I glanced down at the fabric of the bench seats that made up the banquettes.
Am I really thinking about putting my hand in there? It looked clean enough, for all its shabbiness, but still…disgusting things fell between seat cushions. It was a fact.
The phone rang again and with it the instinct to answer a ringing phone kicked in, and I shoved my hand down into the crease between the top and bottom cushions and then wedged it along sideways, running into nothing, not even cracker crumbs or the odd toy car, until I hit the plastic case of a phone. I pulled it out and glanced at its face.
Dylan.
Accept. Decline.
With a small brush of my thumb, I touched accept.
So small a thing. Really. In the crazy mix of drastic shit I’d been doing this week—answering that phone seemed like nothing.
Just goes to show, I guess.
“Hello?”
“Jesus, Megan, where the hell have you been?” a guy said, his voice not angry so much as exasperated. Relieved, almost.
“I’m sorry.” I wedged my hand back into the cushions to see if anything else had slid in there. Money. Money would be nice. “This isn’t Megan.”
Aha! I pulled out three quarters and a nickel.
The guy sighed. The kind of sigh I was terribly used to. The put-out sigh. The angry sigh. The this is your fault sigh.
And I had this visceral reaction, screwed into the marrow of my bones over the last five years, to do everything in my power and some things incredibly outside of my power to appease the anger behind that sigh. To make it all okay.
But those days were officially over.
Sorry, Dylan. No one sighs like that at me. Not anymore. Not ever.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and lifted my thumb to turn it off, but his voice stopped me just before I disconnected the call.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got no reason to treat you like that. Is Megan there?”
“No.” Okay, I was pulled back in by an apology. Because apologies were nice and they were rare. And this guy sounded sincerely worried. Megan might be his wife. Or girlfriend. His daughter. “She moved out a few days ago. She must have left the phone behind.”
His chuckle was deep and very masculine, and it made me think that I haven’t heard many guys laughing in my life. And that was too bad. It was a nice sound.
“She must have,” he agreed. “Have you moved into the trailer?”
My protective instincts were new and fragile but they were working, and they rose on shaky legs to stop the unthinking answer that came to my lips.
I don’t know this man. I don’t know him at all.
“Just cleaning it,” I said. “I don’t live here.”
“I hope that’s not as bad a job as it sounds.”
“No. It’s fine. Megan must have kept it real clean.” I rolled my eyes at myself.
“What’s your name?”
This is a man. Not a boy. Not a guy. But a man. His voice had a low quality, a rumble and a rasp, like maybe he hadn’t done a lot of talking today. Or maybe he didn’t talk much at all. Or he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day—which shouldn’t sound so good. But it did. He had an accent—something Southern. And despite his apologies he sounded…rough.
Something weird was happening to my heartbeat.
“You know mine,” he said.
I nearly closed my eyes as that dark tone sent chills across my back like a cool breeze.
“Dylan,” I said. “It said your name on the phone.”
“Right. Well, I guess you don’t have to—”
“Layla.” The name came out of nowhere. Layla was my cousin, a wild girl I’d only met once but a name I’d heard over and over again in Mom’s warnings and stories of forbearance. “You don’t want to end up like Layla, do you?”
Which was hilarious, because last I’d heard Layla was an extremely popular makeup artist in Hollywood and happy.
So, Mom’s horror stories had worked, and no, I didn’t end up at all like Layla.
But in this new life…maybe I’d endeavor to be more like Layla.
Layla had been bold. And confident. Embarrassingly sexy to utterly staid and uptight me. Annie McKay.
“Are you okay?” Dylan asked, pulling me away from thoughts of my cousin.
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“People don’t end up in the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground because everything’s going great in their lives.”
“Tell me about it,” I laughed. The relief of sitting still, letting go of some of that fear I lived