Everything I Left Unsaid(96)

Silent, he tossed the books onto the bed. The article. The notes.

She wanted to gather them up, out of his reach. Out of his sight. But it was too late. Everything she owned he’d ruined with his touch. She tipped her head so she couldn’t see them. Like a child, she thought if she couldn’t see them, they weren’t real.

They never happened.

All she had left was getting out of this.

“Who is Dylan Daniels to you?” he asked.

“No one. I don’t know who he is.” Annie got to her feet without any idea why she was lying when she was doing it so badly. All she knew was that she could not put Dylan in the middle of this nightmare.

“Stop.” He held up the phone, the screen showing all of their text messages. The picture she had sent of her nearly naked body. Her breasts and her tummy, the pale white blur of her thighs.

Annie had been unfaithful to a man who smacked her around over chicken pot pies. Strangled her over windmills. She could not imagine what he would do over adultery.

“I know about it all. So you need to stop lying. For your sake.”

He was going to kill her. A gasping sob cleared her throat.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered. His face creased with agony. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Annie nearly laughed. But terror had squeezed her body.

“I don’t like it, Annie, but I…I guess I understand.” He tilted his head like the old yellow lab they used to have. “What I did to you made you…act out like that. I know that’s not you. That picture, those notes. That’s not the Annie I know.”

The Annie he knew was a rag doll. A scarecrow. An animated reflection of him. The Annie he knew was gone.

But Hoyt was still talking. “We can go back home and just forget it. Forget this Dylan Daniels. Start over.”

That was impossible. There was no forgetting Dylan Daniels. He was burned under her skin. Into her bones.

Move, she told herself, keep moving, don’t just sit here and let him ruin you again. As long as she kept moving she was alive, and as long as she was alive, there was a chance.

Annie pulled a clean shirt out of the dresser. “You mind?” she asked, when he just kept standing there. That gun held so casually in his hand as if to mock her fear.

A muscle twitched in his jaw and he glanced down at the books on the bed and the phone in his hand, silently asking if she really thought she was deserving of modesty now. But then he bowed his head and walked out of her room as if granting Annie some privacy was a favor. A silly stupid wish by a silly stupid woman.

Once he was gone, she pulled off her dirty shirt and slipped on her clean one. The windows in here were all too small to climb through, but she pushed open her curtains hoping Ben was still in his garden, hoping she could catch his eye. But his garden was empty. Joan’s trailer was still dark.

As lightly as she could, she stepped to the door, listening for sounds from the rest of the trailer so she could try to tell where he was. But it was silent. Eerie and silent and awful.

Shaking, she cracked open the door to see Hoyt back in the captain’s chair. He was eating a cinnamon roll from the bag she’d brought down from Dylan’s. If Annie was careful and if she was quick, she might get to the door before he did.

Acting as if she was still dizzy, she made her way into the small kitchen with her hand along the wall. Four feet. Three. Two. The door was right there. She paused for a second, holding her head as if she could barely stand. She needed him to think she was weak.

“You want to pack up?” He asked. “I’d like to get home. We’ve been gone too long.” Like they’d been on a trip. A fun excursion.

“Can we have some food, first? I need something to eat. It will make me less dizzy, maybe.”

She turned herself around a little, getting her body between him and the door, and then made like she was reaching for the paper bag but instead of the bag she reached for the door, pushing it open, cold air rushing toward her as she threw her body down the steps, but Hoyt grabbed the back of her shirt and then a handful of her hair and yanked her back into the trailer.

And then slammed the door shut.

Annie screamed so loud and so hard her throat ached and he backhanded her, tossed her onto the floor of the trailer and got down on top of her, squeezing the air from her body. His hand closed over her mouth. His knife had slipped forward and the leather tip of the sheath touched the bare skin of her hip, where her shirt had ridden up.

She tried to flinch away from it, but he was too heavy.

With every breath she took that knife rubbed her. Scratched her.

“Look at me, Annie,” he said in that calm voice. “I found you and we’re together again. There’s nowhere for you to go. And you need to realize that.”

She shook her head, trying to buck him off with her hips.

“This Dylan man, he’s not for you. And you know what? I forgive you for having an affair with this man.” His voice said otherwise. His voice and his narrowed eye and the vicious disgusted curl to his lip, they told her she would be paying for these sins. “Some kind of dirty affair. Sending a man who is not your husband a picture of your naked body. You—”

He shifted over her and she felt, to her utter horror, that he was hard under his zipper. This man who had so rarely had sex with her was aroused. She closed her eyes against this new awful terror.