Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

“Pull over,” I sputtered, reaching for my door with one hand, and my belt with the other.

“I can’t, there’s nowhere to…”

“Pull over or I’m gonna pee on your chair, and every time you get in the car…”

Reaching for my hand to keep me from jumping out before we’d rolled to a stop, he maneuvered us over to the side of the road. “Jesus Christ, go!”

Maybe a normal woman who was twenty-one weeks pregnant could pull the squat and pee thing, but this woman was carrying a heifer so it wasn’t as easy. Pushing down my panties, I tried to kick them up in the air with my right foot and catch them, but they were too hooked around it. By the time I managed to actually do it, I had to lift my dress, spread my legs as far apart as I could, and just go. No squatting, no muss, no dignity, just sweet bliss as Lake Erie left my body.

The mental image of what I must look like made me laugh at the same time.

“What’s so funny?” Tate yelled from his side of the car.

From the way he’d pulled in, I’d been able to keep some dignity thanks to there being a bush on one side of me, and my side of the vehicle on the other. Then again, was there any dignity when you had to kick your underwear repeatedly up at your face, and then squat like a sumo wrestler to pee at the side of the road?

“Do I look like a sumo?” I yelled back, belatedly realizing that I’d invited him to watch me pee. “No, no, forget I said anything.”

“Yeah, you look like you’re about to launch at the other guy,” he muttered from right behind me, scaring the shit out of me.

If he’d come out ten seconds earlier, there would have been no way to recover any of the shreds of dignity I had now. He would have seen me midstream, probably sending a Morse code signal with the effect laughing while you peed had on the flow. Thankfully, I’d reached the bottom of my bladder, which left me with a new problem.

“Do you have any napkins?”

“Napkins? Why?”

“I need to wipe.”

Why didn’t men know this? Oh, because they got to just shake the snake and walk away. Or, they stood ten feet away from the toilet like they did in The Bar and hoped for the best. It was so bad that I’d put a sign over the urinals and in each cubicle which read: Players with short bats, please stand closer to the plate. It was in the shape of a baseball plate too, which added to its cuteness. But seriously though, those ‘bats’ weren’t as big as they thought!

Did they take the hint? Did they hell.

Just then, a handful of napkins was shoved under my nose, and then he thankfully walked away again. Cleaning up, I looked for a place to put them, and ended up having to shove them in the bush beside me. It bugged me because gross and trash on the road, but there was nowhere else to put them.

Climbing back in, I smiled gratefully at Tate when he handed me a wet wipe for my hands.

Men, they just didn’t realize how easy they had it.* * *“So, have you had any weird cravings?” Tate’s grandmother Linda asked me. We were all at his parent’s house waiting for the big reveal.

“Not really,” I shrugged, and I hadn’t. Twizzlers, the standard pickles, milkshakes, root beer and candy, that was it. The fact that I was mixing them all together was neither here nor there.

“I had terrible cravings when I was pregnant with Lilith,” Mom told us, rubbing my stomach like she did every time she passed me. It was the total opposite of what Dad did which was to look at it like I was carrying an alien, and then glare at Tate. “Yes, I wanted bread dipped in milk, pickle splits, a certain sauce that shall not be named,” she gave me a quick look as she said that. “I even licked a bar of soap because it smelled so good.”

“What the hell is a pickle split?” Tate’s sister Ariana asked.

“Well, it’s like a banana split, but with pickles…”

Turning around, I made my way quickly over to the open door, breathing in the fresh air. We weren’t allowed to go into the living room yet because Hurst was setting something up inside it, and we weren’t to go near the front of the house either because something else was going on there, so the back it was. While we’d been out, someone had gone and gotten King Ferdinand and Bojangles, and they were in their enclosures in Tate’s parent’s garden which both had pink and blue balloons stuck all over them.