Author's Note: So this chapter was nearly ready to be posted on Sunday night but when I re-read it, I ended up doing a bit of a re-write. Then last night my internet went down. I seriously cannot thank you guys enough for the reviews. I love hearing what you guys think of this story so much it's kind of ridiculous. I really hope this chapter lives up to your expectations!
Jesse sighed and leaned his head on his dressing room door after he shut it, leaving Rachel standing alone in the hallway. The look on her face as she had seen Isla standing in his dressing room had absolutely killed him. He had wanted to take her in his arms so badly and tell her how much he really did love her, but he couldn't do that. Finally, he turned around to face Isla again, who was now looking at him.
"Look, I know there's a lot we need to talk about, but can we just please have this discussion at home? I just want to get changed and go home," Jesse said, running his hand through his hair and rubbing the back of his neck.
The fight had obviously gone out of Isla too as she sighed and said, "Sure. We can talk when you get home." She grabbed her purse and walked over to Jesse, stopping in front of him. "By the way, you were wonderful tonight," she told him before she leaned up to kiss him on the cheek and left his dressing room.
Jesse stood motionless for a moment after the door had closed behind Isla. Everything inside of him was screaming for him to go check on Rachel and make sure she was alright. But he knew she wasn't because he wasn't.
Rachel fought back tears as she changed out of her costume and makeup in her dressing room. She had known that Isla was coming back that afternoon and she thought that she had prepared herself for it, but apparently she hadn't prepared well enough. She just had so many emotions warring inside of her. Some she knew would feel and others that had never even crossed her mind.
Of course she had known that she would feel guilty, but she didn't know it would be like this. A weight that felt so heavy that it hurt to breathe. Even though she knew how deteriorated Jesse's marriage with Isla was, it still didn't change the fact that she had slept with another woman's husband. Not only had she had sex with another woman's husband, she had done it on her couch, her floor, her kitchen, her shower… her bed.
Then there was Donovan that she had barely thought about since the first night that she had spent with Jesse. Not only had Rachel helped Jesse break his wedding vows, but Rachel had broken a promise that she had made to Donovan when she had agreed to marry him. Rachel felt bile rise up in her throat and ran to her trash can as she emptied the contents of her stomach into it.
She took a few deep breaths to calm her nerves and grabbed a tissue to wipe her mouth off. On top of the guilt she was experiencing, there was such intense jealousy. Rachel didn't think she had ever felt this level of jealousy in her entire life. Tonight it would be Isla sleeping next to Jesse. It would be Isla that would wake up next to him in the morning. And eat breakfast with him. Kiss him on the lips before she walked out of the apartment. Rachel felt another wave of nausea wash over her as she thought about Jesse making love to Isla. It was almost too much to bear.
As she closed her eyes, she saw Jesse's smiling face and heard the words that he had whispered to her during their love scene. I love you. Rachel felt her heart skip a beat as his words played like a record in her head. He loved her. She still couldn't believe that he had told her during the show that he loved her.
The night before when Rachel had thought that Jesse was going to say those three little words, she had thought that she wasn't ready to hear them and that it was still too soon to even be uttering them. But she had been wrong. The way he had said it and the moment he had chosen to say those words had been perfect. And she was in love with him too. In fact, she had wanted to tell him just that when she had gone to his dressing room.
She thought about how maybe it was fate that Isla had been in Jesse's dressing room and Rachel had been unable to tell him that she felt the same way. Maybe before she said those words to Jesse, she needed to figure out just where she and Donovan stood. She needed to know where Jesse and Isla stood. Sure when she and Jesse had talked the first night she had been inside Jesse's apartment, he had pretty much told Rachel that his marriage to Isla was over but what was to say that he wouldn't change his mind.
He and Isla had been fighting when he had told her that after all. Although, he had also told Rachel that things between them had been bad for awhile. Saying that his marriage was on the rocks was one thing, but actually doing something about it was a whole other story. Would he actually leave his wife? Could she leave Donovan? Deciding that she didn't want to have to think about any of that, at least not alone anyway, Rachel called Kurt.
"Hey," Kurt said as he answered his phone.
"Do you mind if I stay with you for a couple more days? I'm not ready to go back home yet," she explained.
"I take it Jesse's wife is back?" Kurt asked. It wasn't a judgment, just a simple question.
"Yeah," Rachel told him sadly. "Can we get drunk when I get to your place?"
"Of course," he replied. "Get your ass here so we can start drinking. You and I haven't had a wine night in way too long."
"Ok, I'll be there in thirty," she said before hanging up the phone. Rachel smiled, extremely grateful that she had Kurt as a friend.
As Jesse walked out of his dressing room, he turned and looked down the hall towards Rachel's dressing room. Instead of going to her like he still so desperately wanted to do, he made his feet walk in the direction of the stage door so he could go home and have a long overdue conversation with Isla.
He had hoped that he would run into Rachel outside of the stage door, but he had no such luck. When he thought about it, it was probably a good thing. What would he have said to her while they were surrounded by so many fans? It wasn't like they could have a private conversation or anything. So Jesse plastered on his best show face for all of the fans and smiled for pictures and was friendly to everyone that he talked to.
Despite knowing that Rachel was probably already gone or still inside, he looked around for her as he walked towards the street to catch a taxi. He hated that he had told her that he loved her and then they hadn't even been able to talk about it. Jesse held his phone in his hand for a few minutes as he rode in the back of the taxi, debating on whether or not he should call her or text her. He wanted her to know that he was thinking about her.
I meant what I said to you earlier, he typed out. He looked at it for a moment and decided that it was better than no communication at all. Jesse was pretty sure that she wouldn't respond so it didn't hurt his feelings when the taxi pulled up outside his apartment building and she hadn't sent him a reply. He paid the taxi driver and got out of the car.
Taking a deep breath as he looked up at the building in front of him, he started walking towards the door. "Good evening, Mr. St. James," the night doorman said as he opened the door for him. "I see that Mrs. St. James is back in town." He looked at Jesse knowingly and Jesse simply nodded. "Have a wonderful night, sir."
"You too," Jesse responded as he walked through the door and into the lobby of the building. He trudged over to the elevator ignoring the urge to run back out the door and take a taxi to Kurt's. Before he knew it, he was turning the key in the lock of his front door and walking into his apartment. He immediately saw Isla sitting on the sofa with a large glass of red wine in her hand.
Without saying a word, she got up and walked over to the bar, pouring Jesse a glass of scotch. "Thanks," Jesse said, slightly taken aback, as she handed him the glass. He followed behind her as she led the way back over the couch and sat down. "Look, Isla," Jesse began before she cut him off.
"I'm sorry, Jesse," she rushed out. Jesse was completely baffled by this turn of events. He hadn't expected those words to come spilling from her lips, especially when she had been so reluctant to utter them when she had ambushed him in his dressing room earlier. "I don't want to fight. I know I should have been there for your opening night performance and I'm sorry that I wasn't," she explained. Jesse waited for the inevitable 'but' that he knew was coming. "But," there it was. "You have to understand my point of view. I love what I do and it's important to me and I don't ever want to do anything to jeopardize that."
"I do understand that because my career is important to me, but when did we stop being important to each other?" he asked. "There was a time when you would have done everything in your power to reschedule those meetings in Paris or put them off for a couple of days so you could be there to support me. Instead, I had no one on opening night."
"We're just at a different place in our lives than we were when we first got married," she told him, blatantly ignoring his last comment. He wasn't going to pretend like it didn't hurt that she didn't even seem to care that neither she nor his parents could make it to his opening night performance. "But I promise I'm going to do better."
They sat in silence for a moment while Isla waited for Jesse to say something in response. "Forgive me if I'm having a hard time believing you. It's not like we haven't been here before," he finally said. He hated to be a jerk because he knew that she probably believed the words she was saying and that this time would be different.
"Look, I'm not saying it's going to be easy for me Jesse, and I'm sure I'll screw up but I'm going to try," she told him. "I just need you to have a little more patience with me."
"I need some time to think, Isla," he said. He didn't know what else to say so he gulped down his scotch before he stood up. "I'm sorry, but I can't be here right now." She looked at him like he had just slapped her as he grabbed his keys and walked out the door.
Rachel and Kurt sat on his living room couch with an empty bottle of red wine sitting on the coffee table and a half emptied one sitting right next to it. Kurt looked at Rachel's phone again and read the text message that Jesse had sent to her earlier. "So he said he loved you? While you were onstage in front of a sold-out live audience?" Kurt asked for at least the third time, just before he took a large swig of wine out of his glass.
"He whispered it in my ear. No one else heard him," Rachel exclaimed in exasperation, snatching her phone back from him.
"That you know of," Kurt corrected her which only made Rachel roll her eyes.
"Can we please talk about how I was about to tell him that I love him when I went to his dressing room," Rachel cried out in frustration.
"Do you really love him?" Kurt asked excitedly.
"I think so," she confessed. "I'm so confused. I haven't talked to Donovan in days and a part of me doesn't really want to, but am I ready to give up on my relationship with him after only a few perfect days with Jesse?"
"Rachel, this was all happening way before you and Jesse actually had sex," Kurt pointed out rather bluntly.
"Okay, fine, whatever," she replied. A beat then, "It's scary."
"What is?"
"The fact that in all the time that I've been with Donovan, he's never made me feel like this. Ever," she explained, her hand clutching at her shirt just over her heart. Kurt waited for her to continue, knowing that his friend needed to get this all out. "Donovan can hurt me, but I know that I could walk away from our relationship and pick up the pieces and carry on. With Jesse… if it didn't work out I might honestly lose the will to live," she declared dramatically.
"Now you're just being a drama queen," Kurt said with a shake of his head.
"No, Kurt, it would be devastating. It would destroy me," she said. Then her imagination started running away from her with all sorts of equally tragic scenarios. "What if I leave Donovan and Jesse decides that he loves Isla and wants to be with her? Then I'm left all alone, shattered and broken because the man that I love is happily married to another woman. Plus I'd have to work with him every day and pretend like I don't love him. Or what if I leave Donovan and he leaves Isla and we realize that what was driving us together in the first place was our unhappiness in our current relationships and we don't make each other happy either?"
"Rachel, you two aren't falling for each other because Isla and Donovan are pushing you two together. Sure, it might have made the initial decision to cross that line a little easier but all you did for weeks once you two started hanging out together is gush about how wonderful Jesse is," Kurt retorted, hoping that he could help her see the flaw in the tragic endings she was considering for her and Jesse.
Ignoring him Rachel thought of another scenario. "Or, what if they get pregnant? What if I get pregnant with Donovan's baby? I mean, I know he and I are not having sex but who's to say that we won't in the near future and I get pregnant and my decision is made for me. I couldn't very well leave Donovan if I was pregnant with his child. I'm sure Jesse wouldn't leave Isla if she was pregnant with his child. Or what if Jesse got me pregnant? I don't want him to be with me out of some sort of obligation," she rushed out. "I mean, I'm on birth control but nothing is 100%!"
She finally looked over at Kurt who was staring at her like she had two heads. "Are you living in a soap opera? None of that is going to happen. And before you come up with another crazy scenario, Isla is not going to figure out that Jesse is having an affair and try to trap him into staying with her by having Jesse get her pregnant. Or even better yet, because I know how your mind works, having another man get her pregnant and saying it's Jesse's."
"You don't think that's a real possibility do you?" Rachel asked, seriously.
"You do realize that you've officially hopped aboard the crazy train, right?" Kurt asked. "No more wine for you." He reached over and took her wine glass out of her hand and placed it on the table.
Rachel looked at Kurt with an expression cross between her being offended and hurt. "I just don't know what to do," she admitted.
"Are you prepared to leave Donovan and end your engagement to him?"
"I don't know," she told him in a voice barely above a whisper.
Kurt scooted over on the couch and wrapped his arm around Rachel, pulling her into his side. "I'm on Team Rachel, remember? I just want you to be happy." Rachel nodded and wrapped an arm around Kurt, squeezing him a little.
"Do you have any of your own drama that we can talk about now?" Rachel asked hopefully. Kurt just laughed.
Jesse walked outside of his building, not sure of where he wanted to go. He thought about calling up Thomas and seeing if he wanted to get a drink with him, but decided that he didn't really feel like discussing the matter-at-hand with his friend. At least not at that moment.
What he really wanted to do was talk to Rachel. He needed to talk to Rachel. So he hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address for Kurt's building. He was thankful that he and Rachel had gone to Kurt's the day before, otherwise he wouldn't have known where to go. And Jesse was pretty sure that if he tried to call Rachel's phone, she wouldn't answer. When he got inside the building, he went to the concierge and told him who he was there to see.
Jesse heard the concierge talking to Kurt and Kurt telling the man that it was fine to send Jesse on up to his apartment. So Jesse got in the elevator, hit the button for Kurt's floor and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet nervously while he waited to get to his desired floor.
He didn't even have a chance to knock as the door opened and Rachel appeared in the doorway. "Hi," Rachel greeted him quietly. Any resolve that Rachel might have had at distancing herself from Jesse vanished the moment she looked at him.
"Hi," Jesse returned. "Look I'm sorry for just showing up here like this, but I needed to talk to you. Is there somewhere…" he trailed off. He didn't exactly want to have this conversation in the hallway and he was sure that Kurt and Daniel wouldn't appreciate being kept awake by him and Rachel talking.
"Come on," she replied, shutting the apartment door behind her. She grabbed Jesse's hand and led him back to the elevator. She didn't let go of his hand as she pressed the top floor and stood next to him in the elevator. Jesse felt a sort of calm wash over him at just the feel and warmth of her hand in his. She pulled him along behind her as the elevator doors opened to a small lobby that led out to a rooftop terrace.
Once outside, they walked in silence to a corner of the terrace and she sat down on one of the lounge chairs, pulling him down next to her. "Is everything alright?" she asked, turning to face him as she wrapped her leg underneath her. The look on his face when she had opened Kurt's door had killed her. All she had wanted to do was wrap her arms around him and give him whatever solace she could.
"No," he replied softly. He pulled their joined hands to his chest and rested them there as he ran his other hand up and down her arm.
"What happened?" She wasn't sure she really wanted to know, but he had come over here because he needed to talk to her about whatever he and Isla had said, or didn't say, to each other so she was willing to listen.
"She comes back and doesn't even offer up an apology until I practically have to force it out of her then she expects me to just believe her empty promises and act like all is forgiven and that our marriage isn't crumbling around us," he said, looking in Rachel's eyes.
Rachel felt her heart constrict. "What did you tell her?"
"I told her that I needed some time to think," he said.
"But," Rachel added.
"But the truth is, I don't really care if she wants to try because I've heard the story before and I know how it ends. She'll make a concerted effort for a little while and then we're right back to where we are now. I just don't know if I want to do it anymore," he explained, looking down as he continued to rub his hand up and down her arm.
Silence hung in the air between them as Rachel took in his words. "Jesse, I'm not going to tell you to leave your wife," she told him.
"I'm not asking you to, I just…" he didn't know what he was asking.
"Listen, we both just need to take some time and figure out what's going on. Not just between us, but with our partners," she said. It sounded stupid and cowardly, even to her own ears, but she wasn't ready to face the alternatives just yet.
"Rachel, I don't want this to be like after we first kissed last week," he replied. "You can't ask me to just stay away from you. I can't do that."
"I'm not saying that," she said, reaching up and caressing his face. "Do you think that I'd want that after the last few days we've spent together?"
"What are you saying then?" Jesse asked in confusion.
"You shouldn't make any rash decisions right now. You need to really make sure that ending your marriage is what you want," she said, as she hooked her fingers between his button-up and rubbed one of the buttons absentmindedly with her thumb. "You married her for a reason and who's to say that this time won't be the one time that she actually keeps her promise and you guys fall in love all over again." It hurt her to say that, but she had to be realistic. He and Isla had a history together that she couldn't compete with. There were things that they had shared that Rachel would never share with Jesse.
"I doubt that," Jesse scoffed.
"Never say never," Rachel told him.
"And what about you? Are you just going to back to Donovan and try and work things out? Do you really want to be in that kind of relationship? Do you really want to marry someone like that?" he asked, reaching up and brushing her hair back from her face.
She thought about it for a moment, looking down at her thumb that was still playing with the button of his shirt. "I don't want to have any doubts," she replied, turning her gaze back to his.
"You still want to be with me while we figure this stuff out? Are you sure you're okay with that?" He wanted her to be absolutely sure that this was what she wanted. While what they had done the last few days was cheating, they both hadn't had to worry about their partners. Despite knowing that they were both in other relationships, it had been too easy to pretend otherwise. There wasn't going to be any pretending anymore. An affair would involve sneaking around and lying. He wanted to know that she could live with herself.
"Yes, I'm sure," she replied, moving as close to him as she could on the lounge chair they were still sitting on. "I need to know if what we have is real and worth all the heartache that it will inevitably result in."
"This is very real," he said in almost a whisper as he wrapped his arms around her waist.
"That's what scares me," she confessed quietly before she pressed her lips to his and pulled him down on top of her on the chair. The alive sounds of the city on the streets below them like a musical score as they relished the feel of each other. Jesse slipped his hand underneath Rachel's shirt in the back to feel the warmth and softness of her skin. She sighed at the feeling and caressed his tongue with her own in a slow, deep kiss that seemed to go on for ages.
"I have to go," Jesse sighed as they eventually pulled apart, reluctantly.
"I don't want you to," Rachel pouted, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him to her.
"I don't want to either, but I have to," he told her, placing a kiss right next to her lips before he stood up and pulled Rachel with him. Linking his fingers through hers, they walked back to the elevator and rode it down to Kurt's floor. Jesse stood in the elevator door as they said good-bye. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said, cupping her face in his hands before he placed a kiss on her lips. "How does breakfast sound?"
"Perfect," she replied, smiling up at him. "Good night, Jesse."
"Good night, Rach." He watched her walk back inside Kurt's apartment before he hit the button for the lobby. He thought about how just the night before they had wished for tomorrow to never come, but here he was now thinking that tomorrow couldn't come soon enough.
