The gearbox design was done, his team was manufacturing the prototype, and Dylan should be collapsed, face-first on his bed, beginning to sleep the first of two days away.
But instead, Dylan stood at the windows, looking out at the black night.
There was a glimmer of a campfire on the mountains on the other side of his valley, just visible through the dark trees.
He used to camp with his brother. Well, not so much camping as sleeping outside when shit got bad with his parents. But Max had made it seem like an adventure.
Max. He pressed his forehead against the glass. Why am I thinking about Max?
He’d put these memories, these thoughts away. Because they hurt. Because they made him angry. Sad. Thinking about Max led to missing him. And nothing good ever came of that.
I’m tired, he thought. Exhausted. That’s why he was thinking of Max. And Layla. Thoughts of her were a burning coal in the center of his brain. A constant hum while he’d been retooling the design.
Was she still at the trailer park? Was she okay?
He couldn’t outrun thoughts that something might have happened to her. He couldn’t outrun the fact that he wanted to hear her voice again. Wanted that brief and strange moment of intimacy repeated. Again. And again.
The usual chorus of dissent was too tired to stage an intervention. He knew all the reasons why Layla was a bad idea. He just didn’t care anymore.
This is fucking idiotic, he thought and finally grabbed the phone, because he couldn’t stand himself anymore. Just call her.
He paused with his thumb over her number on the screen.
It was very nearly dawn. Phone calls at this time were only scary.
And I made a promise.
She had to call him. It was the only way it could work.
Resigned, he tucked his phone back into his pocket. Margaret had made him some dinner before she left and it was bubbling away on the stove.
Margaret was his business partner Blake’s mother. And somehow the care and feeding of Dylan had slipped under her umbrella. She was his half-cook, half-housekeeper, all pain in the ass. Though he imagined she was exactly what a mother would be like, if one managed to get a good one.
But as good as whatever she’d cooked smelled, he wasn’t hungry. Not for food.
Two years since he’d ended things with Jennifer. He was twenty-nine years old and he lived like a monk. Margaret said it was because he had trust issues. He didn’t argue. Though Margaret was implying that he didn’t trust other people.
Which was true—to a point.
The person he really didn’t trust was himself.
What would he do to someone as innocent as Layla? How would the blood and dirt on his hands ruin her?
But Layla didn’t know anything about him. The accident. His past. His money.
She knew nothing. And her voice had still broken with interest and desire.
That’s what he couldn’t shake.
It was obvious she’d lied to him about not living at the trailer park. Probably her name, too. So maybe he wouldn’t tell her about himself. Those things he didn’t want anyone to know. He wouldn’t lie; he just wouldn’t tell her.
If she was going to pretend to be someone else, so would he.
As long as she didn’t find out his last name, or what he’d done, he could be anyone.
Suddenly the ache was back in his flesh. In his blood.
Thinking about her—the potential of her, the potential of who he could be with her—he was hard, again.
He sighed and put his head against his fist where it rested on the window. It was dark out there, the only light the bright spark of that campfire in the distance. And it was dark in his house.
It was dark in him. Always had been.
How easy it would be to lick his hand, slide it into his pants, and take care of this ache. Hard and fast, until at least for a brief bright moment, he could let himself go. Let all of it go.
But he didn’t much like easy.
He didn’t question how he knew it, but Layla would call him.
And he would wait for her.
But perhaps he would send her something. Just to move things along.
ANNIE
The next afternoon, there were sixteen bags of garbage stacked out near the road for trash pickup. Blistering and sunburnt, I stumbled back to my trailer only to find, there on my stoop, three giant tomatoes, each the size of my fist, and a small jar of mayonnaise.