Jagger didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what Layne would want to hear, and he didn’t want to discount anything about the situation. If he came on too strong then it would probably piss Layne off, and if he didn’t come on strong enough then it would probably embarrass Layne, so all he did was place a hand on Layne’s shoulder and give it a hard squeeze. “You need anything else, you let me know.”
Those words, more than anything, seemed to fill a hole inside of Layne. It made him feel not so damaged. It wasn’t even the words that his friend had said to him, it was the way he said them. No judgment, no pity. They were just words spoken between two friends that were having a conversation. Layne had never felt more appreciative in his life to have this group of men in his everyday existence. The feelings that he felt scared him, but for one of the first times in a long time, he thought with the help of these guys and possibly Jessica he would be okay.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next morning, Layne woke up with a mission. He quietly let himself out of his dorm and successfully walked himself out of the clubhouse without a lot of people seeing him. Late last night, he had texted Doc Jones and let her know that he needed to talk to her. That it was important. She had immediately texted him back and told him that she could see him first thing in the morning. That had been all he needed to hear. He knew that he needed to see the Doc before he even saw Jessica again, he needed to get his head wrapped around all the fucked up shit that was going on inside it.
The ride to the old farmhouse was relaxing. He really did love the ride and the scenery that lead out to the office she used. It calmed him down; just liked he had hoped it would. Before long, he was pulling onto the gravel drive. Before he had even fully parked and gotten off the bike, the front door to the house was open, and the Doc stood on the front porch.
“Mornin’, Layne,” she called out, a cup of coffee in her hands. “I think it’s going to be a beautiful day, hot as hell, but beautiful.”
It made him smile to hear her curse, even if it was just the word “hell”. He let the side of his mouth tilt up as he walked up the steps. “Yes ma’am, it does look to be a beautiful scorcher.”
He held the door open for her as they made their way inside.
“You want some coffee, Layne? I have homemade cinnamon rolls too.”
The smell of the fresh-baked pastry hit his nostrils, and he inhaled deeply. He hadn’t had a home-cooked meal like that in a very long time. Not since he was small and lived with his grandparents. “That almost smells like my grandmother made it,” he admitted as he walked over to the stove and then bent down, inhaling the sweetness.
“Take one,” she encouraged him. “We’ll eat it out here and drink our coffee before we even begin the session. I don’t have anybody else until the middle of the afternoon.”
He wondered if he should do this, if she was trying to get into his head with a home-cooked breakfast and a cup of coffee. Then he realized just how suspicious that sounded and immediately felt bad. What if she was doing this out of the goodness of her heart and he hurt her feelings? Without another thought, he grabbed two and set them on a plate she had next to the cookie sheet.
“You want coffee or orange juice?” she asked, holding the coffee pot up along with a plastic bottle of the orange stuff.
“Orange juice, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t do nectar of the gods, huh?” she teased. “We couldn’t be in a long-term relationship.”
He puffed out a breath on a small laugh. “It tears my stomach up. I used to try to drink it when I was at boot camp because it was a different choice than water, but then I’d end up in the fuckin’ bathroom and in trouble. I learned real quick that I have the food palette of a four-year-old,” he smiled. A real smile.
She laughed along with him. “I wish I had a camera so that I could take a picture of that smile that just came across your face, Layne. Now I know why Jessica couldn’t say no to you.” She said it softly, so that she didn’t scare or spook him.
Usually words like that would cause him to tense up, but in this setting, it was okay. “Believe it or not, back in my day…” he laughed when she frowned at him.
“You are not an old man! Don’t even start talking about ‘back in my day’.”
“Back in my day, I was a bit of a ladies man. There weren’t many women that ever said no to me if I put my mind to having them on my arm, in my bed, whatever. They usually just came running.”
“That’s sick, Layne.” She had a seat at the kitchen table and motioned for him to do the same.
He took his cut off and took the seat she indicated, placing his napkin in his lap before he took a bite of the cinnamon roll.
She watched him closely. He had excellent manners. Unlike most men, he didn’t shove the food in his mouth and then chew with his mouth open because it was hot or he’d taken too big a bite. He chewed quietly, slowly, methodically.
“It wasn’t sick,” he said after he swallowed. “They wanted me,” he shrugged. “I took what they offered.”
“Were you a ladies man from a young age?”
“I don’t know.” His face flamed red. Now that they were talking about it, he was embarrassed about the words he’d said to her. “Women just seemed to like me.”
Doc Jones took a drink of her coffee and then set it down on the table, pulling her bottom lip in between her teeth. She cocked her head to the side and cut her eyes at him. “I call bullshit on you, Layne O’Connor. Are you gonna be honest with me or not?”
“Alright, alright,” he sighed.
She watched as he took a drink of his orange juice and politely wiped his mouth.
“When I was younger—a teenager—I lived with my grandparents.”
“Where were you parents?” she interrupted, but this didn’t feel like a session, it felt like she really wanted to know, as someone who wanted to have a conversation with him.
“Mom and Dad had me young, real young. Mom was fifteen years old and Dad was sixteen. I have a few memories of the two of them, but they just couldn’t handle a life with a young child. They were married for two years, from what I understand, and then they got divorced. I can distinctly remember living with my mom until I was about thirteen years old,” he continued.
She sat with her chin on her hand, engrossed in his story. “What happened at thirteen?”
“Mom and I always lived in shithole dives. Like, I can’t remember one good one. We lived in small apartments, run-down houses, and a couple of drafty trailers. When I was thirteen, it took a turn for the worse. She had gotten mixed up with this boyfriend who I couldn’t stand, and he’d moved us into a house just off of Main Street.”
Doc Jones grimaced. That was not a great area of town, and back then it had been even worse.
“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 b
ite 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-Seven
“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 never 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.
Worth The Battle (Heaven Hill Series) Page 17