Beautiful Mistake

He leaned in, putting one hand on my knee. “How’d you like a little more German in you tonight?”

Ugh. I was just about to tell the idiot he’d be playing with himself tonight, when Charlie interrupted. With the bat. He tossed it on the bar right between us, causing Mason to jump back.

“Everything okay over here?” My girl doesn’t look too happy.”

I didn’t want to cause a scene. Just wanted my bad date to be over.

“That’s your father?” Mason asked.

I ignored him and spoke to Charlie. “Everything’s fine here. We were going to call it a night anyway.”

Mason misunderstood. After he gulped back the remnants of his drink, he stood. “My place or yours?”

“You’re going to yours. I’m going to mine.”

He reached for me, and I stepped back. “Go home, Mason. Before you go home with Charlie’s bat up your ass.”

Realizing he wasn’t getting laid, Mason paid the tab and took off. I smiled at Charlie after he was gone. “Did you double the price of Jack and Coke?”

“Asshole surcharge.”

I laughed. Not wanting to walk out right after Mason, I sat at the bar with Charlie for a while.

“Dating sucks,” I huffed. “No wonder I don’t do it that often.”

“I’m glad dating wasn’t what it is today back in my day. I’d never have met my Audrey.”

Charlie’s wife had been gone at least ten years—heart attack in her early fifties.

“How did you two meet anyway?”

“The old-fashioned way, in the grocery store.”

“That’s sweet. Did your carts crash into each other like in the movies?”

“Something like that. Audrey was in the fruit and vegetable aisle picking out some eggplant, and she put her things in the wrong cart. She was halfway down the aisle before she realized. When she went back to find her cart, she noticed the cart she’d taken had a handwritten grocery list in it.

“She’d taken your cart?”

“Yep. She handed the list back and said, ‘I took the wrong cart. Wouldn’t want you to forget some of the important items on your list’.”

“What was on your list?”

Charlie shrugged. “It said ‘cheese and other shit’.”

I furrowed my brow. “Literally? It said cheese and other shit? Not a list of the other shit?”

“I only cared about remembering the cheese. I like a slice of cheddar at night before I go to bed. The other shit covered the rest and wasn’t as important.” Charlie stared into space. “Anyway, Audrey smiled at me, and my heart did this weird double pump that it had never done before. Thought I was having a heart attack. Had to sit down right there next to the eggplants to catch my breath. Turned out it wasn’t just cheese and shit I picked up in the supermarket that day.”

“Maybe I should try the supermarket. I don’t think online dating is for me.”

“I never tried it, but seems dumb. Causes you to make this mental checklist of what you’re looking for in a mate and then try to find people who can check all the boxes. But the reality is, doesn’t matter which boxes are checked. When you meet the right person, your heart will let you know.” He winked. “And other parts of your body.”

Rachel

I wasn’t late. I was really freakin’ late.

I also needed a shower, a mechanic, a bottle of wine, and quite possibly a new job—not necessarily in that order. And to think, I’d been running a half hour early just four blocks from the college. Plenty of time to find a parking spot and still walk in fifteen minutes before I was supposed to meet him, showing Professor Punctuality that I could be on time. But then…a blowout. A loud boom followed by a long whoosh. I tried to ignore it and kept on driving, but eventually the repeated flopping and tug of my car to the right made me pull over.

It sucked. But I had time, and my ex-roommate, ex-whatever he was for a little while, Davis, had taught me how to change a tire. All was good...at first. I whipped out my jack, lifted the car like a pro, and went to work on the flat. Everything was moving along nicely until I got to the very last lug nut. The damn thing was stuck. Really stuck. At one point, since the lug nut was at the three o’clock position, I had the wrench on it and used my foot to try to bear down—it still wouldn’t budge. Then I had the bright idea that maybe I should put all of my weight on it. So I jumped up on to the long handle of the lug-nut wrench, hoping the sudden force would pry the sucker loose. But instead, the wrench slipped off and somehow snapped back to smack me right in the shin.

Now I was twenty minutes late, my leg was killing me, and I’d just limped to school in ninety-degree heat, smelling like tire grease. My only hope was that maybe Professor West had also gotten a flat and was late himself. It was a long shot, but I had to hold on to something in order to keep from having a total breakdown as I rushed through the hallways.

Arriving at the lecture hall, I peeked in before opening the door. Of course, Professor West was sitting at his desk.

I took a deep breath and went inside to face the wrath.

“Before you say anything—I was a half hour early. I swear.”

He’d been writing in a planner, and when his head came up, I saw he was wearing glasses for the first time. Damn. They make him even sexier. Was I insane for even finding his scowl kind of hot?

“And what happened today, Ms. Martin? Did you get distracted somewhere between parking illegally a half hour ago and finding my classroom? Stop to play in the dirt, perhaps?”

“What?”

He looked me up and down. “You have dirt all over your face and clothes.”

My hand rose to my face, where I began to rub at my cheek. “Oh. This isn’t dirt. It’s grease.”

“That makes it much better.”

“I got a flat tire on the way over here.” I had no idea where the dirt was on my face, but I was nervous and rubbed at random spots all over as I spoke. “The lug nut was stuck, and I couldn’t get it off. I tried to—”

“Ms. Martin,” he interrupted. “Stop doing that.”

“But it’s true. I really tried to get here early. I built in all this extra time and then boom—a flat tire. It wasn’t my fault this time.”