Chapter 6
MIKE
By the time I’d done four hours of milking, three hours at the café, and then driven over to Pahīatua to pick up some more drench for the sheep, I was tired and cranky.
I’d been dodging my sister’s calls, and her messages were all variants of what the fuck were you thinking .
I hadn’t intended to tell Lyssa to come to New Zealand, and I definitely didn’t think she’d actually do it.
She’d just looked so sad on our Holli-ford family call, all alone in her chaotic hamster cage of an apartment.
Now she was here . In Aotearoa, in my house and in my kitchen, wearing just her knickers and saying things like or ... dot dot dot to me.
Everyone knew what or ... dot dot dot meant, right? Meant she wanted my Mike meat. Meant she wanted to saddle me up and ride me like a pony. Meant that if I asked nicely, she’d have hopped up on the counter and spread her legs.
Part of me—the Mike meat part—really liked that idea. But Lyssa was off limits and I was a changed man. I had big boy business goals now. NEW MIKE.
As the fucko in the Toyota Hilux in front of me made another unsignaled turn, I leaned on the horn. He flipped me off out the window and I waved cheerfully back. Eventually, he veered off down a side road—without indicating, of course—and my thoughts returned to Lyssa.
She was only a year younger than me, but I was going to pretend there were whole decades between us.
Or I was Switzerland, and she was… dunno, somewhere far away from Switzy.
I’d failed Geography at school, even though I had the best sense of direction of anyone in this town, and they all knew it.
In Boy Scouts when I was twelve, they blindfolded us and led us deep into the forest and then left us there without any food or water.
Said it was a survival test. I was the only kid who found their way back to camp.
They had to use search-and-rescue dogs to find everyone else; Michael Clarke nearly didn’t make it.
That Scout group didn’t exist anymore. For obvious reasons.
Thing was, Michael would have been fine if he’d just fucking followed me, like I told him to. It’s like they say: You can lead a stubborn ass to a river, but you can’t make him follow it downstream.
I was busy thinking about Michael’s terrible sense of direction, about bush survival, about keeping my mouth shut on Zoom calls and turning down dot dot dot offers from lanky brunettes; so when I pulled down my driveway, I didn’t notice that Baz wasn’t in his paddock.
I also didn’t notice that the fence that split the grass into two halves was flattened in the middle in a suspiciously Baz-sized shape.
But I did see a familiar lanky figure flattened up against the side of my shed, an ice cream container clutched in her hands and a terrified look on her face as my large pet sheep bolted toward her.
I threw the truck into park and tore a branch off the golden elm tree on the fence line, before vaulting the gate with one hand.
“Oi, Baz!” I waved the branch.
Baz skidded to a stop inches from Lyssa and swung his head around to eye me.
It took him a split second to decide that leaves had nothing on Mini M’s special nuts.
This should have been enough time for Lyssa to get over the fence to safety, but she wasn’t a country kid, and she didn’t take the opportunity.
Instead, she stayed pressed against the boundary fence.
Baz was a wether, with none of the danger of an uncut ram.
He was harmless in terms of intent. The problem was, he was a big motherfucker and currently on a vet-mandated diet, which left his bottomless pit of a gut permanently unsatisfied.
Baz was huge and more than capable of accidentally trampling someone when he was fixated on food.
A few years ago, Brittney Wylie had her femur shattered by a charging ewe.
Lyssa didn’t know that, and she also didn’t know Baz was just after food, as demonstrated by her death grip on the ice cream container.
If she’d just thrown some of the nuts or dropped the container, he would have left her alone.
Baz thrust his head toward her, teeth reaching, and Lyssa let out a sharp scream.
“Lyssa!” I bellowed. “Drop the nuts!”
She kept hold of the container, her face a mask of pure horror.
Fuck.
I broke into a run as Baz went up on his back legs to pin Lyssa.
He used to do that to me when I bottle-fed him as an orphaned lamb, climbing me to reach his bottle.
I hadn’t thought to train him out of it because I hadn’t anticipated that knee-high lamb being a bajillion-pound eating machine with an insatiable craving for horse pellets.
I dove and got my arms around Baz’s neck just in time to tug him off balance. Surprised, he tumbled, legs flailing. As his bulk landed on me, all the air was slammed from my body and immediately replaced by searing pain.
I grunted as I took a cloven hoof to the thigh. Baz kept wiggling and protesting until I let him go. He clambered back to his feet, huffing in shock. Fair enough. From his perspective, his two-legged father had just performed an illegal tackle on him for no reason.
“Lyssa,” I wheezed. “Throw the nuts for him.”
Stunned, it took her a second to figure it out.
Luckily, Baz was likewise still processing his astonishment.
She opened the container and threw the pellets, some of which landed on me.
Baz, with the sprightliness of a much younger sheep, jumped to the closest cluster, hoovering them from the grass like an outdoor Roomba.
I lay on the grass for a while longer, trying to catch my breath. The pain in my ribs was searing. My woolly little problem child had definitely done some damage.
Baz didn’t give either of us a second glance—he was busy eating. I hoped he enjoyed his stolen nuts. They were going to give him a guts ache and set his diet back weeks, but at least Lyssa was fine—brainless as a rock for letting herself into this paddock holding his favorite food, but fine.
Baz then heaped even more indignity on the situation by following his nose to the nuts right beside—well, my nuts, and batting me in the junk with his hard nose as he tried to get the last treat.
My yelp cut the air and I clutched my goods, trying to breathe through the pain. Eventually, when I could see again, I looked at Lyssa.
“Are you—” I broke off with a wheeze and had to try again. “O?—”
“Okay?” She nodded, and her voice was shaky. “Yeah.”
“— Out of your fucking mind .”
“Huh?”
With the ginger movements of an old man, I clambered to my feet. Through sheer luck, my ribs weren’t broken, but they were definitely bruised, and my thigh and ball sack were killing me.
“I know you’re a city girl, Lysander , but if you wouldn’t get in a stranger’s car, you shouldn’t walk into a paddock before you know what’s in there, okay?”
She crossed her arms. “Ever heard of a rideshare, Michaelangelo ? My life revolves around getting in strangers’ cars.”
That was a good point, which I didn’t feel like acknowledging.
“Don’t wander into random paddocks,” I growled.
Lyssa pointed at a tear in the fence, which I hadn’t noticed when I’d thought Baz was going to accidentally kebab her.
The rear boundary fence was a permanent fence, (not a makeshift paddock divider that Baz could flatten, like the other fence in here) and there was a large tear in it, leading to my chicken coop.
“One of your chickens got stuck,” she said.
Now that she mentioned it, there were feathers in the wire.
“I came in here to rescue it. I forgot I was holding the nuts, and I definitely didn’t know that your sheep is a four-legged Pacman who thinks everything is an aspirin dot.”
“What?”
“You know, the game?” She opened and shut her mouth, like that explained anything. “I think your chicken and sheep are colluding, because when he started running at me, the chicken hopped out of the fence like it’d never been stuck at all.”
“My animals aren’t colluding.”
She narrowed her eyes. “They got to you too.”
Lyssa Luxe was either out of her mind or the most brilliant person I’d ever met.
Maybe she was both. Maybe that was why so many people on the internet cared how many triangles she cut her toast into, or how she styled scarves.
On the surface, her allure was her bananas outfits, but it ran deeper than that.
You never knew what she was going to do next, but you knew it would be entertaining.
Her personality was addictive, and I was starting to think like an addict.
Baz had devoured all the nuts in the grass and was now nosing at my pockets—as if he and his fucking nose hadn’t caused me enough trouble today.
His teeth closed over the denim of my jeans, and he tried to suck the chocolate bar wrapper I’d stowed in my pocket earlier out through the fabric.
I’d be impressed by his nose if it wasn’t so destructive.
I pushed his head away. “You’re insatiable, kid.”
Giving up on the chocolate bar wrapper, Baz leaned against my legs, wordlessly begging me to scratch his withers the way he liked. I obliged.
Lyssa hung back, eyeing him warily. But Baz wasn’t planning to gore either of us—he just lost his faculties when faced with the siren song of forbidden food, which was fair enough.
If I was told I couldn’t eat ice cream and a two-scoop cone wandered into my house, I’d probably lose my shit too.
Especially if my parent charged at me, waving a tub of frozen yogurt to try and fool me into thinking that was better.
Eventually, Baz wandered off to eat the leaves from the branch I’d left in his paddock, and Lyssa followed me inside.