The Road I'm On by letmesign

Let me start by telling you that letmesign is one of my absolute favorite Jella writers. Her Bella/Jasper stories always leave me wanting to beg for more, despite knowing that I won't get more because they're all one shots. So when I saw that she had a brand new multi chap Bellsper fic, I damn near exploded. No lie. Now, it's only three chapters but it's complete and very underappreciated because it should seriously have two batrizillion reviews.

You heard me- batrizillion.

In The Road I'm On, we start off with Bella sitting in a therapis'ts office which immediately leaves us wondering why she's there in the first place. This therapist seems more than a little asshole-ish with her constant silence and persistent attention to her notebook and Bella is fed up with the woman's blasé attitude toward her.

"Isabella."

Bella's eyes snapped down from where they'd been staring at the diploma in question. The doctor never looked up from her notepad.

"What?"

"How do you feel, Isabella?"

She thought for a moment, blinked the exhaustion from her eyes. "How do I feel?" Bored. Angry. Empty. Irritated.

Alone.

Maybe if she'd been able to sleep the

last two nights, she would have more to say. Dr. Phillips sighed, because apparently repeating a question wasn't worth several hundred an hour. "Yes, how do you feel?"

Since the one thing she'd had pounded into her head by the good doctor was the importance of honesty, Bella answered without tact. "I feel like you're an idiot."

Anti-climactic in every way, the doctor's eyebrows barely twitched. "Is that all?"

"I feel like you're wasting my parents'

money." Dr. Phillips nodded for Bella to continue, looking up for a moment calculatingly, then back down at the paper. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

"I feel like maybe you're trying to fix my problem by being as obnoxious and acerbic as possible." Bella huffed, sat back in her chair, and crossed her arms over her chest. She could feel her heart thundering against her forearms. Dr. Phillips wrote in her notebook. "Go on."

"And one more thing." Bella stood up out of her chair and approached the doctor. When she was only a foot away, she bent at the waist, and peered over the notebook until the doctor finally raised her eyes. "I'm right here. How about you try looking at me instead of your fucking paper for once?" Dr. Phillips cleared her throat, calmly maintaining her writing position. "Isabella, kindly return to your chair."

"No."

"Are we going to have an incident,

Isabella?"

"I sure as hell fucking hope so!" Bella

shouted, her arm swinging out to knock the notepad from the doctor's hand. "Look at me! Look at me!" she demanded. Her throat started to tighten, making her voice shrill and her head ache. Her pulse thrashed in her ears as she tore the paper in her hands to shreds. Faintly, she registered the sound of other voices in the room, and the stab of a needle in her arm."

After being drugged, Bella awakens in a strange van being driven by a strange man to a strange place which turns out to be EJ Farms, a retreat focused on equine therapy. On the farm, we're first introduced to a loveable and happily pregnant Rose and when it's dinnertime, we get a glimpse of the other residents at the retreat. Even though they didn't get much playing time, I adored each and every one of them. From Bree, the cute kleptomaniac to Angela, the recovering anorexic and the most adorable of the bunch, Ben, who, after introducing himself to Bella, kindly asks her to stay away from his stuff as he precisely cuts a piece of his cornbread into identical strips.

When we meet Jasper, it's instantly clear that he's unlike the numerous therapists of Bella's past. Instead of calling her by Isabella, the name on her file, he automatically knows that she prefers Bella. And when she suffers from a panic attack, nearly losing consciousness in the process, Jasper doesn't badger her with inane questions, instead gently prodding her to figure out the cause for herself.

In the meantime, Bella meets her therapy horse, who is the coolest horse ever, Comet of Andromeda Galaxy, or Andy for short, and the two immediately hit it off. After very little coaxing during their first session, Jasper is quickly able to discover what brought Bella to the farm: She's terrified of being alone, of being replaced.

After a few weeks, thanks to Andy's calm demeanor and daily therapy sessions with Jasper and Emmett, Bella is noticeably better, the tension and panic all but gone...

Until she has a recurring nightmare that sends her running to Andy's stall in the middle of the night for comfort. After falling asleep on the horse's back, Bella is woken up a few hours later by Jasper and in her broken state of mind, Bella makes an irrational move.

"Jasper," she breathed, and without warning, she pressed her lips up against his. His mouth was warm and dry, but soft. He smelled like his cologne and the outdoors. All those sensations were quickly removed, however, when he took a startled step back from her.

No one had ever done that. Not right away, anyway.

"Bella, we can't."

His words trailed off when she grabbed the hem of her shirt, lifting it over her head in a movement so practiced it was almost mechanical.

Keep him here. Make this work.

Somewhere deep down, she knew this was what her other doctors had referred to as promiscuous behavior. It seemed like such a double standard, though. She gave men something they wanted, and in return, she got what she wanted. It was a simple exchange.

Men wanted sex. Bella wanted to be needed by someone. She wanted not to be alone. What could be more the opposite of being alone than having sex?

For the first time, though, her moves weren't working. She was standing in a dark barn in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but underwear and cowboy boots, and Jasper wouldn't even look at her. His eyes were fixed on the rafters, jaw clenched so hard she could see it flexing as he gritted his teeth.

Her stomach felt suddenly hollow. Why wasn't he looking at her?

"Jasper?" she said again, her voice childlike even to her own ears.

"Bella, put your shirt back on," he rasped.

"No," she responded stubbornly and took a step forward. Andy whinnied anxiously behind her, as if she could sense the tension. "I'm half-naked, here, Jasper. Why aren't you looking at me?" Confusion and hurt were quickly turning to anger. She reached out in the dark, taking hold of his belt buckle and yanking him closer to her.

He let her pull him, but kept his eyes focused over her shoulder like his life depended on it.

"Look at me, Jasper." The desperation was clear in the shrillness of her voice, but Bella couldn't seem to squelch it or stop herself, even though she was becoming conscious that she was doing something wrong. "Look at me!" she screamed, flashbacks of Dr. Phillips' office flickering in her mind.

At last, Jasper's eyes shifted to meet her gaze, but refused to go any lower.

That's when it hit her, rejection worse than she'd ever had. This wasn't typical male balking at commitment, freaking out over apartment hunting or bedspread shopping like she'd experienced before.

Jasper didn't want her. Not even physically.

Shell-shocked, she released her fingers from the brass knuckles buckle on his belt and took a shaky step back. "Oh," she muttered, incapable of saying anything else. "Oh." With hands quivering, she picked her shirt off the dirty floor and pulled it back over her head. "Oh."

The Road I'm On is a short tale of a scared and broken girl who's struggling to feel and be loved and we all know that Jasper is the perfect guy to do just that. ;-) But will he cross the line from therapist to... more? Well, you'll have to read to find out!

Since she'll be attending grad school, letmesign has informed me that she will no longer be writing. This is her last Bellsper fic guys, so show her the immense love that she deserves and tell her that the Darlin's sent you!

Until next time...