We made our way to the bar, Lyssa teetering in platform boots. I got us some drinks and a coke for Dean, who was our driver.
Sundays at the Woody were busy in a low-key kind of way. Rugby or racing played on the overhead TV, and there was always someone to play darts or pool with. There were a cluster of gumboots at the door underneath Jase’s sign (Boots Off or Fuck Off), and all the regulars were at their usual spots, beverages in hand.
My dad was in the corner talking with the guy who technically owned Levitate, Nolan Watson. When dad got pneumonia last year, we’d hit a bit of a rough patch. Caroline had come through with money before we went into receivership, but Dad still decided to accept Nolan’s offer to buy the place. Apparently, Nolan collected rural cafés. Dad ran the place and everything had stayed the same, but it technically wasn’t his anymore. Having that financial burden lifted from his shoulders had taken ten years off him. Maybe twenty. I hadn’t seen a lot of Nolan since the deal, but that was good as far as I was concerned. A silent moneybags partner? Grand. I’d already asked Nolan if he wanted to give me money for Mike’s Place too, but he’d said no. Said farm animals weren’t his thing. Monster.
We pulled up seats. Even though Lyssa was going to go back to New York soon and Dean lived at the ass end of the region, so it didn’t matter if they got on, I made a stab at finding some common ground.
“Lyss, Dean’s an interior designer. He loves fabric and all that shit. Dean, Lyssa used to work at Bossi. She was their youngest intern, and some of the shoots she styled were their highest viewed ever.”
Lyssa should have been impressed by my awesome social skills.
Instead, she looked shocked. “How did you know that?”
I compulsively watch every video you make.
Quickly, I cast around for a lie. “Maybe Caroline said it once? Dunno. Is that wrong?”
“No.” She took a sip of her wine and didn’t wince. I’d got her a sauvignon blanc because that’s what the blackboard said they had, but ten to one, the liquid in her glass was a mix of everything white that vineyards had left over and sold to Jason for cheap.
The Woodville pub was nothing fancy. The food was burgers, and the drink options were a miscellaneous white wine, miscellaneous red wine, beer or soft drink. Although these days we also had nonalcoholic beer because it wasn’t the twenty-tens anymore, and most of us tried to base our personalities around more than drinking. Most—Oz was usually pickled before noon, but so was his dad.
Remembering this made me kinda bad for hitting him.
“So, what brought you from Bossi to Aotearoa, Lyssa?” Dean asked.
I’d never seen Dean make conversation before and was taken aback—until he shot me a look over his beer when Lyssa wasn’t looking. It was knowing and pitying all at once.
I’d hoped Dean would have forgotten that I’d once mentioned watching a few of Caroline’s roommate's videos. But that look told me that not only had he remembered, he had guessed I was up to my neck in hot water having her stay with me. I wasn’t exactly famous for my restraint, and Lyssa was testing it like it had never been tested before—all of which Dean had worked out, damn him. That was the annoying thing about having friends who knew you well. You couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes.
Lyssa told Dean the same generic thing about wanting to visit our beautiful country that I’d heard her say in her videos. She didn’t mention her internship, the livestream video, or why she didn’t go home to her family to lick her wounds after that, like anyone else in her shoes would have.
“I think I spoke to Hannah on the phone once,” she said to Dean. “When Caroline was last here.”
Jason slid two dishes over the bar to us, one heaped with pistachios and the other empty and ready for the shells, and he waved off the tip Lyssa tried to make him take. People thought she was trying to trick them when she did that. No such thing as free money, and all that.
I snacked on the nuts as Dean and Lyssa’s conversation moved to their pets. Lyssa was showing him pictures of Root Beer, and Dean was flicking through his phone for pictures of his dog, Ghost, when he scrolled to something in his gallery that had him quickly stowing his phone after a wary look at me.
“What was that?” I demanded.
“I’m going to remind you, Mike, mate, that Hannah is a grown woman, and what she does—or doesn’t—send me is up to her.”
Great, now I have to punch two fuckers in one weekend.
I heaved a massive sigh and prepared to get to my feet. Dean was my best boy, so I wouldn’t hit him too hard, but he couldn’t be walking around showing racy pics of my cousin to people.
Impractical nails wrapped around my bicep, and Lyssa tugged me back into my seat.
“One punch per weekend,” she said in my ear, which was eerily close to what I’d been thinking. “Your cousin is allowed to send tit pics if she wants to. That’s her right as a titty-haver.”
I put my head on my arms on the bar. “Stop saying Hannah and tits. My tummy is delicate.”
Dean patted me on the back in a way he thought was comforting but made me want to hit him even more.
“My phone’s away now, mate. You’re safe.” Then my notoriously tight-lipped friend did something else I’d never heard him do before. He volunteered information. “When Hannah and I first got together,” he told Lyssa over my head, “Mikey was a bit put out about it.”
“Really?” she asked. “Why?”
“Dean is old,” I replied, voice muffled.
