“Here, let me help you,” I said, rushing to his side. I didn’t even think about what Dylan had said. His dire warnings about this old man’s danger. Frankly, I just didn’t believe him.

“I got it,” he breathed, clearly straining.

“Stubborn man,” I muttered and ignored him. I grabbed a bunch of bricks, setting them down beside his pile. I got another load before he could straighten his back.

“I’m not helpless.”

“I know.”

“You don’t need to treat me like I am.”

“I’m not. I’m just helping you.”

He grunted, which made me smile.

“You don’t got enough work?”

“What else am I going to do?” I asked, taking out the last of the bricks.

He sighed. “I hear alcoholism is time consuming.”

I was worn down and thin with all my worries and that joke just made me howl.

“It’s not that funny,” he said with a smile, watching me sideways.

“I know,” I said, wiping my eyes.

He started clearing the bricks off the cement pad that I’d placed my stacks on. “Thanks for the pasta sauce,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

“It was better once I put some of my oregano in it.”

I sobered again, shackled by the reminder of my own gutlessness. Can’t ask for what I want. Can’t enjoy what I’ve got. Can’t even touch my body without being pulled apart by all the shit I’m trying to leave behind.

That night…after the thing with Dylan, I’d taken Fifty Shades of Grey and thrown it in the drawer with the gun and the phone and shut it. I’d been enjoying that book, was excited to read the rest of it, but I denied myself that because I’m a gutless dummy.

Because in the end, I get what I deserve.

I started an Agatha Christie novel. Because who doesn’t love Agatha Christie? But the whole time I wanted to be reading the book in my bedside table.

“I’m sure it was,” I said, crouching down beside him to clear the cement pad. After my shower I was going to finish that damn book. I was. No one was going to stop me. Not even myself. “What are you working on?”

“A little brick oven,” he said, brushing leaves away with his hand. “It’s too hot to cook in the trailer during the summer.”

He pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket and I saw again under his white shirt the shadow of that big, black tattoo.

It seemed ominous.

“Where did you live before here?” I asked.

“A bunch of places.”

“What did you do?”

“A bunch of things. Why are you asking?” His suspicion was uncomfortably threatening.

Because I’m trying to figure out why I’m supposed to be watching you.

“We’re neighbors,” I said with a shrug.

“Where are you from?”

“Oklahoma.” I surprised myself with the truth. “A farm.”

He grunted and took the wheelbarrow back over toward his trailer, where a pickup truck was parked. I followed and helped him move a bag of cement and a bucket from the truck bed into the wheelbarrow.

“You want me to help you with that?” It was hard watching him struggle.

Smith, who’d helped Mom and me on the farm, broke his hand once fixing a tractor. He’d had the whole thing in this weird splint, and then in a sling, but he wouldn’t stop working. Trying to do everything with one arm. I followed him around relentlessly until he snapped and demanded to know what I was doing.

“Waiting for you to need me,” is what I’d said.

I was doing the same thing with Ben. Waiting for him to need me.

Memories of Smith were best not contemplated. They were best kept behind their locked door.

“I don’t need your damn help,” Ben said, and wheeled it across the rough ground toward the bricks and cement pad.

I ignored him and followed. Once he made it there I helped him unload it, despite his grumbling, and he took the bucket over to the hose he had coiled up and hanging around a fence post, connected to a spigot in the ground.

His bad mood, with its familiar undertones of begrudging tolerance, made me feel better.

Smith again.

“What brought you to this place?” he asked over the gush of water into the bucket.

“I was running,” I said.

“Now what are you doing?”

He turned off the hose and brought the bucket back over to where I stood. When he set it down, water sloshed over my feet. I watched puddles form around my beat-up tennis shoes and didn’t answer. Didn’t have an answer.

Running had been such a wild departure—a giant crack—and I was still running. I didn’t know what happened after running.

“Seeing the sights?” he asked when I didn’t answer, oddly paralyzed by his question.

What am I doing, now?

“No?” he asked, with a smile. “Finding yourself? No, I know…finding God.”

I shook my head. “I think…I think I’m just…waiting.”

“For what?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s not waiting, girly. That’s hiding. And I got a lock on both.”

Those words were a punch in the gut and I could barely breathe as I watched Ben, shaking and in stages, get down on his knees.

Silent, shaking as much as he was, I crouched down beside him.

Shoulder to shoulder, I helped Ben start work on his oven. We mixed the cement with an attachment to his drill and we troweled a thin layer over the cement pad and then slowly, carefully, started to build something. “What are you hiding from?” I asked.

“Done a lot of bad things. To a lot of people. Here’s as safe as anywhere.”

“What are you waiting for?” I asked after we’d been working for a long time.

“Something that’s never gonna come. Not for me.” I wanted to ask more, but we were three layers up and it was obvious he was getting tired.

“You want a break?” I asked.

“No.”

But a few seconds later he was coughing and then he was bent over coughing, holding a handkerchief from his back pocket over his mouth as he hacked away.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said. “But let’s call it a day.”

“Really?” I looked down at the bucket of cement. It was going to harden and be ruined.

He got to his feet, refusing help from my outstretched hand.

“Yeah, too hot.” He walked away, looking bent and frail.

I watched him walk to the trailer and then I bent and kept working a little bit longer, spreading the cement on with a trowel. Placing the bricks, scraping away the curl of excess. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until the cement was gone and the first few layers of the brick oven were in place.

Ben’s trailer was silent, his hiding spot secure.

—

Later, I took another cold shower and then, still too hot and too out of sorts to eat, I crawled into bed.

I’d made that promise to read the book, but I didn’t want the book.

I wanted Dylan.

In the bedside table I practically heard the phone taunting me.

Annie McKay—runs away from her old life only to keep living by its rules. It was sad.

And it made me angry.

I opened the drawer, grabbed the phone, and made a deal with myself.

If he’d called or texted, I would call him back. If he hadn’t, I’d forget about this whole situation, finish my book, and if and when I felt like it—masturbate on my own like a normal person.

And honestly, why would he call? I wouldn’t call me. I would quickly forget the whole thing.

My first ever orgasm to the sound of his voice probably didn’t even register in his life.

I turned on the phone, my heart pounding in my clumsy fingertips.

Call me.

That was it. One text message.

And say what, I wondered. I’m a freak. A total mess. I don’t know what I want, other than it’s not what I have.

Other than it’s more.

I didn’t give myself a chance to be scared. Or nervous. I called him back. I was utterly and totally compelled by that demand.

“Layla.” He answered right away. How had his voice gotten so familiar? I felt like I’d been listening to his voice on a loop for a week.