Page 9 of Rolling Thunder

Evan’s phone beeped to announce a text from Dan.

Dan: Filming at 2!

Evan: I’ll be there

Evan rubbed his face. His mind kept wandering back to Kayla. It was the dog that first caught his eye in her driveway. He’d pulled over, thinking he would just collect the dog, but that was sort of an excuse. If he was honest, he wouldn’t mind if the dog took up residence on Kayla’s farm instead of his place. He didn’t really want a dog, but he did want to talk to Kayla again.

It was refreshing and alluring that Kayla didn’t seem to be throwing herself at him like the other girls. She had a look of knowing in her eyes, and the motorcycle didn’t awe her. She’d been around some dangerous people, but somehow seemed…innocent?

Kayla was beautiful and delicate, and there was something sad and wary about her that awakened something primal and male in him. It hadn’t been that way with Amber, a party girl who partied her way into his bed until he figured out what she was really up to. Amber was pretty and smelled good, and he was years without a woman and fresh out of prison. He’d been an easy target. Maybe this swamp was going to his head… He was no one’s knight in shining armor. And yet here he was, rescuing lost dogs and fantasizing about the lonely horse girl.

He definitely wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, but he had some primitive response to her that he couldn’t quite explain or understand. He didn’t think she was playing hard to get. There was something authentic and different about her. There had been a spark between them for a moment, and it had ignited a fuse inside him that now just wouldn’t quit. The draw to her was at odds with his desire not to get involved with another woman right now. He’d grown up happy, with two basically stable parents. But his early twenties had shattered his faith in humanity and all his trust in people. At first, that mistrust hadn’t applied to women. But after a bad run of luck that culminated with Amber’s betrayal, now it did.

There was no way any of this was going to end well. For now, he had to put her out of his mind. It was the first day of filming.

Filming the pilot episode was an eye-opener. Evan had never given any thought to what went on behind the cameras for TV, but now here he was, being directed on which way to walk into the house so that the lighting on his face was correct for the clip. He had to walk into the house four times, ride up on his bike three. The first ride up, a passing motorist honked a horn at the cameras and ruined the shot. The second one had been okay, but Duckie—who he’d taken to calling Quack in his head, had decided after the fact that they should begin with a head-on shot and then swing around to the side as he dismounted.

He tamped down his frustration and boredom and played along. Watching Dan in his element somewhat made up for it. Dan schmoozed with Quack, and he could see that even she was taken in by Dan’s charm. The crew requested a shot inside Dan’s cottage.

“I’ve got neighbors camped out in my living room. They lost their place when Ian came through. We really can’t film in there.”

Quack looked annoyed, but acquiesced.

“All right, boys. I think that’s a wrap!” a man with a tablet proclaimed, tapping notes to himself. Evan learned this was Dennis. He oversaw getting the necessary single shots to create the intro for their show. So far, he was the least offensive of the crew.

The crew was an efficient machine when it came to loading and unloading gear. They’d switched effortlessly from filming to packing. They reminded Evan of a dozen ants at a picnic, racing back and forth in lines, carrying one item after another back to the big vans that had brought the equipment.

They still had a house in progress that they had to do real work on, and all they’d done so far today was ride up and down Dan’s driveway and mug for the camera, trying to get the shot that Quack and Dennis wanted. The vans pulled away, and Dan and Evan were alone again. It was a strange sensation, to have spent the day under such an intense microscope only to be abruptly abandoned. It was not unlike being scrutinized under a giant magnifying glass until he felt like he was starting to scorch, then left steaming in the evening coastal breeze. Not entirely unlike stepping out of the prison gates and realizing that no one was going to tell him when to take a piss, when to eat, when to report for lockdown.

“We should go try to wrap up the work we pretended to do so they could film us,” Evan said, hearing the resentment in his own voice. He knew his anger was at the memory of prison, and regretted it, but Dan just laughed.

“Fuck it, tomorrow’s a new day. Let’s have a beer and call it a night. We aren’t filming again until next week. We’ve got plenty of time to get that project done.” They now had the signing money to carry them over if this house didn’t sell right away. Evidently, Dan had convinced them to start work on his neighbor’s house for the first episode. That was a most welcome miracle for the people who had very little hope left besides Dan’s living room floor. Despite the aggravation, it was worth it.

CHAPTER 4

Kayla slammed the door and looked back at the little blue house where she’d spent half her childhood—before her mother and grandmother’s incessant fighting had led the latter to put a single-wide on the other side of the farm so she could get Leanne out of her house without losing tabs on Kayla. That had been the beginning of the end, and this felt like the same.

She was about to go back into hell—and this time, Trent wasn’t dragging her back kicking and screaming like he sometimes did. This time, she was going out of desperation. And that made it so much worse.

The smell of the club was as unique as a fingerprint. It was imprinted in her mind like a criminal record on file. Stepping through the back door of the club was like stepping into a run-down movie theater and watching scratchy, skipping scenes play on the screen. At fourteen, getting drunk with adults had felt like a privilege that she wanted. It had felt like freedom. Like everything else, that was a lie. Trent had used her false confidence and lack of inhibition to trick her onto the stage. The longer she stayed away from the farm and her grandmother’s good advice, the more she believed the lies that were spewed here.

These days, she spent more time on the farm than she did here, and coming back felt so very dirty and wrong. It gave her a new perspective on what had gone on here. At the end of a day on the farm, she had literal dirt under her nails, but it was earthy and washed off easily. The stain of this place wouldn’t wash off no matter how hard she tried. It wasn’t freedom at all. She’d become Trent’s slave. He’d never needed to put chains on her body, since he had already carefully installed them in her mind when she was too young to realize what he was up to.

The truck she drove to Fort Myers had belonged to her grandmother, and even driving it to Trent’s bar felt wrong. Seeing it parked in the trash-strewn parking lot drew her up short even knowing she had parked it there. It was almost as if her grandmother was leaning on the tailgate with a disapproving stare. How could she explain how she’d wound up here? How she had sunk to such a level? She couldn’t, and that was why she hadn’t visited her grandmother enough to know that she had cancer.

She’d only found out when Mr. Morales had called her when Kay died. She’d fallen so out of touch, she hadn’t known her grandmother was even sick. The call came out of nowhere, and it still felt like a sucker punch. She’d just naively assumed there would be more time to make it right somehow…and then suddenly, there was no more time.

Footsteps shocked her out of her memories, and she startled, realizing she’d been standing in the dark parking lot staring at the old truck. She shot a look over her shoulder, expecting either Trent or a customer to have followed her back here. But it was just one of the other girls heading out for the night. Time to make her break.

Driving back home, she felt the opposite of how she’d felt with Evan. He made her feel safe, excited. Now she felt polluted, used, and broken. The contrast was glaring and made tonight even more painful. She couldn’t allow herself to see him again.

Safe at last in her driveway, she cut her engine, drank straight from the bottle, and listened to the peaceful night. How such tranquility could exist alongside the debauchery of the strip club she’d just left was a mystery to her. The throbbing club music still bounced around in her head like a bad dream lingering.

It was an ugly night no matter how she looked at it, so she decided she’d rather not look. The wad of cash she now had meant she could make her mortgage payment and her farm was temporarily safe, but she had sold her soul for it, and the loss was ever so obvious and gaping now that she was alone with it. She’d bought a bottle of Jim Beam on the way home and cracked it open at the end of her road, reasoning that she couldn’t get drunk and crash on the arrow-straight mile left to go.

She sat down on her stoop in the pitch dark under the broken porch light. Tonight, she didn’t want light anyway. She wanted to be hidden in the darkness until she drank herself into oblivion. She lived her life swinging wildly from panic to the numb fearlessness of despair, which was where both the Dancing Palm and the bottle took her. She’d allowed herself only two drinks at the Dancing Palm because she had to drive herself home. It wasn’t nearly enough to drown the Palm from her memory: the smell of stale booze and stale cigarettes that technically were no longer allowed, but somehow always made their way indoors, the jeers and cheers of drunken men dangling dirty dollar bills.

She was at least partly in the bag when she noticed a flickering light from the woods adjacent to her house. Her porch faced the adjoining five-acre lot, which her grandmother had left wooded, unlike the ten acres of pasture that made up the rest of the farm. Now it was a dense tangle of wild Florida jungle full of short, sharp scrub palms, papery melaleuca trees, hanging moss and live oaks. There had once been riding trails through it on which Kayla had led her grandmother’s young students on mini trail rides. Now they were so overgrown that she took trail rides down the road to the abandoned orange grove instead.

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