Jesse hadn't been in a serious fight in a long while. He was now recalling how much fun they were not. Fighting when there was nothing behind it was a good time. He liked a good random brawl. Bar fights that quickly turned into the chaos of strangers throwing punches at each other, a good drunken boxing match over a perceived slight or spilled drink. All of these things were fine. Fighting with a man who believed you'd done him serious harm was another thing entirely.
Jesse was not enjoying himself one bit.
"She has never stopped loving you!" Jesse spit back, dodging one blow but ending up with another landing more soundly because of it. Wash's inebriation made it hard to predict what he was going to do, or where his fists were going to land in relation to where the other man likely thought he was throwing them.
The Southern boy matched blow for blow, not wanting to walk out of this with more bruises than the pilot. If there was anything that he did not like more than this fight it was the idea of losing this fight. There was the matter of pride. An idiot idea that in knowing Wash wasn't a fighter, Wash should not win here. An even more moronic spark in his brain that told him that because of who he'd grown up with, he should be the one standing at the end of this, no matter what.
"Yer fightin now, ya jackass." Jesse gave a quick but strong push, hoping to force Wash to back off.
"It ain't like she got here and just jumped on the first man she saw, Wash." Jesse wiped the blood from a cut under his eye. "She waited for ya for years. Years. She even got you a couplea times. Had ya fer real brief moments. But she kept losin you."
He was now aware that the other patrons had scattered and the bartender was vanished. But he didn't take his eyes off of the emotionally wounded man in front of him. That would have been a dangerous mistake.
"It ain't even like we just met one day and that was that. We were friends first, Wash. We been friends a while."
Jesse didn't know if this information would make any of this better or worse, but he felt compelled to share it. To let Wash know that none of this was a conspiracy against him. To inform the poor guy that his wife had always loved him.
"You can't say you ain't got a chance. Every possibility that she loves you more'n me, Wash. Yer her heart at the end of it."