by M. O'Keefe
“Does it matter? You knew all along apparently. It was the most useless lie ever told.”
“It matters!” he yelled. “Because, you’re here, Annie. It’s like you said: despite everything both of us did to make sure that never happened, you’re here. It’s inevitable, and so, I would like to know why you lied. Even when you knew it was safe. What are you scared of?”
For years, years and years and years of my life, if someone shouted at me I would shrink inside my bones. I would hide deep inside of myself and nod my head. I would nod and say yes. Yes, you’re right.
I’d say I was sorry a thousand times. A million. Whatever it took for the yelling to stop.
I fired Smith. I sold my land for windmills. I ducked my head and took it. The yelling, the fists, the disdain and marginalization. I took it all to make the yelling stop.
I laughed, but it sounded nervous, not cavalier. Old habits were weighing me down. “You’ve lied to me—”
“I’ve never lied,” he interrupted, his anger white hot and barely controlled. I swallowed and took a step back, my hip hitting a chair. He watched the movement and saw all the things I couldn’t hide.
“Are you scared?” he asked, and I wished I had enough bravado to tell him no, to shake my hair out of my eyes and yell right back at him.
“You’re yelling at me and I’m…here. Alone. It would be stupid of me not to be afraid.” I wished I weren’t, but I was.
My fear seemed to put a pin in his anger and he took a deep breath. Another. The electric tension in the air dissipating enough that my fear lifted.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
“I’ve…I’ve had a few people say that to me and then go right on ahead and hurt me.”
“Your mother? Who else?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to talk about it. He could put a barricade around his secrets.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, calmly. All that fire in him banked for the moment. Not gone; it would be foolish of me to think that that anger was gone. It was just…hidden. “And I won’t lie to you. I told you the first night that I would never lie to you. And I just…I want to know why you lied.”
I swallowed, my hands wrapped tight around the back of the chair beside me. “I lied because I was scared. I lied because I didn’t know you. And you were asking me to do things—”
“Things you wanted,” his silky voice reminded me. I felt acutely the security blanket of the phone, of distance and anonymity, being ripped away.
“Wanting it made it even scarier! Those things we did, those aren’t things I do. I barely knew about them, so it was easier to be someone else. Someone braver and bolder.”
“Layla.”
“Yes,” I sighed, wondering if he could even fathom this kind of choice. The desire to be the opposite of who he was. Maybe when he was a kid, chasing his brother around, trying to be tough.
“That makes sense,” he said and I smiled, bitterly, angry to have some of my secrets ripped away.
“Glad you approve.”
The air around us seethed, no matter how much both of us would pretend otherwise. “Why Layla? Why’d you pick that name?”
“Layla was my cousin.”
He lifted his eyebrow. “Layla with the hand job?”
I nodded, my throat aching. A blush raced up my body from my feet to the top of my head. That night, the night I told him, the sound of his heavy breathing, the sound of his zipper lowering, was like a living, breathing thing between us.
Hard and slow, just the way I like it.
It was impossible to look at him. He filled up the entire room and I felt squeezed by his presence. There was a table between us but it was like I felt him right up against me.
“And you’re Annie. The cousin who watched.”
I was so off balance with this man, wanting more. Constantly wanting more. More than I should, more than I was really comfortable with. More than he wanted.
I nodded. The cousin who watched—that sort of summed up my entire life before running away. The woman who watched life go by. Who watched her freedom get ripped from her. Who watched herself get smaller and smaller every minute.
“How did you end up at the trailer park?” he asked, as if he could see inside my mind. The pictures there I couldn’t get rid of. “What are you so scared of?”
I shook my head. The answer to everything he was asking me was no. No, I would not tell him. No, the things we’d done did not give him the right to all my secrets. No, he could not bully it from me.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t push.”
He seemed stunned that I’d asked. And he rocked back, a little. Our entrenchment not as deep as I’d thought.
“Okay.”
I felt a threatening softness toward him at his capitulation. It wasn’t his nature and it didn’t come easily.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, ate the leafless strawberry I’d been playing with. His fingers were wide and blunt, the nails cropped close. White calluses covered the tips.
I still wanted those hands on me. I still wanted to know what it would be like to be touched by him.
“I’d like to go home,” I said.
“Do you? Do you really want to go home?” That voice, that soft, dark, rough voice that led me places I’d never imagined I’d go.
His eyes were hot on my body. He’d been thinking the same thing I had. He still wanted more of me. Despite everything.
“You’re the one who didn’t want to see me,” I said because I could feel all of this turning. I was getting swept up again by him and heading toward water that was inevitably going to be over my head. “You ended it because I said I wanted to see you. I didn’t even mean it, I just wanted it, and you said we couldn’t talk to each other anymore. And now you want me to stay?”
“I do.” I opened my mouth to argue but he held up his hand. “And no more lies, Annie—you want to stay too.”
I did, but hadn’t I been reckless enough? Wasn’t it time to go back to being Annie McKay?
“No. I need to find out if Ben is okay. If Joan—”
“Call.”
“What?”
“Use the phone…Call…what’s his name at the desk?”
“Kevin. He’s your employee, isn’t he?” My words were wasps, stingers out. I wanted to touch him and wound him. Every breath I pulled into my lungs sizzled. Burned.
Anger was no stranger to me. I lived with anger. A low-level seethe every minute. An anger I’d had to swallow over and over again. Because while I might be angry, I couldn’t show that anger. Showing anything but a bland and smiling face would get me hurt.
Never, not with my mom and certainly never with Hoyt, had I been allowed to behave this way.
Childish and petulant. Pissy.
It was fucking revelatory. A delight. It felt like I’d unbuttoned a pair of too tight pants. Pants that had been suffocating me.
“It’s a means to an end, Annie. Easier to keep an eye on Ben.”
“Why do you need to keep an eye on Ben? Were you related to that girl in the fire?”
“Why are you twenty-four years old and never touched yourself before?”
He was not going to pull a single punch. If I stayed, it was open season on my secrets.
From his back pocket he pulled out a phone and looked up a number before handing it to me. “Call him. Make sure your friends are okay.”
I pressed call on the screen and walked back toward my room.
“Flowered Manor RV Park.” It was Kevin.
“Kevin,” I said. “It’s Annie. I’m calling to make sure everything is okay.”
“Well, we got some power lines down because of the storm, but other than that everything is okay.”
“Last night…Ben?”
“He’s fine. Came in this morning before the rain to get a newspaper. Grumpy as a cuss. But that’s usual.”
“And Joan?”
“Haven’t seen her.”
“The guy on the motorcycle?”
“I heard about that. No sign of him this morning. Where are you?”
“I’m…” Christ. Where am I? “At a friend’s.”
“You have friends?”
“Very funny. But that guy last night…he didn’t do anything?”
“He was loud, apparently. Caused some trouble and then he left.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You stay dry,” he said. “And indoors. Not fit for man or beast out there.”
“Thank you, Kevin.”
I hung up and cowardly felt like hiding in the room.
Because Dylan wanted me to stay and I…I wanted to stay. Well, that wasn’t the total truth. My body wanted to stay. And my body ached for him. I felt like those phone calls between us were a promise, like the storm rolling in over the valley. And I was flush with the potential to make good on that promise.
My head was trying to make a case for getting the hell out of here.
You are alone in an isolated cabin with a man you don’t really know.
I knew enough though, didn’t I? Enough to know that if I stayed, something amazing would happen. He would touch me. Kiss me. Make me come. And not by myself. Not alone in a shitty trailer on the edge of a swamp.
The need for connection—for what we had on the phone to be made real. Physical. It was all that mattered.
I was Annie McKay, and I could go back to my strange, hollow, friendless existence later. I could go back to hiding and waiting later.
I did not think about Hoyt. My husband.
Marriage, I decided, was not the word for what I had.
Another time I would figure out what word fit. Another day.
But right now…Dylan.
In the end it wasn’t a decision. Dylan was an instinct. An urge, like a tide in my blood.
I would do this. I would have this.
And then I’d forget it.
I went back into the kitchen to find him standing in front of the windows, watching the storm. The rain and the clouds. The flash and crackle of lightning, spanning the distance between heaven and earth. A link—electric and momentary—between the two.
“Everyone okay?” he asked without turning around.
“Yes. They’re fine. Apparently, Max left without doing anything.”
He made a low assenting noise in his throat.
I set the phone down on the table and clutched my shaking fingers together. “Now what?”
Lead me, I thought. Lead me like you’ve always led me.
He turned, his face, that nose, those lips, the edges of the scar there on his neck.
Dylan.
“Now, take off your clothes.”
DYLAN
Truthfully, Dylan expected her to comply. Dylan expected her to do everything he asked. She was twenty-four and she was so innocent. The kind of innocent that never went away. She could watch a dozen strippers give blow jobs and she’d still be innocent.
Pure, that’s what Annie was. She was pure.
Pure, but curious…it was a killer combination.
That purity, it was a part of her. It was in her eyes as she watched him from across the room. It was in her voice. Fuck, it was in the ramrod straightness of her spine, like she knew she shouldn’t be here. Like she knew she was better than this place, and what was going to happen here.
Dylan wondered again where she was from, what kind of life she’d had that kept her insulated from the world. What she was so damn scared of. But then he shoved the thought aside, because she’d made it clear it wasn’t his business.
He’d never been innocent. He’d been ruined since the moment of his birth.
And he was going to smear her with all the filth on his hands. He was going to get it all over her.
The devil in Dylan Daniels was in charge now. And the devil couldn’t wait.
ANNIE
Take off your clothes.
The words ignited inside of me, burning away what was left of my reservations.
“No,” I said, the courage coming from I had no idea where.
He lifted his eyebrow, flares of color showing up on his cheeks, because he wasn’t expecting me to say that. And he liked it.
Dylan always liked it when I said no.
More fire. More courage. I did not recognize myself in this moment.
“No?”
Instead of answering, I sat down on the leather chair facing him. It was big, that chair, and it practically swallowed me whole. His eyes burned into me and I leaned back, spreading my legs. Slowly, making sure he saw everything. That his eye tracked every twitch of my fingers. I lifted my hand from beside my hip to touch my stomach and then the top edge of my shorts.
I could feel the heat of my pussy on the tips of my fingers.
With one hand Dylan swept all the stuff off the ottoman, magazines and a book. The television remote. It all clattered to the floor, but I didn’t jump. His eyes held me pinned to the chair. He sat down on the ottoman, facing me, so close our knees touched. So close I could smell him.
“Show me what you’ve been doing,” he said. “Show me what you’ve been doing all alone in your trailer.”
My fingers slipped down over the fabric between my legs. My fingers curled and I scraped my short, blunt nails against myself. My eyelids flinched with the pleasure/pain.
“Good pain?” he asked.
“You were right,” I whispered. “It does exist.”
He clenched his hands around his kneecaps. And I imagined he wanted to grab me and was stopping himself, and that restraint…God, it was so sexy. And I wanted more than anything in the world at this moment to break that restraint. To test it, over and over again, until he snapped.
“What else do you like?” he whispered.
I pushed the palm of my hand harder against my pussy and arched into it, rolling my hips against the pressure.
“I like that,” I said, biting my lip.
“Take off your shorts,” he said.
I shook my head, smiling at him.
“You,” I told him.
He reached for me with big, thick hands, calloused and nicked. Scarred not by the fire, but by the usual things. Life things.
I held my breath, waiting for their touch. It seemed in that moment I’d been waiting for his touch forever. My whole life. He grabbed hold of the bottom edges of my shorts, his hands brushing over the tops of my thighs in the process, and I gasped. His eyes lifted to mine and he stroked his thumb against my leg again.
I felt that touch inside my skin.
Dylan was touching me. And I read some kind of surprise in his face.
After all this time, we were touching.
After another second he yanked the shorts down my legs, revealing my old bikini underwear. The blue ones with the white flowers.
God. It had to be this underwear.
The elastic bit into my skin and red hair curled over the edges.
“You’re a redhead,” he whispered, touching those curls, and then he touched the underwear, right over my core. Right where I ached. “You’re wet.”
“I’m…” on fire, dying. Hurting.
Unable to wait, unable to do this at his pace, I slipped my fingers beneath the tight blue crotch of my underwear, and we both looked down to see the rolling edges of my knuckles as I made my way down to my clit.
“Spread your legs wider,” he whispered and I complied. I lifted my knees, bracing my feet against the edge of the cushion.
“You are so fucking gorgeous,” he said, his eyes moving over my body. My shoulders. My breasts. My hand between my legs.
Dylan watching was hotter than I’d expected, hotter, almost, than I could take, and I squeezed my clit between my fingers.
“Does that feel good?” he asked.
I nodded, squeezing it harder and then letting it go. In time with my heartbeat.
Slowly, he reached forward and touched the top trembling edge of my breast, just where it rose above my camisole. Just his finger there across that small
curve.
I jumped. Startled, shocked even. His eyes were locked on mine and I couldn’t look away. My fingers under my panties slipped farther, lower, until I was inside of myself, reaching deep and high and as hard as I could.
That had always felt good. Always been enough. But somehow with his eyes on me, with his hand on my breast, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
“Dylan…” I breathed, hoping he’d understand and he’d just do it. Just push my hands out of the way and take over. That’s what I needed him to do, because the things I did alone in my trailer, they weren’t enough. Not nearly enough.
“You can do it,” he said, cupping my whole breast in his hand, his thumb right over the hard edge of my nipple.
“But I want you.”
His face was flushed. Blotchy, almost. His jaw as hard as granite.
“I want you to fill me up,” I whispered.
But all he did was press my nipple between his thumb and finger and pinch it, slowly building up the pressure until I groaned. Until I felt like I was being pulled into pieces.
“More,” I begged. “More…”
“Keep going,” he told me, and I lifted my hips up off the chair.
“Dylan—”
“This is what you get,” he breathed. “All you get right now.”
Oh God. Fuck him. My face twisted and I lifted my other hand, using both between my legs, keeping up that heartbeat on my clit, and slipping two other fingers inside of myself.
Between the look on his face and my hands between my legs I was lost in the pleasure, swept up in some kind of endless tide, and then he squeezed my nipple as hard as I could take it, as if he knew the very specific calibrations of pain and pleasure in my body, and I screamed. I screamed and arched up off that chair.
The orgasm went on and on. Until finally I collapsed back against the leather. Boneless and strange. Different.
I opened my eyes and found him watching me and tenderness unspooled in my chest. Something living and vibrant, a wild…affection for him.
It was startling and awful. The wrong thing at the wrong time. And I felt myself flinch away from his eyes. Away from his touch.
“Annie?”
I took a breath, another, trying to rein myself in. Find my footing.
“Are you okay?” he asked.