Page 71 of The Player Next Door

“Then what is it? I can tell you’re mad, and I know it was stupid of me to say but—is this about what I said the other night?”

“What, that you slept with me forexperience?” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but once it was out there, there was no taking it back.

She stumbled in her heels. Logan shot his hand out without thinking, but she’d righted herself before he could help. “So, it is about that,” she said quietly.

“It’s not,” Logan insisted. “It’s—I don’t know.” He didn’t want to have this fight, but he had no idea how to avoid it, either. Maybe there was a reason he’d never bothered with a relationship before.

Maybe he just wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe his dad was wrong.

“Then what is it? Because you’ve been off all night.”

Logan shrugged. They arrived at his car but neither made any move to open a door. He looked at her, wishing he wasn’t so fucking pissed at her. The first time he met her in the elevator he thought she was cute and funny, and she just saw him as a chance to learn something new and prove herself to her boss. It made him feel stupid and ashamed and a hundred other things that made his chest too tight. Logan had been so sure of where he stood with Clare, so sure of who she was, that discovering she’d originally slept with him for experience was throwing him into a spiral. And if he couldn’t be sure of who she was, he didn’t know where to go from there. What if she started seeing through him? What if she started thinking of him—or worse, already thought of him—like the other women he slept with? Like he was just an amusing guy to fuck for a while, before she moved on to someone real. He couldn’t be sure she would keep looking at him the way he’d come to love, full of adoration and fondness.

“You were supposed to be better than that,” he said finally. “You were supposed to be different from the others.”

Clare took a step back from him, her normally soft eyes going flinty. “And what if I’m not? What if I’m not the woman you made me out to be in your head? What then? You can’t hold me to some imaginary standard I never agreed to. I made a mistake, Logan, but so did you.”

For some reason, her throwing his actions in his face made him angrier. “I told you about mine right away.”

“You didn’t tell me everything,” she retorted. “You told Schneider we were together way before we were. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say this was all just to keep his business.”

She was wrong but she was also right, and Logan hated feeling that way. He didn’t want to feel guilty, he wantedherto feel guilty. “Be honest: if I hadn’t asked you directly the other night, would you have told me?”

Clare at least did him the courtesy of looking in his eyes as she broke his heart. “No. I wasn’t going to.”

“You would have kept on lying to me.”

“It wasn’t lying,” she started.

“Sure as hell feels like it,” he snapped.

“Why are you so mad?” Clare snapped back. “You only started dating me to impress Schneider. Don’t act like you’re so innocent in this.”

“That’s different.”

Clare crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh yeah? How?”

It wasn’t, and he knew it. He wondered if this was what drowning felt like, because there wasn’t enough air in his lungs, and he was beginning to think there never would be. The thought of living without her was physically painful, but it was also coming one way or another. Better for him to end things now, rather than wait for the inevitable.

“Maybe I should have just listened to you when you said guys like me aren’t interested in women like you,” Logan said, aware he was blowing up the best thing he’d ever had. “Maybe it would have been better that way.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, the color draining from her face.

Logan had never been so deliberately cruel before, but he hated seeing her sad and he hated himself for hating it, but he had no idea how to pull out of the tailspin. All he could do was lash out. “How would you know what I mean? Is this how your character would react?”

“Stop it,” she said, voice wavering. “It wasn’t like that.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what it’s like? I was just going along like a fucking idiot, thinking this was real, while you were taking notes for your stupid fucking game.”

“Fuck you. You know that wasn’t what happened. I was the oneriskingsomething by being with you,” she whispered.

“Am I supposed to be grateful or something?”

“No, but I did just spend an hour charming the shit out of a gross old man for your job.”

That barb hit home, but Logan couldn’t let it go. “I guess we’re even, then. You got what you needed and I got what I needed.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “Logan, don’t.”