Everything I Left Unsaid(64)

For a very wealthy man.

Hoyt spent five years making me feel small. Unwanted. Unwantable. He made me feel like a nuisance and a failure. At the beginning I’d been hurt, wounded. But I slowly grew to not want anything. If I never wanted anything more than what I had, I could never be hurt.

So I was totally unprepared for how hurt I was looking at Dylan’s house. And I realized how much I’d wanted with him. How far I’d reached.

And I felt toyed with, shamed even. As if I were nothing, a speck, a stupid girl, a puppet, and he was the man with money and drivers and housekeepers and beautiful houses, pulling my strings.

My chest hurt.

Did he sit there? I wondered. Did he sit on that couch, with his feet up on that ottoman and study the mountains while he talked to me? Did he touch himself there? Did he ask me to eat dessert for breakfast and to taste my own come on my fingers? Right? There?

Did he hang up and laugh at me? At my eagerness? My total lack of experience or sophistication?

Was this fun for him, playing with me?

I couldn’t breathe; shock and anger had their fists down my throat.

“Are you coming?” Margaret asked, having walked across the room to stand at the entrance to another dark hallway.

“I need to see Dylan.”

She shook her head. “He’s not here.”

Wasn’t that perfect? He wasn’t even here and I was still being controlled by him. Why did this hurt? I wondered, limping on my sore feet after Margaret down that hallway. There were no pictures. No mirrors. Nothing. Just dark walls and doors that I kept walking past on my way to some room that had been set aside for me.

God, the house was really huge.

Margaret opened a door. “Here’s your room. There’s a bathroom through there,” she said. “I’ve got a toothbrush and some other things you might need. There are some clothes in the drawers—”

“For me?”

Margaret smiled. “Of course.”

“How did you know what size?”

“Dylan said small.” She shrugged.

How did…? The picture. He’d seen my body in that picture. “Thank you,” I breathed. Horrified and on fire in the same breath. Thinking about the cake. The charger, all the little lures that pulled me into Dylan’s life.

“It’s no problem—I’ve got a granddaughter about your size. They were things I’d bought for her.”

“I can’t take them—they’re gifts for your granddaughter!”

“She’ll never know. Now, get some sleep, honey,” she said. “You look done in.”

She closed the door behind her when she left, leaving me alone in a simple room with a big bed covered in a blue bedspread. The far wall was curtained, and I walked over and opened it up. I could hear running water through the sliding glass door.

I opened the door and stepped out onto a small balcony. The sky was pink, the rising sun still behind the mountains. To the left and right there were other little balconies, four of them. Little extra nooks and crannies on a house that just kept going. There was a brook beneath me, falling off the edge of the cliff the house was built onto. This house was built into a cliff. With a waterfall falling under it.

It was like magic, this house.

My back pocket buzzed and I jumped, startled. My phone. I’d forgotten. No bra or shoes, but I had this damn phone shoved in the back pocket of my shorts.

Suddenly all that shit I felt, the grubby bit and the meaningless part—it was all gone. I was still hurt, still impossibly wounded, but I was furious, too.

And if I’d learned nothing else in the last two months of my life, it was that fury felt better than pain. Every damn time. So I grabbed onto my anger with both hands.

“Dylan?” I asked after I answered.

“You okay?”

“I’m in your goddamn house.”

“Good.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’m…in my garage.”

I lifted my head, as though I could smell him on the breeze. “Here?”

“Here. But—”

“How do I get there?”

“Layla—”

“Tell me how to get there or I’m going to start tearing this place apart!”

His chuckle was unexpected and it did nothing to cool me down. “I’m not kidding, Dylan. I’m seeing you right now or I’m walking out that door.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“And if you think that will stop me you’re crazy.”

He was silent for a long time; I could hear him breathing. “Go through the big room. I’ll leave the door open.”

I ran back down the hallway through the big room. Margaret had vanished, thank heavens. And down in the far left corner of the room near the floor-to-ceiling window was a cracked door, a slice of yellow light cutting into the shadows.

With my hands shaking, I pushed open that door.

The garage was big. Like a cathedral. In the center of it was one whole car with its hood open, surrounded by pieces of cars. It smelled of oil and concrete. On a metal table there was a dismantled engine and on the far wall there was a long wooden bench.

Sitting in a pool of light, on a stool at the bench, his back to me, was Dylan.