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.

There was no room for distractions. Strange obsessions. Sweet girls on the other end of the phone.

So he shoved those thoughts away.

But four hours later he was still thinking about her.

Layla.

ANNIE

In the dream, I was leading a crew of detasselers. Teenagers mostly, only a few years younger than me, but somehow they seemed so much younger. Childish with their summer jobs and packed lunches, the early hours making them grumble. One girl, despite being told to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants because corn rash was a bitch, stood there in cutoffs and a bikini top.

“You are going to get corn rash. And corn rash hurts,” I said, lifting my Del Monte cap and setting it back on my head over and over again. A nervous tic.

The girl glanced sideways at a boy who had his paper-bag lunch over the front of his jeans and was pretending so hard, so painfully hard, not to notice Bikini-girl’s attention that the corn could practically detassel itself, under the power of his discomfort and lust.

“I’ll be fine,” the girl said, flashing the boy the coyest of smiles.

“Stop saying that!” I yelled, startling everyone. I didn’t yell, as a rule. A rule I’d learned the hard way. I swore like a sailor, but I didn’t yell.

I took my clipboard with all the crew lists and the leaders and the fields they’d be going to and I started to smash the clipboard against the hood of my truck.

Stop. Smack. Fucking. Smack. Saying. Smack. That.

You will not be fine.

None of us will be fine!

I woke up, the tension reverberating up my arms, my hands clenched in painful fists. My heart pounded in my throat.

Did I yell? I waited, agonized, for the creak of the bed when Hoyt turned over. But he wasn’t there. His side of the bed was empty.

Where is he? Did I oversleep?

Quickly, I put it all together: the surprisingly great mattress, the sunlight through the beige curtains, the smell of Febreze.

The trailer.

Hoyt’s not here.

More importantly, I wasn’t there.

I could have wept.

There was a sudden pounding on the door and it felt like the top of my head might explode. That was the banging from the dream, someone at my door. Carefully, I pulled out the top drawer of the small bedside table between the bed and the wall of the trailer.

The black rubber grip of the .22 felt awful in my hand. Awkward. Cold, and both too big and too small.

“Annie McKay?” a voice asked, a Southern drawl coloring it.

It took me a second, freaking out as I was, but I finally recognized the voice. We don’t truck with no nonsense. That’s what that voice outside had said to me. It was Kevin, the guy in the office, knocking on the trailer door.

Adrenaline and relief made me dizzy.

And the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping or eating in days kept me dizzy.

The world was spinning.

“You don’t have a phone number for me to call,” he said, still talking through the weak metal door with the shitty lock. “And it’s half past nine. You said you were going to start work at eight.”

“Oh no,” I said, scrambling up. I’d slept in my clothes, despite the heat, ready to run if I had to. I wasn’t sure if that was still necessary, but I couldn’t quite convince myself not to do it. I put the gun back in the drawer and pushed my feet into my shoes. “Just a second!” I yelled.

I brushed my teeth too hard, too rushed, and I split my lip again.

“Shit,” I hissed, pressing cheap toilet paper to it.

“You coming, or what?”

“Sorry!” I yelled.

The toilet paper stuck to the cut and I left it there, looking like a guy who’d nicked his face shaving for church. In the mirror, my bruises seemed to be greener than they were yesterday. I put the scarf back on, despite how stupid it looked with my tee shirt and cutoffs, and then I put on my big movie-star sunglasses.

Could I be any more obvious? I wondered, carefully peeling the toilet paper from my lip.

But the thought of not wearing the scarf and the glasses made me feel naked.

So obvious won.

—

Kevin was a big man. Tall, wide, big stomach, big shoulders. His belly peeked out beneath his giant red tee shirt, already sweaty in the August North Carolina heat. He had big feet wedged into Adidas shower flip-flops that looked like they’d been welded on at some point. He wore his gray-black hair in a long ponytail down his back, with ponytail holders at regular intervals, keeping it all in line.

“Morning,” he said without much of a smile. He didn’t seem like a smiler.

Kevin was a still waters kind of guy. Or maybe he just didn’t give a shit.