I would have to go back to town tomorrow, to the library, if I wanted to find out anything about him. Stalk him on the internet like other girls my age.
My phone buzzed in my hands with an incoming call. I felt somehow as if I’d slipped into water way over my head. Why did everything feel so different now?
“Hey,” I said. So much of my excitement and anticipation had taken a turn and I was anxious. Uncomfortable.
“Hey, you okay?”
“Fine. What are you in the middle of at one o’clock in the morning?” Who the hell are you?
“Just a meeting, a fucking boring nightmare meeting. We just finished. Are you—Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Baby, I gotta call you back in a second. I swear to God, I’m going to kill some idiots around here tonight. You gonna be awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Don’t fall asleep.”
I hung up and wondered if I should head back out on the highway toward one of the truck stops with the free Wi-Fi. But then, in some weird moment of clarity, I decided it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who he was. All he was to me was the guy on the other end of this phone. The guy that pushed me farther and faster out of my terrified little box than I ever would have gone on my own. Maybe he would tell me in time.
Maybe not.
But I had no intention of telling him who I was. Who I really was, and why I was in this last-ditch trailer park, looking for any crack in my self-made, Annie McKay prison through which I could escape.
I couldn’t be hypocritical.
If he was a mobster, a spy, a male model, a politician—none of it mattered.
So he was Dylan. Just Dylan.
And I was Layla.
And I didn’t need to know anything more about him, but I still wanted to see him. Touch him.
Have him.
I scrolled through the phone features and found the camera.
I held it up slightly and kind of squished my upper arms against my breasts so they weren’t sliding into my armpits and I put my hand down the front of my pink panties. One leg bent at the knee. I took a picture and checked it.
Ugh. Too much knee, no boob.
I tried again and then again.
Finally in the fourth picture my freckles didn’t look like a rash against my pale skin, and my boobs were actually in the picture and my hand down my underwear looked sexy…really sexy instead of kind of strange. (I’d had to change my underwear, because the pink looked too little girl and that was the last thing I wanted.) So, in the end I had a pretty hot picture of myself, but not my face.
I sent it to him.
Me. Annie McKay. Sent a picture of my naked body to a man.
One minute later my phone rang. I answered, but before I could say hello he asked, “Is that you?”
“No, it’s the stripper I brought home.”
“Is that a joke?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“So that is you?”
“That is me.”
“You…” He exhaled hard. “God, baby you’re so pretty. Your skin, it’s like…it’s so fucking beautiful.”
I’ve never been called pretty. Much less fucking beautiful. The only nice thing Mom ever said was that I had nice hair, implying everything else was ugly, and Hoyt said I was a hard worker and a fine woman…I know, such a charmer.
But this from Dylan; I was flushed with pleasure. Ecstatic at the idea that someone would think I was pretty.
Because I was. A little.
Not like Joan, but I was me. And I was pretty.
“Tonight…” I sighed.
His dark laugh was delicious.
“That was the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.
“I doubt that. You were wild, remember? I bet you’ve heard a whole lot worse than that.”
“You’re wild now, too. And brave. What else do you want to be?”
“I want to be with you.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them and I heard him suck in a sharp breath.