by D. N. Hoxa
He pushed me back a couple of steps.
“Come on. Give me an option!”
But I couldn’t. I didn’t have one.
“That’s right,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “So shut your hole and be a man about it. We’re doing this for Dad.”
He turned around and walked inside. Doc followed, shaking his head. I needed to be by myself, so I headed for the woods.
All my life, I’d been the quiet one. The calm one. I never spoke without being spoken to. Dad used to say that when I was a baby, they sometimes forgot I was even there because I never cried. Never wanted attention. Maybe that was why I’d never had any friends before.
But I had my brothers. I had Dad. That was all I really needed. In kindergarten, everybody beat me. Or so they said. In elementary school, I hit back. In high school, nobody came close to me, because I followed Alan’s and Doc’s advice. On the first day, I picked the biggest, strongest bully I could find, and I broke three of his teeth. He was in the process of taking lunch money from four kids. He even had them lined up against the wall.
I enjoyed beating the hell out of him. He never took money from little kids anymore. And I never had to take shit from anyone. School worked for me. I liked to learn stuff. I had good grades, a pretty good chance of getting into a decent college. Study architecture.
Then, Dad got sick. Everything in my life hit pause. It felt like it hadn’t started ever since, and I was mostly okay with it. I learned to accept the hand I was dealt. Beating people was okay.
I should’ve known not to get too comfortable. Nothing good could come out of this. But taking a life? I was naïve enough to think that that would never be required from me.
Now that it was, I couldn’t process it. It made me sick, both physically and mentally, because I knew I had no choice. I was going to have to do it. It didn’t matter what I thought. I had lost control of my own body, and someone else played it like I had strings attached to my limbs.
I never knew how much I’d loved my freedom until I made that deal in my dream. And now, I had no choice but to do the Devil’s bidding.
The girl’s name was Willow Robinson. She was twenty years old, lived in Granton, and worked at a cake shop called Treat Yourself. She had studied law in Minneapolis for three months before her father died, and she returned to Wisconsin to live with her mother. A year later, her mother Maria married George Mitchell. A year after that, George Mitchell paid us thousands to kidnap and kill her.
“Look at her,’’ Doc said, shaking his head, his cigarette burning between his fingers.
Willow’s picture was in the middle of the table, and below it was the picture of Treat Yourself. George had done his homework really well. I wondered why he didn’t just go through with it himself…
Oh, right. The guilt.
And the fucking bastard swore to us that he was a good guy.
Willow looked much younger than twenty. In the picture, she had her blond hair tied behind her head, and the way she smiled for the camera told you she was shy. She wore black pants and an oversized green shirt that reached her thighs. She had no makeup on that we could see.
“If innocence had a face…” Alan mumbled, then took Doc’s pack of cigarettes and lit one for himself. Alan wasn’t a smoker, but this was a special occasion.
I hadn’t been able to tear my eyes off Willow’s face for the past hour. My imagination went wild with scenarios in which I’d be able to actually take her life. None of them worked. I ended up running in each.
George’s words repeated themselves in my mind. Putting myself in his shoes to try and find reason behind all of this was impossible.
But then something occurred to me.
“He said get rid of her,” I said in wonder. “He said just get rid of her and make sure she never comes back.”
“Yeah, so?” Doc said.
“He never asked us to kill her, did he?” I stood up.
Holy shit, why hadn’t I thought about that before?
“How else are you going to make sure she never comes back?” Alan said, but he stood up, too, and waited for my answer. He was considering it.
“We can!” I said. “Fucking hell, we don’t have to kill anyone. Don’t you see? He never asked that from us.”
If I’d had wings, I would’ve hit the sky that second.
“Yes, but how are we going to make sure she never goes back? Kidnap her and keep her in the fucking basement forever?” Alan said.
My smile faltered.
“We could give her money to disappear,” Doc said.
“Or we can just tell her the truth. She’ll stay away all by herself.”
“You think she’ll leave her mother with that lunatic after she learns the truth?” Alan laughed dryly. “And that’s assuming she believes us.”
“Shit,” I breathed. “Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll tell her mother who he really is, and they’ll both leave him.”
“And then he’ll come back here and ask us to kill both of them,” Doc said.
My eyes squeezed shut. Was it possible that there was no other way out of it?
“There has to be something we can do!”
“We can’t just make her disappear,” Alan said.
“What if we take her someplace she could never come back from?” I said.
“Like Tibet?” Doc said and rolled his eyes.
“If she left college to come stay with her mother, she’s not going to just leave her here,” Alan said with a tired sigh. He was right. Willow didn’t look like someone who’d leave her own mother alone with a lunatic who hired some guys to end her life.
“Fuck!” I shouted and hit the leg of the table with the tips of my toes, forgetting that I wasn’t wearing any shoes. It hurt so much, it brought tears to my eyes.
“Look, the first step is to know her first. See what she’s like. If we do know her, we’ll know if we have any other options,” Alan said.
“Yeah,” Doc said and flinched. “I don’t want to know her before I have to kill her.”
“I do,” I whispered. That was the least I could do for her.
“Then it’s settled,” Alan said and pointed at me. “Your job is to make contact with her. Get to know her, and come up with options. If there are any.”
“Wait, what? I’m not going to do that!”
“Or, we could just go there tomorrow and kidnap her on the spot. I don’t really want to know her, either. It’ll make everything much harder.”
“You’re being a prick,” I hissed.
“I’m being what I need to be. So what do you say, Adrian?” He crossed his arms in front of his chest and sat back down.
“You’re not going to put that choice on me. I won’t make it.”
“Then we’ll take her tomorrow.”
He stood up, Doc followed him, and they headed inside the house. What the hell? Were they serious?
“Wait!” I called before they closed the door.
I couldn’t believe this. I should’ve just kept my goddamn mouth shut and avoided all of this. No, if I didn’t do it, my guilt would drive me insane. I didn’t even want to think about how much more my headache would grow.
“I’ll do it,” I said reluctantly. They heard the venom leaking from my words, but neither seemed to care.
“You have two weeks.”
Two weeks. I had two weeks to get to know a girl I was going to kidnap, then probably kill. And if I didn’t do that, they would just make me go kidnap her tomorrow. For a second, it felt like I was giving her two weeks. Just for a second. The misery drowned me, and my headache tripled within that second. I stayed outside on the porch until I fell asleep.
Willow Robinson
Trying to figure out why I woke up more tired than when I went to sleep lately was getting me nowhere. I was wasting time sitting on my bed, staring at nothing, thinking.
A shiver later, I closed my eyes, sat up straight, and tried meditation. I’d been trying every morning for the past thr
ee weeks, and that had gotten me nowhere, either. I tried to concentrate only on my breathing. In and out. I even set the alarm to ring ten minutes later, but when it did, I found myself thinking about God knows what when I should’ve been focusing on my breathing. It was useless. Meditation was not for me, it seemed.
I threw on some clothes and tiptoed down the hallway and down the stairs. Mom and George were asleep. I didn’t want to wake them, so I made my sandwich as silently as a ghost before I slipped out the door. Maybe I was selfish for going to work an hour early every single morning, just because I didn’t want to see them. I wanted an hour to myself.
But I couldn’t help it. I’d rather I was gone by the time they woke up.
Cece gave me the keys to the shop gladly when I asked her. Who wouldn’t want to find the place clean and ready at eight sharp, Monday through Saturday? She was a good woman, or would be if she could ever stop judging everything that moved.
The shop smelled heavenly when I opened the door—one of the few things I loved about it. I went through my usual routine of taking the cakes out of the freezer in the back, mopping the floor, cleaning the tables, turning everything on and adjusting the temperatures of the fridges. I cut myself a slice of chocolate cake before I sat down in my usual spot at the very end of the shop where passers-by couldn’t see me. The shop was still closed, anyway.
Cece made amazing cakes—I’d give her that. They melted in my mouth as soon as I bit into them. That was why her shop Treat Yourself had done so well in such a short time. And lucky for me, I’d come back to town just in time to land a decent paying job as a counter-girl.
The cake did what sleep wasn’t able to do for me lately. I felt more rested with chocolate in my stomach. I wished I’d known this about me when I went to college—for all three months of studying law. It was ridiculous, really. So ridiculous, I never told anyone about it. Even with that piece of information about me, I was the most boring person on the planet. Without it, it was worse.
I was a twenty-year-old girl who never (really) went to college, who lived with her mother and her step-father. I had no friends. I had no boyfriend. Who would want to date a girl who still lived with her mother?
It didn’t matter that my mother wouldn’t let me leave, even if heaven and earth became one and the same. She wouldn’t hear it. I wasn’t allowed to even mention it. She claimed she was still “finding her way”. That if I left her, she wouldn’t be able to handle it.
“What about George?” I asked her once.
“What about George?” she said, shrugging.
So I was stuck. I couldn’t go back to college. I couldn’t even get my own place. My mother needed me. Dad’s death had broken her. After her attempt to take her own life, I promised to stay with her for as long as she needed me. She still claimed she did, so there I was. Working in a cake shop. Living in my mother’s house. A broken record playing over and over again. A nightmare that didn’t seem to want to end any time soon.
The day started as it always did. People came in at all hours, each with a more specific request than the last. We rarely got people who actually sat down to eat at one of the four tables Cece insisted we put there. Most were take-outs, and I was fine with that. I was never good at interacting with people. I wasn’t a very social person.
Five minutes before my break, a boy entered the shop. He stopped by the door and looked at me. He looked at me like he knew me, and for those few seconds that his eyes were on mine, I didn’t breathe.
He then swung the door closed and went to sit at my table, the one farthest away that could barely be seen by the counter. And he hadn’t even made an order.
He spelled trouble with every move he made. His dark blond hair was longer than people kept it around these parts. He tried to keep it away from his face, but strands escaped his ears here and there. He wore a faded black shirt with short sleeves, and his right arm was covered in tattoos of all kinds and colors, all the way down to his wrist. His jeans hung low on his hips, and his sneakers were torn. He didn’t seem to mind. The way he held himself said that he knew just how beautiful he was. Beautiful and dangerous.
I cleared my throat when I caught myself analyzing every inch of him. “Uh…excuse me, orders are made at the counter,” I said. I’d never had to tell anybody that before, so I wasn’t exactly sure which words to use.
“Oh,” he said and stood up to come to me. Up close, he was even more intense. He had an aura about him, one that made me want to hide behind the counter and not get up until he left. “Hello.”
“Uh, hi. What can I get you?”
It was hard to look at his face. His hazel eyes seemed to play with the sunlight that reflected on the glass of the cases on both sides of my small counter. But it was even harder not to look at him.
“I’m not sure,” he said and scratched the back of his neck. “I’ve never been here before, so why don’t you suggest something? Just keep in mind that I’m not a big fan of cake, and I don’t really like sweets that much.”
“You don’t like sweets?” That sounded alien to me.
“Not really, no,” he said.
“Well, uh…everything we have is here. You can just choose whatever looks good to you,” I said, and waved at the cases. But he wouldn’t take his eyes off me. I felt my cheeks grow red.
“I trust you to choose for me,” he said.
“Okay, uh…since you don’t like sweets…” I took a plate and looked at the refrigerators. “Do you like carrots, coffee, or lemon better?”
He smiled. I died a bit inside.
“Lemon,” he said, so I sliced a piece of Cece’s lemon cake and gave it to him.
“That will be four dollars, ninety cents.”
He took out his wallet, and I was surprised to see that it was brand new. I was expecting it to be a bit torn at the edges, just like the rest of the things on him. He gave me a ten dollar bill but didn’t accept any change.
“My name is Adrian, by the way,” he said before he went to sit down again.
“Nice to meet you, Adrian. I’m Willow.”
My tongue tied, but I hoped he didn’t notice. I was naturally a shy person. I never did small talk with anyone, so I hadn’t really had any practice.
“Willow,” Adrian said. “That’s a beautiful name.”
My cheeks burned. Compliments made me want to run away screaming. Good thing I didn’t get many.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“May I ask how you got it?”
I smiled sadly. “My father. He had a willow tree in his backyard growing up, and he said that that’s where his best memories were from.”
It was a weird name, but my father liked it, and I’d learned to like it, too.
Adrian smiled again. “You’re lucky.”
“What does your name mean?” I said, surprising myself more than him. Why was I still talking to him?
“Nothing as special as yours. It comes from the word Adria, which in Illyrian meant sea.”
I nodded and bit my tongue to keep from asking any more questions.
“Is that all? It’s kind of my lunch break,” I mumbled.
“Right now?”
“Yeah. It started a few minutes ago,” I said reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you say so? I could’ve come by later.”
“That’s okay. I’ll eat as soon as you’re done.”
“I need to leave for you to get your lunch?” he said, narrowing his brows.
“Kind of,” I said. “The owner’s usually baking at this time, so I close the shop until I eat.”
“Why don’t you close the shop and come eat with me? I’ll buy you a cake of your choosing, too, to make up for the time I wasted,” he said, and his eyes, a mix of dirty brown and green, shone.
“Oh, no. Thank you, but no.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because…” Why not, Willow? “Because you’re…you’re a customer.”
“We shared the stories behind our names. I’m p
retty sure we’re considered friends by now,” he said, squinting his eyes. My lips stretched into a smile without warning.
“I don’t…I don’t think that’s a good idea.” But if he asked me why, I wouldn’t know what to say.
“Sure it is,” Adrian said. “Come on. I’ll wait at the table.”
He took his seat again, but he put the cake aside without touching it and crossed his arms in front of him. Too many questions and contradictions filled my mind, but the most important thing of all was: why would a guy who looked like that want to have lunch with a girl like me? I was pretty sure he could have any girl he wanted. What the hell did he want with me?
But then, I thought: why do you need to over-think everything, Willow? Why not just enjoy your lunch with another human being for once in your life? Friendships had always ended quickly for me ever since elementary school, so I never really hung out with anyone besides Mom and George, and sometimes Cece.
I don’t know how I did it, but I swallowed hard, took my sandwich, closed the door to the shop and put up the Lunch Break sign before I sat right across from Adrian. I was shaking, my appetite completely vanished. My cheeks were on fire, too.
“There you are,” Adrian said, smiling a real smile, showing his teeth and all. I was desperate to look anywhere else but at his face.
“Why aren’t you eating your cake?” I said.
“I’ll wait until you finish lunch, and then we’ll have cake together.”
Instead of answering, I just nodded and took out my sandwich.
While he watched me chew, my eyes landed on his arm and his tattoos. They looked so real up close like that. They were beautiful, but it was impossible to understand what any of it was without focusing on every line and color.
After a few minutes, feeling his eyes on my face became too much. I couldn’t handle it.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “At the shop, I mean.”
He had said he didn’t like cake, and the shop was a cake shop.
“Just passing by. I wanted to eat something, but I didn’t want real food. So I thought, why not try some cake?” he said.
“Cake is real food, too,” I mumbled.
