Until Forever (Providence Series Book 3) Page 6

  Picking up a rag because I couldn’t let her down, I wiped my hands off and headed over to the basin to wash them before I got in my beautiful car. “Okay My, I’ll be there in a bit. What time is the appointment?”

  “One-fifteen.”

  Looking at my watch, I saw that it gave me twenty-five minutes to get her and then get her to the clinic. I’m sure my shiny baby could do that. Signing off, I washed all of the shit off my hands and then headed in the direction of the doors telling one of the guys where I was going. His smug smile made me want to bring in one of the birthing videos and call it a staff training exercise, again. Maybe I’d just do that anyway.

  I’d just walked out of the doors when I heard the one voice that truly made me nauseous.

  “Cole!” What was with Adele and that fucking baby voice. Had it always been like that?

  “Not now,” I walked past her in the direction of my car.

  “But Cole,” she wrapped her barbed claw around my arm. I might not be a nasty guy, but I couldn’t take her touching me, so I snatched my arm away and turned to glare at her. “I know you must hate me, but the truth is that…”

  “I don't have time for this,” I cut her off. “I’m off to take my sister-in-law to get checked, seeing as her baby,” I stressed the word, “is due in a week. Then I’m going to go and see my girlfriend.” Another stress. “You do not feature anywhere in those plans.”

  She was still standing staring at me with her mouth open as I walked away. In the past, I’d been a pussy and had come to heel every time she told me to. Well, times had changed.

  As I got to my car, my heart sank. On the front of it was a massive fucking sticker of a unicorn with: my other ride is a unicorn on it. The fuckers had even stuck it straight onto the car. If that left even a tiny mark I was going to…what the fuck was that?

  “You bastards,” I yelled as loudly as I could, not giving one shit who heard me. The loud blast of laughter from inside almost had me turning around to beat the crap out of them, but then I remembered Maya. I didn’t have time to take the fucking rainbow wheel cover and fluffy rainbow chair covers off. The glitter that they’d scattered everywhere…I was going to fucking kill them. Thankfully, I could take the four unicorns hanging from the rear view mirror down, though. Reaching across after I’d thrown them in the back, I went to lift the bobble head unicorn off my dash, but they’d stuck it down. I was going to find out who did this and I was going to kill them.

  Then it hit me…Ren had something to do with this; that’s why he was ‘delayed’. Ohhhh I was going to tell Maya, but first I was going to wind the shit out of him.

  Turning on the engine, I picked my phone up and tapped out a message to the wrinkled sack.

  Me; Wait until Maya finds out u couldn’t get to the doctors appt b’cause u wanted me to find the unicorns. An appt for ur own child. U’re a dead man!

  Putting my phone on silent, I drove towards Ren and Maya’s to go and collect the heavily pregnant woman and the annoying ass, also known as Amy. Actually, maybe I should ask if they had anything plastic like a trash bag to protect my seats in case her water broke?

  I was still mulling over the upholstery in my car when I pulled up to the house, seeing Amy and Maya standing waiting on the porch. Being the amazing gentleman that I was, I got out of the car and rounded the back to open the do…taking a couple of steps back I stared at the addition that I’d missed the first time round - a rainbow horse’s tail stuck to my trunk. It was so long that it actually brushed the ground, and I’d driven all the way here with it. Groaning and putting my head in my hands as the two evil witches on the porch laughed their asses off, I thought back to all of the people who’d been staring and pointing as I drove past. I thought it was just the natural beauty of my car for fuck’s sake, but it looked like a gay pride version of My Little Pony so no wonder they’d stared!

  Looking closely, I noticed that they’d just trapped it in the trunk instead of sticking it on like I’d been scared they’d done. Popping the trunk open, I shoved it all inside and started making plans to shove it so far up Ren’s ass that…

  “Thanks, Cole. I appreciate it,” Maya said, coming up and kissing me on the cheek. Like the sap that I am, I followed her around to the passenger side and opened the door for her as Amy let herself into the back.

  I’d just started the engine and was driving with the mandatory SUV filled with Coleman’s men behind us when I started the beginning of the end of my brother.

  “So, Ren’s not actually stuck in traffic…”

  Ebru

  Cooper had been in for his check up to see how he was recovering from the injuries that he’d sustained when the bomb at Luke’s house went off, and I was just walking back down to the ER to get back to work when I looked up and saw Cole’s ex-girlfriend walking towards me. Just fucking great. Picking up a chart and staring at the words on it, I did my best to look busy in the hopes that just maybe she’ll walk past me; I was wrong.

  “Who are you?” The baby voice was gone, and the one that had replaced it was nasty and matched the sneer that she was now aiming in my direction.

  “Pardon?”

  “Bitch, don’t mess with me,” she took a step forward until we were almost touching. “Who are you?”

  I really didn’t have it in me to play this game, especially not with the girl that Cole still loved, so I made a point of just looking down at my work badge that was pinned to my scrubs.

  “Well, Ebru,” she hissed my name, and it took everything in me not to take a step back. Had this chick never heard of personal space? “Cole is the father of my child, and I would strongly advise you not to interfere with what’s going on between us.” My stomach felt like it dropped out of me to the floor. He had a child? “Ah, he didn’t tell you did he? Oh dear, my bad.”

  I didn’t give her a chance to say anymore as I turned and walked to the locker rooms, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. He had a child? That one word just kept repeating around and around in my head. Why didn’t he say something? Where was the child? Did everyone else know?

  Making the only decision that I could, I picked up my phone and started typing.

  Cole

  “Cole. Hey, Cole!” one of the guys yelled from the back. “Your phone’s going off!”

  Making my way over to where all of the paperwork for the waiting vehicles was, I picked up my phone and smiled when I saw Ebru’s name on the screen. Clicking onto the message, the smile immediately disappeared.

  Ebru: Your ex paid me a visit. You never said you had a child?

  Fuck me, that bitch! That fucking bitch! I almost dropped my phone as I typed back. I wanted to call her, but she was on duty, so I knew she wouldn’t answer it. In fact, I’d be surprised if she even answered any messages from me.

  Me: I swear there’s no kid. Am on my way.

  Yelling out to Ren as I ran past him, I headed toward my car desperate to get to her. All I could think of was how she must be feeling, and I was pissed at myself for not explaining sooner.

  Thankfully, the hospital was only a couple of blocks away and Ebru’s shift would be ending soon, so I took a deep breath and walked through the doors of the ER. Because they were short staffed, she was on rotation in departments, but this week it was the ER which was great because I didn’t have to go hunting for her.

  In front of me at the nurse’s station was Lars who was looking at the screen of a computer with a frown on his face that got worse when he looked up and saw me walking towards him. Shit, did he know too?

  “She’s crying.”

  “I’ll fix it. Where is she?” I couldn’t stand the thought of her crying, and I wasn’t lying, I was going to fix it.

  Nodding towards an accessible toilet, he reached under the desk and passed me out a funny looking thing that I recognized as a key to disengage the lock of the toilet. As I walked up to it, I wondered if I should maybe knock first just
in case she was actually using the toilet. I decided against it because what if she didn’t come out?

  “What are…” she said as I opened the door and slipped inside. Her little nose was red and she was wiping her cheeks with toilet paper. I knew from experience that the stuff was about as soft as aluminum foil, and worried what it would do to her poor face with how hard she was wiping it. When she realized who it was, she turned away from me and leaned over to wash her face in the sink. “I’m just getting ready to leave to get my stuff. There was no need for you to come here.”

  I pulled some hand towels out and waited for her to finish with the basin before passing them to her.

  “Yeah, there was. I need to explain. Ebru, there is no baby; she got rid of it when I didn’t do what she wanted.” Way to go, Cole, just blurt it all out why don’t you?

  “What?” She stopped rubbing her face and stared at me in shock.

  This really wasn’t the place to discuss this shit, like at all. “Listen, can we go for a drive and I’ll tell you all about it?” I wasn’t above begging. In fact, maybe I should start now?

  Thankfully, I think she was in too much shock to argue with me, though, because she gave a slow nod and followed me out of the toilet. Lars looked up and passed over her bag as we walked past, but other than that nothing was said as we headed out to the car.

  “Leave your vehicle, baby. I’ll drive you in tomorrow, okay?” I really didn’t want to be apart from her right now. Knowing that I was going to be spewing the most painful moment of my life very soon made me need the contact with her badly. She must have felt the same way because again she followed me with no questions or arguments.

  I drove us toward the one place that gave me peace, the lake. Parking up fifteen minutes later, I turned to her. “You ready?”

  “Why are we here?” She was looking around her now, having just realized where we were.

  “I have a special place that I want to show you. And I want to be there when I tell you what happened.”

  Nodding again, she got out of the car. The relief that I felt when she reached for my hand was overwhelming.

  Walking through the woods to the area with a large rock that I always sat on when I came here to think, I launched straight into the story. I wasn’t going to leave us both suffering.

  “I met Adele at a friend’s house when I was nineteen. Initially, I wanted nothing to do with her, but back then fun was fun, ya know? And she practically offered it up to me on a plate,” I felt like a bit of a shit for phrasing it like that, but I had been young at the time and any respect that I’d ever had for her was long gone now. Fuck me this was hard. “We were only together for a couple of months, and it didn’t really seem serious to me, so I ended it. Turned out, she’d wanted Ren or Brett anyway because they were the ‘uncatchable Townsends’. Every female wanted to be with them, but they didn’t do commitment.” I started throwing the little rocks around us into the water for something to do with my hands. This was the worst part to tell. “Then she told me she was pregnant.”

  Ebru flinched and went to move away from me, so I continued. “She got rid of it.”

  Ebru

  Every part of me froze as he said those five words.

  “She got…rid of it?” What did he mean?

  “She aborted my baby,” he whispered, his voice cracking halfway through the sentence.

  It took me time to process what he’d just revealed while he went back to throwing small stones into the lake. It was completely silent around us apart from the plink of the stones going into the water and the odd animal noise here and there.

  “You didn’t want her to keep it?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. She just got rid of it.” He sounded so bleak when he said that, that I almost burst into tears. At that moment, I was torn between holding him, throwing up or going and throttling the bitch.

  I always tried to see both sides of the story, and something wasn’t adding up. Maybe there was a problem with the fetus? “Why did she do it?”

  He shrugged, but tensed up even more, so I knew there was more to the story. “Why Cole?” I pressed.

  “Because I wasn’t the Townsend that she wanted. Ren and Brett were what she was really after, and she said she didn’t want to get stuck with ‘Cole Townsend’s bastard’,” he said, huffing out a self-deprecating laugh.

  I was so shocked by what he’d just said that I had absolutely no idea what to say back and just stared at him. He eventually turned his head to look at me, and the look on his face broke my heart.

  “No one else knows about this, do they?”

  He shook his head slowly in response. The poor guy had been carrying this around with him alone.

  “Wait, is that why you passed out drunk here and ended up with…” I didn’t want to kick the guy while he was down, so I just gestured to his crotch. Thankfully this got a small smile from him as he nodded. “I’m so sorry!” I decided to take the risk and put myself out there, so I climbed onto his lap. He immediately wrapped his arms around me and shoved his head in my neck and I held onto him tightly. I hated that bitch hugely, but I also hated that people thought of him as a clown when that wasn’t the real and true Cole; there was so much more to him.

  I hated making myself vulnerable by talking about the two events from my life that had broken me and that I was still struggling to recover from. I needed to share in return, though, so that he knew, without me saying it outright, that I was invested in this relationship between us.

  “I was bullied from the age of twelve until I was sixteen,” I whispered into his hair. “The only person I had behind me was my sister.”

  He raised his head and looked at me with a ‘what’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ look. “You’ve confided in me, so I want to do the same.”

  “Didn’t your parents stop it?”

  “No,” I replied, shaking my head. “They told me that it was in my mind, that I needed to give out the love to get the love back.” I almost started laughing at the confused look on his face. “They’re pagans,” I tried to explain, but the confusion got even worse.

  “As in no dairy and no meat?”

  I never thought I’d laugh when I told this story, but there was a first time for everything. “That’s vegan, Cole. Pagan’s worship the earth; it’s actually quite beautiful, but my parents only cared about themselves. Louise and I were left to raise ourselves, and God forbid we ever needed anything…” I broke off and took a couple of seconds to clear myself of the hurt that they’d caused both of us.

  “So, when I was in tenth grade, the girls who had been bullying me for four years had finally had enough of me following my parents’ advice, which was to smile and give out love. I had a free period and stopped at the girls bathrooms on my way to the library. I’d heard them come in because they were talking about a couple of the popular guys in our grade so I’d tried to take my time, but they weren’t leaving.

  “When I walked out, they were waiting for me, and I didn’t even have a chance to say anything. The ringleader turned around, and I thought she’d just punched me in the side a couple of times because I felt winded. The other two girls pushed me, and I hit my head off the cubicle behind me and passed out,” fuck I hated this bit. “When I woke up, there was blood all over the floor around me. They’d stabbed me three times.”

  “What the fuck?” Cole exploded, making me jump. “Please, tell me those fucking bitches are in jail.”

  “I had to drag myself out of the bathroom and down the hallway. It was my English teacher who found me; she’d thought the red line down the hall was a prank. I coded on my way to the hospital, and when I woke up, my sister Louise was hysterical. My parents…,” I couldn’t hate them for this anymore because what they’d done to Lou was far worse. “They just said that I would grow from the experience.”

  “I…how the fuck are you meant to grow from someone who tried to kill you?” he spluttered.

/>   Shrugging, I continued. “They refused to pass over the girls’ names to the police, and when we got home, we released their names out into the world in the hope that they would find healing and peace at some point in their lives.” I finished.

  “Are all vagrants like that?”

  It took me a second to understand what the hell he was asking me and, proving that he really was an amazing guy, I burst out laughing. “Pagans, Cole. Pagans.”

  “All right then, Pagans.”

  “No, it was just my parents’ way of dealing with it and their viewpoint on life,” his hands rubbing up and down my back relaxed me. I don’t think he even knew how much comfort that simple action was bringing me.

  “What about Louise? Were they the same with her?”

  I wasn’t ready to discuss this with him, so I just nodded. I didn’t discuss Lou with people because every memory that I had of her was mine and I was so protective of her. Even though I trust Cole, I needed to keep this one thing for myself for a bit longer.

  Hugging me closer, Cole rested his chin on top of my head while I sat staring out over the water with my cheek on his chest. After at least ten minutes of back rubbing and silence, he said something that was just typically Cole.

  “It’s a bit sick being a non-meat and animal produce eater and calling yourself a pigeon isn’t it?”

  Chapter Seven

  Maya

  It was six days until my due date and, seriously, Shamu had nothing on me. I hadn’t seen my toes in months, I had to get someone to make sure my shoes were on properly, nothing fit and I felt like the baby was going to drop out of me any second. Ren was driving me nuts harping on about the fact that he was having a son, and the amount of ‘baby shit’ that we had around the place was crazy. Even Isla and Luke didn’t have this much, and they had two. I hadn’t even gotten to buy a majority of it, Ren was like a crazy man buying everything he came across. Two weeks ago, I’d put a ban on his new online shopping obsession, so now he got it delivered to work and snuck it into the house at night.