I was about halfway to the school when I felt the car veer slightly to the right and then quickly back the other way. It was almost funny. What an odd little jerk. I started to laugh and then the reality sank in. My heart dropped to my stomach for a moment when the thought that I was getting a flat raced through my head. But the car seemed fine. Everything was still working and I was rolling down the road.
Then I began to notice that one side of the car seemed a little bit higher than the other one. While I pondered how strange that was, I began to hear the flapping sounds of a flat tire slapping against the pavement.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” I groaned as I pounded the wheel hard with my palm, which now began to throb.
“Dammit!”
Ignoring my throbbing hand, I searched for a good place to pull over. I was tempted to try to drive it another mile and a half to the school, but I did not need the additional financial burden of replacing rims. It would have made a bad situation much worse.
I pulled to the side of the road and got out to survey the damage. My driver’s side rear tire was completely flat. Bending down to take a closer look I could clearly see a screw sticking out of the rear side of the tire.
“How the hell did this happen?” I asked.
I threw my hands up in the air and fought the urge to shout all of the expletives I could think of to the Heavens. Why was this happening to me? Now of all days? I was going to be late to work. I’d changed a tire only once in my life and it had been in high school. My father thought it a good idea that I know how to do this and forced me to learn.
Of course the thing with skills like that is if you only ever do it the one time then ten years later you almost forget how.
Not to mention I was going to show up at the school covered in grease and dirt. I didn’t think that the four-year-olds would mind much, but it would bother me the whole day.
I opened the trunk and retrieved the jack. Then I opened up the compartment that housed the spare tire and hoisted it out on to the road to check if it had air. To my surprise, it was not bad.
I quickly proceeded to jack up the car. When it was at the appropriate height I grabbed the lug wrench and started to loosen the bolts.
This was when I ran into issues. They would not budge. They seemed to be welded on and no matter how hard I tried, nothing happened. I tried to turn the wrench with everything I had, but eventually I had to face the fact that it was no use.
“Damn!” I shouted.
I stepped back to reassess the situation and catch my breath. I remembered how to change the tire and I had a spare, but I could not get the flat tire off the car.
There was only one option left for me. I had to get help. Great. This was going to waste so much more time…
I grabbed my phone and started to dial AAA. That was when I noticed him walking towards me. Where had he come from? I hadn’t even heard anyone else pull up behind my car. I guess I was too involved with fighting with those lug nuts.
The man striding towards me was tall, slender but muscular, and very clean cut, although his hair was styled in a bit of a unique way. I hadn’t really seen it before, but it suited him. His hair was short everywhere except the front. That was very long, half of it draped back over and the other half sticking up, as if frozen in place with a mountain of hair spray.
But as captivating as his hair was, it was nothing compared to his hypnotic, blue eyes. They accentuated his gorgeous, kissable lips perfectly.
“Are you having some trouble?”
His voice was deep, but friendly. I thought I detected a bit of a southern twang to his drawl. I wondered exactly where he was from. East Texas perhaps?
“Um, yeah. It seems that my flat won’t come off. I gave it all I had and those lug nuts just wouldn’t budge.”
He smiled. “Being stubborn, huh? Yeah, that happens a lot. There’s been more times than I could count when I thought I would never get them off there. Trust me though, when you are working on them and they don’t feel like their budging, they are. You just have to trust the process.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said. He spoke slowly and deliberately as if he was explaining something very complicated to a small child. I didn’t take offense to it though; he just did not seem to be trying to be offensive in any way. It was probably just the way people talked wherever he was from, which I was dying to ask him. But patience. First I had to get rid of this tire issue.