AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jesse loves me.
And somewhere, in the back of my mind, I always had doubts that my dream would come true.
Now that it’s here, I’ve failed to consider everything it might mean. I’ll have to make it work somehow.
At the moment, I can’t be with him full-time anyway, as I’ve made so many promises to Maddie.
Maddie… And my brother…
“Jesse?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“What will we do for the rest of the tour? I mean, will we tell people? About us?”
He doesn’t reply right away, and my nerves skitter across my flesh. Is he rethinking his feelings for me?
I berate myself for the thought. Jesse is a good man. An honest man. A proud man. A man who wouldn’t say something to a woman that he didn’t mean.
No. Jesse’s feelings are real. And his fear is that mine are not. That they’re just the lovesick musings of a young girl with a crush.
Even though I know they’re not. My feelings are as real as his, and I’ve had them for so much longer.
“I honestly don’t know,” he finally says.
“I never told Maddie—or my cousins—how I felt about you. But I should probably tell you that Maddie asked me straight out if I had feelings for you.”
“You mean before we went on the tour?”
“Yes. When I was trying to talk her into coming, you know, trying to talk her out of going back to school for her last semester.”
“I get the feeling, Brianna, that your wanting Maddie along on this tour was not completely altruistic.”
He’s not wrong. And if he truly loves me, and because I truly love him, I must confess.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m not proud of it, but that was the initial reason why I wanted Maddie to come along. But it didn’t stay that way, Jesse.”
“Oh?” His voice is tight.
He has the right to be pissed at my initial reasoning for wanting Maddie to come along. But I no longer feel that way, and I need to make that clear.
“No. I had no idea Maddie felt so left out of the little group with my cousins and me. We’ve always tried to include her. Please believe that.”
He caresses my shoulder with his lips. “I believe that. Family is family. Family always trumps friends.”
“So you do get it.”
“Of course I get it, Brianna. Everything I do is for my family. This concert is for my family.”
“I know that. And I’m going to try to never to forget it again.”
He sighs. “That’s the thing about you, Bree. And it’s part of why I fought so hard against you. Not just your youth but your privilege. There are things about my family that you’ll never understand.”
“Donny and Brock understand.”
“But do they? Perhaps Donny understands better than Brock. After all, Donny wasn’t born into riches, and he remembers what his previous life was like.”
A brick hits my stomach. Unless Callie told Jesse, he has no idea what Donny’s previous life was really like. At least the last several months of it. It was way worse than anything any of the Pikes could have possibly been through.
