by M. O'Keefe
“Well, it’s hardly yours. I am not your business, Dylan.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
A few phone calls, some drunk texts, and two ill-advised pictures—that’s all we had between us. A handful of paltry, inconsequential things. How in the world did they add up to something so damn heavy?
“You didn’t want to see me, remember?” I whispered, revealing some of my hurt. “You ended it.”
His silence was agreement. Yes, he was saying. Yes, I ended it. Yes, I didn’t want to see you.
“I didn’t ask to be brought here,” I said, sounding shrill. His silence was making me crazy. Shut up, I told myself. Shut up and forget about him.
“You can go home tomorrow.”
We were at an impasse. Forty feet between us, and every inch was lined with barbed wire and land mines. And it would be easy to turn around and leave. Wait out the hours until that driver came back to take me home.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just walk away and not…ever have seen him.
“Come out of the shadows,” I said.
He rolled toward the bench, his back to me. “Go on to bed, Layla. It’s been a long—”
“Stop!” I cried. The anger and fear and hurt exploded out of me. “Just stop. I’ve been bossed around, thrown into cars, driven to some kind of mountaintop fortress to…you. You, Dylan. You ended it and I still wound up here. To you!” I kept spitting out that word, like it somehow meant something. Like on the stupid weird map of my life he had been some kind of spectacular surprise destination. “I’m exhausted, I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m…” I cut myself off. I was not going to admit that I was turned on. Though, undoubtedly he had to know. He always seemed to know. He knew over a phone and now I was standing here, panting, my body shaking…God. Damn it. He had all the cards and I was standing here barefoot in my pajamas. If there was ever a moment I longed for a bra, this was it. My nipples hurt, they were so hard. I knew he could see them.
“Inevitable,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not in the mood for games!” I yelled.
I couldn’t see him, but I could tell he was smiling at me. I knew what his voice sounded like when he was smiling. “Games are what you like. Dirty little games. That’s all we’ve got, Layla.”
I fought back the surge of memories of all of our “games,” because I was not going to be distracted. And he was trying to marginalize it, and what we did—what happened between us—couldn’t fit within any margins I’d ever known.
“I know about the accident. The fire. I went to the library and looked you up.”
“It’s not about the fire.” He lifted his hand to the back of his neck like he was rubbing sore muscles there. And I got the sense that he was lying. “The fire is nothing. There are a lot of things I haven’t told you. Things you’d just be better off not knowing.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Dylan,” I yelled. “Let’s start with something! Let’s start with you telling me one true thing.”
He looked down at his hands, shadows playing over his beautiful body. “You are…beautiful. You look exactly like I thought you would.”
I gasped, the words so unexpected they slid right through my ribs. Right into the meat and blood and bone of me.
“I never imagined you,” I said.
“Probably smart,” he laughed.
“You just…were you. Just Dylan.” Just everything.
He lifted his head, watching me, and I stood there with nothing. In the face of all that he had, the slimness of my existence, its utter weightlessness, was shocking. But I was out to even the scales. Just a little. Just enough that I could look at myself in the mirror tomorrow. Just enough so I’d know that I’d fought for something. My own worth in this game we’d played. I wasn’t a pawn. I was a person.
“And I’m pretty much done with other people telling me what’s best. So, either stand up, or I’m leaving.”
“Layla—”
I turned for the door.
“There are bears out there!”
“I’m not scared of bears,” I snapped over my shoulder, stepping into the living room. Maybe I’d find some shoes in the closet. If I could find the closet.
“Stop,” he yelled from the garage. “Stop, girl. You’re gonna…fine. Fine, Layla! Come back.”
I stepped back into the garage, the door closed tight behind me, my arms over my chest. My feet were so cold they were numb at this point.
Slowly, he stood up from the shadows. He sort of unfurled from the chair. He wasn’t tall. But he was big. He wore a plain white tee shirt over wide shoulders and a big chest that tapered down to a lean waist. His faded blue jeans were low on his hips, held up by a thick leather belt.
I sucked in a breath, light-headed. His head was still in the shadows and he reached over across the bench, his biceps a beautiful gilded curve, and then he tilted the lamp up so it hit his face.
And he turned, facing me full-on.
The scars were pink and shiny up the side of his neck to his ear. The scar tissue spread across the left side of his face like kudzu, touching the corner of his mouth.
But the rest of his face was the same as those pictures in the articles. Striking. Masculine. Those lips…oh God, those lips. The shiny taut edge only made them more compelling. More beautiful.
“Happy?” he said, tilting his head so I could see the extent of the scars. He was uncomfortable, standing there like that in the light. On display.
“No,” I whispered. “I’m not happy.”
I’d thought, somehow, that it would be so much worse. Because the news coverage just stopped. Because he was shrouded in mystery.
But they were just scars. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I’m sorry for the pain you must have felt. And the fear you must have lived through. I’m sorry that happened to you. But those scars did nothing to change my feelings for him—conflicted as they were.
“Is that why you stopped talking to me?”
He shook his head, the shadows shifting over his face.
“You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?” I asked, knowing the answer before he said a word.
I’d told him things I’d never told anyone before. Things I hadn’t even conceptualized. But he’d shared nothing of himself, because that made sense. I was the one who’d reached for more. Who’d felt so alone that he’d seemed like a friend.
I had no reason to feel betrayed, but I did.
I looked down at my hands, the calluses on the tips of my fingers. Part of my thumbnail was turning black. I’d smashed it the other day trying to get the damn engine on the mower to work. But this…this thing/not-thing between us. It hurt worse.
“Is Ben okay?” I whispered. “Will you at least tell me that much?”
“Probably; he usually is.”
“Who is Max?”
“A dangerous guy. A…very dangerous guy.”
“You know a lot of dangerous guys.”
Something hard slipped over his face. Something…scary. And I stiffened. An old instinct braced me.
“You should go back to your room, Layla,” he said, sitting back down on the stool, rolling belly up to the bench. I was being dismissed and frankly, he was probably right. But I was pretty done with being bossed tonight.
“I’m not going to do that, Dylan. You don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, but I deserve to know what is happening at the trailer park.” My home.
He spun back out and his eyes, full of hot knowledge, touched me. My shoulders, my stomach. My bruised knees. My breasts.
For a second I thought he was trying to scare me away. With sex. Like he was threatening me. If I stayed, he’d what? Fuck the hell out of me?
Stupid man.
That was not going to scare me away.
Interest, sexual and sharp, flooded me. Warmed me, from the inside out.
“Max is a part of the same motorcycle club Ben use
d to be a part of,” he said.
“The Skulls.”
He nodded.
“Did you…are you in the club?”
“No, I have nothing to do with the club.” He picked up a little screwdriver and fiddled with it like he was bored or needed distraction, and I wanted to stomp across that floor and shake him. “Most of the time Ben and Max have nothing to do with each other either. I don’t know why he was there.”
“Joan, my neighbor? Do you know her?”
“The stripper?” he asked with that crooked smile. “I only know what you’ve told me.”
“She’s actually a DEA agent. Undercover. Did you know that?”
The screwdriver clattered against the bench when he dropped it and I wanted to smile at him. At his surprise. It was nice to know something he didn’t. “No. I had no idea.”
“Do you know why she’d be undercover?”
“Had to be something about the club,” he said with a shrug and then winced, reaching up to pinch the muscles at the base of his neck. I fought the urge to ask if he was all right. I fought the urge to care.
“She said I should call you. She knew about you.”
“You didn’t tell her—”
“That we were having phone sex?” I spat the words because I was pissed. I was pissed because he wasn’t mad. Because he was acting like this was no big deal. “No. I didn’t. But somehow when this Max guy showed up she knew I should call you. Why?”
The tension in his silence was razor sharp, and whatever he was going to say, I had the sense I should brace for it. Duck and cover, like when I was a kid and we practiced tornado drills at school.
“I own the trailer park,” he said.
I swayed backwards, putting a hand against the wall to catch myself before I fell over.
He jumped to his feet, like he was about catch me, and I shook my head—I couldn’t have him touch me. Not at all. And so he froze. Just froze.
“Layla?”
I flinched and turned my face away. Mortification swallowed me whole.
“Then you…you know. All about me.” That I’m lying about my name. That I showed up with bruises around my neck covered in a stupid, silly scarf. That half my trailer is paid for with manual labor in the damn field.
“I own the trailer park because of Ben. The rest of it…doesn’t matter to me.”
“You don’t know—”
“What?” he asked, stepping out of that freeze toward me.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Now who is lying?”
I laughed, throwing my hands up in the air. “Does it matter?”
We stared at each other, long and hard.
“I guess you’re right,” he said and turned away from me. “Go on back to your room, Layla.”
I was being sent to my room like a child. And it would have been the right thing—I should have done what he said, like a good girl, and gone silently back to that bed and stared at the ceiling until he decided to let me go.
But somehow I couldn’t.
“My name is not Layla,” I said. “I lied. All along. I lied.”
He turned back toward me.
“I know.”
“What?”
“Well, I figured you told me some lies to protect yourself. You wanted to be called Layla.” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem to be any of my business.”
None of his business. Of course. That, too, shouldn’t hurt. But it did.
It was like running into a wall at top speed. “And they worked so well, didn’t they?”
“You don’t have to protect yourself from me, Layla.”
My laugh was ripped from my stomach, nearly a sob. “You don’t know anything about what I have done to protect myself.”
“Then tell me.” He was the sharpened edge of a blade, bright and awful. Violence waiting to happen. Not to me, but on my behalf. I could set him against the world.
For a moment I could barely hold onto my secret.
I turned on shaking legs and went up the steps to the door, desperate to get out of there.
DYLAN
It shouldn’t matter. On the gigantic pile of lies the two of them had told each other, that she’d lied about her name should not matter at all. And it hadn’t up until this moment.
This moment, watching her shaking and walking away from him, it mattered.
He’d understood all along that she was doing it to keep herself safe. Because he was a stranger; because the things they were doing were so outrageous to her.
He understood better than most the desire for anonymity.
But it wasn’t just Dylan and what they did together that scared her.
Something else had her deep down scared.
He knew the look of terror, the smell of it. The way it could make your body shake like a fever.
Don’t, he told himself again. The plan had been to get her out of that park, bring her here where she was safe, but never let her see him. Never let himself see her. But he’d blown that, and the image of her was seared now into his brain. Small and thin but long-legged, white-blond hair, and eyes the color of powder-blue paint.
The smart move was to let her go.
But he couldn’t.
Keeping her here was a mistake. For her, potentially a dangerous one.
She’d lied to him. She was scared. Very scared.
And that changed everything.
ANNIE
I opened the door from the garage to the main part of the house, surprised to see that morning was being ushered in on the billowing clouds of a storm.
Thunder boomed and the air smelled like electricity. No rain, though. Mother Nature was only setting the loud and violent stage.
Margaret was in the kitchen, preparing food, and at the sound of the door to the garage opening, she turned with a tight smile that quickly vanished when she saw me.
“What are you doing in the garage?” she asked, as if I’d been snooping around the place.
“Talking to Dylan. Turns out he was here after all.”
Her face was unreadable, but everything about her gave the impression of being shocked.
“Is he in there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
For a second a smile burst through that wall of impassivity. And then it was gone. I didn’t know what that smile meant. I didn’t know what anything meant anymore.
Margaret set down a pot of coffee on a table full of food. There was homemade bread set out with butter and jam beside it. Cut-up melon and strawberries filled the bottom of a pretty pottery bowl. There were cinnamon rolls. Fresh ones. Still steaming.
If my stomach weren’t in knots, I’d be all over that.
“I’m sorry I don’t have much for you.” Margaret looked down at the food like it had failed her.
“It’s a feast.” I picked up a strawberry like I had an interest in eating it, but my stomach rolled over at the idea. So, I just held it, picking off the green leaves, one by one.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Margaret, in a pale yellow shirt and a pair of black leggings, poured me a mug. “Milk? Sugar?”
“Black.” I drank it black because it was cheaper. And faster. Because it didn’t bother anyone. “Actually, can I have some sugar? Both, actually.”
Margaret fixed up the coffee and handed a dark blue heavy pottery mug to me. “I don’t understand people who drink coffee black. It’s like they don’t want to enjoy themselves.”
Huh. Score one for Margaret.
I took a sip of the coffee and nearly grimaced. It was too sweet. And not hot enough with the milk. Come to find out, I liked it the way I’d always had it. Go figure.
“Margaret,” a soft voice said, and suddenly Dylan was behind me. I could feel him there in the nerve endings along my back. The hair on my neck stood up.
Him. That’s what every part of my body said. Him.
And mine.
I put the mug on the table before i
t fell from my fingers.
“Go shopping,” he said.
“For what?” Margaret asked, putting her hands on her hips and giving the impression of a woman at her wit’s end. A mother, actually—she gave the impression of being a mother. Frazzled but affectionate.
“I don’t care. You’re always telling me my house needs stuff; go get some.”
“You have a guest. Who has had a rough night, and you want me to—”
“I want you to get out of the house,” he said, and my skin shrank. It squeezed me tight and I couldn’t breathe.
“Dylan,” she said, her façade cracking. Her worry visible, but not for me. No, her worry was entirely reserved for Dylan.
“It’s fine,” he told her. “I’m fine.”
Right, I nearly laughed, like I was going to hurt him? Chip that steel edge of his? Impossible.
“All righty!” Margaret said, and she opened up a small closet and grabbed her purse, stomping around a little to make her point. “But I’m using your money and filling up your fridge.”
“Go gambling, I don’t care. Just be gone.”
Dylan walked past me to shut the door behind Margaret.
The door closed with a heavy, loud click and he turned to face me.
Dylan.
Those lips like pillows. The taut, shiny flesh at his thick neck. The scars looked worse here, in this light. But I had no reaction to them, besides concern. They were not repellant or scary. They just were.
His dark, heavy-lidded eyes were unreadable and they walked all over me. My hair, my eyes, the neckline of my camisole, my legs beneath my shorts.
I felt naked under that gaze, my clothes stripped away.
“Tell me your name. Your real name.”
“No.”
His face split into a grin, and I remembered he liked my opposition. My sharp edges. This was how things between us started and I did not have the strength to go down this road.
“It’s Annie,” I said. “Annie McKay.”
He blinked. Again. Smiled a little.
“That suits you.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. Obstinate even when I didn’t want to be.
“I need to know why,” he said. “Why you lied.”
