Chapter 15

When we reach the house, it was silent. Esme had spoken kindly but I couldn't bring myself to play along again. Though her compassion and motherly love feel like a version of home, it also feels undeserved and awkward. She isn't awkward, she is totally comfortable in her nature but I don't know how to react to this level of intimacy, of kindness, of closeness. Additionally, I have never gotten anything good that I did not work hard to earn, there was no good fortune in my world. There were pain and punishment and I had to work for every scrap of food, every breath in my lungs was earned. I've done nothing for this affection. I know that her actions are...relatively normal. I have conflicting lives in my head, life with my family where I loved the world, loved the bad in people, knew what respect and human decency is; and then the life I live, the one whos rules I've lived by for so long now. It's like someone who grew up poor but inherited a geat sum or won the lottery, that someone would grow accustomed to their new life. This someone may discover that he missed his friends or family and that wealth has driven them apart. This person would remember being poor..but those rules/ways of life would fade from his mind. They wouldn't know how to go back to that life of poverty.

The house was beautiful, though I had seen bigger and better. As a slave, though most vampires were nomads, the older or more sentimental of the bunch will keep an old mansion or home to hold their possessions. I have, before and during the 'downtime' of my entertainment years, spent my servitude cleaning such places. This place, however smaller and simpler, was far more open and elegant...it was alive in a way. Everything about it felt welcoming and the sun creates spots along it's side from the exposed spots in the trees. This is like no other place I have ever been. All the places I have served were old and vacant of any life but ourselves. It was dusty and ugly and lonely, despite so many belongings. This home is like the heads of a coin toss.

Inside was even better, light and open and bright. The male Cullens all stayed a good distance away, perhaps still concerned for my comfortability -a kind but currently unrequired gesture. Jasper stayed in the back, leaning motionless on the wall, his eyes never leaving me. He doesn't breath or attempts to act human, it's almost like entering this house transformed him yet somehow while his undead eyes followed the rise and fall of my chest, monitoring every pesky emotion, he was gorgeous. His expression was a deep confusion, a v between his perfect eyebrows and his lips pursed against one another, what about me could make him lose his normally cryptic composure? Although his eyes are fixed on the whole of me, I know he notices every small involuntary move of my wrist or falters in my upturned expression, the heat flooding my face. I know he could see it all and it was both exhilarating and embarrassing to cause such a...reaction from him, to have his eyes look only unto me as if I were precious as if something about me was capturing the gaze of such enamored beauty. This is an unfamiliar feeling, to want him to see me but to also wish to shy away, I've only ever wanted to be invisible while stuck in a place I could never hide.

Apparently Edward and Bella bypassed the house and went to their home, leaving Dr. Cullen, Esme, Emmett, Rosalie, Jasper, and myself in the home. Dr. Cullen and Esme held each other lovingly from across the room, she had glided over to him at some point while I was engulfed in a world of only Jasper. Rosalie wasted no time in silently leaving up the stairs, her head upturned but her steps light- it's as if she isn't sure how she feels about me yet. Emmett follows closely behind, almost like a puppy. He bounds after her with no real motive in leaving -except that she was. Jasper was still behind me on the wall. I should be afraid, vampires on either side of me, but I simply wasn't. For a moment I thought that Esme and dr. Cullen was oblivious to their sons stare but the way Esme looked at me, before controlling her expression, was enough evidence that they did know and it was odd. She was...grateful maybe? I'm not sure but it was an emotion she had sought to hide from me about the way I interact with Jasper. The questions burned inside me, the story he told at the hospital made less and less sense...I mean it made sense but why me specifically? He's existed for a while so why this sudden and singular interest in saving the tormented? There are many forms of slavery, forms they would know about from this world if it were merely a heroic chance to save troubled people, then why am I so special, why look at me in this way? I need to know. There is more to the story than what he's telling me, I can feel it in his stare.