A Masterpiece Gone

Chapter Nineteen

Jessie leaned against the wall by the automatic doors keeping a strong grasp on Jackson and Neil's leashes. The level of excitement and uncertainty she possessed for the past twenty-four hours withheld any possibility of sleep, but her exhausted eyes behind her gigantic sunglasses knew it was all worth it as just breathing in the outdoor air made her feel better already.

"Psst! Jess!" a female hissed somewhere ahead towards her right by two women loading rather hefty bags in the back.

As Jessie traced the sound of voice to the BMW behind the truck, she nearly crumbled. "You shouldn't be here!" she called, placing her sunglasses above her head.

"Yeah, well, fuck booking car service. If I'm helping to smuggle you out of the UK, we need to have a little heart to heart before you are left to your own devices," Jenny declared as she made a beeline for Jessie and her loads of luggage.

Pulling her in a hug, Jessie kept the leashes in one hand and firmly clung to Jenny with her free hand. "I hope you didn't take off work. If I knew you were going to do this, I would have taken a cab myself and tell you about this later," she whispered into Jenny's ear.

Breaking away from their embrace, Jenny rolled her eyes before she greeted Neil and Jackson. "Just shut up and get in the car before you get noticed," she teased Jessie. "Take the two smaller bags and I'll worry about the rest including their crates."

Within five minutes with Jackson and Neil compliantly sitting in the backseat a little forlorn from ten hours on a plane with a mild tranquilizer, Jenny returned to the car slapping down her new Dolce & Gabbana shades from the top of her head to cover her eyes. In the five second span of Jenny beginning to pull out, Jessie snickered as she witnessed Jenny already chewing out the taxi that almost clipped the side of her car.

God, it feels so good to be back in New York, Jessie thought happily leaving the JFK terminal.

A couple of hours before the plane had descended, she began to really worry about what would happen when her parents came back to an empty house and a note but as Jessie now calculated that that very moment would probably be happening maybe within the hour back in Essex, that last trace of regret completely dissolved into the Queens atmosphere.

"What's in the white paper bag?" Jessie asked as she peered down at the bottom of her feet.

"Breakfast or I guess technically brunch by the time we get to your house," Jenny replied as she clicked her turn signal. "We'll talk there because Lord knows your phone is going to probably be shrieking any minute now if it hasn't already."

However, Jessie's phone remained silent throughout the long ride home with two business calls that Jenny took over her car's Bluetooth serving as the background noise.

"That's too bad for Sarah, isn't it?" Jenny declared haughtily to the man on the other side of that second call as she slowed the car down in front of Jessie's gated driveway. "You know, Bob, we can't just give out to people extra vacation time like it's candy. She's the one that wanted to spend her entire five weeks touring Europe back in March so now she has to wait until January for more days...if she even lasts that long working for me."

Jessie quietly motioned that she would hurriedly get out of the car to punch in the code into the keypad as Jenny did not have her clicker. Jenny nodded in acknowledgement before staring up at her sunroof in disgust as Bob went on to explain that Sarah wasn't expecting her friend to get married in Punta Cana so unexpectedly next weekend.

Once Jessie entered the code, she took in the view of her three-car garage that led to the kitchen of her dreams that did not need remodeling upon purchasing the house. Shaking her head contently, Jessie backed up before reentering the car to Jenny biting her bottom lip.