I glared at her. “Jesse,” I said. “You seriously just asked what was going on between the two of us. Pay attention.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I thought you had slipped into quoting Disney movies and I wasn’t keeping up. Go ahead. Tell me why it’s not the same between you.”
“It’s just not. He’s not the same as he was. He’s different in the sense that it feels almost like… like I think he brought more home with him than what he left with. Does that make any sense?”
She stared blankly at me for a few moments. “No.”
I sighed. This would be the point in time to give up trying to make the situation make sense to her. That was really difficult when it didn’t really make sense to me.
I stopped trying to break things down for Sara and went back to just lamenting the ridiculous heat and finishing off the pizza. That all made sense to me. There were no questions or ambiguity there. Pizza, beer, and I had an understanding, and I was appreciating that more than ever before.
I also knew this wasn’t going to be the end of the situation. In fact, I hoped it wasn’t. Because that would mean it was the end of spending time with Jesse again. Once again, he would be gone from my life and I’d be left with questions and an empty spot from where he tore part of me away. I didn’t want that to happen.
My only hope was that it wouldn’t.
Maybe it was just awkwardness after the two of us hadn’t seen each other in so long. Like Sara said, he was a man now and I was a woman. We weren’t the same people as we were when he left. As nice as it would have been to be able to pick right back up where we left off and feel exactly the same as we always had, that was unrealistic.
So many years had passed and both of us had lived our lives during those years. We had to grapple with that. We had to come to each other through all those changes and figure out where we stood. Maybe that wasn’t as insurmountable as it felt. Maybe the strange feeling and undeniable strain between us was just the effect of the time spent apart and us attempting to navigate this new chapter of our lives.
More time together could ease that. If Jesse showed up at the bar on Friday night and spent more time with me, we could get used to each other again. Being around old friends in an environment that was familiar and comfortable to him could help take away some of the edge, some of the feeling that he was out of place. We could settle back in and it wouldn’t feel so different anymore.
“So, was that it?” she asked. “Are you going to see him again?”
“Hopefully,” I said. “I invited him to come up to the bar on Friday night to hang out with us.”
Sara’s eyes widened. “Do you think Garrett might tag along?” she asked hopefully, looking particularly goo-goo eyed over Jesse’s brother.
I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Not likely,” I said. “Garrett never shows his face in Green Valley anymore.”
“That’s true,” she said with a distinct pout. “I haven’t seen him around here in goodness knows how long. But honestly, I’d take any one of the Montgomery boys. They’re like God’s Gift to Green Valley.”
I giggled and offered my beer bottle for her to clink hers against in a toast.
“You’re not wrong,” I told her. “He did a good job when he made those boys. And he did it eight times.”
“I wonder which days he doubled up on because you know he was going to need to take a break after that many good works,” Sara told me. “That was a well-earned Sunday.”
I laughed. “Amen to that.”
Chapter 15
Jesse
It turned out I wasn’t wrong when I made the assumption Cassidy would be expecting work out of me now that I was home. I didn’t think I’d get to just show back up on the ranch and take time for myself to decompress.
When he found me sitting at the kitchen table having lunch with Clayton after seeing Shannon, he asked me what my plans were now that I was officially back and settled in. I told him I was going to take some time to really find myself.
It was a leap I didn’t really see working out for me and it didn’t. Cassidy took it in stride, telling me that was fine with him. I could go searching for myself right out on the ranch, and when I found myself, I could rope myself up and get to doing as much work as the rest of them. That sounded about right.
By Wednesday night, I’d been put back into the fold of working on the ranch, but I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. I had just finished up a long day of work and was definitely feeling the effects. The manual labor aspect of it was nothing new for me, particularly compared to my days in the military, but I did have a few splinters. I came into the house tired to my bones and staring down at the bits and pieces of fences and scrap wood I managed to get embedded in myself.
“This kind of sucks,” I muttered as I walked into the kitchen.
Wade was sitting at the island, poring over the newspaper and sipping black coffee. That was something that marked him as a true ranch cowboy. Coffee as black and bitter as ashes was like milk to him. He drank it at all hours of the day and night and it never affected him. Somehow, it could wake him up in the morning, but he could guzzle it right up until he put his head on the pillow at night and still fall into a dead sleep. He didn’t even lift his head as I came into the room.
“Good to hear,” he said.
I walked over to the sink and got the water running. I held my hands under it for a few seconds until the cold numbed the surface of my skin, then started plucking at the splinters. Some fell out easily just with me scraping at them with my fingernails, but others had hitched more of a permanent ride.
I was still performing a bit of home surgery on them when Cassidy came in. He had been running errands for the ranch all day and looked much fresher and less beaten up than I felt. He came up to my side and looked at my hands before giving me a sheepish smile.
“Should have worn gloves,” he said.
I glared at him. “Apparently.”
A few seconds later, Clayton came in. He finished up his work earlier than I did and got the jump on a shower at the end of the day. He was still rubbing a towel on his wet hair and he looked in between his two brothers.
“Did Jesse tell you the news?” he asked.
I did my best not to react. It felt bordering on a miracle that I hadn’t gotten ribbed into oblivion by all of them about Shannon. I was under the misguided belief that maybe they’d grown up a bit and were just going to let my private life be my private life, but now I was realizing they couldn’t say anything about it because they didn’t know. And that was about to change.
“What news?” Cassidy asked.
“Little brother here had a drive-by visit from a certain Shannon Dailey the other morning,” Clayton told them.
I was waiting for the teasing. Instead, I got an almost scathing look from Wade. Granted, he didn’t show enough emotion for it truly to be scathing, but the darkness was there on the edges of his eyes when he looked up from the paper at me.
“I’m surprised the girl would want anything to do with you,” he said bluntly.
That wasn’t the direction I thought this conversation was going to go, but I understood it. I had to. It was the same direction as the thoughts already going through my head. Frankly, I was shocked she wanted anything to do with me, too.
Cassidy looked over at Wade and frowned at him.
“Why would you say something like that?” Cassidy asked. “She missed him. She asked me about him every time we saw each other in town.”
Wade shrugged. “She told me she was pissed at him.”
I finally succeeded in yanking one of the particularly stubborn splinters out of my hand using my teeth. Spitting it out into the sink, I turned to Wade.
“What?” I asked. “She said that to you?”
“Come on, Jesse,” he said, looking at me with something close to pity, like he couldn’t believe I was acting like I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Don’t ‘come on, Jesse’ me,” I said.
“The three of you are standing around talking about me like I’m the latest episode of some stupid late-night drama, and I don’t get to be a part of the conversation? Did Shannon seriously tell you she was pissed at me?”
Wade let out a breath as he put down the paper and leaned back in the stool. “Yeah, she did. Every single time I talked to her. It’s not like it was much of a secret. Are you seriously going to tell me it surprises you that she would say that? You thought you could run off on her without a word and she just understands? Maybe you thought she’d clutch her pearls and hang on to the dream of you with a wistful heart all this time.”
“I had my reasons for leaving,” I said, glaring at him.
“Just because you had reasons doesn’t mean you didn’t owe her more than what you gave her,” he said firmly. “She waited around for you to come back and you never did. And here she is, still stuck in the town she never wanted to be in in the first place.”
That hit me hard. I could remember all the conversations we’d had when we were younger. Just like a lot of people born in a small town, she had a complicated relationship with Green Valley. It was where she was born and raised, and in that way, it was always going to be home.
But there was more out there in the world for her. She just knew it. She didn’t want to end up like the other people we knew who just stayed in the exact same place and never saw or did anything. Green Valley was her hometown and her heritage, but she didn’t see it as her future. We had so many plans. So many times, we sat around in the back of my truck looking up at the stars and talking about what we were going to do when we got out of there.
That was what it always was. What we were going to do. It was all about us and the life we were going to have.
Clayton stepped up to the cabinet beside me and reached in for a glass. He looked over his shoulder and frowned at Wade. “You can’t possibly be arguing that it’s Jesse’s fault she never got out of Green Valley. She’s a big girl. She can make her own decisions. No matter what he did or didn’t do, he didn’t have absolute control over her life. She could decide what she wanted to do and make it happen for herself.”
“Says the guy who’s never been in love before,” Wade muttered.
Clayton scowled at him, closing the cabinet door with a little more force than may have been necessary. “Well, aren’t you a ray of fucking sunshine?”
Wade ignored the comment, going back to reading his paper. To him, the conversation was over. He had said his bit. He had made sure all of us knew his thoughts on the situation and didn’t need to be involved in it anymore.
But it wasn’t that easy for me. I couldn’t shake what he said. I didn’t know if that was what my brother had intended or not, but him saying Shannon was stuck here in Green Valley dug deep into me.
Did she really stay because of me? Was I to blame for her stalling her life because she was waiting around for me?
When I had made the decision to leave, I never thought for a second it would impact Shannon like that. Those were some of the darkest moments of my life and I did what I had to do to survive. Leaving wasn’t something I wanted to do because it sounded like a good idea or because it was something I’d always thought about.
The military wasn’t a dream I had for myself but it was a way out. It was a way I could wrench myself free of what I had to deal with every day and give myself a chance of making it. No dreams of glory. No dreams of success. Just pure, primal drive.
I never thought it would do this to her. I knew me leaving would hurt Shannon. I wasn’t so wrapped up in myself that I was blinded to what I was doing. She and I were so tightly bonded, and our worlds were wrapped up around each other—not only in those moments but in the lives we saw ahead of us. I knew when I ran from Green Valley that night that Shannon would have to cope with it. But that was what I thought she was going to do. Cope.
At that point in my life, I didn’t feel like I could mean much. I knew Shannon and I spent a lot of time together. I knew she looked at me with her big eyes and told me she loved me. I knew we talked about having a future together and the life we’d have. But in those days, I didn’t think enough of myself to believe that would last. She would miss me. At least for a little while. Then she would move on with her life and find something much more than I’d be able to give her. She’d be better off without me, I told myself then. She deserved more than someone like me.
Now Wade was telling me all those years ago I left her, and she never pushed ahead. She stayed in that moment. She stayed here. There was so much more life available to her, but she chose to stay in Green Valley because of the chance that one day I would come back. It felt like someone punching me directly in the gut.
“Fuck,” I groaned, slumping against the kitchen counter.
Cassidy came up and clapped me on the shoulder. “You can still make it up to her.”
Clayton moved to set his glass down and missed the edge of the island. The glass crashed to the floor and the loud sound startled me. My heart rate immediately skyrocketed, and my vision blurred.
I gripped the edge of the counter, trying to find something to hold on to, trying to figure out what was happening. Everything around me went fuzzy and I didn’t know where I was for a few seconds. My muscles tensed, ready for combat. My mind blanked, ready to do what needed to be done without the thoughts that might make me stop.
Something made my body shake. It could have been a shell dropping to the ground and sending shockwaves beneath me, but that wasn’t what it felt like. My head snapped back and forth, and I came back into reality. Cassidy was holding the front of my shirt, shaking me hard to try to drag me back out of the episode.
“Jess,” he yelled into my face. “Jess!”
I came to fully, but every part of me trembled. I didn’t want to be touched, didn’t want anyone near me. I wrenched myself free from my brother’s grasp and stepped away.
“Excuse me,” I managed to choke out and walked out of the house.
Chapter 16
Shannon
“Do you think it’s possible that this car is rigged with some sort of technology that makes it self-destruct?” Dad asked. “Like every time something inside it gets a little bit better, another part of it falls apart?”
I pulled myself out from under the car and looked up at him. “I don’t think Mr. Jenkins has the sort of sophistication it would take to develop that sort of technology, Daddy. But I admire you for your hopeful thinking.”
“Well, you can turn that admiration somewhere else because I’m not feeling very hopeful right at this particular moment. This thing is falling apart faster than we can piece it back together and Mr. Jenkins insists on us fixing it. He says it fits in with my service guarantee. I took on the responsibility of fixing it after looking it over, so I have to do what I said. This thing’s going to end up costing us money, not earning any of it.”
I could see how stressed my father was about the job. The car was definitely a mess and I’d dealt with Mr. Jenkins before. He was for the most part just a little old man with far too much time on his hands. But there was that other part of him that was one giant curmudgeon who pinched pennies until they squealed and seemed to make a sport out of challenging businessmen.
As soon as somebody gave any sort of guarantee or promise, Mr. Jenkins was there to challenge them on it. I didn’t tell my father, but I didn’t put it past the old coot to drag a barely functioning vehicle out of his backyard and bring it up to the shop just to see if Daddy would give him the promise of being able to fix it. As soon as he did, he was bound to it, Mr. Jenkins said.
Of course, there was no actual consequences attached to that. My father could give up on fixing the car now and there wasn’t a judge on the planet that would hold him accountable for his guarantee. Some things just weren’t fixable, and no mechanic, even one as good as Daddy, could give an absolute guarantee of overcoming the challenges mechanical systems could present.
But that wasn’t my father. He was tru
e to his word and put more emphasis on integrity and honor than any other person I’d ever met. If he said he was going to do something, he was going to figure out how to do it. Even if that meant working around the clock until he accomplished it—which was exactly what I worried he was going to do. Unless I stepped in and stopped it.
“It’s going to get done,” I said. “We’re going to fix this thing and Mr. Jenkins is going to be over the moon. Just leave it to me, Daddy. I can handle this.”
He stared at me for a long second and I was pretty sure he was going to push back on me, but finally, he let out a breath and nodded. “Thank you, honey. You always have my back.”
“Of course, I do. What are daughters for?”
He came up beside me and kissed me on the cheek. “Well, whatever they’re for, I know I got the very best one. What would I do without you?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” I said. “You’ve got me.”
He smiled at me and headed toward his office. I knew he’d shut the door and settle behind the desk so he could keep working on balancing the books. It wasn’t his favorite thing in the world, and he needed a lot of concentration to handle it, but at least it wasn’t going to battle against this car.
I felt a twinge in my heart as he walked away. Coming to work here for my father wasn’t exactly my greatest aspiration in life. I was good at what I did and always had been, but I thought there was more. I really believed one day I would get out of Green Valley and not end up covered in grease and never be able to get my fingernails all the way clean. I let out a long breath and settled back down, not wanting to let myself go too far down that train of thought.
Rolling back under the car, I went back to the task of getting the car back on the road. I was fully absorbed in the work until I heard someone clear their throat in the shop. It didn’t sound like my father and I rolled myself out to find out who it was.
I hated it when people snuck up on me, especially when it was in the shop. All the tools and chemicals, not to mention cars that were up on lifts didn’t exactly make the environment the safest one for being taken off guard. I also didn’t like when new customers showed up when I was deep in the middle of fixing another car. That didn’t make a lot of sense to anyone else, but somehow, it made me feel thrown off my game, like they were pulling back the curtain and seeing something they weren’t supposed to see.
His Reckless Heart (The Montgomery Boys Book 1) Page 9