I’d said it flippantly, but the silence that followed my words was oddly heavy, as if I’d opened a door he hadn’t expected.
“I’ll tell you why Megan had the phone.”
The sudden lack of laughter in his tone, the new element of seriousness, made me sit up straight.
This is when you hang up, I thought, sensing that we’d slipped past banalities. I was not in the practice of talking on the phone to strange men.
Hoyt would— The sudden thought of him and what he would and wouldn’t do about my behavior—like a cancer in this new Febreze-scented world of mine—galvanized me, sent new steel running down my back.
I’m not Annie. I’m Layla. And fuck Hoyt.
“Why?” I asked, noting there was a change in my voice, too. As if there were a sort of intimacy between me and this stranger who asked about my safety in a lifetime of people not caring.
“There’s a trailer, two away from you. To the north. You can see it out your window.”
I twisted and pushed aside the curtain on the north-facing window.
“Did you look?”
“I did.”
I heard him breathe into the phone and something electric pulsed over me. An animal instinct made all the hair on my neck stand up.
“An old man lives in that trailer,” he said. “Megan kept an eye on him for me.”
“Is he sick?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Does he need help of some kind?”
Again that rumbly dark laugh, again that weird reaction of my heart. “No. He doesn’t. In fact, I made it real clear to Megan that she shouldn’t get to know him at all.”
“So, she just spied on him?”
“She did. And I paid her well to do it.”
“Did she do anything else for you?” I asked. It hardly seemed a job a person could get paid for.
In his silence I realized what he might be thinking, and I felt blood pound through my body in horrified embarrassment.
“What are you asking me, Layla?”
Oh, his voice was suddenly thick with intimacy and now I could not pretend otherwise. Somehow this had gotten sexual. It was the Layla thing that had started it and it was a stupid thing to start. I did not play this kind of game. Didn’t understand it. Was completely embarrassed by it.
Suddenly restless, I stood up. My skin felt far too keenly the rub of my clothes against it.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just seems like something a person should do without being paid.”
“Are you offering to look in on him for me?”
“Sure.” I picked up my bag and walked down the hallway to the tiny bedroom in the back. The double bed was stripped. A stack of clean sheets sat at the end of the faded flowered mattress.
“That easy?”
“That easy.”
“When’s the last time you said no to someone?” he asked.
“Why does it matter?”
“I have a sense, Layla, that you give away your yeses without thinking.”
Oh, he was right. So damn right.
“And you want my noes?”
“I want something you don’t give away.”
My knees buckled and I leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, feeling light-headed. How…how did we get here? What has happened to me?
“Tell me no, Layla,” he murmured.
No was dangerous in my old life. A red flag in front of a murderous bull.
I wasn’t brave enough.
“No.” It was barely a whisper. A breath. A rebellion that screamed through me. It was like Les Misérables in my chest cavity.
“Do you remember my name?”
Inherently, somehow I knew what he was asking. Say my name.
“No, Dylan.”
The sound he made—half sigh, half groan—was easily the most erotic sound I’d ever heard, and suddenly there was no more wondering, no more innuendo. He wasn’t asking what I was wearing, but the effect was the same. The intent was the same.
This is…oh my God, this is phone sex. I’m having phone sex with a stranger in a shitty trailer in the middle of nowhere!
I pulled myself away from the wall. My hands in fists.
“Don’t call me again.” My voice sounded firmer than I’d expected. Firmer than I’d sounded my entire life, and I was proud of myself.