The Heart Of It (8 page)

The razor-edged silence that came before
You got a smart mouth, girl.

The heavy echoing silence that came before a backhand.

Stupid joke. It was a stupid joke. I am made of stupid jokes.

“You just can’t trust advertising anymore, can you?” he asked.

“Especially when it’s on a bathroom wall in a truck stop.”

We both laughed, and this was officially more fun than I’d had in years.

“Are you safe?” he asked.

The question with its implied concern bit into me, sweeping away my laughter like someone taking his arm over a dinner table, sending plates crashing to the floor. Tears burned in my eyes.

No one had worried about me. Not in a very long time.

“Layla?”

“Yes.” My voice was gruff and thick. “I’m safe.”

“You sure?”

I got the sense that if I told him no, that I felt threatened or scared, he would
do
something about it. Arrive at that metal door to
help
me.

The temptation to trust him was not insignificant.

But that was not the point of having run so far.

I collapsed onto the seat, taking in my new home in all its glory. The fake wood cupboards of the kitchen, the narrow hallway with its curtain divider between the bedroom and this main area. I saw the edge of the bathroom’s accordion door.

Mine,
I thought, and something wild and bitter rose in my chest.

“I am.” I was safe. Hundreds and hundreds of miles from my old life. “I really am.”

“Good,” Dylan said as if he knew what I wasn’t saying. And hell, maybe he did. Maybe the story of Annie McKay was a familiar one at the Flowered Manor.

“Do you know where Megan went?” I asked. “I’ll mail her phone.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not her phone; it’s mine. She worked for me.”

“Can I mail you the phone?”

His silence seemed loaded, but not dangerous. “Are you always this nice?”

I laughed, because this was nothing compared to the bending over backward to accommodate people I’d done my past. I’d been able to fold myself up into nothing.

But this man’s concern made me grateful.

“It’s your phone, isn’t it? Only seems right to get it back to you.”

“Most people don’t go out of their way for a stranger.”

“Would it make you feel better if you told me something about yourself?”

I’d said it flippantly, but the silence that followed my words was oddly heavy, as if I’d opened a door he hadn’t expected.

“I’ll tell you why Megan had the phone.”

There was something in his tone, the sudden lack of laughter, a new element of seriousness, that made me sit up straight.

This is when you hang up,
I thought, sensing that we’d slipped past banalities. I was not in the practice of talking on the phone to strange men.

Hoyt would
— The sudden thought of him and what he would and wouldn’t do about my behavior—like a cancer in this new Febreze-scented world of mine—galvanized me, sent new steel running down my back.

I’m not Annie. I’m Layla. And fuck Hoyt.

“Why?” I asked, noting there was a change in my voice, too. As if there were a sort of intimacy between me and this stranger who asked about my safety in a lifetime of people not caring.

“There’s a trailer, two away from you. To the north. You can see it out your window.”

I twisted and pushed aside the curtain on the north-facing window.

“Did you look?”

“I did.”

I heard him breathe into the phone and something electric pulsed over me. An animal instinct made all the hair on my neck stand up.

“An old man lives in that trailer,” he said. “Megan kept an eye on him for me.”

“Is he sick?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Does he need help of some kind?”

Again that rumbly dark laugh, again that weird reaction of my heart. “No. He doesn’t. In fact, I made it real clear to Megan that she shouldn’t get to know him at all.”

“So, she just spied on him?”

“She did. And I paid her well to do it.”

“Did she do anything else for you?” I asked. It hardly seemed a job a person could get paid for.

In his silence I realized what he might be thinking, and I felt blood pound through my body in horrified embarrassment.

“What are you asking me, Layla?”

Oh, his voice was suddenly thick with intimacy and now I could not pretend otherwise. Somehow this had gotten sexual. It was the Layla thing that had started it and it was a stupid thing to start. I did not play this kind of game. Didn’t understand it. Was completely embarrassed by it.

Suddenly restless, I stood up. My skin felt far too keenly the rub of my clothes against it.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just seems like something a person should do without being paid.”

“Are you offering to look in on him for me?”

“Sure.” I picked up my bag and walked down the hallway to the tiny bedroom in the back. The double bed was stripped. A stack of clean sheets sat at the end of the faded flowered mattress.

“That easy?”

“That easy.”

“When’s the last time you said no to someone?” he asked.

“Why does it matter?”

“I have a sense, Layla, that you give away your yeses without thinking.”

Oh, he was right. So damn right.

“And you want my no’s?”

“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 alive-ness. 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?”