Pieces

"What the hell are you doing?" a groggy, hoarse voice asked.

Jasper dropped the diary back in the box and closed it in a motion too quick for human eyes to see.

"Nothing. I was trying to unpack some of this for you."

"Whatever. I've been watching you go through that box for the past ten minutes. God, why can't anyone ever tell me the truth?" Adrian replied vehemently.

She had a blanket wrapped around her small body as she walked to the fridge.

She looked around quickly and poked her head in the cabinets.

"You bought food. You didn't have to but thanks anyway."

Jasper nodded as he picked up the box marked JUNK that he'd only just been going through.

"Where do you want this to go?"

Adrian looked up from the yogurt she took out of the fridge. "Garage."

Jasper walked to the door in the kitchen that led out tot he garage and closed it behind him.

He could go through the diary alone now.

But he still didn't understand why Adrian had it at all in the first place.It didn't belong to her.

Why was she keeping things that didn't belong to her?

He wondered if the things in this box had anything to do with Adrian's depression.

At the moment, in the dusty garage with a junk box in his arms, Jasper vowed to be there for Adrian, even though he barely knew her and she barely knew him.

Because the fact of the matter was that she needed someone there for her.

Someone who might understand her.

Jasper put the box down on an old workbench in the garage, promising himself to come back to it some other time, and walked back inside.

Adrian was sitting on the sofa, Indian style, the blanket wrapped around her like she thought she would die of hypothermia.

She was shaking and crying quietly.

Jasper could practically feel the heat coming from her body.

"Are you alright, Adrian? You're shaking terribly." Jasper asked, sitting down next to her.

"I'm fine. You mind telling me why you went through that box?"

He sighed to himself and turned to look at her.

"I was trying to unpack some of these things in here for you. I saw the box labeled JUNK and I wanted to see what was in it that would qualify it as junk. But when I looked inside, I noticed that it wasn't really junk but objects. That didn't belong to you."

Adrian gave him a long, cold look.

"I know they don't belong to me. They belonged to someone else."

"Who is Rebecca?"

Adrian felt like her heart was about to burst.

No one had ever asked her, up front, about Rebecca.

No one had ever been so blunt.

Her name still made Adrian cry.

"She was my best friend. We were friends since the womb. She killed herself a month ago. Drove herself off a bridge and left an audio tape." Adrian said shakily.

Jasper had never really been one to care about the problems, doings, or dealings of humans but Adrian had caught his interest with this one.

"I am terribly sorry. I cannot imagine how hard that must have been for you."

Adrian sighed as tears clouded her eyes.

"I can't believe I never figured it out, Jasper. There were no signs! We talked about anything and everything! There was nothing we didn't tell each other. So why did she do it?"

Jasper reached across and pulled Adrian to him, folding her up in his arms.

He was overcome with the strong urge to comfort her during this moment.

"You couldn't have known or done anything. it's not your fault."

"But you didn't hear that tape, Jasper! You didn't hear it!"

And with that last statement, she collapsed into a fit of tears.

Jasper stayed with her the entire time, whispering comfort in her ears, until she tired herself out with all her crying and fell asleep again.

Jasper took this time to go hunting in the woods behind her house.

He was still trying to understand why Adrian suddenly felt so important to him, why, in less than 9 hours, she had become his top priority.

He thought of this while he fed on a large rabbit.

He thought about it as he drained a barn owl.

He thought about it as he drank from a brown fox.

And by the time he returned to Adrian's house at 9:48 p.m., he still had no answer.

"Where were you?" Edward asked when Jasper came home at nearly 11 p.m. Jasper didn't say anything and blocked his mind as he went up to his room.

"I had business to take care of." Jasper replied guardedly.

He didn't want anyone in his family to know about Adrian yet, not until he was ready to tell them.

Edward gave him a pointed, skeptical look. "Like what kind of business?"

Jasper spun around and glared at him. "I am 149 years old. Do you honestly believe I have to explain anything to you?" he hissed furiously.

The one thing he hated about the Cullen residence: zero privacy.

Lately, he'd been thinking about getting his own place in Seattle. Close enough to his family but still far enough to be comfortable.

He wasn't a hundred percent sure how much he could take being here. And the fact that everyone was always side-eying him didn't help much: like they expected him to attack the nearest human.

It was like they thought he had no restraint at all.

But he'd done good so far with Adrian. She was so emotional, it overwhelmed the scent of her blood. And Jasper found this to be a double edged sword.

The amount of emotions constantly being emitted by Adrian were staggering but at the same time her blood was scentless.

Bad and bad.

Lose lose.

Jasper sighed as he sat down on his bed that he never slept in. He never slept, of course, but that was beside the point.

He looked out the window as rain beat against it, and wondered how Adrian was holding.