Choosing Forever

by Mary B. Moore

  When we’d gotten home last night, I’d gone straight into the shower to wash the sweat, and everything else, off me. We’d all come to an agreement that none of us, not one, would ever discuss what happened in those restrooms after the machine was switched off. No one wanted to relive any of it ever again.

  After about an hour of standing under the hot water, Sabine had come to find me and had managed to get me out of there with the promise of Tylenol and Motrin. Yeah, I’d fucking needed painkillers, I hadn’t even been able to drive us home. I also hadn’t missed the fact that Coleman couldn’t look me in the eye without laughing, either. The big fat shit! When it came to his time going through all of this shit, I was going to make him suffer.

  Now, it was the morning after and every breath hurt the muscles that had been abused. Sabine had gone out with Maya and Ebru this morning for breakfast which had allowed me peace and quiet to die with a modicum of dignity.

  As with every plan though, it was ruined by my family. This morning, it was Ren and Cole who didn’t even knock on the door, they just walked into my home. Actually, no, walked isn’t the right way to describe the hunched over turtle like movements that they were making as they shuffled their feet along the wooden flooring.

  “We were gonna go to Mom’s, but it was taking for-fucking-ever,” Cole groaned as he tried to sit down. “So, we came here.”

  I knew sitting down was agony, so I just lay on the couch and waited until he figured it out. I was still pissed at the guy for booking us into that torture chamber - otherwise I’d tell him that if he used the back of the couch to lean on, then lifted his knees onto the cushions, he could collapse backwards and it was less painful. Let the shit face figure it out himself.

  After a couple minutes of him squealing and trying to sit down normally, he crawled over the back of the couch and fell face down sounding like a heifer in labor the whole way. Ren had long since figured out how to get onto the couch and was lying out watching the show playing on the television with me.

  “You should do it – he said. It’ll help you connect more with Sabine – he said,” I growled suddenly. “What he didn’t say was that my guts would come out of my dick and my brain out of my ass hole.” The last time came out as a shout and ended on another groan as I tensed the muscles in my poor abused stomach. “I swear that this hurts more than when I got shot,” I gasped. I mean, had the bullet not been enough?

  "I didn't fucking know," he snapped back. "I've never had a fucking baby before. How was I meant to know it hurt that much? In fact,” he tried to sit up, but couldn’t do it with the pain and fell back down. “I think that the technician chick did it on purpose. She looked mighty trigger happy to me!”

  “You fuckin’ idiot,” Ren grit out through his teeth. His jaw was clenched to tightly that I was surprised the muscle didn’t snap under the pressure. “Were you not there when my wife had Crystal? Were you not there when Isla had the evil spawns of Hell? Of course, it fucking hurts!” He yelled.

  A chorus of groans filled the room as Cole and I jumped and pulled the muscles in our stomach’s as Ren whined when his own pulled from yelling. It was justified, but fuck me did they have to do all of this today?

  “My poor wife’s vagina,” Cole muttered once the whining and groaning had died back down. I was with him on that one, I had no idea how Sabine was going to go through all of that.

  “Brett, have you got any pain pills?” Ren groaned out. I did, but they were upstairs.

  Reaching over for my phone, which I’d kept within reach once I’d made it down onto the cushions of the couch, I rang the one person who I knew would help. Putting my phone on speakerphone, I placed it on my abused stomach and waited for her to pick up.

  “Mom,” I made sure to let her hear the pain I was in the second that she picked up her phone. “I need you!”

  With no questions asked, she agreed to come over and hung up. That was the perks of being her favorite kid.

  “What about me?” Cole whined. He had an adverse reaction to most medications, they made him into an even bigger mouth breather than he was normally, so he was banned.

  “Tough shit!” Ren snapped.

  “Fucking sucks to be you, you big pussy,” I sneered. It was his fault, after all, that we were in this situation.

  We lay there for a couple of minutes while Cole sulked, until the most amazing woman in the world came through my front door.

  “Where are the painkillers?” She asked, only just stopping on her way through the house. Pointing upstairs and knowing she’d understand, she carried on, only stopping to throw a bottle at Cole. “There you go, Sweetie.”

  Peeking open an eye to see what she’d given him, I watched as he held up a bottle of kids Tylenol.

  “Is it grape?” He had the audacity to ask in a sulky tone.

  “Yes. And I brought the bubblegum flavored Ibuprofen in case you needed something on top of it.”

  “How many can I take?” He asked as he opened the top of the bottle and started tapping them out onto his stomach.

  “Fucking take all of them,” I snapped. He was holding her back from getting the painkillers that Ren and I were going to die without. Fortunately, Mom hadn’t hung around after throwing them at him and was already almost at the top of the stairs and closer to the miracles of medication that I needed.

  Once I was pain free and able to move, I was going to shove that bottle so far up his ass that it would take one incredibly skilled surgeon and a whole hospital of nurses that knew what the fuck they were doing to remove it from his colon. Ren could hold him down for me.

  Thirteen

  BRETT

  Since we’d caught the guy in front of Sabine’s house in Appledore, things had settled down.

  “I don’t like it,” Coleman muttered during our daily security meeting. “How do you go from sending all of those photos and threats, to just silence?”

  Pacing back and forth in my home office, I nodded as he voiced the thoughts that had been going through my head every day.

  “I don’t want to question it, but it just doesn’t make sense!” I started pacing again. “There were multiple threats every day.”

  Cole and Ren were sitting in the other comfy chairs in my office listening to all of this. That was until Cole, for once in his life, spoke pure wisdom.

  “Maybe, they’ve decided to let things die down after the botched shooting?” He mused around a mouthful of donut. Where it had come from I didn’t know, but he’d been chewing away on it since he got here. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he had a stash behind him. “Or, maybe the whole point was to make you go after Sabine so that y’all would be back to being in one location?”

  Coleman straightened so quickly in his chair that we heard it crack. “Say that again,” he ordered Cole who gave him a withering look and went back to eating.

  “Man, I’m pregnant,” he mumbled, crumbs shooting everywhere as he spoke around the donut in his mouth. “I don’t even remember what underwear I’ve got on.”

  Glaring at him, I sat down in the chair behind my desk. All of the windows in my home had now been changed to a form of bullet proof glass, which was great security wise, but it also meant that we had to rely on the air conditioning throughout any and all hot weather as it wasn’t safe enough to open the windows. It also meant that the house heated up more than it had before, something to do with more reliable insulation or some shit. All I knew was that I was sweating like a pig in a pen with a guy holding an axe in his hand.

  “He might have a point,” Coleman begrudgingly admitted after a short while, jerking his thumb in Cole’s direction.

  “Me?” His eyebrows almost disappeared with the shock. “What did I say?” He stuffed another piece of donut in his mouth.

  “I think it might be both. Waiting for things to settle after the shooting and getting you both into one place,” Coleman looked past me and out of the window and did a quick scan of the field behind me.

  “I read
this book once,” Ren spoke up. All of our heads turned in his direction as wore obvious expressions of shock. “What? I can read, I just choose not to most of the time.” At Cole’s snort, Ren blushed and then admitted, “Okay, I was told there was some hot as shit sex scenes in it. Anyway, this chick had a shit family and ran away from them. She spent years hiding from them and changing the way she looked and all that. After it, she got in with a bad crowd, or some shit like that. When someone tried to kill her, it turned out that she had to run and try to escape from two enemies that had it in for her - the bad crowd and her family.” He stopped, reached over and pushed Cole forward in his chair, fishing out a box of donuts and taking one out. “Then, I think she got pushed off a bridge or something and they thought that it was the bad crowd that had done it. Turns out, it wasn’t. The family had hired someone to go after her and when the bad crowd failed, he took over.” He shrugged and stopped talking and started eating the donut.

  “Well,” Cole asked, sitting wide eyed with another donut. “How did it end?”

  “Eh, she got killed and a detective was piecing it together. Maybe shoulda mentioned that at the beginning,” Ren shrugged and continued eating.

  “That’s a shitty ass book,” Cole snapped while Coleman and I looked at each other. “Were the sex scenes hot?”

  Shrugging again, he took the last bite of donut and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “Nah, turns out they got the wrong book name. That one didn’t even have any in it, and the only reason that I ended up reading it to the end was because I was looking for one.”

  “Her family have had nothing to do with her for years,” I ignored the two fuck heads eating donuts and focused on the unspoken question in Coleman’s eyes. We were both on the same page though. What if?

  Sabine

  It had been two weeks since the birthing experience and today was the baby shower for Ebru and Cole. It wasn’t really the sort of thing that our circle of friends in France had done, and my friends in the U.K. had been more focused on gaining their degrees and working than having babies. So, I’d never been to one and had no idea what to expect.

  We were currently walking behind Cole and Ebru toward their parent’s house and I wasn’t completely oblivious to the fact that Brett kept scanning around us. His movements were small and he tried cover them up by asking innocuous questions like ‘was that a rabbit?’ and pointing in the opposite direction, but I knew what he was doing.

  He’d also been asking me a lot of questions about my family recently. Perhaps he thought that they were responsible for the threats, but he couldn’t be further from the truth. The second I rejected the arranged marriage to Henry, they’d cut me out of their lives. As far as they were concerned, the only reason to have children was to further their stance and position in the society that they were part of.

  My brothers had both married well and held high position jobs, and my sister and I were expected to follow. I hadn’t wanted to marry the slime bag banker that they’d chosen, who was well known to have mistresses all over the country. Seline had been the accidental baby so there had been seven years between us. She didn’t have the power and support of my grandmother to get her out of whatever arrangement my parents chose like I’d had though. This concern I’d discussed with Brett and he’d reassured me that whatever happened, he’d help me save her.

  My husband squeezing my hand brought me out of my thoughts and I realized that we’d reached Colette and Jack’s house. Following them inside, I stopped and took in the decorations and the amount of food on the table.

  “How many people are coming?” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth to Brett, tightening my grip on his hand. There was enough food to feed the entire town.

  “Who knows,” he mumbled as he headed toward where it all was. “There’s cake!” His entire family was obsessed with the stuff. The whole walk over here Cole had talked about the cake, and now Brett was headed straight for it.

  “I don’t think you’re meant to cut into it now…” I broke off as I saw the finger sweeps through the icing on it. Looking around the room, I saw the kids curled up asleep behind the baby gate, or cage as Brett called it, and Hurst and Linda asleep in their recliners. There was also a very visible blue finger poking out from where Hurst had his arms crossed.

  Dragging Brett away from the food and towards where Ebru and Cole were, we stopped when the sound of a loud fart filled the room.

  Looking back toward Brett questioningly, he caught my look and glared back. “It wasn’t me.”

  In France, we didn’t discuss bodily functions. In fact, they were rude and considered uncivil. This family had blown that out of the water entirely though. Instead of discretion, there were things like - baby monitors in toilets, accidental farts, food poisoning, who could burp the national anthem the best and now this. Growing up, I might have been appalled by it, but now it actually endeared the family to me even more. They just did what they did and let the pieces fall where they may.

  At least, that’s what I thought until the smell hit.

  The fart had woken Hurst up who looked around the room before waving his hand back and forth in front of his face in disgust.

  “Jesus, your Gram stinks,” he wheezed out, just as Linda sat up in her chair and started gagging.

  “The hell that’s my ass, you stinky old bastard,” she got out through her coughing. “That one smelled of five-year-old blue cheese…” Looking at Brett I prayed that we never had the type of relationship where we could tell whose fart belonged to whom based on the smell that accompanied it.

  I heard Ebru echo that sentiment. “Please tell me that we aren’t going to end up like this,” she whispered to Cole. Meeting Brett’s eye above the sweater that he’d pulled up over his nose, he winked and shook his head.

  Quietly, he moved us all away from them, leaving us with our backs to the wall next to the front door, and he, Cole and a newly arrived Ren, opened the doors and windows bringing in beautiful, warm fresh air.

  Soon enough, people started to turn up and it was great to meet so many people who obviously loved the Townsend family. It was a bit overwhelming being introduced to so many of them, but this was a far cry to the parties that my parents had held as I was growing up. I’d been paraded around those like I was a prize, and really, I had been as they’d been looking for potential suitors. Here though, I could relax and enjoy meeting people, and it helped that Brett never left my side.

  The love of cake finally got the better of Cole. Unfortunately, he took too long deciding where and how to cut into the big blue bear as his grandmother marched into the room holding a huge meat cleaver. Not wasting a second, she brought it down with a thud right between the bears legs.

  “Holy shit,” Brett gasped beside me in horror.

  “Fuck me, she gave it a vagina,” Gramps said at the same time, as we all stood around staring at the area where the cleaver was now imbedded in the wooden stand that the bear had been placed on.

  Colette came running over and tried to take the cleaver from her at the same time Linda was trying to get it back out of the wood to swing again.

  “No! I want some damn cake!” She snapped, trying to get away and back to the table.

  Hurst quickly picked up a knife, cut one of the feet off the bear, then put it on a plate and waved it under her nose. Linda followed where he led her, pausing periodically to look back at where the rest of the bear cake was. Each time, he would wave it in front of her again and she’d continue following him.

  Once the cake was safe again, and the cleaver had been removed and hopefully hidden in case Linda got the urge for more cake, Brett tugged me up to the table and cut a chunk for me and a bigger chunk for himself.

  “We haven’t even eaten the sandwiches and things yet,” I pointed at the plates of food that were, for the most part, still untouched.

  Shaking his head, he picked up a fork and started digging into the sponge. “One thing you’ll learn in my family,” he mumbled around a mout
hful, before groaning. “Shit that’s good.” He chewed and swallowed it before finishing what he was saying. “When there’s cake and my family are near, you just go for it. You also take no prisoners, it’s every man for himself,” he took another forkful. “Those bastards will let you starve before they give you any cake, so jump, cut and eat.”

  “So, so moist,” Hurst groaned loudly behind us, getting a matching groan from Linda. I’d just taken my first mouthful and had to agree, it was delicious.

  “It melts in the mouth,” Linda groaned. The second forkful that I was about to eat paused halfway to my mouth as my eyes snapped up to meet Brett’s. Slowly, we both took our next mouthful’s, praying that the grandparents stopped talking and making noises.

  “Who baked the cake? I’ve never had such a moist one before,” Hurst moaned loudly again. I looked around the room, seeing varying looks of disgust and nausea on people’s faces at the clearly orgasmic noises filling the room. “I need to buy one every week. Look, it’s practically glistening it’s that moist…”