“I hope so,” he says, checking oncoming traffic and pulling out into the street. “That’s the point. I want them to want to come to work. I require long, crazy hours, which usually entails sleeping at the office during sixty-hour marathon sessions like this one, but I pay triple overtime and huge bonuses at the end of projects like this. What you saw is my entire company, the core of it. I’ve got a couple other subsidiary offices in the city, and some others in L.A. and London, but those are all totally self-sufficient and don’t require any input from me. Those kids up there, they’re my business. All the subsidiaries, all the offshoots and spin-off branches, they run it all.”
“They must work nonstop.” I don’t even try to follow the series of turns Logan takes to get home. I just enjoy the fact that as soon as he finishes a turn, his hand takes mine again and threads our fingers together.
His hand feels natural in mine, and that makes my heart hammer.
“They do. Sixty hours a week is standard fare, eighty or more common. And when we have a huge project like this acquisition, we basically live at the office until it’s done, but then we take a few days off. Or rather, I give them a few days off.”
“You don’t take days off?”
He shrugs. “Not really. I’m not really a workaholic, but I like what I do, so I do it a lot. I stay home Sundays, for the most part.”
“What do you do for fun?”
He eyes me. “Work out, Krav Maga, run, watch movies.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend?”
A shrug, eyes returning to the road. “No. I did, for a while, but it wasn’t really serious. When she made it clear she needed to either get serious or move on, we broke up. It was amicable, and I was honest. I wasn’t going to string her along or lie about not wanting anything super serious.”
“Why didn’t you want anything serious?” I ask.
We’re on his street, which I recognize. It’s a long, quiet, tree-lined avenue of walk-up town houses, lovely, expensive, and serene, an insular little world away from the bustle of midtown Manhattan.
He sighs. “I just didn’t. She was a great girl, sweet, smart, beautiful, easy to hang out with. But it just wasn’t there with her, for me, long-term speaking. I don’t know. I don’t really have any emotional hang-ups, you know? I’m just not going to tie myself down long-term unless I’m really sure about it. It’s not fair to me, or to her, or the idea of an ‘us.’ A long-term relationship is only as valuable as the effort both people are willing to put in. You both have to be totally invested or it doesn’t work. I was in a relationship for a while, right after I got out of the hospital, and I was all in, right? Like, gone for the girl. She was fucking it for me, but I was needy, I guess. Too needy for her. She wasn’t feeling it. So after like, a year and a half, she broke up with me via the super awesome tactic of sleeping with my business-partner-slash-house-flipping-mentor, and then telling me about it. I was still pretty fucked up about how I got injured, you know, the guilt and confusion and everything. I’m not gonna toss out PTSD, because it’s not that. I know guys who have that, and it’s not pretty. I was normal fucked up. Real-deal clinical PTSD is ugly fucked up.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m okay. You never completely get away from the bad dreams and occasional flashbacks, but you gotta expect that, seeing and doing the kind of shit we did over there.” He pulls the big SUV into a parking spot outside his door, exits, and circles around to open my door for me. “When I said I don’t have any emotional hang-ups, that was a little bit of a lie. I do, sort of, because of how Leanne ended things. I don’t trust easily. But that wasn’t the reason why I didn’t want anything long-term with Billie. I trusted her all right, I just didn’t feel strongly enough to move in together or propose, I guess, and that’s exactly what she wanted. I was cool with just dating, having fun, spending the night together here and there.”
He unlocks the front door of his house, disables his alarm, and closes the door behind us. At this point his dog, Cocoa, a massive chocolate lab, is going crazy, barking fit to burst.
“I’m gonna let Cocoa out now, okay? You ready?”
I nod and take a breath, grinning in anticipation. “As ready as I’ll ever be, I think.”
He goes down a short hallway and opens a bedroom door, and the sound of claws scrabbling on hardwood echoes loudly, accompanied by overjoyed barking, and then finally a bear-sized brown blur hurtles toward me. I’m braced for impact, though, and Cocoa’s saucer-sized paws land on my shoulders and her tongue is slapping me in the face and digging up my nose and trying to do an examination of my uvula. I duck my face to escape her tongue, but she follows me, leaning down to lick and lick and lick, until finally I have to shove her off. She leaps back up and actually hugs me, her paws going over my shoulder, her nose wet in my ear. I can’t help but laugh and feel happy about such an exuberant welcome.
The affectionate joy of a happy dog is balm for a troubled soul, I decide.
Logan slaps his thigh. “Cocoa! Wanna go outside?”
The dog’s attention is snatched by that, and she barks once, a short sharp yip, and hauls across the house for the back door. He lets her out, watches her do her business, and then lets her back in, and she lies down on the floor in the middle of the kitchen near the stove, watching us with her big brown eyes.