What the fuck was that?
It wasn’t just the country-girl kindness that got him, which was a novel change in the world. The offer to mail him back the phone? Christ. The trailer park wouldn’t reward that sort of sweetness; he knew that for a fact.
He’d been able to tell the moment she was about to hang up, and the moment she decided to be brave and keep talking. And the moment…the hitch in her breath, the sigh, the husky edge to that drawl-tinged voice…she’d been turned on.
That small reveal of a colossal internal shift. From indifference to desire.
When was the last time someone had shown him something so personal? So intimate?
Maybe never.
And he’d felt her excitement like a physical touch.
Well, like he remembered a physical touch to be. It had been a while. In fact it had been long enough that he’d actually forgotten what want was.
But a ten-minute conversation with a stranger and he was hard as steel. His body primed. Ready.
Craving more.
Dylan had a sixth sense about inevitability. An awareness of things out in the dark he could not avoid. Of events stacking up, paths being forged, the result of which would not be seen for years to come. Usually these inevitable things were bad. For him, anyway.
Layla felt different.
Fuck. Enough, he thought; she was a woman with a nice voice who got turned on thinking about phone sex. Move on.
Around him work was piling up. Deadlines were approaching and his team was getting anxious. Not that any of them bothered him here in his home. But he could feel them, just down the road at the warehouse. He could smell their nerves, their growing doubt. Blake, his business partner, was threatening to actually show up one of these days to see what the hold up was.
So, he shook off the conversation and went back to work on the engine schematic spread out over the bench. They were working on an adapted planetary gearbox for a manual transmission. And it was a thing of beauty. Simply put, it consisted of one large gear—the sun, surrounded by smaller gears—the planets. And around that, there was a larger carrier keeping it all in place.
That was how his world worked best, all parts in sync. He was the sun, the people around him the planets, and the rules he lived by kept it all in line. Controlled. If one piece was dirty, or out of alignment, if the steel had the slightest imperfection, his world simply didn’t work.
There was no room for distractions. Strange obsessions. Sweet girls on the other end of the phone.
So he shoved those thoughts away.
But four hours later he was still thinking about her.
Layla.
ANNIE
In the dream, I was leading a crew of detasselers. Teenagers mostly, only a few years younger than me, but somehow they seemed so much younger. Childish with their summer jobs and packed lunches, the early hours making them grumble. One girl, despite being told to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants because corn rash was a bitch, stood there in cutoffs and a bikini top.
“You are going to get corn rash. And corn rash hurts,” I said, lifting my Del Monte cap and setting it back on my head over and over again. A nervous tic.
The girl glanced sideways at a boy who had his paper-bag lunch over the front of his jeans and was pretending so hard, so painfully hard, not to notice Bikini-girl’s attention that the corn could practically detassel itself, under the power of his discomfort and lust.
“I’ll be fine,” the girl said, flashing the boy the coyest of smiles.
“Stop saying that!” I yelled, startling everyone. I didn’t yell, as a rule. A rule I’d learned the hard way. I swore like a sailor, but I didn’t yell.
I took my clipboard with all the crew lists and the leaders and the fields they’d be going to and I started to smash the clipboard against the hood of my truck.
Stop. Smack. Fucking. Smack. Saying. Smack. That.
You will not be fine.
None of us will be fine!