Page 76 of Finally Mine
Shit.He was new to this boyfriend thing. What was more important? Being there for Gloria after what happened in the park? Or getting to the bottom of the letter?
Conflicted, he followed Gloria into the kitchen and watched her fuss over the tea. She poured a small amount of hot water into two mugs. “Preheating the mugs,” she explained at his questioning look. She put the kettle back on the stove and rummaged through the cupboard for her collection of teas.
He said nothing, the letter still clutched in his hand.
She pretended he wasn’t there, walking through the steps of what looked like a soothing ritual, dumping the hot water out of the mugs and replacing it with tea bags.
“How good of a new boyfriend are you prepared to be tonight, Aldo? Because I think I want to talk.”
“I’m prepared to be whatever you need,” he told her.
“Let’s pretend for tonight that you’re my best friend and I need to vent.”
“Vent away. I’m here.”
The kettle whistled, and he watched her pour the water over the tea, steam rising up from the mugs. She was silent for a long minute. “It was like living with a hard-to-please parent. My entire life revolved around not upsetting him. No makeup. No friends. Only the foods he liked. But no matter how good I got at reading him, I still did things he didn’t like. I still got hit.”
Aldo’s fingers fisted, crushing the envelope.
“He controlled the finances, my car, where I could and couldn’t go. I knew that I could go home to my mother, but I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t try to hurt us both if I left. He wasn’t always awful. I think that’s part of the cycle. The short fuse, the explosion, the apology, the sweetness. A week before I left, he brought me a stack of paperbacks by my favorite author from the library book sale. It wasn’t all blood and bruises.”
She looked up at him, gaze earnest, and handed him a mug.
“I had hope for so long that after every apology, this would be the time he changed. He was a victim, too. His father beat him bloody every other week until he got big enough to fight back. He confided in me. He’d seen his father hurt his mother his entire life. It’s what he knew. The physical brutality, that was one thing. I could mostly heal from that. It was the emotional side of things. Whittling away at my self-esteem, one snide comment, one accusation, at a time. He hated you for some reason,” she confessed.
Aldo absorbed the statement, knowing the exact reason why Glenn Diller hated him.
“He accused me of having a crush on you, and I denied it. Even though it was true.” She shot him a sidelong look.
“You did?” he asked.
Gloria nodded, remembering. “Who wouldn’t have a crush on football star Aldo Moretta?”
Aldo needed desperately to move his body. To pace before the rage inside him erupted. Gloria stepped around him and led the way into the living room. She sat on the couch, gestured for him to do the same. He tucked the letter beside him on the cushion, still not sure how to approach it.
“I was shocked. Sure, looking back there’d been warning signs. Times when he was rougher than the situation called for or making controlling demands that felt like love at the time. When he hit me, I pushed him. Called him a ‘loser asshole,’” she recalled. “And he fell to his knees in front of me and cried. He begged me not to leave him. Apologized for hitting me. Said it was an accident that he’d never do it again. He told me his story. That all he knew was violence. But he’d change for me. I felt…powerful. I had the choice to stay or go, and he was putting it in my hands.”
“But he never changed,” Aldo said quietly.
She took a sip of tea, and Aldo did the same. It was soft and floral. A gentleness removed from the ugliness of their conversation. “No. But he did give me hope. Weeks would go by, and things would be fine. He’d be working. We’d have a little money. He’d laugh at my jokes. Then I’d ask him to pick up onions on the way home from work, or I wouldn’t wash his work shirt fast enough. Or he wouldn’t even pretend to come up with an excuse that involved me.”
Aldo suddenly got what true friendship was. As a man who was half in love with the woman bravely telling her story, hearing the details of her abuse was a kind of torture. But for Gloria, it was a cleansing. A healing. And that was more important than his own temper, his own discomfort. “Did he ever hurt you in other ways?”
“You mean rape,” she said flatly.
He nodded.
“Once,” she said quietly. “Though at the time I didn’t recognize it as rape. In recent years, I was more of a live-in housekeeper and cook.”
Aldo forced himself to take another drink to soothe the ache in his throat. He put the tea down and took Gloria’s hand. Squeezed.
“I stayed in hope and fear, in repeating cycles of both. I stayed because it was easier sometimes. Other times because I physically couldn’t leave. And I have to live with that. I have to live with the fact that I wasn’t strong enough to leave him the first time. I’m responsible for my choice to stay.”
“It’s not cut and dried like that, Gloria,” he reminded her. “Brain scans show similarities between victims of abuse and soldiers on the battlefield.”
She shifted to face him on the couch. “Do you wonder if that’s part of our attraction? That we’re both survivors?”
Aldo let go of her hand and squeezed her knee.
