Noah snapped his mouth shut. He’d forgotten that Jacob trashed his house. He nodded his head as he reached for the door handle.
He was moving slowly until he heard the passenger door open. He jumped out and turned around, “Hang on, babe. Wait until I can help you.”
Jesse rolled his eyes, “I have a headache and sore ribs, Noah. I think I can walk,” he said but he waited in his seat.
Noah closed his door then walked around Jesse’s until he was standing next to him, “What if you get dizzy or something? Let me help, please?”
Jesse held his hand out to Noah, who pulled it around his waist and then wrapped his only free arm around Jesse’s hips and helped him stand up. Noah hissed when the shift that they did sent a stabbing pain up to his injured shoulder.
“It sounds like I should be helping you,” Jesse mumbled.
Noah gently squeezed Jesse’s hip, “Brat,” he said and he caught Jesse’s smile out of the corner of his eye.
They made it inside the house and got comfortable on the couch as Kelly and Cole walked into the living room.
Tears filled Kelly’s eyes when he looked at Jesse. This was his brother. His long-lost brother.
They hadn’t really had time to talk or reconnect since they’d been back in each other’s lives because of all the danger surrounding both Jesse and Noah. To Kelly, they still felt like strangers. And he hated that.
Jesse stared at him for a long time before the barest dip of his chin in a nod had Kelly’s feet moving him forward.
“Watch his ribs,” Noah whispered to Kelly as he pushed forward, reminding him that Jesse was still sore. Kelly was very grateful for the reminder because his plan had been to snatch Jesse up in a giant bear hug and that would’ve hurt him – something that was totally unacceptable to Kelly.
“Jesse,” he whispered as he carefully wrapped his arms around his brother’s shoulders and pulled him in.
Jesse’s arms closed around Kelly’s lower back and he buried his face on Kelly’s huge shoulder.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he whispered.
“Me too,” Jesse said.
“God, Jess,” Kelly said with a choked sob as his tears began to flow.
“I know, Kel, I know. But we’ve got time now, yeah?”
Kelly stepped back, wiping his eyes as he stared at Jesse, “When did you get so wise?” he said with a smile.
Jesse glanced over at Noah and smiled, “When I met this guy.”
Noah smiled back and then pain crossed his face. Pain and exhaustion.
“I need to get this guy settled somewhere. We’ll catch up more in a bit, okay?” he said as he looked back at Kelly.
“Yeah, no problem. Would you two like anything to eat or drink?”
Noah glanced at Jesse and shrugged his uninjured shoulder.
“Um, just some water for now would be good, thanks,” Jesse said and then he and Noah started walking slowly down the hall towards their room. Jesse helped him to the bed and then fussed a bit, fluffing pillows and helping him get comfortable until Noah reached up to grab his wrist.
“Stop,” he whispered.
“But….”
“No, babe. I don’t need comfort or fancy pillows or blankets. All I need is you. Stop fussing and come lie down with me.”
“But….,” Jesse started to say again but then he frowned and glanced away.
“What is it? Talk to me babe.”
Jesse turned around and sat on the edge of the bed with his back to Noah. His hands were clasped in his lap as he stared down at them.
Noah reached over and began rubbing Jesse’s back and neck, “Babe?”
Jesse whispered something so quietly that Noah couldn’t hear it. But then he saw a tear slip from Jesse’s eye and roll down his cheek.
“Hey. It’s okay, Jess.”
Jesse turned his head to look at him and there was so much overwhelming sadness in his eyes that Noah could actually feel it.
“God, babe. Please, tell me,” he said.
“It’s all my fault,” Jesse whispered again but loud enough for Noah to hear it.
Noah frowned, “What’s all your fault?”
Jesse waved a hand between the two of them, “This, all of this. You getting hurt, my concussion, you having to be subjected by that, that, that man again, all of this is my fault. You had to shoot me for fuck’s sake, Noah! God, I’m such a fucking idiot.”
“What are you talking about, Jesse? This wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was,” Jesse said with a whimper.
“Babe, how could you possibly think this was your fault?” he said as he clasped Jesse’s shoulder and gently encouraged him to lie back on the bed next to Noah.
Jesse swiped a few tears from his cheeks, “I never should’ve charged at him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could never overpower Jacob. I, I, I just reacted when I saw him with that gun but I should’ve stayed put. I’m such an idiot.”
“Jess, you’re not an idiot. You’re fucking brave as hell.”
Jesse shook his head, “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are, babe. Do you want to know what I know?”
Jesse sighed, “Yeah.”
Noah brushed Jesse’s hair back from his forehead, “I know that you rushing Jacob was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen, I know that watching you when he had you in his arms, seeing the strength you had when you told me not to let him take you left me in complete awe and I know that I would be dead right now if you hadn’t done what you’d done.”
Jesse’s eyes went wide as he looked up at Noah, “What?”
Noah smiled and pressed a kiss to Jesse’s forehead then he pulled back and brushed his hair back again, “Babe. If you hadn’t jumped in when you did, Jacob more than likely would’ve just shot me to get me out of the way and it would’ve been worse than a shoulder wound. You saved my life, babe.”
“But….he got you anyways.”
“Yeah, he got me, alive and pissed off.”
Jesse huffed and frowned at Noah.
“Babe, this is what I do for a living, remember? I protect people and that means that sometimes I have to fight. I’m trained for this. I have to deal with assholes like Jacob all the time.”
“Yeah, assholes like him but not him. He’s different, Noah and you know it. He can not only hurt you physically but mentally too. The physical wounds usually heal fairly quickly but the mental ones, God, Noah, the mental wounds,” he said with a shudder as he squeezed his eyes shut, “they may never heal,” he whispered as he stared up at Noah.
Noah’s heart broke for the young man in his arms. Jesse was right. They had both suffered greatly at the hands of Jacob Knight. They both had scars, both visible and invisible. And it was time they shared them with each other.
Noah pulled Jesse closer and pressed a kiss to the top of his head, “I think it’s time, babe.”
“Time?”
“Time for me to tell you everything and for you to do the same for me.”
Jesse inhaled a sharp breath, “I, I don’t know if I can, Noah.”
“It’s going to be hard babe, I know that. It will be brutal….for both of us. But I think it will help, I think it will make it easier for us to understand and I think it will help us both begin to heal.”
Jesse tilted his head again to look up at Noah, “You do?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Jesse opened his mouth to say something else but closed it when Kelly stepped into the doorway, “Hey, I, um, I brought you both some water,” he said as he slowly stepped inside. He set the bottles on the side table and stepped back again, “Do you two need anything else? Is it time for pain meds?”
“No,” Noah said at the same time that Jesse pushed back up to a sitting position.
“Yes,” Jesse said, glaring at Noah.
Noah rolled his eyes, “I hate those things. They make me sleep.”
“You need sleep, Noah. It will help you get better.”
Noah stuck out his bottom lip in a pout, “Fine. But we’re talking later, okay?”
“Absolutely we will, Noah. I promise,” Jesse said as he pulled Noah’s bottle of prescription pills from his pocket.
A week later that talk still hadn’t happened but it wasn’t Jesse’s doing. No, it was Noah who kept avoiding it. Actually, Noah was pretty much avoiding any talking at all and Jesse had no idea why…….
Twenty-Six
Jesse pulled open the glass door and stepped out on the deck and into the early morning dawn. He sighed as he looked out over the fog shrouded valley below.
“You okay?” Kelly said from behind him, startling him.
Jesse turned his head to find his brother sitting in one of the padded rocking chairs up against the house.
“What are you doing up?”
Kelly’s haunted eyes looked out at the view, “Hazards of my previous life.”
“Nightmares?”
“Sort of. I used to get them and they were bad. I’ve punched out a few people in my sleep. But now, with Cole next to me, I seem to wake up as soon as I start thrashing but before the nightmare really hits.”
“Were they nightmares about war and killing people?”
“At first, yeah. But recently they’ve changed.”
“Into?”
“Me hunting and killing certain people.”
“Who?”
Anger and pain filled Kelly’s eyes as he looked back at Jesse and said, “The men who hurt Cole. And Dad.”
Jesse stared at Kelly for at least a minute as he tried to digest how he felt about the idea of Kelly killing their father. He realized that he wouldn’t give a shit one way or the other if the man was dead, hell, for all Jesse knew he might be dead already, but what he did care about was what it would do to Kelly. That was unacceptable.
He opened his mouth to say that but then the other part of Kelly’s statement finally seeped into his brain. “What men who hurt Cole?”
The pain that lanced through Kelly’s entire body as he looked off over the edge of the deck again was palpable.
“After I left, you know, after Dad threatened me?”
“Yeah?”
“The bullies that I had kept away from Cole all those years?”
Jesse’s heart started pounding in his chest as he whispered, “Yeah?” again.
“The found him,” Kelly said, his voice breaking as he obviously tried to keep from crying, “they found him and they hurt him, Jess. They hurt him really bad. They r-r-r-raped him. They all raped him. At the same time.”
A gang rape?
Jesus Christ
Jesse knew who Kelly was talking about. Even though he was a lot younger than Kelly, he still knew who those assholes were. There were three of them. The leader, Mitch and his two faithful sidekicks, Shane and Trevor. He knew they were mean but he never realized just how evil they truly were, until now.
But the idea of Kelly going after them, of him going after their Dad, had Jesse stepping towards Kelly.
“You can’t go after them, you know that, right?” he said as he sat in the chair next to Kelly.
Kelly tipped his head back and squeezed his eyes shut, “But I can’t seem to shake this anger. Every time the thought of them,” he inhaled sharply, “the images that pop into my head of them hurting Cole, God, Jess, I get so angry that hurting them is all I can see. I don’t know what to do.”
“What you need to do is let it go.”
Kelly snorted a laugh, “Yeah, right.”
Jesse placed a hand on Kelly’s arm, “I’m serious, K-man. I just got you back, I refuse to let you go again because of something that happened in the past that you cannot change. And make no mistake, I will lose you, Cole will lose you, we will all lose you. Either we lose you because you’re in jail for murdering them or we lose you to the darkness that takes you over because you’ve become just like them, we will lose you. Even if you do this and get away with it, it will change you, Kelly. It will change you into someone dark, into someone different, into someone that Cole cannot love. He’s with you because he loves you. He’s with you because you love him. He’s with you because he let what happened to him go, he’s moved past it. You need to do the same.”
A few tears rolled down Kelly’s cheeks before a sob broke free from his chest, “Fuck, you’re right.”
Jesse stood from his chair, pulled Kelly to his feet and pulled him into a hug as the man cried.
“It’ll be okay, K-man, you’ll be okay.”
“Fuck, J-bird, I’m the older brother here. I’m supposed to be guiding you, not the other way around.”
“You can guide me, Kelly,” Jesse whispered.
Kelly pulled away from the hug, swiping his hand across his face to dry his tears as he said, “How? What do you need?”
Jesse looked out at the view, “I, I need to tell Noah what Jacob did to me and I don’t know how. I’m worried that it will change how he feels about me.”
“That’s bullshit,” Kelly growled out.
Jesse glanced back at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Sorry. I just mean,” he huffed out a frustrated breath, “that man worships the ground you walk on, Jesse. Nothing’s going to change that.”
Jesse’s eyes returned to the view, “I hope so.”
Kelly waited a few moments before he asked, “Was it bad, J?”
Jesse’s head turned, “Not as bad as what he went through. But yeah, it was bad.”
“Do, um, do you want to tell me?”
Jesse stared at him for so long that Kelly almost said never mind because he thought Jesse was going to say no.
But on the slightest whisper, Jesse said, yeah and they both sat back down on the chairs.
Half an hour later, Kelly had to force his fists open because they had been clenched so tight for so long that they began to cramp up.
“God, J-bird, I’m so…”
He was forced to stop by Jesse’s finger over his lips, “Don’t. This wasn’t your fault. You had to leave or Dad would’ve killed you. And as bad as things were with Jacob? It was still better than staying with Dad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Jacob never hit me. Dad, well, after he fractured my cheekbone by punching me in the face for reading some bodybuilding magazine, I decided that he wasn’t worth sticking around for.”
“Fuck,” Kelly mumbled as he glanced away, “For me it was Sports Illustrated. He yanked it out of my hand, yelled at me for checking out the athlete’s bodies and shoved his fist into my ribcage because I was lying on my bed.”
“He was such a fucking asshole.”
“Yeah, he was,” Kelly said and then they were both quiet for a while.
“So, Jacob was violent with Noah?”
“Very. I don’t know details yet but I do know that he had to make multiple trips to the hospital. Well, you saw his medical file, you probably know more than I do.”
“And nobody at the hospital ever said anything?”
Jesse shook his head, “Jacob is not only a well-respected lawyer but he’s also very intimidating. He has this powerful presence that just automatically makes people back away.”
“I hate to ask this but why Noah and not you? The violence, I mean.”
Jesse shrugged his shoulders, “That’s probably something only Jacob can answer and even he might not know. Maybe because I came to live with him when I was still basically a kid? I mean, I was only fourteen. Noah was an adult when they got together. Maybe he would’ve started hitting me around after we started having sex. Sex could be his trigger. I have no idea but it really doesn’t matter. We were both fucked up by him and now we’re here for each other. That’s what matters.”
Kelly wrapped an arm around his shoulder, “You’re right. Damn, you’ve grown up to be one hell of a smart man, little bro.”
Jesse smirked, “So have you, old man.”
Kelly barked out a laugh, “Dick. How about we go cook some breakfast and bring it to our sle
eping princes’ in bed?”
“Sounds perfect.”
Twenty-Seven
Noah rolled to his back with a silent groan. He hated this, fucking hated it. Every time he tried to sleep, the same nightmare would begin, teasing the corners of his mind like something out of a horror film. Something black, something dark, something that got his heart racing and his breath sawing in and out of his lungs…..and that’s what would wake him up. He never knew what the nightmare was because the leading edge of it was so frightening that his mind would force him to wake up instead of bearing witness to whatever horrors were trying to sink their claws in him. But it still fucked him up. It was still ruining everything. He knew he was pulling away from Jesse, he knew the man felt his distress, felt his worry, felt his distance. But he couldn’t seem to stop it. He knew it wasn’t because this was his first normal relationship and he didn’t know what he was doing. Loving Jesse and being loved by Jesse was easy. It had come just as naturally to him as breathing. It was so normal now that he felt like he could divide his life into two distinct sections: Before Brubakers and After Brubakers, Before Jesse and After Jesse, or, more realistically, before his heart was awakened and after.
Because of that, he knew that none of his nightmares, none of his stress, none of his turmoil was because of Jesse.
This was all because of Jacob.
Fucking Jacob Knight still wouldn’t let him go, at least not in his mind.
When he really thought about it, Jacob had been holding his mind, his heart, hostage since the day Noah had woken up in that hospital room. He’d thought that he was finally free but he really wasn’t, was he?
Oh, his body was free from the beatings, the abuse, the torture.
But his mind and his heart had been locked behind an impenetrable shield. He thought he was keeping them safe, keeping them protected.
But he now knew that he was slowly starving them, depriving them of what they truly desired, of what they needed to survive:
Love.
To love and be loved by a beautiful, giving, perfect soul.
To be loved by Jesse.
Blackbird Fly Home (Doyle Global Securities Book 1) Page 15