For the second time that morning, Jesse was confused by something he was being told. It wasn’t even like she was saying anything all too complex; it was just the last thing he had expected. Not only had she dragged her ass down to the jail first thing in the morning to pay half a grand to bail him out, but now she was taking him back to her place so that he could take a shower and eat something that she was willing to make for him.
And this is after he had gotten thrown in jail because of a fight he had gotten into the night before. While they were on a date. On Valentine’s Day.
His head nodded, showing that he understood, even if he didn’t truly understand, if that made any sense. Things would have been different, if she was a temporary fling who thought it was a turn on that a guy would get into a fight over her, but Claire wasn’t like any girl he had been with before. She wasn’t like any girl he had ever met before, but his background was much different than hers. He had been raised in New York, one of the busiest cities in the world, surrounded by people who didn’t so much as spare a passing glance to those who passed them on the street. Here in Babylon, at least in her neighborhood, people knew each others names and cared who was doing what where, when, and with whom.
This was another reason why his guilt weighed so heavily on his conscience – people were bound to here about what went down at Experience, and how the minister’s daughter’s loose cannon of a boyfriend went off on some guy. She was going to have to deal with more consequences because of this than he was.
When they finally pulled up to the curb outside of her house, Jesse remained in the car, sitting in the dead silence that followed after she turned the car off. He stared at the glove box for a long while, and without even thinking, he spoke in that same low, tired voice.
“Why are you doing all this?”
He looked over at her, hoping she would give him an explanation that made sense – he also hoped that her explanation wouldn’t be that it was the ‘Christian thing to do’, because he definitely didn’t deserve it, if that were the case. He was truly baffled by the whole thing, and while he should have just been grateful for her generosity, he needed to know.
He wasn’t used to being taken care of after he had done something ‘wrong’.