people seem to be losing interest so i'm probably gonna post up through chapter 19/20 and call it quits. thanks for the ride 3
XXX
The next morning, Leah Clearwater was waiting for Lilah outside of Sullivan's. This time, she was smiling, pacing back and forth in a sort of nervous way.
"Good morning."
Lilah raised a brow at her, though she smiled nonetheless.
"Good morning."
Leah beat Lilah to the door and held it open for her, allowing her to go inside first. There, Lilah handed Leah her walkie, and then took her own. The thing started to screech as soon as Lilah touched it. She cussed under her breath and beat it into submission, hanging it off her belt loop once it was quiet. She tucked her lunchbox in the cubby behind the counter and kept her thermos with her, the kind with the lid that could be detached and used as a cup.
Bev eyed the two young women suspiciously. In a matter of days, Leah had gone from being Leah around Lilah, to acting like a little girl desperate to make a friend on her first day of school. Bev didn't understand. She didn't really care to, either. She was too old to get involved with whatever was going on between her employees. She gave the girls some directions and set them loose, watching as Leah bounded after Lilah like a lost puppy.
"Have you decided that you'd like to be friends?" Lilah asked as the two entered the greenhouse.
"Maybe," Leah said. "Though I don't like my friends to patronize me."
Lilah's eyes went a bit wide. "I didn't mean to."
"I know you didn't, I'm just giving you the warning for next time," Leah said. She shifted her weight between her feet, stuffed her hands into the pockets of her old hoodie. She didn't exactly know how to proceed, but she decided it was best to go on as she always did: boldly and brashly. "Look, I'm not exactly a 'friendship' person. The last two people I considered to be my close friends are now dating each other, y'know, so I have a few trust issues that I think I'm entitled to."
"I'm so—" Lilah began, only to be cut off by Leah raising her finger in the air.
"No patronizing, Porter. You apologizing to me over and over again is considered patronizing," Leah said. "But like I was saying, I'm new to this. I don't know if I'm going to call whatever you and I have brewing a 'friendship,' but it's close enough. You're the only person who's been kind to me or shown me an ounce of understanding since my breakup. And because of that, and because I desperately need a friend even if I don't want one, I've decided to give you a chance."
"Well, thank you," Lilah said. She was not patronizing now, merely throwing Leah's energy back at her. "I'm honored."
"You shouldn't be. I'm horrible company to keep," Leah said. There was a new glimmer in her dark brown eyes, a lighter one, that Lilah thought quite suited her. "Anyway, for this to work, I'm going to have to know something about you. It's only fair, since you know about the worst thing that ever happened to me, that I know more about you than your name and the fact that you're from Massachusetts."
Lilah searched her brain for something she could tell Leah about herself.
"Before I moved here, I taught high school English."
Leah looked disgusted.
"Oh my god, now I know there's something seriously wrong with you," she said, her smile beginning to show. "You chose to be around teenagers all day?"
"Yeah, they're not so bad," said Lilah. "And when they are, I can't blame them. I don't think anyone enjoys being a teenager."
Leah nodded emphatically. Lilah wanted to tell her more, to let Leah know she had a past that allowed her to understand Leah's pain, but, of course, she couldn't.
"No wonder you've been so nice to me. You're used to dealing with overdramatic teenagers and their love woes. My whole dramatic breakup story is something you hear every Tuesday."
"Do you want some tea, Leah?" Lilah asked, unscrewing the lid off of her Thermos. "I made some of my own brew last night and I have enough to share."
Leah was not a tea drinker. But, in the spirit of trying new things with Lilah, she said, "Sure."
Lilah poured her some in the detachable cup part and handed it to her. They touched their drinks together and said a cheers, and both took a sip, and Leah was profoundly aware of the way Lilah was watching her, waiting for a reaction. She wished she could've given her the reaction she deserved, and yet, she couldn't help herself.
She spit out the tea.
"I'm sorry," Leah said. Her whole mouth was sour and so was her expression. "But that tastes like straight piss."
For a brief moment, Lilah looked taken aback, and Leah feared she'd ruined whatever was starting with her. But then, Lilah smiled. And laughed. And Leah joined her.
The two young women shared a laugh. And another, and then another, as they went about working side by side the rest of the day, navigating the new relationship they'd decided to forge together. Leah realized that, if she was not in control of her life and subject to what the universe threw at her, she could've gotten a much worse friend thrown at her than Lilah. Likewise, Lilah appreciated Leah—she was hard around the edges in ways that the Cullens were not, and kept her on her toes in a way that reminded her of Morgan.
As they left work that afternoon, neither knew just how much the other had started to like them.
Unfortunately, as Lilah drove away from Sullivan's and towards The Lodge, the lightheartedness she'd felt around Leah rapidly began to fade. Everything else came crashing back into her mind. Her father, his hunt, her family on the other side of the country, being away from them in Forks for some indefinite amount of time, and, most recently, whatever the hell had happened between her and Jasper the previous night at the Cullen's house.
She didn't even know where to begin with that. She could tell that he hadn't used his gift to induce that overwhelming, consuming feeling she felt when their hands had touched, because he had looked just as shocked as her when it happened. Like he felt it too, and was just as astonished by it.
She couldn't describe it. Not in a way that made any sense to her. A profound attraction, a gravitational pull, an intense emotional endearment…it was all of those things, but not quite. Not in a way she'd ever experienced. Morgan had always teased her for falling too hard for her college boyfriends and girlfriends, but this was more, so much more, than any of that had ever been.
She didn't even know him. She didn't even know him, and she already felt all of that.
She wanted to ask Constance, or Alice, but she was far too embarrassed to actually ask either of them anything. How was she supposed to approach that conversation? She didn't know how to bring it up. And if she did, what was she supposed to say? Hey, I touched Jasper's hand for a half a second, and I kinda feel like I'm starting to fall in love with him now? Is that a vampire thing, a witch thing, or am I just a touch-starved freak?
Yeah, as comfortable as she was with Constance, as as comfortable as she was becoming with Alice, she still couldn't imagine having that conversation with either of them. With anyone, for that matter.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized it couldn't just be a vampire thing. She'd touched Constance, Alice, Edward, Emmett, Carlisle, and Esme in some capacity, and she'd never felt a thing like it. Just Jasper. Which, to her, made it harder to ignore, because it wasn't some vampiric charm thing that happened all the time. It was, very clearly, something specific to Jasper.
She hooked a right turn into The Lodge's parking lot and parked around the back of the building, next to Shelley's aged minivan. She did her best to shake her thoughts from her mind. She had food to focus on now. Cooking. Something familiar, something that had distracted her from so much, for so long.
She stepped inside and shrugged out of her jacket. She didn't think that cooking would be enough. She found herself wishing she'd brought some of her books along with her to Forks. Books were what she went to when cooking failed her. In the chaos of packing to leave overnight, though, she hadn't packed any beyond her spell book. She cursed herself for it now that she found herself in desperate need of a book. She'd have to check out the library. Maybe on Sunday.
She'd wanted to hike that day, but, on second thought, decided it wasn't worth the risk. She couldn't afford to put herself out there, in the middle of the woods, vulnerable, just in case something did happen, just in case her father or one of his church members showed up in Forks.
In the kitchen, Shelley greeted her brightly, and prompted her to wash her hands. They were expecting a busy evening. Lilah tried to quiet her mind again. She had to focus.
Across town, at the Cullens' house, Edward, Alice, and Jasper had holed themselves up in Jasper's room to discuss the Lilah Situation, as Alice had dubbed it. Jasper had requested that the rest of the family not be brought in yet. He wasn't even sure if he really wanted Edward as involved as he was, but seeing as Edward would hear it anyway, he didn't exactly have a choice.
"At some point, you are going to have to talk to her about this," Edward said. He stood off on his own, by the door, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. "I'm not going to try to tell you what you should say when you do, because I don't have a clue about that, but you will have to have a conversation about it with her. She felt it just as much as you did, and she's even more confused about it than you are, since she doesn't understand our concept of mating."
Jasper had hardly ever been as grateful for Edward's stoic nature as he was in that moment. Especially when compared to Alice, who was overjoyed, and wanted nothing more than to help him plan some elaborate date night for Lilah.
Shooting Edward a bit of a glare, the kind she'd learned from Rosalie, Alice asked, "You think he should deny them both what's between them?"
Edward raised a single shoulder into a half-shrug.
"I don't know," he said. "I can't pretend to know what the right thing to do is in such a situation. But I understand why he's hesitant. Lilah's in enough danger as it is. It's unfair to put her in any more."
Alice rolled her eyes. "She wouldn't be in any more danger. She knows about vampires, Jasper doesn't even want to drink her blood. I don't know what the problem is."
"The Volturi," Jasper said. He didn't look up from the carpet as he spoke. "They'd either want her turned or killed, and then they'd extend the same punishment to her family…that's another thing, Alice, I can't possibly take her away from her family. I don't have to tell you how much she loves them."
Again, Alice rolled her eyes. "I'm not saying that isn't true, but I think this is just as much about you're idea that you're more damned than the rest of us and don't deserve anything good to happen to you."
Jasper was silent. She wasn't wrong. Out of all of the members of their family, he was undoubtedly the worst. The one who was unquestionably evil. He'd killed more humans and vampires than he could ever imagine counting. He was a key player in the southern wars. He killed for power and for fun more than he ever had for food. He killed because Maria told him to. Because he thought he loved her, because he deluded himself into ignoring the actual feelings she had towards him, visible through his gift, because it was easier to justify what he did for her if he deluded himself into thinking they were in love. He killed after he left Maria, because he didn't know any other way, and perhaps he felt he was too far gone to change. Even after being accepted by Carlisle and Esme with open and loving arms, he continued to kill, because he just couldn't eradicate that thirst, that need to take human lives like the rest of them could.
He would always be weaker. He would always be more dangerous.
His human life hadn't been much better. His father had begged him not to enlist in the army, desperate not to lose his youngest child, his only son, to a war he didn't support. Jasper enlisted anyway, not because he was exceptionally passionate, but because everyone else was doing it. He wanted that respect and some adventure, he supposed, because anything was better than staying at his father's house in Houston, with his stepmother, both of his sisters long gone and married by then.
He rose through the ranks. He wasn't proud of it now. Time had made him realize that being the youngest major in Texas for the Confederate Army was nothing to brag about. He'd fought for the continued right to own slaves. It was made worse by the fact that he wasn't even passionate either way. At the time, he didn't care who won, north or south. He wanted an adventure and he went about it in the most sick way possible. He was too young and full of himself and his own self importance to understand what he was really fighting for and why it was wrong. He had fought on the side of slavery because he was too bigheaded to realize what he was actually doing. Becoming a vampire and honing his gift made him well aware of the evils he'd helped perpetuate.
He was stuck with it now, for eternity, as he was stuck with all of the killing and violence he'd indulged in for three quarters of a century.
Edward thought he was damned simply for being a vampire. Jasper was knew he was damned because of his actions—vampire or not, he'd be damned. Maybe not even in the traditional, Christian understanding of the word as Edward believed, but in whatever sense there was, a sense Jasper had been trying to chase down through both religion and philosophy.
Jasper was damned. Whatever that meant. Surely, though, it meant that he was not deserving of being loved. He already knew he wasn't deserving of the love of Alice, of any of the rest of the family. He certainly wasn't deserving of the love of Lilah.
His eyes flickered up to meet Edward's. He understood, as much as he could. He answered Alice's question from before.
"Yes," Edward said. "That has a lot to do with it."
Alice said. She squeezed Jasper's hand in her small hand.
"Can I make one suggestion?" she asked. She met no opposition, so, looking into Jasper's eyes, she said, "I think you ought to give Lilah a chance to make her own decision here. You don't know how she's going to react unless you give her the chance to react. I think you should get to know her, to allow her to know you, all of you, and go from there. If she does end up hating you, then so be it. But to never give her the chance to make her own choice about this doesn't seem fair to her, just as it doesn't seem fair to you."
It was a surprisingly rational and measured take from Alice, considering her emotions had gotten in the way thus far. Jasper looked to Edward again.
"I think that's more than fair. To both of you."
Jasper nodded. Alice prodded him in the arm and said, "Call her. Ask her to go hiking with you, I know she wants to go."
He didn't answer. She prodded him again, forced him to look her in the eye as she said, "One of us is getting the chance to have a mate, Jas. Don't waste it."
She was right. He hated how right she was. Neither of them ever thought they had a chance, and now that one of them did, he was throwing it out the window, right in front of Alice, who didn't even get a taste of that hope.
"Okay," he said finally. "Okay."