Page 112 of I'm Your Guy
My mood doesn’t improve when I let myself into the house. Everything is immaculate. Every throw pillow fluffed into place. Every chair tucked into the table. There are vacuum stripes on the rug.
In the rear of the house, the air is lemon scented. Carter has cleaned the downstairs bath and the guestroom. The bed is freshly remade.
In the center of the guestroom quilt is another needlepoint pillow with a ribbon around it, and a gift tag: For Mrs. DiCosta. The pillow reads: I’m not a regular mom. I’m a cool mom.
It’s beautiful, of course. But I don’t even care. Because Carter is gone, and once again my house is quiet. Before I met Carter, I never used to notice the silence, but now it’s deafening.
I turn the tree on to cheer myself up. Then I make my way upstairs to take off my suit.
There’s a note on the bed. And the house key I gave him as well.
Oh no.
Jersey—
You needed your house furnished for Christmas with your mom. I told you I could make that happen. Honestly, it made me so happy to do this for you. I needed this job. But I got so much more from the experience than I ever expected.
When I met you, I’d had a bad run. People kept letting me down.
But not you. I mean that.
I had to leave tonight, but not because you did anything wrong. It’s because we’re both at a crossroads, with lots of issues to settle. You probably can’t settle yours while I’m in your house. And I can’t settle mine while I’m freeloading off you.
I’m thinking I might need to go home to Montana and reboot my life. I’m sorry it has to be like this. I’ll miss you more than you know, and I wish life was easier right now for both of us.
Please take care of yourself. I’ll be thinking about you.
— C.
P.S. There is a gift for you on the porch.
I curse into the silence of my bedroom. He’s going to Montana?
I reread the letter and notice it doesn’t say for sure that he’s leaving Colorado. Just that he’s considering it.
Am I grasping at straws?
Depressed, I pad downstairs and find my present. It’s a little gas fireplace and a bag of marshmallows. He’s even provided me with a sharpened stick for roasting them.
With nothing better to do than brood, I figure out how to operate the fireplace. It makes a warm glow on the porch. I sit down and put a marshmallow on the stick.
Alone in the firelight, I miss Carter terribly. He should be here, eating the first marshmallow.
Okay—the second one. I burned the first one.
I set down the stick, and drop my head into my hands. My chest aches.
Letting him go is a terrible mistake. It’s just that I don’t know how to quit making it.
* * *
It’s hard to get out of bed the next morning. Practice is a gloomy blur. And then we’re down to one more game before the holidays, an out-and-back in St. Louis.
It’s a brutal one, as if St. Louis is so desperate to get to their holiday break that they don’t mind crosschecking us all to hell to get there.
I watch their rookie center take Stoney down in a blatantly illegal hit. The penalty is called, but only for two minutes, when by rights it should be a game disqualification.
Anger roars through me. I’m suddenly so damn frustrated that my hands are coiled into fists.
