The Other Way : Thirteen

You Kiss Me Just Fine Sugar

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Jasper was sitting on the deck when I got back to the villa, shoes discarded and shirt undone, basking like a cat. The sun was just beginning to set and the sky was bleeding red and orange and yellow into the water, wind calming to a cool breeze blown through with salt and lavender. He’d been working so much that I’d barely seen him and hated that I was about to ruin this perfect moment with a bunch of heavy shit.

I basically pretended to be a mermaid and made out with Alice.

The sea water really was fucking with my head because all I could think about was her tongue against mine, her hand on my neck, breath in my mouth. She pressed right up against me, salty and damp and hot from the sun, metal of the barbells through her nipples biting into my own skin and-

“We need to talk.” I tumbled into the chair beside Jasper and he eyed me warily for a moment.

“I know,” he sighed. “Edward cornered me today.”

“And what did he have to say?” I asked blandly, not wanting to give away that I already knew but sure that Jasper could see it on me anyway.

“Not a whole lot, actually. He accused me of cheating on you.”

“Are you?”

“Not yet.” He squared his jaw, obviously trying to be truthful. What the fuck? Even though I was prepared for the shock, my face slipped.

“Jacob?”

Jasper’s tightened mouth cracked into a tight smile, telling me far more than his words did. “He’s a sweet boy. Too young.”

“Have you slept with him?”

Jasper snorted. “We’ve only been here three days, Honey. I’m not that slick.” I watched his mouth tighten down again but his gaze didn’t waver off me, fixed and pointed. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you. It hasn’t been more than a few kisses here and there, so . . .”

“He’s not your first.”

I didn’t ask, fully aware that he wasn’t. Jasper was nothing if not discrete, but I’d suspected a few liaisons over the last couple of years. The exchanged glances over my head, late-night business dinners that sent him home smelling of brandy and someone else’s cologne.

“No. But he’s one of a very limited handful. No one’s ever been serious enough to warrant telling you about.” He stared at me intently for a while before he spoke again, voice gentle. “I know that you haven’t, at all.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes, knowing full well that he was aware of my solo stint as of late. There’s not a whole lot of room to hide elephants when you live with someone, even if it is in a mansion.  

“Come here.” Jasper wrapped a hand around my wrist and tugged me from my chair, pulling me into the lounger and letting me curl up against him. His skin was warm, chest smooth and his heart thumping in time to the waves. I tucked my hands up underneath my chin and he wrapped his arms around me, the comforting familiarity of our normal making everything so much more confusing.

“How did you know it was him?” he asked eventually, voice thoughtful as he stroked my arm. I flashed back to Jacob’s face for a split second, trying not to imagine them kissing but unable to help myself.

“Alice told me. She said Edward saw you together yesterday.”

“Right,” Jasper exhaled. “I suppose that explains his shitty attitude. He tried to kiss me, you know? When he came to me about you.”

“He did?” I would have never pegged him as the type, but Jasper had taught me not to take anything at face value. Edward was currently putting me through the same tutorial.

His chest bobbed underneath my cheek when he chuckled. “Yes. In retrospect I think maybe he was testing me, trying to confirm what he saw. But I’m not what he wants.”

“What does he want?” I knew the answer to this too, though I doubted Edward would ever tell Jasper what he said to me on the boat dock.

“You.” Jasper’s hands stilled and he sunk his fingers into my hips. “He wants you.”

“He told you that?” My mouth fell open in astonishment. Wrong again.

“In so many words, yes, but I’ve known it since the moment he laid eyes on you. It’s fairly obvious.”

It certainly seemed to be the opposite, in my opinion. I felt like I was an agitation, an itch that couldn’t be reached somewhere in the center of his back, not the object he was lusting after. I’d never seen him smile at me, only that crooked smirk that made me feel weak-kneed and on-edge.

He saved his smiles for Alice.

“Alice kissed me today,” I blurted before I even thought it, lavender soaked mind still stuck in that lagoon with a painted mermaid pressing her tits up against mine and pushing her tongue into my mouth. I had always been terrible at hiding things, and was even worse with him. I probably had it written all over my face. Yep. Jasper’s eyebrows arched dramatically and it took a moment for the sly smirk but when it came on, it came on hard.

“Well, well, Sweet Pea,” he purred at me. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Cut it out.” I slapped his chest, trying to shake her off. Trying not to blush. Trying to play it cool, and probably failing at all three.

“Did you like it?” He grabbed my hand and pressed it to his breast bone to keep me from hitting him again.

“Sort of.” I scrunched my face up until I realized that I probably looked like Alice, saying the exact same thing to me when I told her I was married. “She told me I deserved it.”

Jasper huffed under my cheek, silent for a moment. His fingers dug into me again when he spoke. “She’s right, you do.” He tugged me tight before speaking again. “You know that I love you, right? Backwards and forwards and probably more than anyone in the world, except Rose.”

“I love you too, but you’re driving me insane,” I huffed before I could stop myself. My mouth was obviously broken. Jasper sat up and pulled me away to look at me, holding me at an arm’s length with his eyes piercing into me until I relented. “What do you think it does to me . . . all the affection? Sometimes it’s overwhelming.” I deflated like a balloon.

“I could say the same thing to you concerning your penchant for non-existent sleepwear.” He gently pinched the skin on the back of my arm, chiding me softly. Point well made since I’d shed my bathing suit for a short sheer number that was just a shade or two pinker than my skin. His fingers summoned a wave of goosebumps and his gaze left me feeling naked

“You touch me like you love me. And you look at me like you’re undressing me,” I accused and his blush when his wandering eyes met mine again was more than enough to prove my point. He sighed with a soft smile, shaking his head at me as though he was amazed that I hadn’t caught on yet.

“I do love you. And if there is only one woman in this whole miserable world that I dream about fucking up against a wall, it’s you. I’m sorry for being so hands on lately, but you make it too tempting, especially when I see someone like Edward look at you the way that he does.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. After all this time. I pinched him back to disguise the fact that my insides were fluttering like a pack of rabid butterflies and tried to sound like I was teasing.

“Such a boy.”

“You have me pegged,” he chuckled. “I’ve done it before.”

“I know. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Rose’s birthday.”

Jasper scowled at the memory, rolling his eyes. “That guy couldn’t take a fucking hint. I had to do something.”

Something entailed his fist and a few choice words bestowed upon the over-friendly dancer before he kissed me breathless in the middle of the crowded dance floor and then hauled me out of the club. Flung over his shoulder and carted out like a girlfriend about to get her just desserts.

“He was no good for you.” Jasper shook his head, obviously disgusted.

“And Edward is?”

“I don’t exactly think that he’s what’s best for you, but I don’t think he’ll be bad for you either. I’ll try to scale back on my territorial side, if you want him.”

“Is this the conversation couples have before they go out to a swing club?” I poked him in the ribs hard enough to make him squirm, trying to keep things light but feeling heavier than I had any words to explain.

“I just don’t want you to sacrifice anything for me. You’ve given me everything.” He glanced around, the sea and the jungle and the heavy air so far removed from the places we had started from. Cramped studio apartments to a house with five bathrooms. Back breaking jobs to luxury vacations. My old shitty truck to the shiny silver bullet I drove now. I didn’t doubt that he would have succeeded without me, but we had done this together, in a way.

“I’m not sacrificing,” I told him truthfully and he wrung his mouth up to the side.

“Maybe not, but you’re not getting any either,” he winked at me. “I’m telling you to go for it, but you’re not playing along.”

“I don’t know if I remember how to play along,” I grumbled, chewing on the insides of my mouth and pouting a bit, if I was at all honest. I was bordering up on terrified, nervous and panicky at the fence line of an entirely new territory, clutching the barbed wire and faltering before I’d even climbed over.

“You kiss me just fine, Sugar. Every time is sweeter than the last.” Jasper pulled me back into him and settled us against the lounger, his words sparking across my skin. We lay there in silence until his phone started beeping, an impatient Emmett on the other end complaining via text that he was starving. Jasper sighed and set his phone down, holding me tighter instead of pulling me to my feet as I expected.

“Let’s stay in tonight. We can order food, relax. It’s been a little dramatic at dinner lately, don’t you think?”

I chose not to acknowledge his dig at the scene between Edward and I last night. “You want Jacob to deliver our dinner? That’s sort of cruel.”

“Someone else will. Please. I want you to myself tonight.” Something about the tone of his voice reminded me of the morning he’d begged for my good-luck wishes, the day of the mystery meeting that had launched us to the here and now. The strain he’d been under which he’d only barely managed to hide, ditching the tie and wearing his lucky vest as a weak disguise. His face was much more relaxed now, gone so soft in the center that he was almost unrecognizable.

“Ok,” I relented, picking myself off of him rather ungracefully to stand. “Order us some dinner. I’m going to shower.”

“Can I join you?” He ran a palm up my leg, skimming along my skin until he was nearly cupping my ass. Someday I was going to make him pay for all this nonsense, but for the time being . . . small victories.

“Certainly not. I intend to use your razor and I don’t feel like sharing.” I put a palm to his cheek and tried not to grin too big as I teased him.

“I basically agreed to share my wife with a tattooed mongrel, and you won’t even share my razor?” Jasper joked, eyes bright in the last piercing rays of the sun.

“You’re not technically sharing me, Jasper. You’d have to actually use me first.”

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2:13 a.m.

There’s this thing known as sleep, and I totally suck at it.

Always have, probably always will and even on vacation, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I sat on the deck, wrapped up in his bathrobe, letting my insomnia tangle with the lavender high and Alice’s kiss and the way Edward sucked those lip rings into his mouth.

Distilled and packaged in triple strength formula, because now I had Jasper’s approval.

He was flopped across the bed in nothing but his briefs, spread eagle and taking up as much of the mattress as he could after I vacated. We’d left the windows open to fight the heat and pulled the mosquito netting around the bed to ward off the bugs. At first, when he wanted to play Cowboys & Indians in the tent of our bed, he’d looked like a little boy, face bright with imagination. Now, sleeping in the grey light from the moon with his curls in his eyes and his back on display, he looked like a goddamn fairy tale.

A false-truth who flirted as much as he withheld, damn him.  

I had been selling shoes and pretending to be an author when I met Jasper, but only because it was easier to deal with than my real life. I was chock full of blissful denial, swimming in a sea of abdication, the day-to-day labors of breathing and blinking and existing much easier to deal with when they were the only things you were paying attention to. I was out there in the middle of an endless expanse of water, rocked to sleep in a tiny battered boat, drifting from one island speckling my denial-sea to another. Aimless and blown nowhere in particular. Scooping bucketfuls of resentment and longing out of the weakened hull and helping men try on shoes that cost more than a month’s worth of my rent when Jasper arrived. He brought a measure of gravity to all of my resigned flailing. Patched up a lot of those leaks that were threatening to submerge me.

Thank fucking god for that man.

Even if he was snoring.

Jasper rolled over, snuffling in his sleep and throwing his arm out across the bed as if he was searching for me. I might not sleep with the man, but I loved him desperately enough to hold myself to him, whatever that meant. I couldn’t imagine my life without him, didn’t want to, and had no intention of losing him.

I glanced out at the ocean and for the first time noticed someone standing in the water of adjacent lagoon, a barely visible shadow in the bright glare from the moon. Another figure danced down the beach and into the water, stopping near the first and throwing their arms around them. It must have been Alice because after it was over Edward bent down and scooped her up out of the water, holding her to his chest and making his way slowly back toward the sand.

Leaving a trail of footprints up the beach.

Singular for the pair that disappeared into the water.

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