Текст книги "Everything I Left Unsaid"

Автор книги: Molly O'Keefe

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

For a second those wide edges of my life didn’t connect; anger slipped out of my hands. And I didn’t know what I was doing here. Or how in the world I’d gotten here. To this house. To this man.

“Layla?”

At the sound of his voice—so familiar, so achingly familiar—all the pieces of my life slammed back together.

Helpless, I closed my eyes and let that voice work its way through my body.

“You okay?” Even that familiar question was somehow bittersweet.

He’d spun around, shifting back out of the pool of light so his face and half his chest were in shadow. The shadows were dense and maybe that was easier…maybe that was better. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew they were watching me. His hands were in fists at his knees.

“Is this where you bring all the women you kidnap?” I asked, coming out swinging, for once in my life.

“No,” he said. “I don’t bring anyone here.”

“Well, aren’t I a special snowflake,” I said through lungs that felt as if they were collapsing in on each other.

“Layla,” he sighed.

Suddenly, I wished very much that I had not sent him that picture.

I felt painfully bared to him, wholly exposed. I’d sent him a naked picture of myself. My pale, thin, boyish body. All my flaws, all my imperfections, my feminine failures—he’d seen them.

And he sat there in the shadows, unwilling to show me anything of himself.

The distance between us throbbed. With anger. With lust. Questions and huge fucking secrets.

Beneath my ribs, I ached. Between my legs I ached. My fucking blood ached at the sight of him. I took a deep breath and clenched my hands together in front of me, as if I needed something to hold onto. And maybe I did. I was so adrift.

“I’d like to go home.”

“You can when I know it’s safe.”

“You are not the boss of me.” Really, could I be any more idiotic?

“When you’re in danger,” he said, “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.”

“Why?” I asked, baffled by this protectiveness. By his attention. From the first phone call to now, I didn’t understand. Why me?

I didn’t want his concern to mean anything. I didn’t want to be warmed by that in some way. But anger was a blanket that could not cover all of me and my exposed parts soaked it up. I was helpless against that kind of care, I had no…defenses against someone’s worry. For me.

He was silent, there in the shadows. Like he had no intention of explaining himself.

“I don’t need you to do that.”

“Not your choice,” he said, with a shrug. As if my desires were irrelevant in the equation.

“Well, it’s hardly yours. I am not your business, Dylan.”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

A few phone calls, some drunk texts, and two ill-advised pictures—that’s all we had between us. A handful of paltry, inconsequential things. How in the world did they add up to something so damn heavy?

“You didn’t want to see me, remember?” I whispered, revealing some of my hurt. “You ended it.”

His silence was agreement. Yes, he was saying. Yes, I ended it. Yes, I didn’t want to see you.

“I didn’t ask to be brought here,” I said, sounding shrill. His silence was making me crazy. Shut up, I told myself. Shut up and forget about him.

“You can go home tomorrow.”

We were at an impasse. Forty feet between us, and every inch was lined with barbed wire and land mines. And it would be easy to turn around and leave. Wait out the hours until that driver came back to take me home.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just walk away and not…ever have seen him.

“Come out of the shadows,” I said.

He rolled toward the bench, his back to me. “Go on to bed, Layla. It’s been a long—”

“Stop!” I cried. The anger and fear and hurt exploded out of me. “Just stop. I’ve been bossed around, thrown into cars, driven to some kind of mountaintop fortress to…you. You, Dylan. You ended it and I still wound up here. To you!” I kept spitting out that word, like it somehow meant something. Like on the stupid weird map of my life he had been some kind of spectacular surprise destination. “I’m exhausted, I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m…” I cut myself off. I was not going to admit that I was turned on. Though, undoubtedly he had to know. He always seemed to know. He knew over a phone and now I was standing here, panting, my body shaking…God. Damn it. He had all the cards and I was standing here barefoot in my pajamas. If there was ever a moment I longed for a bra, this was it. My nipples hurt, they were so hard. I knew he could see them.

“Inevitable,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m not in the mood for games!” I yelled.

I couldn’t see him, but I could tell he was smiling at me. I knew what his voice sounded like when he was smiling. “Games are what you like. Dirty little games. That’s all we’ve got, Layla.”

I fought back the surge of memories of all of our “games,” because I was not going to be distracted. And he was trying to marginalize it, and what we did—what happened between us—couldn’t fit within any margins I’d ever known.

“I know about the accident. The fire. I went to the library and looked you up.”

“It’s not about the fire.” He lifted his hand to the back of his neck like he was rubbing sore muscles there. And I got the sense that he was lying. “The fire is nothing. There are a lot of things I haven’t told you. Things you’d just be better off not knowing.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, Dylan,” I yelled. “Let’s start with something! Let’s start with you telling me one true thing.”

He looked down at his hands, shadows playing over his beautiful body. “You are…beautiful. You look exactly like I thought you would.”

I gasped, the words so unexpected they slid right through my ribs. Right into the meat and blood and bone of me.

“I never imagined you,” I said.

“Probably smart,” he laughed.

“You just…were you. Just Dylan.” Just everything.

He lifted his head, watching me, and I stood there with nothing. In the face of all that he had, the slimness of my existence, its utter weightlessness, was shocking. But I was out to even the scales. Just a little. Just enough that I could look at myself in the mirror tomorrow. Just enough so I’d know that I’d fought for something. My own worth in this game we’d played. I wasn’t a pawn. I was a person.

“And I’m pretty much done with other people telling me what’s best. So, either stand up, or I’m leaving.”

“Layla—”

I turned for the door.

“There are bears out there!”

“I’m not scared of bears,” I snapped over my shoulder, stepping into the living room. Maybe I’d find some shoes in the closet. If I could find the closet.

“Stop,” he yelled from the garage. “Stop, girl. You’re gonna…fine. Fine, Layla! Come back.”

I stepped back into the garage, the door closed tight behind me, my arms over my chest. My feet were so cold they were numb at this point.

Slowly, he stood up from the shadows. He sort of unfurled from the chair. He wasn’t tall. But he was big. He wore a plain white tee shirt over wide shoulders and a big chest that tapered down to a lean waist. His faded blue jeans were low on his hips, held up by a thick leather belt.

I sucked in a breath, light-headed. His head was still in the shadows and he reached over across the bench, his biceps a beautiful gilded curve, and then he tilted the lamp up so it hit his face.

And he turned, facing me full-on.

The scars were pink and shiny up the side of his neck to his ear. The scar tissue spread across the left side of his face like kudzu, touching the corner of his mouth.

But the rest of his face was the same as those pictures in the articles. Striking. Masculine. Those lips…oh God, those lips. The shiny taut edge only made them more compelling. More beautiful.

“Happy?” he said, tilting his head so I could see the extent of the scars. He was uncomfortable, standing there like that in the light. On display.

“No,” I whispered. “I’m not happy.”

I’d thought, somehow, that it would be so much worse. Because the news coverage just stopped. Because he was shrouded in mystery.

But they were just scars. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I’m sorry for the pain you must have felt. And the fear you must have lived through. I’m sorry that happened to you. But those scars did nothing to change my feelings for him—conflicted as they were.

“Is that why you stopped talking to me?”

He shook his head, the shadows shifting over his face.

“You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?” I asked, knowing the answer before he said a word.

I’d told him things I’d never told anyone before. Things I hadn’t even conceptualized. But he’d shared nothing of himself, because that made sense. I was the one who’d reached for more. Who’d felt so alone that he’d seemed like a friend.

I had no reason to feel betrayed, but I did.

I looked down at my hands, the calluses on the tips of my fingers. Part of my thumbnail was turning black. I’d smashed it the other day trying to get the damn engine on the mower to work. But this…this thing/not-thing between us. It hurt worse.

“Is Ben okay?” I whispered. “Will you at least tell me that much?”

“Probably; he usually is.”

“Who is Max?”

“A dangerous guy. A…very dangerous guy.”

“You know a lot of dangerous guys.”

Something hard slipped over his face. Something…scary. And I stiffened. An old instinct braced me.

“You should go back to your room, Layla,” he said, sitting back down on the stool, rolling belly up to the bench. I was being dismissed and frankly, he was probably right. But I was pretty done with being bossed tonight.

“I’m not going to do that, Dylan. You don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, but I deserve to know what is happening at the trailer park.” My home.

He spun back out and his eyes, full of hot knowledge, touched me. My shoulders, my stomach. My bruised knees. My breasts.

For a second I thought he was trying to scare me away. With sex. Like he was threatening me. If I stayed, he’d what? Fuck the hell out of me?

Stupid man.

That was not going to scare me away.

Interest, sexual and sharp, flooded me. Warmed me, from the inside out.

“Max is a part of the same motorcycle club Ben used to be a part of,” he said.

“The Skulls.”

He nodded.

“Did you…are you in the club?”

“No, I have nothing to do with the club.” He picked up a little screwdriver and fiddled with it like he was bored or needed distraction, and I wanted to stomp across that floor and shake him. “Most of the time Ben and Max have nothing to do with each other either. I don’t know why he was there.”

“Joan, my neighbor? Do you know her?”

“The stripper?” he asked with that crooked smile. “I only know what you’ve told me.”

“She’s actually a DEA agent. Undercover. Did you know that?”

The screwdriver clattered against the bench when he dropped it and I wanted to smile at him. At his surprise. It was nice to know something he didn’t. “No. I had no idea.”

“Do you know why she’d be undercover?”

“Had to be something about the club,” he said with a shrug and then winced, reaching up to pinch the muscles at the base of his neck. I fought the urge to ask if he was all right. I fought the urge to care.

“She said I should call you. She knew about you.”

“You didn’t tell her—”

“That we were having phone sex?” I spat the words because I was pissed. I was pissed because he wasn’t mad. Because he was acting like this was no big deal. “No. I didn’t. But somehow when this Max guy showed up she knew I should call you. Why?”

The tension in his silence was razor sharp, and whatever he was going to say, I had the sense I should brace for it. Duck and cover, like when I was a kid and we practiced tornado drills at school.

“I own the trailer park,” he said.

I swayed backwards, putting a hand against the wall to catch myself before I fell over.

He jumped to his feet, like he was about catch me, and I shook my head—I couldn’t have him touch me. Not at all. And so he froze. Just froze.

“Layla?”

I flinched and turned my face away. Mortification swallowed me whole.

“Then you…you know. All about me.” That I’m lying about my name. That I showed up with bruises around my neck covered in a stupid, silly scarf. That half my trailer is paid for with manual labor in the damn field.

“I own the trailer park because of Ben. The rest of it…doesn’t matter to me.”

“You don’t know—”

“What?” he asked, stepping out of that freeze toward me.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Now who is lying?”

I laughed, throwing my hands up in the air. “Does it matter?”

We stared at each other, long and hard.

“I guess you’re right,” he said and turned away from me. “Go on back to your room, Layla.”

I was being sent to my room like a child. And it would have been the right thing—I should have done what he said, like a good girl, and gone silently back to that bed and stared at the ceiling until he decided to let me go.

But somehow I couldn’t.

“My name is not Layla,” I said. “I lied. All along. I lied.”

He turned back toward me.

“I know.”

“What?”

“Well, I figured you told me some lies to protect yourself. You wanted to be called Layla.” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem to be any of my business.”

None of his business. Of course. That, too, shouldn’t hurt. But it did.

It was like running into a wall at top speed. “And they worked so well, didn’t they?”

“You don’t have to protect yourself from me, Layla.”

My laugh was ripped from my stomach, nearly a sob. “You don’t know anything about what I have done to protect myself.”

“Then tell me.” He was the sharpened edge of a blade, bright and awful. Violence waiting to happen. Not to me, but on my behalf. I could set him against the world.

For a moment I could barely hold onto my secret.

I turned on shaking legs and went up the steps to the door, desperate to get out of there.

DYLAN

It shouldn’t matter. On the gigantic pile of lies the two of them had told each other, that she’d lied about her name should not matter at all. And it hadn’t up until this moment.

This moment, watching her shaking and walking away from him, it mattered.

He’d understood all along that she was doing it to keep herself safe. Because he was a stranger; because the things they were doing were so outrageous to her.

He understood better than most the desire for anonymity.

But it wasn’t just Dylan and what they did together that scared her.

Something else had her deep down scared.

He knew the look of terror, the smell of it. The way it could make your body shake like a fever.

Don’t, he told himself again. The plan had been to get her out of that park, bring her here where she was safe, but never let her see him. Never let himself see her. But he’d blown that, and the image of her was seared now into his brain. Small and thin but long-legged, white-blond hair, and eyes the color of powder-blue paint.

The smart move was to let her go.

But he couldn’t.

Keeping her here was a mistake. For her, potentially a dangerous one.

She’d lied to him. She was scared. Very scared.

And that changed everything.

ANNIE

I opened the door from the garage to the main part of the house, surprised to see that morning was being ushered in on the billowing clouds of a storm.

Thunder boomed and the air smelled like electricity. No rain, though. Mother Nature was only setting the loud and violent stage.

Margaret was in the kitchen, preparing food, and at the sound of the door to the garage opening, she turned with a tight smile that quickly vanished when she saw me.

“What are you doing in the garage?” she asked, as if I’d been snooping around the place.

“Talking to Dylan. Turns out he was here after all.”

Her face was unreadable, but everything about her gave the impression of being shocked.

“Is he in there?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

For a second a smile burst through that wall of impassivity. And then it was gone. I didn’t know what that smile meant. I didn’t know what anything meant anymore.

Margaret set down a pot of coffee on a table full of food. There was homemade bread set out with butter and jam beside it. Cut-up melon and strawberries filled the bottom of a pretty pottery bowl. There were cinnamon rolls. Fresh ones. Still steaming.

If my stomach weren’t in knots, I’d be all over that.

“I’m sorry I don’t have much for you.” Margaret looked down at the food like it had failed her.

“It’s a feast.” I picked up a strawberry like I had an interest in eating it, but my stomach rolled over at the idea. So, I just held it, picking off the green leaves, one by one.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

Margaret, in a pale yellow shirt and a pair of black leggings, poured me a mug. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Black.” I drank it black because it was cheaper. And faster. Because it didn’t bother anyone. “Actually, can I have some sugar? Both, actually.”

Margaret fixed up the coffee and handed a dark blue heavy pottery mug to me. “I don’t understand people who drink coffee black. It’s like they don’t want to enjoy themselves.”

Huh. Score one for Margaret.

I took a sip of the coffee and nearly grimaced. It was too sweet. And not hot enough with the milk. Come to find out, I liked it the way I’d always had it. Go figure.

“Margaret,” a soft voice said, and suddenly Dylan was behind me. I could feel him there in the nerve endings along my back. The hair on my neck stood up.

Him. That’s what every part of my body said. Him.

And mine.

I put the mug on the table before it fell from my fingers.

“Go shopping,” he said.

“For what?” Margaret asked, putting her hands on her hips and giving the impression of a woman at her wit’s end. A mother, actually—she gave the impression of being a mother. Frazzled but affectionate.

“I don’t care. You’re always telling me my house needs stuff; go get some.”

“You have a guest. Who has had a rough night, and you want me to—”

“I want you to get out of the house,” he said, and my skin shrank. It squeezed me tight and I couldn’t breathe.

“Dylan,” she said, her façade cracking. Her worry visible, but not for me. No, her worry was entirely reserved for Dylan.

“It’s fine,” he told her. “I’m fine.”

Right, I nearly laughed, like I was going to hurt him? Chip that steel edge of his? Impossible.

“All righty!” Margaret said, and she opened up a small closet and grabbed her purse, stomping around a little to make her point. “But I’m using your money and filling up your fridge.”

“Go gambling, I don’t care. Just be gone.”

Dylan walked past me to shut the door behind Margaret.

The door closed with a heavy, loud click and he turned to face me.

Dylan.

Those lips like pillows. The taut, shiny flesh at his thick neck. The scars looked worse here, in this light. But I had no reaction to them, besides concern. They were not repellant or scary. They just were.

His dark, heavy-lidded eyes were unreadable and they walked all over me. My hair, my eyes, the neckline of my camisole, my legs beneath my shorts.

I felt naked under that gaze, my clothes stripped away.

“Tell me your name. Your real name.”

“No.”

His face split into a grin, and I remembered he liked my opposition. My sharp edges. This was how things between us started and I did not have the strength to go down this road.

“It’s Annie,” I said. “Annie McKay.”

He blinked. Again. Smiled a little.

“That suits you.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. Obstinate even when I didn’t want to be.

“I need to know why,” he said. “Why you lied.”

“Does it matter? You knew all along apparently. It was the most useless lie ever told.”

“It matters!” he yelled. “Because, you’re here, Annie. It’s like you said: despite everything both of us did to make sure that never happened, you’re here. It’s inevitable, and so, I would like to know why you lied. Even when you knew it was safe. What are you scared of?”

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?”

“I do.” I opened my mouth to argue but he held up his hand. “And no more lies, Annie—you want to stay too.”

I did, but hadn’t I been reckless enough? Wasn’t it time to go back to being Annie McKay?

“No. I need to find out if Ben is okay. If Joan—”

“Call.”

“What?”

“Use the phone…Call…what’s his name at the desk?”

“Kevin. He’s your employee, isn’t he?” My words were wasps, stingers out. I wanted to touch him and wound him. Every breath I pulled into my lungs sizzled. Burned.

Anger was no stranger to me. I lived with anger. A low-level seethe every minute. An anger I’d had to swallow over and over again. Because while I might be angry, I couldn’t show that anger. Showing anything but a bland and smiling face would get me hurt.

Never, not with my mom and certainly never with Hoyt, had I been allowed to behave this way.

Childish and petulant. Pissy.

It was fucking revelatory. A delight. It felt like I’d unbuttoned a pair of too tight pants. Pants that had been suffocating me.

“It’s a means to an end, Annie. Easier to keep an eye on Ben.”

“Why do you need to keep an eye on Ben? Were you related to that girl in the fire?”

“Why are you twenty-four years old and never touched yourself before?”

He was not going to pull a single punch. If I stayed, it was open season on my secrets.

From his back pocket he pulled out a phone and looked up a number before handing it to me. “Call him. Make sure your friends are okay.”

I pressed call on the screen and walked back toward my room.

“Flowered Manor RV Park.” It was Kevin.

“Kevin,” I said. “It’s Annie. I’m calling to make sure everything is okay.”

“Well, we got some power lines down because of the storm, but other than that everything is okay.”

“Last night…Ben?”

“He’s fine. Came in this morning before the rain to get a newspaper. Grumpy as a cuss. But that’s usual.”

“And Joan?”

“Haven’t seen her.”

“The guy on the motorcycle?”

“I heard about that. No sign of him this morning. Where are you?”

“I’m…” Christ. Where am I? “At a friend’s.”

“You have friends?”

“Very funny. But that guy last night…he didn’t do anything?”

“He was loud, apparently. Caused some trouble and then he left.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You stay dry,” he said. “And indoors. Not fit for man or beast out there.”

“Thank you, Kevin.”

I hung up and cowardly felt like hiding in the room.

Because Dylan wanted me to stay and I…I wanted to stay. Well, that wasn’t the total truth. My body wanted to stay. And my body ached for him. I felt like those phone calls between us were a promise, like the storm rolling in over the valley. And I was flush with the potential to make good on that promise.

My head was trying to make a case for getting the hell out of here.

You are alone in an isolated cabin with a man you don’t really know.

I knew enough though, didn’t I? Enough to know that if I stayed, something amazing would happen. He would touch me. Kiss me. Make me come. And not by myself. Not alone in a shitty trailer on the edge of a swamp.

The need for connection—for what we had on the phone to be made real. Physical. It was all that mattered.

I was Annie McKay, and I could go back to my strange, hollow, friendless existence later. I could go back to hiding and waiting later.

I did not think about Hoyt. My husband.

Marriage, I decided, was not the word for what I had.

Another time I would figure out what word fit. Another day.

But right now…Dylan.

In the end it wasn’t a decision. Dylan was an instinct. An urge, like a tide in my blood.

I would do this. I would have this.

And then I’d forget it.

I went back into the kitchen to find him standing in front of the windows, watching the storm. The rain and the clouds. The flash and crackle of lightning, spanning the distance between heaven and earth. A link—electric and momentary—between the two.

“Everyone okay?” he asked without turning around.

“Yes. They’re fine. Apparently, Max left without doing anything.”

He made a low assenting noise in his throat.

I set the phone down on the table and clutched my shaking fingers together. “Now what?”

Lead me, I thought. Lead me like you’ve always led me.

He turned, his face, that nose, those lips, the edges of the scar there on his neck.

Dylan.

“Now, take off your clothes.”