Everything I Left Unsaid Page 2

  Oh, he was right. So damn right.

  “And you want my noes?”

  “I want something you don’t give away.”

  My knees buckled and I leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, feeling light-headed. How…how did we get here? What has happened to me?

  “Tell me no, Layla,” he murmured.

  No was dangerous in my old life. A red flag in front of a murderous bull.

  I wasn’t brave enough.

  “No.” It was barely a whisper. A breath. A rebellion that screamed through me. It was like Les Misérables in my chest cavity.

  “Do you remember my name?”

  Inherently, somehow I knew what he was asking. Say my name.

  “No, Dylan.”

  The sound he made—half sigh, half groan—was easily the most erotic sound I’d ever heard, and suddenly there was no more wondering, no more innuendo. He wasn’t asking what I was wearing, but the effect was the same. The intent was the same.

  This is…oh my God, this is phone sex. I’m having phone sex with a stranger in a shitty trailer in the middle of nowhere!

  I pulled myself away from the wall. My hands in fists.

  “Don’t call me again.” My voice sounded firmer than I’d expected. Firmer than I’d sounded my entire life, and I was proud of myself.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “Promise.” Why I expected him to keep that promise I had no idea, but having acted so stupid I felt the need to at least attempt smart behavior. God, that lie about cleaning the trailer was so see-through. He knew where I lived. He could find me in the middle of the night, break through those flimsy locks—“I promise. You’re safe. Goodbye, Layla.” And he hung up.

  I hung up a moment later, staring down at the phone as if I’d never seen its kind before.

  It’s just a phone, I thought, despite its near pulsing heat in my hand. Its strange aliveness. It echoed in me, a foreign nature that was not entirely my own. Something hot-blooded and impulsive.

  Don’t be stupid. Or stop being stupid. Or…something.

  I walked back into the kitchen. Turned off the phone and threw it up in a high cupboard. A phone would be a handy thing to have in case of an emergency, and when he stopped paying for the service, I’d find a way to get my own.

  My hands were shaking. My whole body quaked like an aspen leaf. I stepped sideways into the tiny bathroom and turned on the faucets. Cold water blasted out, ricocheted off the sink, and sprayed across my body, soaking through my white cotton blouse.

  I sucked in a shocked breath.

  “Damn it,” I muttered and cranked the water back off.

  I pressed cold hands to my eyes and cheeks and then opened my eyes to stare right at the woman in the mirror. My shirt, thanks to the water, was see-through, and I could see the pink of my flesh beneath it. A white bra. My nipples…there. Painfully, obviously, there.

  Slowly I unwound the sheer, floral scarf from around my neck.

  The bruises under my chin and at the sides of my neck were turning yellow at the center. Green at the edges.

  The one at the corner of my mouth was still dark and ugly and red.

  This is my body. Those are my bruises.

  The hands shaking on the sink, those are mine, too.

  Those words I said to that man.

  Dylan.

  Those were mine. My words.

  This is me.

  I took a deep breath, feeling overwhelmed by the empty space around me, usually filled in with so much fear. Without that fear, without the rules—said and unsaid, implicit and explicit—I felt undone. Unmade. As if I’d been pruned, allowing—God, please, please allow—new growth.

  My hair, the thick, pretty red curls replaced by a lopsided cut I’d given myself and then dyed black in the Tulsa bus station, made me unrecognizable to myself.

  “So,” I said out loud to the reflection in the mirror. That stranger staring back at me. “Who are you?”

  DYLAN

  Make no mistake, Dylan Daniels was the beast. He was the bad guy in the stories. Some other asshole could be the hero, save the day and get the girl.

  Alone and gruesome, he’d stay up on his mountain with his money and his work, as far from people as he could get because that was how he liked it.

  It was better. For everyone.

  But every once in a while he got to worrying about the monsters that lived off the mountain and he called to check up on Ben.

  Carefully, like it was a bomb with a lit fuse, Dylan put the phone down on the workbench in front of him.

  Pencils rolled onto the floor, but he barely noticed.

  For five years he’d had the old man looked in on. By six different people. Four women, two guys.

  The first question any of them asked was what was in it for them.

  And that worked for Dylan. The voices on the other end of the phone belonged to people who were all disinterested and influenced only by the stupid amount of money he paid them. The six people he’d hired didn’t get invested. They didn’t give a shit about the old man or why Dylan wanted him watched. And Dylan didn’t have to worry if they got hurt. Or if they vanished without a word, which was what happened more often than not in that crappy trailer park.

  Five years. Six people who were only a disposable set of eyes and ears. Nothing more.

  Until now.

  Layla.

  What the fuck was that?

  It wasn’t just the country-girl kindness that got him, which was a novel change in the world. The offer to mail him back the phone? Christ. The trailer park wouldn’t reward that sort of sweetness; he knew that for a fact.

  He’d been able to tell the moment she was about to hang up, and the moment she decided to be brave and keep talking. And the moment…the hitch in her breath, the sigh, the husky edge to that drawl-tinged voice…she’d been turned on.

  That small reveal of a colossal internal shift. From indifference to desire.

  When was the last time someone had shown him something so personal? So intimate?

  Maybe never.

  And he’d felt her excitement like a physical touch.

  Well, like he remembered a physical touch to be. It had been a while. In fact it had been long enough that he’d actually forgotten what want was.

  But a ten-minute conversation with a stranger and he was hard as steel. His body primed. Ready.

  Craving more.

  Dylan had a sixth sense about inevitability. An awareness of things out in the dark he could not avoid. Of events stacking up, paths being forged, the result of which would not be seen for years to come. Usually these inevitable things were bad. For him, anyway.

  Layla felt different.

  Fuck. Enough, he thought; she was a woman with a nice voice who got turned on thinking about phone sex. Move on.

  Around him work was piling up. Deadlines were approaching and his team was getting anxious. Not that any of them bothered him here in his home. But he could feel them, just down the road at the warehouse. He could smell their nerves, their growing doubt. Blake, his business partner, was threatening to actually show up one of these days to see what the hold up was.

  So, he shook off the conversation and went back to work on the engine schematic spread out over the bench. They were working on an adapted planetary gearbox for a manual transmission. And it was a thing of beauty. Simply put, it consisted of one large gear—the sun, surrounded by smaller gears—the planets. And around that, there was a larger carrier keeping it all in place.

  That was how his world worked best, all parts in sync. He was the sun, the people around him the planets, and the rules he lived by kept it all in line. Controlled. If one piece was dirty, or out of alignment, if the steel had the slightest imperfection, his world simply didn’t work.

  There was no room for distractions. Strange obsessions. Sweet girls on the other end of the phone.

  So he shoved those thoughts away.

  But four hours later he was still thinking abo
ut her.

  Layla.

  ANNIE

  In the dream, I was leading a crew of detasselers. Teenagers mostly, only a few years younger than me, but somehow they seemed so much younger. Childish with their summer jobs and packed lunches, the early hours making them grumble. One girl, despite being told to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants because corn rash was a bitch, stood there in cutoffs and a bikini top.

  “You are going to get corn rash. And corn rash hurts,” I said, lifting my Del Monte cap and setting it back on my head over and over again. A nervous tic.

  The girl glanced sideways at a boy who had his paper-bag lunch over the front of his jeans and was pretending so hard, so painfully hard, not to notice Bikini-girl’s attention that the corn could practically detassel itself, under the power of his discomfort and lust.

  “I’ll be fine,” the girl said, flashing the boy the coyest of smiles.

  “Stop saying that!” I yelled, startling everyone. I didn’t yell, as a rule. A rule I’d learned the hard way. I swore like a sailor, but I didn’t yell.

  I took my clipboard with all the crew lists and the leaders and the fields they’d be going to and I started to smash the clipboard against the hood of my truck.

  Stop. Smack. Fucking. Smack. Saying. Smack. That.

  You will not be fine.

  None of us will be fine!

  I woke up, the tension reverberating up my arms, my hands clenched in painful fists. My heart pounded in my throat.

  Did I yell? I waited, agonized, for the creak of the bed when Hoyt turned over. But he wasn’t there. His side of the bed was empty.

  Where is he? Did I oversleep?

  Quickly, I put it all together: the surprisingly great mattress, the sunlight through the beige curtains, the smell of Febreze.

  The trailer.

  Hoyt’s not here.

  More importantly, I wasn’t there.

  I could have wept.

  There was a sudden pounding on the door and it felt like the top of my head might explode. That was the banging from the dream, someone at my door. Carefully, I pulled out the top drawer of the small bedside table between the bed and the wall of the trailer.

  The black rubber grip of the .22 felt awful in my hand. Awkward. Cold, and both too big and too small.

  “Annie McKay?” a voice asked, a Southern drawl coloring it.

  It took me a second, freaking out as I was, but I finally recognized the voice. We don’t truck with no nonsense. That’s what that voice outside had said to me. It was Kevin, the guy in the office, knocking on the trailer door.

  Adrenaline and relief made me dizzy.

  And the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping or eating in days kept me dizzy.

  The world was spinning.

  “You don’t have a phone number for me to call,” he said, still talking through the weak metal door with the shitty lock. “And it’s half past nine. You said you were going to start work at eight.”

  “Oh no,” I said, scrambling up. I’d slept in my clothes, despite the heat, ready to run if I had to. I wasn’t sure if that was still necessary, but I couldn’t quite convince myself not to do it. I put the gun back in the drawer and pushed my feet into my shoes. “Just a second!” I yelled.

  I brushed my teeth too hard, too rushed, and I split my lip again.

  “Shit,” I hissed, pressing cheap toilet paper to it.

  “You coming, or what?”

  “Sorry!” I yelled.

  The toilet paper stuck to the cut and I left it there, looking like a guy who’d nicked his face shaving for church. In the mirror, my bruises seemed to be greener than they were yesterday. I put the scarf back on, despite how stupid it looked with my tee shirt and cutoffs, and then I put on my big movie-star sunglasses.

  Could I be any more obvious? I wondered, carefully peeling the toilet paper from my lip.

  But the thought of not wearing the scarf and the glasses made me feel naked.

  So obvious won.

  —

  Kevin was a big man. Tall, wide, big stomach, big shoulders. His belly peeked out beneath his giant red tee shirt, already sweaty in the August North Carolina heat. He had big feet wedged into Adidas shower flip-flops that looked like they’d been welded on at some point. He wore his gray-black hair in a long ponytail down his back, with ponytail holders at regular intervals, keeping it all in line.

  “Morning,” he said without much of a smile. He didn’t seem like a smiler.

  Kevin was a still waters kind of guy. Or maybe he just didn’t give a shit.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, pushing up the edges of the scarf. “I overslept. I usually don’t sleep so late.”

  Last night it had taken me hours to fall asleep. I’d jumped at every sound, and there were lots in the trailer park. People yelling, doors slamming. Wind and trees. A car alarm.

  But finally I’d drifted off after two in the morning. Usually I’d be up at dawn, but sleep since I’d left Oklahoma had been in fits and starts.

  And honest to God, who would have thought that mattress would be so comfortable?

  “You’re the one who said you wanted to start today,” he said, his eyes wide under bushy eyebrows. “I thought you was nuts.”

  “Nope, just broke.” When I’d asked about work in the area while doing the paperwork for the RV, he’d told me they were hiring at the park to do some groundskeeping, and I’d jumped at the opportunity.

  Physical labor, right where I was living. I wouldn’t have to go into town. Meet other people.

  My gut, which had been silent for my entire life—seriously, not a peep out of the thing for twenty-four years—had been yelling at me nonstop since I woke up on my kitchen floor two weeks ago. And my gut seemed to think this arrangement, this job, was not to be passed up.

  “Did I tell you what you’ll be doing?” he asked, walking in front of me down the dirt track between my trailer and the next one.

  “No. You just mentioned some lawn work.”

  Kevin laughed, but I didn’t find any comfort in it. I had the distinct impression he was laughing at me. “Well, that was clever of me,” he said ominously.

  The trailer next door was nearly identical to mine, though it seemed to be a newer model. White, where mine was totally ’70s beige, with a darker brown racing stripe down the side. American Dreamer written in sort of an old-timey Western print.

  Yep, she was a beaut.

  But the white RV next door had a wooden deck on the outside with a chair, a table, and an ashtray.

  Deluxe.

  I had trailer envy.

  “Does anyone live there?” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the neighbor’s trailer.

  “Joan,” Kevin said. “Keeps to herself. Not too friendly. If you’re smart you’ll stay away. She’s kind of a bitch.”

  The skin on the back of my neck prickled as I walked by, as if someone was watching me from between two slats on the blinds. But when I glanced back there was nothing.

  I’d been paranoid most of my life—it’s not like I could just make it stop.

  “Ben, on the other hand,” he said, pointing past Joan’s trailer to the trailer the man…Dylan…had asked me to look in on.

  Just the thought of his name electrified part of me, like a filament in a lightbulb starting to glow.

  Don’t. Don’t think about him.

  “Nice guy. Quiet, but not rude about it. Grows a hell of a garden.” He pointed over at the far end of the property, where I could see fencing and some plants.

  Hardly sounds like a guy worth watching, I thought, wondering if Dylan wasn’t looking after the wrong person.

  “Other side of the park,” Kevin said, jutting his chin out at the trailers just visible over a giant rhododendron bush, “that’s where the families are. Some are great. Some are screamers and drinkers and scene makers, so I try to keep the people without kids on this side.”

  “Are you quarantining them? Or us?” I asked.

  He gave me an a
rch look. “Hell if you won’t appreciate it by next Friday.”

  Probably true.

  We walked single file across a wooden bridge over a rain ditch that because of a recent storm was gurgling along happily under my feet.

  Black-eyed Susans and forget-me-nots and tons and tons of Queen Anne’s lace covered the banks of the small stream. Crickets were loud and jumping into my legs. The highway was a bunch of miles in the distance, but I could feel the hum of trucks on asphalt rumbling in the boggy ground beneath my feet.

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “This place.” I flung out a hand toward the flowers, the stream. A cricket smacked into the back of my leg and then buzzed away.

  Kevin’s look made it clear he doubted my sanity. “You must see some real shit holes if this is nice.”

  Oh Kevin, you don’t want to know.

  Because the truth was, I hadn’t seen anywhere. Shit hole or otherwise.

  Mom had been on a campaign practically since the moment of my birth to convince me that the world outside of the farm was a godless, terrible place. Full of selfish people doing selfish things. Men who’d want nothing but to hurt me, and women who’d look away while they did it.

  When you are told that shit day in and day out, you start to believe it.

  It’s probably why I stayed so long with Hoyt. Because the unknown was just so…unknown.

  But here I was, in the thick of it, and so far, my new life was a million times better than my old life.

  So, yes, it was nice.

  “And here it is,” he said, coming to a stop in front of an overgrown field full of black garbage bags torn open by animals. Cans, dirty diapers, and newspapers spilled out in the weeds growing as tall as my head. He had to shout over the drone of black flies.

  And the smell…

  Oh dear God, I take back all that “nice” stuff.

  Behind the wall of weeds was a giant oak with a ratty old rope hanging from one of the branches.

  “What’s the rope for?” I asked, because surrounded by all this filth it looked like the scene of a terrible crime. The cover of a horror novel.

  “Behind the weeds is a real nice watering hole.”