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?”
I shook my head. The answer to everything he was asking me was no. No, I would not tell him. No, the things we’d done did not give him the right to all my secrets. No, he could not bully it from me.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t push.”
He seemed stunned that I’d asked. And he rocked back, a little. Our entrenchment not as deep as I’d thought.
“Okay.”
I felt a threatening softness toward him at his capitulation. It wasn’t his nature and it didn’t come easily.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, ate the leafless strawberry I’d been playing with. His fingers were wide and blunt, the nails cropped close. White calluses covered the tips.
I still wanted those hands on me. I still wanted to know what it would be like to be touched by him.
“I’d like to go home,” I said.
“Do you? Do you really want to go home?” That voice, that soft, dark, rough voice that led me places I’d never imagined I’d go.
His eyes were hot on my body. He’d been thinking the same thing I had. He still wanted more of me. Despite everything.
“You’re the one who didn’t want to see me,” I said because I could feel all of this turning. I was getting swept up again by him and heading toward water that was inevitably going to be over my head. “You ended it because I said I wanted to see you. I didn’t even mean it, I just wanted it, and you said we couldn’t talk to each other anymore. And now you want me to stay?”
“I do.” I opened my mouth to argue but he held up his hand. “And no more lies, Annie—you want to stay too.”
I did, but hadn’t I been reckless enough? Wasn’t it time to go back to being Annie McKay?
“No. I need to find out if Ben is okay. If Joan—”
“Call.”
“What?”
“Use the phone…Call…what’s his name at the desk?”
“Kevin. He’s your employee, isn’t he?” My words were wasps, stingers out. I wanted to touch him and wound him. Every breath I pulled into my lungs sizzled. Burned.
Anger was no stranger to me. I lived with anger. A low-level seethe every minute. An anger I’d had to swallow over and over again. Because while I might be angry, I couldn’t show that anger. Showing anything but a bland and smiling face would get me hurt.
Never, not with my mom and certainly never with Hoyt, had I been allowed to behave this way.
Childish and petulant. Pissy.
It was fucking revelatory. A delight. It felt like I’d unbuttoned a pair of too tight pants. Pants that had been suffocating me.
“It’s a means to an end, Annie. Easier to keep an eye on Ben.”
“Why do you need to keep an eye on Ben? Were you related to that girl in the fire?”
“Why are you twenty-four years old and never touched yourself before?”