Page 4 of Cross To Bear

“I should’ve said something about Mum’s…”

Yes, you should’ve.

“I thought I had.”

Did you? Did you really?

He let out a sigh and then stopped in the middle of the road, staring at me.

“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I know I’m a fuckup.”

This was the point where I usually melted. He was a fuck up some of the time, though we all were sometimes. He admitted it easily though, asking for forgiveness each time so sweetly and then one thing would lead to another…

“Maddie bear…”

He shot me a lazy smile, that seemed to be an incarnation of the summer sun that beat down upon us, moving closer, arm outstretched, ready to pull me back into his orbit. Before he could, a car beeped because Jesse was standing in their way.

“Let’s just go,” I said, walking over to the car.

My car. I’d wanted us to take our own cars, so that he could drive home whenever he wanted to finish up, and I wasn’t stuck at the family home all day. I loved them all, but I had stuff to do. Clean the kitchen again, for one. Though when we’d reached the garage under our apartment, I saw his was missing.

“Razor took my keys,” he explained.

Then Razor deserved a big sloppy kiss on the cheek, I thought. Bjorn’s sleuth ran the garage Jesse worked at and they kept an eye on his ‘baby’ brother, taking his keys from him when he’d had too much to drink to stop him from driving home drunk.

We got in the car now, after loading all of our items up, and then I turned on the ignition, easing the car out to take us to Jesse’s parents’ place.

Chapter 3

“Maddie, darling!”

Nelly strode over, arms wide, then grabbed me in a warm hug. Every time I came around, since the very first day, she’d always looked stoked to see me. Other people talked about their MILs from hell, but not Nelly. She was always warm, loving, supportive and right now she was squishing the life out of me before letting me go.

“Happy birthday, Nells,” I said, placing a kiss on her cheek. “Have the boys been spoiling you?”

“Breakfast in bed,” she said with a sigh. “Then a massage therapist arrived not long afterwards and worked his magic.” She rolled her shoulders theatrically. “Theo has magic fingers. I should give Jesse his card.”

Jesse organise a massage for me? The idea was so incongruous I didn’t know what to say. And as if to save me from that, the man himself walked in, a slab of beer on each shoulder.

“And here’s my baby!”

Nelly rushed towards him, forcing her son to juggle the beer, setting it down on the kitchen table as she wrapped her arms around him. Jesse returned the hug quickly enough because if he had one saving grace, it was that he loved his mum. I saw it in the way he cradled her against him, the woman seeming tiny in comparison to his towering height, his muscles flexing as he squished her tight then let her go to press a kiss to her cheek.

“Happy birthday, Mum. I tried to make you that potato salad—”

“Did you?” Nelly looked over her shoulder at me theatrically. “How bad was it?”

“I got woken up by the sound of a smoke alarm,” I replied drily.

“Oh god…?” She chuckled then punched her son in the arm. “So what did you do? Burn the whole apartment down?”

“Almost.” He gave her a sheepish shrug. “The boiled eggs caught on fire.”

“How the fuck did you set water on fire?” Taz, one of Jesse’s dads, walked into the kitchen with a slight frown. “Jesus, Jesse—”

“The water boiled dry,” my boyfriend replied. “And then the eggs started smoking—”

“And you were too, weren’t you?” Taz peered into his son’s eyes, something I’d neglected to do. “Having a morning joint before losing track of time?”

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