Teaching Willow: Session Four (6 page)

My breath is heavy and loud in the silence of the room.  My palm feels sticky as I move my fingers up and down my cock, wishing more than ever that Willow was really here and that I wouldn’t be confined to fantasy for the rest of my days.

But she’s not.

It was just another illusion.  Just another dream that will probably never come true.

SEVENTEEN- WILLOW

I’ve left Ebon a dozen messages, called his phone two  dozen times.  I get no answer.  I’ve gotten no return call. 

I fight to fend off hopelessness, depression, despair.

What am I going to do if he leaves?  I’ll never find him.  There’s no one who can tell me where he might be.  His mother is dead.  His father is…I don’t even know where his father might be or what his name is.  Obviously he isn’t afraid of changing his name and starting over.  But whether he did that or not, I could spend the rest of my life scouring the earth for him and never find him. He’d be gone. Just gone.

And he might
already be.

I pace the floor of my bedroom, beating the walls of my mind for some kind of alternative, some way to find him that I’m overlooking.  And then it hits me.  The police.  The police know where he is. Not only did Ebon’s neighbor overhear one talking about it, but I feel sure they kept close tabs on him until the investigation into his mother’s death is complete.

Suddenly, a small bright spot appears on my dismal horizon.  Now, to find Detective Arnold.

I waste no time in climbing back into my car and racing to the police station.  I rush up the sidewalk and push through the glass double doors, pouncing on the first person I see.  The unlucky person happens to be a uniformed guy around my age, wearing an overly eager expression on his face.  I suspect he might be a rookie.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where I might find Detective Arnold?”

“Uhhh, let me see if he’s in,” he responds politely.  There’s a nervous, uncertain look on his face, one that says I’ve asked him something he doesn’t know the answer to, that reinforces my suspicion about his status.  When he turns and asks a mean-looking woman if she knows how he could find Detective Arnold, I know I was right.  He’s definitely a rookie.

“How the hell should I know?” the lady responds gruffly.  “Go check his office.”

The cop turns a red face to me.  “I’ll be right back.”

He disappears behind a locked door and I’m forced to wait for him while the mean lady stares at me.  Luckily, he returns fairly quickly.  “He’s not in his office right now.  Can I leave him a message for you?”

My heart plummets.  “Sure. That would be great.  My name is Willow Masters.  He’s working on a case involving Ebon Daniels.  I spoke to Mister- er Detective Arnold a few days ago about it.  I need to know where I can find Mr. Daniels. He’s not at his house; he’s at a hotel and I’d like to know which one.  I have some things to discuss with him.”

The young cop is writing furiously as I talk.  He stops when Mean Cop Lady speaks up.  “Honey, he’s not going to give you information like that.  Don’t waste your time.  This is not the white pages.  Besides, if I’m not mistaken, there’s a restraining order against him.  And it’s in your name.  You don’t need to be going anywhere near him and causing problems.”

I’m both disappointed and irritated.  Why would she assume that I’m going to cause problems?  Is it
that
obvious that my treacherous lies have destroyed the man’s life?

“I won’t be causing any–”

“If you go near him, you will absolutely cause trouble.  A restraining order isn’t a sweet request, honey.  You could get him thrown in jail for violating it.  Do yourself a favor and stay away from him.”

I swallow the enormous lump that has formed in my throat and I give the lady a shaky smile before I turn and hurry back the way I came. Here comes the hysterical crying again.

EIGHTEEN- EBON

My shit is packed.  Now, the hotel room more closely resembles the way it looked when I found it rather than like a crack addict has been hiding out in here for days.  My story is done.  It’s stored neatly on my computer and on the thumb drive that I’m going to have delivered to Willow.  Eventually.  Right now, I can’t attempt to reach her at all.  No form of communication until the restraining period expires.  That’s in three months’ time.  While it’s true that I’ve got nothing but time, three months is a lifetime when so much has happened already, when so much has been left unsaid.  When the woman I fell in love with lied to me for weeks, when my mother tried to kill her, when her family forbid me to see her and when she ended up taking out a restraining order.  Three months after all that is like the final nail in an already mostly-sealed coffin.  I don’t know how we could recover from that.    

Until then, I found a furnished apartment in Jacksonville that I can sublet.  It’ll do until I can get my house sold, until I can figure out what to do with my life.  It’ll
have to
do.  I have zero other choices.

I stand, glancing again at my dead cell phone where it rests on the nightstand, half covered by a newspaper that I never looked at.  Like everything else, it’s been neglected. I don’t know when the battery died, but it doesn’t matter.  I don’t know anyone who might be calling it anyway.  Hell, if the police needed me, they’d just come knocking.

I reach for it and walk to the bathroom, tossing it into the toilet.  I’m leaving it behind, along with everything else.  Except my memories.  There’s no way I’d part with those, no matter how painful holding onto them might be.  They’re all I’ve got.

My feet feel like lead when I walk to the entryway and stop.  This seems so final, like I’m shutting the door on this chapter of my life. In a way, I guess I am.  It’s the only thing I
can
do.  Although there are few things I know for certain at this point, the one thing I
do
know is that I can’t stay around here.  I’m too close to Willow.  She’s all I can think about, yet she might as well be a million miles away, and it’s tearing me apart. I can’t live like this.  I can’t sleep in the bed where I saw her naked. I can’t abide in the house where my mother attacked her. And I can’t live in the town where I’ll see her face at every turn.  Too much has happened.   There are too many memories.  And too little hope.  I have to get out of here.  The sooner, the better.

Resolute, I open the door, turning to scan the interior one more time to make sure I haven’t left anything.  Then, slowly and quietly, I literally close the door on my past.  It’s time to move on.  To what, I don’t know. I only know that I have to try.

NINETEEN- WILLOW

Three weeks have passed.  Three excruciating weeks.  And still no word from Ebon.

After I left the police station that day, I went home and spent the night crying into my pillow, avoiding my sister.  The next day, I called back and got Detective Arnold’s number.  I left a message for him on his cell phone, one he returned a super-rapid two
whole
days later.  He wasn’t any more help than Mean Cop Lady and Rookie.  He pretty much reiterated the same things–that there was a restraining order and that I needed to stay away from him and not cause trouble.  Blah, blah, blah.

It was the next day when I got really desperate. I started calling around to every hotel in the yellow pages asking for Ebon Daniels.  When that yielded nothing and neither did spending another night crying myself to sleep, I called around the next day asking for Noah Snell.  Still no luck. The only option left to me was blowing up his voice mail and staking out his house, both of which I did without giving them a second thought.

The first week was pretty uneventful.  I parked outside Ebon’s house and watched it for hours on end.  No one came or went.  Nothing looked disturbed between the times when I left to go home and shower and then came back.  Until Tuesday of the second week.  That’s when the realtor showed up to put a sign in the yard.

That sign dashed my hopes pretty effectively.  He obviously wasn’t coming back and I had no way of finding him.

It was at the end of that second week that I got the idea to try to get some info from the realtor.  That didn’t work out very well either.  Evidently there are strict confidentiality guidelines between realtor and home buyers and sellers.  She could tell me all sorts of things about the house, but not a damn thing about Ebon.  I was proud of myself that I waited until after I’d hung up to call her a useless whore, along with a few other choice names.

The three days and nights following that experience were pretty brutal.  I think that’s when it really set in that I probably won’t ever see Ebon again.  Unless he reaches out to me, that is.  But in the absence of that, it’s likely that I’ve seen the last of him.

To say I’m devastated would be a tragic understatement, and to say that I’m having to fight to keep my head above water, emotionally speaking, would be awfully close to that same level of understatement.  But unlike years past, now I have something keeping me afloat, something that gives me hope for tomorrow regardless of what happens with Ebon. 

The fourth night after the realtor shot me down is when my little miracle happened.  I felt the baby move for the first time.  Little more than a flutter in my abdomen, it might not seem like much, but to me, it changed everything.

TWENTY- EBON

One of the few things that I purchased when I moved into my first story temporary home in Jacksonville was a calendar.  I learned from my time in the hotel room that days and nights have little meaning when you’re wandering aimlessly through life.  Time ceases to flow and exist like it has in the past.  But I have a date that I need to keep an eye on, which is the reason for the calendar.  I circled the day that the restraining order expires and I’m crossing off every day that passes, counting down until I can send Willow my story.  To send her my apology.  I hope beyond hope that it makes a difference, although I have my doubts that it will.  Most importantly, however, I just want her to know, just
know
what happened and why, and what’s in my heart.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really let her go, but it’ll make it more bearable if I think that she’s read my word, if I believe that she knows how I feel.  If that changes nothing, then I’ll have done everything within my power to make it right.  Even if none of it worked.

TWENTY-ONE- WILLOW

“You seriously need to stop eating so much. You’re a damn cow!” Sage blurts as I sit on the couch eating my breakfast.  I’m sure she’s enjoying that
I’m
the one struggling with weight now. 

I want to laugh at her, to tell her that she’s so fucking stupid that she can’t even tell that I’m pregnant.  I know that I’m hiding it well. I’m watching my diet closely, doing everything I can to make sure the baby is healthy, so I’m not gaining much weight.  My belly
is
showing a little more these days, but not so much that I can’t conceal it with baggy shirts.  That’s undoubtedly why she thinks I’m getting fat. 

Dumb ass.

“Well, lucky for you, you won’t have to look at me much longer.”

Sage turns to stare at me, giving me a disgusted look.  “I can’t believe you’re actually going to do this.”

“Why?  I can take care of myself just fine.”

“But moving to the beach?  To work at a surf shop?  Seriously?”

I shrug, not giving her the satisfaction of another argument.  Besides, the less I tell her, the better.   She has no idea what my
real
plans are.  I’ve been waiting tables at a really nice restaurant in Gainesville, saving my money so that I can get a place of my own.  I’ve already been approved for state assistance with my maternity care.  It’s amazing how easy it was to swallow my pride when it came to a choice between trying to make it on my own and taking the best care of my baby.  My daughter won, hands down.   

I found out last week that I’m having a little girl.  With every day that has passed in this pregnancy, my child has become more and more of a lifeline.  I live for her.  Everything I do, everything I eat, every plan that I make is for her.  I’m always thinking of what will be best for her.

Living on my own isn’t ideal, of course, but I can’t risk my family finding out. I can’t be sure what they’d do and, to me, it’s just not worth it to find out.  My daughter and I will be just fine without them, just fine on our own. I can’t risk them trying to take her from me.  So I’ve decided that, come hell or high water, my baby will be cared for and loved with every breath I take. 

Starting with making a new life for us. 

Last week, just when I was beginning to get desperate and dejected about my options in life, I saw an ad for a child care technician at a day care.  A job like that, no matter how much it pays, couldn’t be more perfect.  After the baby is born, I can take her to work with me, something that I already cleared with the supervisor during my interview.  As it turns out, between my age and my educational background, I’m just what they were looking for.  And they were
definitely
just what
I
was looking for.  Paying for day care would’ve left me with no money for anything, but now I won’t have to worry about that.  I will be able to move into my rent-controlled apartment at the end of the month.  It’s near the hospital and my new job (once I start next week), and it backs up against a park, which will be perfect for me and the baby. 

Life is far from perfect, but it’s better than I could’ve hoped for when I woke up in the hospital all those weeks ago.  Now if I could just stop pining away for Ebon…