Worth The Battle (Heaven Hill Series) (27 page)

“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

“S
orry, 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.

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.