5. Jesse
Jesse
I CAN’T STAND hearing Elsie crying. The sun is just rising but I’ve been lying on my couch, staring at the ceiling all night.
Although she blamed her tears on hormones, I can’t shake the feeling I’m part of the reason she was sad.
I can’t blame her for not opening up to me.
I still haven’t answered her question about why I avoided her after that night.
It’s important to her. She asked like she hoped I’d go see her even after I said it was only one night. As if she didn’t forget me.
I pull on running shoes and let myself out into the dark.
The air’s cold enough to bite at four-thirty, mountain air that hasn’t caught up with August yet, mist still hanging low between the pines.
I run harder than I should on a trail I know too well to actually need to see, breath sawing white in front of me, shoes hitting the packed dirt in the same rhythm I’ve used to outrun every bad memory I’ve ever had.
It doesn’t work this time either. Nothing about her seems to work the way avoidance used to.
I’ve been agonized over not having an answer for her, turning the question over on every run, every silent hour on that couch, every time I catch her watching me across a room like she’s waiting for something I don’t know how to give.
I don’t know how to tell her who I really am without watching it change the way she looks at me.
I hate admitting the truth even inside my own head.
Colton’s coming up the switchback as I round it.
“Didn’t expect company,” he says as he falls beside me, breath even.
Neither did I. I know everyone’s favorite path, the times they run or use the dojo. I never accidentally run into anyone on this mountain. Which means I unconsciously sought Colton out.
The trail narrows, forcing us into single file for a stretch.
“Something’s wrong,” Colton says, once we’re side by side again.
“I don’t know what to tell Elsie.”
“About the danger, or about you?”
I don’t answer, which is answer enough for a man who’s known me five years.
“You know what I think?” Colton’s not even breathing hard, the bastard, while I’m working for every lungful in this thin air.
“I think you’ve spent so long deciding what you don’t deserve that you never once asked yourself what you actually want.
What kind of relationship are you trying to have with her, Jesse?
Because right now it looks like you’re trying to protect her from a man who doesn’t exist.”
“You don’t know that he doesn’t.”
“Don’t I?” He slows just enough to look at me properly, the trail widening again around a stand of aspens turning pale in the coming light.
“I watched you carry her out of that apartment like she was made of glass. Over the years, we’ve rescued several women but I’ve never seen you worry about an operation the way you did during our two briefings about Zidaru.
Tucker is going insane because you keep checking in with him. You’ve never done that before.”
Colton is right. I’m good at building security systems but Tucker is the best of the best when it comes to everything related to computers.
Gathering information and evidence on all our targets is his work.
We’re a team that trusts each other’s abilities and don’t get involved in each other’s roles.
I’m worried about Elsie in a way I’ve never worried about anyone else.
I want to take care of Zidaru as soon as possible.
“That man who’s going insane over a woman is not the hitman Ruthless, whom everyone in the business believed was a cold-blooded killer. That’s just you, Jesse. It’s always been just you under all of it, even back in LA, even when you didn’t believe that yourself.”
“I can’t give her the bright life a younger, innocent man can.”
“She obviously likes mature men, like Freya and half the women in town.” He shoots me half a grin. “Grumpy ones at that.”
I sigh.
“I know Elsie’s stronger than you’re giving her credit for. She survived a crime boss stalking her for two years. She’s carrying twins alone and still had the spine to tell you to leave her apartment. That’s a woman who can probably handle more than you think she can.”
“And if she can’t?”
“Then you’ll have your answer.”
He shrugs, easy as anything, like he’s not handing me the exact thing I’ve been too afraid to consider. “But you don’t get to decide for her that she can’t handle you. That’s her call to make.”
We run the rest of the way back in silence, and by the time the cabin comes into view through the trees, the sky just starting to grey at the edges, I still don’t have a plan. But something in what he said won’t let go of me either.
Inside, the cabin’s dark and quiet. I climb the loft stairs before I can talk myself out of it and find her asleep, curled on her side, dried tear tracks catching what little light there is.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Don’t wake her. Just watch her breathe for longer than I probably should, and somewhere in that stretch of quiet, watching her, I find something that feels close enough to the start of an answer.
Her eyes open sometime after the sky’s gone fully grey outside the window. She startles slightly, finding me there, then settles when she recognizes my face.
“You’re up early,” she says, voice still thick with sleep.
“Couldn’t sleep. I’ve been thinking about your question.”
She pushes herself up against the headboard.
I gaze at my hands, scarred across the knuckles in a dozen small places she’s probably noticed and never asked about.
“When I was growing up, nobody ever made me feel like I mattered to them. I sort of felt detached from everyone. The staff at the orphanage fed and clothed us, ensured we survived.” The words come out rougher than I mean them to, unpracticed, a story I’ve never told out loud in this much detail to a single living person.
“I kept to myself at school too, and I wasn’t particularly good at studying. Teachers left me alone.”
Elsie just watches me, giving me room to keep going.
“As soon as I graduated from high school, I joined the navy. I was good enough that they put me on a SEAL team a few years later, and for the first time in my whole life I felt like I belonged somewhere. Like I mattered because of what I could do.” I stop, throat tight.
“Brian, our team lead, used to invite me to his place for Christmas dinner. His wife set an extra plate for me every year like it was nothing. I used to sit in that kitchen and think, this is what a home and family supposed to feel like. Then one day my team died on a mission while I was doing an investigation out of the country. We were together for eight years. I was the only one who lived.”
“Jesse.” Her hand finds mine, careful, like she’s not sure if she’s allowed.
I let her hold it, grateful her compassion dulls the pain.
“I left the military. I went to work as a hitman in LA. Killing monsters who trafficked vulnerable humans and got away with it because nobody with power cared enough to stop them. I had a code. I never broke it. My boss knew I wouldn’t take the job if the target were someone who didn’t hurt people.
Every time I finished a job, I felt the same way I did on my SEAL team.
Like I mattered because of what I could do, even if that was end it for someone. ”
Her brown eyes are awash with a myriad of emotions but there’s no revulsion in them.
“I’d been in that line of work for four years, when I met Colton.
Both of us stepped in to assist a woman being abused by her boyfriend outside a bar.
He told me about the security firm he was a part of here, which was led by Rory O’Connor.
I knew of O’Connor’s honest and honorable reputation as the Red King during his mixed martial artist days.
His endeavor to gather talented veterans and ex-athletes to not only build a security firm for profit but also to run pro bono missions to rescue vulnerable people, resonated with me.
I retired by faking my death then joined the firm. ”
I take a deep breath, praying for courage even though I’ve always preferred to rely on myself.
“Sometimes, I kill to protect a client. I don’t lose sleep over it. What I’m trying to say is the only identity I had to offer you was a killer’s, and you deserved a hell of a lot better than that.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, thumb moving slowly over my knuckles, and when she finally speaks her voice is steady in a way that undoes something in my chest.
“You are a hero, Jesse.”
“I’m not—”
“You are. You’ve spent your adult life thinking the thing that makes you feel like you matter is proof you’re broken, when it’s actually proof of the opposite. You were never the monster, Jesse. You were the thing standing between people and the monsters.”
Something cracks open in my chest, wide and unfamiliar, like a door I’ve kept bolted for years finally swinging loose on rusted hinges.
“I’m fourteen years older than you. Most days I don’t say a word. I don’t know how to be a boyfriend or someone in a family,” I admit.
“Every relationship I’ve ever had was built on being needed for a job. I trust Colton and everyone on my team with my life and I’d sacrifice mine for any of them if needed. It was the same with my SEAL unit. However, I don’t know what I am to somebody when there’s no mission attached to it.”
“You just have to be here.” She lifts my hand, presses it flat against the curve of her stomach, warm under my palm.
“That’s the mission. You’ve been brilliant at it the whole time I’ve been here.
Also, there are different types of family.
I’ve watched you with your team the few times you joined them for a meal at the diner.
You’re a family, Jesse. They care about you, you care about them. ”
“Sweetheart.” I’m so overcome with emotion, it’s all I can manage to say.
I feel it then, the faintest flutter of movement under my hand, so small I almost miss it, and something in me goes still and full at the same time that I don’t trust myself to speak for a second.
“I love you,” I say, when I finally can. “I’ve loved you longer than I’ve let myself admit. I want to be here for you and our kids. Will you give me a chance? You can teach me how to be the kind of man you need and I’ll try my damn best to be it.”
There are tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. I don’t know what that means.
“You had a difficult childhood, I can only imagine the loneliness you felt. It would be no surprise if you turned into a selfish man or a monster like Andrei. You didn’t because you’re a good man, Jesse.”
She leans forward, forehead resting against mine. “I love you. Everything that you are makes you the man I need.”