Oliver appeared at my hip in his collared shirt, squinting up at the goat pen with suspicion. "Goats are ruminants. They havefour stomach compartments and they regurgitate their food to chew it again. It's called cud. I don't think we should be doing wellness near an animal that vomits on purpose."
"That's a really good point, bud," I said, because it was, and because he was holding my hand a little tighter than usual, which meant the noise and the open space were getting to him. I crouched down to his level. "You don't have to touch any goats you don't want to. You can be my official documentarian. You count the goats and you tell me if any of them are breaking rules. Okay?"
His shoulders came down an inch. "Goats can't read rules."
"Then you tell me when they break the rules they don't know about. That's the most important job there is."
He considered this, decided it was acceptable, and produced a small notebook from his oversized backpack. I straightened up, feeling for one brief, shining second like a competent mom. Then I saw the men, and the feeling died a quick and embarrassing death.
Because here was the thing nobody had warned me about goat yoga: everyone gets down on all fours like the Lord intended, and that includes the three single fathers who had, for reasons I was choosing not to examine, also volunteered to chaperone a goat-based mindfulness experience on a Tuesday.
Cole, Luke, and Ben were already on their mats in the grass, dressed like men who actually planned to exercise. Shorts, t-shirts, the works. Which was stupid of them, because now I was going to have to stand there and look at their muscles and perfectly formed bodies while a yoga instructor named Sunshine told them to "breathe into the hips."
Cole's shirt had ridden up. There was a strip of his lower back on display, all that black ink disappearing into his waistband, and his forearms were braced in the dirt and corded with muscle. I had personally had those forearms pinning me to myown mattress not so long ago and my entire body remembered it at once, like a dog hearing a can opener.
I looked away. I looked at Luke instead, which was a tactical error of the highest order, because Luke had dropped his head and his shaggy hair was hanging down and his shirt was doing nothing to hide the way his shoulders worked, and Luke caught me looking and did not stop looking back. He held my eyes from upside down between his own arms and slowly, deliberately, raised one eyebrow.
A small involuntary squeak escaped me and I looked at Ben.
Ben was the worst one. Ben wasn't even pretending to do the yoga. Ben was lying on his back on his mat with his hands folded on his chest, watching me have my entire crisis in real time, and when our eyes met he grinned at me like he could read every filthy thought in my head and was honored to be in there.
"Miss Morgan." Sunshine had appeared beside me, calm in a way that felt unnaturally medicated. "We have a mat for you."
"Oh, I'm okay, I'm really more of a supervisor…"
"Mindfulness is for everyone, most importantly the teacher." She steered me toward a mat that had been placed, by someone who hates me, directly between Cole and Ben. "Especially those carrying tension. You're carrying a lot of tension.”
"I contain a normal and healthy amount of tension," I said, lowering myself onto the mat while every joint I owned filed a formal complaint, "for an underpaid teacher and a single mother and um-" I stopped before I said a woman with three boyfriends. "A full life. A very full life."
"Mom only does yoga when the app reminds her," Oliver reported from the fence line, not looking up from his notebook. "She has done it four times. The app is named Brenda. She yells at Brenda."
"Thank you, Oliver."
Cole made a sound to my left that might have been a laugh if Cole laughed. I refused to turn my head, because turning my head meant looking at him, and I was a professional.
Then the goats came.
I cannot fully explain what happens to twenty-two children and three grown men when a herd of goats is released into a yoga session, except to say that it is the closest I have ever come to witnessing the rapture. The kids lost their minds. The goats, who had clearly done this before and harbored zero emotional-support feelings toward anyone, went straight for the biggest targets in the field.
A small brown goat climbed directly onto Cole's back while he was mid-pose and stood there like a tiny king surveying his land. Cole went perfectly still. He had the frozen expression of an ex-military man who has decided that the goat has the high ground and must be respected.
"Don't move," Ben told him, delighted, already filming on his phone. "Don't you dare move. This is the best day of my life."
"Get it off me."
"Absolutely not. It chose you. It sees something in you, big guy."
A second goat headbutted Luke square in the ribs as he attempted a warrior pose, and Luke—who had never once in my presence been anything other than infuriatingly composed—said a word that made three nearby parents gasp and Emma shout, "DADDY. NAUGHTY WORD." from across the field.
I was laughing. I couldn't help it. I was sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat between two of the men I was apparently sleeping with, watching a third get steamrolled by certified emotional support livestock, and I was laughing so hard my eyes watered.
And then a goat approached me and attacked my lanyard. The whole thing. It got the cord in its weird rectangular-pupiled mouth and it just started going, and I grabbed the other endand we had a brief tug-of-war that I want the record to show I was winning, until the cord snapped and I went backward into the grass and the goat trotted off with my staff ID and the little laminated photo of me from four years ago when I still had bangs.
"That's a felony," I informed the goat. "That's federal."
A hand appeared in my vision. Ben, crouched over me, blocking out the sun, grinning down with that easy crooked thing he did with his mouth. "You alive down there, Cupcake?"
"A goat just ate my identity. I'm legally no one now. I can do crimes."
