Those were such strange words. Foreign to my life.
Because I wanted to see what would happen if I talked to Dylan again.
What I might do if he asked.
Tell me no.
Because I wanted to be asked to do something I couldn’t quite do on my own.
I pressed the power button and the phone slowly blinked to life.
He answered a breath after the first ring, but instead of his voice all I heard was the revving of an engine. Or lots of engines. I pulled the phone from my ear.
“Just a second,” Dylan yelled into the phone and then I heard his voice, muffled as he yelled to someone else on his end, “I’ll be in my office.”
A second later the roar of the engines was gone. “Hello,” he said.
Oh.
His voice made me ache harder. I sat back down on the settee and crossed my legs, squeezing them together until sparks shot out through my nerves.
“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.