“Well, you’ve aced pull in parking and parallel parking, and you’ve got backing up down. The next thing to do is to actually drive on the road. You up for that?” I suggested.
Izzy swallowed hard, looking around nervously.
“Sure!” she squeaked.
I started to chuckle.
“Alrighty, then.” I gestured to the open road. “Drive me somewhere, darlin’.”
So, she did.
A lot of somewheres.
She drove for so long that she even got her first gas pumping lesson, too.
And, an hour and a half later, I was dying of starvation and confident that she would definitely be able to pass her driver’s test with flying colors.
Just when I was about to suggest we go grab some dinner, we passed a cop car that was on the side of the road behind a white sign.
Automatically I looked at Izzy’s speed, rolling my eyes when I saw that she was going one under the speed limit.
Typical new driver.
My eyes went to the rearview mirror, and I winced when I saw the cop turn his lights on and pull a bitch, turning around to come up behind our truck.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“What?” Izzy asked, looking at me with a frantic glance back at the road.
“Cop,” I said, jabbing my finger over my shoulder. “He’s pulling you over.”
She gasped. “Oh, shit! I don’t have a license, Rome!”
“You still gotta pull over, honey,” I pointed out, feeling for her.
The first time I was pulled over, I’d been nervous as hell. I almost threw up on the cop’s shoes, too. I had a baggie of weed in my pocket, and I was so goddamn sure he’d know just from the look on my face.
Luckily, though, I just got a warning, and he let me go.
When I got home, I promptly threw the weed away, thankful that I’d been too scared to even try it. It was a good thing, too, because the following week, I was randomly drug tested for athletics. I was thanking God and that cop for pulling me over and scaring the shit out of me.
Tyler had looked at me wide-eyed once I got back, sure that I’d smoked the stuff he told me not to even get, but I set him straight by explaining what had happened. We took that as the sign it surely was that we should never go around that crap again.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she chanted over and over again as she pulled my truck to the side of the road. “Oh God, oh God.”
Once she had the truck pulled safely to the side of the road, she shut it off and put her hands up.
I would’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so distraught.
“Put your hands down, honey.” I controlled the laughter. “He’s not going to arrest you.”
She looked at me like she didn’t believe me, but she did as I’d ordered, putting her hands in her lap and chewing on her lip nervously.
I let the laughter I’d been holding back fly when I saw it was Wade getting out of the car.
She looked at me with wide eyes, not yet having seen who it was that was pulling her over.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hissed at me, staring at me like I’d grown a second head.
While her eyes were on me, Wade had made it to her window.
I rolled my eyes at him when he lifted one knuckle and knocked softly.
Izzy jumped and whipped her head around.
The second she realized that it was Wade her shoulders slumped and she dropped her forehead down on the steering wheel.
“Roll the window down.” I poked her.
She ignored me, so I reached over her and did it myself, or at least tried to. I couldn’t get around her, so I gestured for Wade to come to my side and rolled my own window down.
“You’re such a douchebag,” I chuckled.
Wade’s smile was unapologetic.
“We got an anonymous call that there was an erratic driver in a vehicle with a similar description as this one.” Wade paused, eyes glancing over at the woman on the opposite side of me. “You weren’t driving erratically, were you?”
Izzy’s eyes were big on her face as she stared wide-eyed at Wade.
She blinked at him in confusion. “I haven’t even gone over forty yet!”
As if there were some magic number that meant she couldn’t possibly have been driving erratically since she hadn’t gone over that speed.
This girl.
Wade started to laugh.
“You do have a taillight out, though,” Wade pointed out.
“Bullshit,” I said. “This is a brand-new truck.”
He gestured to the back. “Come and see. There’s a crack in the tail light, too.”
We all climbed out of the truck and went to the back, Izzy stopping closest to the side of the road as all three of us crowded around the cracked tail light.
“It looks like someone took a bat to it,” Wade said, looking down at Izzy. “You didn’t do that did you, Izzy?”