Chapter 19
Time was supposed to heal all wounds, not allow a staph infection to take hold, so Jolene figured another old adage had bitten the dust. She wasn’t feeling any better about her breakup with Chance, despite the fact that a month had gone by. If anything, it felt worse. Festering. Infected. Oozing. There was no other way to describe the pain she was feeling.
“Hart! Are you for real right now?” Wayne barked at her. “What the hell is that, woman?” Wayne was sitting on his ass, in his pajamas, looking like a mountain man who had no access to a shower. There were pastry crumbs on his burgeoning gut, yet he’d had the nerve to make a crack about her curves.
Jolene hated him. He may have been a musical genius but that didn’t make him any less of a prick. She sighed. The joke was on her for damn sure. She had stomped off on Chance to take this deal with Wayne, and it had been nothing but a booby prize. “I’m singing,” she said shortly.
“You’re caterwauling.”
He was being a diva. There was no other way to put it. He had staff surrounding him all the time, no fewer than six people waiting on him at any given moment. He liked his shoulders massaged while he ate. He needed his feet rubbed between rehearsing songs. He had a beautiful wife, who was truly the definition of a gold digger, to place her lips on his at his raucous command, and despite having a pretty young thing, he still managed to leer at every other woman he encountered. He yelled at his assistant, he belched out loud, and he constantly reminded everyone how many hits he had written and how many Grammys he owned.
Worst of all, he was stinky. Sour, sweaty, rotten-beef stinky. He was a rank, mean, sexist man pig, and Jolene had never wanted to tell off someone so badly in her entire life.
Instead, she had to force herself to say politely, “What would you like me to do differently?”
“How the hell should I know? Anything but that, that’s for damn sure.” Wayne was sixty-five and well advanced for his age into crotchety-old-man territory. It had been too long since he’d been hungry for success. He no longer remembered what it was to want.
That made him highly unlikable.
Jolene never wanted to act like that. Frankly, if she ever did, she hoped someone would knock her butt back into the dirt. Success did not give you a right to be a shit to everyone around you.
She knew what it was to ache with the need for something better. Her whole life, she had been wanting and found wanting. When she was a kid, no one had expected much from her and her siblings. When she was thirteen, she’d heard one of the serving ladies at the church social murmuring to another that, given her messed-up family and her looks, it would be a miracle if Jolene Hart wasn’t knocked up by fifteen. It had stung like hell, but Jolene supposed in retrospect that she owed the woman a thank-you. It was her spiteful voice that had kept Jolene a virgin until her early twenties. She had been determined to prove to everyone that her wants were legitimate. She had wanted respectability. Admiration. Success.
As a kid, she had wanted food, comfort, more wood on the fire. She had wanted quiet. Peace. Christmas.
When she had made her way to Nashville, she had wanted a chance, had wanted to sing, had wanted a job. Any job.
Now she wanted security.
It was what had made her take this job with Wayne. She’d wanted a guarantee that she could retain her status in the industry. Never turn down an opportunity. It hung over her like a desperate and urgent ghost, reminding her of what happened when you settled. When you gave up. You got trapped in a life like her mother’s. A good woman beaten down by reality. Jolene had scraped and clawed after her dreams so she wouldn’t meet the same fate.
But not all wants were necessary. Not all wants guided her in the right direction. She understood now that craving security wasn’t a want so much as it was a fear.
Staring at Wayne Rush, sprawled out on a couch in all his arrogant glory, she realized that she had done the same thing with Chance. She had responded out of fear, because sometimes when a want grew so great that it was frightening, you either clung to it or pushed it away. She had pushed Chance away, and she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sing. She was a hot goddamn mess, and the festering pain wasn’t decreasing. It was growing and growing until she felt like she might go crazy or suffocate if she didn’t do something about it.