“Is this Layla?”

I closed my eyes in a kind of embarrassed relief, because truly his voice sounded like he was smiling. “It is.”

“You okay?”

No. I’ve been reading a dirty book and it’s worked on me and I don’t know what to do with myself, and I thought if I called you, you might tell me.

“Fine.” My voice was shaky. Everything about this was shaky. “Everything is fine.”

Lie! Lying liar!

“I’m real glad you called.”

“You are?”

“I didn’t like thinking I’d scared you.”

No more lying. So, instead, I went with total naked honesty. “Truthfully, I kind of scared myself.” He made a rumbly curious sound that raised goose bumps across my spine and the silence after my words was loaded, filled with questions I didn’t have the answers for yet. “You…you’re at work?”

“I am always at work.”

“You work in a garage or something?”

“Why do you ask?” Something cold laced his words, something slightly defensive. Or accusing. Very distrustful. Like I had no right to wonder about him. Or ask.

“Because when you answered your phone it sounded like engines in the background,” I said quickly.

“Right. Yeah, you could say I work in a garage.”

Still, the small note of suspicion and distrust in his voice cooled me down some and made me doubt what I was doing all over again. Jesus, what do I know about this man? He could be worse than Hoyt.

“Look, I just wanted to tell you that Ben is fine—”

“You talked to him?”

“Sure. Wasn’t that the point?”

“No. It’s not the point. You’re supposed to watch him. Not talk to him.”

“What?” I laughed, imagining myself peering through the blinds at him. “Like a spy?”

“You need to keep your distance. He is not a nice guy.”

“I really don’t think we’re talking about the same person,” I said. “An older gentleman, with a silver buzz cut—”

“The words Free tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and Dead on the knuckles of his left?”

So, that’s what those letters were. “Well…I couldn’t actually make out the words…but—”

“It’s the same guy. I know he seems innocent, and probably real likable, but that’s not real. That’s not the real him.”

“He gave me a bunch of tomatoes. I made him some pasta sauce.”

He was breathing heavily into the phone and his voice was hard. Not the way I’d heard him before. If he’d sounded like this the first time we talked, I wouldn’t have called him back. I would have been too scared. Of him. Not myself. “Layla, I know you have no reason to trust me, but please…please don’t get messed up with him.”

“Okay,” I said, placating him. I’d promised myself I’d stop with the self-deception; I didn’t say anything about lying to some stranger on the phone.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, sounding doubtful. “Because I need you to trust me.”

“I don’t know you.”

His chuckle felt like a hand across that tender skin at the nape of my neck. The skin that had never been touched before. Not in kindness.

And I didn’t know if Dylan’s voice was kind. Or if he was. All I knew was that my body reacted to him.

“I guess that’s true.”

“Are you an ax murderer?”

“No. You?”

“Nope. Well, at least we got that out of the way.” I laughed. “Though maybe it would be funny if both of us were, you know, ax murderers. Like the worst coincidence. Or maybe a dream come true—I imagine that ax murderers don’t get to date—”

“You sound nervous.”

My mouth was hot and dry. Worse than the creek bed back home in August. “I…ah…a little. I guess. Yes.”

“Are you trying to be brave?” His voice tipped into that familiar place where we’d been last time. Like, he was letting me know there was something more he wanted to talk about. Underneath the laughter and the banalities, there was a darker place we could go.

“I’ve never been brave in my life,” I said, longing so hard for that darker place. If having a dirty book would have gotten me in trouble, wanting this forbidden thing would have gotten me hurt I don’t know how bad.

But not here.

Not with him—this stranger on the phone.

This is why I called, because I don’t know how to find these dark, forbidden places on my own.

“You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“Are you telling me I shouldn’t?”

“No, but you said you scared yourself last time we talked.”

The trailer was small and dark, and it was as if there were only the two of us in the wide world.

“I did,” I murmured, feeling almost powerless. But in a good way. Like I was giving up the power instead of having it taken from me. The act of willing surrender made all the difference.

Made it okay.

“Then talking to me is brave.”

“I guess so,” I said, giving myself some points when I was usually so damn stingy.

“What else do you want to be brave about?”

Everything. My life. My body.

“I bought a dirty book today.” I closed my eyes and slapped a hand to my forehead. Honestly, could I be any less cool? I felt like a teenager.

His chuckle was low. Rough. “Did you? Was it good?”

“I’m not done. But yeah…it’s hot.”

“Was that brave?” he asked.

“Very. You tell me one,” I said, mortified and on edge.

His sigh was the kind of sigh that came after a long, hard day, when it seemed to be you against the world. I was pretty familiar with that sigh. “Well, I fired a guy today. A friend’s brother. I let it go on for too long because I owe my friend a lot. But in the end, I had to let the guy go.”

“I’m sorry. That’s a hard thing to do.”

“You ever fire anyone?” He sounded surprised.

“Once,” I said, not wanting to remember. “It was awful.”

“Yeah, today sucked. You go.”

“A brave thing?”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t tell him about the cereal and the chocolate chips. I already sounded like an idiot with the book.

“Yesterday, it was so hot I wanted to lie down on my bed in the middle of the day naked and let the wind blow over me.”

I bit my lip and he exhaled slowly through his nose and I sensed that I’d shocked him. Or excited him. I sure as hell shocked and excited myself. But it was happening. I’d said those words and my body was coiled, hot and anxious. Full of restlessness and embarrassment and a kind of yearning that hurt.

For sex. Lust. Orgasms. Oral sex. Red rooms with whips. Blindfolds and handcuffs. Kisses in elevators that changed a person’s entire life.

Things other women took for granted that had been denied me, my entire life.

I wanted to feel my body from the inside out, in a way I never had before.

“Did you do it?”

“I chickened out.”

“Why?”

“Self-conscious, I guess. Too much sunlight maybe.”

“No sunlight now.”

I held the phone away from my face for a moment and took a deep breath.

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

“Why don’t you do that now? Open your windows, take off your clothes and stretch out on your bed, and then you can tell me what else you want to be brave about.”

This is why I called. Exactly why I called. I can’t chicken out now.

I got up from the settee and walked to my bedroom. My fingers opened the fly of my shorts and when they fell to my ankles, I stepped out of them and kept walking. I took off my tank top. I hadn’t bothered with a bra because of the heat, and I didn’t have much up top anyway.

The underwear stayed on. I was still Annie McKay after all.

The windows were open, the breeze making the little beige curtains wave.

In my threadbare pink bikini underwear, I lay down on my made bed.

The wind danced across my stomach. Over my nipples, turning them into hard beads. I almost touched one. Almost.

It was like when I cut my hair and felt the wind against my neck for the first time. I felt exposed and raw.

Brand new.

“How’s it feel?” he asked, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a murmur.