with, and the…weirdness of this call made me giddy. I felt like a stone kicked downhill. Rolling faster and faster toward something.
This run-down trailer park had the market cornered on last-ditch efforts. Everything and everyone from Kevin to the morning glories out front seemed to be holding on with a white-knuckled intensity.
“You know the brochure did promise modern amenities, but I haven’t caught sight of the spa,” I joked. “And weedy watering holes don’t count.”
There was silence after my words. And I knew silence as well as I knew sighs. The variations, the cold undertones. The hot overtones.
The razor-edged silence that came before You got a smart mouth, girl.
The heavy echoing silence that came before a backhand.
Stupid joke. It was a stupid joke. I am made of stupid jokes.
“You just can’t trust advertising anymore, can you?” he asked.
“Especially when it’s on a bathroom wall in a truck stop.”
We both laughed, and this was officially more fun than I’d had in years.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
The question with its implied concern bit into me, sweeping away my laughter like someone taking his arm over a dinner table, sending plates crashing to the floor. Tears burned in my eyes.
No one had worried about me. Not in a very long time.
“Layla?”
“Yes.” My voice was gruff and thick. “I’m safe.”
“You sure?”
I got the sense that if I told him no, that I felt threatened or scared, he would do something about it. Arrive at that metal door to help me.
The temptation to trust him was not insignificant.
But that was not the point of having run so far.
I collapsed onto the seat, taking in my new home in all its glory. The fake wood cupboards of the kitchen, the narrow hallway with its curtain divider between the bedroom and this main area. I saw the edge of the bathroom’s accordion door.
Mine, I thought, and something wild and bitter rose in my chest.
“I am.” I was safe. Hundreds and hundreds of miles from my old life. “I really am.”
“Good,” Dylan said as if he knew what I wasn’t saying. And hell, maybe he did. Maybe the story of Annie McKay was a familiar one at the Flowered Manor.
“Do you know where Megan went?” I asked. “I’ll mail her phone.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not her phone; it’s mine. She worked for me.”
“Can I mail you the phone?”
His silence seemed loaded, but not dangerous. “Are you always this nice?”
I laughed, because this was nothing compared to the bending over backward to accommodate people I’d done in my past. I’d been able to fold myself up into nothing.
But this man’s concern made me grateful.
“It’s your phone, isn’t it? Only seems right to get it back to you.”
“Most people don’t go out of their way for a stranger.”
“Would it make you feel better if you told me something about yourself?”
I’d said it flippantly, but the silence that followed my words was oddly heavy, as if I’d opened a door he hadn’t expected.
“I’ll tell you why Megan had the phone.”
The sudden lack of laughter in his tone, the new element of seriousness, made me sit up straight.
This is when you hang up, I thought, sensing that we’d slipped past banalities. I was not in the practice of talking on the phone to strange men.
Hoyt would— The sudden thought of him and what he would and wouldn’t do about my behavior—like a cancer in this new Febreze-scented world of mine—galvanized me, sent new steel running down my back.
I’m not Annie. I’m Layla. And fuck Hoyt.
“Why?” I asked, noting there was a change in my voice, too. As if there were a sort of intimacy between me and this stranger who asked about my safety in a lifetime of people not caring.
“There’s a trailer, two away from you. To the north. You can see it out your window.”
I twisted and pushed aside the curtain on the north-facing window.
“Did you look?”
“I did.”
I heard him breathe into the phone and something electric pulsed over me. An animal instinct made all the hair on my neck stand up.
“An old man lives in that trailer,” he said. “Megan kept an eye on him for me.”
“Is he sick?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Does he need help of some kind?”
Again that rumbly dark laugh, again that weird reaction of my heart. “No. He doesn’t. In fact, I made it real clear to Megan that she shouldn’t get to know him at all.”