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“Mollie, calm down!”
“No! It’s a fucking—I almost touched it!” She urged me forward. “Do something.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Be a man! Go to war!”
“With a snake?”
“Yes! Isn’t that what you’re good for?”
I turned to her, but she shoved me toward it with more force than I knew she possessed. Rolling my eyes, I inspected it, making sure it wasn’t actually venomous. “It’s a barn snake, princess. Totally harmless.”
“Tell that to the heart attack it just gave me,” she said. I gently coaxed it out of the barn while she went back outside.
“Am I just glorified snake removal to you?” I asked her.
“Today? Yes.” She heaved out a breath and leaned on her knees. “Whew! That was scary.”
“You’ve fallen off a roof.”
“I’d take a broken ankle over dying of snake venom.”
“It was abarnsnake.”
“Potato, po-tah-to.” She waved me off, and I only had a second to wonder where the hell her logic had gone before she was climbing the tractor.
“All right. Time to make a fool of myself.”
“Do you know how it works?”
“Nope. But I’ll figure it out.”
“Let me—” I reached to show her how to use it, but she stopped me.
“Don’t you have something else to do?”
“Not till eleven.”
“You’re the one who said youwantedme to figure things out.” She leaned forward. “Are you going back on that now?”
“I’m making sure you don’t destroy the barn trying to get out of here.”
“Hey, I’m an excellent driver. Andyou’rehovering. It’s starting to look like you want to spend time with me.”
“Wrong,” I said.
That was a lie. This was more fun than I had expected, even though I had no idea what went through her head at any given time.
“Sure,” she said, putting it into gear. “You tell yourself that.”
The tractor didn’t move, mostly because she was hitting all the wrong buttons. She tried more, but to no avail.
Yep. This was going exactly how I’d expected.
“Need help?” I called.
“Fuck off!” she yelled back. “But yes.”