Read Online Rhymes With Cupid by Anna Humphrey - Free Book Online

lesson that afternoon. In fact, there was no parallel parking at all. He did make me drive one exit on the highway (something that made my pulse race even faster than parking), but even that wasn’t completely disastrous. I must have checked my blind spot ten times, but somehow I managed to merge before the dotted lines on the road ran out.
    It also kind of helped that, as soon as we got in the car, Patrick took a CD out of the glove box and slid it into the player. “Surely Sarah,” he said as the music started. It was kind of mellow, with a lot of guitar and hardly any drums. “Do you know them?”
    I shook my head. When I’d been dating Matt, he’d taken me to a few heavy metal concerts. The singers were always dressed in black. They wore silver chains hanging from their pockets, jumped up and down, and shouted a lot. For some reason, I’d felt like I had to pretend that I thought it was totally hardcore and awesome. But I was really more into classic rock. Stuff like Van Morrison and the Doors, which my uncle Tom (who played the bass in an amateur, old-guy rock band) had introduced me to. Besides that, the only thing I really listened to (and not by choice) was the soft rock, seventy-percent-Céline-Dion radio station my mom always had on.
    “You should give them a try,” Patrick said, turning up the volume. “I think you’d really like them.” To my surprise, I did like them. The melody was pretty, and kind of catchy and, without even realizing what I was doing, I released my death grip on the steering wheel and started drumming my fingers along to the music. By the time we were done with the lesson, I was so relaxed that I actually made the left-hand turn onto our street (across two lanes of traffic) without any cars honking their horns at me from behind for taking too long.
    It would have been a not-so-bad lesson all around, actually, if Patrick hadn’t wanted me to practice backing into his grandfather’s driveway. “It’s pretty easy. Line the rear bumper up with the edge of the driveway,” he instructed.
    I’ll admit: I knew my wheels were crooked, but I was hungry. My mom always made a roast chicken after she grocery shopped on Saturdays, and I could practically taste it already, so I didn’t bother pulling forward to fix them. Twisting my body around to see over my shoulder, I hit the gas pedal and came into the driveway at a 45-degree angle, landing the front wheels in the garden between our houses and slamming on the brakes with the back bumper sitting about two feet from Patrick’s garage. It maybe wouldn’t have mattered, except for the crunching sound we heard as I backed up. An innocent shrub in Patrick’s side of the front garden had obviously paid the price for my impatience.
    “Oh God,” I said, getting out of the car to examine the flattened collection of twigs. “I’m so sorry. I’ll buy your grandfather a new one as soon as the garden center opens, I promise.”
    Patrick drew in a breath as he crouched down and gently lifted one of the crushed branches. He let it drop into the snow again. “Thanks, but I don’t think this one can be replaced. It’s a blossoming Japanese cherry bush. They’re kind of rare.”
    I felt like I was going to cry. Leave it to me to run over the most rare and beautiful bush on the entire block. “Well, maybe I can order one off the internet, or something. Somebody must import them. I’ll find one. I swear. I told you I sucked at backing in.” I looked at the mangled mass of twigs again and sighed. This clearly wasn’t Patrick’s fault. “God, I’m an idiot. I knew I didn’t have the right angle. I should have pulled forward and straightened out the wheels, but I was in a rush. I’m really, really sorry.”
    Patrick stood up, a smile breaking across his face as he laid a hand on my coat sleeve. “Elyse, relax. I was kidding,” he confessed. “But, by the way, you’re right. You just needed to pull forward a bit to straighten your