Jesse
Pain explodes along my jaw when my brother hits me. I stumble, closing my eyes as I try to make sense of what just happened. It’s not until I see Elijah moving toward Farrah that my mind clears.
I lunge at him, wrapping my arms around his torso and bringing him down to the ground. A console table smashes, and a lamp falls onto the floor. It shatters in a loud crash.
Elijah is wild. He punches and kicks and scratches at me until I can get a grip on his arms. I pin him down, and the two of us stop moving. Blood drips from a gash near my eye. I’m panting, and Elijah is still staring at me with pure hatred.
Finally, he shakes me off.
“Fuck you, slut,” he spits at Farrah. “And you too. You’re no brother to me. I’ll make sure both your names are dragged through the mud. You thought you were some sort of saint with that fucking Football School of yours? Ha!” He shakes his head and turns back to the front door. It shakes when he slams it, and I lay down on the floor on my back. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
I’m exhausted.
I hear Farrah lock the door and then sense her kneel next to me. Her hands go to my chest and then my jaw. I wince.
“I’ll get some ice and some bandages,” she whispers. I can only groan in response. I hear her walk away and I open my eyes. I prop myself up on my elbows and survey the damage.
Farrah’s console table is destroyed. The lamp has smashed into a thousand pieces around me, and there are spots of blood all over the floor. I sigh.
Farrah reappears with a wet facecloth and a bag of frozen peas. She dabs at my face as I wince, and then places the peas against my jaw. She works quietly, bandaging my cut and then disappearing again to wash the facecloth off. I push myself up to my feet and walk over to the couch.
I sit down, sighing heavily.
Farrah sweeps up the damage. She’s not looking at me.
“Farrah,” I say quietly.
She makes a noise, but doesn’t look up. She turns her back to me and sniffles. Her hand goes to her face and I think I see her wipe a tear away.
I sigh.
Watching her like this hurts more than Elijah’s punch to my face. I drop the bag of peas on the coffee table and push myself up. Walking behind her, I wrap my arms around her and pull her close.
She shudders, sobs, and finally melts against my chest. She spins around and lays her head against me, and I hold her as she cries silent tears.
Placing her hands on my chest, she looks up at my face. I can see the pain in her eyes as she shakes her head.
“Jesse,” she starts.
“Shh,” is say. “It’s okay. It’s over now. I’ll deal with him.”
She shakes her head again, swallowing. When she opens her mouth, I don’t want to hear what she has to say. I can see the look on her face—she’s completely closed off. She’s hurt, and worried, and I know she’s retreating back into herself.
“Jesse, I don’t want to do this to you.”
“Do what to me?” I tighten my arms around her waist and lay a soft kiss on her lips. She whimpers, curling her fingers into my chest. “Do what to me, Farrah?”
“I don’t want to be the reason you and Elijah fight. I don’t want to be the one who tears your family apart.”
“You aren’t! You’d never be that!” If only she knew what a mess my family was! If only she could understand! “Farrah, listen to me. This thing between Elijah and I, it has nothing to do with you.”
“Tell me the truth, Jesse,” she says, stepping back a tiny bit more. The space between us is only a few inches, but it feels like a chasm that can’t be bridged. “Those things Elijah was saying, about the other women. About just trying to get back at him…”
I shake my head. “No. None of that was true. I liked you the minute I met you, and it had nothing to do with him.”
She nods. The tears are gathering in her eyes again and I pull her closer. She cries into my chest, and I hold her. Her head nestles under my chin and it sends a bolt of pain through my jaw, but I ignore it. Farrah is in much more pain than I am.
It feels like she’s slipping away from me. Even holding her in my arms, I can feel how frail and vulnerable she is. Seeing Elijah barge in like that shook something out of her, and I don’t know how to fix it. I hold her close and kiss the top of her head.
“Come on, Farrah,” I whisper. “Let’s go to bed. We can finish cleaning up in the morning.”
This isn’t the romantic evening I thought it would be. Farrah passes out in my arms, and I think it’s from sheer exhaustion. Between the ordeal at the restaurant and then Elijah barging into her apartment, I think she’s completely emotionally drained.
Me, on the other hand—I’m wide awake. Call it adrenaline, call it nerves, call it whatever you want. I can’t stop thinking about Elijah’s face. It was so full of bitterness and hatred. It was like I was seeing the real him for the first time since we were kids.
The last time I saw that face, he was holding a knife to my chest when we were just young teenagers. For twenty years, he’s kept that side of himself hidden, but now it’s making another appearance.
I hold Farrah closer to me and she mumbles something in her sleep. My heart hardens, and I know that I’ll do anything for this woman. Elijah is no longer my brother. He’s nothing to me.
Tonight, I realized that I haven’t meant anything to him for a long, long time. It’s time I accepted that, and stopped living my life tiptoeing around my little brother.
31
Farrah
Jesse finds me in the kitchen in the morning. He wraps his arms around my waist and rests his chin on my shoulder. I stop buttering my toast and lean my back against his chest.
“Morning,” he growls into my ear.
“Morning.” I turn in his arms and lay a soft kiss on his lips. “Thank you for yesterday. I don’t think I ever said it.”’
“You don’t need to thank me for anything.”
His eyes are so soft, and his touch is so tender it makes my heart hurt. How can I put him through this? Last night was just another glaringly obvious sign that this relationship will never work. I pull away from Jesse’s embrace and take a deep breath.
“Jesse, I—”
“Whatever you’re going to say, don’t say it,” he says, shaking his head.
“Jesse…” My throat tightens. My chest feels like it’s being crushed in a vice and I can’t get a full breath. I put my hand to my chest and feel a pain right in the center of it.
“Farrah, I know what you’re thinking. You think that it’ll be better for me if we’re not together. You think that you’re tearing my family apart.”
My eyes blur with tears.
“You’re not, Farrah.” He puts his finger on my chin. I close my eyes and let the tears stream down my cheeks. “Listen to me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I sob.
He’s still holding my chin. His other hand strokes my hair and he lets out a big sigh. “The only way you can hurt me is by leaving me.”
I sob again. It’s an ugly, snorting sound, and Jesse starts laughing. “Come on,” he coos, pulling me into his broad chest. I sink into him and my resolve starts to crack.
I don’t want to leave him. I want to wake up next to him every day, and smell his scent on my pillows when he’s not there. I want to be able to run my fingers through his hair and see that brilliant smile of his.
Is that selfish?
I would put him through hell with his family just because I want him to be mine.
I sigh.
“Hey,” he says, smiling. “Come on.”
My lips twitch into a shy smile and Jesse’s eyes gleam. Then, something crosses his face and he nods to the kitchen table.
“Let’s sit, I want to tell you something.” He grabs my toast and takes a big bite out of it before handing it over. I roll my eyes, and he grins. Before he sits, he grabs two cups of coffee and sets them down on the table.
His face
is stony when he finally sits down across from me. I gulp. I don’t know what to expect. Jesse takes a deep breath and then pulls his tee-shirt off over his head.
His fingers brush over the jagged white scar on his left side. His hand is trembling, and his eyes are closed. I’m ready to jump up and wrap my arms around him when he opens his eyes and speaks.
“My brother did this to me about twenty years ago. I was fifteen or sixteen, I can’t remember.” He looks at me with steely grey eyes. They’re hard, as if he’s remembering the most painful memory of his life. He stares at a point just over my shoulder and keeps talking.
“I found him in his bedroom with Sally Harvey. I’d been seeing her—well, I mean. I was young. We’d gone out for ice cream and held hands a couple times. She let me kiss her on the lips. I…” his voice falters. “It was just school-kid love, you know? Like passionate, teenager hormonal emotions. But…”
He sighs, wrapping his big palms around his coffee mug.
“But I cared about her. I was supposed to take Sally out that afternoon, and I was going to ask her to go to the Regatta with me.” He sees me frown, and he explains. “Up by the cabin, at the end of the summer, there’s a big Regatta. People bring their boats from all over, and then in the evening there’s a big dinner and a dance. It was a big deal. I was going to ask her to be my girlfriend. I know it sounds stupid. I was just a kid, but…”
“It’s okay, you don’t need to downplay it. It would be big deal to a sixteen-year-old.”
Jesse nods. “So I walked in on Elijah with her. He’s two years younger than me, so he was only like fourteen years old! And here he is, with the girl that I loved, making out on his bed. She’d never kissed me like that. He saw me walk in and he got this… this smile on his face. It wasn’t a smile, it was so cold.”
Jesse shakes his head, sighing. “I started yelling. Sally was yelling. Elijah went nuts. He pushed me out of the room and into the hallway. His eyes…”
Jesse stares at the spot behind my shoulder again. His hand goes to his chest, as if he’s reliving the moment.
“He pulled out his Swiss Army Knife that my father had given to him for his birthday that year. Anyway, he pulled it out, and he held it against my neck. He said that if I ever walked in on him again, he’d slice my neck from ear to ear. He—” Jesse falters. “He vowed to never let me have a relationship with a woman. Said he’d steal every one of them away.”
He drops his head into his hands as my heart thumps. Elijah said those things? When he was fourteen years old?
“And then he sliced my chest. I needed thirty-two stitches. Sally went to the Regatta with Elijah. And Elijah made sure to make a move on every single girlfriend of mine that he met. Some of them cheated on me with him, some of them didn’t. But it was enough for me to stop bringing them around him anymore.”
The last words break my heart. Jesse laughs bitterly, shaking his head. “I know it’s pathetic to still let something like that affect me. I’m a fucking grown man.”
I get up and wrap my arms around him. “You don’t need to explain anything. I can’t believe I was going to marry that asshole.”
Jesse looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. He runs his finger along my cheek and shakes his head. “When I met you, it made me so mad that you were marrying him. It tore me up inside.”
“I’m not marrying him,” I say quietly. “And storming in here only makes it worse for him.”
“Does it, though? I could see it in your face last night. You wanted to end it with me. And this morning… I swear you were going to break up with me. One way or another, Elijah always gets what he wants.”
My heart breaks. Jesse is right. I was going to break it off with him this morning. I was doing it to protect him from his own family… or at least that’s what I told myself. Maybe I’ve been second guessing my relationship with Jesse to protect myself.
“Just do me a favor, Farrah,” Jesse says, pulling me onto his lap. “Give me a chance. Let me show you that I don’t care what Elijah thinks, or says, or does. Let me show you how much I care about you.”
I can’t speak, because my voice is gone. There’s a huge lump in my throat and my eyes are blurring. All I do is nod, and Jesse pulls me in to his chest.
He kisses me gently and then groans when his phone rings. Pulling away from me, he takes his phone out of his pocket and glances at the screen.
“I gotta take this.”
I nod.
“Hey, Coach,” he says into the phone as I get up off him. He stands up and turns away. “What’s up?” Jesse’s body tenses. I see the muscle in his jaw twitch and my heart starts beating faster. “Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll be right there. I understand.”
He hangs up the phone and takes a deep breath.
“Is something wrong?”
Jesse glances at me and kisses me softly again. “I gotta go in to talk to Coach. Nothing to worry about.”
Despite his words, his face is dark. I watch him leave and I know that something is very, very wrong.
32
Jesse
Coach Williams is sitting behind his desk when I knock on the open door. He waves me in without looking up, and I take a deep breath. His neck is red, betraying the anger bubbling just below the surface. He finishes what he’s writing, and sweeps his meaty hand through his thin, greying hair.
“Sit.”
I nod, taking a seat across from him. Even though I’m a grown man, being called in to Williams’ office never fails to make me as nervous as a school boy. I grip the arms of the chair and wait for him to speak.
“What the fuck happened to your face?” He asks after a pause.
“Nothing,” I reply. Williams’ jowls tremble. His eyes narrow and I take a deep breath. “Just a bit of a scuffle. It’s not important.”
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with the phone call I got this morning, would it?”
I frown. “Phone call?”
Coach Williams leans back, smoothing his tie and folding his arms over his generous stomach. He watches me, and I try not to shift in my seat.
Coach is the type of guy who would lay down across railroad tracks for you, but if you cross him, he’s just plain scary. He commands authority like no one I’ve ever seen. He has to—he’s got an entire NFL team and staff as well as the press to wrangle every day.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity of staring, he sighs and shakes his head.
“You know I have friends at the Globe.”
I nod. I don’t like where this is going. The Globe is Boston’s biggest newspaper.
“Well, I got a phone call this morning that accompanied an email. It was about you, and your new girlfriend, and your brother.”
My blood turns to ice. The press got a hold of something? They could turn this whole thing about Farrah, or about me. They could paint Elijah as the victim. I lean forward in my chair and Coach shakes his head. He spins his computer monitor toward me and opens an email attachment.
I sigh, closing my eyes.
Pictures.
Half a dozen pictures that tell a story. Pictures of Elijah and Farrah at their engagement party, and then a picture of me and Farrah kissing in the club six months ago, and finally, a picture of Elijah’s battered face. It’s a selfie, and I assume he took it this morning.
“They’re saying you attacked Elijah and stole his fiancée.”
“That’s fucking bullshit! He attacked me. He cheated on her! We only started seeing each other after the Football School was finished. That was months after they broke up!” I don’t mention the night at the club, because, well, it would only hurt my case.
Coach Williams leans back again and studies my face. He nods.
“I believe you, Jesse.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Coach shakes his head.
“But I’m not sure everyone else will. Our first game of the season is next week, Jesse. We don’t need this kind of distraction.” He sighs, his
eyebrows drawing together as he combs his hair back with his fingers. His voice is soft when he speaks again. “Your brother’s fiancée, Jesse? Was there no one else that you could go after?”
A feeling passes through my chest and I sit up straighter. I look him straight in the eye and I shake my head. “No. There is no one else. There was never anyone else.”
He stares at me for a few moments, and then dips his chin down ever so slightly. “I can hold off the guys at the Globe, but that’s not to say that he won’t sell his story to other newspapers.”
“So how do I stop it?” Pain is radiating from my heart. This will destroy Farrah. The pain I saw in her eyes last night will be nothing compared to what a public shaming in the press will do to her.
“Can you talk to your brother?”
I start laughing. I can’t help it. I shake my head. “Look at my face, Coach. This is what happened when I tried to talk to him.” I pull down my shirt and show him my scar. “This is what happened when I tried to talk to him. He’s a fucking loose cannon.”
Williams tents his fingers over his stomach and leans his head down. He stares at a spot on his desk, thinking. I chew my lip. I wish I knew what to do.
I don’t want to stoop to Elijah’s level. I don’t want to bring the truth to the press and shame my brother like that. I just want this whole thing to go away.
Coach Williams’ phone pings, and he reads the message. He glances at me.
“My contact at the Globe wants to talk to you. I told her that I was sure it was a misunderstanding or it just wasn’t true, and she wants to hear your side of the story.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want any of this in the papers, Coach. I just want it to go away.”
“The only way we can make it go away is to face it head-on. Come on. I’ll drive.”
Before I know it, we’re walking into the Globe’s headquarters. I slip my phone into my pocket after going back and forth over whether I should tell Farrah about all this. I decide to wait it out. Williams marches me straight to the reception desk, and we’re told to wait while they get his contact. His daughter went to college with one of the Editors here, and it has come in handy more than once when a controversy threatens to spill over.
Mr. Right: The Complete Fake Engagement Series Page 32