Tiger Lily - May Dawson Page 0,44

over at her, at the stubborn curve of her chin and the sweet slope of her nose and the little freckles that dotted her cheeks. I wished it were that easy. She might leave Brad in the past, but I didn’t think she’d leave every mean thing he’d ever said to her.

“What did you mean when you said you never should’ve left Silver Springs?” Blake pressed on.

Dylan slapped his hand over his face and muttered through his palm, “Come on, Blake.”

It was as if Dylan couldn’t stand to watch.

“I meant,” she said hotly, and then seemed to lose power. She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about my problems with you, Blake.”

Hurt etched itself across his face instantly.

I glanced between the two of them, trying to figure out how to help them.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because you just wade in to fix them! Pushing everyone around like a herding dog!”

His jaw set. “That’s not fair.”

His voice had gone hard, and Lily visibly bristled at his tone.

Her lips parted, the look on her pretty face sour, and I knew her next words would be tart. She and Blake would just go on hurting each other because they didn’t know how to communicate. It would be even worse because the four of us were crowded into the cab together, so they had an audience for their fumbling.

“What do you think the Disney princesses would do with Brad?” I asked abruptly.

Lily threw me a dark look. “Don’t make fun of me right now. I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not!” I said. “The princesses are role models for a lot of little girls. And frankly, I don’t think they get enough respect.”

Lily side-eyed me, but I could tell she was curious. Lily always loved the princesses—I was pretty sure she knew the words to every Disney song.

Dylan twisted in his seat to look back at me, a bit stunned.

“I think,” I went on slowly, trying to come up with something as I went, “that a certain princess would have hit him with a frying pan. So frankly, I think your restraint was remarkable.”

“I bet Flynn would have pushed him into a closet,” she mused.

“Or over the balcony railing,” Blake muttered.

“Too dark,” she said, leaning forward to rest a hand on his shoulder, as if she was comforting him for getting an F in Disney Prince 101. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

We went on talking about the dire fates that the enterprising princesses would inflict on a douchebag like Brad, and the miles sped by, until Lily was laughing again.

When we reached her grandfather’s house and we were unloading, Blake passed by me and glanced over his shoulder at Lily, climbing the porch steps with a potted plant on each hip.

He clapped my shoulder. “Thanks.”

“For what?” I asked innocently.

“Being the smart one,” he said. It was an old joke between us—he was never impressed by my brains—but right now, it felt too much like he meant it. Maybe he didn’t always know the right thing to say to Lily, but he always took care of her—and of all of us.

“You know we both look up to you,” I said, jerking my chin toward Dylan, who was unstrapping some of the furniture of the truck bed and couldn’t hear me to argue. “You must be pretty smart yourself—or we would’ve murdered you in your sleep for telling us what to do all the time.”

“Too dark,” he said, but as I clapped his shoulder back, we smiled at each other before we went back to work.

A few minutes later, I found myself following Lily up the stairs and down the hall to her room.

I set the last of the boxes of books on Lily’s bed. “There you go. Want me to help unpack?”

She shook her head. “Wow, it seems so weird that my life just fits in here. I had this whole life out in the real world…”

She flopped on the edge of her bed, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear absently.

“Silver Springs is the real world too.” I sat down next to her, even though it was a close fit.

She shifted closer to me, almost imperceptibly.

“I guess you’d know,” she said. “You could be anywhere.”

“Where do you want to go?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Archer. I don’t know what I want.” She glanced away. “I just know I want something…different.”

“If you ever have any idea what you want,” I told her. “I’ll help you get it.”

“Oh?” A playful smile crossed her