Free Retreat by Liv James

even close,” David called after him.
“Watch your back asshole.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    CHAPTER
5

 
         It didn’t take Clara long to decide her
best option was to hightail it home.
         Some might call it running away but she
decided to view it as a strategic relocation. She’d carefully listed her alternatives
on the backside of a table tent at a crowded truck stop off interstate 44 near
Claremore. The adrenaline-rich forty-five miles between the deep-fried chicken
sandwich in front of her and the asshole she’d left behind had helped her put
things in perspective.
         She could stay, she decided, and start over
in Tulsa.   It would require digging deeply into the
reserves she managed to save while she worked down in Fort Worth and kept mostly intact after she
moved into David’s house. It also meant figuring out a creative way to cover
the hole in her resume, which was expanding rapidly now that she wouldn’t be
able to use Aesthetics as a reference.
         She absently twirled her straw, bobbing the
lemon wedge up and down in her gargantuan iced tea – one size! – as she
considered the other possibilities.
         There was Fort Worth and Jon’s offer, but she still had
enough pride to keep from sniveling back to him for a mercy job. Latching onto
David had obviously been a colossal mistake and she wasn’t ready to hitch her
fortunes to another man who’d already proved unreliable once.
         So that left Brighton.
         It wasn’t ideal -- everyone with half a
brain deserted the center of the geriatric state before the ink on their
bachelor’s degrees dried. While most of her friends landed in one of the poles
– Pittsburgh or
Philadelphia –
more than a few left for greener pastures altogether. On the bright side that
meant she didn’t have to worry about her old friends looking down their
predominant noses at her. The only one left was Meg, who worked as her father’s
assistant and would probably be giddy to see someone her own age cruise into
town again.
         Clara half-turned on her bar stool to
survey the truck stop’s dining room.
         The majority of tables were occupied by
tired looking men in rumpled clothes, sitting singly like she was. She supposed
she should’ve felt uncomfortable surrounded by all that testosterone as she
perched on the round red stool in her business suit, but instead the transient
anonymity of the truck stop was proving a good place for clear thinking.
         She smiled as she remembered that Marcy
used to call them fuck stops because of the propensity for low-grade hookers to
wander among the lonely truckers, but she didn’t see anything here that
resembled a sexual free-for-all. On the contrary, she noticed a few booths with
families in them tucked along the rear wall. The men themselves reminded her of
the laborers her father used to hire when she was a kid and he was still trying
to make a go of it with the mine. They’d been mostly harmless, trying to make a
living in a world that never seemed to be on their side.
         The only thing acutely seedy about her
current setting was the oppressive bouquet of fry oil and diesel fuel, which
she was sure would shadow her in the fibers of her clothing until she found a
decent dry cleaner.
         She stared back down at her list and tapped
the point of her pen along her three choices, making pin-size blue dots that
she started to connect to form a constellation that slightly resembled Orion.
         There was a fourth choice, she decided,
which would be to go someplace completely new. She considered adding it to her
list but stopped, crossing out the large number four she’d already doodled. She
didn’t think she was up for that yet. That wasn’t to say that a few months in Brighton might not change her mind.
         Her agile waitress hurried by, balancing
six plates up one bare arm and throwing a scowl at the inside-out