Love and Lists
Page 34

Gavin gets out of his car and walks up to me with a smile. “Flat tire, huh?”
Shit. He already knows. Time to distract him.
“Hey there, handsome. I could use a little help pumping myself back up,” I tell him in my best Marilyn Monroe voice.
Gavin looks at me quizzically. “Are you getting sick? You’re voice sounds funny.”
Fucking Rocco.
Clearing my throat, I turn away from him and walk up to the front tire. “I don’t know what happened. I was driving home when all of a sudden I had a hard time steering. My car was swerving all over the place. I was so scared.”
Gavin glances down at the tire, then back up at me and doesn’t say a word.
Son of a bitch! Do cars lose control when they get a flat tire?? I should have googled it.
“Aww, you’re okay now. It’s totally normal. Cars always do that with a flat tire,” Gavin tells me.
Oh thank God.
“So, do you want a lift home or something?” he asks.
“Uh, I kind of thought you could just change the tire,” I tell him.
Gavin nods his head. “Right, right. Change the tire. I can totally do that.”
He turns and walks around me, opening up the door to the backseat and sticking his head in.
“What are you doing?”
Pulling his head back out, he turns and looks at me. “Changing the tire.”
“I think the stuff’s in the trunk,” I tell him in confusion.
He laughs awkwardly and slams the door closed. “Oh, yeah. I totally knew that. I was just checking to make sure you didn’t do any damage … to the … backseat and stuff.”
While he quickly walks to the trunk, I reach in through the driver’s side window and hit the trunk release button. Moving to the back of the car, I see him standing there just staring into the trunk.
“Everything is under that floor mat,” I tell him, pointing to the middle of the trunk.
“I know. I was just … um … assessing the situation. Thinking about my plan of attack,” he replies, reaching into the trunk and flipping back the mat.
I watch as he leans in and grabs the tire iron, flipping it up in the air casually as he turns and smiles at me. He reaches his arm out to catch it as it comes back down, but instead of catching it, he smacks his hand against it and the thing goes flying out into the middle of the road. His smile falls and he races over to quickly pick it up.
With his head down and the tire iron clutched tightly to his chest, he walks right by me and up to the tire. I’m pretty sure he’s trying to look cool, and I am not about to call him out on it since I stuck a f**king butcher knife into my tire to get him here.
Squatting down on his knees next to the tire, he attaches one end of the iron to a nut and starts to turn it.
“Um, you need to jack the car up first,” I remind him.
“I know that. I always loosen the screws first.”
“They’re called lug nuts.”
“Well, where I come from, we call them screws.”
“We both come from Ohio. I’m pretty sure they call them lug nuts everywhere,” I say with a laugh.
“Are you trying to tell me how to change a tire? I know how to change a tire,” he complains with a huff, grunting as he puts all of his muscle into trying to loosen the nut.
Oh my God. He doesn’t know how to change a tire.
“You don’t know how to change a tire,” I mutter.
Shit! Rocco is going to kill me. This is so not going to make Gavin feel like a man. I need to shut the f**k up.
Gavin drops the tire iron to the ground with a clang and stands up, stalking over to me.
“I totally know how to change a tire,” he argues, as we stand toe-to-toe.
“Fine. What’s the part on the tire where the air goes?” I question.
He purses his lips and stares down at me. “It’s an air-tube-put-inner-thing.”
It’s kind of cute that he’s trying to act like he knows what he’s talking about. But it’s also a little irritating. I have a flat tire and he was supposed to be the big man and fix it for me so he could feel better about what happened the other night. My dad taught me when I was five how to change a tire.
“Actually, it’s a valve stem,” I tell him with a smile.
“Whatever! It has nothing to do with changing the actual tire so who cares?!” he complains.
“I can’t believe you don’t know how to change a tire. You’re a guy and you have a penis. You should have been born knowing how to change a tire!”
Gavin puts his hands on his hips and glares at me. “Yeah, well you’re a girl and you have a vagina. Does that mean you can waltz over to that field over there, squat down, and pop out a baby?”
The way we’re arguing reminds me of when we were little. We haven’t done this in a long time. It always pissed me off when I was young. Now it turns me on. Gavin is so hot standing here in front of me on the side of a deserted road. My eyes move away from his, and I find myself staring at his lips.
I open my mouth to fire off a smart-ass reply to his vagina comment when I’m suddenly pulled up against him and his mouth crashes down to mine.
Maybe this whole flat tire thing actually worked.
Chapter 16 – Children of the Corn
Gavin ends the kiss before I’m ready for it to be finished and pulls away from me. He opens up the back seat of the car and jerks his head. “Get in.”
I don’t even hesitate. I have no idea why I’m getting in the back seat of my car, and I don’t care as long as it involves more kissing. Quickly crawling into the car, I turn around to find Gavin getting in beside me. I grab onto the front of his shirt as he slams the door closed behind him and pull him against me, our mouths colliding so hard that our teeth clank together.