Mad Gold (Providence Gold Series Book 2)

by Mary B. Moore

  The beautiful mystery woman’s mumbling was getting louder, and she kept pointing to her mouth when she opened it. Then she began pointing down at her crotch too, drawing everyone’s eyes south of the border.

  “Give it to her,” I ordered.

  What the hell the woman was reacting to if it had moved down to her crotch?

  Then again, I didn’t have a medical degree, so what the hell did I know about every type of allergy and how they played out? Maybe what she’d eaten had travelled down and was affecting her intestines? And if that was the case, could she rupture something down there?

  On that thought, I turned back to the Captain who was glaring at the back of the haughty flight attendant’s head as she stormed away.

  “Bitch,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “No shit! How much longer until we land in Austin?”

  Looking worriedly at the motions the woman was still making, he checked his watch. “Roughly forty-five minutes. Do you think she’ll be okay that long?”

  The woman nodded her head vigorously at us, then looked over our shoulders and frantically shook her head. Turning to follow where she was looking, I saw the flight attendant was back with a pack of Benadryl and a glass of water.

  I reached up just in time as she thrust them at me, sneered at all of us and then stalked away again.

  “I wanna say she’s had a bad day, but the truth is she has terminal resting bitch face,” the Captain muttered, still glaring at her back. “And a total bitch mentality.”

  He then excused himself as I got the pill ready and held it out to the woman who was still shaking her head with her lips tightly pressed together. Sighing, I moved my hand back to my side and tried to figure out how to get her to take it.

  “Here, son, I’ll help,” the old man offered, before reaching up and placing his hand on her forehead.

  I thought perhaps he was going to try to calm her and talk some sense into her. Instead, with an insane amount of strength, he held her head down and beckoned for me to put the pill in her mouth, which had opened with a squeak at the force being applied by the old guy.

  Popping the pill in, I closed her mouth, pressing upwards on her jaw, and then held my hand over lips while the old man clamped her nose shut.

  She squirmed and wriggled slightly, growling each time, and then gave a rough and awkward swallow.

  “Reckon she’s about done,” the old man chuckled. “Might wanna give her a sip of that water.”

  Holding the glass to her lips, I avoided eye contact with the beautiful ones that were currently trying to set me on fire and ignored the chuckling still coming from the helpful old man. Granted, I’d be about the same level of pissed if I was in her shoes, but it really was for her own good.

  “Sir, you’re going to have to sit down,” flight attendant, aka Mile High Bitch, snapped behind me. “We’re beginning our descent.”

  “I’ll swap with you,” the old man said as he got up and gestured to his chair. Stepping over the sick woman, he nodded at me and walked over to where I’d originally been sitting. “We’ll swap our stuff when we land.”

  Standing up and wincing when my head met the overhead luggage compartment this time, I tried to figure out how to get into the vacated seat. Either side of me, the attendants were collecting trash from passengers, so they blocked the aisles. This meant that the only option was to climb over the woman.

  At any point, doing this was awkward as shit be it on a plane, a game, or the movie theater. You had to bend your crotch away from them to avoid any rude crotch-to-face rubbing, and you had to make sure not to stand on their feet. However, when you were my height and the person couldn’t move, you really had to be careful because the only place on your body that their face would rub against if you misjudged it was your dick.

  Just as I straddled her legs with my own, the man seated in front of her went to raise his chair into the upright position, forgetting to sit up first. This meant that the back of his seat came crashing down even further than it had been originally with his weight still pressing on the back giving it some extra force, inadvertently sending me flying forward.

  My crotch ended up on her face, and by that I mean her entire face. Her forehead met the button on the top of my jeans (which were riding slightly lower than normal after sitting for so long), her nose met the middle of my dick, and her chin was left using my balls for support.

  How the hell was I meant to get out of this situation? I couldn’t move backward at all, and I didn’t think it would be polite to wriggle my crotch around with her face pressed against it. So, I had no option but to freeze and try to figure out the best way to word an apology to her.

  Of course, I hadn’t realized that we were the center of focus for a majority of the passengers in our section until people started to react.

  Mile High Bitch gasped.

  The air marshal started laughing loudly.

  And the old man snorted, “Well, that’s one way to get her attention.”

  Pushing against the back of the chair that was still pinning me in place, I tried to either get some space to move sideways or hurry the guy up in putting his chair into the upright position. When he finally did it, and I got the space to remove my dick from her person, I sat down and rubbed my face with my hands.

  How the hell did something like that happen?

  Taking a deep breath, I turned to apologize but winced when I saw the word ‘Levi’ on her forehead from the button on my jeans. For a second, I might have also scowled because the word made me think of my sister’s asshole of a best friend. Well, he wasn’t an asshole per se, but he was a pain in the ass. It only occurred to me what I was doing when mystery woman nervously looked at me and then quickly looked away again, so I wiped all thoughts of him from my mind and tried to smile instead.

  “Sorry,” I finally mumbled, pointing at her face.

  She went back to glaring at me and mumbling what I was certain weren’t nice things at me. Thankfully, her tongue was too swollen for me to make out what those not so nice things were.

  “The Captain has radioed ahead and a medical team will meet you both once we stop at the terminal,” resting bitch face snapped as she passed. “Oh, and, try not to stick your penis in her in the ambulance.”

  I couldn’t hold back anymore and gave her back as good as she was giving, or at least trying to give.

  “I hope you pay Nike for the use of their branding.”

  The two Nike ticks snapped together in confusion, making her look like a demented emoji. Her face was the color of one too, seeing as how she was wearing yellow toned makeup. Did she not look in the mirror when she did that shit every morning?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your eyebrows,” I drawled. “They’re like a Nike tick on each side of your face. Well, except that one’s higher than the other one,” I pointed at her left brow.

  The sad thing was – that wasn’t a lie.

  “Well, I…”

  “Don’t you have a job to do?” I questioned, making sure she knew I had zero interest in anything else she had to say. As she went to talk again, I looked back down at mystery woman’s face, noticing her lips were now twitching like she was trying not to laugh, and then waved my hand dismissively at the hoity bitch. “On you go.” When she again went to say something, I sighed, stood up and said loudly, “Just do it!” pointing toward the front of the plane.

  It was only when the people around us started roaring with laughter that I realized what I’d said.

  Nike eyebrows – just do it.

  Dahlia

  I’d decided to go with my dad to see Grandma in New York at the last minute. She’d been feeling progressively worse since Christmas and he’d been flying back and forth, so I’d been busy working at the garage that we owned in Gonzales County and hadn’t even had a Sunday off in months.

  This time though, I’d figured I’d go with him to see her, and we’d made plans to visit for a week to help her get things in o
rder, and also to chase up her doctors who weren’t giving us any answers.

  When we’d gotten there, she really hadn’t been well and the doctors still couldn’t figure out what the hell was the problem. Then, just to add insult to injury, that night a storm hit and her roof came down on one side of her house. Because of this, it had been decided I’d fly home to manage the garage, and he’d stay to help my grandma out and fix up her house.

  Some might see that as being a huge misfortune, but I was used to shit like this happening. I had a terminal case of the S.O.L.’s – Shit Out of Luck’s. When my best friend referred to me as her soul sister, she actually meant her shit out of luck sister, I was sure of it.

  Usually, people were known as just being accident prone. Not me! I absolutely had accidents, a lot of them. In fact, I could trip and fall over thin air. But it didn’t stop there. Nope, my S.O.L. involved being a magnet for the most bizarre and unlikely things happening.

  When I took my driving test in high school, we were on an open road and there was no traffic around. None, zip, nada! I’d been thinking it was the easiest thing in the world and was feeling smug about my luck turning, when a truck had pulled out of the fields beside me and just missed the car. I’d avoided it and had kept us safe, again crowing internally over how lucky I suddenly was. Two minutes later, the truck lurched slightly, the tailgate dropped, and a crate with about ten chickens in it burst open. I’d swerved around those feathery buggers and avoided all of them – apart from the one that somehow came through the passenger window and landed on the examiner’s lap. In all fairness, he had to pass me because he’d flung his arms around while he was screaming and had accidentally punched me in the eye, but it was my lack of luck that had caused the whole thing to happen, so I couldn’t be upset over that.

  Then there was the time in chemistry when the experiment Mr. Perkins was doing caused the sprinklers to go off, or at least try to. A couple drips of water had fallen, and then a deluge had burst through the ceiling above us because the pipe had burst. It was nigh on impossible for it to happen they’d explained afterward, but it had.

  For my eighteenth birthday, Dad had flown us to Montego Bay, in Jamaica, for a vacation to celebrate. I’d been leery of flying in case we went down in a winged inferno, but that hadn’t been what had happened. No, all the toilets had backed up and had to be locked down. Hundreds of passengers, hours of flying, sewage stuck in the bowl and no useable toilets. Men just did not understand how lucky they were that they could pee in empty bottles.

  That was just the tip of the iceberg on my luck.

  Which led me to right now.

  On the day I’d originally been due to fly home on, there had been an accident that had made me miss my flight, even though I’d given myself four hours to get there. I hadn’t been able to get on another flight for three days – no surprise there – so I’d stayed at a hotel and entertained myself in the Big Apple. Gotta make lemonade out of lemons, right?

  Yesterday, I’d decided to get out of the center of the city on an adventure and had passed a tattoo place. Ever since I was little I’d wanted to get something done so, on a whim, I’d gone in to see if they did piercings. Now that I had the chance and the time, I was going to do it.

  There had just been a cancellation, so they’d booked me in for this morning. Because it was on a road that led out of the City toward the airport, I put my name down, and that was it! I’d turned up just as they flipped the sign to open, and I hadn’t screamed or passed out throughout the whole appointment. Score for me!

  I was doing okay, as well – until I checked in at the airport and realized how swollen my tongue was after having a poker shoved through it and then a metal skewer bolted in place. I also realized that my belly button, which had received the same treatment, was rubbing against the waistband and button on my jeans and it was freaking agony.

  When I’d gotten on the plane, I’d frantically asked for ice because that was meant to help swelling – right?

  As we took off, I resigned myself to the fact I’d be crunching ice and fanning my tongue for the duration of the flight, so I’d tried to get as comfortable as possible, praying that it would pass by quickly.

  Unfortunately, ice was made of water. Consumption of water created urine. Hours of crunching the ice equaled lots of pee. So, with my bladder feeling like it was going to explode, alongside my tongue, I’d gone to stand up and head to the bathroom.

  Of course I’d forgotten to unbuckle my belt, which made it tug on my skewered belly button. It had also made me clench my jaw, which tugged on the big fat brisket which was now my tongue. I don’t think there was anyone in the world who wouldn’t have screamed at the dual bolts agony that both of those sensations caused, me included.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, a big behemoth had come bearing down on me like an angry gorilla and had then decided that I was having an allergic reaction to something.

  Which brought me to now – my fat ass being literally carried off the plane while everyone watched on. Well, not fat per se, more like pleasantly rounded. I was a size ten and made no apologies for my love of food, so long as it wasn’t red meat. If I could only live on red meat, I’d be the size of a twig. That shit was nasty and my body reacted strongly whenever I ate it.

  I kept trying to tell the big silverback gorilla I wasn’t sick, but he just ignored me.

  Which is exactly what I was doing at this exact moment, again.

  “Ndot thdick!”

  “Honey, I don’t think now is the time to even be thinking about dicks,” he muttered, putting me onto the gurney that was waiting for me. “I know we got close to that at the party, but we need to focus on getting you better before we revisit it, okay?”

  What the hell was he talking about?

  What party? The only time I’d gotten close to his dick was when he’d rudely smashed it into my face while I was sitting down. I know that it was down to the selfish asshole in front of me who’d been trying to insert himself on my lap for the duration of the flight, but it had still been a full-frontal face dicking.

  And who called a flight a party?

  As they wheeled me through the terminal and into the room where a doctor was waiting for me, I sighed and laid back, hoping that they would realize there had been a mistake, and quickly. I desperately needed to pee again.

  Don’t pee. Don’t pee!

  I kept singing it inside my head – obviously I couldn’t do it out loud – as Harambe (as the big gorilla will now be known) told the doctor what had happened as he took my vitals.

  “She seems okay,” the doctor noted, sounding unsure. “Can you open your mouth for me, Miss?”

  I did as the doctor said and closed my eyes, just waiting for what I knew was about to happen.

  “Caaarrrriiiiist,” he groaned out. I assumed he was saying Christ, but what did I know. My tongue was currently as fat as my thigh. “Welp, found your problem. Shit on a shingle, girl. What in the gorilla in Manila did you do?”

  I truly appreciated the fact he’d used a gorilla reference given our present company – who was now receiving a hard glare from me, again. I really didn’t appreciate having to explain what had happened, especially not with my cow's tongue, and it was his fault.

  Alas, I did my best and took a deep breath to fill the kind doctor in.

  Two

  Dahlia

  W alking out of the terminal behind a fuming Harambe – whose full name was Madix Blue, the lucky primate bastard – I sighed and went into my purse to dig for my keys. I was going to get a cab home and try to put this nightmare behind me.

  And suck on ice, lots of ice.

  Just as I looked up to see where the taxi rank was, Harambe stopped and turned to say something. Unfortunately, this put his foot right in front of mine. One foot hooking later, and I was flying through the air, as were my keys.

  I bounced on the sidewalk, groaning at the pain in my knees, my belly button, my tongue… basically everywhere hurt when I
hit the concrete.

  My keys went flying and bounced off the sidewalk too, then slid across it and went right down a drain.

  “What the hell?”

  When you have as much happen to you as I did, you make peace quickly with the fact that you make yourself look a complete and utter twat publicly on a regular basis. You get used to the embarrassment, the laughter, the cuts and bruises. So, I did the same right now, even with the handsome giant with the strangest eyes I’d ever seen looking on. They looked almost black until you got up close to them, which I’d had the good fortune of doing when the doc had explained to him that my tongue was unusually swollen for a tongue piercing. As he’d explained it all, Madix had bent over with his eyes squinted to look at the little silver ball poking through the heifer in my mouth. That’s when I’d seen that they were in fact a beautiful dark purplish gray.

  And at this precise moment, his weird eyes were burning a hole through my forehead as I looked back up at him, like where I was currently sitting was completely normal. As he continued to stare at me, I noticed something new. He also had a little ring of lighter silver around his pupil. Holy shit, this dude would make a great shifter!

  A gorilla shifter!

  Because I’d given up trying to talk after I’d drooled my way through the explanation with the doctor (and had resorted to writing it all out when they hadn’t understood a word I’d said), I didn’t even try to explain my current position to him. I just sat there and shrugged even though I was screwed, and not in an ‘ooo, that feels good!’ kind of way.

  My dad had a copy of my key, which unfortunately was on his key-chain with him in New York. I had a key to his house, where another copy of mine was sitting, however that was attached to the keyring that was probably winding its way to the ocean – or however drains worked. Added onto that, my best friend was out-of-town visiting her parents, so I couldn’t call her for help or a place to stay either.