Everything I Left Unsaid(69)

For years, years and years and years of my life, if someone shouted at me I would shrink inside my bones. I would hide deep inside of myself and nod my head. I would nod and say yes. Yes, you’re right.

I’d say I was sorry a thousand times. A million. Whatever it took for the yelling to stop.

I fired Smith. I sold my land for windmills. I ducked my head and took it. The yelling, the fists, the disdain and marginalization. I took it all to make the yelling stop.

I laughed, but it sounded nervous, not cavalier. Old habits were weighing me down. “You’ve lied to me—”

“I’ve never lied,” he interrupted, his anger white hot and barely controlled. I swallowed and took a step back, my hip hitting a chair. He watched the movement and saw all the things I couldn’t hide.

“Are you scared?” he asked, and I wished I had enough bravado to tell him no, to shake my hair out of my eyes and yell right back at him.

“You’re yelling at me and I’m…here. Alone. It would be stupid of me not to be afraid.” I wished I weren’t, but I was.

My fear seemed to put a pin in his anger and he took a deep breath. Another. The electric tension in the air dissipating enough that my fear lifted.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said.

“I’ve…I’ve had a few people say that to me and then go right on ahead and hurt me.”

“Your mother? Who else?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to talk about it. He could put a barricade around his secrets.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, calmly. All that fire in him banked for the moment. Not gone; it would be foolish of me to think that that anger was gone. It was just…hidden. “And I won’t lie to you. I told you the first night that I would never lie to you. And I just…I want to know why you lied.”

I swallowed, my hands wrapped tight around the back of the chair beside me. “I lied because I was scared. I lied because I didn’t know you. And you were asking me to do things—”

“Things you wanted,” his silky voice reminded me. I felt acutely the security blanket of the phone, of distance and anonymity, being ripped away.

“Wanting it made it even scarier! Those things we did, those aren’t things I do. I barely knew about them, so it was easier to be someone else. Someone braver and bolder.”

“Layla.”

“Yes,” I sighed, wondering if he could even fathom this kind of choice. The desire to be the opposite of who he was. Maybe when he was a kid, chasing his brother around, trying to be tough.

“That makes sense,” he said and I smiled, bitterly, angry to have some of my secrets ripped away.

“Glad you approve.”

The air around us seethed, no matter how much both of us would pretend otherwise. “Why Layla? Why’d you pick that name?”

“Layla was my cousin.”

He lifted his eyebrow. “Layla with the hand job?”

I nodded, my throat aching. A blush raced up my body from my feet to the top of my head. That night, the night I told him, the sound of his heavy breathing, the sound of his zipper lowering, was like a living, breathing thing between us.

Hard and slow, just the way I like it.

It was impossible to look at him. He filled up the entire room and I felt squeezed by his presence. There was a table between us but it was like I felt him right up against me.

“And you’re Annie. The cousin who watched.”

I was so off balance with this man, wanting more. Constantly wanting more. More than I should, more than I was really comfortable with. More than he wanted.

I nodded. The cousin who watched—that sort of summed up my entire life before running away. The woman who watched life go by. Who watched her freedom get ripped from her. Who watched herself get smaller and smaller every minute.

“How did you end up at the trailer park?” he asked, as if he could see inside my mind. The pictures there I couldn’t get rid of. “What are you so scared of?”

I shook my head. The answer to everything he was asking me was no. No, I would not tell him. No, the things we’d done did not give him the right to all my secrets. No, he could not bully it from me.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t push.”

He seemed stunned that I’d asked. And he rocked back, a little. Our entrenchment not as deep as I’d thought.

“Okay.”

I felt a threatening softness toward him at his capitulation. It wasn’t his nature and it didn’t come easily.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, ate the leafless strawberry I’d been playing with. His fingers were wide and blunt, the nails cropped close. White calluses covered the tips.

I still wanted those hands on me. I still wanted to know what it would be like to be touched by him.

“I’d like to go home,” I said.

“Do you? Do you really want to go home?” That voice, that soft, dark, rough voice that led me places I’d never imagined I’d go.

His eyes were hot on my body. He’d been thinking the same thing I had. He still wanted more of me. Despite everything.

“You’re the one who didn’t want to see me,” I said because I could feel all of this turning. I was getting swept up again by him and heading toward water that was inevitably going to be over my head. “You ended it because I said I wanted to see you. I didn’t even mean it, I just wanted it, and you said we couldn’t talk to each other anymore. And now you want me to stay?”