I had no idea how both of us were going to fit inside, but somehow we were able to squeeze two chairs by his desk. When I plopped down I noticed a picture frame that was propped about eye level on the wall.
“You kept your copy?” I breathed.
He followed my gaze and smiled at our homecoming selfie. “Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I? It was the only thing you ever mailed to me after I moved.”
I didn’t know what touched me more, the fact that he had kept the picture all those years—even the years of radio silence—or the fact that it was hung on his wall when mine had been hidden away in a box.
“It was a good night,” he commented, still staring at our younger selves.
“Pretty good,” I agreed.
“Got worse as it went on though.”
I flinched. “Can we change the subject?”
“To what?” He leaned over so his body was only inches from mine. He folded his hands together and placed them on top of his desk, while one of his legs jutted out from underneath, rubbing against mine. We were so cramped inside the tiny office that I felt we were breathing in each other.
“Like…um…” I had to focus. “Why drive me across state lines? You could have just told me about your restaurant. I would have believed you.”
“But you wouldn’t see the relationship I have with my employees. You wouldn’t see the following I have and all the regulars I tend to.”
Relationship with Hannah, he means.
“I would have believed all those things even without seeing them,” I argued.
He took a deep breath and released his hands, drumming his fingers against the surface of the table. “I wanted to show you that even if I was here, I still thought about you every day.” He pointed to the photograph. “I stare at this photo during every shift. I used to just sit here and dream about seeing you again. I’d wonder what you were doing, who you were with.” His voice grew deeper. “Or if you were seeing somebody.”
“You could have just called me and asked,” I croaked. “Actually, you could have even visited.”
“See this?” He gestured around the kitchen. “This is what I made myself out to be. Once I moved to Charleston I was able to say goodbye to the Jesse that kept fucking everything up and reinvent myself. Sure when I first got here I was still trying to be that same badass I was. I’d sneak out, binge drink, and one time I even got high on some laced shit and was on the verge of just ending it all.”
“What?” I gasped.
He nodded. “Then my dad basically knocked some sense into me. He enrolled me into therapy for my anger management and drinking problem. I hated it at first, but the same group also landed me my first job as a bus boy. I soon realized that putting all my restlessness into something productive was good for me. It wasn’t long until I became a workaholic and realized that positivity was all I needed to better myself. I needed good things in my life to prevent me from going bad again.”
“So that’s why you shut me out? Why you stopped calling me and stopped returning my calls to you? Because I wasn’t a good influence?” Of all the bullshit I’d ever heard.
He shut his eyes. “No. I cut you off because I was afraid if I didn’t, I’d want to move back and be with you.”
The world really did stop spinning this time. However, unlike NYE, this world was full of hysterical screaming. I couldn’t figure out if it was a good scream or pure outrage.
His eyes darkened. “I couldn’t move back. I couldn’t go back to the guy I once was. The angry guy. The reckless guy. I just couldn’t.”
“So why come back now? After all these years? And why come to work at my store when you obviously could afford not work in Bethel Falls at all.” I waved my hands in the air, motioning around his gigantic kitchen.
He took a deep breath. “You never really saw my mom.”
“Yeah, I have.”
“No. You saw her, but you didn’t see her.” He shot me down. “You only saw what she wanted you to see. Like today.”
“She was sick and she was lonely,” I said firmly.
“And she was showing her good side,” he replied calmly. “When you’re not there you don’t hear her calling me an idiot, a mistake, or stupid every five minutes. You don’t hear her yelling at me and blaming me for being the reason why Dad never came back. She’s a master manipulator and she gets you to believe what she wants you to.”
“But I heard she stopped…” I allowed my voice to trail off not wanting to speak the words out loud.
“Taking advantage of people?” he offered.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“That’s what I heard too. She even made me believe it.” He shook his head and grunted. “She told me all about her history of employment and how she quit drinking. Even told me how she volunteers with the neighborhood watch. She’s my mom so I wanted to buy it. Hell, I did buy it. Then she told me she missed me and wanted me to visit, but yes, I was still scared to come. I didn’t want to be dragged back to my old lifestyle even if I wanted to see you badly.”
“Oh,” I whispered.
“Then she got sick.” He shut his eyes. “I had a long talk with my dad and we both agreed that maybe if I couldn’t help her back when I was a kid, that didn’t mean I couldn’t help her now. So, I took a sabbatical from work to move back to Bethel Falls, if only temporarily.”
“That doesn’t answer anything about me.” I felt like such a brat saying it out loud, but I really needed to know what happened between us. “Why did you stop talking to me? If you wanted to show me that,” I pointed to the photo, “and tell me I still meant a lot to you, why did you even want to shut me out to begin with?”
“Because I was weak! Don’t you see that? I was always weak! From getting caught up with drinking at seventeen to allowing myself to hit rock bottom. I was pathetic.”
“Of all the lame excuses…”
“No. Listen to me, please,” he pleaded. “Every time I called you I’d feel my resolve weaken. I’d want to pack my bags and whisk you away like I promised.”
Yup, that lump on the floor was my heart flying out of my chest.
“The only thing stopping me was the fact that you were in Bethel Falls and I knew I owed it to myself and my dad not to go back. Then you went to college, which was…”
“Out of town,” I finished for him.
He nodded. “I knew I could visit you then, but I was afraid that somehow I’d drag us both down.”
“Why?”
He hesitated for a moment. “Promise you won’t get mad.”
My heart was a jackhammer. “Why would I get mad?”
He ran his tongue around his mouth as if lubricating a passage for the words that would hurt so much to hear. “You were like my trigger.”
“What?” I gasped. A range of emotions took me over from shock to sadness to outright anger. “How can I be a trigger? I never made you do anything that you didn’t want to. In fact, I was always following you.”
His eyelids shut and his breaths became quick and short. “Being around you does something to me. It reminds me of throwing everything out the window and just being reckless.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I ground out.
“I know it doesn’t to you, but it does to me. You…you represented the good in a time that was so bad. You were like the reward when I did something wrong. It was a fucked up form of positive reinforcement, I guess.” He rubbed against his closed lids and swallowed quickly. “I was afraid that if I saw you again I’d revert back to the boy I was in Bethel Falls. Every time I spoke to you over the phone I felt the same rush I did whenever we were together. I had no idea what would happen if I actually saw you in person and that’s why I stopped calling you and answering your calls.”
Excitement is linked to dopamine.
Dopamine is linked to love.
“It can’t be possible,” I whispered, feeling the glimmer of hope.
“What was that?”
“Never mi
nd.” I shook my head in a hurry. I swallowed a gulp of air suddenly feeling incredibly lightheaded. I didn’t want to come right out and say ‘I think you love me too’ but I needed him to see that I was not a trigger for recklessness.
In a careful tone I said, “I don’t think the rush you felt had anything to do with being bad.”
His eyes finally opened, staring at me as if I had just spoken a foreign language. “You can’t know that.”
“I do, because…”
I feel the same way when I’m around you.
Deciding it wasn’t the time or place, I switched gears. “If you were planning on hiring a nurse for your mother all along, why even come back for so long? Better yet, why did you take a job with us?”
It was a question I had asked before, but one that still remained unanswered. I prayed that possibly this time he’d tell me.
“Unless you’re uncomfortable,” I added with sarcasm.
Wincing, he nodded his head slowly. “My dad told me that to be a better man you sometimes have to do things you don’t want to.”
Like me.
“As much as it pained me to face my mom again, I knew I had to do it. I also thought that because more than enough time had passed, past triggers wouldn’t affect me as much. I’d grown enough as a man to be able to stand my ground and remain the person I became. I was finally brave enough to face my fears.”
“Okay…”
“That included seeing you, of course,” he whispered, shielding his gaze away from me. “I wanted to see you so much but how could I? Like you said, I cut you off completely. Why would you even want to see me again? I couldn’t help but go over the same questions in my mind, over and over again. Would you be angry? Would you want to see me? Would you remember me?”
“Of course I’d remember you, dummy,” I blurted out.
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Either way I knew I needed to stop being a pussy and be what I kept convincing myself I was—a man. I needed to see you but I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Then as luck would have it I ran into your dad at the pharmacy. He did a double take of course and had the reaction I expected.”
“Shit.” My mouth froze open, imaging my dad causing a scene at the store. For a jolly looking man he could really pack a punch.
Surprisingly, Jesse rested his lips into a soft smile. “But then I explained to him why I was in town. I told him how much I changed and…”
“And what?” I was gripping onto the edge of my seat.
“He asked if I needed a job.” He chuckled softly with a shake of his head. “I guess he felt sorry enough for me to lift that ban he had against me seeing his daughter, right?”
I pressed my lips together, recalling that horrible night, and shuddered. Pushing away the memories, I asked in confusion, “But you didn’t need a job. You had one here.”
“But I needed to see you. Let me rephrase that—I needed an excuse so you’d have to see me.”
A rush of butterflies filled my core, causing a tingling sensation to travel up and down my veins. The electricity wrapped around the tips of my fingers all the way to my toes.
Then I remembered something.
“So why did you ignore me for the first few days you were there? Why did you act like I was some sort of pariah?”
“Like I said, I was nervous. I didn’t know what you thought of me and that nervousness was justified the moment I saw you for the first time. You looked as if you were horrified to see me.”
“No, I wasn’t! I was…”
“What?”
“Nervous too,” I admitted.
He let out a relieved laugh, relaxing his furrowed eyebrows. “Well, if I had known that it certainly would have made my life easier.”
I couldn’t help but smile back, but soon that smile faltered. “You would have known me if you never shut me out.”
“Rocky—”
“No, let me finish,” I snapped. “If you were so afraid of me triggering you and bringing you back down, what was the deal with you trying to make me bad? What was the deal with messing with me?”
“I guess…I guess…”
“Enough with all the secrets, Jesse. You aren’t the only one who grew into their big boy pants. If you have something to say to me, just say it.” My gaze flitted to the photo once more. “This isn’t some stupid art critic tearing me down; it’s my best friend confusing me. I need some clarification before I go crazy.”
He raked his fingers through his hair, yanking a bit on the ends. “I guess I wanted to reconnect with you so bad that at that point I didn’t care anymore, okay? I wanted so much to feel what we used to have that I figured if, that even for a bit, we reverted back to what we used to be, things would be good between us.” He lowered his hands and sighed. “And…”
“Yes?” I swallowed back what felt like shards of glass in my throat.
“When your dad gave me the job he made me promise not to drag you down again. He told me you were a good girl and remained one after I left. I guess it took that moment to realize I was the one who suckered you into all the trouble we got into. In some stupid corner of my mind I thought that maybe if I proved you did have that bad girl in you all along then I wasn’t so bad after all. I wasn’t the only one to blame.”
“Well, that’s kinda selfish.” I shook my head in disgust.
“What was I supposed to do, Rocky?”
“I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t have thrown genitalia at my face?”
The clatter of a falling metal pot sounded somewhere from the kitchen. Jesse turned to me with a horrified look on his face. “Can you keep it down? You do realize we’re at my job, right?”
“Like those rubber dildos weren’t showcased around mine?” I crossed my arms and puffed out my chest a bit. “Stop throwing double standards at me.”
His shoulders sagged forward, causing the thin fabric of his long sleeved shirt to bunch up at the curves of his biceps. I followed the fold of the fabric, trailing the path down the length of his arm to his clenched fists. “I’m sorry. I guess I just got caught up in the moment.”
“Funny, I remember saying that same line to somebody and not being believed.” I scowled.
“About that…”
“Can we not talk about it right now?” I shook my head, feeling entirely overwhelmed. “Can we just focus on why you were messing with me?”
“Because we had fun! Because it felt like old times! Because even though you acted horrified I saw the hint of happiness in your eye each time we busted each other’s chops. You liked it as much as I did.”
There really wasn’t any denying that.
His face darkened and his voice dropped. “You looked happier than you ever did when Ethan was around. Do you love him?”
The question caught me off guard. Suddenly the familiar spasms of guilt rushed through me again. Ethan was such a good guy and yet, here I was still deciding if I was into him or not when it was obvious he had already invested his feelings into me.
“What?” I whispered.
“Do you love him?” he repeated firmly.
I wrung my hands, twisting my fingers as if my life depended on it. “I don’t know. It’s a little too soon for that, don’t you think?”
His eyebrows knitted tightly together. “You know he’s not good for you, right?”
“Why not?” Say it, Jesse. Stop with all this between the lines bull crap. If you’re thinking what I think you are, I need to hear you say it to me out loud.
He gaped at me. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been telling you?”
Yes, but I need you to say it.
I kept my mouth closed, further irritating him.
With a deep breath, he finally nodded. “Fine. Do you want a tour?”
“Wait, what?” Totally not the direction I thought this conversation would take.
“Of my restaurant,” he explained. “This conversation is a bit heavy. I think we need a break.”
He stood from his
seat and held his hand out for me. I couldn’t help but wonder if this action was symbolic in some sense, but couldn’t dwell on it for too long.
“Come on, let’s go,” he urged. “You’re forgetting we have a four hour drive back.”
“And you’re forgetting it was your idea to drag me here,” I muttered.
He looked visibly hurt, but merely nodded his head. “Fine. Let’s go.”
I stood up without grabbing his hand, worried of how I’d react once our skin touched. Would I sweat again? Would I flush? Would he be able to read through my emotions? Would I be able to read through his?
We walked through the kitchen about an arm’s lengths apart. He pointed out pots, pans, work stations—all gibberish to someone like me. By the time we made it out to the dining area we were practically three feet away from each other. Hannah looked ecstatic, but I couldn’t really blame her.
As we meandered around the wooden tables and admired the prints hung on the wall, I couldn’t help but feel Hannah’s eyes burning into the back of my head. After a few minutes of being accosted like this, I turned to Jesse in exasperation. “Can you tell your girlfriend to stop staring at me? It’s really getting on my nerves.”
He came to abrupt halt and peered down at me in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I leaned over as closely as I had the courage to and whispered, “Hannah.”
The speed at which his eyelids opened and closed would make Speedy Gonzales jealous. “Again I repeat, what are you talking about? She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh, but I thought…”
“You really haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said, have you?”
“You haven’t really said anything,” I muttered.
Jesse looked as if he were ready to give me an earful when suddenly I let out a loud gasp.
“What? What?” His head turned from left to right.
“You…you kept it?” I asked in complete shock.
His gaze followed mine, landing on an aged charcoal sketch of a seventeen year old Jesse. The picture had yellowed with age and was a bit torn at the corners, but there it was.
Smiling kindly, he nodded. “Of course. You can’t just throw away a work of art.”
Two Outta Three (Two Outta Three #1) Page 15