“But that’s not what happened?”
“Well, as you know, I was playin’ for New York.” He pauses. “I fuckin’ hated it there. Resented it with all get-out ’cause that’s not where I was ’sposed to be.” He shrugs. “That agent of mine sold me out. He had a back-door deal for another player with the Steers without telling me about it first.”
I have no idea what a back-door deal is, but it can’t be good.
“Sounds like they pulled the rug out from under you.”
He nods.
“Obviously, you’re not holding a grudge against the Steers?”
“No. It had nothing to do with them. Their GM hadn’t known I was interested.”
“If you want to find a silver lining…at least you have experience now?”
He glances over at me. “You find the good in everything, don’t you?”
I mean, I try to.
Sometimes I have to. “Working with little kids will do that to a person. Everything is a travesty to them. I spend a looot of time calming them down.” I laugh quietly, thinking back to this past week when I had to teach little Maya Newbauer to count to ten after Noah Olson took the last watermelon Jolly Rancher out of the treat bowl on my desk.
She had her fists clenched and tears rolling down her eyes as if the whole world was going wrong that day.
“Dude,” I then say. “We had sex.”
“Did you just say ‘Dude, we had sex,’ or ‘Duke, we had sex’?”
That makes me laugh again. “Dude. I definitely said dude.”
“You just duded me.”
“At least I didn’t call you bro.”
He yawns, big and loud. “That’s true.”
I snuggle down into the covers and let out my own yawn. “So tired.”
“Same.”
And then we sleep, not mentioning the sex again—at least not tonight.
* * *
He’s gonewhen I wake up.
Like—gone,gone.
Not just from the bed.
Everything in the bedroom is gone—his clothes and toiletries and the duffel bag he had it packed in. It had taken me a few seconds to sort it all out in my brain after my eyes had peeled open, and I called out to him several times only to be greeted by absolute silence.
Then I’d looked over at the dresser where his cologne and wallet had been. Looked at the closet where his bag and personal items had all but been spilling out for an entire week and saw…nothing but two open closet doors.
I sigh, sitting up as my alarm clock goes off with an hour to get ready for work.
I can’t believe he just left without saying goodbye.
I thought, if anything, we were at least friends?