by M. O'Keefe
I laid my head back against the cushions and like the seventeen-year-old girl I’d never been—I giggled.
Ho. Ly. Shit. That…had been amazing. Dylan had been amazing.
What I’d had with Hoyt followed—to the letter—what my very uncomfortable high school health teacher had told us about sex. Or procreation. There had been the hardening and the insertion and the ejaculation.
It had been cold and clinical and painful.
What had happened with Dylan? I didn’t even have words for it. But if I’d had a wish list for what sex could be like, Dylan just crossed everything off the list.
I fell sideways back onto the couch, my hands between my legs, where I was warm and sore. Who knew…honest to God…who knew my body was designed to feel so much?
What a fucking miracle that was.
When I turned sixteen, our church got a new pastor. The first time he spoke from the pulpit, Mom and I went to church in the best of our Sunday best. We sat in our pew, right side, third from the back, and waited with bated breath to hear the new guy.
I remember exactly his sermon. Exactly. Tolerance. That faith was not just faith in God, or faith in people who looked like you or were attracted to the opposite sex. Faith was faith in humanity. God loved all of us. And we should do the same.
It had been a revelation to me.
Not so much for Mom. We didn’t go back until that pastor left.
It was weird, my body sore from sex, my mind blown from the power of what I could feel, but at that moment, more than any in the past few years…I missed church.
The power of those two things—the spiritual and the carnal—were connected, like the arc of electricity between heaven and earth.
From behind the cracked-open door that led to Dylan’s garage, there was a thump and a muffled curse. Dylan was up.
I pressed a hand to my heart where it pounded, barely contained by my ribs and my skin. Part of me wanted to vanish. Just…not be here. Not look at him. Not try to make conversation after what had happened between us. I didn’t know how to do that. Not with any grace.
But another part of me, alive and hungry and curious, wanted to do all of that again.
I grabbed my clothes from the floor but they smelled like sex and sweat, so I wrapped the blanket around my body and walked back to the room that was mine.
In the drawers I found a clean set of pajamas. Size small, the tags still on the soft fuchsia tee shirt. And the dark navy flannel pants with the stars and moons and bright yellow suns scattered over them.
They fit. They fit perfectly and they were pretty.
Dylan didn’t pick them out, I got that. Margaret had. For her granddaughter. But they were pretty pajamas with little suns on them and I loved them.
The storm had not stopped. Rain fell in sheets on the windows. Outside it was just a swirl of gray. I looked down out the window and wondered if there was a chance this house might slip right off this mountain.
I wondered if I’d slipped off a mountain.
I’m married.
I watched the rain fall into a dense cloud of mist, where it just vanished.
I’m a married woman.
It was one thing to lie about my name…but I’d just made Dylan a participant in adultery. I swallowed and rested my head against the window. And tried, really, really hard, to convince myself that it didn’t matter. What Dylan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
But it mattered.
And I knew it.
I put on a pair of thick socks I’d found in the top drawer and made my way back across the house and then slipped through the cracked door into his dark garage.
The light was on over his bench, and he sat there in a pair of jeans and boots and nothing else.
He was beautiful, his skin dusted with gold under that light. His muscles flexed and shifted under that skin.
“Dylan?” I said, standing on the cement stoop, three steps up from the floor of his garage.
“You’re awake,” he said. He didn’t turn, the muscles of his arms twitching faster as he finished what he was working on. “Just…one more second.”
In that minute, I honestly didn’t breathe.
But then he turned around, and I blew out my breath as coolly as I could before I got light-headed.
“I was tired.” Awesome. Awesome response. “It was a long night.”
“Sure.”
He was still looking at me. Not quite smiling. Not quite not smiling, either. It made me nervous, that look. Like I was something he was slowly taking apart and putting back together, over and over.
“So…what is all this stuff?” I looked around his garage because I didn’t know what else to do.
“All this stuff is cars,” he said. “Those are tires. Anything else you’re unfamiliar with?”
Oh…I couldn’t. I was too raw for teasing now. “I’m…I’m not…I haven’t done this.”
“Fucked a guy and then talked about cars?”
The laugh barked out of me.
He crossed the room and climbed the three steps, his eyes on mine, burning away the embarrassment and insecurity until all that was left was my heartbeat in my chest and the heat in his eyes.
“Hey,” he said and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Just enough. Just enough that I could taste him. The salt and spice. He’d brushed his teeth and had coffee. I could taste all of him on his lips.
“Hey,” I whispered and kissed him back. Wishing I’d had coffee and brushed my teeth.
He stepped back. “Nice pajamas. I like the suns.” He reached out and touched one of them on the front of my thigh and just like that, I was ready. I was hot and damp and…ready.
“So,” I said, stepping back for just a little distance. “What’s going on here?”
“I fix cars.” He took his own distance, taking the steps down to the floor.
He was being evasive—I knew, because that’s how we were with each other. So, I slowly gathered all those things I knew about him, the crumbs he’d left, and I followed him down the steps to the floor.
“You fix cars and go to parties in tuxedos. You live on a cliff in a beautiful house—”
“Don’t come down here,” he said. “You don’t have shoes.”
He was wearing steel-toed boots. Boots and no shirt.
I glanced down at my feet in the thick wool socks I’d found. My toes were curled over the edge of that cement step, like I was about ready to jump.
“You told me people pay you a lot of money for something stupid.”
“I fix cars.”
“You’re telling me you’re the best-paid mechanic in the world?”
He laughed and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Yeah. Sorta.”
“Dylan…” Please, I wanted to say. Throw the girl whose mind you just scrambled with what will undoubtedly be the best sex of her life a bone. “We just had sex.” What a stupid, inadequate word for what had passed between us. “And I know nothing about you!”
“That’s not true. We…” His throat bobbed and this cavern, this great cathedral of space, shrank to nothing. To zero, and I could hear his heartbeat. The sound of his swallow. “We know plenty about each other.”
Heat exploded between us. His beautiful, scarred lips, my scarred knees. Every car and machine between us—it just incinerated.
What I knew about him I could hold in my palm and when he looked at me like that, it didn’t matter.
“I fix race cars,” he finally said. “Build engines. I…invented a fuel injection valve that…sort of made some money.”
I nodded, fighting a smile. “Sort of.”
“Trust me,” he said. “No one is more surprised than me.”
He walked back over to his bench and I sat down on my step. I was pretty sure that he was going to shoot me down if I tried to talk about the accident, but it was worth a shot. And maybe his mind was a little scrambled too. “After the accident you started fixing cars.”
“Before the accident I started fixin
g cars. That’s how most drivers start. Souping up the engines on their dads’ old Fords to see how fast they can go before things fall apart.”
I watched him putting tools away in big metal cases, like filing cabinets on wheels. He grabbed greasy rags and threw them into a cloth bin in the corner.
“So,” I said, stepping lightly into this conversation. “When you were a kid, messing around with your dad’s Ford, he didn’t mind?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye because I knew what I was doing, the sleeping dog I was poking at.
Dylan stilled, his back to me. “My dad taught me. I keep forgetting that.”
I pulled the sun on my knee into a fold. Obliterating it.
“Ben said he didn’t have any kids,” I whispered, my voice carrying through the cavern right to him, and he flinched. Just once. But then he started moving again. Pushing himself back into motion.
“Put that together, did you?”
“I thought for a long time you were related to the girl in the fire.”
“Nope. I’m related to the murderer.”
“Dylan? Why would he say he doesn’t have kids?”
“Because he stopped being my pop a long, long time ago.”
“But you didn’t stop being his son?”
Dylan turned. Amazing how inscrutable he was. He could close a door so fast, so hard, there was no chance to get in, no chance to see anything but what he wanted to show.
I nodded like I understood, and the silence between us started to get chilly. “So that makes Max—”
“My brother.”
“The badass you wanted to be like.”
Dylan watched me a long time. “Yeah,” he said.
Looking at Dylan, strong and fierce in this beautiful house, with Margaret and the money implied in all of it, I could not connect the dots between him and Ben. They were so many miles apart.
“Is your mom Maria?” I asked. He could not control his shock. His drop-jawed astonishment.
“How did you know about Mom?”
“Your dad—”
“Ben,” Dylan said with a mean laugh. “That man is no dad.”
“Fine…Ben told me about her.”
Dylan blinked as if he really couldn’t believe what I was saying. “What exactly did he tell you?”
“That he missed her, but they were bad together.”
“Bad together,” he laughed, humorlessly. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Did he hit her?” I asked, wondering how Ben could look me in the eyes when I was telling him about Hoyt. How could he look me in the eyes and have done the exact same thing to another woman?
“No. Good Saint Ben never lifted a finger against her, like that was what made all the other shit he did all right. There is more than one way to hurt a woman, and Ben found them all.”
I did not need to be sermonized on the many ways men could hurt women. I glanced away from the intensity of his eyes. They saw too much, those eyes of his. He started throwing tools back into the toolboxes. Each one landing with a clatter and a bang that made me jump.
“Is it really dangerous at the trailer park?” I asked.
He leaned back against one of the cars and crossed his arms over his bare chest, looking like every single sexual fantasy I never allowed myself to have.
“Ben is an old fucking man. Harmless. But if Max is coming around, then, yes.”
“There are other people there. Families. Young kids.”
“Yep.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“The world is rough all over, Annie. My brother is an outlaw. My father was an outlaw. They are both involved in shit that’s not safe.”
I put my head in my hand. I ran away from Oklahoma to try and get safe. To get away from violence and abuse. I thought I’d done it, in my Febreze-scented escape.
“Annie, listen…” He came over to stand in front of me.
How odd, I thought, to know that skin so well. The taste of it. The feel of it. And to know the man inside of it not even a little. At that moment I let the fact that I didn’t tell him about Hoyt be okay. Cowardly, yes. Awful, sure. But I let it. “I have a house in Charleston. You can stay—”
“No!”
“Why no?”
“Because I don’t know you! I’m not going to live with—”
“Slow down there, killer. I’m not asking you to live with me. I have a house where you can stay. If you’re going to be uptight about it you can pay me rent.”
“I don’t like cities.” My gut made me say that.
“What’s wrong with cities?”
“People.”
He laughed. “That I can understand. You don’t have to tell me right now; you can think about it. But I gotta say, it seems like a pretty easy call to me. Shitty trailer or a beach house in Charleston.”
“It’s a beach house?”
“Oh, that changes your mind?” He laughed.
“I’ve never been to the beach.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever.”
“Jesus Christ, honey. Did you live in a box before you answered that phone?”
The smile died on my face and I ducked my head, rubbing my cheek against my shoulder. I did. I lived in that box. And I smashed it right open.
“Anything else you want to get off your chest?”
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Thursday. The twenty-fourth.”
“It’s my birthday.”
For a minute he gaped at me.
“Everyone has a birthday,” I said when it seemed his shock went on a bit too long.
“You’re twenty-five? Today?”
I nodded, back to nervously obliterating the sun on my pants, but then he smiled. Not one of his half smiles, or mocking grins. It was a smile that revealed a very real amount of happiness. Of joy, even.
It did not make him more handsome, he was already far too good-looking, but it made him very human. And again, that dangerous affection for this stranger curled through me.
He pushed off the car and…well, he prowled over toward me. Loose-hipped and gleaming, he came to me. To me. Annie McKay. And he bent down, one hand braced on the wall, the other on the railing.
His smile…I swear to God, it was beautiful. Beautiful because it was rare, because of those scarred lips, because it was all for me.
I couldn’t stop myself. I tipped my face up, like a plant toward the sun, and smiled right back.
Softly, sweetly, he kissed me. Again. And again. And again, again. A thousand small breaths across my face. His mouth was delicious and I was starving.
“What do you want for your birthday, baby?” he asked, so low, so quiet, I felt the words more than heard them.
“One more day.” The words came without thought. Without a plan. I wanted one more day in this magical house on the edge of the cliff. “One more day with you,” I said.
I reached up and touched the edge of a scar, a thick, white wrinkle on his neck. He had the Virgin Mary tattooed over his heart. I felt my own buckle in my chest.
And then it’s over. It has to be.
He nodded like he heard me.
“One more day,” he agreed, and those arms swept me up.
For a second I was awkward in his hold. All legs and arms caught up between our bodies. I jerked away and he gave me a quick jostle.
“You want me to drop you?”
“No…I’m just…This is awkward.”
“Relax.” Another kiss. Another jostle and my arms were out and around his neck and my legs were around his waist and suddenly, it was the most natural thing.
I could feel the skin of his waist against my legs, his neck on the inside of my elbows.
This electricity between us found new routes. The tops of my ears burned, the tips of my fingers. The back of my throat.
He carried me through his house, past my room, through the last door at the end of the hallway. It was his room and I barely noticed. I was too busy feeling his lower r
ibs vibrate as he breathed.
There was fine hair at the nape of his neck. Soft when I stroked it one way, like the bristle of a brush when I touched it the other way.
I could do that all day.
My twenty-four-hour birthday wish.
Something cold touched the back of my thighs, and he flipped on a light and I blinked into the reflected brightness in the mirrors. We were in his bathroom. A bathroom so big my trailer could fit in it.
His kiss lingered. His hands slid from my ass to my waist and my shoulders and I twitched. I did the same to him. I took all the touches I didn’t take earlier. I ran my hands all over his body. All that silky bare skin, the thick muscles beneath it. My fingers brushed over the scars on his ribs and he twitched.
“Does…does that hurt?”
“It’s not comfortable,” he said and kissed me again. I kept my hands away from his scars.
When he pulled back, his lips were swollen and damp. Pink.
I reached up and touched them with my fingers. “You have a pretty mouth,” I said.
He sucked my finger into his mouth and then slid back, until it fell from his lips. “I have a girl’s mouth,” he said. “A cocksucker mouth.”
“What?” I cried.
“Pop’s words,” he said.
“What a stupid thing to say,” I muttered and pulled him back toward me. I touched his mouth, all the edges, the soft curves, the hard edge of the scar tissue, and he twitched and tried to pull back but I put my legs around him, keeping him still. “You’ve got a beautiful mouth.” I had no idea if my opinion mattered, but I wanted to say it. I gave him one hard, quick kiss and let him go.
Smiling, he reached into a glass-lined shower and turned on the faucet. Water thundered down from a big, round showerhead and the glass near the floor immediately got foggy.
There was a bathtub next to the shower, one of those big Jacuzzi ones. And a toilet beside that. Outside the window over it, there was only sky.
“Are we taking a shower?” I asked, excited by the idea.
“You are. And you’re going to take your time.”
“Are you telling me I stink?”
“No. I’m telling you I need twenty minutes to get things organized.”
“For what?”
