fifteen reasons to forget about you (edward/rosalie)
fifteen reasons to forget about you
otempora01, rated G.
Twilight, Edward/Rosalie, mentions of Edward/Bella and Emmett/Rosalie, pre-Twilight.
They spent the first few days wandering around one another in the most frigid of awkward silences.
Complete, 1,976 words. Beta'd by pinkbutterflies. Happy birthday, anythingbutgrey!
*
You say so many things, well, not a word was true
If you’re still in that state of mind then I’d still vacation inside of you
Well I think you’re worth every minute and every dime I spend
I’ll spend all my time fighting dragons just to keep you alive and talking
Your imagination’s running wild round your deceptive heart
This is my crusade and you’re the unreachable star but I’m reaching
Tinkerbell, dry your tears, outside it’s only raining and I’m still here
-Don Quixote, Pencey Prep
*
1.
They spent the first few days wandering around one another in the most frigid of awkward silences. Her thoughts about him were indifferent at best and downright vicious at worst. She left rooms whenever he entered, blatantly ignored him when she couldn’t, and never referred to him by name. It was as though she blamed him for her transformation.
When Edward tentatively brought the situation to Carlisle’s attention, he received a knowing smile and a reassurance that he’d spend the rest of eternity trying and failing to figure out women.
2.
Her first actual words to him were, “Move out of my way.”
She hadn’t been with them for a week before Edward caught the murder in her thoughts and as Carlisle’s prodigal son he could not in good conscience let her out of the house. He blocked her doorway like a very stubborn brick wall and met her dark, dark eyes with the same defiance he saw reflected back at him.
Check.
“I said move out of my way,” she repeated, her voice growing low and angry.
Edward shook his head in the most subtle of ways. “You will regret it.”
“I have only one regret and you are keeping me from righting it.”
She darted to the left, but Edward was there in the same instant.
Check.
“We don’t harm humans. Haven’t you listened to a word Carlisle said to you?”
Rosalie snarled something unladylike and whirled around with her mind on the window behind her. Edward moved to block her-just in time for her to run backward out the door and down the stairs. By the time he reached the front door, she was a little blond spec in the distance.
Checkmate.
3.
She came home late. Edward gave her one long look of disgust behind Carlisle’s disappointment and locked himself in his room.
4.
Edward was in the garage working on his car when he heard Rosalie approach. She was thinking louder than usual either to get his attention or to get on his nerves. He lifted his head out from under the hood and tried not to glare.
Instead of explaining herself, Rosalie came to his side, peered at the exposed engine parts, and asked him pleasantly what he was up to.
Edward told her, just as pleasantly, to go away.
Predictably, she did no such thing, instead continuing to watch as he checked the oil and replaced the carburetor then drifted out again as soon as he was finished.
She did the same thing two weeks later.
And again a week after that.
After one month, Edward began to tell as well as show and Rosalie began to learn as well as watch. After two, the chore became routine and then, to his surprise, enjoyable. After three, Rosalie fixed his car all on her own and he gave her the spare key as a prize.
5.
“You and Rosalie seem to be getting along well,” Esme said slyly, exchanging glances with Carlisle across the living room.
Edward, passing through to get an extra wrench for Rosalie, could hear their thoughts loud and clear. “Not that well.”
Esme hid a smile and Carlisle laughed outright. Edward rolled his eyes at both of them and returned to the garage. Rosalie was sitting on the trunk of the car, muttering something indistinct under her breath even as she conjugated Latin verbs in her head. Whatever she was thinking, she wanted him to hear no part of it.
She looked up when he was only three yards away, then hopped off the trunk and left without a word. The silences became awkward and frigid once again.
6.
“Did I do something to upset you?” Edward asked from the doorway.
Rosalie, brushing her hair by the vanity, ignored him.
“The Liberace playing in your mind seems to answer the affirmative.”
Edward had never taken the time to actually look at Rosalie’s hair before, but it was very well-managed. The brush slid through each individual blond strand with such ease that he had to wonder just how much time she spent making herself look the way she did each morning.
“If I’ve somehow offended you, I’d like to be given the opportunity to apologize.”
The brush stopped and Rosalie turned, giving Edward full-view of her beautiful face made inhumanly perfect from the transformation. Even in anger she was beautiful. He might have told her so if he wasn’t quite sure she was already aware and prided herself on it.
“Why would you feel the need to apologize to me?” she asked with sardonic humor. “We don’t know each other that well, do we?”
Edward frowned. “I didn’t mean that quite the way you seem to think I did.”
“Then how did you mean it?”
“Esme and Carlisle are trying to pair us up.”
The Liberace stopped. All her thoughts did, really. She was well and truly stunned. “You and I? Are they mad?”
“Apparently so.”
Rosalie eyed him for a moment as though he might possibly be lying to save himself from her wrath, then straightened, turned and returned to brushing her hair. “I suppose we don’t know one another that well after all.”
Shining around her neck through the folds of her shirt was the spare key he had given her. Edward smiled and left the room.
7.
The first time they kissed was, predictably, after an argument. Edward didn’t think of them as arguments so much as they were civil disagreements, because one or both of their tones would grow cold and they would simply snipe at one another until someone lost their temper and left the room. He considered himself to be a gentleman, but sometimes Rosalie’s holier-than-thou attitude, vanity, and rash judgment had him saying things he wouldn’t normally say, just to see her lips curve into a scowl.
That should have tipped him off, his fascination with her lips.
They were in the garage, the two of them, doing work on the car Esme had bought for Rosalie. She loved that car. It was her baby, the love of her life that he had caught her talking to more than once. Edward accidentally scratched the paint, Rosalie made a rather caustic comment about his hands, and Edward returned it with one about her level of intelligence. They never once stopped working on the car together, even as the comments became more vicious, more underhanded, and, some, downright cruel.
He had no idea how the conversation shifted from the car to his love life, but suddenly she was snapping, “You may as well just come out and admit you’re gay, already. It’s obvious.”
“I’m not interested in men, Rosalie,” he replied tightly. “Maybe you’re just unattractive.”
“What did you just say to me?”
She dropped her oil rag. That wasn’t a good sign. However, Edward was busy closing the hood and didn’t notice.
“I suggested that perhaps you aren’t even half as beautiful as you seem to think you are.”
“Take it back.”
“I will not.”
She grabbed a fistful of his shirt, whirled him around to meet her fierce glare head on. “Take. It. Back.”
Edward’s eyes longed to fall instinctively to her lips, but he had far too much self-control to do anything more than glare back silently. The longer he went without saying a word, the more furious her eyes and thoughts became until, with a sound that was half-angry half-devastated, she pushed him hard against the car and began to leave.
I’m beautiful… he heard her think despondently and he instantly felt a wave of guilt and shame washing over him. He said her name, but she didn’t stop until he was blocking her path and cupping her face with his hands.
“I apologize. I didn’t mean a word of it.”
“Then why did you say it?” She was trying hard to sound unaffected but her voice cracked the slightest bit and Edward kissed her in lieu of an answer because it seemed like the easier thing to do.
The kiss lasted three seconds. Then, Rosalie jolted back, Carlisle called to ask if either of them wanted to go hunting, and they couldn’t look one another in the eye for weeks.
8.
It wasn’t fair to say they were dating. To date was for both parties to acknowledge they belonged exclusively with one another. Edward and Rosalie were simply… privately affectionate.
The encounters mostly occurred in the garage where, regardless of whether or not anything needed tuning, the two of them would go out to their cars, tinker, bicker, and somehow end up kissing as though their metaphorical lives depended on it. Edward discovered things about Rosalie he never thought he’d want to know. What she tasted like, what she sounded like when he licked into her mouth, how she twisted when he slid his hands under her dress.
In front of Carlisle and Esme, nothing shifted between them. There were no smoldering glances, no brief touches, no casual innuendoes. Rosalie preened and Edward played the piano and the garage retained their secret in silence.
9.
Edward didn’t love Rosalie. Not in that way. He had existed before her and he was sure he could exist after her as well. Still, that didn’t explain the way his breath hitched when she kissed just above his naval, even though breathing ceased to be mandatory long ago.
10.
They counted down the new year from the balcony in Edward’s bedroom. She leaned against the railing while he leaned against the doorpost.
“It’s been nearly two years,” she said as the humans counted down to midnight in the distance. “Two years since I lost everything.”
“Is it truly so terrible?”
She kissed him as the clock struck midnight and it felt suspiciously like a yes.
11.
Edward came home one day to hear that they had yet another one recovering in an upstairs bedroom. Carlisle didn’t look angry, not the way he had when Rosalie was found, but he did look worried. Edward ventured upstairs, opened the door a crack.
Rosalie was sitting vigilantly in a chair by the unconscious form of a mountain of a boy. The image was so private; he felt as though he were an intruder and so he closed the door quietly and retired to his room.
12.
The boy’s name was Emmett. He was attacked by a bear, saved by Rosalie, and kept looking at her as though she was the second coming. It was obvious that Rosalie enjoyed the attention. She practically lit up every time Emmett entered the room and focused on her.
She volunteered to teach him the way of the coven and Edward didn’t see them for long stretches of time. Rosalie never returned to the garage alone after that.
13.
The worst part of it was that Emmett was a great guy. He was funny where Rosalie was ill-humored, happy where she was irritable, big and muscular where she was lithe and petite, and earnest where she was snooty. Emmett was great and great for Rosalie and so it came as no surprise when the two of them announced that they were in love. Edward wrote his first lullaby then. It sounded like a funeral march.
14.
It was just a good thing he hadn’t been in love with Rosalie or things would have gone a lot worse. They only talked about it once. She came to his room in the middle of the night to return his key, an apology on her lips. After she was gone, Edward crushed the key in his bare hands and threw it out the window.
15.
Her name was Isabella Swan and she smelled like temptation. Everyone was wary, but Rosalie flat out didn’t approve and sometimes, holding Bella and humming her to sleep, Edward thinks that might be part of it.
END
otempora01, rated G.
Twilight, Edward/Rosalie, mentions of Edward/Bella and Emmett/Rosalie, pre-Twilight.
They spent the first few days wandering around one another in the most frigid of awkward silences.
Complete, 1,976 words. Beta'd by pinkbutterflies. Happy birthday, anythingbutgrey!
*
You say so many things, well, not a word was true
If you’re still in that state of mind then I’d still vacation inside of you
Well I think you’re worth every minute and every dime I spend
I’ll spend all my time fighting dragons just to keep you alive and talking
Your imagination’s running wild round your deceptive heart
This is my crusade and you’re the unreachable star but I’m reaching
Tinkerbell, dry your tears, outside it’s only raining and I’m still here
-Don Quixote, Pencey Prep
*
1.
They spent the first few days wandering around one another in the most frigid of awkward silences. Her thoughts about him were indifferent at best and downright vicious at worst. She left rooms whenever he entered, blatantly ignored him when she couldn’t, and never referred to him by name. It was as though she blamed him for her transformation.
When Edward tentatively brought the situation to Carlisle’s attention, he received a knowing smile and a reassurance that he’d spend the rest of eternity trying and failing to figure out women.
2.
Her first actual words to him were, “Move out of my way.”
She hadn’t been with them for a week before Edward caught the murder in her thoughts and as Carlisle’s prodigal son he could not in good conscience let her out of the house. He blocked her doorway like a very stubborn brick wall and met her dark, dark eyes with the same defiance he saw reflected back at him.
Check.
“I said move out of my way,” she repeated, her voice growing low and angry.
Edward shook his head in the most subtle of ways. “You will regret it.”
“I have only one regret and you are keeping me from righting it.”
She darted to the left, but Edward was there in the same instant.
Check.
“We don’t harm humans. Haven’t you listened to a word Carlisle said to you?”
Rosalie snarled something unladylike and whirled around with her mind on the window behind her. Edward moved to block her-just in time for her to run backward out the door and down the stairs. By the time he reached the front door, she was a little blond spec in the distance.
Checkmate.
3.
She came home late. Edward gave her one long look of disgust behind Carlisle’s disappointment and locked himself in his room.
4.
Edward was in the garage working on his car when he heard Rosalie approach. She was thinking louder than usual either to get his attention or to get on his nerves. He lifted his head out from under the hood and tried not to glare.
Instead of explaining herself, Rosalie came to his side, peered at the exposed engine parts, and asked him pleasantly what he was up to.
Edward told her, just as pleasantly, to go away.
Predictably, she did no such thing, instead continuing to watch as he checked the oil and replaced the carburetor then drifted out again as soon as he was finished.
She did the same thing two weeks later.
And again a week after that.
After one month, Edward began to tell as well as show and Rosalie began to learn as well as watch. After two, the chore became routine and then, to his surprise, enjoyable. After three, Rosalie fixed his car all on her own and he gave her the spare key as a prize.
5.
“You and Rosalie seem to be getting along well,” Esme said slyly, exchanging glances with Carlisle across the living room.
Edward, passing through to get an extra wrench for Rosalie, could hear their thoughts loud and clear. “Not that well.”
Esme hid a smile and Carlisle laughed outright. Edward rolled his eyes at both of them and returned to the garage. Rosalie was sitting on the trunk of the car, muttering something indistinct under her breath even as she conjugated Latin verbs in her head. Whatever she was thinking, she wanted him to hear no part of it.
She looked up when he was only three yards away, then hopped off the trunk and left without a word. The silences became awkward and frigid once again.
6.
“Did I do something to upset you?” Edward asked from the doorway.
Rosalie, brushing her hair by the vanity, ignored him.
“The Liberace playing in your mind seems to answer the affirmative.”
Edward had never taken the time to actually look at Rosalie’s hair before, but it was very well-managed. The brush slid through each individual blond strand with such ease that he had to wonder just how much time she spent making herself look the way she did each morning.
“If I’ve somehow offended you, I’d like to be given the opportunity to apologize.”
The brush stopped and Rosalie turned, giving Edward full-view of her beautiful face made inhumanly perfect from the transformation. Even in anger she was beautiful. He might have told her so if he wasn’t quite sure she was already aware and prided herself on it.
“Why would you feel the need to apologize to me?” she asked with sardonic humor. “We don’t know each other that well, do we?”
Edward frowned. “I didn’t mean that quite the way you seem to think I did.”
“Then how did you mean it?”
“Esme and Carlisle are trying to pair us up.”
The Liberace stopped. All her thoughts did, really. She was well and truly stunned. “You and I? Are they mad?”
“Apparently so.”
Rosalie eyed him for a moment as though he might possibly be lying to save himself from her wrath, then straightened, turned and returned to brushing her hair. “I suppose we don’t know one another that well after all.”
Shining around her neck through the folds of her shirt was the spare key he had given her. Edward smiled and left the room.
7.
The first time they kissed was, predictably, after an argument. Edward didn’t think of them as arguments so much as they were civil disagreements, because one or both of their tones would grow cold and they would simply snipe at one another until someone lost their temper and left the room. He considered himself to be a gentleman, but sometimes Rosalie’s holier-than-thou attitude, vanity, and rash judgment had him saying things he wouldn’t normally say, just to see her lips curve into a scowl.
That should have tipped him off, his fascination with her lips.
They were in the garage, the two of them, doing work on the car Esme had bought for Rosalie. She loved that car. It was her baby, the love of her life that he had caught her talking to more than once. Edward accidentally scratched the paint, Rosalie made a rather caustic comment about his hands, and Edward returned it with one about her level of intelligence. They never once stopped working on the car together, even as the comments became more vicious, more underhanded, and, some, downright cruel.
He had no idea how the conversation shifted from the car to his love life, but suddenly she was snapping, “You may as well just come out and admit you’re gay, already. It’s obvious.”
“I’m not interested in men, Rosalie,” he replied tightly. “Maybe you’re just unattractive.”
“What did you just say to me?”
She dropped her oil rag. That wasn’t a good sign. However, Edward was busy closing the hood and didn’t notice.
“I suggested that perhaps you aren’t even half as beautiful as you seem to think you are.”
“Take it back.”
“I will not.”
She grabbed a fistful of his shirt, whirled him around to meet her fierce glare head on. “Take. It. Back.”
Edward’s eyes longed to fall instinctively to her lips, but he had far too much self-control to do anything more than glare back silently. The longer he went without saying a word, the more furious her eyes and thoughts became until, with a sound that was half-angry half-devastated, she pushed him hard against the car and began to leave.
I’m beautiful… he heard her think despondently and he instantly felt a wave of guilt and shame washing over him. He said her name, but she didn’t stop until he was blocking her path and cupping her face with his hands.
“I apologize. I didn’t mean a word of it.”
“Then why did you say it?” She was trying hard to sound unaffected but her voice cracked the slightest bit and Edward kissed her in lieu of an answer because it seemed like the easier thing to do.
The kiss lasted three seconds. Then, Rosalie jolted back, Carlisle called to ask if either of them wanted to go hunting, and they couldn’t look one another in the eye for weeks.
8.
It wasn’t fair to say they were dating. To date was for both parties to acknowledge they belonged exclusively with one another. Edward and Rosalie were simply… privately affectionate.
The encounters mostly occurred in the garage where, regardless of whether or not anything needed tuning, the two of them would go out to their cars, tinker, bicker, and somehow end up kissing as though their metaphorical lives depended on it. Edward discovered things about Rosalie he never thought he’d want to know. What she tasted like, what she sounded like when he licked into her mouth, how she twisted when he slid his hands under her dress.
In front of Carlisle and Esme, nothing shifted between them. There were no smoldering glances, no brief touches, no casual innuendoes. Rosalie preened and Edward played the piano and the garage retained their secret in silence.
9.
Edward didn’t love Rosalie. Not in that way. He had existed before her and he was sure he could exist after her as well. Still, that didn’t explain the way his breath hitched when she kissed just above his naval, even though breathing ceased to be mandatory long ago.
10.
They counted down the new year from the balcony in Edward’s bedroom. She leaned against the railing while he leaned against the doorpost.
“It’s been nearly two years,” she said as the humans counted down to midnight in the distance. “Two years since I lost everything.”
“Is it truly so terrible?”
She kissed him as the clock struck midnight and it felt suspiciously like a yes.
11.
Edward came home one day to hear that they had yet another one recovering in an upstairs bedroom. Carlisle didn’t look angry, not the way he had when Rosalie was found, but he did look worried. Edward ventured upstairs, opened the door a crack.
Rosalie was sitting vigilantly in a chair by the unconscious form of a mountain of a boy. The image was so private; he felt as though he were an intruder and so he closed the door quietly and retired to his room.
12.
The boy’s name was Emmett. He was attacked by a bear, saved by Rosalie, and kept looking at her as though she was the second coming. It was obvious that Rosalie enjoyed the attention. She practically lit up every time Emmett entered the room and focused on her.
She volunteered to teach him the way of the coven and Edward didn’t see them for long stretches of time. Rosalie never returned to the garage alone after that.
13.
The worst part of it was that Emmett was a great guy. He was funny where Rosalie was ill-humored, happy where she was irritable, big and muscular where she was lithe and petite, and earnest where she was snooty. Emmett was great and great for Rosalie and so it came as no surprise when the two of them announced that they were in love. Edward wrote his first lullaby then. It sounded like a funeral march.
14.
It was just a good thing he hadn’t been in love with Rosalie or things would have gone a lot worse. They only talked about it once. She came to his room in the middle of the night to return his key, an apology on her lips. After she was gone, Edward crushed the key in his bare hands and threw it out the window.
15.
Her name was Isabella Swan and she smelled like temptation. Everyone was wary, but Rosalie flat out didn’t approve and sometimes, holding Bella and humming her to sleep, Edward thinks that might be part of it.
END