Page 17 of Finally Mine
He’d thought about throwing his hat in the ring, but the one time he’d come close, Gloria had paid the price. Aldo never forgot that.
“So tell me what a structural engineer does,” Gloria said, piping up over the low croonings of Blake Shelton.
Aldo grinned at her and made a left turn. “A structural engineer designs structures like bridges and tunnels and buildings. We do inspections, some demo. We work a lot with contractors and architects to make sure what they’re building isn’t only pretty but sound.”
“Wow. And you’re in the National Guard, too?” she asked.
He nodded. “We’re deploying soon.” In two weeks. Which was why he needed Gloria to know where he stood. He wasn’t letting another decade go by without telling her how he felt. But tonight wasn’t the time. She was still brittle, fragile. He’d watched her disappear into her head a half-dozen times tonight only to fight her way back. He admired the hell out of her for it. Enduring what she had and then making small talk around a picnic table was something a lot of soldiers couldn’t handle when they came home.
“Oh,” she said softly. “When?”
“Just over two weeks.” He felt the twist in his gut when he said it. Before, picking up and hauling out had been inconvenient. But there wasn’t much difference to him whether he was working his ass off at the office or in a godforsaken desert. He still had no one to come home to. That, to Aldo, made all the difference.
“Wow,” Gloria breathed. “Where are you going? Are you nervous? When will you be back?”
He did the thing that felt most natural. He reached over the console and took her hand in his. “Afghanistan. I’m already anxious to come home. It’s a six-month deployment.”
“Six months?” she sounded upset, and it did something wonderful to his ego.
“Six months.” He nodded. “Imagine where you’ll be when I come home.”
She sat quietly in the dark of his cab, eyes straight ahead. But she held his hand tightly as if she were afraid he’d pull away.
“Did you always want to be an engineer?” She asked, finally changing the subject.
“No. I wanted to be a ninja for a while. Then I moved on to a superhero. Then in kindergarten, I decided I wanted to be a dinosaur until my mom told me dinosaurs were extinct and I was a dumbass.”
“No, she didn’t!”
“Ina Moretta is a loud, mean woman,” Aldo told her. “One time when Luke and I were kids—stupid kids—we were playing on the lake when it froze. Without adult supervision of course.”
“Oh, no,” Gloria said, covering her eyes with her free hand.
“Oh, yes. The ice broke, and I sank like a lard ass until Luke fished me out. But when Ma heard about it, she made me take ice baths for a week as punishment.”
“She did not!” Gloria laughed.
“Okay, so maybe they were lukewarm baths, but still. The woman is a mercenary.”
“I’d like to meet her someday,” Gloria mused.
Aldo brushed his thumb over hers. “Say the word. I promise to stand valiantly between the two of you.”
She laughed, the brightness of it filling up his truck, his chest. Yeah, this was worth coming home to and worth not leaving again.
* * *
He easedup to the curb in front of Gloria’s mother’s house. If she wondered how he knew where she lived, Gloria didn’t ask. She slipped her hand out of his and fished the pie plate off the floor. “I believe this is your payment for chauffeuring me,” she said.
He caught a whiff of the cinnamon-y goodness under the foil. “I think we should get married,” he decided.
Gloria’s jaw dropped, and then she laughed again.
“I’m serious,” he insisted. “Just, maybe spend the next six months thinking about it, okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” she said, still laughing when she released her seatbelt.
“Hang on,” he said, sliding out from behind the wheel. He hurried around to her door and opened it. “You’re engaged to a gentleman.”
