Chapter Nineteen #3
“I felt special for having something that nobody else did,” I admit carefully, fighting the heat spreading over my face.
It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, but my body doesn’t feel the same way.
“All those girls who flirted with you or got some small piece of you knew the hockey player who got into a division one school and was probably going pro one day. They saw what they wanted to and took what they wanted from that persona. I got everything. I saw everything. The good. The bad. The in between. I saw you without your guard up at home, and I felt special because of it.”
Nibbling on my bottom lip as Jesse’s face softens, I tell him the rest of the truth that I’ve never willingly admitted to him. He knows bits and pieces, and could probably assume the rest, but I’ve never put my feelings to words. Never allowed myself to.
“You’ve always gone out of your way to make sure I’m okay.
To take care of me when I’m sick. To stand up for me when I need defending.
To make sure that my dreams become a reality even when I’m on the verge of giving them up.
You were nice to everybody because that’s who you were as a person.
But you have been there for me through it all, no matter what you had going on in your life.
It made it easy to see you as…more. To think that, in the back of my mind, I was yours. ”
There. I said it. I can’t take it back now, not that I want to.
It’s long overdue, anyway. Those damn blackout curtains were the start of an amazing friendship that blossomed into something so much bigger over the last decade and a half.
And the crush I’d had on him for longer than that was cemented.
It always would be because Jesse has been a pivotal part of my life for longer than he hasn’t been in it.
He felt like mine. Whenever he’d come home from school to vent to me about his friends or teammates, I knew he wasn’t telling anybody else.
When he checked on me if I was in my room for too long and he worried I’d had a migraine, I felt so cared about.
He was always nice to people in high school.
He never bullied anybody or judged them for not being in the popular group.
I’m not sure he even saw himself as a popular kid.
But the kindness he offered me was different than what gave everybody else. It was personal. Genuine.
Jesse’s smile is warm and his eyes warmer as they scope out my hesitant expression.
“You’re right,” he agrees lightly, his voice smooth as butter and featherlight.
“I was nice to everybody. But I didn’t care about them.
Not really. It isn’t just you, Bells. I considered you mine too, and I knew I didn’t have a right to. ”
My shoulders sag with relief that it isn’t only me—that it hasn’t been me.
Yesterday should have been a pretty clear indication of that but hormones make people do funny things.
Sex doesn’t always have to mean anything.
I’d had it casually before without falling for the person I’d shared a bed with.
But that isn’t the case here.
Jesse feels the same way.
“I thought you were going to tease me for having a crush on you all these years,” I admit sheepishly, scratching my cheek.
He rolls his eyes and slides off the stool, rounding the island to pull me into him for a hug. Those arms are warm around me, not squeezing or demanding or wanting to move things in a direction other than comfort.
“I suspected you did,” he tells me, pressing a kiss against the crown of my skull.
“But I think part of me had one on you, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
I had a staring problem, especially when you wore that yellow sundress with the little white flowers.
Kyle used to smack me upside the head and tell me I was drooling whenever you’d walk around school wearing that. ”
What? There is no way he’s saying what I think he is. “You had a crush on me?”
He chuckles, pulling back and moving hair behind my ear.
“Is that so unbelievable? Like you said. You saw a version of me nobody else did. It was always simple around you because you never made me feel like I had to be anyone other than myself. You liked sports and could hold a conversation. Once, you challenged my dad on who was likely to go to the Frozen Four and I swear I had a boner when you started throwing out the statistics of your predicted teams.”
The teams, as I recall, all advanced.
His father’s picks did not.
I grin. “I gave you a boner, huh?”
I shouldn’t be proud of that, but teenage Belle is high-fiving adult Belle right now. The teen version of me only read about boners and attraction. I never experienced it firsthand very often. And when I did, I was somewhat emotionally removed.
“Don’t act so smug,” he tells me.
“Too late,” I sing-song.
Amusemnet lifts his mouth. “Point is, I’ve liked you for a long time too. You’ve always been real with me when very few people have.”
We look at one another, and warmth spreads across my whole body as his fingers trail down the outline of my jaw and land on my chin.
Tingles of awareness spark my heart into overdrive, but he doesn’t kiss me like I think he will.
Instead, he delivers one last truth that may as well have killed me, brought me back to life, and killed me again.
“What happened between us yesterday was inevitable,” he whispers, locking eyes with me so I don’t mistake the seriousness in them. “We are inevitable, and I’m going to do my damndest to prove that to you.”
I let out a rush of air feeling those words envelope every inch of me.
He didn’t tell me he loved me.
But he may as well have in that moment.