Christmas on 4th Street (Fool's Gold #12.5)(27)

He glanced at her. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to be a soldier.”

“Yet you are one.”

He shrugged. “Not really. Being a doctor was a way to honor the family legacy and still do something I wanted to do. Hard to do that while writing a thesis on great American writers of the twentieth century.”

“Your dad pressured you.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” He drank from his beer bottle. “My dad was determined. He talked about Gideon and me going into the army from the time we were born. Doing anything else wasn’t an option. Looking back, I tell myself I should have stood up to him.”

“You were a kid. Did you even know there were other choices?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “I just knew I couldn’t go do what Gideon did.”

She’d been lucky with her family. They wanted her to do whatever made her happy. But not all parents were like that.

There was a knock on the door. She stood and groaned as her feet and legs protested, then hobbled to the door. Gabriel beat her there and pulled out his wallet.

“I’ve got this,” he said.

She grinned at him. “You’re such a guy.”

“Thank you.”

Ten minutes later they were seated at her small table. She put out plates and napkins, and they were digging into the pizza.

The crust was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The melted cheese was hot, the grilled vegetables the perfect texture.

Gabriel stared at her half of the pizza. “Vegetables? Seriously? On pizza?”

“I know. I can’t help it. But you have your manly all-meat.” She grinned. “Beer and pizza. Later you’ll probably feel the need to go challenge some teenaged boys to a drag race.”

“Or I could just watch wrestling on TV and have my manhood affirmed that way.”

“Really? Wrestling? Don’t they wear tights?”

“It’s not tights. It’s—” He sighed heavily. “Why do I bother?”

She laughed and took another bite of her pizza.

When they’d polished off every slice, she leaned back in her chair. “That was great. And later, there’s ice cream.”

“A gourmet meal?” he asked.

“One of my favorites.”

He started to say something, then stopped. She had a feeling it was going to be to ask her if she ate like that, how come she was so thin. And she didn’t want to talk about her weight or how she was still working her way back to what she had been.

“Any pizza where you were stationed?” she asked.

“Sure. The army provides. In Germany there were a few places around the base. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was more of a challenge to find. The mess had it, but it wasn’t exactly the same.”

She got up and walked to her refrigerator, where she grabbed a second beer for each of them. “You were close to the front line, weren’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

She remembered what Felicia had told her. “You were also the doctor on the plane, right? The one who flies with those being medevaced to Germany?”

He nodded cautiously.

She could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. She would guess he’d seen a lot of horrible injuries on those flights. From what she’d read and seen on news reports, the injured were in pretty bad shape when they were flown out. Gabriel and his team would have been doing their best to keep everyone alive while working in really cramped conditions.

“It must have been intense,” she said.

“My work mostly is. I see the soldiers when they’re first injured. Get them stabilized and ready for whatever surgery they’re going to need.” He relaxed a little. “The hours are long and when I was in a field hospital, the injuries just kept coming.”

“How did you unwind?” she asked.

She was waiting for him to say volleyball or video games, or maybe make a joke. Instead, he stiffened and seemed to be looking at everything except her.

Her brain processed the change in him and tried to fill in the blanks. Then she felt herself starting to grin.

“Sex?” she asked, not bothering to hide her amusement. “Are you saying that there’s sex in the military?”

“I was on a softball team,” he grumbled.

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

He met her gaze. “Yes, sometimes sex was a way to escape.”

“Horndog,” she said cheerfully. “So is that why you never married? Because I think you’re going to need to give Ana Raquel an answer on that one. Not to mention your mother. Not that she’s going to want to hear what you’ve been doing in your spare time.”

“I don’t care what Ana Raquel thinks about me, you won’t tell my mother and no, that’s not the reason I’m not married.”

He opened his mouth as if he were going to say more, then closed it.

“Gabriel?” she asked quietly, wondering what he was thinking about. “What happened?”

He looked at her. “There was a woman. A doctor. I liked her a lot. We’d been dating for a few months. It was...different.”

“You cared about her.”

He nodded. “A few of her friends were going out in a Humvee. Just the girls. She went with them.” His mouth twisted. “One second they were driving away, laughing and the next they were hit by a rocket.”