Jesse's Girl

by Shiloh Walker

  Tears stung her eyes. “I’ve been the lucky one. I love you.” She stroked her thumb over his lower lip and said, “You’ve made my life so wonderful.”

  “We’ve made our life wonderful.” He kissed her hand then twined their fingers together, resting their hands between them. “We did it, Zoe. You and me.”

  “Yeah. You and me.” Her heart ached, because she knew soon the you and me would be over.

  Roger was dying. They had a few weeks together at most, maybe just days. Their life was almost over.

  As though he was reading her mind, he squeezed her hand. “Don’t stop living, baby. This part’s winding down, but it’s not done for you. You’ve got your whole life yet, and there’s so much left for you to do. I don’t want you to stop living just because I’m going to be gone.”

  Tears blinded her. The knot in her throat was going to choke her. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she whispered. Squirming closer, she pressed her head against his chest. She remembered, just a few months ago, how strong, how solid that chest had felt. Now, there was just skin stretched over bone. Cancer was eating away at him, killing him all too quick…stealing him from her. Closing a hand into a fist, she said, “I can’t talk about this right now.”

  “Then when, Zo? Another few days, a week or two, it’s going to be too late. I think hours might be too late. I’m running out of time and you know it. I can feel it.”

  The tears burning her eyes broke free and began to roll out of her eyes. But she said nothing as he stroked the back of her head. “You’ve spent the past few years taking care of your mom, the past few months taking care of me and your mom. Setting yourself, what you want, what you need off to the side.”

  “I’m doing what I want, what I need. I’m here with you,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “I’m here with you. That’s what I need, what I want.”

  “I know.” He pressed his lips to her temple. “Just promise me, when this is over, that you won’t quit living. Don’t get wrapped up in your grief…don’t get too wrapped in taking care of your mom, in the store. Live your life, baby.”

  He cupped her cheek and forced her to look up at him.

  She stared into his eyes, saw that tender, gentle smile on his face.

  “I want you to fall in love again. I want you happy. I want to think about you getting married, and maybe having kids. We didn’t get around to that and part of me regrets that something awful—too late for me. But not for you, baby. Just live…okay?”

  She closed her eyes, swallowed until she thought she could talk without bawling. Then, with her eyes still shut, she murmured, “Roger, I can’t even think about that right now. I can barely think about how I’m going to get through losing you, much less what’s going to happen after. Oh, God…”

  She started to sob.

  His arms, still so strong, still so safe, came around her. “You’ll be fine, baby. You’ll be just fine.”

  Four days later, with his head in her lap, Zoe was reading to him. His headaches were too severe for him to read anymore, but he loved listening while she read. She loved just having the time to spend with him.

  She turned a page and reached down, stroking a hand down his shoulder. “I love you,” she murmured.

  “Hmm. You too. Love you, Zo.” Then he sighed and whispered, “Tired.”

  She set the book aside. “We’ll finish reading it later then.” She stayed where she was, absently caressing his arm, staring down at his face, watching as he drifted off to sleep.

  She knew, then, somewhere inside.

  Selfishly, she didn’t want to tell anybody.

  But she did, gently easing her way out of the bed, straightening the covers. His parents were dead, but his sister and her husband, they would want to be here. James.

  But that was all. Jesse was already here. Those were the ones who mattered.

  And those were the ones with Roger two hours later when Roger breathed his last.

  Zoe was sitting in the bed with him, holding his hand. Jesse stood at the window, staring outside. His sister, Bianca, sat in a chair on the other side of the bed, her husband behind her. James paced the room quietly.

  He slipped quietly from this world. Too quietly, Zoe thought.

  That final breath, she thought it just might shatter her.

  She didn’t want to blink, didn’t want to look away.

  If she did…

  “Roger,” she murmured, stroking her hand down his face.

  Bianca started to weep silently.

  James came up to stand behind her, resting one strong, comforting hand on her shoulder.

  But Jesse was the one who began to quietly take action.

  He was the one who made all the calls.

  He was the one who handled it when other calls began to come in.

  And when Roger was taken away and Zoe started to cry, he was the one who held her.

  Chapter Six

  When this is over, she’s going to need you…

  Roger had been wrong. Other than those first few hours after Roger’s death, Zoe hadn’t needed him at all.

  She’d handled all the arrangements without him.

  She’d handled the funeral without him.

  And now, two weeks after the funeral, she was handling packing up her home without him.

  A lot of her furniture had already been put into storage or moved to the small apartment she was renting. The heels of his boots rang hollow on the hardwood floors as he moved through the house, looking for her. He vaguely recalled hearing somewhere that it was unwise to make major life decisions after the loss of a loved one…selling a home, changing a job.

  Not that Zoe would much care.

  Blowing out a breath, he finished searching the first floor and started up the back staircase, hoping to find her upstairs.

  She wasn’t there, either.

  He found her in the attic, kneeling in front of dust-covered boxes, her rich, vibrant red hair pulled into a ponytail, her face pale, her eyes tired.

  “Hey.”

  She glanced up at him, smiled. “Hey.”

  “I see you’re not wasting any time clearing out of here.”

  “No reason to,” she said, shrugging. “I can’t stay here. It’s too full of memories.”

  “There might be a time when you want those memories back.”

  She grimaced. “No. I’ll still have the memories. Moving won’t take them away.” She brushed her hair back from her face and said, “This is a place for a family, Jesse. Roger and I…well, we’d thought about it, maybe were going to try later. It was always later. Now we won’t have a chance for later. And I don’t want to walk around inside these four walls and think about the ‘later’ we lost.”

  Put that way, hell, he couldn’t blame her.

  Settling down on the ground in front of her, he peered inside one of the cardboard boxes. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged and looked around, staring at the various boxes. “There is just so much stuff. Roger kept everything. The clothes and stuff, I’ll just give to Goodwill, but the other stuff? His books? His golf clubs?”

  She slanted a look at him. “You play golf?”

  “Only under extreme duress.” He studied the golf clubs and said, “You can ask my dad. He plays. He might like them. Sentimental stuff, if nothing else.”

  Looking back at her, he had to fight to keep from reaching for her. Had to fight to keep from pulling her into his arms. Just to hold her. Just to cuddle her. She looked so tired…so worn and exhausted.

  In the back of his mind, he thought about what Roger had told him. What Roger had said. Wondered what Zoe would say.

  She needed time…time to heal, time to mourn.

  Jesse just needed her, the same way he needed her the past few months—hell, the past fifteen years, but he’d been too damn stupid to see it.

  Jamming his hands in his pockets, he paced the floor, staring at the boxes, the odds and ends of
the past fifteen years of her life.

  Abruptly, he turned and stared at her.

  “Why did you marry him, Zoe?”

  Her hands stilled.

  Then she went back to the task at hand, sorting through a box as though it was the sole focus of her life. “Is that really any of your business, Jesse?” she asked softly.

  “You married him two months after I left,” he said, his voice bitter. Angry. Far more bitter, far more angry than he had a right to be, he knew. But two months—two fucking months.

  “What would you have done if I’d come back?” he asked, feeling hollow inside as he stared at her bowed head.

  Zoe laughed sadly. “What ifs. You know how empty those are? What ifs.” She sighed and shoved the box aside. “What if you’d never left…or what if you’d taken me with you?” She sighed and drew her knees up. She stared at him and he waited for her to answer, waited so long he didn’t think she was going to. But finally, she did. “Now there is a question,” she murmured, she looped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on her upraised legs. With dark, wide eyes, she studied him. “And it’s a good one. If you’re so torn up about me marrying him, Jesse, then you answer my question, and I’ll think about answering yours. Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  One hand curled into a tight, impotent fist, Jesse turned away, staring out the small slit of a window, out into the clear, cloudless sky. “I thought about it. For close to a year, I woke almost every damn day wanting to call you, ask you if you’d come join me, even when it wasn’t possible. Shit. You were too much a part of me, Zoe. Eighteen years old and I couldn’t breathe without feeling you, thinking of you. Sometimes it scared the shit out of me.”

  “You left me because you thought about me too much?” she asked, lifting a brow.

  “I left because I had to get out. I didn’t deserve you, you know.” He turned to look at her, aching inside. “I didn’t realize it then, but I didn’t deserve you. I never did. I was selfish, an immature brat of kid but one thing I did right—I did know you’d go with me. I knew that then. But I didn’t ask. It didn’t seem right to ask. How fair would it have been to drag you along when I didn’t even know where in the hell I was going?”

  “Maybe you were looking at it wrong,” she suggested. “If I was with you, the where wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Then she stood up, absently dusting off the seat of her pants.

  She moved to stand by the larger window, staring outside. Her shoulders slumped and she reached up, rubbing at the spot between her eyebrows. “You were gone, Jesse. I didn’t have much of anybody. I had the scholarship to U of L, but it wasn’t going to cover everything and I didn’t have the money to cover anything else. Two days after graduation, my mother threw me out and—”

  “What?”

  She glanced back at him, a strained, tired smile on her face. “You heard me. I was over the age of eighteen and I was out of school. As far as she was concerned, she’d done her duty with me and she no longer needed to burden herself with me. I…” She paused, blowing out a harsh breath. This wasn’t easy to talk about, even now…and there were secrets that she wouldn’t share with him. Secrets she couldn’t share.

  How could she admit to him, to anybody, that her mother hated her that much?

  “She never wanted me, you know,” she said quietly.

  Jesse was quiet for a moment. “You two never got along well, I know that.”

  She snorted and shook her head. “Oh, it was more than that. She didn’t want me, would have thrown me out on my butt sooner, except she didn’t want the town knowing about it. Once I was eighteen, I was no longer her problem.”

  She sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear. “And she wasn’t going to put up with me. She…well, she threw me out.” A dull, painfully red flush climbed up her cheeks and she glanced back at him. “I didn’t have any place to go. In the end, it was your dad who ended up helping me out. You know how he is,” she said, forcing a smile. She hedged easily, shifting her gaze back outside. “Always got to be somebody’s white knight. Made sure I had a place to stay the first few nights, helped me find a job. He offered me a place to stay until I figured out what to do…and a job.”

  “That…well, that sounds like Dad.”

  “Doesn’t it? He’s a great guy,” she said quietly. “You have no idea how lucky you are to have him.”

  Jesse was quiet.

  “Roger and I just ended up spending a lot of time together that summer. We both missed you. Both of us were more or less planning on staying around here, although he was commuting to Lexington for college. I ended up just going to the community college. I kept working at the shop—that was the job your dad helped me get. It’s the place I own now. And toward the end of the summer, Roger proposed…I…well, I was so at loose ends, I said yes, and I don’t think it was until the day of the wedding that I even realized what I’d agreed to.” She shrugged and leaned against the wall, arms wrapped around herself.

  She missed him…her husband.

  Missed feeling his arms around her…

  And then, there were arms around her.

  Jesse’s arms.

  She stiffened, unable to relax, unable to breathe at first.

  But slowly, so slowly, the tension in her body eased. Quietly, she said, “I miss him. I feel like somebody has cut off my arm. My leg. My heart. Something vital. It’s like it will never grow back, either.”

  “I’m so sorry, Zoe.”

  She was crying. She hadn’t realized it, but she was crying. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “It was like one day, he showed up and he was just always there. Ever since that summer. I didn’t plan to fall in love with him. It took me forever to stop thinking about you. To stop waiting for you to come back home. And then one day, I rolled over in bed and saw him, and I was like…wow. I love this guy.”

  She eased away from Jesse and walked over to the box, kneeling down in front of one of the open boxes. This one held pictures. She lifted one out—it held their smiling faces—hers and Rogers.

  Jesse hadn’t ever felt more like an outsider. Hadn’t ever felt less needed.

  Shit, what was he doing here? She needed to be alone with her memories right now…or at least have time without somebody standing there and thinking about how much he still loved her, how much he still wanted her, and how damn stupid he’d been to walk away.

  “It took me almost two years,” she said quietly. “You know that? Almost two years before I could look at him and realize just how lucky I was, and I think he knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  A bitter smile twisted her lips and she looked at him. “He knew that for the longest time, whenever he touched me, I wished it was you.”

  Then she sighed and looked back. “That wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t fair at all, and even though he knew I still loved you, he…hell. It’s not like it matters now. I loved him so much and now he’s gone.”

  It was a quick sucker punch to his system to hear that from her—guilt, regret, longing…so much of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice gruff.

  Still with that sad smile on her lips, she said, “Don’t be. I had one hell of a life with Roger. Did it end too soon? Yes. I wanted another fifty years with him. I wanted kids with him…wanted grandkids. I wanted to…” She pressed a kiss to the picture she held and then knelt down, put it back in the box. “I wanted a life with him. I was going to try and talk him into a cruise this summer. Alaska. I wanted to go to Alaska. Or maybe Europe. We’ve always stayed somewhere fairly close, nothing exotic. Nothing exciting. But we always had each other and we were happy.”

  She closed her eyes and wiped the tears from her face. “Some people go their entire life without really knowing what it is to be happy. I had it. Yeah, I lost him, but at least for a while, we had each other. It’s better than nothing, right?”

  Give her time.

  Jesse brooded into a bottle of beer and then lifted
it, sending Roger a silent salute.

  “Not to doubt you, buddy…I’m sure you know your wife, but she’s not looking for another chance with me.”

  Feeling a quizzical set of eyes on him, Jesse glanced up and saw the bartender’s curious look. Forcing a smile, he said, “Friend of mine died a few weeks ago. Still having some trouble letting go, I think.”

  “That sucks,” the man said, grimacing.

  “Yeah.” Taking another sip of his beer, he sat the bottle down and studied the battered, scarred surface of the counter. “Doesn’t it?”

  Then, shutting the world, the bar, the bartender, all of it out of his head so he could focus on the beer, on his thoughts, and on his memories.

  Focus, and think.

  No…she didn’t seem to need him the way Roger thought she would, but Jesse had let her go once. He didn’t plan on doing it again.

  Time. He just needed to give her time.

  He’d already waited fifteen years.

  What was another few months…another year…?

  He could do that.

  It wasn’t like she was going anywhere.

  He sure as hell wasn’t.

  Not again.

  Not now.

  Chapter Seven

  Staring at the vivid blue of the ocean depicted on the brochure, Zoe rubbed her hands together.

  It had been nearly a month since she’d buried Roger, and although she knew she couldn’t run from her grief, she also knew she couldn’t stay here, either.

  Couldn’t stay here and live with the reminder of her life with him…and the life they’d missed out on. Day after day, staring at the places where they used to eat, where he’d worked with James, the square where they used to go for walks in the summer.

  The memories were choking her. All of it.

  She needed to get away, and not just for a weekend. A trip to Lexington, a trip down to Savannah to visit with some friends, that wasn’t going to do it. She needed to get far, far away.

  Alaska seemed pretty damn far.

  Was she really doing this?

  All of her life, she’d wanted to travel.