Never Say Forever

There’s only one thing I can do. I’ll just have to rescue myself.

I angle my gaze up the sharp incline ahead, the mountainous terrain craggy and grey. Between me and the summit, an ancient-looking village full of ochre-coloured buildings seems to cling to the mountainside, the landscape between here and there dotted with black and white goats. While the road down would undoubtedly be easier, I didn’t see a garage as I passed through. Meanwhile, I had spotted a sign for the same pointing up ahead. It’s a strange place to have a garage, and maybe the workshop won’t be open, but at least it’ll have a phone.

Medieval-era villages have phones these days, right?

I sigh. Whichever way I go, it’s going to take me forever to reach civilisation in these heels. Heels that, as I take a step backwards to pull open the car door, twist from the thin ankle strap and snap at the heel.

And there goes my Zen . . .

“What in the blueberry fuck muffins is my life right now!” My shoulders slump, and with a strangled sob, I drop my hands and head to the little Fiat’s roof. If there ever was a time that God, the Universe, and the goddess that is Mother Nature would forgive a little profanity, surely that point would be finding myself lost, stuck halfway up the mountain with a flat tyre and a dead phone while wearing a summer party dress and pretty yet broken spindly heels.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck nuggets!” I punctuate my profanity against Fred’s baby blue roof with my curled fist before deciding this just isn’t doing my feelings justice.

Feelings. So many feelings. And most of them murderous.

“Charles, you little buttmunch!” I jack-knife straight and begin to yell through Fred’s open window as though Charles can hear me through my broken phone. “When I get my hands on you, I’m going to strangle you with your Gucci belt!”

In a better frame of mind, I might’ve judged the road to be quiet enough to have my little meltdown in private because it doesn’t seem to be the kind of road that has a lot of hitchhiking prospects, even if I were a less cautious kind of girl. But I’m not really in the emotional headspace for thinking due to the large levels of angry I’m currently brewing. I stomp on the sandy rubble beneath my feet, wobbling heel and all, just a shopping cart and a quart of tequila away from crazy lady territory as I continue to yell.

“That’s your new belt, Charlie boy, the one I secretly think is really, really ugly, and gayer than jizz on a handlebar moustache! Your patron saint”—Cher—“would excommunicate you for wearing that particular colour of snakeskin you rotten, selfish, pain in my—”

“Is it pink?”

“Pussy!” I whip around at the interruption, not quite able to stop my tirade. “Is what pink?” The word is immediately followed by my raised hand and the much more sensible, “Please don’t answer that.”

Despite my request, he does so anyway. And in English, because that’s the kind of day I’m having. In the middle of the French countryside, would it have been too much to ask that an actual Frenchman would’ve thought to interrupt my mini-meltdown? A non-English-speaking Frenchman, preferably.

“The belt.” His voice is deep and amused, his accent, I realise, American. Because of the way the sun is beginning to set behind him, I can’t make out much more of him other than to say he’s tall. “The other, a gentleman would never refer to,” he adds.

I snort inelegantly. “Gentlemen? They died out with the dinosaurs, didn’t they?” It’s hard not to be bitter, not just about Charles but also my missed afternoon drinks. The very same drinks my friends put together to cheer me up after I was unceremoniously dumped last month. Though dumped isn’t really the right way to describe the new man in your life disappearing like a puff of smoke. So you could say I’m completely off men at the minute, gay, straight, or mother-fluffin’ otherwise.

“I’ll refrain from suggesting you’ve been hanging around with the wrong kind of men.” The confident note in his tone makes it sound as though he’s doing exactly that. Confident, deep, and a tiny bit amused as he takes a couple of steps closer. “Manners aren’t a fashion statement,” he adds, swiping up the wrench I’d flung down in frustration after realising the spare was gone. “A gentleman knows his actions say more about him than his words.”

Ooh, an action man, my mind unhelpfully intones. Probably a rich one, too.

Because only the rich have this kind of confidence, I’ve found. I don’t need to glance at the car behind him to know the man is wealthy. And while I’d ordinarily steer clear of rich men—because they tend to think very highly of themselves, on a largely groundless basis—I take a moment to remind myself that this stranger didn’t have to stop for the crazy lady talking to herself by the side of the road.