Everything I Left Unsaid(56)

I hung up and wondered if I should head back out on the highway toward one of the truck stops with the free Wi-Fi. But then, in some weird moment of clarity, I decided it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who he was. All he was to me was the guy on the other end of this phone. The guy that pushed me farther and faster out of my terrified little box than I ever would have gone on my own. Maybe he would tell me in time.

Maybe not.

But I had no intention of telling him who I was. Who I really was, and why I was in this last-ditch trailer park, looking for any crack in my self-made, Annie McKay prison through which I could escape.

I couldn’t be hypocritical.

If he was a mobster, a spy, a male model, a politician—none of it mattered.

So he was Dylan. Just Dylan.

And I was Layla.

And I didn’t need to know anything more about him, but I still wanted to see him. Touch him.

Have him.

I scrolled through the phone features and found the camera.

I held it up slightly and kind of squished my upper arms against my breasts so they weren’t sliding into my armpits and I put my hand down the front of my pink panties. One leg bent at the knee. I took a picture and checked it.

Ugh. Too much knee, no boob.

I tried again and then again.

Finally in the fourth picture my freckles didn’t look like a rash against my pale skin, and my boobs were actually in the picture and my hand down my underwear looked sexy…really sexy instead of kind of strange. (I’d had to change my underwear, because the pink looked too little girl and that was the last thing I wanted.) So, in the end I had a pretty hot picture of myself, but not my face.

I sent it to him.

Me. Annie McKay. Sent a picture of my naked body to a man.

One minute later my phone rang. I answered, but before I could say hello he asked, “Is that you?”

“No, it’s the stripper I brought home.”

“Is that a joke?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“So that is you?”

“That is me.”

“You…” He exhaled hard. “God, baby you’re so pretty. Your skin, it’s like…it’s so f*cking beautiful.”

I’ve never been called pretty. Much less f*cking beautiful. The only nice thing Mom ever said was that I had nice hair, implying everything else was ugly, and Hoyt said I was a hard worker and a fine woman…I know, such a charmer.

But this from Dylan; I was flushed with pleasure. Ecstatic at the idea that someone would think I was pretty.

Because I was. A little.

Not like Joan, but I was me. And I was pretty.

“Tonight…” I sighed.

His dark laugh was delicious.

“That was the f*cking hottest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“I doubt that. You were wild, remember? I bet you’ve heard a whole lot worse than that.”

“You’re wild now, too. And brave. What else do you want to be?”

“I want to be with you.”

The words slipped out before I could stop them and I heard him suck in a sharp breath.

The brittle silence told me I’d done something I couldn’t ever undo. I’d changed everything.

I knew it with the terrible sixth sense that I’d developed over the years, that specific and terrible skill of knowing when something was falling to pieces around me. “I know that’s not going to happen,” I said in a rush, desperate to try and put back together this thing that I had shattered. “I do. I get that. I have my own reasons for why that’s a really terrible idea. But I watched this girl dance on this guy’s lap. She was facing him and he was…he was grabbing her ass. So hard with both hands that the skin around where he was grabbing her was white. And it was like he couldn’t hold her close enough, or hard enough against him, and I’ve…I’ve never been held like that. Not once. Not ever. And I wondered what that would feel like. What would it be like to have someone want me that much that he…just grabbed me and held on as hard as he could.”

“Layla—”

But I didn’t stop. I was on a roll. “What would that be like with you? And what would it be like to hold your cock in my hand and to put it in my mouth? Or to slip my fingers into yours, my fingers covered in my—”

“Layla,” he said, his voice sharp. Almost a crack. “Stop it. You have to…We can’t.”

“I know. But I want it. Don’t you…want that?” Just tell me you want that.

“Listen to me.” His voice was different. Totally different. “This is over now.”

“What?”

“It’s over now. I told you not to…build anything around me and I meant it.”

“I don’t know anything about you!” I cried.

He was silent for a long moment. “That’s not true and we both know it.”

“I know you wear a tux to parties,” I said. “You work on cars.”

“You heard my voice mail message, didn’t you?”

Dylan Daniels.

“Yes.”

That’s when I realized why he always answered the phone so fast. It wasn’t eagerness for my calls. It was so I wouldn’t find out who he was.

“Is this because I’m poor?” Because I wasn’t. I was actually far from poor. My name was on the deed to a thousand-acre farm in Oklahoma, one of the biggest corn providers in the state. I was actually pretty f*cking rich in my own right.