Page 73 of Single Dad Dilemma
“I mean, if you only cared about your reputation and looking perfect to everyone, you’d be fake as hell. You’d try to be everything to everyone. Matchtheirdefinition of perfect. Andfake, Barrett King, is not a word I’d ever use to describe you.”
His eyes settled on my face again, their searing weight making me wish I hadn’t said anything.
“It’s not?”
Keeping my expression as close to unaffected as I could muster, I allowed myself one fleeting look in his direction, and when our eyes locked, I felt a powerful little shock all the way down to my fucking toes. “No. You were too much of an asshole at the beginning. You didn’t give a shit what I thought.”
“Quite true,” he murmured, keeping his gaze on my face even when I looked away. “I guess I could use that as my proof if he ever says it again.Go ask Lily,I’ll say. She’ll vouch for my dick-ish tendencies.”
“I can be counted on for many, many things,” I said sagely. “Who’s not listening to you? Mr. Grumpy over there?”
He hummed, and I decided to take that as a yes.
“Just tell him to fuck off if he doesn’t listen. You’re the boss.”
“Simple as that, huh?”
“Totally. But as you can imagine, I’m not a perfectionist and I don’t care what people think of me.”
The lie hung in the air, low-hanging fruit that must have been so hard for him to ignore. But he did. The man had every opportunity to call me on the second round of rampant bullshit, but instead he let it be.
How nice to be in possession of such epic restraint.
Barrett glanced over at Maggie—they were still getting her hooked up to mics and messing with lighting—then he turned contemplative eyes toward me.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m curious about something,” he said, all slow and thoughtful. It made my skin itchy.
“It better not be about me.”
At my snappish tone, his eyes softened, and I might not have noticed if we hadn’t been so close.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Oh God.”
Another almost-smile, and my lungs cinched tight around absolutely nothing. “Nothing bad. No tattoo questions.”
My shoulders relaxed an inch or two. “Okay.”
“Tell me what you’d do,” he said in a deep pitch that felt all sorts of intimate, speaking as if we were the only two people in the room. We weren’t even close to alone, but as we stood off to the side, I could almost pretend that we were. Dangerous, dangerous thing, that.
“About what?”
“You have someone who’s important to the team. Supposed to be your leader. But he’s rash. Reckless. Stubborn. Doesn’t like to listen. Hates being corrected. But he’s talented. Smart. Not performing even close to his potential. You can see it, but he doesn’t want to dig deep enough to get there. He thinks he’s untouchable. That there will never be consequences to his actions. That he can keep shoving himself forward in life without ever stopping to look back at where he could’ve reacted differently.” My brow furrowed, heart inexplicably racing as he spoke. He tilted his head and watched my face. “What do you do to get through to him?”
I adopted an airy tone. “Buddy, if you need me to help coach your team of big man-babies, you’ve got bigger problems.”
“Tell me how you’d handle someone like that,” he said again, and his coaxing tone was my undoing. “Someone who looks at the world in a completely different way than you do.”
There was no way I could look at Barrett again, because he was dangerously close to prying back a layer of carefully constructed armor. Something bolted down and hidden from view. Instead, I closed my eyes and pictured a different face. As a teenager, I assumed it was frustration, but now, as an adult, I could see the weariness. It couldn’t have been easy, dealing with me.
Someone rash and reckless and stubborn and who looked at the world in a completely different way. The situation was vastly different, but the similarities were striking enough that I couldn’t ignore them.
If I could go back, would I tell her to do something different? Impossible questions like that could never truly be answered, because the truth couldn’t always be distilled down into a clear yes or no. My heart screamed yes. A million times. But I couldn’t, and entertaining a different reality was a fool’s errand.
“There are always consequences to our actions,” I said, then cursed the slight unsteadiness in my tone. “No one can protect us from those, and I don’t think they should. Even the best people in the world—patient and understanding and full of the best intentions—can’t save someone from themselves.”
