He didn’t have to be told twice. Without a look back to the shop where everybody else was working, he stormed over to his bike and hopped on. He felt like he was in a race against time to save not only his mind, but his life.
Chapter Nineteen
“Layne, I’m surprised to see you this early today,” Doc Jones said when she opened the door to his persistent knocks.
“Yeah, I’m sorry to spring this on you, ma’am,” he told her, and he really was. “But I need to talk with you.”
“Don’t be sorry, what’s happened?” she asked as she ushered him into the room she used for her appointments.
He had a seat on the same couch he had sat on the day before. “I’m pissed and I don’t know how to deal with it.”
“Okay then, why are you upset?”
“I’m not. I said I was pissed,” he told her again. “Upset and pissed are two totally different things with me.”
“Then explain to me what’s going on here.”
He couldn’t sit on that couch anymore, he had to get up, he had to be able to move, not feel like he was caged in. She didn’t say anything when he did this, but her eyes followed him sharply as he made a circle around the room. “Jessica went to Goodlettsville, she doesn’t have a cell phone, I can’t get hold of her, and she didn’t even tell me she was going. It’s pissed me off.”
The older woman’s eyebrows screwed together. “Layne, that’s not that big a deal,” she softly told him.
“Not to most people,” he agreed.
“So explain to me why it’s a big deal to you.” She sat up further in her chair. “I’m pretty awesome, but I’m not psychic.”
Hearing her use the word awesome struck him as funny. Not so funny that he laughed, but he did give her a small smirk. “I have trouble trusting women.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Obviously trust issues haven’t been a problem your whole life, Layne. From what I’ve been able to gather, you’ve known Jessica a while, and you’ve apparently trusted her before. Am I right in that assumption?”
“You are.” He finally stopped pacing back and forth, having a seat on the couch. He put his elbows on his knees and hung his head there for a long time. Did he want to open up to this woman, or did he want to keep running from his memories? A part of him knew that it might be easier to open up to someone who knew absolutely nothing about him and his past. Maybe he could stand to see disappointment in this person’s eyes because it didn’t mean as much.
“Are you going to let me in, Layne? You’ve got to let someone in there.”
What she said was right, and he knew that. “Yeah, I’ll let you in,” he finally whispered.
“Then tell me, what happened that made you not want to trust women.”
He swallowed hard and leaned back on the couch, closing his eyes. It was easier that way, he could hide from the guilt that he still felt. With his head tilted against the soft cushion, he began to speak. “Jessica and I had a sexual relationship, but it wasn’t cheap. That’s not to say that I ever thought it would really go anywhere. She’s an actress for fuck’s sake, and I was a military guy. It’s not like I was comfortable in her world. It was different for her though, she could fit into mine.”
“How?” Doc Jones asked, needing him to elaborate so that she could fully understand.
“Back then she wore a wig in movies; not a lot of people knew what she really looked like. When she would come see me on post, she wouldn’t wear her wig, she wouldn’t be heavily made up, and she wore regular clothes. Most people believed we were high school sweethearts, because that’s the type of vibe we gave to others.”
The picture he painted didn’t sound anything like what she had imagined. “What happened?”
“I did—do—love her. I’ve only told her that once, but she’s a very special person to me, always has been. It’s different though, when you go into a war zone and you’re not sure if you’re going to come out of it alive. Things are magnified, feelings are magnified. When I left, Jessica and I made no promises to one another, even though I knew that she felt for me the same way I felt for her,” he continued, squeezing his eyes shut.
“What changed that?”
He brought his hand up to his forehead and rubbed vigorously, almost like he was trying to wipe the memories away. He moved his tongue along his lips, like he wanted to get rid of the taste in his mouth. “She went out to dinner with some Hollywood type, and the news even made it over to the war zone. It pissed me off. I don’t know why it did. We were still talking every chance we could, and I knew what she was doing, but the day I heard about her on the news we lost two members of our patrol. One of those guys was a really good friend of mine.”
Doc Jones made some notes on her pad of paper. Scribbling furiously, she tried to keep up with the words that her mind wanted to ask him. “Seeing her with another man coupled with a good friend dying made for a bad situation, huh?”
“Bad situation is probably a good way to put it,” he agreed.
“How bad did that situation get?”
He sighed. “Like most people who are stuck in a war zone, you’re surrounded by it. But I was lucky; we had some contractors who came to ours every couple of days. There was a girl who kept looking at me when she would drop off our rations and gear. Just so happened that day was one of the days she was there. Relationships are highly discouraged between anyone over there, but you’re in a highly intense situation—a lot of men and women are away from their husbands and wives. Many of them use it as free rein to have that affair they’ve always wanted to have. So while it’s discouraged, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. It does. It happens a lot.”
“So you went into a relationship with this woman? Am I reading into this correctly?”
Layne shifted in his seat. “Not exactly a relationship, to be honest with you. It was sex, a lot of it, whenever and wherever we could. It was forbidden, so it was hot and I couldn’t get enough. Meanwhile, I was still talking to Jessica and sharing things with her. I really was a bastard, but you have to understand. This was the only way I could get through the deployment; I had so many things going on, so many people getting hurt. We had suicides and people being sent home because they just couldn’t handle it anymore. This was the only way I could keep my sanity. I had to trust someone besides the men I slept beside every night. I started really telling this contractor some things, nothing that could hurt national security, but I was freer with her than I should have been.”
“What was her name, Layne?” Doc Jones asked. She found it odd that he didn’t give this woman a name; he just used “her”, “she”, “contractor”. For some reason he didn’t want to mention her name.
“I can’t. If I say her name, then I give her power again, and I don’t ever want to do that,” he shook his head.
“Okay, we’ll deal with that later, but keep going.”
“One day, we got a call from our commander that they were bringing in some contractors and we would need to interrogate them because they had been found outside the green zone, fraternizing with some locals.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Not really,” he shrugged. He was beginning to get agitated. He got up and walked around the room, hands on his hips, his back to her. “We all did patrols, the kids loved us. There were dogs that would constantly try to follow us back behind the gates, and there were people in the community who looked up to us. Those people knew that we were trying to give them back their homes. It got boring being behind those gates all the time, soldiers and contractors alike would sometimes go outside it. What was unusual was that they wanted us to interrogate them.”
“Did you always interrogate?”
“No, but it was part of my job, depending on what was going on. I didn’t actually interrogate her, but I sat in on it. I found out that she was giving information to members of an off-shoot terrorist group. She was making notes of our procedures and the way we had things set up on the inside, thin
gs like that. Things that nobody would really think about when you’re sneaking off to fuck. It hit me like a ton of bricks, what she had been doing each time she convinced me to have forbidden sex with her in a different location was not exciting like I thought. It was wrong.”
“How did that make you feel?”
He laughed, but it was without humor. “How do you think it made me feel? Like shit. I mean like complete and literal shit. In getting my fuckin’ rocks off, I was potentially endangering the people who fought alongside of me. It pissed me off. In the end, she came at me with a gun that she had somehow smuggled in, and we had to put her down.”
Doc Jones flinched. He said that like the woman had been a diseased dog, and she was glad for once that his eyes were closed and he hadn’t been able to see it.
Out of nowhere a loud scream came from him, and his knees hit the floor. “She fucking lied to me, lied to me, I endangered every person I cared about. I could have gotten everyone on my base killed. I could have gotten myself killed. Do you know how guilty I feel?” he screamed at her. “Do you know what a piece of shit I feel like every day that I get to walk around and those guys over there that didn’t get to come home have me to thank for it? Their families—they have me to curse,” he bit out, tears rolling down his face. “All because I was a dumbass. It’s so much to live with every day,” he cried. “So much, and the guilt eats at me,” he admitted.
Doc Jones got up from her seat and went over to have a seat next to him, pulling him into her arms. “Layne, all we do is try to make it through the days. We do that however the hell we can. Sometimes those choices aren’t smart, sometimes they don’t even make sense, but all we can do is put one foot in front of the other and move forward.”
“At the expense of others?” he asked, coughing loudly.
“You didn’t know that, you didn’t understand it, and you sure as hell didn’t mean for it to happen. Sometimes we make mistakes.”
“Mistakes,” he spat out. “How do you tell a mother that her son died because I made a motherfucking mistake? How do you tell a wife or a daughter that her husband or father died because I was selfish?”
Doc Jones’ heart broke. He took this so badly, and she wasn’t sure how to get it across to him that sometimes things just happened. “You’ve got to forgive yourself, Layne. We are all human,” she hugged him to her.
“I don’t feel human.”
“Human is feeling the things you are, it is questioning everything that you’ve gone through and going through the grief process. It’s coping with the fact that a woman that you believed in lied to you.”
It was as if he flipped a switch, he came out of that blackout zone. The tears stopped and his voice went back to normal.
“Her lying to me has stayed with me. Then there was an incident towards the end of my deployment that’s stayed with me too. We were in a huge firefight, and another one of my friends was killed right next to me. That’s where I sustained the damage to my leg.”
“Wow,” she said, leaning forward when he went to get up.
“I know, so much happened over there in a year, and I just wasn’t equipped to handle it all. Then I come back here, and everybody wants me to be the same person I was when I left. Well, the Layne O’Connor that left wasn’t the man who got friends killed and cared more about fucking some chick in the war zone than he did if he was going to come back at all. The Layne that left here actually gave a damn, and this one,” he said as he beat his chest, “just doesn’t. I don’t care about anything.”
“That’s a lie and we both know that. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t feel so bad about what you did there, especially what you did with another woman. I think you don’t want to care, so it’s easier for you to let people believe that you don’t.”
“You’re kind of scary, how smart you are,” he complimented her.
“I have a degree,” she answered dryly. “What I’m concerned about with you, Layne, is your anger. You’re right, you weren’t justified in the anger that you experienced today because you didn’t know how to get hold of Jessica.”
“I just snap so easily,” he breathed deeply. “I don’t want to, but I do.”
“It’s a symptom, but it’s one you’re going to have to learn to control.”
“How the fuck am I going to do that?”
She raised her eyebrow at him. “By doing what you did today, removing yourself from the situation, seeing me if you have to. Anger is good in some instances, and I’m not telling you to let it go altogether, but you can’t be getting pissed at Jessica because she went on a shopping trip with friends and she didn’t clear it with you first. There’s a name for men like that.”
He knew where she was coming from. He didn’t want to be an abuser, ever, and he knew without a doubt that if he didn’t get this taken care of, he was heading down that road right now. “What do you suggest?”
“The same way you go to that dark place, Layne, you need to learn to go to a good place. When it gets to be too much for you, close your eyes and go to a beautiful place that you can remember easily. A place where you were completely and utterly happy.”
He didn’t escape the irony when he realized that place was with Jessica.
Chapter Twenty
“Thank you so much for inviting me,” Jessica told Bianca and Meredith as the three of them sat at dinner after their marathon shopping trip. It had been nice being with them, away from the clubhouse, but nice also being a friend on a day trip with other friends. “I haven’t done that, just for the fun of it, in a very long time.”
“Why not?” Bianca asked as she took a bite of the appetizer they had ordered. “Don’t people, like, pay you to come shop in their stores? Just because of who you are?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “That’s the thing; I haven’t done hardly anything for just the fun of it in so long. I was beginning to wonder if I had it in me anymore. I can’t even tell you the last time I went out with a couple of girls just for the hell of it. Usually we go out together so the paparazzi can be called and they can get a picture of all of us together. Then they can talk about how good of friends we are one week and the next week they can make up stories about how one of us slept with the other one’s boyfriend. It’s a slippery slope that we navigate in the entertainment business.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Bianca told the women as she took a drink of the Jack and Coke both she and Jessica had ordered. She swallowed and waited a moment before she continued. “I kissed ass for a lot of years and would be fake when I had to be, but I couldn’t do that all the damn time.”
“It does get old,” Jessica admitted. That was something she couldn’t say in her everyday life. No one would understand where she was coming from and call her crazy if she even mumbled those words. “You start to wonder if people even care about you or if they just care because they can be seen with you. It’s a weird business. One that, if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t get into.”
Meredith laughed from where she sat. “It’s so funny that you say that because I’ve been thinking the same thing about my chosen profession.”
Jessica watched as the other two women exchanged a look. It wasn’t a pleasant look, but that didn’t keep her from being curious. She wanted to ask, to see why they shared what they did, but figured it wasn’t her business. If there was one thing she didn’t want to do in this little group of friends she had found, it was offend or force herself upon them. “So if you could do anything in the world, what would be your dream job?”
“I would be a teacher,” Bianca answered, shrugging her shoulders. “There’s nothing else in this world I’ve ever wanted to do. I want to let kids know that there are other options than just the same old, same old. I wish someone had done that for me. Some people feel called to do things, and that’s what I’m called to do. I’m going to be living my dream come August.” She looked pointedly at Meredith.
“I’m still trying to figure it ou
t,” Meredith admitted, sighing. She knew what she wanted to do, but she was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen for her. “I have my communications degree, and there are literally a blue million things I could do with it, but I’m just not sure I want to.”
“Then what do you want to do?” Jessica questioned as she took a bite of her food. “If there was absolutely anything—even trade places with me for the day?”
The table got quiet as Meredith thought about the question, and it was obvious that she was struggling as she bit her bottom lip. “I would be a mom,” she said quietly. “I would be a mom, and I would work at the battered women’s shelter and children’s home in town so that little kids wouldn’t have to grow up without parents. Tyler did that for most of his life, and it breaks my heart.”
The mood that had once been jovial shifted slightly with her admission. Jessica knew she had to cut the tension, and if that meant she had to share a secret about herself, she would do it. “I’d be an erotic romance author,” she blurted out.
Liquid went flying from her left, landing on her arm as Bianca spit out the drink she had just taken. Meredith began beating on her chest to dislodge the food she had just eaten and sucked down her windpipe.
Bianca recovered first. “You would what?”
Now this was the embarrassment she had hoped to avoid. “Be an erotic romance writer, if I could,” she said again.
“Like…” Meredith started and then stopped, blinking rapidly, trying to find the words that she wanted to say. “Fuck it. Do you have something that I could read? I’m an avid reader.”
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