He didn't recognize the purple-inked handwriting on the note he'd plucked from beneath his windshield wiper. Maybe his eyes were whacked from staring at computer code all day. So he blinked again, and again, and saw only the same few words in the tiny and most likely female script: "I heart your car." A black cloud descended over his thoughts as he shook his head and crushed the slip of paper in one pale fist. More jokes. He drove a beat-to-crap Honda Civic that wasn't even born in this century, hardly the stuff that inspires women to verb a perfectly good noun like "heart." And if this writer of purple prose knew who owned the car? Yeah. Game over. He saw how they reacted to him. Women whispered when he walked past, gave him a wide berth in the hallways, as if afraid they'd catch something. A computer virus. Nobody wanted to talk to the dorky code guy. He wasn't all smooth and sexy like the dudes in advertising or sales. No. He sat in the basement under the fluorescent lights and drank cold coffee and wore Spiderman socks.
Maybe he should rethink the socks.
He tossed the crumpled note on the back seat of his car.
When he turned, a girl was standing there. He jumped, and pressed a hand to his heart, which from her sudden materialization, had started to verb.
"Sorry," she said, the left side of her mouth lifting for a second. "I didn't mean to scare you."
She was pretty. Her hair was long and dark and neatly parted on the side. Her glasses sat crookedly on the bridge of her nose, and he couldn't explain his desire to straighten them. He opened his mouth to say something hopefully clever, maybe to ask her name or if she was new because he'd never seen her before, but his mind felt like a giant intersection, all the strings of words confused as to which had the right of way.
She gestured to his car and said, "I have the same one."
That explained the note. He looked up, across the neat rows of parked vehicles, and as if to assist him, she pointed. "I keep thinking I should get something newer," she said. "But then I'd have to find new bumper stickers, and I don't know that they make any like that anymore."
She kept talking, something more about her car, but he had followed the line of her finger. One of the stickers read, "I'd rather be watching Firefly."
And then he smiled, and his heart really started to verb.
