"Looks like you're all spiffied-up," I said, breathing in his clean, masculine smell as he hugged me.
"I even scrubbed under my fingernails," he said. He thrust his big hand in front of me as if I should see for myself. I reached out for it and gave it a thorough inspection, turning it over and noticing that his nails were indeed grease free.
I tried my best to ignore the nervous feeling I got from touching him. I glanced up, and we made eye contact. He had light green eyes—the most beautiful eyes that had ever been put in a human being. Jesse's eyes. I was convinced he had the only pair like them in the world. He wasn't as tall as my boyfriend, but he was thicker.
I still had his hand in mine when Elvis made the sound of a doorbell and said, "Come on in!" indicating that someone had just come in the main door.
"Everyone else gets a nice greeting," Uncle Michael said with a smile. "Except for Jesse, he gets sirens. Uncle Max taught him that."
I was laughing at that and hadn't even seen who came in the door, but then I heard a woman's voice.
"I thought you were just coming in to get your glasses," she said. I turned to find Tammy Gwinn standing there, looking straight at Jesse with a wide-eyed, in-a-hurry expression. "Where are your glasses?" she asked.
"Hey Tammy," Uncle Michael said.
"Hi," she said, smiling at Michael and then quickly at me before looking at Jesse again. When she first glanced at me, she looked annoyed by my proximity to Jesse, but she recognized me quickly. We had met each other a few times before, and she knew I was Jesse's cousin.
"We've got a wedding to go to," she said with another rushed expression aimed at Jesse.
He walked over to his workstation in search of his glasses. "She's a bridesmaid," he said as if to explain his girlfriend's fussy behavior. He took a pair of wire-framed glasses off of the counter and put them on his face, adjusting them before focusing on us again. Tammy had come into the room by this time, and I turned to find her standing in her lavender colored, satin, floor-length dress. Her blonde hair was teased to perfection and sealed to an indestructible finish with about a can of hairspray. I knew her as Jesse's girlfriend, but I also knew her as the head cheerleader at UM. I went to all of Barrett's games, so I saw Tammy and her cheerleading squad on a regular basis.
"I got some dust in my eyes from the polisher today, and my contacts were bothering me," Jesse explained, coming to stand near us again.
"You ready?" Tammy asked with no regard to his comment.
He nodded and went to stand next to her.
My heart broke. I wasn't a woman-hater, but I did not like Tammy Gwinn, and I didn't want my cousin to like her either. I didn't know what he saw in her other than a perfect exterior.
"I'm glad you're coming to work here," Jesse said, smiling at me as he started to pull his girlfriend toward the door.
"You're coming to work here?" Tammy asked, glancing at me with newfound curiosity.
"Short term," I said with a shrug. "Office stuff. Marketing analysis."
"Oh, that's right, you're a math and science person."
A nerd. That's what she was thinking. I could see it in her condescending smile. Everyone else in the room thought her smile was totally genuine, so I pretended I thought so too and gave her a fake but genuine-looking one of my own.
"We should get together sometime," she said, surprising me. "You're dating Barrett Hall, right?"
I nodded and she smiled. "I love Barrett," she said. "I hang out with all those guys." She glanced at Jesse. "We should all get together sometime."
Jesse shrugged at me, and I gave him a skeptical expression, which I changed to a smile as soon as Tammy faced me again.
"Sure," I said. "Maybe once the season is over and I get through my finals."
She smiled and shrugged before motioning to Jesse.
"Bye, y'all," Jesse said.
"Bye y'all!" Elvis called loudly. "Y'all come back!" he added as they let the door close behind them.
I smiled at my uncle and shook my head at the bird. I wanted to say something about how annoying Tammy was now that they were gone, but Uncle Michael was smiling and didn't seem annoyed at all, so I kept my comments to myself.
"Thank you," I said, hugging him. "I'm excited to get started."
He squeezed me tightly. "Thank you, Rose. I'm excited, too."
He held open the door for me, not knowing that I had to walk around the building to get to my car.
***
My roommate, Rebecca, was sitting in the living room when I got back to my apartment.
"Barrett called," was the first thing she said when I walked in the door. "How'd it go?" she added as I kicked off my shoes.
I smiled. "Good. I got the job."
She clapped and whooped for me, and I was still smiling about that as I crossed to the kitchen. Our small apartment had a peninsula separating the kitchen and living room, and I sat on one of the barstools, looking at Rebecca.
"And he's gonna pay me," I said.
"He is? How much?" she asked.
"Commission, I think. He was saying something about me taking a percentage, but I don't know. We'll have to talk about it." I stared at the wall behind Rebecca and said the words in a slow, dazed tone because I could not stop thinking about Jesse. I thought I had gotten the encounter with him out of my head, and I felt annoyed and agitated with myself that my thoughts kept going back to him.
I breathed a sigh, reminding myself to focus on the conversation with Rebecca, and she took it as a sigh of disappointment. She looked at me with a perplexed expression. "What's wrong? I thought you'd be happy about getting paid. I thought you were planning on doing it for free."
I smiled. "Nothing," I said. "It wasn't that. It was just a tired sigh." I swiveled in the barstool. "I'm going to take a shower."
"Aren't you gonna call Barrett back?" she asked.
I glanced at the kitchen phone that was hanging on the wall right next to us. "I think I'm gonna take a shower first," I said. "If he calls again, just tell him I'll call him back in a few minutes."
"You okay?" she asked as I began walking backward toward my bedroom.
"Yeah."
"Do you still want to go see a movie?"
"Yeah, why?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I don't know I just thought you looked upset for a second."
I shook my head. "Just tired," I said.
I didn't even need a shower. In fact, I was making more work for myself by taking one. I had plans to go to the movies with Rebecca that evening, and a shower just meant that I'd have to get dressed again. I didn't, however, see how I had any other choice. I had to do it in order to shock the thought of Jesse Bishop right out of my head.
When I was a little girl, I had a friend named Phillip who told me that when I got sad about something, all I had to do was take an ice cold shower, and it would wash the feelings away. The colder the shower, the better the affects. I was generally a happy person, but I had taken anywhere from thirty to fifty of these ice cold showers in my lifetime. None of them had ever fully worked to get rid of whatever was bothering me, but I still did it every time I felt overwhelmed just in case.
I started the shower running warm water just to ease myself into it. I stepped in and let the water run all over my face and hair, feeling like I wanted to cry over my lot in life but not letting myself. Technically, I had a productive day with the job and everything, but Jesse.
Jesse.
I knew there was a chance that I would run into him once I started working at my uncle's place, but I certainly hadn't expected to see him today.
He was the most wonderful man—the man of my dreams. He was smart, handsome, rugged, and athletic, and yet humble and tender.
Jesse Bishop.
He was all of these perfect, wonderful things, but he was also…
my first cousin.
I felt miserable as I let the water wash over me. I had been madly in love with Jesse for most of my life, and I hated myself for it.
/>
A flood of memories hit me. The first was a conversation I had with a girl named Emily when I was in the second grade. She was older than me and had been cluing me in on the idea of boys and relationships and crushes. She asked me if I liked any boy, and I told her I liked Jesse, at which point she grimaced and told me that was disgusting and a first-class sin to marry your cousin or to even be attracted to him in any way. She gave me a lecture about it and told me I could never, ever think that way about Jesse again. She said she could think that way about Jesse because she wasn't his cousin, but I clearly couldn't.
Emily scared me to death that day, but she assured me she wouldn't tell anybody about what I said, which made me feel a little better. I still lost sleep over it.
I put Jesse out of my mind for years after that. I was around him all the time, but I had assured myself that I could never have feelings for him.
I learned somewhere during my adolescence that he wasn't really blood related to me at all, but that didn't matter since everyone (including Jesse) just thought of us as cousins.
I was able to keep my distance and keep him out of my thoughts until one dreaded night when I was fifteen.
Chapter 3
My worst-ever Jesse relapse happened the night we watched the video of Michael Jackson's Thriller. I was a freshman in high school, and Jesse was a junior. There was a huge group of us at a friend's house. His name was Chris Hanks, and he had a big screen TV, which was a huge deal.
Chris and his family had a mansion with lots of property, and we all watched the Thriller video before going out to a bonfire in his backyard. Most of our high school was there, so I didn't even talk to Jesse until later that night when a lot of people had already gone home. Jesse was staying the night at Chris's, and I was riding home with someone who was staying late, so we were two of the remaining ten or twelve at the end of the night.
It was during that time when I left the garage and went to the bonfire. I found Jesse there. He was sitting on a log, poking at the fire with a huge stick—probably six or eight feet in length. It had to be that long because the fire was huge and hot, and he couldn’t get any closer.
Two other people were sitting nearby, but they were preoccupied with each other, so I only spared them a quick glance before looking at Jesse again. He smiled at me, and my heart melted just like it did every time. I smiled back and waved, trying to look unruffled.
I was just about to sit on the opposite side of the bonfire, but Jesse patted the seat next to him, indicating that I should go over there. I could hear music playing from the garage. It was pop radio, and they were playing a song Jesse knew by heart, so he unabashedly sang it out.
He was being silly and smiling the whole time, but he had undeniable musical talent. I was dreading being next to him even before I sat down. I initially left three feet of space between us, and Jesse stared down at the empty space and then at me with a questioning expression.
"What's the matter? You don't like my singin'?"
I smiled and scooted slightly closer. "I love your singin'," I said. "I just didn't want to get too close while you were stirring up the fire."
He smiled at me, and then I watched as the look on his face shifted. He grew gravely serious, staring at me with a predatory expression. He scooted close to me, puffing out his chest, breathing deeply, and staring down at me in the most intimidating way possible.
"Were you scared from that Thriller video?" he asked, trying to scare me.
"I wasn't too scared," I said in a damsel in distress type voice with a hand to my chest, mimicking the actual video as much as I could.
Jesse held his serious expression and puffed out his chest even more as if to say that I was a fool for not being afraid.
"Maybe you should have been scared," he said, still looking deadly serious as he stared straight at me. He had always been a bit of an actor, so it made sense that he was trying to convince me that he was a zombie or whatever Michael Jackson was in the video.
What did surprise me was the way he continued looking at me. Jesse was messing around for the first few seconds, but I watched in amazement as his expression shifted from one of crazed-zombie to one of curiosity, or confusion, or frustration, or some mixture of all three. Jesse took a deep breath, and I watched his chest rise and fall as he continued to stare at me. He looked at my whole face, stopping to stare at my mouth, and for about five glorious seconds, I thought Jesse Bishop, the love of my life, was actually going to kiss me. I knew in my heart that he wanted to—I could see it by the way he looked at me. He stared at me for what seemed like forever before he finally broke eye contact.
"Your dad was adopted, anyway," he said in a frustrated mumbling tone as he turned to poke at the fire again.
"What?" I asked. My fifteen-year-old heart was about to pound out of my chest. "What'd you say?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said. "I was just messing around with you." He shrugged it off and turned to say something to Jason, the guy who was sitting close by with his girlfriend.
That night did me in for quite sometime. Nothing ever happened between us, but the memory of the way Jesse looked at me that night stayed with me for way longer than I cared to admit.
Okay, I'll admit it.
Two years.
I didn't completely obsess about him for that long, but I didn't date anyone else either. It wasn't that I was hopelessly devoted to Jesse as much as it was the simple fact that no one else was as good as him. I compared all potential suitors to him, and they all fell short.
Barrett was the first guy I felt a real attraction to, and that wasn't until my sophomore year of college. I dated a few guys off-and-on for very short periods of time during high school and my first year of college, but Barrett was my first long-term boyfriend. I had been with him for a little over a year now, and thought things were going pretty well—until I saw Jesse at the shop.
I was close to my family, and Jesse's sister, Jane, was one of my best friends, but I really only saw Jesse at family occasions, and there were always a lot of people around, so it was easy for me to act busy and not pay much attention to him.
But not tonight.
Tonight there was a hug.
I replayed the whole scene in my mind… the way he hugged me while I held his hand, searching for non-existent dirt under his fingernails. He was always easy to hug, and I could have been in that position a lot over the years, but I had somehow always managed to evade him.
If he had been my blood relative, it would have been easy for my heart to understand that he was off-limits, but as it stood, my brain said no but my heart still rebelled. I was drawn to Jesse the way you're drawn to a famous movie star—hopelessly and perpetually crushing even though you know you'll never have them.
I remembered the way he smiled and put on his glasses. I remembered thinking what a juxtaposition it was that this tough, motorcycle-building guy could be so sweet and adorable.
I felt my stomach tie into knots when I thought of Tammy in her lavender dress, beckoning Jesse to come over there and telling him to hurry up. I felt hot blood rush to my face at the memory of it, and I reached down to adjust the faucet.
I twisted the knob all the way to the right and gasped when my shower switched from pleasant to shockingly cold. I gasped two or three times as I did my best to get used to the cold water. If nothing else, the miserable shock of it served to distract me for a minute.
I went to my bedroom a few minutes later, feeling a little better.
"Barrett called again!" I heard Rebecca's muffled voice as she yelled through the walls.
"Thanks!" I yelled back.
My little brothers had gotten me a Swatch phone for Christmas. It was the kind where two people could use it at once. One person would use the receiver, and the other could pick up the base and use it has a second receiver. My brothers thought it was the coolest thing, and it really was, only I never found myself in a situation where I wanted to let someone listen-in on my phone calls. It was a neat lo
oking phone, though, and I picked up the teal and pink receiver and dialed Barrett's number.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Hello," he said.
"Hey."
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I just got out of the shower, why?"
"I was gonna come by and pick you up to come to a wedding with me."
"Why are you still in town?" I asked. "I thought y'all were leaving for the game."
"Something happened with the bus. It's only a three-hour drive, so coach said we'll just leave in the morning. Everybody's going to the wedding now. I was gonna see if you wanted to come with me."
"What wedding? I was planning on seeing a movie with Rebecca."
"You can do that anytime. Randall Boyd only gets married once, and it's tonight. Everybody's gonna be there. Most of the team's going to the reception. We're gonna surprise him."
Randall Boyd graduated two years earlier. He was the star center for the Tiger basketball team and a beloved Memphis athlete. There was no doubt in my mind that Tammy was a bridesmaid and Jesse was a guest at this very same wedding.
I couldn't see him again so soon.
"A wedding reception?" I asked in a tone that very clearly meant I did not want to go. "Why don't you just come to the movies with me and Rebecca?"
"Because I don't want to," Barrett said. "Everybody's going to that party."
"I wasn't invited to that," I said. I had a towel wrapped around my head, but I took it down, letting my damp hair fall onto my shoulders. I ran my fingers through it, not even caring that there were tangles.
"I was invited," Barrett said. "The whole team was. Randall's our homeboy. We just didn't think we'd get to go because of the game."
"Y'all still have a game tomorrow," I said. "You don't need to go out partying all night."
He breathed a laugh. "It's a wedding, Rose—not a bachelor party. We're not even going to the wedding, just the reception. I want to go. Me and Randall are tight. You don't have to come if you don't want to, but I'm going."
"I hate to do that to Rebecca," I said.
Jesse's Girl (Bishop Family Book 2) Page 2