I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. Obstinate even when I didn’t want to be.
“I need to know why,” he said. “Why you lied.”
“Does it matter? You knew all along apparently. It was the most useless lie ever told.”
“It matters!” he yelled. “Because, you’re here, Annie. It’s like you said: despite everything both of us did to make sure that never happened, you’re here. It’s inevitable, and so, I would like to know why you lied. Even when you knew it was safe. What are you scared of?”
For years, years and years and years of my life, if someone shouted at me I would shrink inside my bones. I would hide deep inside of myself and nod my head. I would nod and say yes. Yes, you’re right.
I’d say I was sorry a thousand times. A million. Whatever it took for the yelling to stop.
I fired Smith. I sold my land for windmills. I ducked my head and took it. The yelling, the fists, the disdain and marginalization. I took it all to make the yelling stop.
I laughed, but it sounded nervous, not cavalier. Old habits were weighing me down. “You’ve lied to me—”
“I’ve never lied,” he interrupted, his anger white hot and barely controlled. I swallowed and took a step back, my hip hitting a chair. He watched the movement and saw all the things I couldn’t hide.
“Are you scared?” he asked, and I wished I had enough bravado to tell him no, to shake my hair out of my eyes and yell right back at him.
“You’re yelling at me and I’m…here. Alone. It would be stupid of me not to be afraid.” I wished I weren’t, but I was.
My fear seemed to put a pin in his anger and he took a deep breath. Another. The electric tension in the air dissipating enough that my fear lifted.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
“I’ve…I’ve had a few people say that to me and then go right on ahead and hurt me.”
“Your mother? Who else?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to talk about it. He could put a barricade around his secrets.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, calmly. All that fire in him banked for the moment. Not gone; it would be foolish of me to think that that anger was gone. It was just…hidden. “And I won’t lie to you. I told you the first night that I would never lie to you. And I just…I want to know why you lied.”
I swallowed, my hands wrapped tight around the back of the chair beside me. “I lied because I was scared. I lied because I didn’t know you. And you were asking me to do things—”
“Things you wanted,” his silky voice reminded me. I felt acutely the security blanket of the phone, of distance and anonymity, being ripped away.
“Wanting it made it even scarier! Those things we did, those aren’t things I do. I barely knew about them, so it was easier to be someone else. Someone braver and bolder.”
“Layla.”
“Yes,” I sighed, wondering if he could even fathom this kind of choice. The desire to be the opposite of who he was. Maybe when he was a kid, chasing his brother around, trying to be tough.
“That makes sense,” he said and I smiled, bitterly, angry to have some of my secrets ripped away.
“Glad you approve.”
The air around us seethed, no matter how much both of us would pretend otherwise. “Why Layla? Why’d you pick that name?”
“Layla was my cousin.”
He lifted his eyebrow. “Layla with the hand job?”
I nodded, my throat aching. A blush raced up my body from my feet to the top of my head. That night, the night I told him, the sound of his heavy breathing, the sound of his zipper lowering, was like a living, breathing thing between us.
Hard and slow, just the way I like it.
It was impossible to look at him. He filled up the entire room and I felt squeezed by his presence. There was a table between us but it was like I felt him right up against me.
“And you’re Annie. The cousin who watched.”
I was so off balance with this man, wanting more. Constantly wanting more. More than I should, more than I was really comfortable with. More than he wanted.
I nodded. The cousin who watched—that sort of summed up my entire life