Loving Jessie by Dallas Schulze

lashes lifted slowly, and she stared up at him with eyes that seemed a little blind. She’d had too much to drink, he reminded himself. If she looked dazed, it was probably the wine. He thought maybe he should say something. Make some light comment to put everything back on a comfortable footing. Except “comfortable” didn’t even begin to describe what he was feeling.
    In the end, he didn’t say anything. Setting his hands on her shoulders, he turned her and gently nudged her through the front door, shifting her to the side so that he could lean in and pull it shut behind her.
    With Jessie tucked safely out of sight, he stood on the front porch for a moment, surrounded by the heady scent of late-summer roses, aware of a throbbing ache in places he had no business aching around Jessie Sinclair. Especially now, when the problem wasn’t just the memories of watching her grow up but the fact that she was apparently in love with his best friend.
    Suddenly very tired, Matt ran his fingers through his dark hair. Hellfire and damnation. Maybe you couldn’t go home again after all.

Chapter Five
    T o say that Gabe’s kitchen was a work-in-progress was to be guilty of gross exaggeration. There were cabinets, but only half of them had doors, and most of the countertops had been ripped off, leaving space only for a new microwave and a toaster that looked like a prop from a fifties sitcom. That left enough room for a coffee mug and a spoon, if you were careful about where you set them.
    The stove had been state-of-the-art when Eisenhower was in office. The pilot light had ceased working during the Johnson administration, and two of the burners had expired around the time Jimmy Carter entered the White House. The two remaining burners functioned reasonably well, as long as you liked to cook over a very high heat. On the same wall as the stove and inconveniently located in a corner next to the back door was a state-of-the-art side-by-side refrigerator with all the bells and whistles.
    The single sink was deep enough to bathe a medium-size child or a large dog, the white porcelain so chipped and crazed with age that it looked like a relief map ofthe Sierras. The floor was a mosaic of subfloor and the tattered remnants of yellowing linoleum.
    It was a mix of old and new, functional and barely tolerable. The best thing that could be said about it was that it had potential. For the past week and a half, Matt hadn’t had any complaints about it, but the morning after the party at Reilly’s, he would have traded every bit of that potential for an automatic coffeemaker, preferably one that could be programmed to have the coffee ready when he stumbled into the kitchen after a nearly sleepless night.
    As he set water on to boil and pulled the drip apparatus out of one of the partially disassembled cabinets, he decided that, before the sun rose again, he was going to have a decent coffeemaker. And some decent coffee beans, he added, as he measured coffee into the filter perched on top of the glass carafe. Eight years of living in Seattle had left its mark, ruining him forever for commercial coffee.
    “Is that coffee?” Gabe asked as he wandered into the kitchen, a tattered pair of gray sweatpants riding low on his hips.
    “Only in the most loosely defined sense of the word,” Matt said sourly. “In more civilized parts of the world, this would be called swill.”
    Coffee mug in hand, Gabe turned to look at his younger brother, his dark brows raised in faint surprise. Matt had never been what anyone would call a morning person, but he wasn’t usually this surly, either.
    “Missing your Starbucks?”
    Matt muttered an agreement and glared at the coffee trickling slowly through the filter and into the carafe. Gabe waited until the coffee was poured into mugs before speaking again.
    “Have a good time last night?”
    “Fine.”
    “It was great seeing Jessie and Reilly again.”
    “Yeah.”
    Gabe added a spoonful of sugar to his