“What are you doing?” my sister asked.
“I’m going to order some fortune cookies that have what I want them to say inside them. Then I’m going to send them to Hoax…and if he happens to guess, then I’ll confirm my pregnancy with him. If he doesn’t…then at least I kind of told him.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.” She paused. “What did Mom and Dad say?”
“They haven’t,” I admitted. “They both know, of course, but I haven’t flat out told them that I was pregnant yet. I think they’re both trying to deny the fact that they’re going to be grandparents.”
She snickered. “Mom said that she was too young for grandkids when Janie had hers. She’s in denial just like you are, I’m sure.”
Speaking of… “Are you going to tell them that you’re coming?”
She grinned. “No. That’s why I asked you to pick me up at the airport.”Chapter 17You need to get in shape. If you were murdered right now, your chalk outline would be a circle.
-Things you shouldn’t tell your pregnant sister
Hoax
Two weeks later
“Yo,” Carl called.
I looked up just in time to see a box the size of a twin-size mattress coming directly at my face. Okay, technically it wasn’t really all that big. More the size of a shoebox, but it was still pretty big when it was coming directly at your head.
I caught it and managed not to get hit, but barely.
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“Welcome,” he sat down next to me. “What’d we get?”
I laughed.
In the sixteen weeks that we’d been here, the men of my team had come to love mail day almost as much as I did.
Pru sent each of the men a little something, learning their likes and dislikes almost as easily as she’d learned mine.
I handed out the boxes as fast as I could, and each man ripped into them.
“Why is my woman having to send us stuff when y’all have women at home?” I accused, looking at both Treat, who didn’t give a single damn, and Carl.
Carl shrugged. “My wife only sends me letters. They’re sweet and all, but damn I wish she’d send me some fuckin’ food.”
I grunted in reply and pulled the box closer to me. The rest of the stuff was mine.
Grinning, I reached for the fortune cookies first.
Lately, I’d had one in each box.
They were getting increasingly weird.
Last time I’d gotten one, it’d said ‘soon to be three peas in our crazy pod.’
This week’s was no different.
“And then there were three,” I read aloud. “Boring.”
I tossed the fortune into the box and reached for the sticks of beef jerky that she always sent that I only ever got one or two pieces of if I wasn’t fast enough.
“What’s up with those fortunes?” Carl mumbled around a mouth full of powdered donuts.
I leaned back in my chair and popped the top on the hot Dr. Pepper.
It wasn’t cold, but goddamn was it still good.
“I have no fuckin’ clue,” I admitted. “I’ll have to ask her next time I talk to her if she’s started going to a different Chinese restaurant.”
“Maybe we’ll get to go home soon and you can ask the Chinese place if they started buying from a new supplier.” Treat popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth.
“Fuck you,” I grumbled.
I was sitting down on my ass when we should be doing something, and honestly, there were about five thousand things that I could think of to do instead of sitting here twiddling my thumbs.
If we’d just get our shit together, we could get the fuck out of here, and I could get home to where I needed to be.
Unfortunately, we were playing a hurry up and wait game, and that game was one that couldn’t be rushed—at least according to the commander.
“If the surveillance comes back tonight indicating our target is in the area, we’ll move on him,” Treat said. “I know y’all are getting restless, but hopefully the end is in sight.”
The end was in sight.
Goddamn, but that had been the exact same thing on the fortune cookie Pru had sent me in her package of random shit that she thought I might like.
Grinning when I thought about it and how accurate that fortune was, I found myself thinking about the other fortunes I’d gotten while I’d been home with her.
The first one: A short stranger will soon enter your life with many blessings to share.
That one, at least, wasn’t true. Not unless a ‘short stranger’ was indicating Pru, but I’d already met her at the time.
The second fortune that I’d gotten: Patience may not be your virtue, but you must learn to embrace it or you’ll kill your friends.
That one, I hoped, was one I was following.
Patience was indeed a virtue. One that I very rarely possessed.