“Would you,” I paused, looking around, “like to come with me?”
She raised an eyebrow. She examined me, apparently taken aback by the invitation.
“Where?” she asked.
“The desert.”
“We’re in the desert.”
I shook my head. “Deeper. Farther. To a place you’ve never been.”
Her eyes flickered to the spaces around me, where she could see the windows across from our bedroom doors, filled with the dark sky.
“Fine.”
On either side of the highway, the city was bright with flashing casinos, huge animated billboards, and the occasionalNude Girls Livevan passing to the side. But the more we drove, the quieter it got. Soon, Hazel shifted, watching the succulents flash by in the darkness. She hadn’t put up as much of a fight as I had anticipated. I couldn’t make sense of it. Did Hazel trust me? Was she curious about what I wanted to show her? Or was she afraid of being alone?
I wanted to think it was one of those options, but part of me wondered if she was simply drawn to danger. To the possibility of being hurt. In the desert, where we were going, we would be alone. If something happened to her, no one would be able to find her. An attraction to danger may have been why she had ended up with the crime lord, Eric, in the first place. Why Zaid had captured her. Why she agreed to live with me.
Was that why she was with me?
The idea made me sick. Was I any different than my step-father?
But there was a tenderness to Hazel that showed vulnerability. She wasn’t purely thrill-seeking. She was multifaceted, a riddle to unlock. I had to figure her out for myself.
Two hours out of the city, I turned off the road and went into the dirt. The familiar cacti, shaped like a deranged broom, had grown over the years. I turned off the engine and the lights. Once out of the car, I sat on the trunk, the car dipping with my weight. Eventually Hazel joined me, leaning on the car.
“So?” she asked.
How could I put this in a way that would force her to wake up, but not in a way that would scare her? I could start small.
“I used to come here a lot.” I glanced around. The only solid thing in Las Vegas was that the desert was always the same. Harsh. Unforgiving. That stability had given me a sense of peace once. “My step-father’s out here.”
“He lives in the desert?”
“Not living.”
We were so far out of the city that a car passed every few minutes. From the road, no one would be able to see our car or know that we were out there. The stars were bright, but they lit nothing. As if they knew that the worst acts should never be seen in the darkness.
“I used to come here a lot,” I said again, “to make sure he was dead.” In the desert heat, his body had mummified, turned from green to orange, then leathery, reminding me of a husk of corn. Until finally, I buried him out here. Zaid had taken care of him for me, when I was scared of what needed to be done. I was barely a teenager. Though Zaid was not much older than I was, he was the father I never had.He doesn’t deserve to live, Zaid had reassured me.No man that hurts women like that should be allowed to breathe.
But I had been raised by my step-father, and part of me wondered if it was only a matter of time before I did something as awful as beat a woman until she was a bloody pulp. Give her cataracts that she was too proud to fix. Made her think that nothing was wrong. That this was normal. That their love was passionate, and violence was a mere side effect. It only meant that they were truly living.
I had made it my mission to do the opposite. To protect my mother and people like her. I could never let myself do that to someone, even if that meant never falling in love.
That didn’t stop my urges to watch a woman writhe with fear, the heat within her strong, the powerlessness consuming her. But I rarely indulged.
I pulled the folded note out of my pocket, the first one, the less direct of the two. I reread it, then handed it to her.
Hazel’s lips quivered as she read. She quickly folded it and handed it to me, as if the words would physically hurt her. She bit her fingers, gnawing on them, as if thinking about the severity of the situation. Her reaction made me ache. I had the urge to hold her hand, to pull it from her mouth and rub it, to make her concentrate on anything besides that, to dig my fingernails into her skin if I had to, as long as she thought about something else for a few moments. But I didn’t move. It wasn’t fair to do that to Hazel. She didn’t need me like that.
“It’s Oliver,” she said, her voice determined. “He would have hurt me if it hadn’t been for Christine. I was lucky that she was there that first night.”
That may have been true to some extent, but I wasn’t sold that it was Oliver. He was too obvious. This stalker was more careful. Subtle. Unnoticed. Likely hiding in broad daylight.
“You need to be vigilant,” I said. I gestured at the desert around us. “This is where bodies end up. No one goes searching for someone in the desert.”
For a flash of a second, the moonlight glittered, illuminating the tears in her eyes.
But the brave Hazel returned. “He won’t kill me,” she said. “I know it.”
I didn’t trust him to be safe. Nor did I trust Hazel to watch out for herself. Not entirely. But for a moment, I let the fact that she wasn’t afraid, reassure me. She was strong. Unstoppable. And I would kill the person who tried to break her, for her sake, and for mine.
