Page 49 of Big & Lily

“RUN!” Lily is off, sprinting away from the moose, her calf, and me. Not looking back, but yelling at the top of her lungs, “BIG! RUUUUN!”

Now it’s just me and the moose. Her ears are twitching. Shestomps a foot. I don’t speak moose, but I recognize a stressed mother when I see one. Without taking another breath, I follow Lily’s lead.

I bolt past tightly packed trees, my boots squishing into something soft underfoot. I can’t tell if we’re being followed, but if I turn around, I’ll end up on the ground, the perfect target. Finally, I catch up to my sister. With my breath all but gone, I can only tag her on the back to tell her I’m alive. We keep going, past branches that snag on our sleeves and fallen logs that turn us into hurdlers, and finally, when I think it’s not the beast that will kill me but the coronary, we break out of the woods into the tall grass.

Only then do we stop, our hands on our knees, gasping for breath. We wait for a rustle of the trees or a crashing through the pines. Mercifully, the woods are quiet. Lily puts her hand on her heart and sucks in air and then bursts out laughing. “Holy shit,” is all she can manage.

“You are insane,” I say. “We could have been killed.”

“Did you want to stick around to find out?”

“No,” I say, feeling the nervous giggles rising. “Most certainly not.”

We laugh at ourselves, at our close call, at our wildlife adventure, and then I get serious. “Nobody needs to find out about this, got it? Especially not Brick. I think they’ve seen enough drama from us for one trip.”

“Well, well. Devious. I don’t know this sister, but I like her.” I shrug and smile. “Maybe I was wrong,” adds my sister. “Looks like Big-style fun won’t be a snooze fest, after all.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Where have you two been?”

Luna raises one eyebrow as we walk up to the van still giggling. She hasn’t seen us like this yet, the Ackerman sisters on the same side of some joke or entertainment, so she is right to be suspicious.

“We took a walk, down the road,” I say before my sister, delighted by our good fortune in surviving a moose vs. woman experience, blurts out the truth.

“We just came from there,” Mimi adds. “We must have missed you.”

“We saw you. Picking those beautiful flowers,” Lily says gesturing to the small bouquet of wildflowers in Mimi’s hand. “Your heads were down.” Man, she’s fast on her feet. No wonder Lily is such a great salesperson.

Time to change the subject. “I’m starving. Did they start lunch without us?”

“No,” says Luna. “Brick and Jace are finishing setting up. It took them a while to sort out the van and call their friend to come pick us up. They’ve found a pretty spot over there. We came back to get our collapsible drinking cup to make a vase for these flowers.”

When the four of us walk into the meadow where everyone is sitting on folding camp chairs with Heidi’s lunch spread out on aplaid blanket between them, Dane hops to his feet. “Ladies, welcome,” he says with a slight theatrical bow.

He may be talking to all of us, but he is looking only at Lily. He opens his arms, gesturing to an empty seat next to him. Instead, Lily takes the chair across the picnic blanket next to Xavier. The actor acts crestfallen. Lily is wrong about him.

“You have to say something to him,” I’d told her as we’d walked back to the van through the tall grass.

“You got that all wrong. I told you. Dane knows it was a one-time thing.”

“Does he?”

“He’s going back to LA. The land of beautiful women. And I was drunk and mad. And you weren’t there to stop me.”

“Oh, this is on me now?” I don’t say that I’d been trying to stop her all week. I don’t say that she’s done nothing but tell me to back off—using much saltier wording. My sister wanted to play with fire. Now she’s got third-degree burns and I’ve run out of salve and bandages. “Listen, not that it’s any of my business—”

“Since when?”

“You should talk to him. I might be wrong about what he knows and doesn’t know, Lil, but you need to clear the air. Wejustsaid we were going to enjoy the last few days. That means you and me. Not you, me, and pining Just Normal Dane.”

“Can you do it for me?”

“Do what?”

“Talk to him. You are so much better at this stuff than me. Remember Randy McGovern?”

“From eighth grade?” I was twenty-one years old, barely out of college, about to start my job at the construction company where I’d meet Tim. Thirteen-year-old Lily had cried about the boy who wouldn’t take the hint. Then Randy McGovern cried when I hithim with the truth bomb, because Lily Ackerman was the love of his life. Then I cried because I felt so badly for this poor, skinny, mop-headed boy whose heart I broke for my sister.