Текст книги "Everything I Left Unsaid"

Автор книги: Molly O'Keefe

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

I woke up slowly, rolling slightly, only to find my back stuck to whatever I was lying against. My skin peeled as I sat up. Leather. I’d fallen asleep on the leather couch.

There was a soft blue blanket over my very naked body.

My very naked, very…sore body. I felt stretched wide between my legs. The muscles in my back, in my thighs—they felt like they were made out of water.

I felt like I was made out of water.

I pressed my fingers against my lips as if I could hold back the giggle. I wanted to giggle. A giggle was going to happen.

I laid my head back against the cushions and like the seventeen-year-old girl I’d never been—I giggled.

Ho. Ly. Shit. That…had been amazing. Dylan had been amazing.

What I’d had with Hoyt followed—to the letter—what my very uncomfortable high school health teacher had told us about sex. Or procreation. There had been the hardening and the insertion and the ejaculation.

It had been cold and clinical and painful.

What had happened with Dylan? I didn’t even have words for it. But if I’d had a wish list for what sex could be like, Dylan just crossed everything off the list.

I fell sideways back onto the couch, my hands between my legs, where I was warm and sore. Who knew…honest to God…who knew my body was designed to feel so much?

What a fucking miracle that was.

When I turned sixteen, our church got a new pastor. The first time he spoke from the pulpit, Mom and I went to church in the best of our Sunday best. We sat in our pew, right side, third from the back, and waited with bated breath to hear the new guy.

I remember exactly his sermon. Exactly. Tolerance. That faith was not just faith in God, or faith in people who looked like you or were attracted to the opposite sex. Faith was faith in humanity. God loved all of us. And we should do the same.

It had been a revelation to me.

Not so much for Mom. We didn’t go back until that pastor left.

It was weird, my body sore from sex, my mind blown from the power of what I could feel, but at that moment, more than any in the past few years…I missed church.

The power of those two things—the spiritual and the carnal—were connected, like the arc of electricity between heaven and earth.

From behind the cracked-open door that led to Dylan’s garage, there was a thump and a muffled curse. Dylan was up.

I pressed a hand to my heart where it pounded, barely contained by my ribs and my skin. Part of me wanted to vanish. Just…not be here. Not look at him. Not try to make conversation after what had happened between us. I didn’t know how to do that. Not with any grace.

But another part of me, alive and hungry and curious, wanted to do all of that again.

I grabbed my clothes from the floor but they smelled like sex and sweat, so I wrapped the blanket around my body and walked back to the room that was mine.

In the drawers I found a clean set of pajamas. Size small, the tags still on the soft fuchsia tee shirt. And the dark navy flannel pants with the stars and moons and bright yellow suns scattered over them.

They fit. They fit perfectly and they were pretty.

Dylan didn’t pick them out, I got that. Margaret had. For her granddaughter. But they were pretty pajamas with little suns on them and I loved them.

The storm had not stopped. Rain fell in sheets on the windows. Outside it was just a swirl of gray. I looked down out the window and wondered if there was a chance this house might slip right off this mountain.

I wondered if I’d slipped off a mountain.

I’m married.

I watched the rain fall into a dense cloud of mist, where it just vanished.

I’m a married woman.

It was one thing to lie about my name…but I’d just made Dylan a participant in adultery. I swallowed and rested my head against the window. And tried, really, really hard, to convince myself that it didn’t matter. What Dylan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

But it mattered.

And I knew it.

I put on a pair of thick socks I’d found in the top drawer and made my way back across the house and then slipped through the cracked door into his dark garage.

The light was on over his bench, and he sat there in a pair of jeans and boots and nothing else.

He was beautiful, his skin dusted with gold under that light. His muscles flexed and shifted under that skin.

“Dylan?” I said, standing on the cement stoop, three steps up from the floor of his garage.

“You’re awake,” he said. He didn’t turn, the muscles of his arms twitching faster as he finished what he was working on. “Just…one more second.”

In that minute, I honestly didn’t breathe.

But then he turned around, and I blew out my breath as coolly as I could before I got light-headed.

“I was tired.” Awesome. Awesome response. “It was a long night.”

“Sure.”

He was still looking at me. Not quite smiling. Not quite not smiling, either. It made me nervous, that look. Like I was something he was slowly taking apart and putting back together, over and over.

“So…what is all this stuff?” I looked around his garage because I didn’t know what else to do.

“All this stuff is cars,” he said. “Those are tires. Anything else you’re unfamiliar with?”

Oh…I couldn’t. I was too raw for teasing now. “I’m…I’m not…I haven’t done this.”

“Fucked a guy and then talked about cars?”

The laugh barked out of me.

He crossed the room and climbed the three steps, his eyes on mine, burning away the embarrassment and insecurity until all that was left was my heartbeat in my chest and the heat in his eyes.

“Hey,” he said and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Just enough. Just enough that I could taste him. The salt and spice. He’d brushed his teeth and had coffee. I could taste all of him on his lips.

“Hey,” I whispered and kissed him back. Wishing I’d had coffee and brushed my teeth.

He stepped back. “Nice pajamas. I like the suns.” He reached out and touched one of them on the front of my thigh and just like that, I was ready. I was hot and damp and…ready.

“So,” I said, stepping back for just a little distance. “What’s going on here?”

“I fix cars.” He took his own distance, taking the steps down to the floor.

He was being evasive—I knew, because that’s how we were with each other. So, I slowly gathered all those things I knew about him, the crumbs he’d left, and I followed him down the steps to the floor.

“You fix cars and go to parties in tuxedos. You live on a cliff in a beautiful house—”

“Don’t come down here,” he said. “You don’t have shoes.”

He was wearing steel-toed boots. Boots and no shirt.

I glanced down at my feet in the thick wool socks I’d found. My toes were curled over the edge of that cement step, like I was about ready to jump.

“You told me people pay you a lot of money for something stupid.”

“I fix cars.”

“You’re telling me you’re the best-paid mechanic in the world?”

He laughed and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Yeah. Sorta.”

“Dylan…” Please, I wanted to say. Throw the girl whose mind you just scrambled with what will undoubtedly be the best sex of her life a bone. “We just had sex.” What a stupid, inadequate word for what had passed between us. “And I know nothing about you!”

“That’s not true. We…” His throat bobbed and this cavern, this great cathedral of space, shrank to nothing. To zero, and I could hear his heartbeat. The sound of his swallow. “We know plenty about each other.”

Heat exploded between us. His beautiful, scarred lips, my scarred knees. Every car and machine between us—it just incinerated.

What I knew about him I could hold in my palm and when he looked at me like that, it didn’t matter.

“I fix race cars,” he finally said. “Build engines. I…invented a fuel injection valve that…sort of made some money.”

I nodded, fighting a smile. “Sort of.”

“Trust me,” he said. “No one is more surprised than me.”

He walked back over to his bench and I sat down on my step. I was pretty sure that he was going to shoot me down if I tried to talk about the accident, but it was worth a shot. And maybe his mind was a little scrambled too. “After the accident you started fixing cars.”

“Before the accident I started fixing cars. That’s how most drivers start. Souping up the engines on their dads’ old Fords to see how fast they can go before things fall apart.”

I watched him putting tools away in big metal cases, like filing cabinets on wheels. He grabbed greasy rags and threw them into a cloth bin in the corner.

“So,” I said, stepping lightly into this conversation. “When you were a kid, messing around with your dad’s Ford, he didn’t mind?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye because I knew what I was doing, the sleeping dog I was poking at.

Dylan stilled, his back to me. “My dad taught me. I keep forgetting that.”

I pulled the sun on my knee into a fold. Obliterating it.

“Ben said he didn’t have any kids,” I whispered, my voice carrying through the cavern right to him, and he flinched. Just once. But then he started moving again. Pushing himself back into motion.

“Put that together, did you?”

“I thought for a long time you were related to the girl in the fire.”

“Nope. I’m related to the murderer.”

“Dylan? Why would he say he doesn’t have kids?”

“Because he stopped being my pop a long, long time ago.”

“But you didn’t stop being his son?”

Dylan turned. Amazing how inscrutable he was. He could close a door so fast, so hard, there was no chance to get in, no chance to see anything but what he wanted to show.

I nodded like I understood, and the silence between us started to get chilly. “So that makes Max—”

“My brother.”

“The badass you wanted to be like.”

Dylan watched me a long time. “Yeah,” he said.

Looking at Dylan, strong and fierce in this beautiful house, with Margaret and the money implied in all of it, I could not connect the dots between him and Ben. They were so many miles apart.

“Is your mom Maria?” I asked. He could not control his shock. His drop-jawed astonishment.

“How did you know about Mom?”

“Your dad—”

“Ben,” Dylan said with a mean laugh. “That man is no dad.”

“Fine…Ben told me about her.”

Dylan blinked as if he really couldn’t believe what I was saying. “What exactly did he tell you?”

“That he missed her, but they were bad together.”

“Bad together,” he laughed, humorlessly. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Did he hit her?” I asked, wondering how Ben could look me in the eyes when I was telling him about Hoyt. How could he look me in the eyes and have done the exact same thing to another woman?

“No. Good Saint Ben never lifted a finger against her, like that was what made all the other shit he did all right. There is more than one way to hurt a woman, and Ben found them all.”

I did not need to be sermonized on the many ways men could hurt women. I glanced away from the intensity of his eyes. They saw too much, those eyes of his. He started throwing tools back into the toolboxes. Each one landing with a clatter and a bang that made me jump.

“Is it really dangerous at the trailer park?” I asked.

He leaned back against one of the cars and crossed his arms over his bare chest, looking like every single sexual fantasy I never allowed myself to have.

“Ben is an old fucking man. Harmless. But if Max is coming around, then, yes.”

“There are other people there. Families. Young kids.”

“Yep.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“The world is rough all over, Annie. My brother is an outlaw. My father was an outlaw. They are both involved in shit that’s not safe.”

I put my head in my hand. I ran away from Oklahoma to try and get safe. To get away from violence and abuse. I thought I’d done it, in my Febreze-scented escape.

“Annie, listen…” He came over to stand in front of me.

How odd, I thought, to know that skin so well. The taste of it. The feel of it. And to know the man inside of it not even a little. At that moment I let the fact that I didn’t tell him about Hoyt be okay. Cowardly, yes. Awful, sure. But I let it. “I have a house in Charleston. You can stay—”

“No!”

“Why no?”

“Because I don’t know you! I’m not going to live with—”

“Slow down there, killer. I’m not asking you to live with me. I have a house where you can stay. If you’re going to be uptight about it you can pay me rent.”

“I don’t like cities.” My gut made me say that.

“What’s wrong with cities?”

“People.”

He laughed. “That I can understand. You don’t have to tell me right now; you can think about it. But I gotta say, it seems like a pretty easy call to me. Shitty trailer or a beach house in Charleston.”

“It’s a beach house?”

“Oh, that changes your mind?” He laughed.

“I’ve never been to the beach.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

“Jesus Christ, honey. Did you live in a box before you answered that phone?”

The smile died on my face and I ducked my head, rubbing my cheek against my shoulder. I did. I lived in that box. And I smashed it right open.

“Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Thursday. The twenty-fourth.”

“It’s my birthday.”

For a minute he gaped at me.

“Everyone has a birthday,” I said when it seemed his shock went on a bit too long.

“You’re twenty-five? Today?”

I nodded, back to nervously obliterating the sun on my pants, but then he smiled. Not one of his half smiles, or mocking grins. It was a smile that revealed a very real amount of happiness. Of joy, even.

It did not make him more handsome, he was already far too good-looking, but it made him very human. And again, that dangerous affection for this stranger curled through me.

He pushed off the car and…well, he prowled over toward me. Loose-hipped and gleaming, he came to me. To me. Annie McKay. And he bent down, one hand braced on the wall, the other on the railing.

His smile…I swear to God, it was beautiful. Beautiful because it was rare, because of those scarred lips, because it was all for me.

I couldn’t stop myself. I tipped my face up, like a plant toward the sun, and smiled right back.

Softly, sweetly, he kissed me. Again. And again. And again, again. A thousand small breaths across my face. His mouth was delicious and I was starving.

“What do you want for your birthday, baby?” he asked, so low, so quiet, I felt the words more than heard them.

“One more day.” The words came without thought. Without a plan. I wanted one more day in this magical house on the edge of the cliff. “One more day with you,” I said.

I reached up and touched the edge of a scar, a thick, white wrinkle on his neck. He had the Virgin Mary tattooed over his heart. I felt my own buckle in my chest.

And then it’s over. It has to be.

He nodded like he heard me.

“One more day,” he agreed, and those arms swept me up.

For a second I was awkward in his hold. All legs and arms caught up between our bodies. I jerked away and he gave me a quick jostle.

“You want me to drop you?”

“No…I’m just…This is awkward.”

“Relax.” Another kiss. Another jostle and my arms were out and around his neck and my legs were around his waist and suddenly, it was the most natural thing.

I could feel the skin of his waist against my legs, his neck on the inside of my elbows.

This electricity between us found new routes. The tops of my ears burned, the tips of my fingers. The back of my throat.

He carried me through his house, past my room, through the last door at the end of the hallway. It was his room and I barely noticed. I was too busy feeling his lower ribs vibrate as he breathed.

There was fine hair at the nape of his neck. Soft when I stroked it one way, like the bristle of a brush when I touched it the other way.

I could do that all day.

My twenty-four-hour birthday wish.

Something cold touched the back of my thighs, and he flipped on a light and I blinked into the reflected brightness in the mirrors. We were in his bathroom. A bathroom so big my trailer could fit in it.

His kiss lingered. His hands slid from my ass to my waist and my shoulders and I twitched. I did the same to him. I took all the touches I didn’t take earlier. I ran my hands all over his body. All that silky bare skin, the thick muscles beneath it. My fingers brushed over the scars on his ribs and he twitched.

“Does…does that hurt?”

“It’s not comfortable,” he said and kissed me again. I kept my hands away from his scars.

When he pulled back, his lips were swollen and damp. Pink.

I reached up and touched them with my fingers. “You have a pretty mouth,” I said.

He sucked my finger into his mouth and then slid back, until it fell from his lips. “I have a girl’s mouth,” he said. “A cocksucker mouth.”

“What?” I cried.

“Pop’s words,” he said.

“What a stupid thing to say,” I muttered and pulled him back toward me. I touched his mouth, all the edges, the soft curves, the hard edge of the scar tissue, and he twitched and tried to pull back but I put my legs around him, keeping him still. “You’ve got a beautiful mouth.” I had no idea if my opinion mattered, but I wanted to say it. I gave him one hard, quick kiss and let him go.

Smiling, he reached into a glass-lined shower and turned on the faucet. Water thundered down from a big, round showerhead and the glass near the floor immediately got foggy.

There was a bathtub next to the shower, one of those big Jacuzzi ones. And a toilet beside that. Outside the window over it, there was only sky.

“Are we taking a shower?” I asked, excited by the idea.

“You are. And you’re going to take your time.”

“Are you telling me I stink?”

“No. I’m telling you I need twenty minutes to get things organized.”

“For what?”

“Your birthday.”

He grabbed the hem of my shirt and lifted it up over my head. This was another strange minute when I kind of missed my long hair. It would feel good falling down over my bare shoulders. It would probably look good, reflected back in all these mirrors. And I sort of…I sort of wanted him to see it. To see part of the old me and find it desirable. The parts of me that no one found desirable. I wondered what he would think—of my red hair. My Del Monte cap. My cowboy boots.

The steam was filling the room now, and when he reached around me to pull at my pants, I braced my arms behind me and lifted my hips.

He smiled down at the red hair between my legs, his thumb stroked through it, and I looked down to the see the red curls there around his thumb.

Other women shaved. I didn’t. I’d never been waxed. I trimmed the hair because it was hot and I felt cleaner when I did it.

“Why’d you dye your hair?” he asked.

Because I’m running from my husband who tried to kill me.

Reality was intrusive. A bully pounding on the door, and I ignored it as best I could.

Twenty-four hours and then I’d go back to reality.

“I just wanted a change,” I lied.

His thumb slid deeper and I spread my legs wider, lifting my hips higher, jerking when he hit my clit and then lingered there, rolling it against his thumb.

“Dylan…” I breathed, leaning back against the mirror behind me.

He growled but then he stepped back, took a deep breath. “Get in the shower,” he said.

“Now?” I blinked.

“Preparations,” he said. He pressed a quick, hard kiss to my shoulder and then was gone.

The difference between every other shower I’ve ever had and Dylan’s shower was the difference between what happened between Dylan and me on the couch and what happened alone on my bed.

The shower was huge, the hot water endless. And it came out of that showerhead like a spring rain.

I was considering moving into that shower. Maybe I could sublet it.

There was a razor in the shower and masculine-smelling soap and shampoo. I used it all, until I smelled like Dylan. I shaved my armpits and my legs and then, staring down at my pubic hair¸ I decided why not.

Using plenty of shaving cream and sitting on the bench on the far end of the shower where the water didn’t hit me, I shaved my pubic hair. Not all of it.

Still Annie McKay after all.

But some. The edges. The top and then down between my legs. I rinsed off the shaving cream and felt…bare. Deliciously bare. Like a harem girl in the historical romance I’d read.

The hot water turned tepid and I cranked it off, opening the glass door to a room full of steam. When it cleared, I found a towel and a black robe on the marble counter where I’d been sitting.

He’d snuck in while I’d been shaving. I wondered what he’d seen. I wondered if he’d watched. Between my legs I felt puffy. Totally different.

The robe was silk and way too big and even though I rolled up the sleeves and looped the belt around my waist twice, I was still swimming in it.

But it was silky and perfect against my skin and Dylan had laid it out for me, so why would I change? The bedroom when I came out of the bathroom was dark. A king-size bed covered in a dark duvet monopolized the room. There was a dresser on a far wall. A closet in the corner, with the door left partially open. Inside I could see suits. Three or four suits. A tuxedo. I stepped forward and reached into the closet, touching the black sleeve of the tuxedo jacket. There was no label inside, which I gathered to mean he’d had it made custom. And the fabric was the softest, finest thing I’d ever touched.

One day, I thought, looking at that jacket, pushing aside the anxiety it gave me. I have one day in this magical house. Try not to ruin it. The door to the rest of the house was open and I could hear music from the kitchen. And I could smell food. Good food.

My stomach got excited. It had been many hours since the cornbread I’d eaten with peanut butter (a terrible combination) for dinner.

I got even more excited when I stepped into that kitchen and found Dylan drinking beer and putting food out on that barn table. He was listening to music I didn’t recognize. But I never recognized music.

“Wow, these are some serious preparations,” I said, trying to be light to hide all my misgivings. My nerves. The nonstop pounding of reality.

“Hey!” He looked up, his eyes taking in the dark robe and my damp hair. “That looks real good on you.” I did a little preen, pretending to poof up my hair or something. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked.

“You have anything in a bucket?” He shot me a quizzical look and I waved it off. “I’ll have whatever is easy.” My pat answer.

“Well…” He turned and opened up the silver fridge. “Margaret took this shit pretty seriously, so I have a fully stocked fridge right now. But I think we’ll start with…” He pulled out a big bottle. “This.”

“Champagne?”

“Only the best.”

I almost told him I’d never had champagne before, but I thought maybe there’d been enough revealing how little I knew of the world.

I sat down at the table while he opened the champagne.

“What is all this?” I asked, looking at the food he’d set out.

“That,” he pointed with the champagne bottle toward a plate, “is some kind of cheese that you are supposed to eat with those kinds of crackers. I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. Margaret did this.”

There was a bowl of olives on the table and I ate one. There was a pit in it. The pit must make it fancy. As discreetly as I could I took it out of my mouth and placed it in a little bowl that must be there for just that reason.

“Margaret came back while I was in the shower?”

“No, I imagine she came back hours ago. She lives in another house on the property. I called her when you were in the shower.”

“This is quite a compound you’ve got here,” I said, eating the cheese with the appropriate cracker. It tasted expensive. I was used to Velveeta and stale Ritz.

The champagne cork popped and he handed me a flute. And I sat in a mountain home in a silk robe, drinking champagne, and truthfully, I didn’t know how I got there.

Do not, I thought again, ruin this.

Dylan had put on a shirt while I was in the shower. A dark plaid button-up shirt, with most of the buttons undone. The sleeves were rolled up revealing his forearms, and somehow that was even sexier than his bare chest.

I put the cracker and cheese down on a plate and took a sip of my champagne. The champagne was amazing. Like sweet-and-sour sunlight. I took another sip.

“You don’t like it?” he asked, glancing down at the cheese.

“It’s good,” I lied.

He half-smiled, half-frowned at me. “You can say you don’t like it,” he said. “You can actually say, ‘Dylan, this cheese sucks.’ ”

I would never. Not ever.

“It’s good,” I said with a laugh. “Strong.”

He tipped his head toward me. “You can change your mind, you know.”

“About what?”

“About staying.”

“Why…why would you say that? I don’t want to change my mind.” I knocked back half the champagne in one long gulp. Did he want me to change my mind? The thought made me feel incredibly naked under the robe and I pulled the fabric up into my lap.

“You seem wound up.”

Wound up. Right. For some reason the voice in my head, the voice that kept wanting to remind me that I was married, would not shut up.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“I don’t turn out birthday girls on their birthdays.”

I thought of the brunette I saw in those pictures, that beautiful girl who clung to his side, the two of them looking like they were in the pages of a catalog. A catalog where you could buy a richer, more exciting life.

I handed him my now empty champagne flute.

“More?”

“Please.”

He filled my glass back up and handed it over to me, and then pulled a tray out of the oven. He tipped the tray onto a plate, and little pastries rolled off onto the plate. Two landed on the floor and he grabbed them with his bare hand, shoving one in his mouth.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “That’s hot.”

He put the plate down by my hip and ate the other pastry. Watching him do all these small domestic things on my behalf, seeing the trouble and expense he’d gone to for me and my birthday, made me feel worse.

“Is this where you talked to me?” I asked, twirling the champagne glass in my hands. “At this house?”

“Yeah. I mean, usually. I have another building here. A bigger garage with an office. I talked to you a few times there.”

“This house, another garage, and Margaret’s house? All here?”

“I own the mountain, Annie.”

I glanced away, my breath skittering around my lungs. He owns the damn mountain.

“Truthfully,” he said, “I rarely leave this mountain.”

“You go to parties in tuxedos.”

“Yeah, I think that will be the last one I’m invited to. I pissed off one too many people.”

“Were you always like this?” I asked.

“A hermit?” He laughed.

“No.”

“Rich? No. Not at all,” he said.

“Alone.” He seemed intrinsically alone. Self-contained and solitary. Even surrounded by people, he would seem alone.

“I’m hardly alone,” he said. “I’ve got a crew of guys here every day. My business partner. Margaret’s here constantly.”

I wondered if he believed the lie, but I did not. I knew alone. I’d been painfully alone and I only realized it now, after a month at the Flowered Manor. It only took a few friendships of exceedingly shallow depths to show me how alone I’d been. And not by choice.

“Why me?” I asked. The question surprised us both.

“Why you, what?”

“Why’d you do all this with me?” His face was blank, like he didn’t understand what I was asking. “Was it a power thing? Was it like a…I don’t know…a test? A joke—”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Annie? A joke?” He sounded offended.

“I mean look at you, Dylan. Look at all that you have. You could get down off this mountain and have any woman you wanted and instead…you were having phone sex with some stranger who could barely make rent on her shitty trailer in a shitty trailer park. And my guess is you knew that. You knew I was living in that trailer from the very beginning, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I knew, but—”

“So was it some kind of game to play around with the poor girl?” What did he call it that night, virgin kink? Was this poverty kink?

“You think any of that matters to me? What I have and what you don’t?”

“I have no idea what matters to you,” I said, and he blinked.

“Well, that shit doesn’t.”

“So…why me?”

He finished what was left in his champagne glass and then filled it up. He gestured to me to finish my glass.

“A little liquid courage for the birthday girl,” he said, sounding…dark. Angry. As if my questions had wounded him. I drained my champagne and held my glass out for more. “That first phone call, I knew you were lying about living in that trailer. You are a shitty liar.”

Oh, I thought, you are so wrong. So impossibly wrong. You have no idea the lies I’m telling.

“You kept doing this thing, every time we talked. You’d get scared and be about to hang up, but then…it was like you forced yourself not to be scared anymore. To keep talking to me. And every conversation I’d push a little harder, ask you to do more, and you’d…keep coming back for more. Over and over again and…Fuck, Annie. Watching that, being a part of that kind of bravery. It was exciting. Addictive.”

“You didn’t laugh?” I asked. “You didn’t hang up and laugh at me.”

“Never.” It was a solemn vow from him and my nipples got hard. My body wet. “Every time you called me I felt so damn lucky.”

He finished his glass of champagne and stepped over toward me. His hands on his hips. “Now, why me?”

I stared at him blankly. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why’d you do that with me?”

I took a sip of champagne and it fizzed through me, so I took another. And then one more. “I like your voice. And…” I held out my glass. “I like your champagne.”

Silent, he poured more champagne into my glass.

“Tell me, Annie. The truth.”

Oh, the truth. Wouldn’t that be something? What would happen if I just opened my mouth and told him the truth?

“You asked me if I was okay. Every time,” I said, watching the bubbles explode in my glass instead of watching him. “And you apologized. And you seemed to…care about me and I was a total stranger to you. I felt safe,” I said.

“You are safe.”

I gave him an arch look. That was not the song he was singing earlier, urging me to leave the trailer park.

“With me,” he clarified. “You are safe. I won’t hurt you, Annie.”

I think I’m already hurt, I thought. I think I’m bleeding and I don’t even know it.

This was, without a doubt, the nicest thing any man had ever done for me. Ever. The champagne, the disgusting cheese. It was all so kind. It was the most trouble. The most care.

And I didn’t deserve it.

I was lying.

I was married.

I knew I should just leave. Hadn’t I gotten what I wanted? That something amazing I knew he’d be able to give me—I’d gotten it. He’d touched me. Kissed me the way that a woman should be kissed. With passion and care. Some of the ugliness of my life before was wiped away by the last few hours.