Outrageously Yours, page 10
Jason sighed but it didn’t relieve the ache in his chest. He raked his hand through his hair. “Look, I appreciate the help but—”
“What’s the harm in trying again?” she asked.
Jason closed his eyes as he held back the words to explain. He knew he should just thank her and tell her that he’d think about it. It would be the easiest and quickest way to distract her, but he found that he couldn’t. “You don’t understand, Claire.”
“Okay, so you didn’t get what you wanted the first time you tried. That doesn’t mean you stop. So the school rejected you.” She paused when he flinched and then continued in a gentler tone. “The school has changed in the past five years. So have you. Give it another try.”
He stared at the brochure. He was a different person than when he had first applied. He was more mature and had more life experience. But he wasn’t going to resurrect an old dream unless he was sure it would succeed.
“Jason, you are the most optimistic person I know. You think anything is possible. Why isn’t this?”
“Because there is harm in trying, Claire.” His voice sounded dull. Almost numb. It held the hurt at bay. “I tried to get into the school and I was immediately rejected.”
“Why didn’t you try another school?” she asked.
“This school rejected me so fast that there was obviously nothing about me that they thought had potential.” It still hurt to say it. “So I decided to go after my dream in another way and develop my skills. I tried to get an apprenticeship.”
“What happened?”
“I interviewed with this chef that I really wanted to work with.” He clenched his jaw as he remembered how that had gone. “Maybe I went in too cocky. I didn’t want anyone to know how much the job meant to me in case I lost the chance.”
“He picked someone with more experience?”
“Worse.” He clenched his teeth as the old pain rolled through him. “The chef told me I wasn’t going to make it in the culinary field and I should try something else.”
“He said that?” Claire’s eyes widened with outrage.
“I should thank him because he didn’t give me false hope. This guy’s opinion meant a lot to me. He was very familiar with the restaurant business. He listed all the reasons why the industry would chew me up and spit me out.” Jason frowned as he remembered the pain of that moment. “You know, I’ve never told anyone about that. Not even my parents. They already wanted me to abandon cooking and work in the family business. After that, I tried to find any apprenticeship. But I think the hiring chefs could see the desperation coming off me. No one accepted me and I finally had to work for my family.”
“That was years ago,” she pointed out. “It’s different now.”
“Yeah, it is different. I’m too old to go after this dream.”
“No, you’re not,” she insisted. She grabbed his arm, and he got the sense she would have shaken him if she could. “Do you know how many clients I have who are on their second or third career?”
“It’s too late for me.” He had a good job and great friends. It wasn’t the life he had chosen, but he liked what he had. Why change it to go after a dream? He could lose so much by chasing after a goal that would only bring him disappointment.
Claire studied his expression. “You told me you still dreamed about it.”
“In passing. When I have a bad day at work.” His mind often drifted to the idea when he wasn’t careful. He was watching too many reality cooking shows and documentaries about a chef’s life. The challenge and creativity excited him in ways he couldn’t explain.
“You’re bored here.” She gestured around his office.
He stiffened his spine. Was it that obvious? “Where did you get that idea?”
“I’m sure you thought working in your family’s business was going to be temporary. You would regroup and try again. But you were successful here and you needed that feeling. After getting rejected everywhere you went, you wanted a win.”
It was the truth. He hadn’t planned to make Mountain Creek his world. He’d figured he’d work here for a few months. He had been here over five years. How had that happened? Where had the time gone?
“I bet the wine bar was a small step to your dream.” Claire gave him a sympathetic smile. “It was a bridge between what your family wanted and what you dreamed about. It’s probably the only time you were cautious. And for good reason. Do you know how many restaurants fail within the first year?”
He nodded. He had seen the numbers and it had scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t fail in such a grand way. The humiliation would be public and expensive. If his restaurant wasn’t successful, he didn’t want people to know he’d given his best and it hadn’t been good enough.
“But now the wine bar isn’t filling a need anymore,” Claire guessed. “And it can’t because it’s not your dream.”
Jason pulled away from her. He didn’t like that she could read him this easily. “I don’t know why you’re pushing this.” He tossed the brochure on his desk and realized his mistake. He should have thrown it in the trash. Handed it back to Claire. But for some reason he didn’t.
“You’ve always had a restless energy but it’s stronger these days. Haven’t you noticed?” she asked. “You distract yourself with these parties and events. You’re keeping busy, but it’s not the same. Why don’t you admit it? You want to try again.”
“No, I don’t want to.” He’d rather work on something that would succeed than put all of his time and energy into one last chance and have it slip through his hands again.
“Because you believe you’ll fail?” Claire asked. “Failing isn’t the end result. It’s part of the process.”
Jason tilted his head back and groaned. “Yeah, I’ve heard all of the motivational quotes about failure. Once, I believed that if you work hard enough you get what you want. That’s not true. That’s the biggest lie of all.”
“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.”
“But you didn’t drop out. I remember you graduating. It’s not like you to leave a project incomplete,” he said. The corner of his mouth tilted up. “I assumed you always had your nose in your book because you enjoyed studying.”
Claire stared at the floor and shook her head. She’d had a long line of tutors and had always been enrolled in classes during the summer. It had been agony. She’d wanted to do anything but study and attend school.
“It wasn’t until a math teacher in high school suspected I might have a visual processing disability that I was tested.” She still had trouble saying the word. Disability. It was almost as difficult to say as the word disorder. Both labels reminded her that she wasn’t as good as her sisters. She had felt defective compared to them.
“And after you got tested you got the answers you wanted?”
Wanted? Hardly. The tests proved that Claire’s school performance wasn’t the result of being lazy, but there had been no magic pill to take away the struggle. The answers had thrown her into a tailspin, and the relationship she had with her parents had suffered.
“I guess it depends on how you see it.” She crossed her arms and looked away. “I got answers. It turns out my brain works differently. But that only disappointed my parents. I had failed their expectations. Especially when they read the IQ test.”
She heard her heartbeat thumping in her ears. She felt as if she was about to jump out of an airplane without a parachute. She knew she should step back but she wanted to be free from this secret. She needed Jason to see the real her and want her for who she truly was.
“Claire?”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. Claire turned her back on him and stared out the window. The cold rain beat against the glass and she heard the constant pinging against window. She couldn’t see anything outside other than the gray sky.
“I can work around my learning disabilities,” she promised. “I can keep up with others as long as I give myself plenty of time. I can work harder and longer but it’s never going to change my below-average IQ score.”
The silence throbbed in the room. It felt as though it went on forever. Jason awkwardly cleared his throat. “When you say below average...”
She winced and hunched her shoulders when she heard his cautious tone. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be sharing this information with Jason. It was too soon. It was too much for a five-day fling. There were boundaries and she had overstepped them.
Jason was right; she was not the kind of woman who could have a casual sexual relationship. She was telling him things most of her family didn’t know. Her face grew hot. She had felt close to Jason and she wanted to hold on to the connection. She didn’t want to push him away the way she had the other men in her life.
This had been a mistake. Opening up to Jason was wrong. This wasn’t going to make him understand her. They weren’t going to get closer after this. The news was only going to create distance.
She slowly turned around. “I’m not intellectually disabled, but I will never be as smart as I want to be. As I needed to be,” she said quietly. “I can work as hard as I want to, but it won’t make a difference.”
Claire saw the IQ number in front of her eyes but she didn’t dare speak it out loud. It wouldn’t mean anything to Jason but it meant everything to her. It had changed the way she thought of herself. It had changed how her parents treated her.
And from the look in Jason’s eyes, she didn’t need to give him anything more. She felt the vicious twist of disappointment in her chest. She had already revealed too much. Her confession had changed the way he saw her. He would never respect her again.
8
“WHO TOLD YOU that crap?” Jason asked.
“Experts. Many, many experts.” She wasn’t surprised by his anger. It seemed to be the common reaction.
“They’re wrong.” He slapped his hand against his desk. “You are smart and creative. You solve problems on a daily basis and you’re an independent, successful businesswoman. They are wrong,” he emphasized.
She would have been happy to prove the results wrong, and for a while she had acted as if the diagnosis hadn’t existed. But no amount of work made her grades improve and she’d had to accept the truth. Her goals and the future she had imagined were unreachable. Pursuing an Ivy League college was no longer a possibility. Her learning disabilities meant she’d never be a researcher or a scientist like her parents. They still refused to discuss that there was something different about her.
“I was diagnosed with dyscalculia, which is a learning disability for math. I don’t understand the logic in algebra or geometry. I can’t even subtract numbers in my head, and forget about multiplying and dividing,” she confessed. “That’s why I use a calculator every time we talk numbers.”
Jason frowned as he studied her blank expression. “I’m sure you can do it. You’re just being hard on yourself. You’ve always been a perfectionist.”
She wanted to sigh. Perfectionism had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t do simple math operations in her head. She never could and hadn’t realized others had that ability until she had been tested.
“And don’t you think it’s strange that I take notes for everything?” Claire asked. “I know you’ve noticed. You tease me about it all the time.”
He winced and clenched his jaw. “I—”
“That’s not a complaint. I don’t mind your teasing,” she said with a small smile. Jason was never unkind when he poked fun at her. He was playful and flirty. She liked that.
Jason spread his arms out in exasperation. “I only brought it up because I didn’t want you to take an extra step. You’ve always been too hard on yourself.”
“I take notes because I have problems remembering details.” That had been one of the many recommendations the neuropsychologists had made. “I would record our meetings on my phone but some of my clients have a problem with that.”
“That doesn’t mean you have low intelligence,” he argued. “Why would you believe these test results?”
Claire bit her lip as she considered her next words. How could she explain that she’d gradually learned to accept the results? There had been times when she’d wished she didn’t know what was wrong with her. She would have liked to go through life blissfully unaware of her disorders.
But then she remembered how unhappy she had been before she’d been tested. All the times she’d wondered why everything had to be such a challenge. She had felt so lost and confused, out of her depth. She hated how she couldn’t get anything right. So despite how much she despised the labels, Claire was thankful for her diagnosis. She shouldn’t regret knowing the truth about herself.
Claire did, however, already regret telling Jason. She shouldn’t have said anything. She had followed an impulse, a need to get closer to him, and it had backfired.
It was clear that he didn’t want to believe her. He couldn’t accept this part of her.
But she’d wanted him to. She’d hoped he would understand why she was often anxious and quiet. She had spent so much time hiding her true self and being apologetic when she couldn’t meet expectations. When she didn’t improve. She wanted to be with someone who didn’t lecture her or get embarrassed when she made mistakes or couldn’t keep up.
