“We didn’t have a bed that actually had a frame or box springs; I slept on a mattress on the floor. The mattress was a piece of shit. I may as well have just slept on the floor. I remember it was January or February and it was fuckin’ cold. I mean cold as hell, so cold that I couldn’t get warm in the house. I had a horrible cough; I can still remember that cough to this day. She finally broke down and took me to the emergency room. There, they called in CPS because I had bites all over my feet. We had mice in the house, and sleeping so close to the floor wasn’t the best thing to do.”
He stopped then and looked at the other woman. “Do not feel sorry for me,” he threatened.
“I swear to you I won’t, but my God, boy…you’ve been through it.”
“Mom took off when they called CPS, and they asked me if I had anybody else to stay with. Dad was in jail at that point, and I mentioned his name. They knew him and said that I couldn’t go stay with him. They asked me one more time if I knew of anybody; if not, they said I would have to go with the social worker. So I mentioned my grandparents, but it had been over a year since I had seen them.”
“Was this your mom’s parents or your dad’s?”
He took another bite of his cinnamon roll and another drink of his orange juice. “My mom’s. I still don’t know why we went that whole year without seeing them, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve figured it’s because she knew I looked so damn bad. I can look at a few pictures from when I first came to live with my grandparents, and I looked like the sickest kid ever. Anyway, miracle of all miracles, Mamaw and Papaw still had the same phone number they’d had before, and they answered on the second ring. They came to hospital and took me home in Papaw’s old beat-up truck, and I never lived anywhere besides with them after that.”
“How was your life with them?”
Layne smiled softly, uncharacteristic tears coming to his eyes. “It was awesome,” he whispered. He spoke the next words in that same soft tone, almost like if he spoke louder, he would have a break down. “We didn’t have any money, and we lived in a run-down farmhouse out off of Goshen Church Road, but we had love. There was not a day that went by that Mamaw wouldn’t pull me close, kiss me on the forehead, and tell me how much she loved me. They were older when I came to live with them, and she took a job until the day she died to help keep me in clothes and food. She worked the day she died, for me. That money never went to the two of them, it went to me. They made it just fine before I came along; granted they didn’t have a lot, but they made so many sacrifices to bring me into their home, and they not one fuckin’ time told me about it. I saw it, but they never once mentioned it to me. That’s why I joined the military. I wasn’t smart enough to get a scholarship to college, but I wanted to do something for them.”
“Were you able to?” Doc Jones asked, tears on her face. She quietly wiped them away, sniffling slightly as she looked at the young man sitting in front of her. She had a feeling that the answer was going to break her heart.
“Mamaw died while I was in boot camp,” he swallowed against the ridge in his throat. “She was still working so that they would have the money to come see me graduate. Papaw died while I was serving in Iraq. To this day, I still say he died of a broken heart. They were married almost fifty years, and without her there, I just don’t think he could take it.”
“God, Layne,” she whispered, mopping up her face. “Can I hug you?”
That took him by surprise. “I’m okay,” he told her softly.
“But I’m not, I need to hug you,” she admitted.
He chuckled softly and stood, opening his arms to her. She slowly went into them, hugging him tightly around the waist. It struck him as odd, he always thought of her as this larger-than-life person because of the way they all talked about her in the club. However, here in his arms, her head barely hit his chin. She squeezed tightly, and he inhaled deeply. The smell of those cinnamon rolls took him back, and he allowed himself for just a few moments to imagine this was the hug he’d always wanted to give his grandmother before she had passed. It healed a part of his soul he hadn’t known was still a gaping wound, and for the first time in a long time, he felt the warm slide of wetness down his cheek.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Sorry, didn’t mean to get so emotional,” he told her, wiping his cheeks up too.
“Me neither, I really thought the two of us were just going to have a conversation,” she laughed.
“That was a conversation I think I needed,” he admitted.
Doc Jones glanced at the room where she did most of her listening. “Do you want to take it in there, or do you want to sit out there? Either one is fine with me, wherever you feel most comfortable. I think we may have made a breakthrough with you.”
He did too, but he was scared to say anything. Sometimes giving voice to your fears or your successes made them go away, in his mind. Layne only nodded slightly. “I think I might like to sit out there.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“You mind if I get some more orange juice?”
“Help yourself,” she told him, watching closely as he got up from the chair. It wasn’t very often that she could see a weakness in this man, but when he got up, he favored one leg. She remembered reading in the files she had requested from the VA that he had taken a hit to one of his legs. “Does the leg bother you?”
“Ma’am?” The question took him off guard.
“The leg, does it bother you?”
“Sometimes.” He looked down at it, almost like he didn’t realize that he had been favoring it.
“Do you find that it hurts you more after an episode?”
He pursed his lips together and then leaned against the counter, crossing his legs at the ankle as he took a drink of his orange juice. “Yeah, there were some doctors who thought the injury was all mental, but trust me; I have the scars to prove them.”
Her gaze was astute as it roamed up and then back down his body. “Hmm.”
“Hmm? What does ‘hmm’ mean?”
“Do you think that it’s your ‘crutch’?”
“I’m not sure I’m following, Doc,” he told her as he had a seat across from her.
“Just hear me out.” She held her hands up in front of her. “Do you think that it’s possible that you allow it to be more of a nuisance for you after an episode because that can remind people you’re a war hero. That you were damaged over there, but I’m not sure you were damaged as much physically as you make out. This is something that people at large can see, with their own eyes, your limp. They can’t see what goes on inside your head.”
“I got hurt,” he told her, anger glazing his eyes over.
“You did, and I’m not disputing that, but I have a theory about you, Layne O’Connor.”
He stood up, pissed. “Do tell, Doc. You’re one in a long line who has always just wanted to fix me.”
“Don’t get attitude with me. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be out of your own head. I’m trying to get you to see, Layne, you do things with the physical injury to mask the emotional pain…am I right on that?”
He got up from the table and turned away from her, gripping the counter top where it met the cool metal of the sink and let his head fall lifeless between his shoulders. “My neck, it kills me every day,” he whispered. “The tension runs through my body all the time. It’s a daily fight to keep my head up, to keep my mouth above the water that’s threatening to drown me. I struggle every day with sounds and voices and shadows. It’s much easier for people to think that I’m a wounded war hero with a bum leg than for people to realize my brain is just a fucked up maze of mistakes I made. A fucked up piece of a puzzle that’s never going to bring my men back home. I’d much rather them think I need a cane to walk than for them to know that sometimes I can’t sleep because all I can hear in my head is the screaming of people that were dying and I couldn’t save them. Tell me how that’s taking the easy way out.”
“I n
ever said it was easy, Layne.” She got up and came to stand behind him, carefully placing her hands on his shoulders. “I’m saying it’s dishonest and it’s not fair to either you or the people you care about. Be honest with them; let them know when you’re freaking out. They have to know to be able to help you. I think if you could work through the honesty part, the peace would come.”
He swallowed loudly, roughly. “Can I trust that? What if it never comes?”
“Then you live for the rest of your life exactly the way you’re living now. It’s a fifty-fifty shot. Would you rather just glide through life the way you are now and think that maybe one day it might be different? Or do you want to put the work in, let somebody get close to you, and realize that it can be different?”
The logic was hard to dispute and hard to follow all at the same time.
“All you’ve got to do is let one person in, Layne, let one person in far enough to see past the bullshit.”
Could he do that? “I don’t know.”
She walked over to him and took his hands in hers. “You let one person in and the next person will be easier. There is at least one person in this world that you trust above all others, and I think we both know who that is.”
“Jess,” he whispered.
“Let her know what you’re feeling when you feel it, don’t hide yourself from her.”
“What if she’s not into accepting? I kind of fucked up last night. Two times in a couple of days. I don’t have a great track record right now.”
“Then make her understand that you need her, Layne, because if you can’t get past this, I’m not sure there’s a future for you. At some point, you’re going to get tired of the lying; it’s going to weigh you down, and there will be no escaping that pressure. There will be nothing there for you to lay that boulder of half-truths on. You will crush yourself under the weight of it. That’s when we lose most PTSD sufferers.”
He looked into her eyes and noticed the wrinkles there for the first time. She reminded him slightly of his Mamaw. “Okay,” he breathed deeply and then exhaled.
“I don’t want to lose you, Layne. I have a soft spot for any person that’s in this club. I want you to live a full life, and I want you to enjoy it. Tell me that you’re going to try and make it through. I would love nothing more than to see you scream a big ‘f you’ to all those doctors that told you without medication you couldn’t make this work. Without the VA doctors you wouldn’t ever be able to live a life. I got your medical records; I know what you’re dealing with. You aren’t crazy, Layne, don’t let others make you think that you are.”
That was the fucker of the situation. For too long he’d let doctors and diagnoses control how he lived his life. That stopped now.
She had never felt sexy or even wanted until she glimpsed the look in his eyes the first time he’d seen her with no shirt on. Now, all she wanted to do was walk around naked—for him to devour her with that look at all times.
Jessica bit her lip and looked up from the notebook she was writing in. The look she was imagining as she wrote was the one that Layne had given her last night. The one he always gave her when no one else was around. Was it bad that she used him for the muse in most of her stories? It helped her deal with the way he always kept her at arm’s length. In her stories, her women did exactly what she wanted but never had the guts to do. Bending down over the paper again, she continued.
His hungry gaze followed her around the room until she stopped right in front of him. Juliette let her green eyes roam his arms, which held more ink than she had liked on any other man before. This man, however, he was different. He held an air of danger, an air of seduction, and an air that said he would do whatever the fuck he wanted to. That turned her on more than anything.
“What are you writing?”
She had been so engrossed that she hadn’t even heard Layne come up to the table. She was sitting in the backyard a nice distance from the clubhouse; she should have at least seen him coming up. “Just jotting down a few ideas,” she told him before closing the notebook quickly.
“No, seriously. I’ve seen you writing in notebooks before, and didn’t you mention that some of your writings got stolen? Why were you so worried about that?” He reached over, holding his hand out for the notebook.
Jessica shot him a look of death. “This is something I don’t like to share with other people,” she whispered, her voice thick.
The corner of his mouth tilted up. “You that bad?”
“No,” she shook her head. “I’ve had the few people I’ve let read it tell me it’s very good, but it’s not something I share.”
“We don’t have secrets, remember?”
That had been their slogan, their motto, before he’d gone off to Iraq. The two of them were completely honest with each other. Respectively, the only people that each of them could be honest with.
“Some things change,” she whispered.
Taking a deep breath, he got up and went over to sit beside her, straddling the bench seat.
His proximity caused her pulse to race, and she had to question if this was residual from the night before, or just the fact that she loved being in such close quarters with him. “What do you want?” her tone was pleading.
“To try and get back to where we were, to get the trust back. I want to be able to let you in,” he told her quietly. It was hard to get those words out, even after his session with Doc Jones.
“What if I don’t wanna let you in?” she asked.
He sighed again and scooted over so that their bodies touched and he could lay his forehead on her shoulder. Grabbing her hands, he put them around his neck and forced her to turn so that she straddled the bench as well. Once she faced him, he lifted his head and forced her to look at him. When he slowly licked his lips, he didn’t miss the way her eyes followed the moist trail that he left behind. “I think you do want to let me in, and I think you kind of hate both you and me for it, but here’s the thing. I know you, Jessica Shea, and you know me. We can’t keep doing this to each other.”
He was right. They needed to start fresh, and she knew that. “Okay, Layne, I’ll take the bait. What do you want to do?”
“I have to let somebody in, it’s simple as that. I’m going crazy without someone to share my life with,” he started, rubbing her hands and arms where she had them looped around his neck. “I want that somebody to be you.”
She heard what he was saying, but didn’t know if she believed it. “What’s the catch?” she grinned, knowing with him, there was always something.
“I need to know that I can trust you.”
“You can,” she told him, rubbing her hands down his chest.
“Prove it. Show me what’s in that notebook.”
He would have to ask her that.
“If I show you this, I am showing you that I trust you with every single part of me, Layne, and you better not take it lightly.”
“I won’t.”
She knew from the way he said the words that he was telling the truth. Her eyes closed, and she handed him the notebook as embarrassment flamed on her cheeks.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Was it too much to ask for a sinkhole to open up right where they sat? Maybe a tornado to come whooshing by and take that notebook right out of Layne’s hands. Jessica was pretty sure that no one had ever died of utter humiliation and embarrassment, but she was looking to take that title.
It felt like hours as she heard Layne flip through the pages of the notebook. At several parts, she heard him clear his throat lowly. The sound very deep and masculine. She wanted to open her eyes and see if her words affected him, but there was another part of her that was flat scared to death. After what felt like a good ten years, she heard him set the notebook down.
“Wow,” he breathed.
Her eyes slowly opened. It took a moment for them to adjust to the bright light of the hot summer day. The sun in Kentucky was even brighter, more potent, than the sun in California. T
hey stared at each other for long seconds.
“So.” He pursed his lips, a grin tilting up the left side of his mouth. “You write that stuff, huh?” He ran his tongue over his full bottom lip, the color much more pink than normal. A full smile threatened against the skin there.
Jessica didn’t know what else to do, so she smacked him hard on the chest, the leather of his cut dulling the blow. It reverberated against the wooden fence that placed a barrier between the side of the clubhouse and the porch. “Don’t make fun of me, Layne,” she whispered, humiliation causing her voice to be thin.
“I’m not,” he told her, grabbing her hand before she could inflict any more damage on him. “I swear I’m not, it just…surprised me is all,” he admitted.
She didn’t know what to say to that and remained quiet as he touched her. Flipping her hand over in his, he caressed her palm, fitting their fingers against one another and then entwining them so that their palms touched. It was so intimate for the person that he was now; she had to fight to keep her breathing under control.
“It surprised me too, when I started writing it.”
He cleared his throat again, scooting closer to her. “When was that?”
Did she tell him? Was now the time to be perfectly honest with him or should she hold a few things close to her and not let him in on every part of her? Who was she kidding…he was the one person she couldn’t keep secrets from. “When you were in Iraq. I would stay up at all hours of the night. My mind would race, and I would wonder if you were in trouble where you were. It started out as journaling, but then it became stories, and then it turned into this.”
“Any of this about me?” The shit-eating grin on his face made her want to punch him.
“Layne, if were any kind of gentleman you would not ask me that question.” Her face burned a bright red; she could feel it, all the way up to her ears.
“Your refusal to answer the question tells me everything I need to know,” the laughter was in his voice.
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