Everything I Left Unsaid(39)

Pop used to do this thing when he was drunk, when Dylan and Max were young. He’d take those big fists, with the tattoos across the knuckles, and pound them against their shoulders, as if Dylan and Max were stakes and he wanted to drive them into the ground.

Remember who you come from, he’d say with every punch. Remember who you little bitches come from.

Dylan used to wobble under the force, fall to the side. His knees buckling.

Max never did. Not once.

All of Pop’s friends…his brothers, would laugh and get Max a drink. A shot. A joint. A girl. Whatever reward for toughness was available. Dylan never learned that toughness from his dad. He wanted his pop to be like other dads, his mom to be like other moms. He wanted them all to be a family, like the ones on TV. The ones that did nice things for one another.

Sweet things.

It wasn’t until he got sent away that he learned how to be tough. The toughest, actually.

He was forged steel.

And he was forgetting. Layla was making him forget.

He came from a long line of villains. And that shit couldn’t be forgotten. Couldn’t be erased with cake.

You need to remember who you are, he thought. Because you told her not to go building any fantasy around you, and now look at you.

Cake. What the f*ck was he thinking?

He’d send another package. More honest this time.

Dylan Daniels was still the beast. The bad guy in the stories. Layla just didn’t know it yet. And he was forgetting. He was letting himself forget. Because he’d somehow gotten addicted to the sound of her voice. The way her voice made him feel.

Sometimes it was nice pretending to be the hero.

But it was time to stop.





ANNIE


Another package arrived from Dylan the next day.

“What are you doing, girl?” Kevin asked, handing me the package. He’d brought it out to me as I was locking up the shed after work. It was a perfect, hot day. Bright sun. Cool breeze. I’d jumped back in the swimming hole today and felt cool and sleek all the way through.

“Nothing, why?” I had no experience playing it cool and I failed miserably at it.

“Seems to me like you got yourself a long-distance admirer.”

“And so what if I do?” I asked, laughing. Because I did! I had myself a long-distance admirer! Blood rushed to all of my skin, a full-body blush as I thought of yesterday. How I couldn’t say no to him. Wouldn’t say no. Why would I?

“You…sure that’s smart?” he asked. I blinked, surprised he would ask. “It’s just…you know when you showed up here, you looked like you’d—”

I stiffened and turned away, horrified by the memory. That he would bring it up. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, I hear that a lot from people and they’re lying to me,” he said.

“I’m not lying.”

He looked like he was about to say something else. Something about the box. Maybe about the guy who gave it to me and I was touched, I really was. But I didn’t need his concern.

“Thank you, Kevin,” I told him. “But you don’t need to worry about me.”

I walked away from him, back to my trailer. But I felt his eyes on me the whole way.

—

Once inside my trailer, I tore open the box. On top was a folded-up piece of paper, two twenty-dollar bills, and a sticky note.

If you still decide to go, buy yourself some drinks at that strip club, the note said.

Still decide, I thought with what could only be called a giggle. He’d told me to go; he’d set down the rules. I was going.

I was well aware that building some kind of infatuation around this guy was dumb…but it was also fun. And fun was a rare enough bird in my life that I was going to let it stick around if it wanted to.

Good God. Forty dollars’ worth of drinks? Was he nuts? I’d buy myself one. Maybe. And then a box of hair dye, because my roots were coming in and I looked like a weird off-color skunk.

But beneath the drink thing, it said, This is why I watch him. This is why I want you to stay away.

The folded-up piece of paper was a photocopied news story from ten years ago.

GANG MEMBERS ARRESTED AFTER TRIPLE HOMICIDE

Beneath the headline was a picture of a younger Ben and two other men in handcuffs being led into a police station.

Quickly, I closed the article, pressing my thumb along the crease as if I could seal it shut. Forever.

Triple homicide?

Gang member?

Joan had said that, remember? She’d said, that day at the lake, that he’d been a part of a gang. He’d been kicked out for doing something awful.

Was this it? Was this the awful?

It seemed ludicrous. Like a joke. He fried zucchini flowers and told me to stay out of the sun. He gave me tomatoes from his garden. The other morning I woke up to find a loaf of cornbread on my stoop. Still warm.

He was a man whose regrets and remorse sat on his shoulders, nearly visible.

This…article didn’t make any sense.

With shaking hands, I opened the paper back up.


Three members of the Skulls Motorcycle Club have been arrested in relation to the October house fire that killed two men and a young girl that took place in the Tallyrand area of Jacksonville.

According to local law authorities, the two men who died in the fire were tied up and alive at the time the fire was set. The girl was apparently asleep in an upstairs bedroom. The house, area residents claim, was used to make and distribute methamphetamines.