by M. O'Keefe
Instead I concentrated on how freaking crazy it was to have done that.
Me. Annie McKay.
I cannot believe I did that, I thought driving home. I kept laughing. And then cringing. Sighing with anguished excitement.
I cannot believe I did that, I thought in the shower, my hands running over my body. The soap and the water turning everything to silk.
I did not have a stripper’s figure. Not by a long shot. But I was strong and my skin was soft and I was living in my body. All the corners. All the edges. There was not a part of me that I did not feel right now and it was so perfect.
For years I’d been rattling around inside my skin, trying to get smaller and smaller so when the smacks and the pinches and the shoves came, Hoyt might hurt my body, but he wouldn’t hurt me. I never really thought he could tell, that he’d even really noticed me beyond those moments when he was angry.
I’d been wrong. Really, really wrong.
I dried off my skin and in the darkness I walked from the bathroom to my bedroom where the full moon was filtered out a bit by the curtains, which were blowing a little in the breeze.
I went to a strip club tonight. I made myself come while watching a woman give a guy a blow job.
“Who am I?” I laughed, dropped my towel, and lay down, naked on the bed.
But then, a few seconds later, I sat up and grabbed clean underwear from the drawer. I couldn’t explain it. It just felt better to have on underwear. But at least now it was a choice and not a fear.
Point for me.
Excitement and anticipation were battling it out inside me and I felt like Charlie in the Willy Wonka movie when he and his grandfather were laughing and floating up to the ceiling.
I was so damn happy. And proud of myself. I get it—a stupid thing to be proud of, going to a strip club. It wasn’t like I was curing cancer. But still…I was proud.
For the first time in my life, I was proud of myself.
And I booted up the phone and called Dylan, like a sheep to the slaughter. It rang three times and then his voice mail kicked in.
But it was a woman’s voice on the recording.
This is Dylan Daniels. Please leave a message and someone will get back to you within one business day.
What was that?
One business day? A woman’s voice—like a secretary?
And Dylan’s last name was Daniels. How crazy that I didn’t know that. That it was so incredibly shocking to learn that now.
Dylan Daniels.
I hung up before I left a message and stared at the phone like it was a snake.
Quickly, a text message appeared on my screen.
Dylan: Hey. Give me ten minutes. In the middle of something.
It was one o’clock in the morning. Who was in the middle of something at one o’clock in the morning?
After what we’d done at the club?
For the first time it occurred to me to scroll through the phone’s features. I checked to see if by some miracle the Flowered Manor had free Wi-Fi and the phone was hooked up to it.
Would you believe no free Wi-Fi?
I would have to go back to town tomorrow, to the library, if I wanted to find out anything about him. Stalk him on the internet like other girls my age.
My phone buzzed in my hands with an incoming call. I felt somehow as if I’d slipped into water way over my head. Why did everything feel so different now?
“Hey,” I said. So much of my excitement and anticipation had taken a turn and I was anxious. Uncomfortable.
“Hey, you okay?”
“Fine. What are you in the middle of at one o’clock in the morning?” Who the hell are you?
“Just a meeting, a fucking boring nightmare meeting. We just finished. Are you—Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Baby, I gotta call you back in a second. I swear to God, I’m going to kill some idiots around here tonight. You gonna be awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Don’t fall asleep.”
I hung up and wondered if I should head back out on the highway toward one of the truck stops with the free Wi-Fi. But then, in some weird moment of clarity, I decided it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who he was. All he was to me was the guy on the other end of this phone. The guy that pushed me farther and faster out of my terrified little box than I ever would have gone on my own. Maybe he would tell me in time.
Maybe not.
But I had no intention of telling him who I was. Who I really was, and why I was in this last-ditch trailer park, looking for any crack in my self-made, Annie McKay prison through which I could escape.
I couldn’t be hypocritical.
If he was a mobster, a spy, a male model, a politician—none of it mattered.
So he was Dylan. Just Dylan.
And I was Layla.
And I didn’t need to know anything more about him, but I still wanted to see him. Touch him.
Have him.
I scrolled through the phone features and found the camera.
I held it up slightly and kind of squished my upper arms against my breasts so they weren’t sliding into my armpits and I put my hand down the front of my pink panties. One leg bent at the knee. I took a picture and checked it.
Ugh. Too much knee, no boob.
I tried again and then again.
Finally in the fourth picture my freckles didn’t look like a rash against my pale skin, and my boobs were actually in the picture and my hand down my underwear looked sexy…really sexy instead of kind of strange. (I’d had to change my underwear, because the pink looked too little girl and that was the last thing I wanted.)
So, in the end I had a pretty hot picture of myself, but not my face.
I sent it to him.
Me. Annie McKay. Sent a picture of my naked body to a man.
One minute later my phone rang. I answered, but before I could say hello he asked, “Is that you?”
“No, it’s the stripper I brought home.”
“Is that a joke?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“So that is you?”
“That is me.”
“You…” He exhaled hard. “God, baby you’re so pretty. Your skin, it’s like…it’s so fucking beautiful.”
I’ve never been called pretty. Much less fucking beautiful. The only nice thing Mom ever said was that I had nice hair, implying everything else was ugly, and Hoyt said I was a hard worker and a fine woman…I know, such a charmer.
But this from Dylan; I was flushed with pleasure. Ecstatic at the idea that someone would think I was pretty.
Because I was. A little.
Not like Joan, but I was me. And I was pretty.
“Tonight…” I sighed.
His dark laugh was delicious.
“That was the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.
“I doubt that. You were wild, remember? I bet you’ve heard a whole lot worse than that.”
“You’re wild now, too. And brave. What else do you want to be?”
“I want to be with you.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them and I heard him suck in a sharp breath.
The brittle silence told me I’d done something I couldn’t ever undo. I’d changed everything.
I knew it with the terrible sixth sense that I’d developed over the years, that specific and terrible skill of knowing when something was falling to pieces around me. “I know that’s not going to happen,” I said in a rush, desperate to try and put back together this thing that I had shattered. “I do. I get that. I have my own reasons for why that’s a really terrible idea. But I watched this girl dance on this guy’s lap. She was facing him and he was…he was grabbing her ass. So hard with both hands that the skin around where he was grabbing her was white. And it was like he couldn’t hold her close enough, or hard enough against him, and I’ve…I’ve never been held like that. Not once. Not ever. And I wondered what that would feel like. What would it be like to have someone want me
that much that he…just grabbed me and held on as hard as he could.”
“Layla—”
But I didn’t stop. I was on a roll. “What would that be like with you? And what would it be like to hold your cock in my hand and to put it in my mouth? Or to slip my fingers into yours, my fingers covered in my—”
“Layla,” he said, his voice sharp. Almost a crack. “Stop it. You have to…We can’t.”
“I know. But I want it. Don’t you…want that?” Just tell me you want that.
“Listen to me.” His voice was different. Totally different. “This is over now.”
“What?”
“It’s over now. I told you not to…build anything around me and I meant it.”
“I don’t know anything about you!” I cried.
He was silent for a long moment. “That’s not true and we both know it.”
“I know you wear a tux to parties,” I said. “You work on cars.”
“You heard my voice mail message, didn’t you?”
Dylan Daniels.
“Yes.”
That’s when I realized why he always answered the phone so fast. It wasn’t eagerness for my calls. It was so I wouldn’t find out who he was.
“Is this because I’m poor?” Because I wasn’t. I was actually far from poor. My name was on the deed to a thousand-acre farm in Oklahoma, one of the biggest corn providers in the state. I was actually pretty fucking rich in my own right.
Not that I had ever, not once, thought about it that way.
And now, actually, I was pissed. “If it is, fuck you. Fuck you—I don’t give a shit about your money.”
“It’s not money. It’s not…it’s just not anything that should have started. I’ve had someone look in on Ben for five years and I’ve never, ever started anything like this. I’ve barely given a shit about them before, Layla, and then you come around with your bad jokes and wanting to be brave and I’m…” He stopped and I waited, breath held for him to keep going.
“And you’re what?”
“Breaking my own goddamn rules.” I didn’t know what to say to that. To the grief and the frustration that filled his words. Who gave a shit about his rules? He was rejecting me. I’d gone to a strip club for this guy. Laid myself bare for him. Opened myself up to the worst kind of ridicule and he was worried about breaking his own stupid rules? Bullshit! “The phone is yours. I’ll keep the plan going.”
“I don’t want your fucking pity,” I spat at him.
He did that groan. That weird, sexy, half-laugh, half-groan thing that I had believed all along meant that he liked what I was saying, that whatever it was that I was saying was exciting to him. And now I didn’t know what it meant.
I didn’t know what any of it meant.
“It’s not pity. I want…God, Layla, I want you to call me if you need anything.”
“Not fucking likely.” I could not believe how angry I was. I was furious with him. And I couldn’t stop.
“I’m not kidding. If there’s an emergency—”
“I’m not kidding, either. I won’t call you again. I won’t even think about you.” That was a lie and we both knew it.
“That’s too bad,” he said, sounding sad and tired. “Because I’ll be thinking about you. You really are just so beautiful, Lay—”
I hung up. Or disconnected or whatever. I ended the goddamn call and I wished I could call him back so I could end it again.
Fuck you, you fucking fuck, I thought, and threw the phone back into the drawer and slammed it shut. But the stupid thing was so cheap—the whole goddamn RV was a piece of shit ready to fall apart in the next high wind—that the drawer slid back open.
So I slammed it again. And again.
And then it broke.
And so did I. I collapsed back down on the bed, in pieces.
When Mom got angry, the whole ranch cowered. I scurried away, trying so hard to anticipate and make right whatever might be the next thing to set her off. It was a useless effort, of course. On those days, the earth didn’t spin right. The wind was all wrong.
Even the cows looked away when she walked by.
Smith stopped coming to the house for chess games.
My mom was tiny. Like five foot nothing. Yet when she was angry like that, she was a giant. Blocking out the sun.
The next day, after Dylan broke up with me…or whatever, whatever that was…I was that way. The ground shook under my feet as I stomped out of my trailer.
“Whoa-ho!” Joan said as I walked past her trailer. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Boyfriend didn’t like your little game last night?”
She was sitting back on her deck in that silky green robe, the ashtray next to her elbow full of cigarettes. Her beauty was different in the early sunlight.
“What’s wrong?” I snapped, in probably the worst effort ever to get a person to open up.
“With me?” Joan asked.
“Yeah, you look like shit.”
“What got you in a snit?” she asked with a smile that indicated my bad mood was entertaining.
“Life, Joan. Life got me in a snit. Now why do you look like—”
The front door of her trailer opened and out walked the guy from weeks ago. The hairy guy with the skeevy wink and smile. This time, though, he wasn’t winking or smiling.
“We’re good,” he said to Joan as if answering a question I didn’t hear her ask.
“Fine,” Joan said. “See you.”
The guy left with barely a backward glance toward me and Joan took a long drag on her cigarette like nothing was the matter.
Fine. We all had to pretend something, didn’t we? Out here in this shitty trailer park. We all had to pretend something so we didn’t look too hard at what a mess our lives were. We were all excellent editors of our own selves.
“I’m going to town,” I told her. “You need anything?”
“You’re not working?”
“It’s fucking Saturday, Joan. I’m taking a day.”
Joan held up her hands like I had a gun but she was still grinning at me. “I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t need a thing.”
I barely nodded at her and I walked over to Ben’s trailer and pounded on the shitty screen door.
It took a few minutes but Ben showed up. He looked better than he did yesterday, largely because he’d changed his shirt. He wore one of his unwrinkled tee shirts today and he’d showered.
“You look better.”
“I feel better.”
I remembered all the reasons why I was supposed to stay away from him. The warnings. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. My entire life I’d spent caring…soaking up every mood, decoding every silence. So attuned to everyone else around me that I’d practically evaporated.
And I was done with that.
“You need anything?”
He shook his head and I nodded, swallowing back my need to be sure he was all right, to take on his illness like it was my own despite all the shit I thought I knew about him.
“Okay, see you.” I lifted my hand in a wave and jumped down off the small step, but then I turned back around.
“Ben,” I said. “Have you seen a doctor?”
The screen was a shadow over his face. “Yeah. Lots of them,” he said and closed the solid door.
Right, I thought. Not my business.
I got in my car and drove off to town with the windows down, my hair blown back by the wind.
I drove past The Velvet Touch and considered that I didn’t need Dylan. I didn’t need him at all. I had done all that stuff myself. I’d walked into that place on my own. Ordered that piña colada, watched Renee and that guy. Me. All by myself.
Those were my own hands on my body. Every goddamn time.
But you would never have done that if he didn’t ask you, a little voice whispered. Never have considered it if you’d never answered that phone call. You would have stayed locked up in that trailer, waiting for something that was never going to come.
“Shut up,” I muttered to the little voice and turned the radio up louder.
In the grocery store I bought stuff I usually never bought, Pop-Tarts and a bag of chips.
I still had Dylan’s money burning a hole in my pocket. Forty bucks could buy a whole bunch of stuff.
Oranges. The expensive ones.
A can of olives. I loved olives. I was going to eat olives for dinner.
I stopped in the wine aisle, looking for a bucket-o-something, but couldn’t find any. So I grabbed the largest amount of white wine for the cheapest price. It came in a box.
It was box-o-wine night at my trailer.
At the library I checked the Oklahoma papers. Nothing about me.
Though there was a front-page story about more windmills going up in the western part of the state. That’s where we were. Hoyt must love that.
And then I sat there and tried to be better than my instincts. Tried not to fall into some trap of girlish, woman-scorned curiosity. It was over. And I’d come to a good place in my head about this last night. Finding out about Dylan wouldn’t change anything.
Other girls do this—not you.
And somehow that was the argument that put me over the edge. And he wasn’t just Dylan anymore. He was Dylan Daniels and he’d dumped me.
I opened the search page and typed in his full name.
There were a lot of Dylan Danielses in the world. A Realtor in Las Vegas. A teacher in Maine. A ten-year-old spelling bee champion in Florida.
There was also a Dylan Daniels who had something to do with stock car racing.
I scanned through the links:
Car Explodes in NASCAR Nationwide Series Qualifier.
Driver Suffers Third-Degree Burns, In Critical Condition.
Vigil continues for NASCAR driver Dylan Daniels.
After that—nothing. No news. No mention after August 16, 2011. Not a word after the crash.
I scrolled back up and clicked on the first link.
Beneath the headline about the crash was a picture of a man. Close-cut hair, intense dark eyes. A square chin. But his lips…they made my breath catch in my throat.