Gift for Geminiscorp!
Catch and Release
Recipient: geminiscorp
Rating: MA
Warnings: None
Summary: She was his first friend in a new school, and he thought they'd be friends for life. But she has other plans. Will they succeed? AU/AH/OOC JxA
Notes: Thanks, as always, to my editors, whom I love with good reason.
Chapter One
They had met in junior high, becoming fast friends though they were boy and girl. "Inseparable," people said, looking at the two of them, "two halves of a whole." It had been true, too.
People thought of her as the stylish one, trying out different personas as often as she tried out new looks. He, on the other hand, seemed constant-apparently born feeling as comfortable in his own skin as he was in faded Levi's and castoff, monogrammed bowling shirts from the thrift store. But those appearances were only surface-deep.
She had used one of those shirts as an excuse to speak to him when he sat by her in English on their first day of seventh grade. Unaccountably shy for the first time ever, she was grateful beyond measure for the existence of the small (apparently colorblind) man who had once owned the hideous shirt. She hoped the boy wasn't the shirt's original owner, because she was already planning to marry him one day. The thought of promising eternal love to a man named Lester was hard to reconcile with her childhood ideal of a handsome prince.
"Almost Famous?" she asked, glancing at his shirt's embroidered nametag.
He blinked at her for a moment, then grinned. "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."
Blinded for a moment by his smile, she shook her head before replying. "I read everything I could find by Lester Bangs after seeing that movie. I've seen it probably twenty times now."
"Spoken like a true fan of music," he said.
She nodded, extending her hand. "I'm Alice, by the way."
"Jasper," he said, touching her hand briefly. It was his first day of school in a new town and he was relieved to have someone to talk to. His family moved a lot, but making friends never got any easier for him. "I've seen it a lot, too."
After a moment, the room filled with students who trickled in slowly, as if it were the last day of the school year and not the first. Once the teacher spoke, there were no more chances for the pair to talk until the bell rang. When the period ended, they separated for their respective classes, despite Alice's hopes to the contrary.
Between periods, she scanned the halls, trying to appear more casual than she felt as she searched. Her patience was rewarded when she walked into History, her last class before lunch. They had this class together, and little did she know that Jasper was equally relieved to see her. But when he put out his hand to keep someone else from taking the seat next to him, then gestured for her to sit, she knew they would be great friends.
The teacher lectured for the entire period, and they had no chance to speak. When the bell rang, Alice decided to be brave once more. "How about lunch?" she asked.
Jasper agreed, relieved that he wouldn't have to walk into the cafeteria for the first time alone. While other boys might have worried about being seen in the company of a girl, it hadn't occurred to him to be concerned about that. In the short time he'd known Alice, she had already made him feel more comfortable than he'd ever felt at school. His parents were distant, absorbed in their own lives, and though he knew they loved him, he had the sense it was due more to obligation than anything else. But something about Alice made him feel for the first time that he was enough in and of himself. It wasn't a feeling he would give up easily.
And so, the pair pushed their way through the clanking double doors of the lunchroom. There was a moment of silence as people stared at the new kid, but it passed quickly. Every seventh grader was new to the junior high, so it didn't matter as it might have the year before, when they'd all been together in the town's sole elementary school.
Alice spied her friends at a table near the window, and gestured for Jasper to follow. "You'll like them," was all she said.
Though Alice had lived in Forks all her life, she had only a few friends. While her heart was happy in that small circle, her larger-than-life persona occasionally stretched the circle's boundaries more than was comfortable for its other members. "Settle down, Alice," was a refrain she'd heard more than once over the years. She sometimes felt they treated her like a pet.
Jasper followed in the wake of her tugboat imitation, feeling curiously like a payload being towed to shore. They were headed for a table where four other people sat; two boys and two girls. Their names passed by in a blur, but over the course of the next thirty minutes he figured out that the large boy was Emmett, the intense boy was Edward, the tall girl was Rose, and the wryly funny girl was Bella.
The way Edward watched him made Jasper uncomfortable at first, but Jasper realized that Edward was only looking out for his best friend, Alice. Jasper had never been close enough to anyone to experience loyalty, but he admired it, and smiled to show Edward that he was no threat. By the time they dumped their lunch trays and headed off to fifth period, the circle of friends had grown by one.
For the rest of the semester and even through eighth grade, Jasper never had a class without one of his friends. Thus insulated, he had little reason to say much to anyone else. So he didn't; a state which continued well into high school. Curiously, because Jasper was nothing if not observant, he never noticed the absence of other acquaintances because his friendship with the five others filled up most of the empty spaces in his soul. He began the school year wanting to be accepted, but they gave him so much more.
-----
In ninth grade, Jasper and Edward went out for the track team, both as long-distance runners. As their feet pounded out the miles during afterschool practice, Edward confided to Jasper that he'd had an erotic dream about Bella and had felt confused and uncomfortable around her ever since. Jasper's calmness made him the best candidate for such revelations, and he always seemed to know the right thing to do. He'd seen the way Bella watched Edward when she thought no one was looking, and knew his friends were falling in love, even if they didn't know it yet. He gave Edward a nudge and watched him fall, hard.
After a couple of months, Emmett and Rose fell, too, and lunchtime became an exercise in patience for Jasper, who secretly wanted a girl of his own. Alice bided her time, sure that Jasper would be hers before the year was out. But school ended, and Jasper began bringing another girl on the friends' outings. For a long time, Alice's surety never wavered, but when their sophomore year began, the other girl had become a constant presence.
As Jasper's girlfriend advanced in his regard, so Alice retreated from all of her friends. She had been the one who brought them together as children and kept them there, through all the years when peer pressure dictated that boys and girls should not be friends. It hurt her to see how easily they let her go, and having no one else to talk to about what she felt, she sought consolation elsewhere.
The romantic pairs were so wrapped up in one another that it took them a long while to notice her absence. By the time they did, Alice was dating a boy from Port Angeles, and spending all of her free time with him and his buddies. Giving up her once-closest companions made Alice's heart ache, but in the end it was easier to leave the couples all behind than to watch them forget her.
Four of her former friends realized Alice was gone at the precise moment they noticed her sitting on a strange boy's lap at the homecoming game that autumn. Emmett was on the football field with the rest of the team, or he would have been in better sync with the others. It was all for the better that he was focused on the game, as he would also have insisted that Alice enlighten her friends on why she had abandoned them. (They would tell him later.) As it was, Edward was indignant enough for all of them; Rose was surprised but not terribly interested, and Bella both embarrassed and filled with regret, because she had been too wrapped up in Edward to notice Alice's absence.
Jasper felt as though he were seeing Alice for the first time, wanting nothing more than to shake off the newly irritating weight of his girl's clutching hand and demand that Alice explain herself. Alice and her new friends vanished before the end of the game, and when she did not respond to his phone calls or text messages the next day, he grew angry with her, thinking she had stooped to playing games and wondering whether he'd ever known her at all. He reasoned that he would be able to go to her house the following day, after the homecoming dance, and insist that she talk to him.
At the dance, the irritation he'd felt at the press of his girlfriend's hand continued when she intimated that tonight they should give each other their virginity. When her suggestions turned to insistence, his irritation grew into full-blown disgust, and he had to excuse himself to avoid saying something hurtful. He had not realized just how much he missed Alice before then, and that was all he cared to think about.
As he turned from the friends' table, he saw Alice enter the gymnasium on the arm of the boy whose lap she had been sitting on at the game. Though Alice wore blue, Jasper would later swear that he saw only red. He stalked toward them with clenched fists, glaring at the suddenly alarmed boy. By the end of the dance, Alice stood mutinous and silent in the face of Jasper's towering anger and the girlfriend had left the school on the arm of Alice's date.
For the first time, their friends saw Jasper and Alice as the couple they could be: a perfect study in contrasts, bound together by their mutual and intense regard. The friends looked at one another, silently wondering when Jasper and Alice's relationship had become more than platonic. Although their questioning glances lasted no more than a moment, Alice had slipped away once more by the time they looked up again. But this time, she had been drawn away by Jasper rather than leaving him behind.
Chapter Two
Recipient: geminiscorp
Rating: MA
Warnings: None
Summary: She was his first friend in a new school, and he thought they'd be friends for life. But she has other plans. Will they succeed? AU/AH/OOC JxA
Notes: Thanks, as always, to my editors, whom I love with good reason.
Chapter One
They had met in junior high, becoming fast friends though they were boy and girl. "Inseparable," people said, looking at the two of them, "two halves of a whole." It had been true, too.
People thought of her as the stylish one, trying out different personas as often as she tried out new looks. He, on the other hand, seemed constant-apparently born feeling as comfortable in his own skin as he was in faded Levi's and castoff, monogrammed bowling shirts from the thrift store. But those appearances were only surface-deep.
She had used one of those shirts as an excuse to speak to him when he sat by her in English on their first day of seventh grade. Unaccountably shy for the first time ever, she was grateful beyond measure for the existence of the small (apparently colorblind) man who had once owned the hideous shirt. She hoped the boy wasn't the shirt's original owner, because she was already planning to marry him one day. The thought of promising eternal love to a man named Lester was hard to reconcile with her childhood ideal of a handsome prince.
"Almost Famous?" she asked, glancing at his shirt's embroidered nametag.
He blinked at her for a moment, then grinned. "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."
Blinded for a moment by his smile, she shook her head before replying. "I read everything I could find by Lester Bangs after seeing that movie. I've seen it probably twenty times now."
"Spoken like a true fan of music," he said.
She nodded, extending her hand. "I'm Alice, by the way."
"Jasper," he said, touching her hand briefly. It was his first day of school in a new town and he was relieved to have someone to talk to. His family moved a lot, but making friends never got any easier for him. "I've seen it a lot, too."
After a moment, the room filled with students who trickled in slowly, as if it were the last day of the school year and not the first. Once the teacher spoke, there were no more chances for the pair to talk until the bell rang. When the period ended, they separated for their respective classes, despite Alice's hopes to the contrary.
Between periods, she scanned the halls, trying to appear more casual than she felt as she searched. Her patience was rewarded when she walked into History, her last class before lunch. They had this class together, and little did she know that Jasper was equally relieved to see her. But when he put out his hand to keep someone else from taking the seat next to him, then gestured for her to sit, she knew they would be great friends.
The teacher lectured for the entire period, and they had no chance to speak. When the bell rang, Alice decided to be brave once more. "How about lunch?" she asked.
Jasper agreed, relieved that he wouldn't have to walk into the cafeteria for the first time alone. While other boys might have worried about being seen in the company of a girl, it hadn't occurred to him to be concerned about that. In the short time he'd known Alice, she had already made him feel more comfortable than he'd ever felt at school. His parents were distant, absorbed in their own lives, and though he knew they loved him, he had the sense it was due more to obligation than anything else. But something about Alice made him feel for the first time that he was enough in and of himself. It wasn't a feeling he would give up easily.
And so, the pair pushed their way through the clanking double doors of the lunchroom. There was a moment of silence as people stared at the new kid, but it passed quickly. Every seventh grader was new to the junior high, so it didn't matter as it might have the year before, when they'd all been together in the town's sole elementary school.
Alice spied her friends at a table near the window, and gestured for Jasper to follow. "You'll like them," was all she said.
Though Alice had lived in Forks all her life, she had only a few friends. While her heart was happy in that small circle, her larger-than-life persona occasionally stretched the circle's boundaries more than was comfortable for its other members. "Settle down, Alice," was a refrain she'd heard more than once over the years. She sometimes felt they treated her like a pet.
Jasper followed in the wake of her tugboat imitation, feeling curiously like a payload being towed to shore. They were headed for a table where four other people sat; two boys and two girls. Their names passed by in a blur, but over the course of the next thirty minutes he figured out that the large boy was Emmett, the intense boy was Edward, the tall girl was Rose, and the wryly funny girl was Bella.
The way Edward watched him made Jasper uncomfortable at first, but Jasper realized that Edward was only looking out for his best friend, Alice. Jasper had never been close enough to anyone to experience loyalty, but he admired it, and smiled to show Edward that he was no threat. By the time they dumped their lunch trays and headed off to fifth period, the circle of friends had grown by one.
For the rest of the semester and even through eighth grade, Jasper never had a class without one of his friends. Thus insulated, he had little reason to say much to anyone else. So he didn't; a state which continued well into high school. Curiously, because Jasper was nothing if not observant, he never noticed the absence of other acquaintances because his friendship with the five others filled up most of the empty spaces in his soul. He began the school year wanting to be accepted, but they gave him so much more.
-----
In ninth grade, Jasper and Edward went out for the track team, both as long-distance runners. As their feet pounded out the miles during afterschool practice, Edward confided to Jasper that he'd had an erotic dream about Bella and had felt confused and uncomfortable around her ever since. Jasper's calmness made him the best candidate for such revelations, and he always seemed to know the right thing to do. He'd seen the way Bella watched Edward when she thought no one was looking, and knew his friends were falling in love, even if they didn't know it yet. He gave Edward a nudge and watched him fall, hard.
After a couple of months, Emmett and Rose fell, too, and lunchtime became an exercise in patience for Jasper, who secretly wanted a girl of his own. Alice bided her time, sure that Jasper would be hers before the year was out. But school ended, and Jasper began bringing another girl on the friends' outings. For a long time, Alice's surety never wavered, but when their sophomore year began, the other girl had become a constant presence.
As Jasper's girlfriend advanced in his regard, so Alice retreated from all of her friends. She had been the one who brought them together as children and kept them there, through all the years when peer pressure dictated that boys and girls should not be friends. It hurt her to see how easily they let her go, and having no one else to talk to about what she felt, she sought consolation elsewhere.
The romantic pairs were so wrapped up in one another that it took them a long while to notice her absence. By the time they did, Alice was dating a boy from Port Angeles, and spending all of her free time with him and his buddies. Giving up her once-closest companions made Alice's heart ache, but in the end it was easier to leave the couples all behind than to watch them forget her.
Four of her former friends realized Alice was gone at the precise moment they noticed her sitting on a strange boy's lap at the homecoming game that autumn. Emmett was on the football field with the rest of the team, or he would have been in better sync with the others. It was all for the better that he was focused on the game, as he would also have insisted that Alice enlighten her friends on why she had abandoned them. (They would tell him later.) As it was, Edward was indignant enough for all of them; Rose was surprised but not terribly interested, and Bella both embarrassed and filled with regret, because she had been too wrapped up in Edward to notice Alice's absence.
Jasper felt as though he were seeing Alice for the first time, wanting nothing more than to shake off the newly irritating weight of his girl's clutching hand and demand that Alice explain herself. Alice and her new friends vanished before the end of the game, and when she did not respond to his phone calls or text messages the next day, he grew angry with her, thinking she had stooped to playing games and wondering whether he'd ever known her at all. He reasoned that he would be able to go to her house the following day, after the homecoming dance, and insist that she talk to him.
At the dance, the irritation he'd felt at the press of his girlfriend's hand continued when she intimated that tonight they should give each other their virginity. When her suggestions turned to insistence, his irritation grew into full-blown disgust, and he had to excuse himself to avoid saying something hurtful. He had not realized just how much he missed Alice before then, and that was all he cared to think about.
As he turned from the friends' table, he saw Alice enter the gymnasium on the arm of the boy whose lap she had been sitting on at the game. Though Alice wore blue, Jasper would later swear that he saw only red. He stalked toward them with clenched fists, glaring at the suddenly alarmed boy. By the end of the dance, Alice stood mutinous and silent in the face of Jasper's towering anger and the girlfriend had left the school on the arm of Alice's date.
For the first time, their friends saw Jasper and Alice as the couple they could be: a perfect study in contrasts, bound together by their mutual and intense regard. The friends looked at one another, silently wondering when Jasper and Alice's relationship had become more than platonic. Although their questioning glances lasted no more than a moment, Alice had slipped away once more by the time they looked up again. But this time, she had been drawn away by Jasper rather than leaving him behind.
Chapter Two