Page 88 of Finally Mine
“This girl, in this sexy skirt, standing there in the spotlight. Then you opened your mouth.”
His gaze was far away through the windshield as if he were remembering every detail of the moment.
“I sang… Oh my God! “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” I was auditioning for the musical.”
“I walked face-first into a set of lockers listening to you. It was like a fist to the heart. I was a goner.”
She gasped. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I was shy.”
“Aldo Moretta doesn’t have a shy bone in his body,” Gloria pointed out.
“All right, I had to decide if you were too young. A senior and a sophomore? It mattered then. By the time I decided it didn’t matter, I figured I’d play the game, show off for you a little, and then make my move.”
“Make your move?” She twisted in the passenger seat. “Tell me.”
“Well, you were always at the football games. I noticed, of course.” Aldo stretched his arm across the back of the seat to toy with the ends of her hair. “I was going to wait until we had a really good game, one where I was clearly the hero.”
Gloria snickered.
“And then I’d come up to you in the end zone where you and your friends would be celebrating.”
Gloria held her breath, listening to this alternate ending for her teenage self. “And?”
“And I’d stroll up to you all confident and sweaty. And I’d give you the nod.” Aldo glanced her way and jerked his chin at her, arching an eyebrow in the perfect imitation of a cocky high school jock. “Then I’d ask you if you were going to the bonfire or the diner or whatever that night. You would, of course, say yes all breathlessly and excited.”
“Of course,” Gloria said dryly.
“Then I’d show up with the thrill of victory still all over me and I’d say, ‘Gloria Parker, I think it’s about time I kissed you.’”
Gloria swooned on the inside. On the outside, she collapsed back against his arm. “Damn, that would have made my life.”
“Mine, too.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked.
The fun went out of him. She could see it in the tensing of his shoulders, the single clench of his jaw as he stared straight ahead.
“You were already with Glenn.”
“Oh.” A short word in a tiny voice. A reminder of all that could have been but wasn’t. And in its place, ten years of agony. She wanted to cry for them both.
“Gloria,” his voice was rough, his eyes stormy. “I was the reason he hit you that first time,” Aldo confessed.
The weight of the blame he’d carried for a decade opened up and bled like a fresh wound between them.
“What are you talking about?”
“The summer I graduated. The summer he graduated,” Aldo added. “You were at a bonfire, and I talked to you. Glenn didn’t like it. He pulled me aside, tried to be a big man and threaten me for talking to ‘his woman.’”
Gloria swallowed hard. She remembered the bonfire. She hadn’t known what had set him off. But she remembered talking to Aldo. A quick “Hey, how’s it going?”
“It was innocent,” she said quietly.
“Not for me, Gloria. It was never innocent for me. I wanted you, and he could see it.”
“Aldo—”
