Page 96 of Tight Spot

Seven long, excruciating days while I was trying to do what Cole suggested and ensure I was the man who could be the man she needed.

It took me three days to get a hold of my dad. Considering our last conversation and how we ended it and the fact I hadn’t taken his call since, I wasn’t sure if he’d even answer my phone call.

He had.

And any minute, he was going to show up at my door for us to talk. That was all I’d said. “I need to talk to you. In-person. Can you get a couple days off?”

He was a pilot for a private luxury line where he flew the richest of the rich all across the country and world. Or those who wished they were and went into massive debt pretending to be.

Regardless, I was dressed nice, knowing he would be. Harrison Butler had never been a jeans or athletic shorts and T-shirt kind of guy. He was button-down or collared shirts and belts and pressed pants at his most casual.

Even now, I wasn’t sure what to say to the man. The man I’d idolized for years, the man who’d taught me to be strong. The man who’d supported me. The man who had eventually abandoned his children when life threw him a curveball.

I went to the fridge and grabbed a couple of waters. Beer or bourbon would be better, maybe take the edge off.

I debated, stood in front of my liquor cabinet, and jolted when a heavy knock rattled my door.

“Shit.” He was there. A man I hadn’t seen in five years, who rarely made it to one of my games and when he did, never bothered to let me know he was going to be there so I could give him one of my tickets or see him after.

Nope, he’d fly in, watch a game, leave, and send me a text a couple days later telling me he’d been there.

I left the water on the counter, the bourbon in the cabinet, and hurried to my front door.

My dad had always been leaner than me. Taller by an inch or two, and his profession required him to be clean-cut. I figured I knew what to expect when I opened the door to see him. Dark hair like me, styled short and swept to the side, held in place with gel. Maybe a few wrinkles, slight graying of hair at the temples or some shit.

Instead, the man looked like he hadn’t aged a day since I was eighteen, and he’d been in town for my high school graduation. He was dressed as I predicted, a gray athletic polo tucked into black dress pants, recently pressed and perfectly creased with a black belt and shining gold buckle he probably polished himself. He wore black leather slip-on shoes, and there wasn’t a wrinkle or age spot that placed him any older than the last time I saw him years ago. He was edging close to being sixty years old and didn’t look a day over forty.

Both of us stared at each other, and the words I wanted to say to him stuck in my throat, leaving me speechless, nervous as that eight-year-old little boy I was when he left me in charge and told me to take care of them, make sure the girls in our lives stayed out of trouble.

Shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this.

“Hey, Dawson.” He broke first, but I was certain the nervous look on his face mirrored mine.

I opened the door and stepped back. “Come on in.”

His gaze roamed the space, my house. He took in everything, and I caught a flash of amusement when he spied my putting green out back behind the pool. The yellow flag attached to the pin in the hole gave it away.

“Nice neighborhood. You golf?”

“Poorly,” I admitted. I picked it up years ago, because it was what athletes did in their off-season, but I’d never mastered the patience of it. Catching a ball flying through the air was so much easier than hitting a tiny ball into a hole you couldn’t exactly see from two hundred yards away, or sometimes, ten.

“Was always something I wished I had time for.”

He’d had the time. I’d realized that recently. There’d been time for him to be home more, or in the twenty years since. He hadn’t always had to be the pilot that took the week-long flight to Japan or Southern Asia or Australia. He could have worked less. Been around more. Maybe not when we were little, but he definitely could have done it since.

My anger with him pulsed, and I fought to lock it down.

“Want anything to drink?”

“I’m good. You needed to talk to me?”

“Yeah.” Except now that he was here, the beginning was difficult to find.

“Everything’s okay, right? With you? Or your sister?”

My jaw clenched. “Would you care if there was something wrong with her?”

My dad’s eyes widened, and then he twisted his neck and stared out my back windows. “I probably deserve for you to think that I don’t, but I do.”

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