I took a breath and blew it out. “Long ass story and one I’m not super proud of,” I hedged.
He darted me a sharp look though I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with me or with my family, per my tale. “Sounds like whatever’s up is hardly your fault.”
My stomach twisted, I grabbed up my Big Gulp cup and, though I knew it was empty, loudly slurped up the very last of the ice juice in the bottom. Why had I said all that? I’d only managed to make myself look like a complete ass and a weakling on top of being a coward.
“You should know by now that I’ve got a perfection complex. I mean we’ve been working together too long for you to deny that you’ve noticed it.”
He gave a slight nod, eyes still glued to the road. “Oh, I’ve noticed it. I’ve also greatly benefited from it.”
“I always put this immense pressure on myself to be perfect at whatever I do—my job, even my gaming. That came from growing up in the household I was in. Everything revolved around Derek and his fuck-ups, everything. In college I even had to cancel an important lab for one of my classes because my parents scheduled family therapy at the same time and they wouldn’t change it. And of course the family therapy was for Derek. To help him get better. So how could I say no?”
“Was it fair of them to do that to you?”
I snorted. “You should know better than anyone that ‘fair’ doesn’t even come into it. And some of that pressure to be perfect came from inside, you know? Like we were one grade apart. We went to the same high school, and I had many of the teachers he’d had the year before. He’d acted out in class, skipped, fell asleep or was a general pain in their ass. Walking into class on the first day of school the following year, wasn’t easy. Let’s just say those teachers did a lot of pre-judging, expecting me to be a screw-up just like him. I had to work that much harder to prove I was nothing like him and get them past their initial prejudice. Some of them never did.”
Lucas tilted his head to the side, considering, but didn’t say anything. That was enough encouragement for me to continue.
“I guess what I’m saying is that I get it when you say that you were trying to please everyone around you but yourself. I was doing the same thing, though I never really thought about it like that. Somehow I got the idea that I had to be perfect because my brother was such a disappointment. He got all the attention, regardless.”
Lucas pulled his eyes off the road to spare me a long, speculative glance. There was something weighted in that stare of his. It wasn’t haughty or judgmental. It wasn’t expectant or even defensive. There was something there, when I glanced up and met that composed gaze of his. A click so powerful that you could almost hear it happening.
An exchange of… quiet understanding not without a speck of emotion. A breakthrough.
He nodded thoughtfully and returned his gaze to the road. On a weird whim, I rested my palm atop his right hand, which sat on the gear shift. Almost immediately his thumb lightly stroked my pinky. A quiet and simple gesture of solidarity. Of thanks.
When he broke the silence and spoke, it was almost jarring to interrupt that wordless understanding we’d come to. His voice sounded different, as if there were some emotion behind the words. “You’re too hard on yourself. I recognize it because I do the same thing.”
“You do. I mean, you told me the night of your parents’ dinner party that you were a shitty husband. You can’t blame yourself for her cheating.”
He blinked. “I’d like to think I’m mature enough to say that we were both at fault for the failure of that marriage. Sure, her cheating ended it but it was never all that great to begin with. I’m the one who initiated it and then was too busy to really take care of the relationship. That part was my fault. She was a crappy wife, sure, but that doesn’t mean I was any less a shitty husband. That whole thing taught me one thing. I was never meant to be a married man—well in the real sense, anyway.”