Page 55 of Country Road Romance

“You threw me under the bus, didn’t you?” His voice was no longer distant but was instead hard and brittle and ugly. He trulyhated this part of himself, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. It was out there and there was nothing he could do about it.

“I…I…I…,” she stammered, and he knew it was right. He pressed on, each word feeling like a knife in his hand.

“You were afraid it was going to come down between you keeping your job or me keeping mine, and so you decided I was expendable.” He snorted. “I should have known.”

“It’s not like that,” she said. “They told me if someone’s head didn’t roll that they were going to pull the plug on the festival, and I just couldn’t let that happen.”

“So what you’re saying is that you chose the festival over me, your supposed best friend.”

There was no mistaking the sigh on the other end of the line, and he knew that he was pushing her to say something he knew both of them would regret. Jared was too far gone by this point, though, as he knew all too well. His tongue was like an avalanche: nothing was going to stand between it and absolute destruction.

“You know, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this. You were always the kind of person who put yourself above anyone else. I’m just shocked it took this long. You’ve always looked down on me and not taken me seriously, so of course it wouldn’t even have occurred to you to defend me when the chips were down. Did you even really try, Rebecca, or did you just roll over the first chance you got? Did you just go ahead and offer me up without them even asking?” He snorted. “Some queer advocate you are.”

Rebecca greeted that with an ominous silence, and there was a perverse part of Jared that looked forward to what was coming next.

“You know, you’re such an asshole sometimes. You think that you’re the only one who stands up for queer people, you think that you’re some sort of moral purist who gets to stand on the high road and look down on everyone else. You do it with me,you did it with your parents when you first came out, and you’re doing it with Charlie. You didn’t even give him a chance before you were already judging him for what you saw as his faults. However, that’s ultimately ayouproblem, Jared, and you’re going to have to address it sooner rather than later.”

“Do you have anything else you’d like to say to me?” he grated out. “Or have you finished pointing out what you see as my glaring personal failings? I wouldn’t want you to leave anything on the table so you can throw it in my face the next time we have a big fight like this one.”

“I don’t think there’ll be another fight like this one,” she said. He almost thought that he could hear some sadness in her voice. “I don’t think I want to see you for a while.”

Say something, you idiot,that voice in the back of his head was screaming.Don’t torpedo your friendship like this. You deserve better and so does she!

But, like so many other members of his family–and so many Appalachians in general–he was stubborn to a fault. He’d committed to this course of action, and he wasn’t going to back away.

“If that’s the way you want it, then I’m happy to oblige.” He waited a moment. “Is there anything else that you’d like to say, or are we finished with this conversation?”

“We’re done. Goodbye, Jared.”

“Bye.”

The line went dead.

For several minutes he just sat there in his truck, not sure how to feel about what had just happened. On the one hand, he was genuinely angry that Rebecca had betrayed him. On the other, he understood that she’d done the best she could with nothing but bad options, and he regretted losing his temper like that.

Even more distressing was the fact that she had a point about his moral sanctimony. He didn’t like to admit it about himself, but he knew that he tended to look down on people that he didn’t agree with. He knew there were reasons for why he looked at the world that way–both good and bad ones–but he wasn’t really in the mood to look at them with any detail at the moment. At this point, he just wanted to go inside, throw himself in Charlie’s arms, and forget about everything.

He got out of the truck and wandered toward the house, feeling like a zombie. Getting fired by the City Council wasn’t the absolute worst thing that could happen, not financially, anyway. He had some savings, so he wasn’t going to be on the street anytime soon, but he honestly had no idea what he was going to do or what kind of job he was going to pursue.

As soon as he stepped inside Charlie was right there, and he couldn’t help but wonder if all of this would have been happening if he’d never met Charlie Garrett and managed to get sucked into his drama.

“Jared, what’s wrong?” he asked, even his compassion managing to get on Jared’s nerves.

Just once, couldn’t he just be thoughtless like so many other men?Jared thought sourly.

“Well,” he said, determined not to lose his temper, “I got fired. And Rebecca was the absolute worst about it. We had a pretty ugly fight. So, yeah, that’s about it.”

He knew he sounded surly and unpleasant, but he was past caring.

Someone else might have taken a few minutes to figure out just what Jared needed or wanted to hear. A different kind of person, knowing Jared’s peculiar and mercurial temper, would have tried to comfort him or offer him some sort of empty words of comfort, and he might even have welcomed it. Charlie Garrett, however, wasn’t that type of person.

“I mean, maybe there’s a bright side,” Charlie said tentatively, as if he was afraid that Jared was going to yell at him. “I mean, you didn’t seem very happy in that job, anyway. Maybe you can really turn your attention to writing like you’ve always wanted.” He paused. “And maybe you could even think about moving out to California. I know that it’s too early to talk about us living together or anything, but I could help you get on your feet, maybe connect you with the right kind of people.”

Rationally, Jared knew that Charlie was just trying to be helpful, that his offer came from a place of love and affection rather than pity and condescension. However, that was literally the opposite of what Jared needed or wanted right then and so, as he’d done with Rebecca, he lashed out.

“Charlie, I hate to break it to you, but you can’t just drop in whenever you think it’s convenient and solve a problem. In fact, that’s exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. You always rush in to try to solve a problem, but you just make things worse. If you hadn’t punched that asshole in the bar none of this would be happening. I’d still have my job with the City Council, I wouldn’t have had to drag you here to meet my parents, and we could have all been a lot happier.”

He was conscious as he was saying it that his voice was getting higher and higher and louder and louder, and that his parents could no doubt hear every word. He suddenly didn’t care, however. He just wanted to get Charlie as far away from him as possible. He wanted to hurt him so that he would see the kind of person that Jared really was.

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