“Whatever, Tinkerbell. And—come on. You must be used to everyone worrying by now.”
“Yeah…” She was used to it, and she got it. Really. She’d been born premature, and her inner sheep had never grown larger than lamb-sized. She still had dodgy lungs. But being small didn’t mean she was totally pathetic. She wasn’t going to let it stop her going on her OE. In fact, it made the trip all the more tempting. She had months of freedom ahead of her, a chance to do all the fun stuff she could never do at home, surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles.
All the fun stuff.
“From the look on your face right now maybe we should all be worried,” Aroha deadpanned. “But you know why you’re doing the family rounds, though, right? They all think you’re going to meet your mate and be too busy fucking happily ever after to come back.”
“Aroha!”
It felt like everyone in the bus turned to look at her. Sheena slunk down in her seat, mouthing an apology. Her cheeks burned, even though she knew the other passengers were only staring at her because she’d squeaked her cousin’s name so loudly she drowned out the music blaring from the seat across the aisle. She was wearing earbuds. No one else had heard what Aroha said.
“Why’re you looking at me like that? It’s true.”
“That’s…” You can’t be serious, Sheena was about to say. Except she was the only one protesting. Her sheep thought Aroha was being perfectly reasonable.
Like you could recognize ‘reasonable’ if it danced naked in front of you, Sheena huffed at it.
Well… her sheep replied, dozily. I don’t think ‘reasonable’ would be naked? Though that would be nice.
That’s not the point!
Sheena rubbed her forehead and turned her focus back to Aroha. Her cousin was sitting up in bed, her back against the wall. Thank God. If Aroha had come out with something like that in front of the rest of the family, Sheena probably would have disappeared in a blaze of embarrassment.
Which would be standard operating procedure for Aroha. But she hadn’t teased Sheena about it at her goodbye party, where it would have had maximum results. She’d waited until they were talking in private.
Relatively private, Sheena amended, glancing at the full bus around her. The woman in the seat next to her gave her a tired look that said, as clearly as if she’d spoken aloud, Please don’t make any more noise.
Sheena did her best apologetic grimace and turned back to her phone.
Wait.
Aroha had just dropped a perfect bombshell like that, and hadn’t immediately followed it up? She was the queen of the one-two hit, not the one-hit-and-give-you-time-to-recover.
Sheena frowned. Aroha wasn’t even looking at her. Her eyes were fixed on something offscreen with an intensity that Sheena suspected meant she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Just looking away. If that wasn’t enough, she started twisting a strand of her hair so hard Sheena was worried she would yank all the strands right out.
“Oh!” Sheena gasped, so startled by the realization that she had to fight back her sheep’s urge to leap up and run around the nearest paddock until whatever had surprised her had gone away. The woman next to her tutted ferociously. “Sorry!” Sheena said quickly. Her whole brain, sheep and all, was fizzing. “That’s why you’re not coming with me? Seriously?”
“I have things I want to do with my life!” Aroha protested, throwing up her hands. The video feed swooped and then resettled to show her face. She was biting her lip. “Not that finding the fated love of my life and having babies ever after isn’t doing something, but I’ve got things to do here, first.” Her chin went out stubbornly, an expression Sheena knew as well as the back of her own hand.
“You could have said something. I thought you just didn’t want to be stuck in a plane with me for thirty hours,” she joked.
“Well, yeah, that too.” Aroha shot her a sly smile that dissolved too quickly. “Isn’t that why you’re going away, though? Don’t tell me you never thought about it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why are you going, then?”
“To get away from you lot,” she retorted automatically, but her mind was already leaping ahead, following the train of thought Aroha had shoved in front of her.
Every shifter had a soulmate somewhere in the world. Everyone knew that. It was no question the most magical part of being a shifter, because it was the only thing Sheena had ever known to break through her uncles’ stoic Southern Man shells to reveal the tenderness and passion they hid deep inside. Very deep.
But she hadn’t thought about it for herself. Finding your soulmate and settling down was part of being grown up, like buying a house and owning a matching dinner set. She’d spent so long filing it away with the other things she was definitely not going to manage anytime soon that she hadn’t even considered it might actually happen to her.
Now, for the first time since she was seven years old and competing with Aroha over who could come up with the most fantastic-sounding mate, she really thought about it.
She might find her mate out there. The one person in the whole world who was perfectly suited to her. Which was a bit of a worry, really. Sheena sometimes thought she wasn’t suited to herself, especially when something startled her sheep and the next thing she knew, she’d run off somewhere and got herself lost.
But the thing that hit her like a rugby ball to the chest was the idea that being bound to someone so inextricably might mean she never came home again.
It did happen. Aroha was right. Maybe that was why her parents had insisted she do this massive roadie and see all her relatives before she went overseas. They were worried that she would find her mate and immediately settle down wherever she
