Chapter 23
Alice
Nico and I have been cooped up in my motel room for three days, taking turns watching the footage from the cameras we planted. Nothing’s been happening—nothing untoward anyway.
I’m starting to doubt all I think I know about Gael.
Maybe I was the only one he molested. Maybe I really was his special girl, as he called me.
I hate that a part of me was actually proud of that as it occurred to me.
The way little Bianca had been proud. Until she found out exactly what being his special girl meant.
“But that’s not a bad thing. If he stopped doing it, I mean,” Nico says.
We’ve been discussing this possibility all day today.
“That would be the best possible scenario.”
“But it still doesn’t let him off the hook for what he did to you,” he says, his eyes glinting with that hard, sharp steel they always do when Gael is the subject of our talks.
He’s been pushing to just kill him and go home. He even offered to do it by himself, I could just wait at the motel. As if I’d let someone else bring justice to Gael.
“I say we give it until the end of this week,” he says.
“It’s Friday today and that reading group, or whatever, at the community center is starting soon.
Maybe we’ll catch him doing something then.
But if nothing happens by Sunday night, we just take him out.
Then we can be back in LA in time for dinner. And dancing.”
He winks at me, that sharp steel completely gone from his eyes.
My face heats up and I look away, in the direction of the window, which is covered by the heavy blinds so there’s nothing to see there.
Truth is, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dancing we did in San Diego.
And the other things we did there. And things we could’ve done.
Suffice it to say, that being in the same room with him for three days has given me some ideas.
Ideas I never had before.
Ideas that say I maybe could be that girl who loved dancing with him. The one who liked getting kissed and held by him. The one who could let him do more.
But that’s just silly.
“I need some air,” I say and stand up. He does too.
“Good idea,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk and get some dinner. Take out, of course.”
“You stay here, watch the video feed,” I say. “I’m going for a ride.”
“I could still go with you,” he says, grinning at me like he didn’t just ask me to take him for a ride on the back of my bike.
I shake my head, although the idea of him holding on to me as I ride fast down the empty country roads around here is very inviting. “I want to be alone.”
“Too bad,” he says after just staring at me for a few seconds. Then he plops back down in the chair in front of the computer.
I take my time putting on my helmet, making sure none of my hair is showing. Just in case Gael spots me somewhere. And hate that after all these years, I’m still mindful of the man, doing things because of him. This needs to end. I need him out of my head. Maybe Nico’s plan isn’t such a bad one.
The thought scares me. Killing a man in cold blood goes against everything I believe in.
Even the dispatching of Ghost, the serial killer who tortured and murdered my childhood best friend Angel was hard for me to participate in.
But it was right. It was justice. And killing Gael would be too. In a way.
Those thoughts rattle and rage in my mind right up to the point when I mount my bike and turn on the engine. Then everything becomes simple again. Simpler still as I roll out of the parking lot and onto the road.
Everything is so simple when I just ride. I don’t have to think about anything, but rounding the curves perfectly, don’t have to feel anything but the pleasant vibrations of my bike and the wind beating against my body.
I don’t have to be strong. I don’t have to be just, or right. I don’t have to be whole. I just have to be and it’s enough,
And that feeling isn’t much different to the one I’ve been feeling for the past three days with Nico. Stuck in the motel room, listening to his stories and laughing at his jokes. Telling some of mine.
But how do I make that into something more? How do I make it permanent when the thought of letting a man touch me, see me naked, fills me with paralyzing dread?
I still have no answers to those questions. No matter how desperately I want to find them.