He felt uncharacteristically nervous as he drove to fetch Doris. That may have had something to do with the fact that he’d woken up at 4:30 after having a terribly graphic and detailed sex dream about her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a sex dream—maybe not even since he was a teenager. But there you have it! He’d had one, and it had been very inconvenient and terribly inappropriate and, and . . .
Hot!
His nervousness peaked when he pulled up to her apartment and found her sitting on the pavement waiting for him. She was a vision of particularly ugly clothing today. She was wearing some strange purple ruffled blouse which was, he was sorry to say . . .hideous. Just awful. One of the worst items of clothing he’d seen in a long time. His mother had worn something similar in the eighties, when they were still perming their hair. At the time it had been considered very “chic,” but now, here, like this . . . no.Just no!
She stood up when she saw his car approaching. The look was completed by another pencil skirt that sat around her knees, and the cherry on top was the cracked pair of cat’s eye glasses. He sighed. How the hell was he supposed to takethatwith him to a meeting? And he had a very important meeting with the shareholders and board today. He did have a dress code at his office. It was corporate,not eighties fondue party. It’s not like he was expecting a YSL corporate dress suit, he just wasn’t expecting purple . . .and were those shoulder pads?
“Hi!” She climbed into the car and his body involuntarily stiffened in response to her presence.
“Hi,” he mumbled back while pulling away from the kerb. And then they sat in silence again. It was not a comfortable one. They seemed to fall into these silences rather often. But of course they would, it’s not like they had anything in common to discuss. In fact, Doris Granger was about as common to him as an exotic bird of paradise. She didn’t fit into his life at all, and yet here she was, in his car. But as they reached the last block before his office the silence was broken with a loud,
“STOP THE CAR!!”
Ryan jumped with fright and slammed on the brakes. For what, he didn’t even know. As soon as the car had come to a stop, she jumped out and ran onto the pavement. He stared at her in total confusion. As if this person couldn’t get any stranger, she was now jumping out of moving vehicles.
“What the hell?” he muttered to himself. He put his hazard lights on and climbed out. He seemed to put his hazard lights on a lot when he was with her. Maybe that was a sign?This woman was a hazard.
As he got closer he finally saw what she was looking at. There, on the side of the road, was a wounded pigeon. Its wing was outstretched, as if it couldn’t retract it, and his first thought was that it had been hit by a car, and his next thought was that playing with wounded pigeons on the side of the road was going to make him late for work. And then, to his horror, she picked it up.
“Uh . . .” He took a step back. “You have heard of bird flu, right? Put that bird down immediately.”
“It’s injured, though,” she said.
“Well, that’s life, isn’t it? Just leave it there and let nature take its course.”
“Nature take its course?” she repeated, slowly and deliberately, with a clear smattering of anger in her voice.
“Yes,” he said, pointing back down at the pavement. “Put it down.”
“To die?” She was glaring at him.
“Well, what do you think you’re going to do with it?”
“Take it to the vet.” She looked determined. Clearly, she wasn’t joking.
“You don’t take injured pigeons to the vet!”
“Who says?”
“Um . . .” Whodidsay? “I don’t know, but I’m sure you don’t run around taking every injured bird you find to the vet.”
She glared at him with a look that could kill.
He sighed. “It’s the cycle of life, or something like that.”
But his words looked like they were doing nothing to change her mind. He clearly wasn’t going to win this. She looked so determined right now, so single-mindedly focused.
“Fine. But you can’t put it in the front of the car. Put it in the back. There’s a shoebox in there. Take the shoes out,” he conceded, very much against his will.
She smiled at him, and he felt another involuntary feeling; a slight flutter in his stomach. He quickly shut that feeling down. Immediately.
“But if I do this for you, there’s something I need you to do for me later.” He walked to the back of his car and opened the trunk.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you later. But you have to promise to agree to it now.”
“How can I agree if I don’t know what it is?”
