Mad Gold (Providence Gold 2)

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 order, 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.