Page 140 of I'm Your Guy
“I can’t be there today, but I’m sending it over anyway.”
“Gia. Is there a problem you’re not telling me? Is it Mom?”
“It’s not Mom,” she says firmly. “Billy stayed home from school today with a fever, and I don’t want to drive to Trenton with his little cranky ass whining at me from the backseat. So I found a willing volunteer to bring you a sub.”
“Forget the sub.” I rub my forehead, where a headache is suddenly blooming. “They have food in the hotel.”
“Too late. She’ll be there any minute.”
“Who’s she? You mean Mom?”
“Nope. Gotta go give the sick kid some Tylenol. Bye, Tommy! Have a good game tonight!”
The call disconnects, and I stare at my phone for a second, trying to figure out what just happened. My sister just played the sick-kid card, but she sounded a little dodgy about it. Like she didn’t want to explain.
There’s a knock on my door. I get a bad feeling as I cross the room to answer it.
And, yup, it’s bad. When I open the door, I see Jessie, my ex. Sure, she’s holding a bag from Sal’s, but that doesn’t make me feel much better.
Thanks, Gia. Thanks a lot.
“Tommaso,” Jessie says, and her eyes are nervous. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I gesture for her to come into the room, because you don’t leave a lady standing in the hallway. Still, I wonder if I can fake a missed appointment and run out of here.
Too obvious?
“You should see your face right now,” she says. “Gia didn’t warn you?”
I just shake my head.
“Sorry. I’d asked her if she knew when you were coming to town. And she said she had an idea…” She puts the sandwich bag down on the TV console and turns to face me. “Can we talk for a second? I promise not to take up much of your time.”
“Uh, sure.” Thank God my hotel room has a desk with chairs on either side of it. Neither of us glances at the bed as we sit down across from each other.
It’s funny what you remember about a person. As she folds her hands on the surface of the desk, the gesture is so familiar that I feel a stab of pain behind my breastbone.
God, it’s stupid to grieve a marriage that was so fundamentally wrong. But it hurts me to realize all over again that I loved Jessie, and that losing her still hurts in a complicated way.
I failed both of us, and ruined a pretty great friendship, too.
“So I wanted to apologize to you,” she says softly.
To me? “God, why? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
She tips her head to the side, as if considering this idea. “Look, I’ve been to therapy, and I’ve had to admit a few things to myself. Our bad marriage wasn’t only your fault.”
“Yeah, it kinda was.” I stop short of saying why, because I don’t need to. We both already know.
She shakes her head. “See, I used to see it that way. I liked thinking of myself as the injured party. It’s a good story—I’m the girl you married, but you really should not have married a…” She clears her throat. “Me.”
I shrug. “Accurate.”
She squirms in her chair. “That’s actually too simple. The truth is that I wasn’t very satisfied in our relationship before we got married. And when you proposed, I shouldn’t have expected things to suddenly change. That’s not how people work.”
Well, ouch.
“So maybe you omitted a few crucial details. But so did I, Tom.” She actually sounds anguished. “I knew we didn’t have the right kind of spark, and I could have let you go off to the new team alone. But that’s not what I did. I cried, and you proposed to me out of guilt, I think.” She clears her throat. “I knew it was a bad idea, but I went along with it anyway. And when it didn’t magically work, I made it all your fault. I’m sorry.”
