Screw you, sun. Shining bright on a day like today.
What the hell time was it anyway? Six? Seven a.m.? He contemplated just turning over but went on full alert as the sound of a bang from downstairs hit his ears. What the hell? Did that come from the shop? But they were closed today. They were now closed every day. Not to mention the fact that it was the damned crack of dawn.
More shocking than the sun, just then there was another sound, something like a crash, and he bolted upright, hitting his bedroom floor at top speed. They were closed today. Closed, and Mama Joy was . . . well, she was definitely not down there where the crashing sound was coming from. Jesse hit the stairs at a run, though not before he grabbed his old high school baseball bat, kept at the ready behind the back of his bedroom door.
Bat raised, heart pounding, Jesse was filled with more than annoyance when he rounded the corner to the shop’s back kitchen area only to meet the wide eyes of Kerry Fuller. Her fearful and shocked expression of having him come at her with a baseball bat raised quickly turned to clear anger as her eyes narrowed and she gave him a slow up and down.
Suddenly, Jesse was fully aware of the fact that he was clad in nothing more than his gray striped boxer briefs and an early-morning predicament that was totally normal but not one he was sure their sweet Kerry was used to. Though the look she gave him when her gaze came up once again and their eyes locked said, well, maybe she was, and maybe she thought he didn’t quite measure up?
Jesse snorted to himself. Yeah right. As if.
He watched as Kerry’s eyes shifted from him to the bat in his hand and then back to him again. “You plan to do something with that or is it just for show?”
Jesse felt his brow quirk as he fought hard to control his other extremities from doing the same and he let out a low groan. “Dammit, Kerry, what are you doing here so early? You scared the hell out of me and almost got your head knocked off in the process.”
Her look, followed by the low snort that came after, let him know she was completely unfazed. “Early? It’s past nine, and you knew I’d be coming by this morning. I was practically laying on the bell before. Didn’t you hear me?”
“Obviously not,” he said with a shrug and a slight wave of the bat.
The movement once again seemed to bring Kerry’s awareness to his near nakedness and he watched as her eyes roamed over his chest, but then she seemed to think better of it, turning away and walking toward the coffeepot. She poured herself a cup, and as the aroma hit Jesse’s nose—or maybe that was her smell, either way it was both sweet and smoky—he felt his brain starting to come to life, apparently catching up with his body.
“Don’t you want to head back upstairs and put some clothes on? Make yourself decent?” she said.
It took a moment for the comment to click in his brain. Once again, quicker body than brain situation. Decent. That word was so Kerry that Jesse couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corner of his lips. In the midst of everything changing it was good to know some things never did. “No, not so much just yet,” he said, while reaching over her shoulder to take the cup from her hand. “What I want right now is some of this coffee.”
The quick turn and frown from her was just the reaction he was looking for. “Jerko,” she hissed. “There’s a whole pot here. Why do you have to take my cup? Can’t you make your own?”
Jesse took a sip and grinned. “I can, but yours is always perfect. It just tastes better. Besides, who says I’m not decent?”
Kerry shook her head before turning away from him. She grabbed another mug from the plastic dish rack by the coffee maker and silently made herself another cup. Jesse watched as she took a dainty sip before looking up. He knew he was being kind of an ass, screwing with her like he was, drinking her coffee while in his drawers and staring at her in this old kitchen that held too many memories. He paused and frowned. But he also knew that this moment was way more comforting than he was willing to admit out loud. Hell, he was happy to have somebody there, anybody, just to not be alone with his thoughts.
Not now. Not today.
So instead of moving, Jesse watched intently as Kerry brought the mug to her lips again.
The mug was yet another from their mismatched set. They had many that Mama Joy had acquired over the years. A mug from here, a plate from there—like everything else, nothing went with anything quite right in this old brownstone, yet it all seemed to fit together. It was how Mama Joy said she liked it. Things didn’t have to match up perfectly to fit, she’d always told him and his brothers. When he was still young, half-impressionable and full of hope and longing, he’d say—he didn’t know why, maybe just to see her smile, because she always did when he said it—“Like us?” “Yes, like us,” she’d answer back and kiss him on the forehead, warming him from the top clear to his toes.
Jesse closed his eyes for a moment against the sight of Kerry as the image of his brothers came to his mind. Four boys from different makeups and ethnic backgrounds, brought together by their shared need of, first and foremost, a home, but probably more so the love that the seemingly irreverent single Black woman had given them. They now had the nerve to call themselves brothers, so much so that they’d taken that woman’s name to seal the deal. But now she was gone, so what would they do with the legacy she’d left them when it was all said and done? Did any of them even know what the word “legacy” meant?
He opened his eyes and looked at Kerry again. They’d be here soon and Jesse didn’t have a clue how he and his mixed bag of misfit brothers would get their shit together and work it all out. Like the mugs in the house, there was nothing about them that really could place them one with the other. There was him, the youngest, or the baby as Mama Joy used to say, though being a baby was something he could never remember, not even when he reached back to his furthest memories. And now at twenty-seven he could definitely not call himself anywhere near a baby anymore. Still, he was the youngest of his bothers, a mixture of Black from his biological mother and something else, maybe white, maybe not, from his father, who could be just about any middle-aged guy with green eyes and a take-no-responsibility attitude.
Then there were Lucas and Noah, who were at least partially from a matched set since they were the only two out of the four of them that actually shared a blood connection, having been born of the same Asian mother, though they had different fathers. Lucas, the older of the two at thirty, was full—or “ish,” because who really knew what without a DNA test—Korean, and Noah, the younger at twenty-eight, was half Korean and half Black—or Black-ish, because once again, DNA. Jesse had only been able to piece together parts of their past from what they had shared over the years, but what he did gather was that their mother died in a fire, which was tragic and more than plenty to mentally parse, given the fact that Lucas ended up being a firefighter. But Jesse got it, he guessed. Demons being what they were and all.