The turnoff couldn’t have come sooner; I took the muddy track and drove into the woods I knew so well. She didn’t seem concerned at all; if anything, she seemed bored of driving, looking out the window and pursing her lips. Bored of waiting. I stopped the car and turned the engine off.
“So how do you want me?” she asked and licked her bottom lip.
“Hood,” I replied through gritted teeth.
She giggled and opened the door. “Oh, I like your style.”
I shuddered in disgust and nodded my head, gesturing for her to follow me. My knife was in my pocket; I touched it through the thick material of my coat. She walked toward me slowly, swaying her hips. I fought the urge to jump forward right then and plunge the knife into her black heart.
She stopped in front of me. I pushed her down onto the hood and she looked up at me, breathing heavily. Was she enjoying this? No, she couldn’t be. “Lift up your top,” I instructed and she obliged immediately. I tasted bile in my mouth. Her flimsy, hot-pink top covered a tiny pink bra. What had happened to her to turn her into this?
I turned my nose up, pulled the knife out of my pocket, and rested the tip over her windpipe. She gasped, her eyes widening in terror. “W-What are y-you doing?”
“I’m taking control,” I replied and pushed the knife down, lightly piercing her skin. Her body began to shake and tears welled in her eyes. I scored her skin, creating a shallow red line from the middle of her neck to the middle of her breasts. She whimpered and hissed through her teeth, panting heavily to absorb the pain. Her eyes were as wide as I’d ever seen.
“P-Please, stop. I’ll do whatever you want,” she stuttered, body trembling in fear.
I sighed. Didn’t she understand what I wanted? “I want you dead, and I want to be the one that kills you.”
“No.” She whimpered and broke into a loud sob. The noise was like music to my ears. This was what I was good at doing. With this, I couldn’t fail.
“No, no, please!” she begged.
I rested the knife over her heart. “Shh.” Her eyes bulged even wider. I gripped the knife with both hands and, with as much force as I could muster, shoved it down through her chest. She made no noise as her body sagged in front of me.
I took a step back and watched her body slide down the hood of my car, falling to the ground in a heap. I closed my eyes, exhaling deeply.
I have control.
29
LEWIS
Monday, February 28th (Present)
Dawn sat at the kitchen table staring at pictures of Summer scattered across the counter. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” she said, not looking up from where her eyes were fixed.
“Yeah,” I replied.
She ran her finger over one of the photos. “I need to see this smile again.”
“You will, Dawn. Can I get you another cup of coffee?”
“Yes, thank you.” I took her empty mug and flicked the coffee machine on. “How long have you been up?”
“Not sure. A while. Summer was never happy with her hair, was she? I don’t know why. It always looked perfect to me.”
I laughed humorlessly. “She’s a teenage girl. I think it goes with the territory.”
“Do you still cry?” she asked, taking me by surprise. “I feel like I’m the only one. Although I know I’m not.”
“You’re not,” I whispered.
She smiled sadly. “You won’t give up, will you? We can’t give up, no matter how long it takes.”
I was a little hurt she had to ask. She knew how I felt about Summer, and I had spent the last seven months of my life devoted to finding her. Why would I suddenly give up now? I was stuck. I couldn’t move on until we had her back or knew what happened. “Never.”
She swiped away a tear with the back of her hand. “I hate the idea of her being scared out there somewhere. She does know we’ll find her, doesn’t she? She knows we wouldn’t just leave her. I couldn’t bear it if she thought we had given up.”
“Dawn, she knows we wouldn’t. Sum knows how much we all love her.” I wasn’t sure. I hoped. There were no guarantees in this. Everything was down to hope. Knowing Summer, she would probably hope we had given up so we would be happy. That couldn’t happen. This wasn’t like when someone died and you got to say good-bye. We don’t know where she was or what had happened to her. We had no answers, so there was no ending.
“You know you’d be getting a lecture about caffeine overdosing if she was here right now,” I said as she took a big gulp of her coffee.
She smiled halfheartedly and nodded. “Yeah, she had a thing about that, probably because caffeine made her hyper. You remember when she had those Red Bulls and was practically bouncing off the walls?”