Page 40 of His Best Friend's Baby

They hung up and Julia stared at the sky and tried to find her courage. Her worth.

What an idiot I am for listening to Jesse.

She should have stayed, forced him to be truthful about his feelings for her. Instead she’d run.

Courage, she told herself and thought of his haunted face. She smiled, thinking of his groan at the mere touch of her hand.

I’ll just have to try again.

JESSE POURED the other five beers down the drain. He couldn’t look at them anymore, couldn’t pretend they weren’t in the fridge offering him some drunken oblivion. Some solace from his demons.

He tossed the last bottle in the garbage and circled the kitchen again. His knee felt okay, so he couldn’t pretend to need the painkillers. It was just him and the demons, trapped in the cramped kitchen.

He checked his watch.

8:00 p.m.

It had only been hours since Julia had been here. Hours that seemed like years.

Suddenly the walls were too close. The air too stale.

“Wain!” he cried and heard the dog’s collar jangle as he stood up from his spot on the couch in the other room. He appeared, yawning in the doorway.

“Watch the place,” Jesse ordered. Wain barked once in response—the canine equivalent of a good loud “Sir, yes, sir!”

He picked up the keys from the kitchen table and headed out toward his Jeep and whatever salvation he could find in the night. He wanted noise and people and there was plenty of that to be had at Billy’s.

The place was comfortably full of folks in various stages of drunkenness and desperation. People all concentrating so hard on their own problems or good times that they barely noticed him walking in. He eased onto a stool at the bar.

“Well,” Billy said, approaching him with a cardboard coaster. “Tell me you’re in here tonight to do it right.”

Jesse looked at all the gleaming bottles. The rack of taps offering him a dozen different beers and one surefire way to forget his troubles.

He could get drunk. Hammered. He could storm home and tear that house down, drink away his dreams of Julia. Of Mitch. Of the rest of the men.

In the end he couldn’t do it. Memories of dear old dad kept him sober and on a short fuse.

“I’ll have a coffee,” he said. “Black.”

Billy shook his head and Jesse ignored him.

“On the house.” Billy slid a white mug with cold coffee in front of Jesse and walked away, finally showing the good sense a bartender ought to have.

The back of Jesse’s neck prickled and he knew he’d finally attracted someone’s attention. He looked through the bottles of cheap liquor on the bar to the mirror behind them.

A girl in a turquoise halter top watched him from the safety of a booth in the corner crowded with her girlfriends.

He braced himself and within moments she’d left the table and approached him, her muddy brown eyes locked on his in the mirror.

“Hi,” she said, curling her short thick body onto a bar stool. Her hair fell over her bare shoulder in a move so practiced he nearly laughed. “I’ve never seen you in here before.” She smiled at him.

She was pretty in a slightly tawdry sort of way, and her smile was a sweet curve just beginning to grow jaded at the corners. “I’m Samantha,” she said and held out her hand. Her eyes darted with laser intensity over his shoulder toward the pool tables to the left of him for an instant. Three men wearing baseball caps and flannel shirts played pool.

He could feel their eyes watching this little scene between him and Sam with typical male propriety. One of them, a small guy, patted the big guy’s shoulder.

“Let it go, Mike,” he said, and reluctantly big Mike, looking murderous and hard done by, bent back to their game and beer.

A reckless anger churned through Jesse’s bloodstream. He couldn’t win against Julia. He couldn’t fight Mitch. And that’s what he wanted. He wanted to beat Mitch into the ground for the way he’d treated Julia.

His fists clenched, his lungs heaved hard. Adrenaline and the battle readiness he’d lived with for so long steeled him, seeped into his bones, through his nerves. He wanted to hit something, hurt something, be hurt in return. He wanted everything but survival to be obliterated. Destroyed. He wanted to live one breath at a time the way he had during the war.

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