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.
I flicked the jug and made black tea with a slice of lemon for me, and milk tea for her. Then I pulled out a few frozen pizzas and shoved them in the oven, even throwing together a quick salad to go with it. Everything took ten fucking times longer than it should have because my ribs hurt and my balls hurt more. Lyssa stayed glued to her phone as I rolled a wheel through the pizza, and she barely looked away from it as we ate.
Stimulating company, influencers.
My phone didn’t do anything interesting. I only used it for calling the café or emailing my sister or my cousins or my best boy Dean. It wasn’t until I let out an involuntary groan trying to load the dishwasher that Lyssa looked up from her phone.
