Margaret set down a pot of coffee on a table full of food. There was homemade bread set out with butter and jam beside it. Cut-up melon and strawberries filled the bottom of a pretty pottery bowl. There were cinnamon rolls. Fresh ones. Still steaming.

If my stomach weren’t in knots, I’d be all over that.

“I’m sorry I don’t have much for you.” Margaret looked down at the food like it had failed her.

“It’s a feast.” I picked up a strawberry like I had an interest in eating it, but my stomach rolled over at the idea. So, I just held it, picking off the green leaves, one by one.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

Margaret, in a pale yellow shirt and a pair of black leggings, poured me a mug. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Black.” I drank it black because it was cheaper. And faster. Because it didn’t bother anyone. “Actually, can I have some sugar? Both, actually.”

Margaret fixed up the coffee and handed a dark blue heavy pottery mug to me. “I don’t understand people who drink coffee black. It’s like they don’t want to enjoy themselves.”

Huh. Score one for Margaret.

I took a sip of the coffee and nearly grimaced. It was too sweet. And not hot enough with the milk. Come to find out, I liked it the way I’d always had it. Go figure.

“Margaret,” a soft voice said, and suddenly Dylan was behind me. I could feel him there in the nerve endings along my back. The hair on my neck stood up.

Him. That’s what every part of my body said. Him.

And mine.

I put the mug on the table before it fell from my fingers.

“Go shopping,” he said.

“For what?” Margaret asked, putting her hands on her hips and giving the impression of a woman at her wit’s end. A mother, actually—she gave the impression of being a mother. Frazzled but affectionate.

“I don’t care. You’re always telling me my house needs stuff; go get some.”

“You have a guest. Who has had a rough night, and you want me to—”

“I want you to get out of the house,” he said, and my skin shrank. It squeezed me tight and I couldn’t breathe.

“Dylan,” she said, her façade cracking. Her worry visible, but not for me. No, her worry was entirely reserved for Dylan.

“It’s fine,” he told her. “I’m fine.”

Right, I nearly laughed, like I was going to hurt him? Chip that steel edge of his? Impossible.

“All righty!” Margaret said, and she opened up a small closet and grabbed her purse, stomping around a little to make her point. “But I’m using your money and filling up your fridge.”

“Go gambling, I don’t care. Just be gone.”

Dylan walked past me to shut the door behind Margaret.

The door closed with a heavy, loud click and he turned to face me.

Dylan.

Those lips like pillows. The taut, shiny flesh at his thick neck. The scars looked worse here, in this light. But I had no reaction to them, besides concern. They were not repellant or scary. They just were.

His dark, heavy-lidded eyes were unreadable and they walked all over me. My hair, my eyes, the neckline of my camisole, my legs beneath my shorts.

I felt naked under that gaze, my clothes stripped away.

“Tell me your name. Your real name.”

“No.”

His face split into a grin, and I remembered he liked my opposition. My sharp edges. This was how things between us started and I did not have the strength to go down this road.

“It’s Annie,” I said. “Annie McKay.”

He blinked. Again. Smiled a little.

“That suits you.”

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 before running away. The woman who watched life go by. Who watched her freedom get ripped from her. Who watched herself get smaller and smaller every minute.

“How did you end up at the trailer park?” he asked, as if he could see inside my mind. The pictures there I couldn’t get rid of. “What are you so scared of?”