Tiger Lily - May Dawson Page 0,16

lips.

I didn’t know how to get this guy’s attention. I never had.

“Hi,” I said for the fifth time, and when he still didn’t notice me, I reached out and snagged one of his earbuds.

He suddenly realized there was someone beside him and he sat up in a hurry, slamming his forehead into the bottom of the minivan.

“Ooh,” I winced sympathetically. “Sorry.”

He fell back onto the board, clutching his face. The toothpick landed on his shirt. “Shit!”

Then he looked at me, and the most gorgeous baby-blue eyes widened. “Oh, Lily! Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry you swore around me,” I said. “I know I’m very scary.”

“Where did you come from?” He rubbed his forehead, wincing as he does. “Godda—sorry.”

“I curse too,” I told him.

He shook his head. “You’re a lady.”

I scoffed at that. “Have you met me?”

His lips parted slightly. “I have.”

I stared at him, not sure how to respond. Archer was really smart. He was the kind of smart that sometimes made it hard for someone to operate in the same plane of existence as the rest of us.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I work here now.”

He frowned. “What?”

“Blake and Dylan didn’t tell you,” I said, thinking about the gleam in Blake’s eyes when he told me to come say hi. “Your business partners are jerks, you know.”

“Keenly aware,” he grumbled. He dug his heels into the cement, pulling himself on his cart out from under the car, and I followed him. He was a lot quicker than I was.

I sat up on my board as the two of us emerged back into the sunlight. It made me feel a little claustrophobic being under the car, and I drew a relieved breath not to have car-junk in my face anymore.

“You wouldn’t have wanted them to hire me,” I said, taking a shot in the dark.

He frowned. “No.”

“No you wouldn’t have wanted them to hire me,” I asked, “or no, you wouldn’t have not wanted them to hire me?”

He laid back down on the board, pressing his hands to his forehead. “You’re still exhausting.”

I lay back down on my board too, staring up at the ceiling. The two of us were so close we were almost, but not quite touching, and it felt intimate. Just like when we were kids and we’d lay in the grass at the park and read.

“I know,” I confessed. “It’s pretty exhausting from the inside of my brain too, to be honest.”

8

I was manning the desk for the first time later that day when a man walked in, his posture stiff with anger.

My stomach flip-flopped. First customer, and from the way his beetle-eyebrows were drawn together as if they were locked up in a fight, he wasn’t a friendly one.

“Can I help you, sir?” I chirped.

He looked me over. “I don’t know, can you?”

Yep, definitely a friendly one. I could already tell he probably wouldn’t make his mama proud in this conversation. “That’s what I’m here for. What seems to be the problem?”

He rolled his eyes with a dramatic sigh.

Oh, lord help me.

Customer service was exhausting for me. I did a good job, but it left me slump-on-the-couch-and-eat-cereal-for-dinner tired.

Silver Springs was full of paranormal beings as well as people, but in my experience, anything that comes in a vaguely human form tends to be quite annoying.

He threw his keys onto the desk. “I had my car serviced here two weeks ago. Now my engine just died.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” I glanced through the window in the door that led to the bay. Archer had walked me through what to do with customers who came in with and without an appointment; we hadn’t discussed what to do with customers whose thick, animated eyebrows appeared willing to wage war.

“Please hang on here one second while I see if we can take a look at your car now,” I said, hoping that one of the guys could look at it and figure out what was wrong.

“If you can take a look now?” His eyes almost popped out of his head, his voice rising on each word. “I was on my way to an important meeting, now I’m stuck here in your shitty little town and—”

Anger rose in my chest, but I ignored him, pushing the door open and heading into the brightly lit bay.

“Sure, run away,” he added caustically. “Fetch someone who can actually help me.”

Music played from the local radio station and Archer, Dylan and Blake were all working on three different cars, one