Until Tom, Finding Forever (Providence Book 5) Read online

  Also, I didn’t see what I had to do with all of this. Who cared if I was friends with Layla? It was unlikely that whomever the guy was who was doing all of this, would even find my role in her life important. Hell, even my parents didn’t find it important in their lives – and they’d made me together!

  With nothing to say back to her, I just huffed again and sulked as I watched my cat try and break free from his prison. I’d had his nails cut by an unsuspecting tech at the veterinarian’s office last week. By the time we left, she was being offered a sedative that sounded like it was a weaker dose than the one that had been ineffective of on my little ball of Satan. Tom had text me earlier today to say that he had booked Dante in to be neutered, and after explaining the circumstances and showing a video that he’d gotten from somewhere to the Vet, he’d agreed that it could be done slightly sooner than the normal six-month age mark. It was only two weeks early, but still.

  The silence in the vehicle stretched out for a bit longer, before Layla broke it in a way that was now typically us.

  “Folds!” She yelled, making Coleman jump slightly. For as big and scary a guy as he was, I was a bit disappointed by the pussy reaction, even if she had screamed it at the top of her voice.

  Never one to resist the clean word/dirty word challenge, though…

  ”Glistening.”

  “Throbbing!”

  “Turgid!”

  “Drip!”

  “Spurt!”

  “Pucker!”

  “Penetrate!”

  “Gaping!”

  “Oozing,” I gagged halfway through saying. That word was just wrong.

  “Squirt,” Layla squealed, clapping excitedly.

  Just as I was about to yell my next word, the car screeched to a halt and Coleman jumped out and began yelling.

  “I do not get paid enough for this shit!” Halfway through it, he started jumping up and down and was throwing his arms around in the air in a tantrum. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!” Storming back to the door, he opened it and pointed at Layla, then me, and then snapped, “Stop it!”

  Looking at each other, we raised our eyebrows at each other in a ‘what’s that all about?’ way and then looked back at him innocently.

  Growling, he got back behind the wheel and turned the engine on before turning back around to face us. “And don’t think that I don’t know that you fully intend to start that shit up again. It stops here. No more!”

  Making sure my performance was worthy of an Academy Award, I gasped and then stage whispered to Layla, “You didn’t tell me that he has the power of seeing into the future.”

  Nodding her head solemnly, she turned in her seat. “T’is true, indeed he does. I feel, however, that perhaps t’was fueled by the overwhelming display of masculinity that we just witnessed as he slayed that fly!”

  “T’was one that they will most definitely write literary works of art about in the future,” I replied as seriously as I could.

  The big baby didn’t react this time though - how disappointing.

  Sighing, I looked out the window and did my best not to yell out the words now hitting me at a crazy rate while I twiddled my thumbs. Like she was reading my mind, Layla glanced over at me and the unspoken oath of - one didn’t start the clean word-dirty word game and not play it to the end, it just wasn’t the done thing - passed between us. It was funny how we really hadn’t known each other for that long, but in the last nine months, we’d become closer than anyone I’d ever met before in my life, including my family.

  After another ten minutes of silence, I was feeling the need for a nap and my eyelids were beginning to droop, when the big titty baby mumbled, “creamy and moist.”

  This time, it was Layla’s gasp that would have won the award. “That’s just disgusting!”

  “How could you?” I snapped. The man had taken it way too far! One never ever uttered the word moist, that was just heinous!

  His growl was met by glares of disgust from us and a yowling hiss from Dante this time.

  The first rule of the clean word-dirty word game - there are standards, and this man obviously had none.

  “Neither of you, I repeat neither of you, will utter another word. Do I make myself clear?” Why do people always phrase it like that? If you tell someone to be quiet, why ask them as part of a question and expect an answer? It goes against the whole telling them to be quiet order.

  Rolling our eyes at each other, we both turned back to our respective windows, and I went back to looking out at the rapidly passing scenery. Twenty minutes later, the curse that had plagued me since I was little hit.

  “Ummm, I…”

  “No, not one word,” he snapped. “Zip! Nyit!”

  Swallowing awkwardly over the nausea, I concentrated on breathing until the chunder choo choo, as Layla called it, arrived at the station. Pressing the button to open the window, I hung my head out and let that damn train roll straight past the platform.

  “Did…” his horrified voice broke through the roaring in my head. “Did she…puke on my car?”

  “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 mad
e 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 whe
n 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.