Until Tom, Finding Forever (Providence Book 5)

by Mary B. Moore

  “Shut the fuck up,” Taint whispered furiously behind me and went back to sawing. “What the hell kind of rope is this? Normally this blade cuts through rope in seconds – at least when I get tied up.”

  “Kinky!” Tony replied with a wink, his face twinkling now. Maybe I was seeing things?

  Suddenly the rope gave way and my arms were free. This would have been a relief if it didn’t mean moving my most likely broken arm.

  “I’m gonna pass her out to you, okay? She says she has multiple breakages so be careful with her. Once she’s free, run back to the car and get the fuck out of here – I’ll follow later.”

  Nodding his head at a fast speed making it look like a strobe light with the glittering, Tony reached out for me.

  I was proud of myself for not puking on him when he grabbed me a little too tightly before putting me down on the ground.

  “Run!”

  Tony grabbed my hand, thankfully the good one, and we both started to run in the direction that he decided that we should. I just hoped and prayed that this was the same one that the car was in because the constant movement hurt like a bitch.

  There was a boom behind us, followed by shouts and gun shots.

  “Poor Taint,” I panted as we rounded a tree. It looked just like the one that had hit me in the face, but then again so did that one over there.

  Tony started laughing as we went around another one. “Taint? Oh shit, that’s a good one. Did you call him that to his face? I’ll bet he…” He was cut off by a gunshot and then started screaming his lungs out. “What is that? Was it a grenade? It feels like one. My ass!” He was hopping, taking me with him each time which made the pain go from one thousand to fifty thousand on the ‘I can’t handle this shit’ scale. “Look at it, but if it’s bad tell me it’s good. Or tell me in a good way.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I did my best to bend over and look, but my ribs hated me. In fact, my whole torso hated me. “I can’t see!”

  Then he did something that was so freaking bizarre, that I couldn’t hold back the laughter even with the sounds of Apocalypse Now coming from behind us. I regretted it instantly and threw up beside us. I hope that was the tree that hit me – how’s that for karma, you green bastard. Focusing back on Tony, who was still in the position that was responsible for me tossing my cookies, I had to bite down on my good fist to stop myself from doing it all over again. He was leaning against the tree with his ass pointing out toward me and one leg bent out like a dog pissing.

  “Stop fucking around and tell me,” he whined.

  Breathing as deeply as I could, I squinted at his upturned ass. Right on the outside of his cheek was a tear in the material which looked like it had blood on it too. Whether it meant that he had major damage that would result in the loss of said cheek or if it was lying on the ground in the distance, I couldn’t say, so I decided to wing it. “It’s just a scratch!”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, reaching around to touch it. “It feels like more!”

  “Don’t touch it,” I grabbed his hand to stop him from feeling what was left his remaining gluteus maximus. “You have dirty hands and you’ll get it infected.”

  Groaning, he lowered his leg back down and started limping away from me. “Let’s go!”

  At least now he was a slow as I was, so my torso wasn’t screaming at me as badly.

  Through some miracle, we weren’t abducted by ass shooting, tap dancing pussies who hit unconscious women, and we made it to the vehicle.

  Tony hobbled up to the driver’s side and after multiple attempts, turned and tossed the keys at me before limping around to the passenger’s side.

  “Um, I don’t know how to drive,” I tried to explain as I climbed carefully into the seat of what wasn’t actually a car, but a freaking truck on raised wheels.

  “I don’t care,” he whined, trying to climb in the normal way before giving up and planting his face in the seat and pulling himself up. Once he got there, he couldn’t sit on the wound, so he had to put his torso under the dash and sit facing backwards with his arms on the seat cushion. “Just go!”

  I’d obviously watched people drive and had taken some lessons, but I hadn’t ever had the desire to learn and get my license. Regardless, I put the key in the ignition and turned it on awkwardly with my non-broken hand. This consisted of me having to reach across and under the wheel, while saying every curse word possible. When the engine started, I sank back in relief and closed my eyes.

  “Uh, you still have to drive,” came a muffled hiss from beside me.

  “Oops!”

  Putting it into drive, I put my foot down on the accelerator making us both scream when we shot forward.

  “We’re gonna die,” he wailed. “And they’ll put ‘Here he lies, with half an ass!’ on my headstone.”

  “Or maybe – ‘Here he lies, broken hearted. With only half an ass so he couldn’t even have farted!’”

  “If it was your ass hanging off, I’d have laughed. Because it isn’t, I’m killing you in my head.”

  “Fair play!” And it was. If it was me, I’d have been doing the same thing.

  As we screeched around the corner because I’d forgotten that you had to brake, he asked a very valid question – albeit one that would have been better asked before we set off. “Are we going in the right direction?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” I was close to hysterical at the thought of having to go back.

  “Well check the Sat Nav,” he waved his arm around, not actually showing me where it was.

  “Where is it?”

  “On the dash! Where else would it be?”

  “Everything is on the dash, you half-assed twat!”

  “Don’t be so nasty, you pasty trout!” He snapped as a phone screen lit up beside me. I glanced over to see what he was doing and almost ran us off the road. “Fuck we’re going in the wrong direction. Wait, no – maybe it’s because I’m facing backwards. Gimme a sec.” The phone screen turned around to face the front of the car before swinging back round again. “No, we’re going the wrong way. Turn back!”

  I almost asked him how I did that but figured if I swung the wheel to left it would make it happen. Again, I forgot to brake, so Tony hit the door with a thud. “Oops!” I was saying that a lot tonight.

  “You did that on purpose,” he snapped as he groaned and moved, the light on his phone screen showing the grimace on his face.

  We must have only travelled about fifty-feet when a black figure jumped out of the trees and in front of the car.

  “Yeti!” I screeched, finally using the brake pedal which shot Tony backwards.

  His scream joined mine as the back door opened and the Yeti got in. Fuck, I could have locked the doors!

  “Carry on,” came Taint’s voice from behind me, followed by his sparkling dark face appearing over my shoulder.

  I stomped back down on the accelerator and did my best not to lose control of the vehicle.

  “Will you stop jerking me around,” Tony sobbed beside me. “I left half my ass back there and I think the other half is now in my left ear.”

  “What happened?” Taint asked, taking in Tony’s face down position on the chair.

  “I did a Tom,” he continued sobbing, referring to Tom being shot in the butt cheek by the psycho who was probably involved in my bullshit tonight. “Best case scenario - I got a second butt hole. I’ll be like the dog my grandparents had who just shat as he walked not even knowing that he was leaving a trail of bread crumbs behind him,” he gulped, taking a breath in through the hysterical tears. “Worst case – I’ll have to wear those weird ass cutlets and won’t be able to ever go to the beach again.”

  Taint was making barfing noises as Tony embraced the term ‘too much information’ whole heartedly. Normally, I had a pretty strong gag reflex, but with the pain and stress, it started to make me wretch too. Every time he gagged, I’d follow which would make him go again.

  “Stahp,” he pleaded
, panting. I did my best, but I was walking a fine line between not puking and actually taking a ride on my chunder choo choo.

  Trying to distract myself from it, I asked the first question which came to mind. “So, why are you sparkly? I thought I’d come face-to-face with a Twilight character when you first showed up.”

  “They sparkle in the sun,” Tony mumbled, face back in the cushion. “It’s dark out.”

  “I know that,” I snapped, turning to glare at him and accidentally jerking the wheel. Because my eyes weren’t on the road, I really wasn’t to blame for hitting the guy who jumped out and was pointing a gun at us. The only reason I knew that this was what had happened, was because – after the thud of the vehicle hitting it and the following thuds as the person bounced along the roof before falling onto the road, Taint filled us in.

  “You took out the bad guy,” he marveled. “You’re bad ass, Miss Hart!”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I cried hysterically. “Should I go back? Do I leave a note?”

  “No,” both of them yelled at once, scaring the shit out of me.

  “When we tell everyone the story,” Taint said soothingly, “we’ll tell them that you mowed them down in a hail of gunfire.”

  “A hail of gunfire?” Tony croaked in disbelief.

  “I can do that,” I reassured him. It did sound good. “But do I leave a note?”

  “Just drive, blondie. And probably in the direction of the hospital. I think this one’s passed out.”

  Looking over in Tony’s direction, I found that he had indeed passed out – or fallen asleep, but that was unlikely with the injury that he’d sustained to his rectum. How do you fix a second butt hole?

  Following the directions being called out from his phone, I drove us to the hospital – remembering to brake just in time.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tom

  “She’s where?” I yelled as we drove quickly away from the empty house that we’d gone to.

  “At the hospital,” Dad reassured me.

  “Who found her?”

  There was a long silence before he offered up the name. “Tate.”

  “Jesus Christ!” The guy was a menace. He’d probably have shot her thinking she was one of the kidnappers. “Is she alive?”

  “Yeah, but they beat her badly, so the doctors are doing some tests. She also has a broken wrist, so she’s still deciding on what color cast she wants. She’s a bit…indecisive and didn’t like it when they said that they couldn’t give her the rainbow.” I almost laughed at that, but the fact that she was injured and that they’d laid their hands on her and broken her bones made that impossible. “Tony is in surgery,” he added.

  “Holy shit! Will he make it?”

  “Yeah. But you might find that he has a new-found sympathy for what happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was shot in the ass,” Dad choked out.

  “What the fuck was Tate doing? He should know better than to wave his gun around after what happened when we were kids!” And he really should. His dad still walked with a limp.

  “It wasn’t him,” Dad cut in.

  “Holy shit, that’s savage,” Cole said from the front. “Was it the same guy who got Tom? Maybe it’s his M.O.? He could be a serial shit shot.”

  If he wasn’t driving, I’d have punched him. As it was, I needed to get to my pretty girl – she needed me.

  Telling dad that we’d see him soon, I turned to my brother. “I don’t want to hear any more. Just shut the fuck up and drive.”

  “Damn, way to be a party pooper. It’s all shits and giggles until someone shoots you in the shit, hey?”

  “That’s not funny. It doesn’t even make sense, cretin!”

  “Poo face!”

  Leaning my head back and begging everything holy to get us to the hospital quickly, I focused on breathing and not losing my shit. “Hey, what’s up with the lame poop references?”

  Sighing, he sped up when the road ahead of us had no traffic on it. “Louis. Ebru told me that if his first word was offensive, that she’d staple my nuts to my earlobes.”

  Wincing at the mental image, I made a mental note to try and hold back on my own swearing from now on. I’d only just gotten my nuts back and having them attached to my earlobes would ruin all of the plans that I had for my future with Sonya.

  I suddenly realized that I wanted kids. I’d assumed that they’d be in my future, but now I really wanted them and my balls swinging from my ears wasn’t ever going to make that a possibility.

  Then, I thought about what dad had told me about her injuries and it took everything in me not to punch the shit out of the dash in front of me. What if they’d done permanent damage to her? I would love her no matter what, I knew that – she was it for me – but what if she was in pain for the rest of her life? Or if I had to empty out her bag of piss constantly and forgot? Then she’d get embarrassed. I’d have to set a reminder on my phone to do it so that she never went through that.

  Plan in place, I focused on getting to her.

  ****

  Once we’d got there and had parked up, both Cole and I ran at a fast pace through the doors of the building, looking desperately for a member of my family or at least someone that we recognized.

  It didn’t take long because they were all standing in one area, almost blocking it off for everyone else.

  Mom broke away from them all first and ran towards me.

  “She’s okay, so far,” she rushed to say. I was as close to the edge as someone could get before they lost their shit completely and it must have shown. “Come and get the details before you do something dumb.”

  She half dragged me down the hallway toward the rest of the family, stopping me from going and demanding information from one of the nurses who were staring at us all.

  Tate was pushed forward, glittery makeup still in place.

  “Well, tell him,” Gramps gave him a shove on his shoulder as he said.

  Tate had his arms crossed and was sulking as he stared at the wall.

  “Man, you look like a complete twat!” Cole told him from behind me, getting Tate to snap out of whatever bullshit he was mooning over. “Did you purposely decide to do an Edward?” He asked, referring to the character from the Twilight books.

  “Hey, fuck you!” Tate snapped as he lunged forward pointing a finger in Cole’s face. “This shit was necessary. And,” he turned to me, his finger about half an inch from my face, “never ever get her a car. Ever!”

  “Who?” What the fuck was he talking about?

  “Her!”

  “Her who? If I knew who her was, I wouldn’t be asking you who her actually was, would I?” Ah, fuck it. Now I sounded like the old degenerate standing off to the side watching all of this.

  “Sonya, that’s who!”

  My head jerked back at this. “Why the fuck not? If she wants to drive, she should be allowed to. I’m not one of those dictators who demands that their woman be under their feet constantly. Jesus man, you really are a…”

  “She can’t fucking drive, you imbecile!” He roared in my face, making me and everyone else take a step back. “She forgets to brake – even at red lights, she doesn’t indicate – like ever, she thought that the speedometer was ‘like in the computer games where you have to try and hit the highest number’, and, fuck me – she ran over a bad guy and wanted to leave a fucking note for his insurance company!”

  She can’t drive? How did I not know this? It didn’t surprise me to be honest, her parents hadn’t really been that interested in what she’d been doing so long as she was getting good grades and wasn’t under their feet. But to not drive? Who gets to twenty-two and can’t drive nowadays?

  Cole was chuckling behind me, finding this all very amusing. Gramps looked like he was struggling not to do the same. In fact, all of my family were in various states of hilarity after hearing Tate’s rundown about her inability to drive. If she hadn’t had the shit beaten out of
her, I’d probably find it funny too, but I had to make sure that her catheter bag didn’t overflow. I’d come back and revisit all of this at a later date.

  “Where is she now?” I looked past the pathetic twat breathing the same air as me and looked at the only normal member of my family – my mom.

  “Still having x-rays and a CT scan done. They said it would take a while.”

  “Oh, and, get her to stop calling me Taint! I’m not a wrinkly nut sack and I’ve told her repeatedly that it’s Tate - not Taint!” Tate barked in my ear.