by M. O'Keefe
“Stop,” he said, still not looking at her, but he ran a hand over his head, like he knew what she’d been looking at.
“Am I supposed to pretend you’re not sick?”
“Yes.”
“Ben—”
“You look better,” he said, lifting his cup toward her face. Changing the direction of the conversation so fast she nearly got whiplash.
“Thanks. I feel better.”
“That have anything to do with you coming out of Dylan’s trailer this morning?”
While she wished she didn’t blush, she couldn’t control it.
Ben smiled at her.
“He told me he’s trying to get you out of this shit hole, but you ain’t moving.”
“I like this shit hole.”
“He says you’re staying because of me.”
For you. For Dylan. For all of us. Annie nodded. “I am.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“So is driving home alone after chemo. Which, I will point out, won’t be happening on Friday.”
His smooth brow furrowed. “What are you doing, Annie? You got yourself a clean break. A brand-new beginning. No asshole husband chasing you down. A man, a rich man, living in a freaking trailer next to the father he hates, because he wants to keep you safe. You can go anywhere right now.”
“All I want to do is go to the field. Maybe do some mowing.”
“Oh lord, now that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No, Ben.” She finished the last of the coffee and set the cup down on the table before standing up. “The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard is you, sitting in this trailer park for years waiting for Dylan to come down off that mountain to deal with you—”
“I ain’t been waiting—”
“Bullshit, Ben.”
His eyes opened wide at her tone.
“He’s here, Ben. Dylan is here. Now is the time.”
“No, Annie. Listen to me, girl. If you’re staying here thinking that me and Dylan are going to have some kind of big reconciliation, you’re wrong. Ain’t nothing ever going to change between me and Dylan. And if you want a chance with him, at having something real and lasting, then you need to leave. You need to get him out of here. Right now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Ask him why he stayed here,” Ben said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “Ask him why he really stayed.”
Something pinged in her chest, a sharp pain that spread. She’d been right this morning—his reasons for staying were not just about her. There was something he wasn’t telling her.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If he tells you the truth it will.”
He was sucking away her good mood, adding weight to those misgivings she did not want to have. “I’ll talk to you later. And I’m driving you on Friday. No argument.”
“You’re going to be stubborn about this?”
“I’m a farmer from Oklahoma—you’ve never seen my kind of stubborn.” That was a total lie, complete bullshit, but she liked the idea of being stubborn in this new life of hers. So she was going to try it on for size.
He chuckled, once, a little heave of his chest. “You’re going to be good for him, girly. If you can get him out of here. But you ain’t taking me anywhere in that shit-box car of yours.”
“Then fix it for me,” she said. The name Ben called her as she walked away was said with such fondness she actually smiled.
The bell over the front door rang as she walked into the meat-locker chill of Kevin’s office.
“Hey, Kevin,” she said, and miraculously he turned in his chair to face her.
“Hey, kid, you’re up.”
She winced at the nickname.
“You don’t like that?” he asked and she shook her head. “Can I call you killer?”
Her mouth literally fell open.
“Too soon?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m here to work.”
“No way.” He shook his head, and his long ponytail snaked back and forth across his back.
“I won’t do anything crazy. I’ll just mow. I’m sure with the rain and me being gone, the campground field is totally overrun.”
“It is, but I’m guessing you’re supposed to be resting.”
“I will be resting, on top of a riding lawn mower. Trust me, I’m a big girl.”
“I feel like I should get a doctor’s note or something.”
“You get a note from me. Telling you I’m fine.” Stubborn was really working for her today.
“Okay,” he said, slowly. Reluctantly. “You still got your key to the shed?”
She lifted up the dinky key on the rusty key ring and leaned back against the glass door, opening it with her butt.
She was alive.
The sun was shining.
Dylan was here. For now. And her body was back under her keeping.
And she was safe.
And if that note from Joan and all of Ben’s warnings made her nervous, made her feel scared, she could chalk that up to paranoia.
It was just paranoia.
There was nothing to be scared of.
DYLAN
I woke up alone, in a sweaty mess of a bed, hot sunshine beating down on my skin.
In that thin place between asleep and awake, I thought I was back in my parents’ apartment in Jacksonville. Sleeping in the bottom bunk in the little room off the kitchen. Listening to my brother fart and snore in the bunk above me.
The memory made me smile.
But I wasn’t in Jacksonville, and I definitely wasn’t in my king-size bed outside of Asheville.
Annie.
In this sweet spot, half awake and half asleep, I didn’t allow myself to feel anything but satisfied.
The ways she was different from any other woman in my life could not be counted. I didn’t want to say she was sweet, because that seemed to negate all the ways she was fierce. I didn’t want to say she was generous, because it would deny the ways she was selfish.
I’d never had a woman in my life show me so much of herself.
I reached out into the empty side of the bed, just to feel where she’d been.
Something crinkled under my hand.
I opened blurry eyes and read the note stuck to my palm.
I’m mowing. Ask your father where the field is.
Ask my father…
So much for satisfied.
I grabbed my phone and saw that I had two missed calls from Margaret and four from Blake. I also had a missed call from an unknown number.
Max.
Quickly, I called it back and it rang twice and then, again, a robotic woman’s voice said to leave a message.
“Max?” I said. “Call me back.”
I hung up and then called Annie, thinking she’d just gone back to her trailer at some point this morning. But when she answered, there was the heavy grind of a motor for a few seconds before it went silent.
“Hey,” she said. I could tell by the tone of her voice she was smiling. And that made me smile.
“What are you doing?”
“Mowing the field. Didn’t you get my note?”
I looked down at the Post-it she’d attached to my hand.
“Come find me,” she said. And hung up.
I closed my eyes. I was going to have to tell her that she needed to be careful. Annie thought the trouble was gone with Hoyt dead, but there were men on the sidelines who were a whole lot worse than Hoyt.
My own brother among them.
I stood up too fast and I got hard-core dizzy, so I sat back down before I fell over. The doctor had said I’d lost a lot of blood and that the only way to recover was to rest. Take it easy.
Not to spend half my night in a strip club parking lot and the other half with my hand buried between my girlfriend’s legs.
And frankly, not here—this trailer park, with Pops, with Max and Rabbit on the periphery. This was the last place I w
ould take it easy. Here, I needed to be vigilant.
More slowly this time, like a freaking invalid, I got up out of the bed and threw on my jeans and tee shirt from yesterday. It was time to face the music. In this case, the wrath of Margaret.
I dialed her number and she answered before the first ring was over.
“You’d better have a good reason for not calling me last night,” she said.
“I’m a grown man, Margaret.”
“Who just got stabbed in the side and left the hospital against medical advice. Blake and I thought you were in a ditch someplace.”
“Well,” I sighed. “You’re not far off. I’m at the trailer park.”
“The what now?”
I laughed. “The Flowered Manor Trailer Park. Annie wanted to stay here.”
“And you couldn’t convince her otherwise?”
“Not with all my money. She’s happy here.”
“Yeah, well, she’d probably be just as happy in Tahiti—she just doesn’t know it yet. What about you?” she asked, knowing me better than just about everyone. When Miguel and Margaret took me in after jail, I was feral. Grateful, yes, and eager to start fresh and race and work on engines. But I snarled and bit anytime she tried to get close to me. She kept trying, though; I’d give her that. I just didn’t know how to let her get close.
Bodes real well for you and Annie, doesn’t it?
“I’m fine,” I said, putting my watch on.
“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. So, I’ll need you to bring me a few things.” I rattled off a list of the necessities.
“Does Blake know you’re not going to be back at the garage?”
“I’m calling him next.”
“Well, then, I’ll know to stay out of his way.”
Blake was not going to appreciate me moving down to this trailer park for some unknown amount of time.
“I’ll be down there after three,” she said and hung up. She hung up even though I knew she wanted to grill me. She wanted to talk about my feelings. And what Annie meant to me and what I thought was going to happen between us.
All questions I didn’t have answers for.
I looked through the bathroom and found that Joan had left behind some toothpaste, which I squirted into my mouth. She also left behind a package of condoms. I thought of Annie’s body under my fingertips last night, the strange and sad desperation between us, and I didn’t know if the condoms were a blessing or a curse. But they were here.
It was just past ten. I hadn’t slept that late in years. Blood loss and a blow job really took a guy down. I tried not to smile, because smiling felt sacrilegious now that I was awake and looking around this dump of a trailer. Smiling seemed like the opposite of what I should be doing.
But I couldn’t stop it.
Outside, it was already humid and sticky. I cleared the edge of my trailer and looked right, toward the end of the dirt track where Pops lived.
He was sitting in that recliner, slowly rocking back and forth. A smoke in one hand, a coffee cup in the other.
He caught my eye and didn’t do anything.
I didn’t, either.
We just stared at each other for a long moment.
“You heard from Max?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You?”
“I think he called sometime last night. I got a hang-up from that number you gave me.”
“That’s good.”
Ben didn’t say any more; he just rocked back and forth.
“You looking for Annie?” he asked.
“She’s in the field,” I said.
He pointed to the far side of the trailer park. “Follow the path through the trailer park—about a hundred meters past the last trailer there’s a little bridge. The field is another hundred meters past that. You’ll find her.”
I turned without a word and walked away.
“You’re welcome, son!” he shouted after me.
I gave him the finger over my shoulder and he laughed.
I walked past the laundry block and then the playground across the street.
There were two blond girls in pretty dresses with their hair tied back in clips on the swings, and they slowed to a stop as I walked past. Their eyes wide as saucers, tracking me as I walked toward them.
Right. The scars.
Truthfully, I was not used to being stared at.
Everyone in my life was used to my scars. Used to my moods. Used to the beast.
Everything was different down here.
And the staring was part of the reason why down here sucked.
A woman came out of the trailer next to the laundry and jogged across the street toward the kids, watching me out of the corner of her eye like I was going to eat those girls.
The mom was pale and wan, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail revealing the sharp ridges of her collarbones, the fading edge of a bruise around her wrist.
I was scaring them and I didn’t know exactly how to stop.
I nodded and lifted my hand in a half wave that I tried to make as nonthreatening as I could.
One of the little girls, the younger, lifted her hand and waved back with her whole arm, her jack-o’-lantern smile revealing a bunch of missing baby teeth.
It was impossible not to smile back, but I turned away before the mother saw me.
With my scars, my smiles were not…friendly.
Past the last trailer, I kept walking until I crossed the small wooden bridge and saw Annie riding a red mower toward me, a straw hat tipped back on her head, big black gloves on her hands.
My heart surged with more emotion than I could name. Worry. Admiration. A heavy, hard kind of desire. She was pretty freaking cute in that hat.
Perhaps it was because we were out of the hospital or because of what we’d done last night—that tender, heartbreaking act that had been not at all like any sex I’d ever had—but the thought of something happening to her was devastating.
It was devastating and not out of the realm of possibility.
Because my father was here. My brother nearby.
She could get hurt by my family’s bloody past.
And I felt a powerful urge, a need to get her out of here. Away from me.
I had to tell her.
She yelled something at me.
“I can’t hear you!” I yelled.
“What?” she asked with one of those little smiles of hers. She was joking. This was funny to her. “I can’t hear you!”
When she was close, I reached over and cranked off the key. The sudden silence echoed.
“Hi,” she said, with a wide smile. “You got my note!”
“I did. And I don’t like what you’re doing.”
“Mowing?” she asked, pretending to be obtuse. Behind her, half the field was light green and stripped, the other half dark green and wild. “But I am super good at it. Years of practice.”
“Didn’t the doctor tell you to rest?”
“I am. I am resting on my lawn mower.”
Cute, she was so damn cute.
“I don’t need you pushing me and my dad together.”
“Well, you are neighbors—”
“Annie,” I said. “Let me deal with Ben.”
“You still want me to spy on him for you?” she asked, a mad twinkle in her eye. “I’ll call you every night with updates.”
The urge to kiss her was insane. Literally magnetic. So, I took a step back. She noticed, and that twinkle in her eye diminished.
Good, I thought. She needed to be realistic. She needed to look at this place and these people—me—with eyes stripped clear of rose-colored glasses.
I wanted to fuck her and protect her all at the same time. I wanted to keep her and push her away. I was everything in opposites, and I felt torn apart by her.
“I need to talk to you,” I told her, and the wattage behind that smile dropped.
“About last night?”
“No. Well…in a way.�
� She stiffened, her cheeks red, and those bold eyes of hers didn’t quite meet mine. She was ashamed. Somehow. Some way.
And what I should have done was wrap her in my arms, tell her that I wasn’t talking about what happened in my bed, but I didn’t.
And the distance between us slowly grew.
“Annie—”
“No.” She shook her head and then looked right at me, her eyes stormy, her jaw set. I blinked, taken aback by this sudden ferocity, though I wasn’t sure why. She’d shown me her fierceness. I worshipped at the feet of her ferocity.
“What?”
“It’s bad, isn’t it? This thing you want to tell me. It will make me sad. Or angry. And I’m telling you no. Whatever it is, it can wait. For one damn day it can wait.” She tilted her head, her fierceness fading into something beseeching. “Can’t it?”
It was a mistake; I get it. I should have fought harder. Been stronger. But not telling her about Max. About Rabbit. About the danger she was in because of me…it was a fucking relief.
It was like a boulder got rolled off my back.
“It can wait,” I said.
You really are a coward, aren’t you? the voice said, loud and clear, and I couldn’t argue with it.
I stroked her cheeks, pink from the sun despite her hat. The white-blond tips of her hair were damp and clumped together with sweat.
“Good,” she said with a smile. “Because I want to have some fun.”
“Fun?”
“Yes, Dylan, I understand that it’s a thing people have every once in a while. Like squid. Or a stomachache, but better.”
I made the mistake of smiling at her and she clapped. The despondent and wrecked woman who’d come to my bed last night was nowhere to be seen. Or if she was, she was very well hidden. She was all light again and I was drawn to her like a moth. And part of me wished I were stronger. That I could resist her a little better, but I couldn’t.
She owned me. Despondent and wrecked, smiling and bright—it didn’t matter. I was hers.
“Let’s go swimming,” she said with another one of her heartbreaker smiles, the edge of it pulled taut by the stitches.
“What? Where?”
“Over there.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder to what looked like a bunch of weeds around a tree. “The Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground swimming hole!”