Page 13 of Ly to Me

“What?” Her tone pitched with annoyance. Actually, that pitch might’ve been the bulk of the way she’d been speaking to me this whole time.

“You flinched when I moved you away from the road. Did I scare you?”

I studied her movements like it was important to the reason I started walking with her in the first place. She shook her head, her voice low as she said, “No, I just don’t like to be touched, is all.”

“You don’t like to be touched, but you were watching eye candy in the field?”Shit. Probably shouldn’t have said that.

Her steps slowed as we neared a dirt road, and to my surprise, she glanced at me before continuing down it. She was either leading me to a slow, calculated death out in the middle of the woods that surrounded the shack at the end of the road, or—

“Hey!” I hurried after her, not realizing that I’d stopped walking and was now several meters behind. Catching up, she stopped and turned to me, adjusting her bag that I now also realized must have weighed half her body weight.

And there I was talking about being a gentleman and the fucking sidewalk rule.

“Let me carry that for you.” I held my arm out.

She stared at it blankly, her gaze unmoving from my hand as she said, “I’m home now. You can go.”

My jaw worked. “Let me help you carry that inside.”

Her lips pursed. “I carry my bag by myself every day. I think I can handle it the rest of the twenty feet to my front door.”

My eyes narrowed to that door, then to the roof that had a blue tarp over a quarter of it. My gaze continued falling to the busted-out screen covering a thin, old window, and the scraggly weeds growing past the sill. Her home wasn’t a home—not one I was used to seeing, at least.

Lyra’s dark hair swayed beside the door and I bolted to catch up to her, yet again. As I came up behind her, she sighed. “You’re not going to take no for an answer, are you?”

“If I answer with a ‘no’ right now, does that mean you’ll say I can come in?”

“How—”

I pulled her bag from her shoulder and slung it over mine, then held my hand up, directing her to the door. “After you, Ly.”

She muttered under her breath as she fished a key out of her pocket, but when she went to put it in the lock, the door creaked open. Lyra muttered more curses.

“You can put the bag right there.”

I peeked at where she was pointing and tried to hide my frown by rolling my lips in. There was no carpet or flooring of any kind. I’d worked these past few summers with Jared, helping his dad with his construction company, and what she had was subflooring only. “Got a bedroom?”

Her brow arched. “Excuse me?”

“To put your bag in. That’s where you do homework and stuff, right?”

Her sigh lit something inside me, probably because it signaled one thing—she was going to give in again.

“Follow me.”

I did so, but it wasn’t many steps until we reached a small hallway with a few doors. She pulled out another key and pushed it into the lock…on her bedroom door. But, when it opened, I let a genuine smile come to the surface.

Her room wasn’t like the living space we walked past. A circular yellow rug sat in the center, spanning to cover most of the subflooring. A twin bed was pushed into the corner, but made up with a black set and even a few throw pillows.

“This is yours?” She nodded as I set her bag down beside a small, white desk. As Lyra stood in the corner with her arms crossed, my jaw slackened as my eyes roamed the walls. “And…all of these are…”

“Dead?” she finished, letting a giggle slip out.

Make that four things that were fucking adorable. Five for the face she made while doing it.

“I gathered they were dead by the pins sticking out of them.” I grinned at her, and she returned one while walking up to the display closest to me. “Did you catch all of these?”

“Most,” she said, touching the corner of a small, wooden frame with the back punched out. “The ones I didn’t catch on my own were gifts.”