Tiger Lillie Read Online Free PDF Page B

cat-o’-nine-tails ripped into those gorgeous mounds of muscle, those perfectly formed, scarlet wads of tissue. Imagine the pain, the very real agony born of very real nerve endings tucked into a neurological network, synapses firing away, firing, firing, blasting sensation of such horrific proportion not many of us can begin to understand.
    Imagine the blood spattering like popping oil, wads of flesh flying through the air. I try to picture it, at times, just to appreciate His sacrifice, just to try and not forget and throw around His love and pain like it doesn’t really matter in the day-to-day. And I imagine the feeling of a deep scab being ripped away, only that scab covers my entire body and the ripping takes hours.
    And even then, am I going far enough? Probably not. Nails into wrists and feet? Dear God. How did You not come down from that cross? How did You stay? What kind of wonderful love is this?
    Tacy
    My first date with Rawlins McGovern felt like something from a fairy tale. Unfortunately, I’d never read the actual Brothers Grimm or I might have had a heads-up on the future. I felt guilty because Mom and Dad told me I had to wait until I was sixteen to date, but that was two whole years away. I told Rawlins I was sixteen. He really was the nicest guy. Twenty-one years old. A real man, not like the weird boys in my class who were still laughing during the human anatomy unit in science class. I got ready at Barb’s house and he picked me up there. Barb said she’d cover for me if the folks called. I hated to do that to them, but, well, I knew it would all work out fine. Rawlins actually had a car phone. In a blue Miata! His dad partly owned McGovern, Hyde, and Wiley, a really big-time advertising agency downtown. Downtown Baltimore, not Bel Air. In the Signet office tower. And there he was, working at a little radio station to learn the ropes from the bottom up. How cool was that? I couldn’t believe he wanted to date me. He told me he’d never seen a more beautiful girl.
    He actually had a dress delivered to Barb’s house for me. I swear, I looked at least twenty-one in it. It was white with spaghetti straps and a neck scarf. When we drove away from Barb’s house, he said, “You have beautiful shoulders, Anastasia.” He called me by my full name, wasn’t that romantic? “I sent the dress just so I could see them.”
    Oh man! He was so amazing! Two days before, I worried myself about the school’s immature gossip, and suddenly I was dating a mature guy.
    But he didn’t even reach out to touch my shoulders. I thought he might after going to all that trouble, but he didn’t. He just looked at them and flicked his eyes up to look in mine. I can’t even explain what it did to me. But that’s the way it felt with Rawlins. He was so powerful and wonderful. When he dropped me off, he didn’t kiss me or even hold my hand, but he ran a finger down the back of my hand, between the two middle bones, really slowly, and his eyes never left mine and he told me again how beautiful he thought I was. I was so happy.
    Lillie
    Cristoff tosses the newspaper onto my desk and I glance up from my planner, watching as he bales his explosive red hair into a ponytail. “If you’d get a cell phone, Lady Nibs, I could have told you about this sooner. We made The Sunpaper , Lillie, right on the first page of the Maryland section! Right next to that heroin murder in Patterson Park.”
    I sip my first taste of consciousness-inducing Coke and push my orange glasses up on my nose. Just couldn’t contemplate contacts today. Besides, I love my orange glasses. I love orange. It embodies everything bold and upbeat. I have an orange bedroom, an orange bathroom, and at least ten orange articles of clothing. Today I’m wearing at least four of them, with orange loafers and big orange plastic Wilma Flintstone beads circling my neck.
    I’m a nightmare. A size sixteen orange nightmare. I am under no delusion that I’d be allowed as