Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 55769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
But they had a weekday curfew of nine o’clock, and right then, it was ten past.
“Talk to me,” he ordered.
Roam’s steady gaze came to him, but as usual, it was Sniff who talked.
“We want you to teach us how to drive.”
Vance looked over his shoulder at Sniff. “I thought Shirleen was teaching you how to drive.”
“Yeah, she is. Like a grandma,” Sniff replied.
He couldn’t imagine Shirleen did anything like a grandma, including drive, so this was surprising.
“She’s probably just going cautious,” he suggested.
Roam chimed in. “We drive every Saturday with her. Sniff for an hour and a half, me for an hour and a half. We’ve been doing this for six weeks. And she doesn’t let us go over thirty in a forty, we haven’t parked the car in a parking lot, much less parallel, and we haven’t been on the highway. We just drive around for three hours, pulling up in her driveway halfway through to switch out drivers. We’re real good at reversing out of the driveway and driving, and that’s it. When we ask her if we can do more, she tells us we’re not ready. But we are. We’re real fuckin’ ready.”
Jesus.
She was teaching them to drive like a grandma.
And they were both turning sixteen soon, and like any teenager, they wanted the freedom of a driver’s license.
“I’ll talk to Shirleen.”
He said that.
What he meant was, he’d talk to Jules and Jules would talk to Shirleen.
Slowly, as time went by, it was shifting (case in point, the curfew and text). But Shirleen deferred a lot to Jules. She looked to her for guidance with the boys.
It was smart. She was a childless woman who took on two runaway teenagers. And Jules had a lot of experience with runaway teenagers.
But she was finding her way, and Jules would eventually guide her into taking over.
Though now, someone had to teach them how to drive.
That was going to be him, but it was Jules who would talk to Shirleen about it.
Their relief filled the cab.
“I’m waiting!” Shirleen called from the open doorway to her house where she was standing.
“She’s gonna go over homework Monty already went over,” Roam muttered. “Even knowin’ Monty went over it.”
“Let her,” Vance advised. “She gets something important out of it. It’s no hassle for you to give it to her, so give it to her.”
Roam nodded.
“You da man,” Sniff said.
Vance sighed.
Sniff punched him in the shoulder and swung out. Roam held up a closed fist, Vance bumped it, then he swung out.
Vance waited until the door closed on that new family, then he reversed out of Shirleen’s drive.
When he got home, Boo was waiting at the back door for him, filled with news of his day.
Vance ended the conversation by picking him up and curling him like a baby to his chest.
He then went right to Boo’s treats.
Boo was snarfing them down, fingers to fangs, when Jules strolled in.
Vannce’s heartrate, never quite right when he was away from her, settled.
Her gaze went from him to her cat, back to him.
“The vet said he was chonky,” she reminded him.
Vance quit feeding him treats because Boo turned his pointy face her way and glowered at her.
“Cats are supposed to be chonky,” he returned, which meant he got Boo’s attention again, so he gave him another treat.
Jules came fully into the kitchen and rested a hip to the counter. “They’re not. If they were, the vet wouldn’t have pointed out he was chonky.”
Vance answered that by giving Boo another treat.
“We talked about this, Crowe,” Jules snapped. “We’re supposed to cut down on his treats, not give him more.”
He’d never told her Boo had barely eaten while she was in the hospital. And if she didn’t notice her cat had lost weight, he wasn’t going to point it out. She’d had her recovery to concentrate on. She didn’t need to worry about her pet.
Therefore, as far as Vance was concerned, he and Boo were working on getting him back to his fighting weight.
He fed him another treat.
Boo ate it, still purring.
“I hope you don’t spoil our daughter like that,” Jules remarked in a way that had Vance’s eyes racing to her.
What he saw on her face made him go completely still.
They’d decided. Once the doc told her it was all systems go. Once she was back to her normal self physically, they decided.
Life was too short. It was too filled with shit.
They weren’t going to wait.
On any of it.
Marriage. Babies.
Everything.
They were going to do it all right away.
Therefore, she went off the Pill she’d barely got on, but they’d been told it might take a few months for her cycle to regulate.
Maybe it didn’t take that long.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“I took a test. Positive. So I went out and bought another test just in case. Positive. So I got an appointment with my OB, and she confirmed it. I’m pregnant.”