Page 32 of The Cinderella Secret
“Coffee shop on someplace and someplace?”
“What?”
“I don’t know!” snapped Lilly. “We just moved here. I don’t know where anything is! Give me a minute and I’ll ask and text you.”
“Are you safe where you are?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just needed to leave the party quickly.”
“Text the address and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Stay put,” said Ella.
Ella snuck one last look at Aiden as she hung up. He was discussing something with Jerome Strand, who nodded. It was so blatantly obvious who was in charge. She utterly failed to understand how their research could have been so wrong.
Ella shook her head and left the courtroom. Her Aiden obsession just about rivaled her Number Nine obsession. Only in this case, thinking about him didn’t give her that pleasant little erotic charge. There weren’t any fantasies about Aiden Deveraux like she had with Number Nine. Mostly. He might work for the weird fetish one where she tied him up… No. Nope. There were no fantasies about Aiden Deveraux. There was just the spinning angry buzz of having to constantly think about him and what he was doing. Why couldn’t he just have been stupid like the research said? Why did he have to be… himself? He was so frustrating and handsome and smart. He was wrong. All wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Definitely wrong.
Ella drove to the address Lilly texted. It was a crappy diner that looked like it had been at that same location for about hundred and fifty years and probably cleaned twice in all that time. She walked in and took a look at her cousin, who sat at one of the vinyl-wrapped tables looking glum. Ella took another look and realized that under her sweatshirt Lilly was wearing a towel around her waist, and flip-flops.
Ella sat down across the table from her cousin.
“So,” said Ella, “I take it the day off from school slash parents getting divorced pool party was not a success?”
“One of the older boys groped my friend Kacey,” said Lilly. “And I punched him in the face. And then her dad yelled at me for overreacting and being too aggressive and Kacey wouldn’t back me up. So I called them all fucking rapist pigs and I ran out of the house.”
“Yikes,” said Ella. She got up and went around to Lilly’s side of the booth. She put her arm around her cousin and Lilly leaned into her with a sniffle.
“What was I supposed to do?” Lilly asked, her voice tiny and muffled by Ella’s shoulder.
“What you did,” said Ella. “Although it would have been preferable to do it without the alcohol.”
“Chet brought it,” said Lilly. “I didn’t want him and Bret to think I wasn’t cool. I guess I shouldn’t have worried about it considering he was clearly just using it to get to the groping part.”
Lilly sat up and wiped her nose.
“He’s the one you punched?” asked Ella.
“Yeah,” said Lilly, she took a sip of water. “I left my clothes there. I just ran out. I felt… gek.”
“That’s not a word,” said Ella.
“Icky,” said Lilly. “I didn’t want any of them looking at me. Kacey just kept apologizing. She didn’t do anything wrong and she was the one who apologized. I wasn’t going to do that. Everyone was all in my space. I had to get out of there.”
“Good job,” said Ella. “You kept your friend safe. You kept yourself safe. You told an adult and when that didn’t work you got out of an unsafe situation and went to someplace public and called for help.”
“That’s the check-list,” said Lilly, a tear rolling down her cheek. “You gave me the check-list. I thought it was stupid. I wasn’t supposed to need it.”
Ella felt her own eyes well up. “I know, baby,” she said putting her arms around her cousin. “None of us are supposed to need it.”
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” whispered Lilly, repeating one of Ella’s sayings. “Why do boys make us live like that?”
“It’s not all of them,” said Ella, thinking of Number Nine and even Aiden Deveraux, who might be a thorn in her side, but still treated her with the utmost respect. “And some things are just basic principles of self-defense for men or women.”
Lilly gave her a bitter, cynical look that aged her about a decade.
“Because life isn’t fair,” said Ella. “I’m sorry. There are people, most of them men, with more power than you and sometimes you’re going to lose. Learn to fight now. Learn to protect yourself and learn to come back when you can’t.”
“I’m going to have to see them at school tomorrow,” said Lilly.
“Yes,” agreed Ella. “It will take courage for you to show up.”
