by Lucy Score
Gloria joined Harper in the living room and sank down on the couch. It was welcoming, soft, and a vibrant purple that added the perfect pop of color against the white walls and light oak floors.
“So, how’s Aldo doing since he came home?” She hugged a yellow throw pillow to her chest to ward off the automatic ache.
Harper frowned at the back of her TV. “He’s, uh, doing okay. I think the therapy is helping mentally. Physically he’s a beast.”
“He always was,” Gloria said wistfully.
Harper dropped the cord she was fighting with. “Listen, Gloria, I don’t know exactly what his problem is, but I hope you know that that’s what it is. His problem. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I think I had got my hopes up a little too high that we could be something together. That I could be something to him,” Gloria confessed, picking at the tufted button on the pillow.
“Whoa! Let’s back that truck up real fast.” Harper grabbed her champagne mug and flopped down next to Gloria. “You can’t put your worth in someone else’s hands like that. Whether those hands are stroking you or hurting you. It doesn’t matter. Your value comes from inside. Whether you mean something to him or not has nothing to do with how inherently valuable you are.”
Spoken like someone who’d been through therapy, Gloria thought. Hmm.
“I get it,” she told her friend. “And I think I’m starting to believe it. I know I’ll be okay without Aldo Moretta, but I’d still like to at least give it a shot.” Or she had before their last encounter.
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Harper said.
“Is that how you felt about Luke?”
Harper took a swallow of champagne. “That’s how I still feel about Luke. I know that I’d be okay without him—after an exceptionally long mourning period, of course. But I want to be great with him.”
“So now that I can cross off ‘get an apartment’ from my list, my next goal is to be great no matter who is in my life,” Gloria guessed.
“Bingo.”
“Men,” Gloria snorted into her mug.
“Tell me about it,” Harper sighed.
“Let’s order some pizza,” Gloria decided.
“That’s the best idea you’ve ever had in this apartment.”
That night, alone, tucked into clean sheets on her childhood bed in her very own place, Gloria grinned up at the ceiling of her very own home.
“I’m going to be great,” she whispered to the shadows. Tonight, she was enjoying the wanton freedom of sleeping naked for the first time in her life.
32
“I want to learn to run.” Harper bounced on her toes, dancing around him like an annoying, yappy dog.
Aldo growled from his hamstring stretch on the grass. She’d taken his PT homework seriously, and together they’d been working out in the park at the lake three days a week. He hated to admit it, but even he was proud of the progress he was making now. They’d walked two miles today. Two fucking miles on trails. He’d stumbled more than once. But he’d made it without feeling like he was going to keel over and die.
“What brought this on?” he asked, bowing forward over his extended leg and prosthesis. His hamstring argued with him.
“You and Luke run. I’ve seen him leave the house with his brain full of crap and come back from a run smiling. I want that. Plus, I’ve been eating a lot of pizza lately, and I helped Gloria move and couldn’t walk for three days.”
“Okay,” Aldo shrugged, pretending not to be hung up on the helped Gloria move part of Harper’s sentence. “So run to that tree over there and back.”
Harper squinted at the pine tree at the trail mouth about two hundred yards away. “That’s not very far. I want to run miles.”
“You’re not ready for miles yet, smartass. I’m going to check out your form and tell you how to do it better. Besides, for someone who sits at a desk and eats pizza all day, that tree is far enough.”
Harper snorted. “You’re missing a part of a leg, and you’re already working on slow jogs on the treadmill. I think I can handle running to the tree and back with two regular legs.”
His grin was sneaky. He couldn’t wait to watch her puke. “Quit stalling. Run. I’ll watch and judge mercilessly.”
Harper stuck her tongue out at him and turned away. She took off at what was an ugly half-sprint, half-flail, and Aldo laughed. Her shoulders were hunched, her feet kicked out at odd angles behind her, and her entire torso twisted from side-to-side as she hurled herself across the terrain.
He’d never seen anyone worse at running before.
Her pace slowed as she approached the big pine and then slowed again as she turned around. Not so cocky now that she was realizing it was all uphill back to him, was she?
“Let’s go, Harp!” he called. He could hear her wheezes from here.
Slowly, she shuffled her way back to him. “Please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up,” she chanted.
Aldo laughed.
“AGH!” She clutched at her side and finally stumbled back to him, collapsing in front of him. “That wasn’t so bad,” she rasped.
“You sound like a pack-a-day smoker, Harp.”
“I think I have appendicitis. It hurts like a bitch,” she hissed, her hand digging into her side.
“Welcome to your first side stitch.”
“Side stitch?” she repeated on a wheeze.
“Come on,” he said, nudging her with the running shoe on his prosthesis. “Help me up, and I’ll tell you all the things you did wrong.”
“Like saying I wanted to learn to run?”
He gave her the basics while they worked their way through a series of stretches. Don’t swing your torso. Take smaller steps. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Harper looked like she was taking mental notes.
“Let’s take a little cool-down walk,” Aldo suggested, pointing toward the glimmering waters of the lakefront.
“Cool,” Harper said, mostly recovered from her disastrous run. “So how are you doing?” she asked.
He’d known she’d pry and couldn’t say why he felt comfortable talking to her. Maybe it was knowing that her life hadn’t always been all sunshine and rainbows. And that she knew pain, too. Maybe it was that he didn’t need anything from Harper but friendship.
“Good enough that I’m moving back to my place this weekend. The doc cleared it.” It was his first Back to Real Life goal that he’d tackled and achieved.
“Aren’t you going to miss your mom?” Harper teased.
“Me moving out is the only way we’ll both live.”
They picked their way down a short, rocky decline, and Aldo marveled that his muscles weren’t screaming too loudly this time.
“Are you sleeping better?” Harper asked. “Is the pain still keeping you up?”
Aldo gave a shrug and debated answering. “Sometimes it’s like my mind can’t tell the difference between what’s happening and what’s happened. It’s like this blur between history and present. And sometimes the only thing that clears it is pain.”
“Maybe that’s why you push your therapy so hard?” Harper mused.
“Maybe that’s why I push everything so hard.” He had a lot to prove. To himself first. He wouldn’t say he was in the same mental swamp he’d been in when he first came home. The PT helped, and getting back to his own home would help more. But he still wasn’t right in the head. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever get right again.
He thought of Gloria. Wondered if she’d ever be able to accept him like this. Would she want him like this? Or would she recognize the wounds beneath the surface?
“So what’s Gloria’s apartment like?” he prodded. It was torture, gleaning information about Gloria from Harper. It was a little game they played. She knew why he was asking, but he played it off as casual conversation. He’d known she had moved. Knew where. Had even taken a post-midnight walk down Main Street her first night there to see if her lights were on.
“It’s so perfect for her,” Harper said. “She’s already got everything unpacked and decorated, and you can just tell it makes her so happy. She’s right there in the middle of everything, too, which I think is good for her.”
Aldo grunted.
“Speaking of, when are you going to stop avoiding everyone?” Harper demanded. They stopped at the lake’s edge. The water made tiny, steady waves against the shore.
“I’m not avoiding everyone.” He was. He hadn’t been back to work yet. Hadn’t gone out to eat in town. Hell, the only time he left his mother’s house was for doctor appointments or late-night strolls—limps—when the walls were closing in on him.
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “No one is going to think you’re anything other than Aldo Moretta.”
It wasn’t true. But she couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have to face the fact that you were less than you used to be. That you were always going to be less than. And that everyone else would see it, too.
“I really want to punch you in your face right now.” Harper’s words caught him off guard.
“What the hell, Harpsichord?”
“I can see you churning through this whole bullshit ‘woe is me’ garbage,” she said, her voice raising and cutting through the summer noises of kids playing and squirrels arguing, birds chirping.
“I don’t know how to make it stop. Okay? Happy?” He started to stalk off and was reasonably pleased when he was able to.
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” she called after him.
“Maybe you should mind your own damn business,” he said over his shoulder.
She snorted. “We both know that’s not going to happen.”
Another sleepless night. Some nights, it was worse than others. Tonight, every time he closed his eyes, all he saw was dust and blood. He heard the explosion. Saw from a distance as the truck he drove bounced on the shock wave. He watched Oluo crawl out of the passenger side as gunfire erupted. Fear. Pain. Darkness. Red. He wasn’t dreaming. His brain had cobbled all accounts of the incident into a monster memory.
He pulled on a pair of gym shorts and a tank top. It was one in the morning. No one would be out and about. He was safe. The first few walks he’d taken, he’d worn pants in case he ran into anyone. But Benevolence was a town of early risers. Restaurants closed at nine, and downtown was a ghost town by ten.
He snuck through the kitchen, past the stairs to the front door. Even here he could hear his mother’s snores upstairs. “Fucking chainsaw,” he muttered, stepping outside into the cool summer night. He didn’t bother locking the door.
He shuffled off the porch and headed toward her. Always her.
Downtown Benevolence was, as expected, dead asleep. The traffic light blinked, coloring the night in a steady green, yellow, red. Dawson’s Pizza was dark, but two floors above the restaurant, the lights were blazing. What was she doing awake, he wondered. Was she binge-watching TV? Reading? Was she upset about something? Didn’t she feel safe enough to sleep either?
He stopped and stared up, willing her to appear in a window, hoping that she wouldn’t.
He shouldn’t be here. It wasn’t fair to either of them.
What was he going to do when she moved on? When she finally met a nice guy? When he had to read her engagement announcement in the newspaper?
He turned his back on the building and walked on, leaving Gloria Parker behind him.
33
The key slid in the lock, and Aldo pushed his front door open, waiting for the waft of stuffy, unlived air. Every time he came home from deployment, the first thing he did was open the windows in the entire house, letting the stale air out.
But when he stepped inside and dropped his duffle, all he smelled was the faint hints of lemon and cleaning products.
He frowned. Aldo knew damn well his mother wouldn’t have thought to clean for him.
And if she had, nothing above her stocky five-feet four-inches would be dusted. The place was spotless. He’d never been a slob. But this—the spotless mantel, the neatly stacked mail, the charmingly arranged plants…
Gloria.
“Shit.” Her presence was all over his house like a fingerprint. She’d repotted the plants that he’d purchased just so there would be a reason for her to be here.
He was going to have to get rid of them all.
Leaning against the wood of the front door, Aldo waited for the relief he’d expected to course through him. He could finally be alone. No one would be lurking in his kitchen or keeping up a running commentary over The Price is Right or Entertainment Tonight. No one to pretend for. He could sink into the misery in peace.
As soon as he removed all traces of Gloria from his house. Starting with those fucking cheerful plants. It was like she was here.
Hell, he could practically hear her. Singing.
When Gloria appeared on the stairs, lugging his vacuum cleaner down from the second floor and belting out “I Will Survive,” Aldo was convinced he was hallucinating. He was back in that hallway in high school, watching the pretty girl in the spotlight.
And then she spotted him, shrieked, and dropped the vacuum cleaner the last half flight of stairs.
Gloria yanked the earbuds out of her ears. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Aldo blinked. “Me? I live here. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Your mother said you’d be moving back in this weekend.”
His mother knew exactly when he was moving back home as she’d started a countdown on the refrigerator door last week when he told her.
“So you broke into my house to clean?” Asshole Aldo was rearing his ugly head. But he’d come home for peace and quiet. Not to have his sanctuary invaded by the very woman he was desperately trying to forget.
She looked fresh and pretty, and it made him hate himself even more.
“I used the key you gave me when you asked me to look after your place,” Gloria said stiffly. She descended the rest of the way and stepped over the vacuum cleaner.
He stepped closer. “I don’t need someone cleaning my place out of pity.”
“And I don’t need someone acting like an asshole when I was simply doing something nice,” Gloria snapped back, eyes flashing.
For as long as he’d known her, Aldo had never seen a flash of temper from Gloria. It was impressive. And sexy.
She stomped around him, heading for the door, an impressive feat in flip-flops. He hadn’t been this close to her for months. Every sense was alive and reporting back to him in emergency messages. She smelled like cookies and lemon. Her voice, that hint of huskiness, hit him in the chest while his eyes drank her in. She had her short hair pinned up and back, leaving her face unframed. Everything about her was still so delicate. The bone structure, the graceful curve of her slim neck.
The hand that snaked out and closed around her wrist surprised them both. He stared down at his fingers wrapped around her soft skin, wondering what in the hell possessed him to grab her like that.
“I just want to be left alone,” he said quietly. Standing there, looking into the eyes of the woman he had some serious feelings for, Aldo realized exactly how Luke felt with Harper in his home. Conflicted.
Gloria tugged her hand free. “Welcome home, Aldo,” she snapped. Her tone indicating anything but welcome. “You’re welcome for watering your damn plants and baking you a damn pie and cleaning your damn house. Rest assured it won’t happen again.”
She opened his front door and glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, and you can pick up your own damn vacuum cleaner.”
The slam of the front door had Aldo hanging his head. Alone. It was what he wanted. What he needed. And the sooner everyone else got used to it, the better.
His mind was an ugly place these days, and it was better for everyone if he kept to himself.
He pulled out his phone and dialed.
“Why the hell did you tell Gloria I was moving back this weekend?” Aldo demanded.
>
“Why? Was she there when you got there? Did you talk to her? Did you apologize for being a big, stupid asshole?” his mother demanded.
“You set this up!” He was going to have to either murder her or pack her shit and send her to Boca. Whatever it took to get this woman out of his life.
“Well, someone has to have your best interests at heart! If you don’t snap out of this poor me funk, you’re going to stay there, and then no one will want to marry you, and I’ll never get a grandchild.”
Aldo swiped a hand through his hair. “Since when the hell do you want grandkids?” A family now was so far down his priority list it was almost laughable. He’d deployed with the intent of coming home and settling down. Now that he was home, the only thing he wanted was to be left the fuck alone.
“Since I thought you were finally settling down with a nice, smart girl that I don’t hate. She brings me cookies, Aldo! Cookies!”
Leave it to his mother to play matchmaker over baked goods. “Stop interfering with my life!” he shouted into the phone.
“Stop interfering with my cookies!” she shouted back.
“I want to be left alone, Ma,” Aldo enunciated slowly.
“Well, tough shit. Until you get right in the head, I’m going to make it my life’s mission to guide you in the right direction.”
“Stay out of it, Ma!”
“Make me, dumbass!”
34
“I should have said ‘I deserve better.’ No, wait. I should have demanded better.” Gloria’s bedroom ceiling was annoyingly impassive. She’d gone to bed early. But her thoughts were still roiling with all of the things she could have, should have, said to Aldo Moretta earlier.