Chapter 27 Jesse
Jesse
NOW
The thing I love most about riding my motorcycle is that it’s just me and the open road. A place to let my thoughts sort themselves out.
Some people do that in the shower. I do it on my bike.
After Penny dropped me off at the cemetery, I didn’t go straight home. I kept riding.
How else was I going to process what she said?
“I didn’t get everything I wanted… I didn’t get you.”
God, it just keeps replaying in my mind.
So I ride.
Straight past the tiny urban grocery store I spent my summers working at just to save enough to get out of this town. Past the gas station we’d walk to get 99-cent slushies together as kids.
The cold air numbs my face. She was right, it is too cold for a ride, but I needed it. I needed to feel something other than the chaos in my head.
Today was more than I expected, though every day has been since she arrived.
The apology for not telling me about Nan’s death caught me off guard. Not because I was seeking it, but because it was a breakthrough. A mending of the past, and because it meant she saw me. The version of me that still misses Nan, who is still lost in some ways without a family.
And then there was lunch at the café.
The way she smiled at strangers, warmer than her normal self. The way she played with her straw wrapper, a nervous habit, as she talked to me. The way she looked at me when I laughed at one of her jokes about my gray wardrobe—like maybe she remembered the boy I used to be. The boy she loved once.
It didn’t feel forced. Not today.
It felt so natural to be there with Penny. Like we were just two people who’d figured out life together, like we skipped all the heartbreak in between. I let myself imagine that life for a second while I sat there at the café.
I pictured her curling up against me on the sofa, take-out dinner on the way. Because I know Penny hates cooking. Sunday mornings in bed, her golden hair tangled in the sheets.
But that’s a dangerous daydream.
Because the reality is, I broke something in her ten years ago. She said it herself. She wanted me, and I left her.
I didn’t know the extent of how much I broke her until this week. And that kills me. But it’s not something I can quickly patch, at least not all of it, not at once.
There’s no instruction manual on how to rebuild trust from scratch. If it were as simple as saying “I won’t hurt you again,” those words would’ve been out of my mouth already, when I kissed her a few nights ago.
But even if I had said it, would she have believed me?
Trust takes time.
Time is something I don’t really have.
She’s leaving in a week—that’s not enough to rewrite the ending of our story, no matter how much I want it to be. Not enough to prove I’m a man now, not a scared eighteen-year-old kid. Not enough to unpack all the years she lived without me.
But maybe it’s enough for something—a start, a second chance, a maybe.
It’s getting late, and the wind is picking up, so I finally turn around and go back home. At a light near the house, I glance down at my bare hands, red and stiff from the cold.
HOPE inked across one set of knuckles, HURT across the other—fading a little now.
It was the first tattoo I got in prison, and I got it retouched in LA. I got them in a moment when I didn’t know which one I felt more, always toggling between the two.
Some days, I still don’t know which one wins.
Neither Penny nor Fia has asked what they mean, though I notice Penny looking at them a lot. Maybe she’s afraid to find out.
I grip the handlebars tighter, my hands freezing cold, but I don’t mind. I like the way the ache reminds me I am still alive. That today had been real.
I want more of today. I want to remind Penny of the boy who loved her.
And maybe, just maybe, show her the man who still does—the one who loves her enough to wait for trust to come back around.