dropped back down to her phone… and stayed there.

"It's Tai! She doesn't start class for another hour," Wren told him, her fingers flying over her phone as she focused on whatever the other girl had sent her.

The embarrassment and lust were gone, replaced by that radiating happiness again. It was warm and bright, and something he didn't feel enough from the young woman in front of him. This time, however, the happiness was not because of him, and as he watched the light glint off of her downturned glasses, he felt as that happiness began to bleed with something ugly.

As she typed, the ease in her posture began to shift, her sweet scent began to twist into something altogether more syrupy, and he almost felt drunk off it as he stared at her. Her smile began to slip, and her fingers slowed down.

All the while, Jasper felt her emotions begin to churn with that dark core once again returning, her anxiety a yawning hole beginning to suck away the happiness she'd managed. Jasper watched her, the emotions overwhelming as she began to feel an all-encompassing jealousy-

Wren took in a sharp breath, standing up straighter and gripping her phone tight in her hand. He watched her eyes screw shut, and when she purposely held her breathe, he found that he was able to let go of the tight grip he'd had on her emotions.

He counted thirty seconds before her eyes reopened, dark depths blown wide. She slid her phone into her pocket, threw up her hood, and avoided making eye contact with him.

"Ahh, sorry about that, I just, uh, felt a little upset for a moment there I don't know what happened."

He watched her fidget, once again embarrassed but this time with nothing else eating at the calm she'd forced herself into. She was confused, and upset with herself, but not surprised. She didn't know what happened, or why she'd felt so violently jealous at such a moment.

She didn't know that she wasn't feeling that way at all.

The one who was jealous was Jasper.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Hello! I am so sorry, once again, for the time that has past. I work so much these days, and am just so tired and depressed any time I am not working lol. But, I have a bit of time now! I had surgery on the 7th so I'm off work until august 7th. We'll see what I can get out before then! Anyways I know it's short, but hey I just type the words the story does what it wants.

Also, simp jasper, my beloved.