Providence Series Books 5-7 Read online

  “Mmhmm,” Layla replied, sounding totally relaxed and unphased. “She gets car sick.”

  I almost felt bad for him as he spluttered and hit the indicator to turn off at the gas station ahead. Lucky break, man!

  As we pulled up next to a hose, he did a quick look at the new detailing on his vehicle and started yanking at his hair.

  “There’s something not right with this one,” I whispered as we watched him tug at the handfuls of hair in his hands.

  Just then, he stormed back over and opened his door again.

  “Why didn’t you say something before she got in the back? Or when she was feeling sick?” He snapped. Always with the snapping and growling this one. On a technicality, he hadn’t told us that we could talk right now, so we didn’t. After a full minute (I Mississippi’d to see how long it would take) he dropped his head onto the frame of his door. “You’re not answering because I told you not to talk, aren’t you?” It sounded a bit like he whimpered at the end too. Obviously, we couldn’t reply because we were still banned, so again we just sat quietly.

  Spinning around, he slammed the door shut so hard that the vehicle rocked.

  “Just so you know, I’ve nicknamed him BTB- big titty baby,” I told Layla as we watched him pace back and forth as he yelled into his phone.

  “Mmhmm,” Layla replied, wincing when he tripped as he tried to talk into his phone, uncoil the water hose and walk back to us all at the same time. “I prefer CBB – crazy ball bag.”

  “Ohh, yeah. We’ll go with that one.”

  “Wanna swap?” She was already opening the door to do just that as she asked. Pouting, I got out of the opposite side of the car to where CBB was spraying the hose and walked around, digging through my purse for a pack of gum. Before I got back into the car, I used some of the water from the bottles that we’d brought with us to wash my mouth out, popped in a stick of gum, and then got into my new seat.

  The only noise in the car, was the ever present hissing and scratching from Dante, along with the sound of the spray jet cleaning the side of the car. He should consider himself lucky that all I’d had today was coffee. What if I’d had a burger? Or spaghetti? Or mac and cheese? Probably best not to think about food right now.

  Once it was clean, Coleman got in, slammed his door hard enough to rock the car again, and then pulled back onto the road without uttering a word.

  “You may now talk if it involves bodily functions,” he mumbled after a few minutes. The reason for the delay was probably how tightly clenched he had his jaws. Jesus, if he kept grinding his teeth like that, his head could explode with the friction.

  On that thought… ”Hey, do you think your head would explode if you ground your teeth enough to start a fire in your mouth?” I asked Layla as I turned to face her.

  “Is that a bodily function?” CBB snapped.

  “Well…yeah?” And it was. “Grinding your teeth is a movement made by the body due to the function of the jaws and the muscles in them. Ergo, a bodily function.”

  “I meant urinating or vomiting,” he growled, enunciating every syllable.

  “Ah,” Layla chimed in as she leaned through the space between the front seats. “You really weren’t specific about that though, were you?”

  I almost felt sorry for him, but on this one, the law was on our sides.

  “Please,” he whimpered.

  Sighing, I sat back, once again disgusted with the flagrant display of pussiness from this big man. Was pussiness even a legitimate word? I would look it up, but even reading for ten seconds in a car would have me right back on the choo choo, so I made a mental note to look it up later.

  We’d been back on the road, and in complete silence, for a maximum of three minutes when Layla started to shift around behind me. Knowing what was coming, I bit my lip and waited.

  “I need to make sissy,” she groaned. “Ohh, I’m gonna pee. You have to stop!” The girl could go from zero to peemergency in seconds, so her voice sounded panicky.

  “You’ll have to w…”

  He didn’t get to finish because Layla started wailing and bouncing in her seat. “Gonna pee, gonna pee,” she chanted getting louder all the time. “Oh my God, I can feel it. I’m gonna sissy on the seat. Your car will become splash mountain and vom fountain in one day. Please!”

  I’m pretty certain that the hissing coming from my cat wasn’t helping. He had an inner asshole side to him like no cat or human that I’d ever come across. I would also be willing to bet that his hissing, which was now more of a constant sssssss, was being done by him just to make her bladder emergency even worse.

  There were woods ahead of us, so the sulking man mountain beside me pulled over and slammed his foot on the brake. Layla got out in seconds and was running for the trees when she suddenly just stopped in her tracks and squatted a couple of times before walking back to us.

  Getting in, she put her belt back on and happily announced, “False alarm. I was sitting weird and the waist band of my jeans must have been pushing on my bladder. I’m good to go!”

  I’ll give him credit, aside from the grinding of his teeth, Coleman didn’t make a noise as he pulled back onto the road and continued back to the Townsends home.

  All good things come to an end though, and an hour later Layla started to chant about needing to pee again. As she ran off behind some bushes, the only noise was the sound of the horn bleeping every time Coleman’s forehead met the steering wheel - even Satan in the back had gone quiet for once.

  “Do you know how many brain cells you lose each time you do that?” I asked him. “Then again, you’re also burning calories, soooo…”

  His head slowly turned in my direction, so I quickly faced forward and took an interest in the surface of the road. When he just continued to stare at me, not saying even one word, I had to bite my lip to stop myself laughing.

  I was saved by Layla running back to the car, and we quickly started off again.

  Five minutes later, she sighed loudly, and I saw Coleman tense up out of the corner of my eye.

  “I’m thirsty!” she whined. “Hey, where are we on the map?” she asked as she tapped him on the shoulder.

  Not wanting to make a bad situation worse for the ball of fury beside me, but unable to hold on any longer, I did my best to whisper more quietly than I’d ever whispered before, “I need to pee.”

  As we walked across the forecourt of the gas station that Coleman had pulled into so abruptly that we almost got whiplash, we heard Coleman yelling about a ‘raise’ and ‘crazy cows’.

  “Well, that’s just unnecessarily offensive,” Layla huffed as she started stocking up on junk food. I got momentarily distracted by the Twizzlers and choosing which packs of M&M’s I wanted, then my bladder reminded me that I was on a mission and that I needed to complete it ASAP.

  Of course, there was a line. Of course, the lady in the cubicle had food poisoning. Of course, the other toilets were out of use. By the time I got into the one working cubicle, I had pieces of hand towel stuffed up both nostrils, my top was covering my mouth and I’m almost certain that I’d turned purple. I had added new moves to my pee-pee dance though, so at least I had that going for me.

  “Your psycho-pussy just broke free from its enclosure and attacked the big titty baby,” Layla shouted around the door as I was washing my hands. I turned to smile at the other inhabitants waiting their turn for the cubicle of death, and then walked out as quickly as I could. “Holy mother…” Layla gasped and then covered her face with her sleeve before the door could shut behind us. “Warn a bitch!”

  “That wasn’t me,” I grabbed her arm and dragged her toward the now rocking SUV. If you didn’t notice the rocking first, the flashing lights and car alarm going off would have clued you into which one was ours really quick.

  “Sure,” she pulled a face and then stopped as a car door slammed in front of us.

  Somehow, my adorable tiny little kitten had managed to tear Coleman’s shirt so that there were
chunks of material hanging off of it. I’m lying, I knew how because I’d been on the receiving end of those claws many times. Wincing, I edged around him and brought out the economy sized pack of Band-Aid’s that I’d bought the week before and handed them to him.

  When he refused to take the box and hadn’t even blinked, I started to shift from foot to foot and looked in Layla’s direction for help. She was standing looking into the distance like we didn’t exist, and when I opened my mouth she jammed her fingers into her ears.

  Looks like I was on my own.

  “Do you want me to…”

  “No.” There was no shouting, no anger - just one word.

  “I can…”

  “No.”

  “Will you let me finish my sent…”

  “No.”

  Still trying to be as helpful as I could, I picked out a handful, and a tampon which for some reason was in there too, and put them in his shirt seeing as how he didn’t have a pocket anymore. The sound of them fluttering out of a hole somewhere and onto the floor wasn’t good, neither was the growl that I think came from him - or it could have come from my psycho pussy that was probably still running wild in the car.

  The good news was, the tampon had survived and was now poking out from the top of the neck of his shirt. It would have been embarrassing if it had fallen onto the floor like the rest had.

  Checking how many Band-Aid’s were left in the box, I figured I’d be okay, and opened the door of the car.

  If I’d been in this situation before, I would have probably known to duck as the pissed off bundle of ninja pussy came springing out of the vehicle at me and imbedded it’s claws into my ribs. At least I knew for next time.

  “Sonyaaaaaa,” an irritating voice came from behind me, followed by a poke.

  “Just fucking wake her up,” a grizzly bear snarled. “We’re almost here and I need to go and stop the bleeding on my side.”

  “You don’t just wake her up,” the voice replied sounding horrified, which amused me. “You have to carefully bring her round to the idea of being awake.”

  “Bullshit, just do this.” The next thing, my teeth were rattling in my head as a big paw grabbed me and shook me so hard that the top of my head thudded rapidly off of something hard.

  “Oh, Jesus. Do you know what you’ve done?” A voice squeaked, as I lunged at the beast who’d woken me up.

  Wrapping my hands as much as I could around his neck, I squeezed and tried to ignore the hard thing poking in my hip. A quick glance down showed that it was the hand brake, which meant that I now had something to rest my knee on to help me get ultimate power in my upper body and wrangle this Yeti to the ground.

  The fact that it was a hand brake maybe should have registered seconds before the swerving of the car did. This was followed by the steering wheel moving sharply - which my boob was now safely wedged on, and which caused a lot of discomfort when the big hands tried to move it back into position taking my poor blouse bunny with it.

  A choke from the behemoth, a screech of tires, all three of us yelling, “Oh shit!” at the same time, and one pissed off meow from Dante later, and the front headlight of the vehicle hit a mailbox.

  Feeling the car pulling to a stop, I looked around and saw a group of horrified people looking at us from the sidewalk. Thankfully, it appeared that we were on the edge of town, so there didn’t seem to be that many people. Unfortunately, there was that one asshole who always had his cellphone to hand to record incidents like this.

  A quick glance at Coleman who was back to tugging his hair, and I decided that having my feet ripped to shreds by my demonic feline was probably safer. So, I risked the chunder choo choo again and got in the back of the car next to Layla.

  The silence that followed on the short drive to the ranch was one of the most painful things I’d ever experienced. I could feel the simmering inferno coming from the crazy ball bag in the front, and with every second that passed, I braced myself for the explosion that never came.

  The area around us was pretty, and green. Lots of green! More green than I think I’d ever seen in my life, but then I was used to city living. Noise, pollution, shops everywhere, no privacy and this was the antithesis.

  “Uh, is there anyone living out here?” A sudden thought hit me as we turned off down a path that led to an area where huge beautiful houses sat. “Just so you know, if a guy starts playing the banjo, I don’t care if I’ve never run in my life – you won’t see me for dust!”

  Layla chuckled beside me, and then burst out laughing and pointed. Sure enough, there sat an old guy on a freaking rocking chair playing a mother humping banjo.

  “Gramps,” she snorted. I didn’t care if it was fucking Santa. We were in the middle of nowhere and a guy was playing the banjo - I’d seen this movie. In fact, I’d watched it on Sunday so how it ended was fresh in my mind.

  We passed a couple more houses and a group of women with babies who waved at us, and then stopped in front of a gorgeous bright white house.

  “How the hell do you keep this so clean?” I felt it was a good question, I couldn’t even keep a white t-shirt clean, and this house was practically glowing.

  “Long story,” Layla replied as she got out of the car.

  I was about to follow her out of her side of the vehicle just in case scary banjo man appeared on my side, when my door opened, and hands reached in and pulled me out. Obviously, I screamed my ass off.

  “Don’t let them take me!”

  “Hey, pretty girl,” a voice I recognized crooned in my ear, and I’m pretty certain that it was the only time that I’d ever feel complete relief to see Tom. “Glad you made it here safe…what the fuck happened to the car?”

  Coleman didn’t say one word, he just raised his hand and pointed at me. Wincing, I looked around us and saw that there were actually a lot more people than I’d thought there were initially, which was also kind of a relief. If they’d survived here long enough to reproduce the five million kids that they had with them, then the odds couldn’t be stacked that high against me being downed by a banjo playing old dude.

  “Yo - Cole.” A hand was thrust into my face by a guy who’d just walked up to us. He looked a bit like his brother, and a lot like Layla.

  “Sonya,” I replied, shaking his hand.

  “What the fuck happened to the car?” Tom repeated. He was holding my free hand and had moved us around to the front of the car to look at the damage. Low and behold, the little flag from the old mailbox that we’d hit was sticking out of the headlight. What made it worse was that the name Robinson had been carved into it somehow, so it’s not like we could have denied all knowledge of the incident. Then again, the asshole cellphone guy would have made that an impossibility too.

  “He woke Sonya up,” Layla explained as she lifted a big ass bag out of the trunk. “Dibs on not touching the psycho’s cage,” she added over her shoulder as she walked toward the door of the house. As she did, I caught sight of the deep scratches on her ankles that were bleeding little rivers of blood into her flip flops. I would have followed Layla and her bloody legs, but no matter how hard I tugged on my hand, Tom wasn’t letting go.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Cole asked, bringing my attention back to the guys to see him poking something in the open v of Coleman’s shirt neck. Apparently, today really wasn’t a lucky day for me because the tampon that I’d accidentally included in my handful of Band-Aids was still wedged in the space between the buttons of his shirt.

  “I’m so sorry,” I muttered, lunging for it before he noticed what it actually was.

  Again, proving that my luck was for shit, he looked down as my hand got there and my knuckles hit his nose hard. Pulling the tampon back, I yanked my hand, causing Tom to fall into me and the tampon to go flying and hit poor Cole in the head before landing on the floor in front of him.

  With his high-pitched squeal, I remembered that this was the Townsend who had Menophobia - a legitimate fear of periods.

  May
be I’d take on the banjo player after all?

  Chapter 3

  Tom

  T oday, I was taking her cat to the vet. My sister had told me that this species was meant to be huge, so when it had come out of its cage when they’d arrived, I’d innocently asked, “What the fuck is wrong with your cat?”

  Everyone had been thinking it, I was just the dickhead who’d actually asked it. The reaction from both hadn’t been pretty. Sonya had called me an insensitive twat and had told me to go fuck myself, and the cat had curled itself up into some sort of origami figure and had then sprung itself at me, cutting my shin to pieces with its nails that were like freaking Samurai swords.

  Dante she’d called it – shoulda been Uranus because that cat was a fucking asshole.

  She’d been here for two days now, and I’d hardly seen her. We’d had a family meal the first night she was here, and since then, neither her nor Layla had been around. It was starting to bug me. It wasn’t my fault that the cat’s legs were shorter than my pinky finger and it looked like a mutant that was walking on those tiny little sausage things that you get at parties.

  The vet appointment gave me a good excuse to woo her with my Townsend charm though, so I was going to give it my best.

  Walking through Layla’s open front door, I walked into a room full of my family. The hissing coming from the cage in the corner clued me into the fact that now that we were safe to come here because he was locked away, everyone had decided to come for coffee. Either that or from the big shit eating grin on Layla’s face she was fucking with me. I was going to go with the latter.

  Resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be getting my Sonya time, I walked over to the cage where the strangest growls I’d ever heard were coming from. It was like a cross between a purr and a snarl and was accompanied by a nasty licking noise.

  “The fuck is it doing?” I asked Ren who was standing watching it in amusement and disgust.

  Looking down through the top of the cage, which had those bar things on the top of it, I could see the mutant with its leg wrapped around its head. Its front paws were kneading the shit out of the blanket underneath it as its head twisted under its ass. How it had gotten into the position that it was in was anyone’s guess.