Everything I Left Unsaid(17)

“You sound nervous.”

My mouth was hot and dry. Worse than the creek bed back home in August. “I…ah…a little. I guess. Yes.”

“Are you trying to be brave?” His voice tipped into that familiar place where we’d been last time. Like, he was letting me know there was something more he wanted to talk about. Underneath the laughter and the banalities, there was a darker place we could go.

“I’ve never been brave in my life,” I said, longing so hard for that darker place. If having a dirty book would have gotten me in trouble, wanting this forbidden thing would have gotten me hurt I don’t know how bad.

But not here.

Not with him—this stranger on the phone.

This is why I called, because I don’t know how to find these dark, forbidden places on my own.

“You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“Are you telling me I shouldn’t?”

“No, but you said you scared yourself last time we talked.”

The trailer was small and dark, and it was as if there were only the two of us in the wide world.

“I did,” I murmured, feeling almost powerless. But in a good way. Like I was giving up the power instead of having it taken from me. The act of willing surrender made all the difference.

Made it okay.

“Then talking to me is brave.”

“I guess so,” I said, giving myself some points when I was usually so damn stingy.

“What else do you want to be brave about?”

Everything. My life. My body.

“I bought a dirty book today.” I closed my eyes and slapped a hand to my forehead. Honestly, could I be any less cool? I felt like a teenager.

His chuckle was low. Rough. “Did you? Was it good?”

“I’m not done. But yeah…it’s hot.”

“Was that brave?” he asked.

“Very. You tell me one,” I said, mortified and on edge.

His sigh was the kind of sigh that came after a long, hard day, when it seemed to be you against the world. I was pretty familiar with that sigh. “Well, I fired a guy today. A friend’s brother. I let it go on for too long because I owe my friend a lot. But in the end, I had to let the guy go.”

“I’m sorry. That’s a hard thing to do.”

“You ever fire anyone?” He sounded surprised.

“Once,” I said, not wanting to remember. “It was awful.”

“Yeah, today sucked. You go.”

“A brave thing?”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t tell him about the cereal and the chocolate chips. I already sounded like an idiot with the book.

“Yesterday, it was so hot I wanted to lie down on my bed in the middle of the day naked and let the wind blow over me.”

I bit my lip and he exhaled slowly through his nose and I sensed that I’d shocked him. Or excited him. I sure as hell shocked and excited myself. But it was happening. I’d said those words and my body was coiled, hot and anxious. Full of restlessness and embarrassment and a kind of yearning that hurt.

For sex. Lust. Orgasms. Oral sex. Red rooms with whips. Blindfolds and handcuffs. Kisses in elevators that changed a person’s entire life.

Things other women took for granted that had been denied me, my entire life.

I wanted to feel my body from the inside out, in a way I never had before.

“Did you do it?”

“I chickened out.”

“Why?”

“Self-conscious, I guess. Too much sunlight maybe.”

“No sunlight now.”

I held the phone away from my face for a moment and took a deep breath.

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

“Why don’t you do that now? Open your windows, take off your clothes and stretch out on your bed, and then you can tell me what else you want to be brave about.”

This is why I called. Exactly why I called. I can’t chicken out now.

I got up from the settee and walked to my bedroom. My fingers opened the fly of my shorts and when they fell to my ankles, I stepped out of them and kept walking. I took off my tank top. I hadn’t bothered with a bra because of the heat, and I didn’t have much up top anyway.

The underwear stayed on. I was still Annie McKay after all.

The windows were open, the breeze making the little beige curtains wave.

In my threadbare pink bikini underwear, I lay down on my made bed.

The wind danced across my stomach. Over my nipples, turning them into hard beads. I almost touched one. Almost.

It was like when I cut my hair and felt the wind against my neck for the first time. I felt exposed and raw.

Brand new.

“How’s it feel?” he asked, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a murmur.

“It feels good.” I was lost for a moment in the cold and heat of it. The strange vulnerable thrill of it.

“Yeah? Tell me.”

I swallowed. Oh God. I didn’t have the guts for this one.

“It’s been hot for days, hasn’t it?” he asked, as if he knew I’d hit a limit. “And that breeze just cools down all that sweat. Makes you almost cold in places.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Good girl.”

I shouldn’t like those words. I wasn’t his good girl. I wasn’t anyone’s. But my eyes fluttered shut and I lifted my fingers to my nipple. For just a second. It was hot and hard. Burning, nearly. And then I put my hand down on the quilt beside my hip.