Chapter 40 Willow
WILLOW
We drive through the night this time, after a short discussion where we all agree it’s probably for the best if we don’t stop.
At some point during the night, Malice switches with Ransom, taking over as he navigates the back roads Vic has mapped out for us and giving Ransom a rest. I wake up in the morning with my head on Ransom’s shoulder, feeling stiff and sore from being in the car for so long.
When we finally do stop a few hours after that, we pull into an RV park near San Antonio. The guys pay cash to rent one of the RVs, and it’s clear this is one of those ‘no questions asked’ sort of places.
The guy taking their money doesn’t give us a second look as he hands over a key and tells us a row number.
“Someone we used to do work for mentioned this place,” Ransom explains as we hunt down the RV we’ll be staying in.
“He was coming back to Detroit with a bunch of stolen goods and didn’t want to risk a hotel.
Apparently, the guy who runs this place went above and beyond to not notice a damned thing about him. ”
“Convenient,” I agree, nodding. That definitely suits our purposes.
We pile into the RV, which is definitely not a luxury. I think about those home improvement shows I used to watch all the time, and how people with too much money on their hands would buy buses and RVs and have them renovated into trendy little homes.
This is nothing like that.
The appliances are rusty and out of date, and the furniture creaks and sags as we all find different things to flop onto. Besides the bathroom, the rest of the RV is one long room, separated into a tiny kitchenette, a sitting room with mismatched furniture, and a bed that pulls down from the wall.
Ransom groans as he stretches out, cracking his back. “Jesus. I swear I can feel all the vertebrae in my back fusing. Road trips really are the fucking worst.”
All of us are stiff and sore from that long drive all night, but being out of the car and having a chance to stretch our legs feels so much better.
It was worth it, though, to get us away from the site of that altercation with the cops.
Every mile we put between us and the bar in Oklahoma City eased some of the pressure in my chest.
It’s too early to relax, especially when we’re still on this side of the border, but we’re close now, and we just have to keep going.
Malice pulls out a shopping bag and dumps the contents out onto the scratched up coffee table.
“Where did you get all that?” I ask him, eyeing the pile. There’s hair dye, makeup, and a few boxes of colored contacts.
“We stopped at a shop on the way here,” he says. “Sent Vic in while you were sleeping.” He passes the box of hair dye to me. “We need to change our appearances a bit.”
I nod, looking down at the woman on the front of the box, whose toffee brown hair tumbles in waves around her face. Now that we know there’s a warrant out for Malice and the rest of us just helped him evade arrest, it’ll help to look different.
“Dye your hair, and we’ll go get our fake IDs. I bet the guy who runs this park knows a place.”
“Okay,” I murmur, taking the box and heading into the tiny bathroom. I take a minute to open everything and read the instructions, laying out the plastic gloves and the little brush that came with the kit as well.
When someone walks into the bathroom behind me, I turn and see Ransom coming in.
“Need a hand?” he asks, shooting me a lopsided grin.
I smile back. “Sure. That would be great.”
He closes the lid of the toilet and then motions for me to sit down. I do, watching as he mixes everything up and puts on the gloves.
“Have you ever done this before?” I ask curiously.
Ransom nods. “A couple times when I was in high school. I dated this girl who changed her hair color like the fucking wind. One week it was blue, then the next it was back to blonde. I never knew how she managed it, so she invited me over to watch one time. Eventually, I learned enough to help her.”
“That’s nice of you,” I say, keeping my tone neutral even as a wave of irrational jealousy rises up inside me.
He sees right through me, of course, and laughs.
“You don’t have to be jealous of a girl I dated in high school, angel,” he teases. “Last I heard, she was married to a woman anyway.”
“I’m not jealous,” I insist. “It’s just interesting, hearing about you guys as kids. It’s weird to think that you were ever young.”
“Mm, I get that. Especially Mal and Vic, since they’re both so serious in their own ways. Believe it or not, they were always kind of like that.”
“I believe it. Especially considering…” I wave my hand, not wanting to bring up their terrible father right now.
But Ransom must get what I mean, because he nods. “Yeah. They kind of had to grow up pretty fast. We all did.” Abruptly, he smiles. “Do you wanna hear a funny story about Malice?”
“Always.”
Ransom’s grin grows, turning mischievous. He takes the handle of the brush and uses it to part my hair, starting to apply the dark brown dye in sections. “So, even though Malice was always scowling and got into fights every other day, he was still pretty popular with the ladies.”
“Understandable,” I murmur.
“Sure. He was big, he was intense, he was brooding or whatever. They ate that shit up. Anyway, there was this big party close to where we were living at the time. Some kind of homecoming or graduation or something. Malice had gone out a couple hours earlier, and suddenly he comes home, bursting through the door looking more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him before. ”
“What happened?”
“Turns out, some asshole was being a dick to some of the girls at the party, so they wanted to leave. It just so happened that Malice was walking past that house when they came out, and they immediately latched on to him. It was a smart bet, going for the big dude when some creep won’t leave you alone.
Only Malice wasn’t the most… charming person ever. ”
I snicker softly, thinking of the standoffs I’ve had with Malice, how gruff and forceful he can be.
Charming isn’t a word most people would use to describe him.
Honestly, terrifying would probably be a lot higher on the list. He used to scare me too, although it’s hard to remember what that felt like now that I know him better.
“He apparently told them to get fucked and leave him alone, but they kept following him because just being around him was safer than being alone. Malice, not knowing what the fuck to do with this group of girls, came home to find me so I could get them to leave him alone.”
I can just picture it in my head, a younger Malice with a gaggle of teenage girls following after him, trying to get him to walk them home. Just the thought of it makes me laugh, and Ransom joins in too.
“Never thought I’d see the day when Malice was afraid of something like that,” he says.
“It makes sense, in a way. It’s not like he could fight them or anything, so what else could he do?”
“Come beg his little brother for help, apparently,” Ransom says, his blue-green eyes glinting with amusement.
He keeps working his way over my head, and the dye is cold and pungent smelling as he applies it, rubbing it in down to the ends of my hair. As he spreads the dye, he tells me more stories about when he and his brothers were younger, keeping me laughing.
“You should have seen it,” he says, in the middle of a story about the first apartment the three of them shared together. “It was always a fucking mess, half because it was so small, half because Malice could never be fucked to do his dishes. It drove Vic out of his skull.”
“Oh god, I bet.”
“Finally he got so pissed off that he put on a pair of gloves and marched into the kitchen with this big plastic bin. He took every single dish that Malice had used and put it in the bin and then dumped the bin out on Malice’s bed while Mal was out.
Of course that led to Malice fucking losing it when he got home, but Vic didn’t give a shit.
He just calmly told Malice that he wasn’t his fucking maid, and he needed to start carrying his weight or he could get out. ”
“Do you think he would have actually kicked him out?”
Ransom shakes his head. “Nah, but it was an effective threat. Plus, Malice does care a lot, and once he could tell how badly it was affecting Vic, he started to do better. By the time we moved into the warehouse, things were much easier.”
I like that thought, the three of them working out their differences so they could keep living together. Even Vic, so particular about the way things need to be, was willing to work around Malice’s idiosyncrasies, because he loves his twin.
“Okay,” Ransom says. “That’s enough about us. I want to hear more about you.”
“I don’t have many funny stories,” I tell him. Most of my childhood stories are about Misty going on benders, or getting bullied in school or dealing with her shitty johns.
But Ransom dyeing my hair does remind me of something, and I smile.
“So, there was this time when I really wanted red hair,” I begin.
“Oh, this should be good.”
“There was this woman Misty knew, I don’t know if she was also a hooker or just one of my mom’s friends, but she would come by sometimes, and she had the most beautiful red hair.
It was curly and bouncy, and I’d just stare at it in awe.
I knew I was never going to get the curls like hers, but I figured I could manage the color if I worked at it. ”
Thinking about Misty hurts a bit, but I push that down to keep going.
“I didn’t have the money to buy any good dye, so I ended up stealing the first box I saw that looked like the right color at the store.
I was wearing an oversized hoodie, and I tucked the box under it and no one stopped me.
Turns out, trying to dye your hair with a shitty box dye that probably cost five bucks is a terrible idea. ”
Ransom laughs brightly. “What happened? All your hair fall out?”