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“Don’t tell her. I don’t know how she’d take it.” Riley had been pretty devastated when things with Lucas ended. The group had gone on one ice cream binge after another in solidarity.
Also, Olivia had given Riley a long lecture about the dangers of the Clark brothers. Yes, they were all tall, hot, and charming. Yes, this meant that a woman’s biology was programmed to be drawn towards them like moths to a lightbulb. But this also meant you were going to smack into a lightbulb enough times to stun yourself—metaphorically. A smart woman had to resist the pull of her DNA and realize that the Clark brothers were just a bunch of lightbulby, arrogant jerks.
Olivia had waxed on about that subject for quite some time. She didn’t particularly want to take all of it back now.
“You’re probably right,” Annie said. “You should wait and see if Carson is going to Layla McCurdy you before you tell Riley you’ve defected to the enemy’s camp.”
“Right.” Olivia said her goodbyes and ended the call with Annie, but the phrase:You should see if Carson is going to Layla McCurdy youstayed in her mind for the rest of the night.
Just because Carson said he wanted to be a couple now, didn’t mean she shouldn’t be careful with her heart.
15
Carson kept casting glances at his father while the two of them cleaned up the dinner dishes. Olivia was right. Carson should come clean to his father and tell him that his investment in the cabin wasn’t as secure as Carson had led him to believe. He owed his dad that much. Still, Carson hesitated. The truth was, it had been a long time since his father had been disappointed in him, and Carson didn’t want to see that version of his father again.
Without meaning to, Carson remembered his father storming into his bedroom when he was a teenager. His father had been shaking his cell phone in Carson’s direction. “How many more calls from your teachers am I going to get telling me that you’ve got multiple missing assignments?”
Carson shrugged. Facing this sort of criticism was just one more necessary unpleasantness that came with the school year. “I don’t know. I thought the whole reason for putting our assignment status online was that the teachers weren’t going to call you.”
His father slapped his hand against his leg. “They call me because they know me, and they know I expect more from you. Although, after all these years, I don’t know why. You don’t care about being a good example to your brothers. You don’t care about upholding our family name. You don’t care about anything except football. Well, guess what? Football doesn’t pay many bills. You’d better have a backup plan. You’re not living in our basement when you’re thirty because you never tried to do anything with your life.”
His father’s tirade had turned out to be both right and wrong. Carson had managed to pay his bills just fine until his injury. He wouldn’t ever have to live in his father’s basement. But at the same time, now that his future was uncertain, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with his life if his time as a football player was over. Overseeing a construction crew was fine for this project, but he couldn’t see himself doing it forever. So whatwouldhe do?
Go back to school and get some sort of degree? An MBA maybe? Now that he was older, he could force himself to buckle down and endure the tedium of note-taking and homework.
His father put the last of the dishes into the dishwasher and turned it on. “When is the new dishwasher being installed?”
Mrs. Gordon wanted all new, high-end appliances even though the ones in both houses still worked. “Monday,” Carson said.
“If you don’t have plans for the old ones, I’ll take them back to Lark Springs and sell them. No point in dumping them in a landfill when someone can use them.”
His father was always thinking of how to save money. Watch the pennies, he said, and the dollars took care of themselves.
His father rinsed out the sink. “I still can’t believe Mrs. Gordon wants new ones when these still work. Rich people are so ridiculous.” His gaze went to Carson. “Present company excluded. No offense meant.”
“No offense taken. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be in that company.”
“When is your next evaluation with the podiatrist?”
“Eight days.”
His father’s gaze went to the boot on Carson’s foot. “Well, even if you miss playing next season, you’ll be able to live on the profits from the house sale for quite a while.”
That was assuming the team would want him after he’d sat out a year. It was time to tell his father the truth. Anything else felt like a lie. “I’m worried about the sale of the house. Coach Gordon led me to believe that if we remodeled the house to his wife’s requests, they’d buy it. But the last time I talked to him, he mentioned his wife was going to look at other cabins too.” Carson gestured around the kitchen. “If they don’t buy it, we might have to discount the place to find a buyer.”
His father’s jaw went slack and he swore. Carson braced himself for the rest of the response—for the accusation that Carson was irresponsible not to have gotten some sort of written contract from Coach Gordon before he bought the most expensive wood flooring known to man, etc. Carson had told himself as much every day since that phone call.
Might as well give his father the rest of the bad news. “They’re coming up to look at it on July fourteenth.”
His father swore again. “The fourteenth? You told them it wouldn’t be done until July nineteenth. They’re coming early?”
“Yeah, they said it didn’t matter if the cabin wasn’t completely finished. Looking at it in progress would still give them an idea if it would work out for them. But the place needs to be as complete as possible. I don’t want them to compare a perfectly staged home to something that’s still knee-deep in tools and sawdust.”
His father scrubbed a hand over his face. He shut his eyes as though he didn’t want to look at the state of the cabin—didn’t want to look at Carson.
“Look,” Carson said, “You have every right to be angry about this. I convinced you to sink your savings into this project. I assured you the sale would go through. I should’ve gotten some sort of written contract from Coach Gordon before adding a deck and doing the rest of it.”
“Yeah,” his father said wearily. “You should have. Do you have any proof of the agreement between you—a text, an email, or a voicemail—something that would hold up in court?”
