“Haver sweetie…” I purred. I was skipping in front of him, hands behind my back, chest pressed forward. All previous attempts at getting him to give up on me had failed. I needed a new approach; this honeydew sweetness was it, much as it sickened me.

I probably should have switched to doing it this way five days ago. He hadn’t been giving the appropriate reactions to my taunts since that incident. Instead, things had been awkward.

When the stalker Zee pulled out her dagger I had been ready to leave him to her. He’d ruined that by jumping up, spreading his arms protectively, and shouting “Get behind me, Ava!”

Idiot. I was already behind him. Of course, little Sigian me couldn’t be outdone by the incompetent fool who had been sprawled on the ground mere seconds before. So I had been forced to shove him behind me. What followed could only be described as … bickering.

Seriously! Me? Bickering? The murderous pink stalker chick was barely ten feet from where we stood, and we were bickering about who got to protect who. What had this oaf turned me into?

So here was the new me. If I couldn’t annoy him to death, I’d butter him to death. It appeared to be working too; I got a bigger reaction than I’d gotten in days. He gave me a slow, lazy smirk, cocked an eyebrow, and spread his arms wide.

“Whaaaaat?” He grinned as slow as his smirk while he made a leisurely turn, demonstrating the desolate landscape to me as if it was a new world wonder and he was the tour guide showing me around.

This dunce was truly un-be-lievable. There were three things horribly wrong with our current predicament. Things I was trying, and failing, to get through to his thick skull. With that one dramatic statement of his, he was demonstrating all three of them, and he was completely unaware that he was doing it.

For starters, I am supposed to be the dramatic one, not him.

Second of all, he was jinxing it. Any second now a vicious Zee horde would appear on the so-far empty horizon, and it would be his fault.

Lastly, there was no pink Zee. For several days we had traveled with her tailing us. She’d always been there, at the edge of the horizon, hardly ever out of our line of sight. It had been nerve-wracking. Now that she was no longer following us … it was worse.

Fourthly, that it felt wrong for her not to be here meant that we had gotten used to a Zee tailing us. Not just that, after those first two she’d killed while we slept, she had taken care of even more Zees for us. First, it was taking out a trio of them before they could get to us. The next fight she had hovered at the edges, harrying them from the side while they swarmed us. It had all happened so gradually that we hadn’t even noticed. Until one day we found ourselves relying on a Zee to have our back in a fight.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Finally, when we had separated two days ago she had pointed at my map and then in a completely different direction than we were going. I had never even allowed her to get close enough to sneak a glance at our map. Yet there she was, acting as if she was somehow better at navigating these wastelands than we were.

From map reading to navigating to pretending to know our destination … there was so much more wrong with that single action of hers that it qualified as a bazillion points all on its own.

Also, I’d lost count, but those were more than three things. Regardless, I needed to get it through to Haver that we needed to turn back, preferably wi—

“Aaaava?” Haver waved his hand in front of my eyes. There was a concerned frown on his brow. I blinked in confusion. How long had he been standing there trying to get my attention?

“You were dreaming.” He straightened and jammed a finger at my chest.

“I. Was. Thinking.” I enunciated every word very carefully. It was that or snapping at him, and snapping would not do with the new persona I wanted to project.

“Riiight.” He let that word drag out. “About what?”

“Nothing.” I lifted my chin and looked to the side. After a couple of seconds, I clasped my hands behind my back and started dancing from foot to foot. New persona. New persona. Don’t snap at him. Don’t annoy him. New persona. Why was this so hard?

“Well, I for one have been think—”

I slapped him. Hard. It wasn’t my fault. It was the way that he accentuated the word ‘have’. The implication, the nerve, the gall, the audacity. The new persona be damned, he would not get away with this.

Haver touched his reddening cheek. I hoped it hurt. It had to sting more than my own hand did. I was not cut out for slapping. After a vicious scowl, he turned on his heels and headed back in the direction we came from.

“Haver sweetie,” I danced after him, swerved to cut him off, turned towards him, and hopped back to keep ahead of him. “Where are we going?”

My playful act must have looked sickeningly cute. I could see it on his face. He wanted to keep a grim frown but the corner of his mouth was twitching. I hoped he broke soon. He needed to stop walking and answer me before I tripped over my own feet. Any second now I would no longer be able to keep up with his stupidly long legs while walking backward.

He stopped striding forward. I won. I could feel my lips twisting into a happy grin, then the dirt slipping under my feet, then my ass hitting a sharp rock as I fell.

Whimpering I tried to focus on the fuzzy thing swimming in front of my tear-stained eyes. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. Falling on your ass bloody hurts. Why did it hurt so much?

“Get up.” The thing in front of me was his hand. I reached for it and he pulled me to my feet. Still wincing in pain I tried to smile at him. Then I realized that he was still holding me. I hastily extricated myself from his grip and looked dumbly at my now empty hand.

I had succeeded. He had acted gentlemanly and caring instead of like a bumbling idiot. So why did this not feel like a victory, and why did I not know what to do with my hand?

“I’m heading back.” The helpful idiot liberated me from my thoughts. “The bloody Zee was right. We are going the wrong way.”

“Ah, right then,” I sighed. “Let’s go back.”

He looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. “You’re … okay with this?”

“Sure,” I nodded and started leading the way. “You’re the guide.”

I had been suspecting the Zee girl was right for most of the day now. But me proposing to go back would have meant admitting that I was wrong. Convincing the idiot guide that turning back was his idea and that I was merely going along with it was so much more convenient.

Toying with this dunce really was like playing on easy mode.