Page 67 of The Player Next Door
“Yeah, I am.”
Burt sat quietly. He did that a lot, and it was something Logan wished he was better at, but he had gotten used to filling the silences over the years, and it was a hard habit to break. “I’ve never seen you that way,” Burt said finally, and pointed to Logan’s old notebook. “The way you are with her. It made me think of these.”
“Clare made you think of how I was shitty at school?”
“No, how you used to be. When you were younger. You’ve grown into a good man, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I worry you’ve become a little . . . jaded. But with Clare, I saw—well, I saw you. The you that you used to be.”
“I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I?”
“Not at all,” Burt said fiercely. “I just wish—” He stopped and sighed. “She would have been so much better at all of this.” There was only oneshethat the Walsh men talked about in that tone of voice. “She would have been better at making sure you knew how much we loved you. I’m too much of an old bachelor farmer for this, too quiet. You haven’t disappointed me, I just wanted to see you happy. And you weren’t unhappy before, but I don’t think you were happy, either.”
Logan looked down at his old sketches. “Do you think she would have liked these?”
“She would have loved them,” Burt replied immediately. “She loved art, you know that. All kinds, anything you could create or make, she adored and wanted to do it all, and nothing would have made her happier than knowing you have her talent.” He studied the sketches closely for a long minute. “She always said that part of being an artist was putting your heart on display for the rest of the world, and I don’t think I fully appreciated how brave that was until later.”
Logan leaned his shoulder against Burt and let him throw his arm around him. “Being jaded is easier,” he admitted. He thought about Clare pointing out that he refused to share his art because it meant sharing part of his mom with the rest of the world, and wondered how deep this instinct went. Because being jaded really was easier, and sometimes, when Clare would look at him and see him—really see him, even when he’d wanted her to—he had the instinct to run. To blow it up and walk away, because sharing that much of himself with someone else was terrifying.
“I’m sure it is,” Burt said. “But there’s a cost.” Once more, he pointed to the notebook. “You’d lose this, I fear. And I don’t want that to happen.” He let Logan think about that for a few moments before continuing. “I don’t want to butt in where I’m not invited, but Clare is good for you, and I hope . . . I don’t judge your dating habits, I really don’t, but I think you have a habit of—”
“She’s special,” Logan said, deciding to rescue his dad from the corner he’d backed himself into. No one, least of all Logan, wanted to go over his extensive sexual history with his father. “Different.”
“She is,” Burt agreed. “And I just wanted to say that I’m happy for you.”
Logan glowed with pride at the same time his old doubts resurfaced. There wasn’t really anyone he could talk to about his fears. Sam would just call him a sentimental dumbass, even if she’d listen to him, but he and Burt were having a moment and he decided to risk it. Logan’s eyes burned and he looked up at the ceiling, blinking hard. “What if she gets bored of me?” he said, throat tight. “I know she will. She’s—you met her. She’s deep, and I’m . . . shallow.”
“I don’t think I’d call you shallow,” Burt replied softly. “More like a waterfall. A bit showy, perhaps, but deep in ways people don’t necessarily expect.” He sighed. “Your mother was the same way, you know. Bright, always the center of attention, hard to take your eyes off of, even for a moment. You’ve got a lot of her in you, and I know I’ve said it before, but it’s true. Making people feel the way you do, the way she did, that’s a skill. Maybe I didn’t make sure you knew it well enough when you were younger, and that’s my fault. But I don’t want to see you scorn that skill or lose that spark.”
“Clare gave me that spark back, you’re saying?”
“I’m saying I think Clare helped remind you of where you’d hidden it away.”
Logan leaned his shoulder against his father’s. “It’s still scary,” he said.
Burt rubbed his back. “Everything worth having is.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Clare arrived on the rooftop a few minutes before Logan. It had been a long day at work—Noah and Derek and the rest of her team had been kind of loud, and Craig seemed to be avoiding her—so Logan’s suggestion of wine on the roof had been something of a godsend. She needed to unwind, and even if she probably couldn’t go home with him the way she knew she’d want to (thanks to her team meeting tomorrow at the ungodly hour of eight o’clock in the morning), it would be nice to just talk to him.
Clare was curled in one of the chairs she now thought of astheirswhen he appeared, two wine glasses in one hand, and a bottle of white in the other. He grinned down at her and her heart tumbled over because somehow, this astonishingly handsome man was hers.
Logan took the spot next to her, both of them facing the river, and poured her a glass. “How’s the pitch going?” he asked, and it wasn’t his fault—it really wasn’t—but the small bubble of happiness she’d been feeling popped like a balloon.
“It’s fine, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well, we’re supposed to be working on this as a team, you know? We’re going to have the big all-hands meeting soon and the teams are competing on their pitches, but Craig still has me sort of . . . siloed off from the rest of the team, working on the Captain Ellis pitch while the rest of them do their horror thing. His idea is that a two-pronged approach would be better, give us a better shot of being the winning team. But . . .” She broke off and took a long sip of wine, desperately willing it to relax her. “But if that’s true, then why am I on my own? Shouldn’t I be working to integrate my pitch with the rest of the team by now?”
Getting the words out was like simultaneously ingesting and expelling a poison. It had been weighing on her for weeks, but she had been avoiding saying it out loud. Now it felt real, tangible; not just a figment of her imagination.
She hated it.
“You said Craig hired you?”
“He did. He took a chance on me, and my first big project didn’t exactly pan out.”
“And that was your fault?”