Chapter 23 #3
She took off, striding toward the cars with her phone pressed to her ear. I couldn’t hear a bloody thing, but I watched her pace as she listened to the speaker, one arm wrapped around herself, her shoulders hunched.
My brain raced to the worst case scenario: It was that fucko Paul; he was calling to take credit for something else she did.
Or it was one of the trolls online—they’d gotten her number.
Or—the sweat at the back of my hairline rapidly cooled.
Or Paul had realized he was a massive cunt and he wanted her back.
He wanted her sweet lips on his, her eager body under him.
Instead of breaking things, like I wanted to, I bounced my knee, telling myself sternly to chill the fuck out. I was a rational guy, and I had more than one brain cell, therefore I wasn’t going to go off the deep end just because Paul made me feel like a rage machine. I was cool. This was fine.
The combo of fidgeting and stern self-talk meant that when Lyssa came back, her phone back in her skirt pocket, I was able to ask with convincing casualness, “Is everything okay?”
“Absolutely.” She smiled. It was unconvincing. “That was my mom. She was checking in.”
I frowned. “Does she do that often?”
“No. Should we go inside? I’ve never eaten anything Caroline has baked before, and I don’t want to miss out.”
Despite knowing that Lyssa was lying (none of us were looking forward to subjecting our stomachs to what Caroline had in store), I followed her back inside.
My sister was trying to delicately slide pieces of her pie onto Nan’s stolen china, but each piece was sticking to the cake server she was using, so she had to thwack it on the side of the plate.
Mine she gave the biggest thwack, because she wanted me to know she was still mad at me.
In response, I made a point of being cheerful and upbeat—Caroline wasn’t the only showboat in this family, a fact she always forgot.
Hannah had that part of the Holliday DNA too, and as we ate, she told a funny story about one of her boudoir shoots that had been sponsored by an adult toy company.
She’d had to fly with a bunch of their products and explain to airport security why she was traveling with enough “fun-time accoutrements ” (her words) to satisfy an army.
As I listened to my family swap airport stories, all trying to outdo each other, the feeling I’d had earlier of needing to run, to break shit, to swing fists and rail at everyone, finally eased.
I had a girl now, and my family loved her.
Sure, it was a bummer not to get funding for Mike’s Place, but I’d find a way to make it work.
I’d yet to come up against a problem that blunt force and relentless persistence couldn’t overcome.
I wasn’t about to let cold, hard reality roll me over and fuck me now, not when I never had before.
After dessert, which was drier than Dean’s jokes, Chase made cups of tea for everyone—apparently that was his job at family dinner now. I waited for him to suck at it, but it turned out even a spoiled little rich boy could successfully dunk a bag in a cup.
I was stirring my tea and thinking about how to rework Mike’s Place funding model, so I didn’t notice the conversation splinter.
Dad and Chase were exchanging polite remarks about Woodville’s economy, and Tessa was doing Tessa-things on her phone under the table.
Lyssa was speaking rapidly to Dean, Hannah, and Caroline.
Two were listening with attentive nods, but Caroline’s lips were pursed, and she was studying my girl with a tilted head. Something was amiss.
“Woodville’s core attraction in the early ’90s was the racetrack, back when horse racing was a thing people went to,” Lyssa was saying, speaking even faster than usual.
“There was also a major train line that went through the town—it’s still operational today, but only one scenic train goes through four times a week.
” She began listing on her fingers with the kind of dramatic flourish she used in her videos.
“It’s northbound on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then southbound on Mondays and Wednesdays.
” She crossed her arms like a game-show contestant.
“No trains Fridays or weekends, other than freight?—”
“Why are you telling us this, Lyssa?” Caroline interrupted.
“Is it not interesting?” Lyssa froze mid-gesture.
“What about the topography? I can talk about that. See, Woodville is right under the southern side of the Ruahine Range, which is home to a lot of rare native species including the whio, a rare blue duck, and the kaka, a large brown parrot. There are also giant snails there. Can you believe it? They’re called—uh.
Oh, no.” The color drained from her face as she looked around the table. “No one tell me! I know it.”
“Lyssa.” I reached out and put my hand over hers. It was clammy. “Chill girl, it’s okay.”
Her eyes, always wide but now nearly rolling, turned to me.
“I know the name of the giant snail, Mike, I do. I played the audio pronunciation on the conservation website over and over again. I remember it made me think of the Powerpuff Girls. Isn’t it funny how each girl’s personality is color-coded?
Like, I know why they made the sassy one green, but why was the sweet one blue and not pink?
If you’re drawing on clichés, sweet should be pink.
” She suddenly slapped her palms on the table.
“ What the fuck is that fucking snail called? Fuck!” Her head snapped up to Kev.
“Sorry I said f—” With visible effort, she stopped herself.
Dad waved her apology off. “No fucking worries.”
I’d seen Lyssa get locked in on something like this before.
It happened when she was putting together an outfit or telling me the difference between wisteria and lilac (I’d heard this speech twice and I still didn’t know).
And I knew that her quirk of jumping between topics always got more frantic when she was stressed.
But those were times when she cared about the thing. She didn’t really care about New Zealand’s birds or hills—so I couldn’t work out why she was suddenly extremely concerned about the name of a snail.
Like someone had cracked an egg over the crown of my head, realization ran down the back of my neck.
The phone call with her mother.
“Powelliphanta,” Tessa said.
“You’re excused,” I told her.
“No, Mike, you fucking pancake.” Tessa rolled her eyes. “That’s the name of the snail.”
“Oh!” I nudged Lyssa with my shoulder, trying to bring her back to me. “I get why that made you think of the Powerpuff Girls. Now I’m thinking of them too. I’d be the green one, don’t you reckon?”
I was trying to make her smile. All I wanted ever was to make this girl smile.
Instead, she burst into tears.
My arms were reaching for her, but Caroline was already out of her seat and had come around to our side of the table. She slapped my hands away and slid her body into the narrow space between mine and Lyssa’s seats.
“Lyssa, my sweet baby otter.” She pushed Lyssa’s hair off her forehead. When I was little and would dream about mum, Caroline would climb into bed with me and soothe me like that.
“This isn’t about table trivia, is it? This is about Emily. Did she call?”
Lyssa nodded. A tear splashed off her face onto the napkin in her lap.
“Shh, Mike,” Caroline scolded, and I realized I was growling.
“What can I do?” I asked. It physically hurt to see Lyssa distressed like this and not be the one holding her, not be able to fix it. She was so close and yet not close enough.
“I just told you,” Caroline said. “You can shut up.”
I loved my sister deeply, but she was really getting up my nose tonight.
She tossed her pink hair and turned her back on me, cupping Lyssa’s face in her hands.
“Lyssa, my cherry meringue pie with a dollop of cream straight from the can?—?”
“What the fuck?” Tessa muttered across the table. I would explain to her another time about the thing my sister and my girl had where they called each other batshit pet names.
My sister and my girl.
Lyssa and I hadn’t had a chat about labels—there hadn’t been time in between bouncing her on my dick and trying to get my business off the ground—and we hadn’t spoken about what would happen once she went back home.
It made me sound like an idiot to confess this, but I’d forgotten that she didn’t live here.
We would have to figure it out. Maybe it was a good thing that Mike’s Place wasn’t happening—it made me mobile.
“—take my hand,” Caroline was saying, “and we’ll go outside and get some fresh air, yeah? Or the bathroom, fix our makeup.”
“She’s not a child, Caroline.” I got to my feet. “You don’t need to patronize her.”
“I’m not?—”
“Yes, you are?—”
“Mike,” my dad interrupted. “Let them be.”
I rounded on my heel. “What? Why am I getting put on ice?”
“Because you’re a blunt object, mate.” Dean put his arm around my shoulders and steered me over to the ice cream freezer.
He opened it and fished me out a mint chocolate chip cone, which would usually fix my mood in a split second, but not today.
This was more important than ice cream. She was more important than ice cream.
“Caroline’s known her for years, Mike,” Hannah said, thinking that was helpful. “Let her do whatever it is they do. She looks like she’s better at this than you.”
“Better at soothing Lyssa when she’s worked up?” I asked, incredulous. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something about bathtubs and orgasms, but I caught myself in the nick of time. Caroline would scalp me if she learned about that.
I stood there, powerless and frustrated as Lyssa and Caroline headed hand in hand to the Levitate bathrooms.
Dean stood silently next to me, an uncommunicative but persistent ally.
After five minutes, Chase took the phone Caroline had left on the table into the bathroom. So he was allowed to see my girl crying in the bathroom, but I wasn’t.
I glared blue bloody hell at him when he came back into the dining room. He didn’t even look sorry, which any other time I would have respected.
I took a step forward, with half-formed thoughts of picking a fight with Chase to force Caroline to come back out here, but Dean knew me too well and held me back.
“Mike, maybe take a lap around the block,” Dad suggested.
“Un-fucking-likely.”
Dad sighed, and he and Dean exchanged a we tried look.
It was infuriating to be benched like this.
Lyssa was my girl. I wanted to fix her problems. Honestly, I wanted to fix everyone’s problems, but especially hers.
“Sometimes a woman just needs her girlfriends, Mike,” Tessa said, passing me a glass of wine. I didn’t drink wine, but Tessa assumed because she did, everyone did.
“How would you know?” I retorted. “You don’t have any.”
She reached out with her index finger and flicked the end of my nose.
“Ow!”
“Watch your mouth. Or I’ll feed your organs to my cat.”
I shut up. Tessa was scary, but her cat, Buttons, was scarier.
Eventually Caroline and Lyssa returned to the dining room.
For no clear reason, they’d swapped jumpers—Caroline was wearing Lyssa’s checkerboard sweater, and she was in my sister’s pink fluffy thing. Would I ever understand what happened when women went to the bathroom together?
Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe some things were girl things.
I tried to be cool as I held a hand out to Lyssa, wanting to pull her in for a cuddle. She liked a cuddle when she was stressed, I knew she did. She liked how big I was and how small and enveloped it made her feel.
But she didn’t take my hand. Not exactly. She reached out and squeezed it, once, briefly, then dropped it.
What the ever-loving fuck?
I glared at Caroline, figuring she must have whined about her brother and her friend getting naked together and made Lyssa feel bad. But my sister didn’t look guilty or mad, like I would have expected. It was much worse.
She met my gaze with sympathy.
Then she told the room, “We have an announcement.”
My stomach fell out of my anus.