Page 4 of Lovesick
I’ll give the driver a piece of my mind…If I was going to catch it later from my mother, this driver was going to get some shit from me!
Chapter Three
Maggie
Seriously?
I just sat there for a moment, holding the steering wheel in both hands in shock.What happened?Oh,some idiot delivery driver had decided to turn left without…Well, without using a single brain cell. How had he not seen me coming?
Great! Now I would be even later. Even later? Too late. The police would be busy with road closures and directing the parade traffic. There was no way they would take less than thirty minutes to an hour to respond to a call about a minor fender bender. That was if it was minor… I couldn’t see what the front of my blue Honda Civic looked like from here. It could have been completely destroyed by the bigger, heavier, higher fender of the florist van, for all I knew.
Irritation surged through me and left a pit in my chest. So much for my long-awaited break and time with my family.
I pulled the door handle and smacked it open. The action hurt my wrist but it helped relieve my growing annoyance, so I ignored the discomfort. I stalked around the front of my car and glanced at it, but I didn’t take in whatever damage was or wasn’t there because I heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the concrete next to the driver side of the van.
“How did you not see me?” I demanded angrily, tearing my eyes away from my car and fashioning my face into an icy glare. “I was…”
I had expected the driver to be a total stranger. He wasn’t. In fact, he was someone I had once known well - very well.
“Marty?” Any words I had ever known about cars, cops or insurance fled my mind.
Marty LaFleur stood with one hand on the door of the florist delivery van with the name of his family’s business on the side, stuck in his tracks with surprise. “Maggie? Wow, it’s been ages. I didn’t know you were in town.”
I knew Marty was in town, though. He had lived here his whole life, working in the nursery and flower shop business owned by his parents. And in our senior year of high school, we had spent one short summer of our lives dating. It hadn’t lasted. Marty had known he would one day inherit the florist business, so college had never been on his horizon. And for me, well… I had been determined to become a nurse and enrolled in Tulane University and hadn’t seen him since.
“Yeah, I come back every year to watch the parade with my mom and grandma,” I told him. I didn’t tell him that I had also made it a tradition to ask about Marty when I came home for Mardi Gras. Even though we would never have had a future together, I still cared about him, and I wanted only the best for him. A two years ago, my mother had told me that Marty had married, and I had been a little regretful - but mostly happy for him.
“We should move,” Marty said, glancing around to see a car waiting to get by, the driver not-so-impatiently waiting for us to move while he craned his neck curiously and eyed the crash. “How about those free spots over there? We can check out the vehicles then.”
“Sure.” Once they were out of the way, we stood on the grass between the parking lot and the road to look at them from the front. My car looked mostly okay - there were a couple of long scrapes in the plastic on the fender, but nothing too bad. When the two vehicles collided, it had pushed the bumper back against the blue paint around where the front right wheel was situated, but my car was pretty far from new and had a lot of scratches anyway.
The fender of Marty’s van was bent slightly with a couple of scrapes as well, but again, the damage was only cosmetic and we weren’t hurt.
“Yeah. Mostly just a couple scratches.” We shifted to looking at his truck, and I watched his movements closely, but he didn’t seem to be drunk - and I had seen him drunk before back in our high school days. Who cared if he’d had a beer or two? Beer wasn’t strong, and it was Mardi Gras. Who in Louisiana hadn’t had a drink today? “I’m willing to let it slide,” I decided magnanimously.
“Okay, whoa.” Marty leaned against the hood of his van and leveled an eye at me. “This was your fault.”
“Was not!” I protested, although not angrily. “You turned left into me.”
“You didn’t stop at the stop sign.” I followed his pointing finger to a very red sign with STOP in large white letters that was definitely a stop sign. “You’re supposed to stop. I turned because I figured you would.”
I wondered if my naturally pale face was as red as that sign yet. I hadn’t even seen it, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a stop sign there. “Uh…whoops?” I offered as a sort of apology and admittance of guilt.
“Don’t worry about it.” His smile lit up his brown eyes and reassured me. “Because I’m also willing to let it slide. It would probably take the cops forever to get here, and I have a delivery to make, and you have a parade to see. Which is probably starting soon?”
Very, very soon - maybe even right now - but…I hadn’t seen Marty in so long. His chocolate eyes looked serious until he smiled, and that same short beard and mustache covered his jaw and upper lip, although any awkward patches of boyish scruff had filled out since high school. He looked the same, but…better. Incredible, was more like it. He had always been sporty and naturally muscular, but now…looking at his biceps made me want to lick my lips. And… “You got a tattoo?”
“Several, in fact.” I hadn’t expected him to pull up his sleeves and show them to me, and I had to blink once or twice to focus on the ink and not the muscles underneath it. “Gotta keep them under the shirt when I work, though. The old ladies like the dye in the flowers, but not so much the dye on the owner’s son.”
“How’s your mom, by the way?” I asked, eager to prolong the conversation despite the fact that my own mother was probably waiting impatiently.
“She’s great,” Marty told me. “Both shops have been doing well. She’s busy, as always.”
“And how’ve you been? And your wife?” I added to be polite, even though I didn’t really want to be reminded that this man I had once dated and liked so much was married now.
“Oh, uh… we got a divorce. I think she lives in Indiana… or somewhere around there.”
Suddenly, it felt okay to stare at the tempting bit of chest hair just visible over his V-neck work shirt. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. Sorry about him splitting up with a woman I had never met? Not exactly. But I was sorry for whatever put that quiet melancholy behind his eyes and melted that smile off his face. “Why?”
