Page 8 of Husband Material
Despite the situation, I found myself smirking. "Folly Beach, yeah."
I made up my mind.
Before I could think about it, I grabbed my surfboard and swept her up in my arms. There was a second or two of a communal balancing act—but she ended up higher in my arms, and my Hypto Krypto in hers. It would work.
"What are you doing?"
"Taking you to my house. The hospital is a good thirty minutes away, and even if you just want to go to a drugstore, that's a twenty-minute walk. My house is about five."
Giselle relaxed in my arms. "All righty then." She peeled her eyes away from the reds and pinks the setting sun was flinging into the sky and aimed a testy look up to me. "Promise me you are not an absurdly attractive axe murderer?"Absurdly attractive axe murderer? Where have you come from, Giselle?
I gave her a small squeeze. "Promise."
Our eyes locked together.
Adrenaline flowed through my veins as we returned to her notebook underneath the palm tree. We gathered up everything a second time between us, and I carried her to my beach house.
Except this time as I walked, "absurdly attractiveaxe murderer" ran through my head like an addictive sort of tongue twister.
And she is an alluring, French beach fairy.
3
“So, we have pink, blue, or regular old white."
At the kitchen table with her injured foot propped up on a dinner plate, Giselle tilted her head at me quizzically.
"Bandages," I said, holding up the three cloths.
I left it at that. I wasn't going to explain how my ex was the reason I had pink and blue cloth bandages in the first aid kit. She was a smart girl, and had probably already it figured out anyway in the time it took me throw on jeans and T-shirt. Even though I loathed the feel of salty skin under clothes, I’d shower later. Right now, I had a beautiful woman in pain to tend to. She crinkled her nose at me and said, "What the hell, I choose pink."
After inspecting and cleaning her cut, the injury didn't look quite as bad as I'd originally thought, so a simple wrapping over some antibacterial would probably best do the job. If her toe was broken, then time was the only thing to heal it. Thankfully it wasn't her big toe that had taken the blow against the rock. I could feel her eyes on me as I worked, so I looked up and gavehera smile. She'd given me so many.Smiles.In a short time, I'd become rather addicted to Giselle's smiles. I didn't have a lot of experience with smiling women—any really—but I knew enough to understand that I liked them from her. A whole fucking lot.
"What?" she asked.
"Your English." I made the final wrap-around before tucking the excess pink fabric in. "How'd you learn to speak English so well?"
"Oh that," she said sweeping out her hand. "I was just a nerd, I suppose. Ever since I was small, my dream was to see with my own eyes the America I'd read about in my textbooks and seen in the movies. The America with the mint-green goddess of Liberty, the delicious apple pie, and where everyone was so loud and wild andraw. So, in class I was one of the few ones who paid attention and studied on my own. And so"—she cracked a smile—"here I am."
"Is it what you expected?"
Her head shake was decisive. "Nope."
But that still hadn't told me what I really wanted to know. "Why here, though? Charleston, hell—or even South Carolina for that matter—isn't exactly on most foreign traveler's top ten."
"I already did check out New York City and Los Angeles." She made a quick sequence of finger tapping, from her thumb to her pinky, as if that was how fast her trip had gone by. "Anyway, I ran out of money and was tired of all the city, city, cities. I wanted somewhere more quiet…on a beach. Like Cannes in France, but small."
"You choose well then. Guess your English lessons paid off."
Her eyes lit up with mischief. "Not exactly. Our English classes themselves were trash—all Disney movies, and mocking whatever the teacher said to us. It was more my stubborn pigheadedness, as my père used to say, that got me anywhere, and studying at home with Brynne, an American university student who lived with us in Paris. I did my lessons with her. Things like that."
I nodded. "The French classes at the private school I went to were pretty much trash too. I mean, don't get me wrong, the teachers really tried. But I think it's like you said, most of us kids just weren't interested. My French exam in the twelfth grade was passed by the slimmest of margins—sixty-one percent and only by writingDr. & Mrs. Vandertrampon my frog eraser."
Giselle stuck out her bottom lip at me in a pout. "Alors tu ne peux pas parler à moi?"
My blank stare probably said it all, as my dismal years of primary French failed to comprehend what she'd said. "Uh, bonjour?"
Giselle threw her head back and laughed, the deep rumble making her body shake all the way from the long length of her dark golden hair down to her delicate tan feet. After few seconds, she paused. Sticking up the big pink mummified creation that was her middle toe, she wiggled it, and laughed some more. "It is like a big pink marshmallow."
