Chapter 8

Sunday 22 May 2022

She woke early. For a little while, she tried to get back to sleep, but this bed was too soft. She roused and looked at her phone - not as early as she feared, she’d had six hours. Couldn’t complain about that. She sat on the floor at the end of the bed, and watched a couple of lectures she’d missed last week on YouTube. She watched them at double speed and caught up on social media during the boring parts.

By the time her second lecture was finished, Julian had got up wondering where she was, so they went out and sat on the deck cuddling and watching the sun rise. It was nice to be warm again - definitely an advantage of being in the Northern hemisphere. No one was around, and she wanted to, so Julian got a blow job, done in a hurry. She’d just tucked him back into his shorts when Joe and Layna poked their heads out. “Is it safe to come out?” Layna wanted to know. ‘

Larissa laughed and said it always was for them, but had they seen anything?

“Oh no,” Layna said, “we didn’t, but we just know you!”

A few minutes later, Lisa poked her head around the corner. “You guys interested in a run?”

So the four of them went for a run with Lisa and her younger brother to the back of the farm. Just a gentle work out for Julian and Larissa, which was great, and they got shown all the features of the farm. Not surprisingly, they had a fox problem, which was the normal focus of the gun use, and they ran around the fence around the chicken section, checking it out. That one was a daily activity that someone had to do.

After that they had an extended lazy breakfast on the deck, and then after that they packed up, ready to go, Julian and Joe went off to help around the farm. Larissa was interested in that, but figured she should hang with Layna, Lisa and Mitzy. She shouldn’t have worried - having a vet on the farm was too much for Biff to resist, and one of the brothers came to fetch her in a tractor. She hopped on the back of the tractor, and he led her to the goat paddock for her to look at one of the goats. Larissa frowned, it was some kind of infection for sure, but she didn’t know infections around here, and anything more that she said would be risky. Biff understood, and thanked her, he figured the same.

But since she was looking, would she look at one of his dogs? Now here, she was on firmer ground and she had a look at him. Well, his time was up - definitely arthritis. Not worth trying to fix, really, time to retire him from running beside the tractor and tie him up and let him chill in the backyard and take it easy. Just keep him warm through winter, and make sure everyone who passed through the backyard gave him some love, and he’d have a few more very happy years. Then she asked for a tour of the chicken facilities, just out of professional interest - she’d never visited one of the commercial chicken farms, who all had their own dedicated vets at home.

Then it was time for them to go, time for their next adventure. Sad for Mitzy, in particular, who’d really enjoyed having some family to visit. She loved her American family, but she did miss her Australian family greatly.

They headed south from Lisa’s farm. Lisa sat in the middle of the back navigating while Joe drove - Julian said he’d had enough of driving in the right side of the road, which was the wrong one, and while Lisa wasn’t navigating, they browsed social media, ragged on the guys, shared make up tips, and generally bonded.

Steph was awake in the night and feeling down, so they FaceTimed Steph and tried to explain Steph, Larissa and Layna’s fiercely close relationships, and how Steph actually was Layna on social media most of the time. Larissa wasn’t sure how much that clarified for Lisa, since they couldn’t say the really intimate bits, but it sure cheered Steph up.

Then they arrived at their destination, a little country shop with a dock that jutted out into Chesapeake bay. Lisa’s roomie Vi and her boyfriend Dan were waiting for them on the dock, and the dock was full of kayaks and camping gear. It took them about an hour to sort their stuff and finish packing the kayaks, and then they were off, paddling out into Chesapeake bay. Vi was studying biology and ecology and was a big fan of Layna. Her current boyfriend (Lisa emphasised the current bit) was Dan, and Dan was an instructor for the ecology department which meant he was able to check out the University of Maryland kayaks for a research trip.

Kayaking the Chesapeake was a different experience to the Marlborough sounds in New Zealand, where they’d last kayaked - this was big water, and there were big boats around as well, though they weren’t going out into that channel. They paddled from Island to island, exploring the coast line, and counting the various species of birds as they went. Dan and Vi taught them the different birds and their food chains, and how well they were doing. A bit mixed, since the area was starting to change rapidly due to falling land, and increased salt penetration of the land water table, particularly the islands. Raising sea level, Larissa said, is that what you meant? Dan said no, that was happening, but still pretty slow, but the land in this part of USA was slowly falling into the ocean and that was a bigger effect. Still small overall, but starting to be observable.

Julian explained to Dan about David’s theory around ecosystem stability and the way that the introduction of predators was likely to lead to forest collapse 80 to 100 years later, and had they thought about that kind of long change here? That caused a fairly long silence from Dan, who then said, “That’s a subject for dinner tomorrow night.” They were having dinner in Annapolis with a bunch of people from Vi and Dan’s department.

After a long afternoon’s paddling, they pulled up on a lovely beach on one of the islands, and Dan said, “We’re camping here.” In little over an hour, they had their little tents set up, the camping toilet was go, round behind some bushes, and their little cooking fire was starting to settle in. Larissa was hot after all that, so she asked, and everyone was good with it, so she dropped her clothes and ran into the water for a swim. Cool, but not too bad. Julian followed her, of course, but the others ... Lisa was unsure, so Layna wouldn’t, of course. Vi shrugged and dragged Dan’s clothes off and him into the water. When Lisa realised that Layna wasn’t because of her, she said they should go in, and stripped down to her panties and joined them. Larissa gave her a smile - she shouldn’t feel pressured if she didn’t want to.

But she did lose her panties while they were swimming, and wandered out as naked as the rest of them. It turned out she really had lost them too, so Larissa and Julian went back out to look for them, but no luck. Oh well, and Larissa told Lisa about the swim where she lost her undies and had to come back to the beach naked, which made her laugh a lot. Then the others went back to cook dinner, and Layna, Larissa and Lisa sat on the edge of the water, still naked, and had a heart to heart about Lisa’s relationship struggles. Nothing unusual, really, just nervous about trusting a guy after her first boyfriend took advantage of her and then cheated on her. But there might be a guy ... she wanted Layna and Larissa’s opinion of him after dinner the next night, since he was joining them.

After a lovely camping dinner, they sat around the fire, chatting, and Larissa got around to checking her phone for the first time since they started kayaking.

“Umm, Layna?” she said. Yeah? “Umm, I’ve got a message from Steph here. Umm.” Yeah, Layna said. “This weeks woman’s magazines are out. And we’re on the cover of the biggest one, and we’ve got a three page spread inside. I thought we’d have to agree for them to do that?”

Layna frowned. “Oh? Really? I thought ... Well, no, you don’t have to agree, though if you do, they like getting exclusives. Obviously you have to agree for them to do that. Otherwise, they can run with whatever they’ve got. They actually asked me, on Thursday, and I said we didn’t need to go on the front page, so I wasn’t going to sit down with them. I didn’t realise they’d go ahead anyway. What do they say?”

“Steph says it’s mostly stuff off YouTube, except that they clearly got a transcript of my talk, and they’ve used bits of that. She knows because they’ve gone with the timeline I said that night, not the right one.” Right, Steph and Layna knew she simplified it for the talk. “She says it’s mostly OK, though they’ve talked to someone at Uni who’s bitched about how they’ve given me special consideration. That’ll be Annie, I bet.” She shrugged. “Other than that, Steph says it’s nice, saying good things about us to go with the cover, which is a photo of us kissing on the carpet.”