Page 39 of All the Bright Lights

“This again?”

“I’m just saying… Maybe he doesn’t feel up to it.”

“I pay him to feel up to it. That’s his job, Clarke. You get paid to meet the demands of your clients, he gets paid to meet mine. It’s that simple.”

I think on that for a moment, realizing he has a point.

“I guess I get that. It’s just weird.”

“For you maybe. For me, it’s normal.” He turns back to his food and I do the same.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like. Having people fawn over you the way they do. Never being able to go anywhere alone. It must be so exhausting.”

“It is.” He swirls more noodles onto his fork. “But it’s also exhilarating. I get to live the kind of life most people only ever get to dream about.”

“I don’t think I could do it.” I move my food around the plate with my fork.

“It’s not for everyone, I’ll admit. And I do have days where I wish I could just shut it all off. But most days, I don’t know… I really love it.”

“It’s important to find the things you love,” I agree.

“What about you?”

I press my elbow against the bar, leaning my cheek against my hand as I angle myself toward him in a way that I can look at him but not be too close at the same time.

“What about me?”

“Did you always want to sell real estate?”

I shrug. “If you had asked me when I was five, no. I wanted to be a fairy princess with a magic dragon I could fly around on.” I laugh lightly. “But as I got older, I don’t know. I don’t think I ever really considered doing anything else. I saw how hard my dad worked to build the agency and his passion for the business. I guess you could say it was addicting. I wanted to be a part of it.”

“You love it.”

“I do.” I nod softly. “What about you? You obviously didn’t set out to be an actor. I think I’m safe in assuming baseball was your first love.”

“It was.” He shifts, abandoning his food as I have mine.

“You miss it?”

“Every day,” he answers without hesitation.

“Can I ask what happened?”

“You mean with my baseball career?”

“Yeah. I know you were injured, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge.”

“It was my fault.” He mirrors my stance, elbow on the bar, his cheek resting against is hand.

“How so?”

“I messed up my knee pretty good at the end of the previous season, had to have a complete reconstruction done. Doctors told me I wasn’t ready to play when the next season rolled around, I disagreed. Fought to have the trainers clear me, which they did… Reluctantly. Two games in, I was sliding into second base and I felt my knee give. I knew right there, laying in the dirt, with the sound of the crowd buzzing around me that it was over.”

“There was nothing they could do?”

“They did. They rebuilt my knee a second time, but by then the damage had been done. I had been released from the Dodgers and no other team would touch me because I was too high of a risk. Once you’ve been injured the way I have, a sort of stigma follows you around. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t shake it.”

Pain.

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