WORK IN PROGRESS: Guy and Reason

Chapter 10 (Eden/Reason): A Placeholder

Wiping my hands down my thighs, I stood outside Guy's childhood home and rang the doorbell the next morning. Seconds later, Leslie opened the door, her mouth forming a silent O. Recovering quickly, she pushed the screen door open.

"Come on in, Eden," she said, her smile warm like it was every one of the thousands of times I came over here when Guy and I were...us. "It's so good to see you, lovely."

"Good to see you, too, Leslie." It was. Leslie had always been good to me, and I'd loved her like a second mom.

"Guy's just getting out of the shower. He worked out and ran this morning, and just got back. Let me tell him you're waiting and I think he'll break all land speed records getting out here."

She left me alone and I drifted over to where there were some new pictures of Guy in Minotaurs uniform, his arm slung around his mother's shoulders. The number on his jersey stopped me.

17

Your birthday is the seventeenth, my birthday's the seventeenth, we had our first date on the seventeenth, you live on seventeenth street, gave you our promise ring on the seventeenth and I'm going to ask you to marry me on the seventeenth. It's our number, Reason.

"He'll be out in just a minute," Leslie said, coming back into the room, her purse over her shoulder. "I've got some errands to run so I'm just going to head out."

"It was good seeing you, Leslie," I said.

Her face was soft. "You, too, Eden."

Not long after she left, Guy walked into the room wearing faded jeans, a T-shirt and no shoes. His hair was wet from the shower and he smelled...so good. Scent memories are powerful, and Guy smelled like the beautiful times I remembered that suddenly came rushing at me as I inhaled that familiar fragrance.

No.

"Hey, Eden," he said, and he approached me as if I was about to run off, stopping a few feet away from me.

"I want to talk with you."

"Anything."

"And I don't know if we'll ever talk again after today, Guy. And I don't know if I ever want to hear you try to explain why you cheated on me because there's never a good reason for cheating. You were drunk? Lonely? Confused? Ready to become an NFL player without the baggage from your earlier life? Just a cheating dickhead? Low self-esteem? Needing to try something new? Because I looked up all the reasons for cheating and the only ones I could find that applied were you being unhappy with me and needing something more. But maybe we'll get to that. I don't know."

"Whatever you want, Eden. It's up to you. I'll answer anything you ask as best I can."

He still had that voice that had always calmed me. Smooth, even, soothing. While I was bouncing around like a crazy person, Guy had always been the one who could settle me down.

"OK. Let's start with what brought me over here today. A Reason to Care. I watched one of your interviews and I know you started the charitable organization we always talked about and I want to know why."

Why would you still want to make our dream come true when there was no longer an us?

Guy looked down at me for a minute. He was one of those men who was more of everything in person: better looking, bigger, broader, taller. His stick-straight dark brown hair was short on the sides, just a bit longer on the top. He hadn't gelled it back today so it fell softly onto his forehead.

"Have a seat?" he asked. I sat in the chair and he sat on the couch at the end nearest my chair, just a foot from each other. "Do you want anything to drink before we start?"

I shook my head. "No, thank you."

"It's not a simple answer, Eden, and I'll tell you everything, but it's shit you probably don't want to hear because boo-hoo, Guy, but it's the only way you understand why. I'm not saying things for any reason other than it's part of the story to get you to the creation of A Reason."

At my nod of understanding, he continued. 

"When I cheated and ruined everything between us, I fell apart. There's no other word for it. Mom and my coach got me into therapy about a week after I melted down on your porch because I hadn't eaten anything for eight days. Winslow had to call my mom when he found me passed out in our apartment. I couldn't handle my life without you, especially knowing how much I'd hurt you. That was the hardest part to take, knowing that I'd hurt you." 

He glanced away from me for a minute, looking at something I couldn't see. I understood that look off into the distance, as if seeing a Brigadoon-like mist lifting for just a moment as our past rose up before us and we could see it briefly with startling clarity.

"You know how much I hated it when you were in any sort of pain, Eden, and then for the first time, instead of helping you with your pain, I was the cause of it. Couldn't make it right because how do you make something like what I did right? You can't."

This definitely didn't fit the narrative I'd created in my head of him just blithely moving on to the life of an NFL star. Living large. Having fun.

"The therapy helped in that I was eating again. It helped me to calm down. Mom came to stay with me until after the draft. And every day she had to talk me out of driving to your school to talk to you. She'd been in contact with your mom and your mom said absolutely not, that you were barely holding on and seeing me would only distract you and set you back."

Guy swallowed hard.

"So, the therapist helped me see some things that I'd been too fucking blind to see before and I took care of some shit as best I could. I got drafted, pretended to be happy. I went to your graduation against my therapist's advice, and you were so close and your eyes were so sad because of me. It was my fault, Eden, and all I wanted to do was run up to you and beg your forgiveness. Then you disappeared and no one in town knew where you went because your mom wasn't talking, and then I...stopped caring about anything again."

And that was about the time Eden's Wild Male Revue Year kicked into high gear.

"My therapist asked me if there was anything that interested me, and I started telling her about our dream. She said I still could make it happen if I got off my ass and stopped whining about how my stupid decisions hurt you and destroyed our lives. She's like this tiny lady, old enough to be my grandmother, and she was making me feel like a pansy-ass, but she was right. So my lawyer put me in contact with someone who knew about starting a charitable organization and the day after I got my signing bonus, I signed the papers and named it A Reason to Care because that's what it was. I couldn't have you in my life, so this was the closest thing I could get to you."

He rubbed his hands on his knees.

"So I put almost all of my salary into it, got a great fundraising director and put things in motion. My fundraising director insisted I do a shit ton of interviews and trade on my NFL fame -- to drum up interest, get the name and cause out there and bring in donations. And he was right because the work A Reason was doing got the attention of the Hughes family, and Melody Hughes asked to sit on our board. She committed a huge chunk of the family's wealth and their corporation's wealth to the organization, and they have serious funds. We have several other corporations involved and we do quarterly fundraisers, so the non-profit's in good shape and growing every year, and we're really starting to get into the places we wanted to reach."

I wanted to say something, but I wasn't sure what because spending years dreaming about something and seeing it become a reality is a heady experience.

"Excuse me for a minute," he said, getting up to leave.

When he came back into the room, he handed me a thick manila envelope.

"What's this?"

"It's the paperwork I had drawn up from the start. No one person owns a non-profit, but this makes you the CEO, if you want to run it. I've just been acting as a placeholder for you."