Page 57 of The One Decent Thing

Suddenly all the laughter had been sucked out of the room, along with most of the oxygen. The way he looked at me…I’d never even imagined someone looking at me like that. It seemed like too much to hope for. Like, the way Rhett Butler looked at Scarlett O’Hara, only without the ugly mustache.

I was going to get all sappy and embarrass him — or myself — if I kept it up. Time for a subject change. “Nissa texted me to say happy birthday.”

Aidan cleared his throat. “Oh yeah? Cool. How’s her job going?”

Nissa had parlayed her incredible success with my interview into a job as an editor at a weekly paper here in Santa Rafaela. My mom had been forced to resign and move away from Carterville to avoid the negative publicity, and Nissa got most of the credit. I met her for lunch a lot, and we texted all the time. She and Aidan didn’t talk much. I knew they liked each other, and they enjoyed hanging out, but maybe they were too similar, or something. They interacted like bros, all grunts and one-word texts only when practical and necessary. They called each other dude. It was so dumb, but at least I knew Aidan wasn’t going to fall in love with her instead.

“She’s really busy. I think she wants to take down the police chief.”

Aidan shook his head and laughed. “She should leave that dude alone. He’s cool. Tell her to go for that city council member who’s trying to eminent domain the pizza place by the beach.”

He’d gotten surprisingly knowledgeable about local politics, probably because Rick followed it avidly and bitched about it all the time. Also, well, pizza.

“I’ll pass it along.”

A weird silence fell, and I got up to get more coffee to try to shake the mood.

Aidan popped up like a jack-in-the-box the second I stood. “Um,” he said. The present was in his hands, and he wasn’t trying to hide it anymore. It was the size of a shoe box. Given his gift-wrapping skills, it was almost certainly a shoe box. From my closet. It was wrapped in actual birthday paper, though — also from my closet.

“Um?” He was beingso weird. And his cheeks were all red, and he looked so shifty. What the hell was in that box?

“I don’t know if you’re going to like this,” he blurted out. “I don’t — I think you might be really pissed off.”

I set down my coffee cup. “Okay. Maybe I should open it, then?” He slowly held it out, but I had to tug it out of his hands. “Like, what isinthere? Plutonium two thirty-nine? Or no, we’d both be dead, but I’m still worried now.”

I started to turn it over in my hands. “No, don’t! It’s, um, open it that way.”

Fine. I ripped the paper open and revealed the shoe box from my new Dolce & Gabbanas. Which I’d planned to store in the box. I ignored it, making a mental note to go in the closet and see what he’d done with my shoes.

When I lifted the lid, there was something brightly colored poking out of a nest of tissue paper.

My heart stopped. It was a little toy truck.Mylittle toy truck, the dirty broken one that, as far as I’d known, was still sitting buried in a box in the bottom of the same closet with my shoes. Obviously not. I’d told Aidan about it one time, and he’d been appropriately furious on my behalf like the good boyfriend he was, but how the hell had he found it? And why?

The answer to that — or part of it — was obvious when I folded the paper back. The truck wasn’t dirty anymore. Or broken. Aidan had repainted it, carefully matching the colors, and the tailgate had been painstakingly mended. Had he replaced the wood, or glued it? I couldn’t tell. The truck looked like it’d come from a store that day.

“Aidan…” My throat was so tight I could hardly swallow. I was twenty-three years old, as of a couple of hours before. So beyond a toy truck, right? Or I should’ve been.

“Are you mad? I should’ve asked. It was stupid. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done this.” He sounded like me when I was freaking out about something, so un-Aidan-like that I tore my eyes away from his gift to look at him instead. He’d gone a weird color, sort of greenish, and his hands were fidgeting, like he was fighting the urge to pull the present away from me and run.

I pulled it closer to me. “No take-backs. I’m not mad. I’m…” I didn’t know what I was.

“Look inside,” he muttered. And then, even further under his breath, “I’m so dumb.”

Okaaay. I tipped the truck onto its side, hearing a little rattle as I did. The first thing I noticed was that the steering wheel was intact again, too.

The second thing I noticed was the ring hanging off of it.

There weren’t any diamonds on it, or any stones at all. It looked like white gold: just a plain band. It was a ring. Oh, my God, it was a ring.

“Aidan?” My voice shook. “That’s a ring.”

He didn’t call me out on being Captain Obvious. Maybe he was too busy trying not to throw up, because now his hands were shaking and his color was worse. If I was Captain Obvious, he was the not-so-Jolly Green Giant.

“Yeah. It’s a ring. It doesn’t have to be a proposal,” he went on in a rush. “If you don’t want it to be. It’s a ring, yeah, but it’s not a fancy ring, and I didn’t even get it from an engagement ring place, so maybe it doesn’t count?”

Hurt swelled up in me, so suddenly and so profoundly I almost lost it. Did he not want it to count? Why the hell would he get a ring and then tell me how much he didn’t want to marry me?

Oh, God, did I want to marry him? What was I supposed to say?

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