Chapter Four

I snuggled up against Jesse during the movie. I wasn't cold or anything, but it was the romantic sort of thing to do. And the heat coming from his body assured me that the past two years hasn't been a dream. It would have been a good dream, but I would have been VERY disappointed when I woke up. Besides, you can't feel other people's body heat in dreams, can you? I sniffed Jesse's neck. He smelled like soap and something good, but I don't know what it was. What was it David had once said…something about a person's scent that the brain recognizes or something like that? Pheromones. That was it. He'd said it one day after I'd said to Brad when he'd arrived home from his wrestling practice, "For the love of God, take a shower, Brad!"

And David had said something about pheromones and the part of the nose that scientist think may be responsible for picking up the molecular bits of scent and sending them to the brain, telling it what to do…and how a baby knows its mother and father by scent, and how women who live together tend to menstruate at the same time. Seriously. He was so wrapped up in his speech that he said the word "menstruate" without even blushing. Jeez. I can't even say "period" or "PMS" without turning red and getting really interested in the floor.

I put my head on Jesse's chest, my head rising and falling with each of his breaths.

Despite the noise from the movie, I was able to count his heartbeats. I busied myself by trying to match my heartbeat with his.

Thump-thump…thump-thump…

I didn't get much success, but I liked lying there with him beneath me, me feeling his hard chest beneath the softness of mine, smelling his soap, feeling him breathe.

"I like this movie," Jesse said, referring to The Godfather -- and disturbing the heartbeats I was counting, but I could hear and feel his voice reverberate in his chest as he spoke.

Despite the romantic feelings I was experiencing, I groaned. "I know you do," I said. Why couldn't we have gone to the movies? The Godfather wasn't in the movie theater, thank God.

He chuckled. "You pick the next one," he said. "Besides, Susannah, this is almost over. Can you stand another fifteen minutes?"

"I guess." I yawned.

Because David had had to tell Jesse all about his model of the universe on his computer, and how he thought the universe would shrink in the next 100 billion years or so, we'd been too late getting to the movie theater to see the movie from the beginning, and Jesse, being the movie-lover he is, has a thing against not being able to see a movie in its entirety, so we had to go to his place to watch movies or do something else instead. Only not the something else I wanted to do. Well, at least not right away. He wasn't dumb. He knew I wanted to make out. He probably knew I wouldn't get to pick a movie because it would be too late to watch another movie by the time we were finished. Oh well. The kissing was the important part, right?

After the movie was over and the credits were rolling up the screen, he stopped the movie and, he pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head. "What do you want to watch, querida?"

Only instead of replying, I leaned up and kissed him. He kissed me back and our kisses eventually deepened into French kisses, and his hands caressed my back. I was hoping things would go further than before, but I wasn't going to get my hopes up too high. I mean, if he can go for two years with just kissing me and occasionally feeling me up, I guess I can wait, too. Even though he was born in 1830, you can't tell me that hasn't crossed his mind from time to time. He is ostensibly male. And I once read in Cosmo that guys are said to think about it every six seconds or so.

Jesse's six seconds or so don't seem to occur whenever I'm around, though.

Maybe he is an exception to that rule, after all. After a while of kissing -- that had, by the way heated up to getting to second base, to my never-ending happiness -- Jesse decided that it was time for another movie, which I got to pick, so I picked a movie called Donnie Darko because it had some stuff about time travel in it, and anything to do with funerals, time travel, or ghosts had become a private joke between Jesse and me…even if Donnie Darko ended up killing himself at the end of the movie, by going back in time to the night he was supposed to be crushed by an airplane engine when it crashed into his house and landed in his room, so his girlfriend could live -- even if that meant she'd never meet him. (1)

Although the movie was excellent - I had seen it a few times before -- I fell asleep around the middle of it, and I didn't wake up until the next morning, when Jesse nudged me awake. I first realized that I was in his bed. With him right next to me, and I hadn't even made sure this was okay with Mom and Andy.

"Good morning, Susannah. Don't worry, I called your mother last night to tell her that you were asleep and that you'd tried to slap me when I moved you into a more comfortable position. She isn't angry," he said as if sensing my thoughts. He has an uncanny ability to do that…and, if I'm ever thinking about him, he knows. It's kind of like when I used to think about him, and he'd swear that I'd called him, only he just knows that I'm thinking about him. It's really weird.

"Thank you, Jesse," I said, moving closer to him, and putting my head on his chest again.

I looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. I must have really been tired. This would never fly - my spending the night at Jesse's, I mean -- I knew, if my mom and Andy hadn't trusted Jesse so much. But when they saw how old-fashioned Jesse was -- what with being the only guy his age who is actually capable of chewing with his mouth closed, and he actually takes time to enjoy his food, not to mention the fact that his pants are always situated on his waist, not mid-way down his thighs, and he opens doors for my mom and me, and he stands up when a woman stands up, and he makes super-polite conversation with her and Andy when he comes over for dinner -- they were pretty much willing to let me go see him whenever I wanted to.

Frankly, if my mother were not nearly twice his age -- so far as she knew, anyway -- and married, I think she would have been trying to steal Jesse from me, like nearly every other warm-blooded, straight woman who'd come in contact with Jesse in the past two years had tried to do. They usually backed away, however, if I happened to be anywhere nearby, because there must be something they see in me that tells them to get the hell away from my boyfriend.

He stroked my hair. "Susannah, I love you."

He'd finally said it. I mean, we knew that we loved each other, but we'd never said it.

Now he had.

"I love you, too, Jesse," I said, and I kissed him.

"Jesse, what was your family like? I mean, I know you don't really like to talk about them much, because it's really sad what happened, but what were they like? I mean, you've never told me," I said.

"Well, my father's name was Joseph, and my mother's name was Teresa. My sisters were Marta, Mercedes, Josefina, Catherine, and…Susannah." He smiled, and he had a far-away look in his eyes. "Marta was sixteen, Mercedes was fifteen, Josefina was twelve, Catherine was eight, and Susannah was six. You remind me of her sometimes. She always thought she was invincible, always thought that she was going to do as she pleased no matter what anyone said, and she was very cute. She would climb trees and ride horses the way men did - not sitting side-saddle, as women were to - but she was very afraid of thunder storms. She always wanted me to read her bedtime stories." Tears were forming in my eyes. It was just so sweet how he had loved his youngest sister. The whole time he had been mentally comparing me to someone else, he hadn't been comparing me to Maria de Silva Diego, but to his little sister that he loved very much and read bedtime stories to and the little sister he had protected from the occasional thunder storm. All in all, I suppose that him having thought of me at first as a little sister wasn't as bad as him having compared me to the bitch who'd ordered the hit on him once.

"She begged me not to go that day…" he trailed off, but I knew what he'd meant: Susannah, his sister, not me, had begged him not to go marry Maria -- she hadn't known that he wasn't going to marry her, that he had been going to break off their engagement.

But still, she hadn't wanted him to go. I suppose she thought that something bad would happen, and of course, something did. First, Jesse had been murdered in his sleep by Felix Diego, then later "Jesse" -- really Diego -- had been burned to a crisp in the barn I had accidentally set on fire.

"What happened to them?" I asked. Maybe I shouldn't have; I should have just let him talk, but I wanted to know what happened to them, especially his youngest sister.

"My sisters all married and had children, as they were expected to. My mother had died in childbirth, giving birth to another son, which was a still born child. My father died in his sleep twelve years later." He looked sad.

"I'm sorry, Jesse. I shouldn't have asked," I said softly.

"It's okay, querida. I loved my family very much, and I miss them. But Susannah, I am more than glad to be with you," he said.

And at that, the tears that had been forming in my eyes came out, and he kissed me softly.