I held the suit coat up to my frame, knowing it was going to fit perfectly. “Thanks. I’m happy for me, too.”
12
Alessandro
I’d stared down the barrels of guns in my past, and they didn’t make me as nervous as I was driving up to Willow’s house for our first date in six years. I’d planned it down to the minute and designed it with the hope that she would remember how great we were before. I wanted her to be nothing but happy for the next several hours, and maybe, just maybe, if I was lucky enough, by the end of the night, she’d be in love with me again and unable to imagine going back to a life without me. Despite the risk involved, I turned my phone off so I could pretend I wasn’t some mob prince in a royal family of death and doom. I was just a guy, madly in love with a girl, trying to show that girl that the reward was worth the risk.
The car I’d chauffeured for the night pulled up in front of Willow’s family house, the one that my family gifted hers back when her dad started working for us. Obviously, only her mother and brother lived there now, with her dad in prison and her living in California, but while she was visiting, it was like she was living in Philly again, and everything was normal. That’s how I got the idea to recreate our first date. I kind of wished that her dad was sitting on the front stairs the same way he was when I came here for our first date, with a cigar carefully balanced between his lips and a black, magnum colt sitting in his lap. He didn’t say anything as poor, thirteen-year-old me climbed out of the car and walked up to the door with white roses in hand. He didn’t need to. The casual puffs of smoke and absent stare sang loudly, “I don’t care who you are. Hurt my baby girl, and I’ll hurt you.”
He took the fall for a crime and was arrested later that year.
Now it was adult me, dressed in my navy blue suit with a gray shirt beneath, a silver watch encircling my wrist, and my dad’s rings shimmering in the moonlight, praying that a single night would be enough.
The door opened, and where I expected Willow to be standing, Ricky was looking back at me with his signature, slanted grin. He had a beer in his hand and was dressed fairly casually in a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt.
“Hey!” he held up his beer. “Willow will be down in a second.”
I leaned against the door to the car with the bouquet of roses in my hand. “How is she? I mean, like, how do you think this is gonna go?”
“You’re on the right track, I know that. She’s been smiling like a dope all day long.” A hand came flying in from beyond the door’s frame and whacked Ricky on the back of the head. “Ow!”
“Shut your mouth and go away.”
Ricky stepped out of the doorway, and Willow stepped into his place. The sight of her took my breath away. She had her hair down, cascading across her shoulders with wisps of her bangs hanging down into her stunning, blue eyes. She was dressed in the outfit that I bought her, a sign that she must have found it fashionable because she never left the house in something that wasn’t. I was glad to see she’d skipped wearing any sort of blouse under the jacket, simply letting it rest in a V down her collarbone with a crest of cleavage just above the buttons. The pants chiseled out her shapely thighs, and she was wearing the three-inch heels with the strap around the ankle. She was perfection walking. My Willow. Thank you, Lord.
I walked up to her and held out my hand, and she set hers gently inside. I kissed her knuckles before handing over the white roses. Her small smile grew, and she took them, reaching back to set them inside the door frame, where Ricky’s phantom hand met her and retrieved them. She shut the door, and then we walked down the steps to the car.
The chauffeur helped us in the car, and then we were off toward our first stop, a restaurant outside of the city, modeled after a Japanese zen garden. It was decorated with dozens of fake cherry blossom trees and had rock gardens scattered around. She’d seen it on a T.V. show and wanted to go, so I decided to take her there for our first time out. Most young pre-teens in love did movies and dinner at an Applebee’s, but even back then, I knew Willow was worth way more than that.
We were seated at our table, where two glasses of wine were already waiting for us, unlike the glasses of water we’d had back in the day.
“Well, I guess coming back after ten years has its perks,” Willow joked, tipping her wine glass to her mouth after we ordered our food.
“Yeah,” I said with a laugh, “it didn’t even occur to me that we can eat anything on the menu now. We were too young for anything simmered in liquor last time.” I took my own drink, still unable to believe I was sitting across from Willow once again. “Do you remember when we first came here? I was trying to act like I was so mature and confident, but when I opened the menu, my head exploded.”
“You didn’t realize that most of the menu was authentic Japanese dishes and had no idea what to order. Try though you might to be fancy, you were still a snot-nosed little brat looking for mac and cheese.” Willow laughed, and it was music to my ears. “That was hysterical.”
“Do you remember how I asked you out?” I inquired, intentionally trying to get Willow to a reminiscent place.
She nodded. “You said,” she cleared her throat and dropped her voice, “‘Uh, do you wanna go out? For real this time.’”
I nearly spit my wine out. I had totally forgotten about the for real this time part. Back when Willow and I were barely old enough to understand the concept of dating, my brothers, knowing I had a crush on her, dared me to ask her out. I puffed out my chest, walked up to her, and asked her to go out with me, and she was so bewildered that I was afraid she was going to say no. I coughed out something about joking before running away quicker than a speeding bullet.
“How embar
rassing,” I murmured. “Why would you ever agree to go out with me?”
“I thought it was cute,” Willow replied. “You were so nervous that it looked like you were going to throw up all over me.”
“Man, I’m so glad I didn’t.”
I looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine, and it was like nothing had changed. We were sitting in an alternate reality where she never asked me to make a choice. These entire six years, we’d been together, and we were just two people, very much in love, chasing the days of our youth at the restaurant where we had our first date.
“So, give me the highlights,” I started again after a while. “Top five things that have happened to you in the past six years. Go.”
Willow let out a puff of air while her eyes scanned the ceiling, searching for an answer. “Let’s see. Well, the biggest thing, obviously, is work. After I graduated, I was able to snag an internship with a major designing firm in L.A., thanks to Sasha.”
“Sasha Love, right? She’s an A-lister!”