fire. High on painkillers, staring down at his body like it was meat. Like he was somewhere buried inside of it, or floating above but not at all a part of it.
Not a part of anything.
“Get out of here,” Blake said. “You’re a fucking mess.”
He was. He was a fucking mess. He threw the wrench down and left the warehouse. His guys…Blake, they could do it all at this point. No one needed him.
I need you. Please, I need you.
He’d go down off this mountain to her. To make sure she was safe. That he hadn’t made a mistake letting her go down there alone with just her phone and the number of his lawyer.
But she’d insisted on going alone and he respected that.
Fuck.
His phone in his back pocket buzzed and he fished it out. His heart stopped when he saw it was a text from Annie.
I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.
And then:
If you’ll have me.
Something like hope burned through him, igniting in his gut and blasting out through his fingers, the tips of his hair. And he landed squarely in his body again. Squarely inside himself.
And that hope-like thing crystallized into a happiness-like thing.
Part of him screamed out a warning, but he ignored it. He’d been living alone in his regrets for too long. He would not let Annie be another regret.
I do owe you a few more hours on your birthday wish, he texted back, but then erased it, because he didn’t need to try and make it seem like he wasn’t invested. Like he didn’t care.
Instead he wrote: Yes. I will always have you.
ANNIE
Yes. I will always have you.
I tucked my happiness, my glee, behind all my serious thick walls of worry. About my life. My future.
But that hope kept me lit up, and I felt like I glowed, like a lantern. The future was not entirely scary. Not entirely unsure. When the bad stuff was over, there was something good waiting for me.
Something amazing.
Dylan.
The door to my trailer was unlocked. I hadn’t had time last night to find my keys, much less lock up after myself.
Had it only been last night? Really?
How much time did it take for everything to change? I’d moved like a snail through my life before. So slow to know what I wanted. So slow to change. That was over now. I was changing with every breath I took.
I took the metal steps up into my trailer, set down my bag in front of the stove, and turned to shut the door. I slammed it hard the first time so it didn’t bounce.
“Hello, Annie.”
The voice stilled my blood. My lungs. The world swam around me. Instinctively I glanced back toward those captain chairs I never sat in, just to be sure that my exhausted, overwhelmed mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.
But there he was in his faded Wranglers and the dark short-sleeved shirt with the pearl snaps. His hat, sweat-stained and dusty, sat on the chair next to him.
Hoyt.
In my trailer.
The half second it took me to process what was happening was a half second too long, and by the time I was fumbling with the door trying to get it open, trying to get out, away, he was on me.
My arm was locked in his hand, his fingers pushing the nerves on its underside hard into the bone. Immediately my hand went numb. His other hand was so big that when it covered my mouth it partially covered my nose, too, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…breathe.
“Annie,” he whispered. That little smile on his face revealing the crooked eyetooth, the chipped incisor from his days in the rodeo. “Please don’t make this worse. I need…You need to be good,” he said. “And not scream. Can you do that for me? Be good for me?”
His breath smelled like coffee and Halls. He used to eat cough drops like candy, and the scent, familiar and nauseating, sent terror through me. My eyes rolled in my head and I strained away from him. I sank my teeth into the meat of his hand.
“That’s a no,” he said, his face turning hard and awful, and I knew what was coming.
Perhaps it had always been coming. Despite running. Despite that zigzagging escape. Despite this sudden belief