Falling for Mr. Wrong(33)
Georgie knocked the sand off of her feet and slid them back into her flipflops. She needed to get to the grocery store and pick up something to make for dinner, and it was getting late. Her tummy was rumbling and she freely admitted she was a slave to that demanding organ.
She put the key in the ignition, switched the radio to her favorite station, and threw the car in reverse, accelerating out of her space maybe a little faster than necessary. Until she heard a loud crunch and slammed on the brakes.
“Crap,” she said, throwing open her door (dinging the car door next to hers in the process) and walking to the back to see what had happened.
She crunched up her chin and pursed her lips as she took in the sight of a surfboard lopped in half, one side partially dangling by some strands of wood but hanging at a distinctly perpendicular angle to the other half of it, which seemed to have smushed into the back-end of the car next to her, leaving a fairly ugly dent in the vehicle.
Which was evidently owned by a sort of cute guy with a really huge scowl on his face.
“Hey lady,” he shouted, shaking his fist. “What the fuck? You murdered my board!”
Which Georgie knew was her cue to apologize profusely, even as she stared at the guy, whose wet suit was stripped down to his lean hips, exposing a beautiful, tanned chest with strong pecs, dusted with golden hair, which complemented the shoulder-length dirty blond hair on his head and the sexy needs-a-shave scruff on his handsome face.
“Oh my god, I am sooooooo sorry,” Georgie said, reaching to lift the surfboard as if she could just force the two pieces back together. She could not. “I don’t know how I missed seeing that.”
He was nodding his head as if in a catatonic state while flailing his arms in a fit of pique. “Any more than you could have missed a damned atom bomb dropping and the commensurate mushroom cloud,” he said, his eyes wide with what might have been incredulity. “I mean what about the damned board could you not have seen when you were backing out? It’s six freaking feet long. That’s like not seeing a grown man in your rearview mirror.”
Georgie knit her brow, mortified but also kind of indignant because it was as if he thought she’d done it on purpose.
“Except this was sideways, not up and down.” She sort of shifted her hands in a horizontal then vertical manner to demonstrate.
He cocked his head, as if he was trying to grasp if she’d really just said that.
“I’m not going to dignify that daft reply with a response.”
“Look, again, I’m really so very sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it. I was backing up. There was a glare in my mirror I think, the sun was reflecting off of something and it sort of blinded me for a second, and then, I don’t know, your car was back there and it was at a weird angle I guess, and shit, look what I did to that, too.” Georgie nodded at the damaged car.
She grabbed her purse from the car and quickly whipped out a checkbook. “Maybe can I just write you a check and we can not report this to my insurance? I don’t know that I can afford another increase this year.”
He sized up her car, which was downright riddled with pockmarks, much to her current embarrassment. It was the only time she really didn’t feel so great about all the dinks.
“Gee, ya think?” he said.
She rifled through her bag for a pen. “Just tell me how much to replace it and well—” she licked her finger and tried to wipe away the marks on the back of his car, but she knew damned well they weren’t tiny bumper marks but an actual dent. “Well, that too.” She pointed at it.
“Again, I feel really badly about that. I don’t know what happened.”
He was shaking his head, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she wondered if perhaps he was about to throw-up. He had that sort of green-around-the-gills appearance of someone so upset it was a distinct possibility. “You can’t pay me enough.”
She stopped and looked up, pen in hand at the ready. “What do you mean I can’t pay you enough?”
“It’s one-of-a-kind,” he said. “I made it myself.”
Georgie blanched. What were the chances? She couldn’t just plow into a run-of-the-mill Walmart-special surfboard. No. It had to be a bespoke one. If that didn’t beat it all.
“Well, crap,” she said. “Now I feel even worse.” Her eyes started to moisten and damn, if she didn’t hate when she cried. She tried to wipe away the nascent tears with her shoulders, as if pretending she was just itching something on her face. But the thing is, she was one of those criers. A big ugly messy one, once she got going. And sure enough it was like her eyes were leaking, the tears started coming so fast. And with that came a couple of forlorn sobs, so pitiful she was sure she sounded like a dying hyena.
She set her checkbook onto the roof of his car then dug back into her purse in search of a tissue and pulled out one that had a clumped-up wad of chewing gum stuck to it, bunched the thing up, and blew her nose, taking care to not stick the gum to her nostrils.
“Here I was just going to enjoy this lovely day and that sunset, and it was just so beautiful, it reminded me of peppermint and Christmas and deliciousness and now—” She looked at him and he had that look that men sometimes get when they wish they could find an off switch for a woman but know that one doesn’t exist, kind of quizzical yet annoyed, all tinged with anger. She hated that look; it reminded her of her father just before he would light off on her mother and scream and yell and pound his fists into the wall, sometimes so hard he put holes into the drywall. And that memory made her eyes water up even more, particularly because it evoked her parents broken marriage, which then stirred up memories of her own marriage, which never happened, and the next thing she knew she was leaning against the bumper of her beat-up old station wagon, bawling her eyes out and this strange man with the broken surfboard was leaning over her trying to calm her down.