by M. O'Keefe
I pressed call on the phone and lifted it with a shaking hand to my ear. It was three in the morning; there was no way—“Layla?” he said after the second ring. His sleep-roughened voice stroked over me and I could do nothing to stop my reaction. Not one thing. I shivered at the sound of his voice. Goose bumps rising on my arms. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. But Ben…there’s a guy here. Some guy on a motorcycle—”
“Oh fuck.”
“Joan…knew your name. She knew we were talking and she said I needed to tell you that Max is here—”
“Listen, Layla, listen carefully: I need you to stay in the trailer. Don’t go over there. Don’t…don’t even leave your trailer. Get down on the floor by your bed, the side farthest from Ben’s trailer.”
“Why? What the hell are you talking about?”
I could hear his breath shake as he exhaled and was suddenly a dozen times more scared. “Bullets go through trailers like cheese, Layla. I’m sending a car for you—”
“What?”
“I’m sending a car for you. He’ll be there in ten minutes. Tops. Don’t leave until you see a black sedan in front of your trailer.”
“I’m not going anywhere! I’m going to call the cops—”
“You call the cops and I guarantee someone is going to die.”
“This…you’re being ridiculous.”
“I wish I were. Stay inside. Stay safe. Someone is coming to get you.”
He disconnected and I stared down at the phone. In shock. Truly. If I called the cops someone would die? How did that happen?
The fight continued over in Ben’s trailer, but the intensity seemed to have dropped. Ben was yelling too, and now it was just a loud conversation.
In no time a black sedan purred to a stop in front of my window, in the shadows between my trailer and Joan’s. And I thought about that day in the laundry room when I’d scurried away while Tiffany and Phil fought. I’d been so scared—for myself.
Ben was my friend. He was. And I couldn’t leave him here to be bullied or scared or hurt.
I had to have changed that much. I had to have. I couldn’t have run this far to still be so damned scared.
I ran around my trailer to tell the driver he wasn’t needed. He was standing beside the car, a handsome guy older than me.
“You Layla?” he asked and popped open the back door of the sedan.
“Yeah.”
“Get in.”
“No. No, I’m not leaving.”
“Dylan told me to throw you in the backseat if I had to.” He stepped toward me and I stepped back, not about to be manhandled.
“Touch her and I’ll put a bullet in your hand,” Joan said from the shadows of her little deck. Her green robe caught the light and glimmered.
“Joan!” I yelled. “I’m not going to leave Ben—”
Suddenly from the front pocket of her robe she pulled out a badge. Some kind of government thing.
“What…what is that?” I asked. This whole thing was spinning so fast out of any kind of control.
“I’m undercover DEA,” she whispered. “Get in the car and get gone.”
“But—”
“Go!” she yelled. Truly yelled, as in no longer whisper-yelling, and I jerked into motion, stumbling toward the sedan. The driver yanked open the door, but before I got in I looked over at Joan.
“Come with me,” I said. “If it’s really dangerous—”
“If it’s really dangerous I do my job. Go.”
And then I was in the backseat of the car and it peeled out of the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground.
ANNIE
The car rolled through an endless night, parting the sea of shadowy kudzu and dotted by islands of neon rest stops. We got off the highway, onto increasingly smaller roads that switchbacked up hills and down again into gullies, until we were up in the mountains.
Panic and a thousand questions sat in that car with me. How could I have been so content not pushing Dylan about Ben? Who does that? What kind of idiot allows herself not to worry about a possible murderer next door because she’s too busy having some kind of late-blooming sexual awakening complete with phone sex and strippers?
That guy, the motorcycle guy—I thought for sure I’d seen him at The Velvet Touch.
Was that why Joan—an undercover DEA agent—was there?
What was Ben involved in?
With shaking hands, I fumbled for the button to unroll my window.
“You okay?” the driver asked.
“The window—” The word wasn’t even out of my mouth before the window had opened a crack.
The air through the window smelled evergreen.
It was exotic compared to the dust and clay of Oklahoma.
“Where are we going?” I asked the driver. Considering one of the last things Dylan said to me was that he didn’t want to see me again, I figured there might be a 50/50 chance this guy’s orders were to leave me at a hotel. Or a gas station.
Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. “Someplace safe.”
Why did I doubt that? Why did I think that wherever we were headed was infinitely more dangerous than where I’d been?
“Who are you?” I asked.
“An employee of Dylan’s.”
Dylan has employees that drive to trailer parks in the middle of the night to pick up women and whisk them away to safety.
Of course he does.
The headlights illuminated impenetrable curtains of trees and kudzu, and then the car slowed down and stopped in front of the thick black beams of an iron gate stretched across the road in front of it.
Through the window he opened, the driver punched in a code on a metal box, and the gate slid open and the car eased up the drive.
My heart was pounding behind my eyes. In the tips of my fingers.
I couldn’t see the house in the thick shadows of a granite-topped, forested hill. But as the car pulled up, a light flickered on in the murk and I could see a wooden door, the house behind it dark and hulking against all that stone.
Not safe, my gut said. Not safe at all.
“This is it?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Reluctantly, I got out of the car, freezing in the pre-dawn mountain air. I wrapped my arms around myself as best I could. There was running water somewhere, a brook or a river.
It didn’t look like much, this house. There was a back door and a garage attached. A big garage, like a warehouse. It was dark. And had lots of little roofs. Eaves and awnings.
It was a strange little house on a lonely mountain.
Weird and vaguely ominous.
It looked like the evil house in a movie. The one where bad shit happened.
“Dylan’s housekeeper, Margaret, will take care of you. Don’t be fooled by the Mrs. Santa Claus act—she’ll cut you if she thinks you’re going to hurt Dylan.”
“Wait…what?” I turned to ask the driver more about this housekeeper, because frankly, I’d kind of hit my limit on drama tonight, but the driver only waved at me through the driver-side window before taking off, leaving me alone in the parking area. Moths the size of airplanes buzzed over my head toward the light over the door.
Right.
A deep breath.
I stepped across the gravel driveway, wincing as the rocks bit into the bare skin of my feet. I lifted my hand to knock on that dark little door, now totally inundated with moths, but it opened before my fist connected and I nearly knocked on a woman’s forehead.
“Sorry—”
“Are you Layla?” She was short and round, with a Hilton Head sweatshirt zipped up to her neck. She had gray-blond hair pulled back into a bun, stray hairs frizzed out around her head making her look like she had a halo.
No. I was not Layla. I was never Layla.
But I said yes, because this was the bed I had made.
“Well, come on, girl, before these bugs make off with you.” She did not look nice. She was trying to look nice, but
it wasn’t working. She wore a big smile that should have put me at ease, but didn’t come close. She was worried about me being here, or tense. Or something. Whatever her reasons, she didn’t want me here. And it was coming off of her like a radio signal.
Jesus, did I need to worry about her having a knife?
Without much choice, I stepped into the house. The door clicked shut behind me.
“Look at you, poor thing,” she said. “You don’t even have any shoes.”
“Or a purse,” I said. Or money. Or a bra. Such is the nature of trailer park kidnappings.
“Are you hungry?”
“No, please don’t go to any trouble for me.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said, waving me off like waking up at three in the morning to care for a surprise guest with no shoes was totally par for the course in her life.
Lord, maybe it was. Maybe Dylan Daniels brought women up here all the time. Women with no options or boob support.
I followed her through the cave-like foyer. I was beginning to think Dylan might be a Hobbit. A mole, maybe.
Whew, dodged a bullet there, I thought, giddy with panic; for a while I was imagining having sex with Bilbo Baggins.
“Well, you must be exhausted. Follow me and I’ll show you—”
“Where’s Dylan?” I asked.
“Let me show you to your room,” she said, with the kind of smile that indicated I would get no farther with her. That smile placed her firmly on Dylan’s side.
Dylan had a lot of people on his side. The driver. Joan. Margaret.
I had no one.
The woman led me out of the foyer and the house opened up into a wide, tall, beautiful room with a wall of windows facing a dark valley. Leather couches with big pillows faced that window. There was a kitchen in the back corner with stainless-steel appliances and a large dining room table, surrounded by chairs. The floors were hardwood, worn but shining. Rugs were scattered on those floors, under the table, in front of the sink, and before the big wall of windows—beautiful ones. Rich person ones.
Everything gleamed and glowed in the low light coming in those big windows.
The whole room looked like a movie set. A beautiful movie set—not for Hobbits.
For a very wealthy man.
Hoyt spent five years making me feel small. Unwanted. Unwantable. He made me feel like a nuisance and a failure. At the beginning I’d been hurt, wounded. But I slowly grew to not want anything. If I never wanted anything more than what I had, I could never be hurt.
So I was totally unprepared for how hurt I was looking at Dylan’s house. And I realized how much I’d wanted with him. How far I’d reached.
And I felt toyed with, shamed even. As if I were nothing, a speck, a stupid girl, a puppet, and he was the man with money and drivers and housekeepers and beautiful houses, pulling my strings.
My chest hurt.
Did he sit there? I wondered. Did he sit on that couch, with his feet up on that ottoman and study the mountains while he talked to me? Did he touch himself there? Did he ask me to eat dessert for breakfast and to taste my own come on my fingers? Right? There?
Did he hang up and laugh at me? At my eagerness? My total lack of experience or sophistication?
Was this fun for him, playing with me?
I couldn’t breathe; shock and anger had their fists down my throat.
“Are you coming?” Margaret asked, having walked across the room to stand at the entrance to another dark hallway.
“I need to see Dylan.”
She shook her head. “He’s not here.”
Wasn’t that perfect? He wasn’t even here and I was still being controlled by him. Why did this hurt? I wondered, limping on my sore feet after Margaret down that hallway. There were no pictures. No mirrors. Nothing. Just dark walls and doors that I kept walking past on my way to some room that had been set aside for me.
God, the house was really huge.
Margaret opened a door. “Here’s your room. There’s a bathroom through there,” she said. “I’ve got a toothbrush and some other things you might need. There are some clothes in the drawers—”
“For me?”
Margaret smiled. “Of course.”
“How did you know what size?”
“Dylan said small.” She shrugged.
How did…? The picture. He’d seen my body in that picture. “Thank you,” I breathed. Horrified and on fire in the same breath. Thinking about the cake. The charger, all the little lures that pulled me into Dylan’s life.
“It’s no problem—I’ve got a granddaughter about your size. They were things I’d bought for her.”
“I can’t take them—they’re gifts for your granddaughter!”
“She’ll never know. Now, get some sleep, honey,” she said. “You look done in.”
She closed the door behind her when she left, leaving me alone in a simple room with a big bed covered in a blue bedspread. The far wall was curtained, and I walked over and opened it up. I could hear running water through the sliding glass door.
I opened the door and stepped out onto a small balcony. The sky was pink, the rising sun still behind the mountains. To the left and right there were other little balconies, four of them. Little extra nooks and crannies on a house that just kept going. There was a brook beneath me, falling off the edge of the cliff the house was built onto. This house was built into a cliff. With a waterfall falling under it.
It was like magic, this house.
My back pocket buzzed and I jumped, startled. My phone. I’d forgotten. No bra or shoes, but I had this damn phone shoved in the back pocket of my shorts.
Suddenly all that shit I felt, the grubby bit and the meaningless part—it was all gone. I was still hurt, still impossibly wounded, but I was furious, too.
And if I’d learned nothing else in the last two months of my life, it was that fury felt better than pain. Every damn time. So I grabbed onto my anger with both hands.
“Dylan?” I asked after I answered.
“You okay?”
“I’m in your goddamn house.”
“Good.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“I’m…in my garage.”
I lifted my head, as though I could smell him on the breeze. “Here?”
“Here. But—”
“How do I get there?”
“Layla—”
“Tell me how to get there or I’m going to start tearing this place apart!”
His chuckle was unexpected and it did nothing to cool me down. “I’m not kidding, Dylan. I’m seeing you right now or I’m walking out that door.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“And if you think that will stop me you’re crazy.”
He was silent for a long time; I could hear him breathing. “Go through the big room. I’ll leave the door open.”
I ran back down the hallway through the big room. Margaret had vanished, thank heavens. And down in the far left corner of the room near the floor-to-ceiling window was a cracked door, a slice of yellow light cutting into the shadows.
With my hands shaking, I pushed open that door.
The garage was big. Like a cathedral. In the center of it was one whole car with its hood open, surrounded by pieces of cars. It smelled of oil and concrete. On a metal table there was a dismantled engine and on the far wall there was a long wooden bench.
Sitting in a pool of light, on a stool at the bench, his back to me, was Dylan.
For a second those wide edges of my life didn’t connect; anger slipped out of my hands. And I didn’t know what I was doing here. Or how in the world I’d gotten here. To this house. To this man.
“Layla?”
At the sound of his voice—so familiar, so achingly familiar—all the pieces of my life slammed back together.
Helpless, I closed my eyes and let that voice work its way through my body.
“You okay?” Even that familiar question was somehow bittersweet.
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He’d spun around, shifting back out of the pool of light so his face and half his chest were in shadow. The shadows were dense and maybe that was easier…maybe that was better. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew they were watching me. His hands were in fists at his knees.
“Is this where you bring all the women you kidnap?” I asked, coming out swinging, for once in my life.
“No,” he said. “I don’t bring anyone here.”
“Well, aren’t I a special snowflake,” I said through lungs that felt as if they were collapsing in on each other.
“Layla,” he sighed.
Suddenly, I wished very much that I had not sent him that picture.
I felt painfully bared to him, wholly exposed. I’d sent him a naked picture of myself. My pale, thin, boyish body. All my flaws, all my imperfections, my feminine failures—he’d seen them.
And he sat there in the shadows, unwilling to show me anything of himself.
The distance between us throbbed. With anger. With lust. Questions and huge fucking secrets.
Beneath my ribs, I ached. Between my legs I ached. My fucking blood ached at the sight of him. I took a deep breath and clenched my hands together in front of me, as if I needed something to hold onto. And maybe I did. I was so adrift.
“I’d like to go home.”
“You can when I know it’s safe.”
“You are not the boss of me.” Really, could I be any more idiotic?
“When you’re in danger,” he said, “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled by this protectiveness. By his attention. From the first phone call to now, I didn’t understand. Why me?
I didn’t want his concern to mean anything. I didn’t want to be warmed by that in some way. But anger was a blanket that could not cover all of me and my exposed parts soaked it up. I was helpless against that kind of care, I had no…defenses against someone’s worry. For me.
He was silent, there in the shadows. Like he had no intention of explaining himself.
“I don’t need you to do that.”
“Not your choice,” he said, with a shrug. As if my desires were irrelevant in the equation.