Page 2 of Love You Truly

The rogue wheel cuts too close to the end of the aisle, where an unfortunate pyramid of glass jars is stacked five feet high. Well, it was…

I abandon my cart as hers craters into the jars, and she goes with it. Her heels have no chance of digging in and stopping the cart on the slick supermarket floor, so she slides along like a kite surfer in a tornado.

The cart hits the display so hard that it forces a rebound effect, throwing her backward just as I reach her and put my hands out like it’s fourth down and I’m alone in the end zone.

If it were a football game, I’d be the hero. In this case, I’m more like a punching bag, losing my own footing in a sea of pale green pickle juice seeping from dozens of broken jars.

“Whoa…!” she yells, punctuating my string of curses.

The air reeks of vinegar as both of us slip backward, me holding her against my chest and throwing one hand down in an attempt to break our fall. More pickle juice greets my hand, which slips, dropping me to my back. My arm encircles the waist of the woman as her full weight lands with me on the floor.

Then, an eerie, still silence.

It takes a couple of moments before other shoppers appear, observing us down their noses like we’re odd specimens who don’t know how to grocery shop properly. “You guys okay?” A woman in a gray puffer coat down to her knees looks over her small round glasses and tilts her head to the side.

Since I’m pretty certain I took the brunt of our fall, I feel confident that the woman on top of me is probably okay.

“Yup. Fine. Clean up on aisle seven,” I say, forcing levity into my tone when I’m halfway certain I’ve broken a rib. The other shoppers move around our two-cart pileup and go on with their days, and I do my best to push up from the floor with one hand.

However, the pickle juice has its way, and I slide sideways before righting myself. Meanwhile, the woman splayed on top of me wriggles out of my grip, but her heels slide in the pickle juice, and she has no luck separating her body from mine.

I have enough wherewithal to appreciate the warm feeling of her form against mine, the softness of her sweater under my hand, and the scent of jasmine, which I now realize is coming from her hair. Long tendrils dance across my face as she fails to push away.

Finally, I muscle my way to standing, holding tight to her body so she rises from the floor along with me. She’s stiff against my rib cage, and her feet pedal against the floor as she struggles to stand on her own.

“I have it,” she bites out right before slipping and almost taking both of us back down again. I hold on tight, bracing an elbow against a display of paper towels, which stays in place under my weight.

“Not quite, you don’t.” I push away from the towels and test my footing on the slippery floor. I feel steady, but I quickly realize I’m bracing this woman across the swell of her breasts. A part of me knows I need to move my hand—and quickly—lest she think I’m trying to grope her.

When she finally stops fidgeting in my grasp, she looks down at where my hand still grips her securely. I move it away gingerly, testing her steadiness before I take a step backward. I feel a whoosh of refrigerated air between us and fight the urge to pull her back against my chest.

“Sorry. You okay?”

She nods. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I’m not a caveman, and I’ve never had a problem finding women to date. I’m not bragging. If anything, I wish my reputation as a ladies’ man wasn’t tattooed quite so insistently across my face.

“Once a man-slut, always a man-slut,” Lucas says as women sidle up to me. I nod and fist-bump him like we’re in on the same joke, an old habit. My friends seem to expect nothing less from me.

I’d like to be about as far from a man-slut as a guy can get, but old reputations die hard, and people see what they want to see.

Just to punctuate the moment, a jar of sweet baby dills teeters on what’s left of the display, rolls off the top of the jar below it, and smashes on the ground a few feet away. Glass shards explode in all directions.

The woman sighs and turns around and surveys the damage around us—a dozen or so smashed pickle jars, tiny gherkins, and dill slices as far as the eye can see, and the pervasive smell of dill and vinegar. “Bet you didn’t expect to become a human pickle when you came here tonight,” she bites out.

But all I can think is that I know this woman. In fact, I’ve sort of known Mallory Rutherford half my life.

The fact that we’ve barely ever spoken is merely incidental. She was in the same grade as my older sister Beatrix, and I quietly worshipped her beauty like the testosterone-charged younger brother I was. Then, a few years ago, she had a brief fling with my brother. If I ever had any thoughts about asking her out, they died with the eye-rolling tales of what a nightmare she was.

It takes another few seconds for her eyes to sweep from the mess to my face, and I see the jolt of recognition halfway through her next sentence. “You landed hard—are you hurt?”

Her eyes go wide. “Dash.”

“Mallory.”

It didn’t occur to me that the woman careening down the aisle a few minutes earlier was Mallory Rutherford because why would Mallory Rutherford be commandeering a stuffed shopping cart in high heels on a Wednesday night? Doesn’t she have some expensive wine industry gala to attend where she can tease some poor vineyard owner into thinking she’ll sell him a few acres from her family’s sprawling lots?

Mallory Rutherford is a social butterfly, the daughter of land owners on the other end of Napa Valley, and arm candy to any man with a big enough pocketbook. As I said, I barely know her, so her reputation is all I have to go on, whether it’s accurate or not.

---