Would he hold it against me even more for using his name in vain in my head? I wasn’t religious, but I really didn’t need the universe gunning for me more than it already was.
Regardless of whether or not I’d just encouraged the higher ups to mess with me even more, I would not bend to the bitter, twistedness of Mrs. Crane. Not today, Satan!
Jesus Christ, Dahlia. Satan now too? Have you no control over your stupidity? And you just said the Lord’s name in vain again.
Madix’s hand grabbing mine and holding it firmly gave me more courage as I just stared at the old hag like she was an insignificant bug. I wanted to jump over the table and smack her head on a taco – what a waste – but I wasn’t going to give her the ammunition against me. Instead, I was just going to look at her like she wasn’t getting to me like the rest of the table were doing.
That lasted all of two seconds because Levi moved from his seat on the other side of Madix, so that he was kneeling on the floor, and whispered something in his ear. Madix listened looking completely confused and then nodded.
Suddenly, the Townsend insanity reared its awesome head as Levi bolted up from his position, gave Madix a loud smacking kiss on the cheek, and then jumped up on his chair.
“He said yes! Oh, holy Jesus, my sweet cushion tush said yes. We’re getting married!” he screeched, pumping his arms in the air and squealing.
The entire restaurant burst into a round of applause and then climbed up onto their chairs and tables and started chanting.
“Cushion tush, cushion tush, cushion tush, cushion tush!”
I couldn’t help it, the look on Madix’s face teamed with the actions of the people around us, and the Townsends who were now standing on the table yelling, “Say ‘yes’ to the dress!” was too much.
I started laughing harder than I’d ever laughed in my life, so hard that I lost my balance and fell off my chair. From my position on the floor, I saw that the leg of my chair had actually snapped which was what had made me fall. At this moment, I couldn’t even muster one tiny shit for my lack of luck.
“Give me a kiss, pookie,” Levi squealed.
A hand appeared under the table to help me out, and then I was lifted up to sit on the table.
“I’m going to kill him,” Madix growled, watching as Levi slowly and seductively – or at least trying to be – crawled along the table toward us with his lips puckered. “I’m going to shove his balls up his ass and…”
I don’t know what came over me, but I did something at that moment I would never ever have thought I’d have the lady-balls to do. I jumped up so I was standing on the table and yelled, “Levi, you lucky guy. He’s into the kink as well!”
The chants in the restaurant changed to, “Kinky cushion tush, kinky cushion tush, kinky cushion tush!”
I’ll give him credit – when Levi reached him and pulled him in for a big old smackeroo, he didn’t flinch, he didn’t lash out, and he didn’t rub his face afterward.
Instead, he stood up slowly, looked at Mrs. Crane – who was all of five feet tall in her old lady shoes – and raised an eyebrow.
Giving all of us the dirtiest look I’d ever seen her throw, she stormed out of the restaurant with her nose in the air.
Just as she was walking out, Levi screamed and yelled over the still chanting customers, “Get your finger out of there. We’re in public, you sexy bastard!”
Five
Madix
“I hate that old woman,” Erica muttered as we all sat on the porch drinking a beer, apart from Luna who was rubbing her bump and chuckling at something. “She’s been a pain in the ass for years.”
The old bitch from the restaurant had apparently had an issue with the Townsend cousin’s friend Tony and his husband Lars coming to visit a few weeks ago. She also had an issue with anyone of color, anyone who wasn’t Christian, anyone who didn’t go to church, anyone who farted, and anyone who breathed.
She was just a plain old bitch! Because of that, I was impressed with how Levi had dealt with her regardless of the role I’d inadvertently played in it, but I’d never admit that out loud.
“What did she mean about Dahlia’s mom?” Luna asked me.
I shifted uncomfortably because it really wasn’t up to me to tell people. She’d only just told me the story today and if she wanted people to know something like this she’d tell them herself, right?
“Her mom ran away with the previous Pastor’s wife,” Erica responded, shocking me. Waving her hand in my direction, she shook her head as she said, “It was quite the scandal a long, long time ago. She left that poor sweet baby and her daddy. Then again, she was never really maternal in any shape or form. We never saw her with Dahlia or her dad, and when she was pregnant, she was constantly miserable and complaining.”
“Damn,” Luna muttered, looking out at the grass beside Jer and Erica’s house. “That’s rough. Do you think I should talk to her and tell her about ours?” she turned to look at me and cocked her head to the side.
“I already told her.”
“You did?” she gasped. I never spoke about our mom to anyone so even I’d been shocked when I’d opened up to her. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed of it. It was mostly because it was a shitty story. Who wanted to hear that kind of crap?
“Yeah, on the way to the restaurant today,” I said before taking a big mouthful of beer.
“And then he cheated on me and smooched her,” Levi announced in mock disgust. “You dirty cheater you.”
Glaring at him, I took another mouthful of beer hoping that the conversation would move along so that I could make my excuses and go to the peace of my home.
“We rarely saw Dahlia after that,” Erica murmured. “I wish I’d thought to go and check on her. I feel terrible that I didn’t think to do that.”
“She went to high school with us,” Ariana added, looking at Levi. “She was in your grade wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, focusing on his beer and peeling the label off it. The way he was suddenly acting made me feel uneasy.
“Did you know her?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my gut already telling me the answer.
Groaning, he slammed his bottle on the table beside him and put his face in his hands.
“Yeah, and I was an asshole to her one time,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands but we still caught every word.
“You were an asshole to her?” I stood up and went to walk over to him, but Noah, Luna’s husband, caught my hand and shook his head.
“Get your face out of your damn hands, son, and give us an answer,” Jer snapped as he stood up and glared down at his son.
Doing as he was told, Levi looked up at us. “I didn’t say anything to her, but the guys that I was friends, well acquaintances, with did.” His eyes moved to look at the side of the house and then back to us. “I should have stopped it, but I was worried if I stepped in and handled them in front of everyone, it would make them even worse to her. I wasn’t even good friends with the guys. They just followed me and my best friend around, bugging us like we gave a shit about what they were talking about.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to the question I was about to ask, but I had to ask it, anyway.
“What did they say to her?”
When he didn’t answer, Jer took a step forward, catching his attention.
“What did they say?” he repeated my question slowly.
“They called her a taco muncher, a rug muncher, said her mom was a muff diver and shit like that,” he whispered looking sick to his stomach. “The worst one was when we had beans at lunch one day, and the guys started flicking them at her. When she looked up, they yelled that seeing as how her mom like to flick the bean, they thought she would too.”
Kids were such fuckers!
“Who did this?” I growled, ready to beat the shit out of them.
“They’re long gone. I think one of them works for the CIA now,” he said as he looked down at his bottle again. Blowing out a bre
ath, he looked back up at us. “I got the worst one back, though.”
I’d been silently stewing over the information and feeling the rage building up inside me for the poor girl who had been tortured because her mother was a heartless, selfish bitch, but now he had my full attention again.
“What did you do?”
“Poured a bag of sugar in the gas tank of his new Jeep,” he smirked. “And then filled it up with water because I wasn’t sure which one would actually kill his car. He was picking up the head cheerleader for a date and I followed behind him and waited for him to go to her door. Then I got out, did it and waited on the stretch of road he’d be driving down in case she needed a ride home. The next day, I left a flyer in the girls locker rooms that said he’d been diagnosed with anal herpes and anyone who’d touched him should get tested.”
“That was it?” Jer asked, sounding almost disappointed.
“Well, we had to be careful at school,” Levi snapped, glaring over at his brother Archer. “Because of some people, the teachers thought we were assholes and were just waiting for us to do something.”
Archer slowly lowered his beer while he glared at his brother. “I was a victim of teacher brutality and stalking!”
All the Townsends snorted at the same time, avoiding direct eye contact with him when he glared at each one of them individually.
Fucking hell!
“You listen to me,” Erica said firmly, walking up to Levi and pointing her finger in his nose. “You will apologize to that beautiful girl, do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma,” he replied sullenly, looking like a little kid.
In all honesty, he hadn’t done anything apart from not stick up from someone in front of everyone else. We all had a kid at school who got bullied for something. In fact, we all got bullied at school at some point. I could also understand his reasoning for what he did. In all likelihood, it would have made them attack her even more just to get a reaction out of him.
Scratching the beard I’d grown since I’d been living here, I looked out at the acres of grass that surrounded the houses and contemplated the situation I was now in. Realizing that I wouldn’t be able to go as in depth as I wanted to with the Townsend family around me, I turned and said goodnight and walked down the steps.
“Oh, cushion tush!”
Hearing the name that would haunt me for the rest of my life, I turned slowly and saw Levi hanging over the railing of the porch.
“Does this mean the wedding’s off?” he pouted.
“Don’t push your luck!” I snapped and turned to walk back to my house.
“Noted,” he yelled, followed by, “But I do love the cushion you’ve got for my pushin’ on your tush…” he was cut off by the sound of a smack followed by a yelp. “Ma! I just wanted to make sure he knew how much I loved his…” there was another smack and a yelp.
Good, I hope he saw double for a while.
Eight days later…
I hadn’t seen Dahlia in eight days, eight long days. Why? Because there had been an issue on site four where they were drilling and tools were going missing. So far, it had cost the company a grand total of twenty-four-thousand dollars, which might not seem like much for a huge oil company, but when you add on their normal expenses and things like that, it was a big blow.
What pissed me off even more was that we didn’t know who was doing it. We’d tightened security and installed more cameras throughout the operation, but I really wanted to catch the son of a bitch.
Right now, though, we were sitting around the huge family table at Jer and Erica’s for ‘whatever Wednesday’. This Wednesday consisted of a variety of food. Sushi, nachos, fried chicken and steak.
Ariana and Luna had dragged Dahlia to join us, and I mean dragged. She’d apparently been drinking a cup of coffee as she spoke to one of the mechanics– the one who had checked over my truck and assured me there wasn’t a damned thing wrong with it – and they had marched in, grabbed an arm and dragged her into the car. She hadn’t spilled a drop of her coffee, but she was still glaring at them every chance she got.
It was at that moment that I fell in love with Erica and Jer as they marched through and put a bowl of beans in front of her. When she looked at them in confusion as they stood watching her with their arms crossed, I realized what they were doing and grinned.
Game on!
Dahlia kept looking between them and the bowl, not saying one word.
Sighing, Jer reached down, plucked a bean out of the bowl and placed it on the table.
“It’s very easy. You do this, and then you flick it,” he instructed, flicking that bean with precision like he was Tiger Woods.
The bean flew through the air and smacked Levi in the side of the head.
Not realizing what it was, he turned smiling in our direction thinking we’d been trying to get his attention, just as Erica flicked another bean at him. This one hit him dead center in the middle of his forehead.
Dahlia burst out laughing and lined them up on the table in front of her. The whole time Levi was looking around him searching for what was hitting him. How he hadn’t figured out where the beans had come from I’ll never know, but just as he turned with his mouth open to say something, Dahlia let rip and fired the line of beans one at a time. Seeing as how it was wide open, the first one flew into the back of his mouth making him choke.
Laughing his ass off, Archer smacked him hard on the back as he coughed and spluttered.
She did not let up once, though. Each one of the beans that she’d lined up went flying in his direction. Because his head was now facing the floor as he coughed, the only place they could land was in his hair – some staying, some falling.
With a hacking cough, he finally cleared the bean from his throat, catching it in his hand.
“What the hell is this?” he wheezed, reaching for his beer which had one of the pulses floating on top. Not seeing it, he took a mouthful and then spat it back into the glass. “Why are there beans everywhere?”
“Man, if you can’t figure that out…” Archer snorted, still laughing hard. “Holy shit, that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.” I was in total agreement with that sentiment and felt myself warming even more to another one of the Townsends… until he turned his attention onto Dahlia. “Marry me. Please, marry me!”
Every muscle in my body tensed, ready to lunge over the table and punch him in the face. A soft hand holding onto my left one ruined that plan, though. There was something very calming about Dahlia and I could imagine that sometimes that would be beneficial, but at times like this, not so much.
Damn it, I really wanted to punch him in the face. Glaring at him wasn’t giving me the same satisfaction that my fist hitting him would.
“Uh, thanks?” Dahlia chuckled, her face turning bright red. That riled me even more until she leaned into my side slightly.
“Seriously, what the fuck?” Levi snapped, shaking his head to get all the beans out of his hair.
“That was your penance for being a little shit at school,” Jer boomed. Like, literally boomed. His voice was so loud and deep that even Luna’s howling Dachshund, Banshee, stopped for once. “You might have done something about it, but we don’t leave people to fight their wars alone, do we? Next time, remember that and how you’d feel if you’d been in Dahlia’s shoes.”
“And don’t swear at my table,” Erica snapped, glaring at him.
“He said shit,” Levi replied, pointing at his dad.
“It’s my fucking table,” Jer said, moving to sit at the head of it. “Now, let’s eat!”
Leaning into me again, Dahlia grinned up at me. “That was fun,” she whispered. “But you realize that he didn’t do anything wrong, don’t you?”
I don’t think either of us intended to stay like that, just looking at each other, but I’d be damned if I could stop. I felt my lips twitching into a smile which was happening way too often for my liking. The movement caught her attention and her eyes dropped to wa
tch them.
“Oh, just fucking kiss her,” Tate groaned, reaching across me to grab a steak with his fork.
His arm pit in my face was an unwelcome distraction from the woman that I still couldn’t get out of my head.
It was also fucking rude.
Reaching for my fork, I waited until he was moving back to sit down again and stabbed him in the underside of his bicep. The steak dropped onto my plate as he yelped and threw his arm up in the air.
“What the fuck?”
“I think he’s turning into one of us,” Ariana crowed, waving her arms in the air.
That was like a slap to the face. Turning into a Townsend? I’d rather turn into a gorilla.
“Calm, Harambe,” Dahlia murmured as she grinned at me. “One day you’ll look back at this moment and see it as a blessing.”
And on those words of wisdom, she reached over to get a piece of chicken from the tower on the table. Spearing the top one with her fork, she moved backwards toward her plate. Two things happened at that moment. The tower of chicken fell, with pieces of it then rolling everywhere, knocking a jug of gravy over.
She was the complete opposite of me. I liked order and peace, and she was a freakin’ disaster.
And damn, I really liked that more each day.
Six
Dahlia
I wasn’t sure what was going on with Madix. It felt like we were building something, but I didn’t understand what. Sure, there had been touches and some tense moments, but nothing else had happened since we’d kissed and it was making me feel off balance. I wasn’t spending all my time thinking about it, but I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t tried to figure out what our situation was. When I looked at it from the outside, I wondered if I was being immature or just plain old dumb, but everyone had situations like this at some point that they stewed over. I wasn’t any different.
I liked him, okay. I could admit that. He was just such a great guy. Funny, caring, gentle, loyal, protective, he had it all on the inside. And then there was the outside too, which definitely had it all. So, I could admit to myself that I was attracted to the guy. We’d been hanging out doing random things like buying furniture, taking Bing for walks and just having fun, and I loved it. It was so easy and relaxing being around him that even if we only ended up being friends, I would take anything I could get with him.
Mad Gold (Providence Gold Series Book 2) Page 5