the empty space around me, usually filled in with so much fear. Without that fear, without the rules—said and unsaid, implicit and explicit—I felt undone. Unmade. As if I’d been pruned, allowing—God, please, please allow—new growth.
My hair, the thick, pretty red curls replaced by a lopsided cut I’d given myself and then dyed black in the Tulsa bus station, made me unrecognizable to myself.
“So,” I said out loud to the reflection in the mirror. That stranger staring back at me. “Who are you?”
DYLAN
Make no mistake, Dylan Daniels was the beast. He was the bad guy in the stories. Some other asshole could be the hero, save the day and get the girl.
Alone and gruesome, he’d stay up on his mountain with his money and his work, as far from people as he could get because that was how he liked it.
It was better. For everyone.
But every once in a while he got to worrying about the monsters that lived off the mountain and he called to check up on Ben.
Carefully, like it was a bomb with a lit fuse, Dylan put the phone down on the workbench in front of him.
Pencils rolled onto the floor, but he barely noticed.
For five years he’d had the old man looked in on. By six different people. Four women, two guys.
The first question any of them asked was what was in it for them.
And that worked for Dylan. The voices on the other end of the phone belonged to people who were all disinterested and influenced only by the stupid amount of money he paid them. The six people he’d hired didn’t get invested. They didn’t give a shit about the old man or why Dylan wanted him watched. And Dylan didn’t have to worry if they got hurt. Or if they vanished without a word, which was what happened more often than not in that crappy trailer park.
Five years. Six people who were only a disposable set of eyes and ears. Nothing more.
Until now.
Layla.
What the fuck was that?
It wasn’t just the country-girl kindness that got him, which was a novel change in the world. The offer to mail him back the phone? Christ. The trailer park wouldn’t reward that sort of sweetness; he knew that for a fact.
He’d been able to tell the moment she was about to hang up, and the moment she decided to be brave and keep talking. And the moment…the hitch in her breath, the sigh, the husky edge to that drawl-tinged voice…she’d been turned on.
That small reveal of a colossal internal shift. From indifference to desire.
When was the last time someone had shown him something so personal? So intimate?
Maybe never.
And he’d felt her excitement like a physical touch.
Well, like he remembered a physical touch to be. It had been a while. In fact it had been long enough that he’d actually forgotten what want was.
But a ten-minute conversation with a stranger and he was hard as steel. His body primed. Ready.
Craving more.
Dylan had a sixth sense about inevitability. An awareness of things out in the dark he could not avoid. Of events stacking up, paths being forged, the result of which would not be seen for years to come. Usually these inevitable things were bad. For him, anyway.
Layla felt different.
Fuck. Enough, he thought; she was a woman with a nice voice who got turned on thinking about phone sex. Move on.
Around him work was piling up. Deadlines were approaching and his team was getting anxious. Not that any of them bothered him here in his home. But he could feel them, just down the road at the warehouse. He could smell their nerves, their growing doubt. Blake, his business partner, was threatening to actually show up one of these days to see what the hold up was.
So, he shook off the conversation and went back to work on the engine schematic spread out over the bench. They were working on an adapted planetary gearbox for a manual transmission. And it was a thing of beauty. Simply put, it consisted of one large gear—the sun, surrounded by smaller gears—the planets. And around that, there was a larger carrier keeping it all in place.
That was how his world worked best, all parts in sync. He was the sun, the people around him the planets, and the rules he lived by kept it all in line. Controlled. If one piece was dirty, or out of alignment, if the steel had the slightest imperfection, his world simply didn’t work.