Page 69 of I'm Your Guy
Stop it, DiCosta. Be cool.
As if I even knew how.
* * *
When I return to the kitchen, Carter has made two mugs of coffee. I accept one and then shoo him back to the living room while I cook. Half an hour later, I carry two heaping plates to the dining table. There’s thick-cut bacon, cheese omelets, and strawberry waffles.
“Oh God,” Carter moans when I set a plate in front of him. He tosses a curtain onto the floor and picks up his fork. “Strawberries are my favorite thing in the world. And where did you learn to cook?”
“My mother taught both of us. Me and my sister. She said everybody should know how to cook.”
“Your mom sounds great,” he says, digging right in.
“She is.” And feeding him makes me ridiculously happy.
I haven’t fed anyone since I was married. That was the best part of my marriage—cooking and eating together. We made a lot of sense in the kitchen, but not so much in the bedroom.
“What?” Carter asks.
I can’t admit that eating breakfast with him makes me think of being married. “Just thinking I hadn’t used the waffle iron in a long time. Waffles for one is kind of pointless. I usually just have the omelet.”
“Well, I’m here for this,” he says and takes another bite.
My heart swells. “Sleep okay in the guestroom?”
“You have no idea.” He sighs. “Then again, I chose the mattress myself.”
“That room turned out so cool. My brain just doesn’t work like that. I’ve never looked at a room and thought—that wall should look like a birch forest. I look at a wall, and I see a wall.”
Carter takes a bite of bacon and makes a hum of appreciation. “Making things look nice is my only marketable skill. When I was nine years old, I pulled up a corner of the wall-to-wall carpeting in my bedroom and discovered oak floors underneath. By the next weekend, I’d sanded and refinished that floor, and made a papier-mâché shade to cover the ugly ceiling-mounted fixture. When I announced ten years later that I wanted to go to school for interior design, nobody was surprised.”
I gaze at him with the kind of wonder that’s getting harder and harder to hide. “So that’s just how you’re wired. To look at a blank spot and fill it with something better.”
He smiles. “I guess. But sometimes it feels like an affliction. I mentally renovate every room I’m in. High school was torture. Lots of cinder block and fluorescent lighting.”
“Tragic.”
He picks up his fork and starts eating again. “I can put up with a lot of teasing from a man who makes strawberry waffles. But enough about me. How did you get your job?” He swirls a bite of waffle in syrup.
“My mother’s family is thick with hockey players. I never had a dad around, so she signed me up to play sports with my cousins and my uncle.”
His eyebrows lift. “The same uncle and the cousin you punched?”
“Those are the ones. My cousin Marco and I are almost exactly the same age, so we’ve been head-to-head competitors our whole lives.”
“At hockey?”
“At everything. But, yeah, mostly hockey. It made me a better player.”
He gives me a strange look. “Because you needed to prove yourself?”
“Pretty much. My uncle Vin is my mother’s brother. He had a good run in the pros, but no championship ring. So now Marco is supposed to get him one. My cousin has heard every day of his life that he’s destined for greatness.”
“Uh-oh,” Carter says.
“Yup. Lots of pressure on that asshole. The fucked-up thing is that I used to be jealous of it. All that praise.” I shake my head. “Uncle Vin spent a lot of time telling me I was a useless little shit who’d never amount to anything.”
Carter’s eyes widen. “He said that to a child?”
