Romantic - Enemies to Lovers - Forbidden Love
•✦───✧✦✧───✦•
In the peacetime following World War II, Jean Ward loses everything and is sent to live with her best friend, Clyde Mayberry, and his brood of brothers on his family's cattle ranch.
For a...
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•✦─Early Summer, 1956─✦• Jean, age 18
Jory graduated in the top of his class, earning his Bachelor's in biology and the praise of everyone around him.
Jean and the Mayberrys had made the three-hour trip to watch him graduate—a week before Jean and Clyde would graduate high school.
When it came Jean and Clyde's turn, Jean wore one of her favorite dresses and her best pair of heels to accept her diploma.
It was after the ceremony—at the graduation party Mrs. Mayberry had thrown for all the graduates—when it struck her.
Loneliness.
She was surrounded by people on all sides, but yet the sting of knowing that none of them were truly there for her hit her square in the chest.
They were a mix of relatives and family friends of the Mayberrys, and Jean ached knowing that she didn't have any family of her own. Not one of them had shown up solely for her.
She didn't have a family. Mama was dead, Anne was dead, and she'd given up on Daddy returning a long time ago. She knew he was dead, too, though she didn't like to think about that much. Sometimes it was fun to fantasize that he was still out there, trying to get back to her.
But she was grown now. She knew better than that.
Jean slipped through the back door halfway through the party when her throat began to ache from holding back a sob. She kicked off her heels onto the back porch before running through the field toward her old shack, tears in her eyes and messing up her makeup.
She didn't care, coming to a stop at Mama's grave and falling to her knees there.
Even though she hated her mama for what she had done, it was in those moments when her eyes blurred with tears and her throat felt tight that she yearned for her mother's embrace one last time.
It was ages ago, but she missed the mama she had before the war started, the one who laughed and joked and read books in funny voices and held Jean until she would fall asleep each night.
She also missed Anne, even though the little girl had only been in her life for a brief moment. She grieved what could've been, the sisterhood she had only a taste of.
She often liked to stay up at night and wonder about what it would've been like having a sister.
She always admired how the Mayberrys got along, how they would fight and scream and yell at each other, but would always have each other's backs at the end of the day. She liked to think that she and Anne would've been like that, and was saddened that she would never get to know.
