by M. O'Keefe
And mine.
That vicious creature was hers.
Annie watched him beating Hoyt and his violence gave her an awful thrill. A visceral, nameless pleasure. That he could meet Hoyt on this particular battlefield and crush him. That he had the guts and the will and the strength to do what Annie could not.
Dylan will kill Hoyt for hurting me. For touching me.
Because I am his.
And only his.
In a matter of a few minutes it would be done.
And she wanted that.
Was attracted to it.
Felt powerfully cherished by it.
“Stop!” she cried. The thought, the guilt, all of it was overwhelming. His violence, her thrill of its use on her behalf. It put a magnifying glass up to the worst of herself and she was horrified.
I’m not this person, she thought. I don’t want to be this person.
“Please, Dylan, stop.”
He did not listen and he was dodging Hoyt’s hands as they came up trying to grab his throat, his face. His ears.
“Please. Ben!” Annie looked over her shoulder at Dylan’s father. “Please make him stop.”
Ben’s face was impassive and she didn’t know if he was on her side or not. She began to crawl forward.
“Dylan!” she cried again and he stopped. Her words called a halt to his muscles, his bloodlust. His fist remained cocked over Hoyt’s face but he glanced over his shoulder in her direction. Blood ran down his face from a cut over his forehead and his lips were curled back from his teeth in a snarl.
“Stop,” she pleaded. Tears ran over her lips and stung, but she barely felt it. She just wanted this to be over. Her vicious glee in the violence to be washed away. She couldn’t use this man like a weapon. Like a beast. “Please, Dylan. Stop.”
She’d forgotten about the knife. Hoyt’s knife. There on his belt, where he always kept it.
And Hoyt used Dylan’s distraction to unsheathe his knife. It gleamed in the light from the office. Its long, lethal blade ran like silver before he sliced it across Dylan’s side.
The world screamed. Time dragged.
Dylan fell sideways, his hands clutched to his side, blood trickling over his fingers, his eyes wide with shock. Hoyt staggered to his feet, looking for Annie.
Ben grabbed Kevin’s bat and swung it back, rushing across the grass aiming for Hoyt, but Ben was old and Hoyt was young and he just shoved Ben aside, into the cab of the truck.
“You see what you do?” Hoyt screamed at her, his anger a physical force, and she fell back on her ass, her hands brushing against the cold steel of the gun she’d stolen from his safe months ago.
Hoyt still held the knife in his hand, only now it ran with blood. Slick and red.
She didn’t think about what to do.
If she had—at all—she would never have done it.
But because she didn’t think, because she was acting on instinct and fear, she lifted the gun with both hands, elbows soft, body prepared for the recoil. Just like Smith taught her.
Annie must have closed her eyes, because she didn’t see him coming toward her. She only heard him telling her how she would pay.
You’re going to hurt for this, Annie. You’re going to hurt real bad.
Annie pulled the trigger. Once. The explosion ripped the night, tore it to pieces.
And then she did it again.
And again, until the gun was empty, but she kept pulling the trigger until someone touched her shoulder. Annie screamed and tried to scramble away.
“Annie.” It was Dylan.
He was on his knees beside her. Pale. So pale. His tanned skin bone white. And the trickle of blood over his hands was thicker now.
A river of it. Black in the twilight.
He was bloody and torn up. Bleeding. Dying. Mortal and human, and minutes ago, she’d wanted to use him as a weapon. She’d wanted him to kill Hoyt for her.
But she’d pulled the trigger.
Who have I become?
“Hoyt?” She tried to see over Dylan’s shoulder but he got in her way. She could see Ben there, standing over something. His hands were red with blood.
“It’s okay, he’s not hurting you anymore,” Dylan said in a quiet voice.
“What—? Are you—? Oh…God…oh my God.” She was suddenly freezing and she couldn’t get a breath.
“Come on,” he breathed, “let me—”
He reached for her and she flinched away from him. She flinched so hard, she fell back, her hand up like he might hit her. She cowered from him.
He stopped. On a dime he stopped.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
She knew that and she didn’t. At the same time, both those things were true. The world was hurting her.
“Is he dead? Did I kill him?”
“Annie—”
Again he reached for her, but she screamed this time. Look at us, she wanted to say, but the scream didn’t have any words. Look at what we’ve done to each other.
He fell sideways, his eyes blazing but unfocused.
“Dylan!” she cried and tried to force her body to get to his, to reach for him, but she was so cold. Her hands and feet numb. Blocks of ice. And it was spreading up and over her skin. Through her chest. Her heart. Her brain.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” Kevin, behind her, said. The world was spinning. So fast.
“Good,” Dylan breathed, his eyes drifting shut. “Baby,” he sighed, smiling at her. “It’s going to be okay.”
She wanted to believe him. She did.
But the world went dark and she fell, alone, onto the cold earth.
ANNIE
Annie’s mother used to say she didn’t dream. Annie believed her when she was young, because that’s what young kids did. They believed their parents. But as Annie got older, she heard her mother in her room, crying out in her sleep. Annie would creep to her mother’s doorway and watch as she twitched and moaned, fighting off whatever nightmare plagued her. Annie would wake her up, calm her down. But the dreams always came back.
Night after night.
Annie’s mother dreamt. She just chose not to remember. It was an act of will.
Complete self-preservation.
Annie had no such skill. And her dreams roared through her.
In them, Hoyt was over her, telling her to part her legs. She could feel the hard length of his body, and the awful thrust of his erection.
“Do it, baby,” he whispered. “Let me in.”
And then, in the way of dreams, between one moment and the next it wasn’t Hoyt. It was Dylan over her. Dylan’s hands on her.
“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “It’s okay.” And she let him in. All the way in. Because she trusted this man. And her hunger for him, for the pleasure he could bring her, for the mindlessness and ease, was nearly painful. It went past craving. It was a need she felt in her blood. In the fibers of her muscles. The hidden recesses of her heart.
His body was wet and hard, sliding into hers. She licked the sweat off his neck, put her teeth against the tendons there and bit. Bit hard. So hard she tasted blood.
“Yes,” he breathed and he reared up, his eyes dark. Violence and desire thrummed between them.
He was bleeding, where she’d bit him. A red drop slowly making its way over the muscles of his shoulder. I did that, she thought. I made him bleed.
In the dream she turned cold.
“Do it again,” he said, and she shook her head. Pushing against him. She didn’t want that. Didn’t want to want it.
“Baby, it’s okay,” he said in that dark voice. “I like it. You like it, too.”
She shook her head. “Dylan—”
“You wanted this,” he said. That smile turning into a sneer. Hoyt’s sneer. “You like this.”
No. She didn’t.
“Deep down,” he whispered, licking her lips. She could smell cough drops on his breath. “Deep down you want this.”
He put his
hands against her neck. Not enough that she couldn’t breathe, but enough that she was scared. Scared of Dylan. Or Hoyt. An awful monstrous mash-up of the two.
“Dylan! Stop!”
She sat up, her hands at her neck, the scream raking nails across her throat
The room was dark. The bed she was sitting up in was a hospital bed. On her body was a green hospital gown, damp with sweat.
A hospital? How did I get here?
The night, pieces of it, sharp fragments, memories like knives, slipped into her. Hoyt. Dylan. The fight. The knife.
Oh God! The gun!
A garbled cry squeaked out of her throat.
“Hey!” said a soft voice in the shadows. “Hey, you’re okay.”
“Ben?” She sobbed his name, grateful and terrified all at once.
“Right here.” He stepped out of the dark side of the room, where he’d been sitting in a gray vinyl easy chair.
“Where am I?”
“The hospital in Cherokee.”
“Where is Dylan? Is he…okay?” God. Please don’t let him be dead. Please.
“Doctors patched him up. He lost a bunch of blood but he’s fine. Real worried about you.”
Annie pulled her legs to her chest and blocked out the shadowed room by putting her head down on her knees.
She tasted blood from her lip and she pressed the collar of the hospital gown to the split. Beneath the thin cotton of the gown, she felt the heavy silk of stitches.
That dream…she pushed it away from her. Away from her thoughts. Her memories. She would pretend it didn’t happen to her. And the further away the dream got, the colder she got. Until she was ice. Ice all over.
It felt very good to feel nothing.
“What time is it?” she asked, finally lifting her head.
“Eight a.m.”
“Hoyt?” The name, the question, hung in the air.
“You shot him in the leg, that big artery there. He bled out in the ambulance.”
Bled out. She knew what that meant.
“I killed him.”
Ben looked at her for a long time, like he would spare her this. Like if he just didn’t answer, it wouldn’t be true. And she wished she could tell him that it wouldn’t hurt her.
Annie was ice. She was going to be ice forever.
“Ben?”
“Yeah. You killed him.”
Her breath shuddered. Her mind was blank. Ben put his hand on Annie’s shoulder but she shrugged it away.
There could be no touching. The ice would melt under someone’s hands and she knew in the depth of her frozen bones that she needed to stay this way. Cold. Unfeeling. Removed.
“The police have got some questions for you.”
“Am I going to be arrested?”
“I don’t think so. Dylan’s lawyer is pretty good.” “Pretty good” was undoubtedly an understatement.
“Did you talk to them?”
“We all gave our statements.”
“Dylan?”
“Yeah. He answered the questions.”
But did he tell them? she wondered. About us.
“Terrence wants you to tell the cops the truth. About you and Dylan,” Ben said. “Don’t lie. It will only cause more trouble for both of you.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“There is some big blond cop who isn’t a fan, but it’s nothing Dylan can’t handle.”
She made the sound of something wounded low in her throat.
“You got nothing to worry about, Annie. It’s a rock-solid self-defense situation.”
“Nothing to worry about?” She laughed.
There was a hard and terrible seed growing in her chest. Something that felt like relief.
Relief that Dylan and Ben were okay.
That Hoyt couldn’t hurt anyone anymore.
Behind her eyelids she saw the flash of that knife, the way it disappeared into Dylan’s body. She imagined she’d be seeing that for the rest of her life.
So, yes. That hard and terrible seed was relief.
“Doctor says you got a concussion and some stitches in your lip and on your forehead,” Ben said. “And there are a bunch of bruises. He…Hoyt knocked you around pretty good.”
“He’s had some practice.”
She turned and stretched her legs out, putting her bare feet against the hard ground. The cold didn’t register.
“Where you going?” Ben came to her side and she was suddenly swamped with gratitude. That he hadn’t listened when she pushed him away outside her trailer. That he’d been watching her just as much as she’d been watching him. All along.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
“For what?”
“Being here. Bringing me here. Keeping me safe.”
“Not that safe,” he said, looking over her face. “I should have taken you outta there.”
“You couldn’t,” she said. “He would have come for both of us. And that…I couldn’t—” her voice broke.
A sound humphed out of him, something like grief, but he cut it off quickly and nodded, this gruff old man with the garden of regrets.
“Let’s not get sappy, girly.”
Her internal wasteland brightened at his familiar crustiness. And she would have thought it was impossible a few minutes ago, but she smiled.
Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet and stood on shaky legs.
“Going for a walk?”
“I need to talk to Dylan.”
“You…you sure about that?”
No, she wasn’t sure of anything.
“You were dreaming a few minutes ago about him and it didn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t.” Tears clogged her throat. “But I need to see him.”
“And people call me stubborn,” he muttered under his breath. He lifted his hands and it looked like he might try to help her but she jerked away from his touch, nearly falling back over on the bed.
His look told her she was acting crazy, but she didn’t know how to stop. Finally, he took a step back, giving her some distance.
“Be careful,” he said at the door.
“He…won’t hurt me.”
“He won’t mean to, girly. Just like you won’t mean to hurt him,” he said. “But love is a knife that really only cuts one way, and that’s deep.”
I wouldn’t know, she thought. I am battered and bruised. Adulterous. Scared.
A killer.
But love had never touched her. Not really.
“He’s three rooms down,” Ben said as he pulled open the door, and she stepped into the dark and quiet hallway.
There wasn’t a cop outside her door.
And Dylan wasn’t three doors down.
He was sitting right there, in the hallway outside Annie’s room on a chair against the wall. His head in his hands, his arms braced on his knees. He wore a hospital gown, just like hers. Mint green with some kind of checker design on it. He’d been cleaned up. The burns on his neck and the side of his face were red and inflamed, the fragile skin split in places, all of it shiny with ointment.
There was a small white bandage at the corner of his eye and his knuckles were taped and wrapped.
He looked like a boxer after a hard fight.
“Dylan.” The word barely got past her heart pounding in her throat.
“Annie!” His head popped up. He winced and pressed a hand to his side, where she could see the outline of a thick bandage. A dark spot beneath the green fabric. “You’re awake.” His eyes were bright with relief, and he stood, reaching for her.
He gathered her fingers in his hand, all at once.
His heat was searing and Annie gasped. She gasped in pain and pleasure and the…shock of it.
“Annie?” he asked and she jerked her hands back. Out of his touch.
His face went stone-like.
“I just…” she stammered. “I don’t…want to be touched. Right now.”
Twenty-four hours ago she’d begged for his touch. Sobbing and we
t, she’d lain across his bed and begged him to fuck her. But there were no bridges that she could build to get them back to where they’d been yesterday.
She’d burned everything to the ground.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Just a bunch of stitches.”
“It’s not. It’s not just a bunch of stitches.”
“Barely a scratch, Annie. I’ve had worse.” He said it with a smile, but he was lying. His lips were white and he carried himself like a man in pain.
“I’m sorry.” What stupid words. What a shallow sentiment.
“Don’t—”
“He stabbed you.” The words were sticky. Awful. “He could have killed you.”
“But he didn’t.” His eyes traveled down her face and she didn’t know what she looked like, but she could imagine. The stitches on her lip, and over her black eye.
Annie looked down at his hands, the bruises and cuts. His knuckles were swollen, and those that weren’t covered in tape were red and raw, wet with fluid.
“Look at us,” she sighed.
“Annie—”
“I wish I’d never picked up that phone, Dylan.”
“Don’t say that.” He stepped closer, and she stepped back until her body hit the wall behind her. And still he came, closer and closer. A wall of heat. Of intention. Until she could smell him. Sweat and blood and hospital. Until she could feel the heat of him through their thin gowns. Too much. It was too much.
She put her hand up to stop him.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do. I really do. Go,” she whispered. “When you’re discharged, I want you to leave. And don’t look back. Forget about me, Dylan.”
“No.” He shook his head, flat-out refusing. “Not going to happen.”
Footsteps coming from the other end of the hallway broke the moment open and Dylan turned to look over his shoulder.
“The cops are back,” he said and stepped back. “I’ll call Terrence. He’s around here somewhere.”
A black woman was walking toward them in a pair of jeans and a blazer. She exuded authority, the kind of capable assurance that made some knot in the back of Annie’s neck loosen. She was reminded, somehow, of Joan.