A/N: The inspiration for this story came from the song "Winter" by Joshua Radin. I highly recommend it.
** I do not own the characters etc… all belong to SM. Thanks – The Management**
Chapter 1
Bella POV
This room was absolutely disgusting. Sure, I had been assigned the largest of the three bedrooms in our residence suite, but it wasn't much of a consolation considering I had been cleaning for the better part of an hour already. My new room was by itself at the far south side of the suite, with the bathroom nestled beside it. In the middle was a large common area with a living room and kitchen area. On the far north were the other two bedrooms, and they were assigned to my new roommates, Alice and Rosalie, who I had yet to meet. The apartment itself was just a space for me to store my things; I figured I would be spending most of my time in the apartment of my boyfriend, Mike.
I was about to pull out the new iPhone that my dad, Charlie, got me for graduation and call Mike, until I saw a small framed girl with spiky black hair walk into our common room. At first glance I figured she was probably an art or drama major. I headed out from my room to introduce myself. No reason to be a complete bitch on the first day.
"Hi, I'm Bella Swan. You must be Alice right?" It was a 50/50 chance in getting her name right. From the moment I saw her, she just didn't seem like a Rosalie to me.
"Yeah, I'm Alice Brandon from York, Pennsylvania. I'm in fashion merchandising, and you?" she asked curiously as she looked around the room, inspecting everything closely.
"I'm from a podunk shithole called Forks, here in Washington and I'm taking English." I followed Alice into her room and we chatted easily about our lives before school. She was such a naturally happy person, it was practically infectious. I could easily see myself being great friends with her. A few moments later we heard a loud knock on our door, and Alice kept talking as she walked from the room.
When she opened the door, there stood four decent looking guys holding various bags and boxes. They walked into the room and Alice motioned for them to put them in her room. "I had almost forgotten," she said casually as they filed into her room. "I flirted with some guys downstairs and convinced them to bring all my luggage up."
Once the guys were gone, Alice excused herself to go start her unpacking. About an hour later, she wandered into my room and stared angrily.
"You're room is so much bigger, you lucky bitch. I can barely fit all my clothes in the closet." She moaned unhappily. I shrugged my shoulders and stood on my bed to hang a poster sized picture of a park in Chicago. I had always wanted to visit, but never made it further east than Denver, Colorado and that was because of a layover on my way to Phoenix to visit my mom.
"We should do something tonight," she added casually as she sorted through my clothes in the closet. "I have a great fake ID, maybe we can find a good party to go to. Seriously Bella, tomorrow I should take you clothes shopping, you own way too much black." We sat on my bed chatting aimlessly about clothing and drinking games when we heard a loud commotion in the living room.
"Where the fuck is Rosalie?" shouted some male voice I didn't know. Alice and I got up and stood in my open bedroom door, watching the funny exchange in front of us. There were two guys in our common room, with several boxes and a few bags surrounding them. They looked seriously pissed.
"She had us haul all her fucking shit up here and she can't even bother to show up, "said the one on the far left. He was tall with a lanky frame and short blonde hair, not bad looking, but definitely not my type.
"Come on Jasper, let's just put all her stuff in the fridge and cupboards and get the fuck out of here. Serves her and Emmett right for leaving us with all this shit." Ah, Jasper, the tall lanky one had a name finally.
"The one they call Jasper is kinda cute," Alice whispered to me quietly. I wasn't going to let them put all of her clothes and shit all over our apartment, so I gave Alice a curious look and decided to walk out into the common room just as they were opening her boxes.
"What the FUCK do you think you are doing?" I yelled, clearly surprising both of them.
"We're unpacking, what does it look like we are doing?" Said the second boy, as he stood in front of the now open fridge. He wasn't as tall, but it my opinion, he was a lot hotter. He had sexy green eyes and a mess of thick bronze/brown hair that was very appealing.
"Hi, Jasper is it?" said Alice as she sidled up next to Jasper and started flirting unabashedly. He nodded his head and just kept looking her over. "I'm Alice."
"Well, Alice, it's a pleasure to meet you and your obviously very angry friend here, but we have some work to do" said the second guy as he began to open a few cupboards and shove her CD's in.
"Edward, just stop. It would have been funny, but I am sure there are other ways to get back at Rose than to fuck up her stuff," said Jasper as he kept staring at Alice. Edward looked back at him and just sulked furiously.
"Yeah, Edward. Listen to Jasper. Now, since you guys already brought this shit up here, would you mind actually putting it in her room so we're not fucking tripping all over it?" I asked as I grabbed Rosalie's stuff from the cupboard and put it back in the boxes. Edward was clearly pissed, but I could care less. After a few minutes of silence, Jasper and Edward finally grabbed some of the boxes and loaded them into Rosalie's room, putting them on her bed. Alice ran over to the desk in my bedroom and scribbled something on a post it note and shoved it in Jasper's back pocket when he came back into the room.
"Wow, she's fast" said Edward as he sat down comfortably on our couch once the boxes were gone. Jasper followed suit and soon they were both relaxing comfortably in our living room as though they owned the place.
"What on earth are you doing?" I yelled at them.
"We're resting. Moving is hard work ya know." Said Edward sarcastically. Something tells me he never had to move anything in his entire life. "Actually, Miss I'm too fucking special to introduce myself, we're staying put until ungrateful Rosalie and her dick of a boyfriend Emmett show up. He has my car and I'm not going anywhere without it." Edward was so damned frustrating, but so hot at the same time., and that was frustrating too.
"Fine. I'm Bella Swan. Happy now?" I asked curiously.
"Fucking ecstatic. Do you have anything to drink?"
Edward POV
Rosalie and Emmett were dead. If I found anything even closely resembling a condom wrapper in the back of my car, I would beat the shit out of both of them. Rosalie had convinced Jasper and I to bring some of her boxes and bags up to her new suite in residence, with promises of immense amounts of alcohol. When we got to the suite, Rosalie was nowhere to be found and Emmett texted me to thank me for lending him the Volvo. I hadn't fucked lent it to him. He stole it. I should call the cops. If I wasn't certain that there was illegal shit in that car, I probably would have.
Now all Jasper and I have to do is sit and wait. We've been here for almost an hour and Jasper has already met his latest conquest. Some little pixie thing named Alice. She is one of Rose's new roommates, her and some argumentative bitch named Bella. The only thing Bella had going for her was her looks, she had zero personality. She had pretty long brown hair and her eyes were an awesome shade of chocolate brown, and she seemed to have a nice set of tits under her baggy t-shirt. I shook my head and realized I shouldn't be thinking these thoughts. She was a fucking smartass and it drove me nuts.
When I asked her earlier for a drink, she offered me a coke without rum. Who drinks coke without the rum these days, I thought to myself. When she finally wandered out of the room, to what I assumed was her bedroom, I followed. Primarily because I didn't want to sit there and listen to Jasper flirt with Alice, and also because part of me was curious about her.
"What now?" she asked in frustration as I sat myself down at her desk chair and started looking around her room. I had no answer so I just shrugged my shoulders. Then a poster on her wall caught my eye.
"Nice picture," I said pointing to the black and white shot above her headboard. She turned her head casually, her long hair swaying over her shoulder in an adorable way. "That's Grant Park."
"You know Chicago?" she asked. Finally she was interested in something.
"Born and bred. We all are actually. Emmett, Rosalie, Jasper and I. We all went to high school together and this was the only school we all got accepted to together, so we thought it would be funny to go together. Of course Jasper's parents wanted him to go to Emory down in Atlanta, but he prefers parties to books, so here we are." I admitted to her. She smiled a big bright grin and I could see that she was clearly prettier than I had thought earlier in the common room.
We talked casually about Chicago for a little while, mainly her asking questions and me answering them without coming off like a complete prick. It was taking a lot of work on my part though. Suddenly her door opened and in walked some normal looking guy in khakis and a dirty ass t-shirt.
"What the fuck Bella?" he said as he glared daggers at me.
"Fuck off Mike. It's not what you think. He's a friend of my new roommate Rosalie. We were just chatting while Alice, my other roommate and Jasper, Rosalie's other friend, talked." She said anxiously. Clearly this was some boyfriend or something and I was not welcome.
"Bella, there's no one in the fucking apartment," he said as he pushed my door open farther to prove that Alice and Jasper had actually left.
"What the fuck? Jasper is a dead man." I said as I stood from her desk and walked back into the common room. I reached for my cell phone and was about to speed dial Jasper when Mike walked up behind me and grabbed my arm.
"She's taken, so I highly suggest you back off," he said, trying to sound threatening and instead just coming off as a complete dickhead.
"Well, she certainly seemed interested," I spat back at him quietly, doing my best to piss him off. "May the best man win."
"Trust me buddy, you don't want to mess with me," he said angrily, as I pulled his hand from my shoulder.
"You fucking touch me again, and I will break your hand. That is a promise, Mike."I turned away from him and headed into Rosalie's bedroom to call Jasper and find out where the fuck he had gone. After leaving messages for all three of my supposed friends, I headed back into the main common room and found Bella crying softly on the couch. She looked so sad, yet so cute, with her legs pulled up to her chest.
"Sorry, I think I made things worse," I admitted apologetically. Apologizing was not something I did often, so I was glad no one was around to hear me. "In my defense though, he's a complete douche bag. What the hell do you see in that guy?" She just shook her head and wiped away her tears. Apparently Mike had left after a little screaming match with Bella regarding our casual conversation. Jealous asshole.
"We've been together for a while," she said quietly as she pulled herself from her fetal position and moved to a more comfortable spot on the couch. "All my friends from back home said I should just dump him before school and sow my wild oats, just be a normal single girl."
"I agree with these friends of yours," I said, trying to ease the tension with a joke. "I still think you should dump him. He's an ass."
"It's not that easy," she said. She was clearly hiding something, maybe a little booze will get me to the bottom of this situation.
"Let's go get drunk," I offered sympathetically. Girls always wanted to get drunk when they had guy troubles. I knew this for a fact, because I was usually the guy they were having troubles with. "I'll call Jasper and Emmett and have them meet us at my place. They can bring Alice and Rosalie. We have a full bar." I smiled genuinely.
"Let me go get dressed then," she said as she headed back into her room. Her boyfriend was a fucking tool, and hopefully I could prove it to her and she could move on, without the dickhead.