“I’ve never heard you be so negative.” Claire watched him with growing wonder as if he was changing before her eyes. “You are always so optimistic.”
“I’m optimistic when I keep my expectations low.” He didn’t like that about himself, and he knew he was going to regret telling Claire. “I worked hard to launch my dream and it didn’t happen. I adapted my plan and I scaled down my goals but I kept failing. I deferred my dream for years only for it to get further out of my reach.”
“You didn’t defer it,” Claire said. “You talked yourself out of it.”
He should have guessed Claire would give her blunt opinion. She constantly challenged and confronted him. At times, he appreciated that she spoke the truth. But he was protective about this dream. He didn’t want to hear about his shortcomings. He had heard plenty when he had first chased it.
“Maybe I did.” He could accept the truth. “And you know what? It’s better not to plan or to dream. It’s better to take what you can get and enjoy the moment.”
Claire pursed her lips with displeasure. “You don’t mean that.”
“You don’t have the first clue how devastating it is to work toward something and then it doesn’t happen. To say, this is what I want more than anything, this is what I can’t live without. You go after your dream and discover that you can’t have that dream. So you think of another goal, but this time you go for something smaller. Something different. Something else.”
“I’m sorry, Jason. I didn’t mean to open a wound.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to keep failing at something, Claire. How could you?”
She gave a harsh laugh. “I know exactly what it’s like to fail at something that is important to me.”
He tiredly rubbed his hands over his face. “I’m not talking about losing a client or not reaching a milestone on your schedule.”
Anger flashed in her dark blue eyes. “I’ve been there, I’ve worked toward something and realized I could never achieve it.” Her voice held a hard edge. “That was my life every day for thirteen, almost fourteen, years.”
Jason eyes widened. Who would push that long and hard? Only Claire. Her persistence was almost superhuman. “Did you finally get what you wanted?”
He saw the pain flicker across her face before she answered. “No.”
“Why did you stop? When did you decide it was a lost cause?”
* * *
CLAIRE WASN’T SURE why she’d mentioned it. She felt jittery and scared at the thought of someone else finding out the truth about her. It had been different when she’d told Kim years ago. They had been best friends.
Why was she even considering exposing her deepest, darkest secret to Jason?
But she knew why. She wanted to connect with him on an emotional, intimate level. She’d just seen a side of him she hadn’t suspected existed, and it explained so much. She wanted him to understand her the same way. To get why she hid from people and why she was revealing herself to him in so many layers.
But this was a secret that had been locked inside her for years. It was now a part of her. She wasn’t certain she could tell him. She had been warned so often to hide this vulnerable part of her. She might be unable to get the words out, as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff and her body refused to jump.
Claire pressed her hands against her mouth. She shouldn’t say anything. Jason was a client. Her best client. If he realized she wasn’t as smart as he thought, he wouldn’t work with her. She shouldn’t give him more information than he needed.
But she wanted Jason to know this part of herself. He wished he had her tenacity and drive. Maybe he wouldn’t find her inadequate. Maybe he would admire her more if he understood what she had overcome. Would he want to look even deeper and take the time to uncover who she really was?
“I have...never done well in school. My sisters were in the advanced classes and I had to retake kindergarten when we moved here.” Tension bunched in her shoulders. She had carried that sense of failure ever since and would make up stories to her classmates about why she was a year older.
Jason frowned. “That’s not unusual. A lot of kids are held back.”
“It was unheard of in my family,” she explained. She closed her eyes but couldn’t erase the memories. Her parents had been ashamed and angry. “I wasn’t very confident and I often felt lost and confused. I hated going to school and some days the thought of it would make me physically ill.”