Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(28)
Author: Hope Ramsay

“What do you need?” she asked, feeling the hurt of his words prickle along her skin and settle heavily into her heart.

He pushed up from the fender, the move violent and sudden. “I don’t know what I need,” he raged. He punctuated the point by hurling the towel and the ice against the brick wall. It hit with a slushy slap.

“Shit.” He stood there, his back to Jane. He was breathing hard, his hands clenched into fists. “I guess I need to control my temper for starters.”

“That would be good. But get this straight—until I know you’re okay, I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t need to be your lover, Clay. I’d like to be your friend.”

More lies.

“You want to be my friend?” He looked at her over his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

He stared up at the streetlight for a long moment. Then he turned and faced her. He continued to hesitate, as if he were weighing the pros and cons of saying anything else. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded tight. “I’m stuck in my life, Jane. You need to know that.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means I’m having a midlife crisis, and you are one of the symptoms. And meanwhile, the past is coming home to roost, and every time I think about changing myself, the people in this one-horse town remind me who and what I am.”

She leaned her fanny against the fender, folding her arms across her chest. She told herself he was just trying to pick this fight because he was angry and wanted to fight with someone—anyone. So she decided not to fight him at all. “Who exactly are you?” she asked.

A bitter laugh escaped his lips. “I started out my life as a fat boy with a violin whose only friend was a math geek. And I’ve ended up a failure with a violin whose only friend is a math geek with a damaged brain.”

“A fat boy? I don’t think so. You’re a big man, but you aren’t fat.”

“Yeah, well, I was short and fat as a kid.” He went back to studying the streetlight like it held the answers for him. “I didn’t put on any growth until I was sixteen, and then I grew like a weed. And as for being a failure—my brother, Tulane, has just signed a contract with Ferguson Racing to be a NASCAR Sprint Cup driver; Stone is nearly ’bout the most well-respected man in Last Chance; and my little sister, Rocky, got herself a full ride to the University of South Carolina and parlayed her education into a job running Senator Rupert Warren’s Columbia office.”

“Clay, I hate to say this, but it seems to me that you are stuck in a vicious cycle of negative affirmations.”

He turned an angry gaze on her. “Would you stop with the Pollyanna routine? If you want to be my friend, you’re going to have to quit with the glass-is-half-full crap. I’m telling you right here, right now, the glass of my life is half-empty, okay?”

“Okay. But for the record, you are not the only one who suffered through teenaged angst. You have to stop calling yourself names. That kind of thinking won’t help you get unstuck in your life.”

“Do you ever stop with that bull? You don’t know squat about my life.”

“That’s true, I don’t. So tell me, is being stuck in your life the reason you unloaded on your brother?”

“Ah, I knew you would get around to asking that question sooner or later.”

“You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want.”

“No, I reckon I will,” he said on a soft sigh. He came forward and leaned into the fender beside her. He crossed his arms like a barrier. “Like I said, the folks in Last Chance will always see me as that fat boy with the violin who ran off to Nashville, failed miserably, and then came back. And if you want to know why I decked my brother, it was because I could see all that in his eyes, and it pissed me off.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I’m not even sorry I did it.”

“Good, you shouldn’t be sorry for the way you feel. Hitting is wrong, but feelings are feelings.”

“You sound like a kindergarten teacher.”

“Yeah, well, you’re acting like a preschooler.”

“Thanks. So you think I should go use words and apologize, huh?”

“Only if you feel like it. It’s okay to be pissed off at your brother, Clay. He’s so easy to dislike.”

That earned her a chuckle. “That makes you just about the only person in town who doesn’t think he walks on water.”

“For the record, I’m mostly here validating your feelings. Although, to be honest, your brother is not one of my favorite people, especially after what he did this morning.”

He rolled his head so he could look at her out of the corner of his eye. “So you gonna tell me what that was all about?”

“I already told you about his theories. Are you trying to change the subject?”

“Uh-huh. And I’m doing that because I don’t need anyone to validate my feelings, and I don’t like being told that I’m acting like a preschooler. I’m trying real hard to get a grip on my feelings and act like a man.”

Jane turned and faced him, leaning her hip into the fender. “I’m not buying your lame excuses. If you don’t like it in Last Chance, it’s time to move on.”

“You mean like running away? Like what you did when you were a kid?”

Oooh, he was good. “That’s one way to look at it,” Jane said. “Or you could say you’re moving on. You need to decide whether spending the rest of your days managing a hardware store for your ailing uncle and looking after people like Ray Betts will make you happy. You need to decide if maybe being a musician and going back to Nashville to play country music is what you want. And then there’s the choice of going someplace like New York or L.A., where you could be the singer-songwriter that you want to be, but are too afraid to try.”

“Wow, that’s a lot of things on my ‘to do’ list. And, by the way, I thought you said you didn’t know much about my life.”

She shrugged. “I work in a beauty shop in a small town. You hang out there for a day and you pretty much get the full story on everyone.”

“I see. And you’re qualified to tell me what to do with my life because…”

“Well, it seems to me that you weren’t shy about telling me what to do with my life. I think you told me on Thursday that I needed a positive plan for my life, and that singing karaoke and shaking my backside was not enough to get me into the Grand Ole Opry.”

“Touché.” He pushed himself away from the fender and turned to face her. “Look, I need to go bail out Ray. Would you do me a favor and tell Ricki that she needs to make nice to Tricia and let her sleep on my sofa?” He started to step around the van toward the driver’s-side door.

Jane pushed away from the fender and followed him. “That woman is Tricia?”

Clay stopped in his tracks and turned, his features unreadable in the dim light. “You know about Tricia?”

She shrugged. “I heard about her at the beauty shop.” A million new worries coursed through her head. That woman in the bar was pregnant.

He answered her unasked question. “Don’t worry, it’s not my baby. But I’m thinking she came here hoping I would rescue her.”

“And you make a habit of doing that, don’t you? And you go around making yourself responsible for everyone and everything.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know, Clay. It’s what I see with my own eyes. It’s what I hear all the time in the gossip at the beauty shop. You rescued me on Wednesday. You gave Ricki a place to stay last night. And now this pregnant woman shows up and cries on your shoulder.”

“I didn’t rescue you on Wednesday. Let’s get that straight. I took advantage of you on Wednesday.”

She waved away his argument. “Okay, but you definitely feel responsible for Ricki and that other woman. And you look out for Ray all the time. Why do you feel responsible for him?”

A little muscle played in his cheek, but he said nothing.

And that’s when it hit her, like the proverbial bolt of lightning or like some lame animated lightbulb above her head. She put all the puzzle pieces together—everything she’d heard down at the Cut ’n Curl suddenly added up and made sense.

“Oh, crap, you were driving the car the night Ray got hurt, weren’t you?”

“You just won’t give it a rest, will you?” Clay said, his voice sounding raw. He stood there looking vulnerable and angry and lost.

She walked the three paces that separated them. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him back down to rest against her shoulder. He didn’t resist so hard this time.

He was a big man, but she was strong enough to hold him up. She didn’t think of herself as being strong, but she realized that all of the bad stuff that had happened to her over the last seven years had prepared her for this moment. He didn’t need a lover right now. He needed someone to reflect back a new and different image from the one he was used to seeing in the mirror. And that was why the Universe had sent her to this place.

“What happened?” Jane asked.

He didn’t say anything for the longest time. And then he inhaled and straightened up, his arms resting on her shoulders, his hands laced behind her neck. “It was senior year, two weeks before graduation. The Davis High baseball team had just won the state championship on the strength of Dash Randall’s bat, and Ray and I were following the team bus on the way back from Columbia. And from out of nowhere, this pickup truck crosses the dividing line. It almost took out the bus, and I had to swerve.” His lips pressed together. “The guy was toasted. I mean three sheets to the wind.”

“Oh, Clay…”

“I know it wasn’t my fault,” he said tightly. “In my head I know that, but in my heart, I keep beating myself up for yanking the wheel to the left instead of the right. I replay that moment over and over again.”

“Aw, honey.” She reached up and touched his face, the texture of his goatee sliding under her fingers. Her body flashed hot, even as her mind told her to keep it friendly.

“Ray’s body took the brunt of the collision, and he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. I walked away without a scratch. If I had turned the wheel the other way. If he had buckled up. If I had insisted that he buckle up…”

Clay captured her hand and brought it to his mouth. The feel of his soft, warm lips against her palm made her insides tense. He put her hand back on his cheek and leaned into it slightly. “I ran off with Ricki after high school mostly to get away, but when she dumped me for Randy, I came back for a time. I realized there was no getting away from what had happened. So I got Pete to give Ray a job at the hardware store before I headed back to Nashville to try a second time. Even when I was away, I kept tabs on Ray to make sure he got what he needed, and Uncle Pete helps me. But now with Pete so sick…”

His voice faded out, and he leaned his head into her so that they were touching forehead to forehead. “Bad stuff seems to happen to me more than your average guy. You should keep that in mind,” he said.