by Ace Gray
I didn’t read past that. I couldn’t. My body crumbled as the letter fell out of my hands and dropped like a boulder to my feet. It took me with it, letting the last little bit of hope expel from my lungs as I went to the kitchen floor. I felt like I was drowning in the ocean, sinking far below the surface.
“Are you okay?” Rousse asked, his voice sounding every bit as far underwater as I felt.
I looked up at him from where I’d collapsed and couldn’t quite make out his figure. My eyes had blurred with tears, both within and where they clung to each individual eyelash.
“Mercy!” He wrapped himself around me just in time for the levy to break. Rousse just held me as my sobs started shaking my skeleton. “Shhhh, Mercy. Shhhh.” His clumsy fingers combed through my hair as I tried to settle myself.
I don’t know if I cried for a few minutes or a few hours, but Rousse held me until I felt my body come back together.
“What happened?” he whispered, his grip still tight.
The words wouldn’t form on my lips. How did I explain to someone that I’d lost everything? Everything and then some, and all I could really understand was the way the paper felt against my fingertips.
“My dad tried to touch me when I was little.” I felt Rousse tense but it was the only thing I could think of. “And when I was not so little,” I added with a sigh. “I didn't have a family. Not really. Not until him.”
“Are we talking about Dantè?” he asked as he rubbed on my back.
“They won’t let me see him.” I glanced toward the letter that fluttered slightly in the breeze blowing through the house.
“You really want to?” He pushed me back to arm’s length to study me and smiled the smallest, saddest smile as he wiped a tear away.
More fell in its place as his question struck my chest like a dagger. “You don’t?”
“He killed someone, Merce,” Danger said behind me, his voice nothing like the soothing one that Rousse had used. Something much closer to the violent plunge into my chest.
I shoved at Rousse’s hands and stepped back away from both of them. “You don’t really believe he did it, do you?”
“I mean, what they said in court…” Rousse trailed off just as Danger announced a resounding yes.
“Shut the fuck up.” The words bubbled up from a far deeper place than my throat. “I can’t believe you’d say that. I can’t believe you’d think that.”
He shrugged as he eyed me. “I can’t believe you don’t.”
My reflection in the matte surface of the computer screen betrayed just how swollen my eyes were. I jostled the mouse and let the bright white replace my warped expression.
They didn’t understand and that made everything that much harder. Six months hadn’t passed with each tick of the clock weighted for them. Six months hadn’t existed within the confines of the sentence breathe in, breathe out. They hadn’t lost their soulmate. Me? I’d lost my past, my present, my future in one swift gesture. They didn’t cling desperately to the house, the room, the bed, the fading scent of him on the sheets. I was stuck, financially, and emotionally, unable to move on.
I’d never been great at computers—not outside of editing photos—but I could search Google with the best of them. California prison visitation. Visiting an inmate in California. Overriding an inmate request. Demanding visitation. I stopped just shy of Googling why doesn’t he want to see me?! Because that’s the thing I learned. Dantè could approve or deny visitors.
That letter a week ago was from him.
I’d be lying if I said that figuring that out hadn’t crushed a little of what was left inside of me, but I wouldn’t give up. Up until this moment, he never had. I would take a page out of the book of the man I loved, and I’d be strong enough for both of us. Even if I felt I’d break under the weight of it.
I shoved at the hot tears streaming down my cheeks as I cleared the Google history again.
Advocacy lawyers.
Dantè was innocent, I felt that in the marrow of my bones. Every time that one of the boys insinuated something different, my whole body revolted—my bones tried to split out of my skin. I would prove he was innocent if it killed me.
Most of the names were high dollar law firms. Men with numbers after their name that added the same behind a dollar sign. The tears balled back in my throat and I knew with one more page they’d rip loose again. The only way I could afford those kinds of fees were if I stayed. If I stayed in that house with all my memories and the boys who didn’t find them sacred anymore. The boys that would probably scream if they knew I was looking at lawyers.
But I had to look at lawyers. I had to prove what I already knew. I had to get him free. If I couldn’t find someone…
No.
I forced myself to take a deep breath. And click on the next link.
A gray site with electric blue font popped up. There wasn’t much more than an ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ page. There were no photos aside from the brick building they called an office and the few leafy trees that glinted in sunlight that served as a banner. It had been taken with a cell phone camera and somehow I found that reassuring. The whole site actually. Maybe it was because it was proof they weren’t spending money on bells and whistles.
I read each bio then started at the top and read them again. Before I knew it, my head was spinning with their words, their bumbly, legal-jargon filled words. My heart started to thump in my chest, and my fingers trembled on the keyboard. I closed my eyes and tried to force that deep breath again. I couldn’t. There was too much emotion in my throat, in my chest—it was filling me up in a way that left no room for anything else.
I grabbed a sheet of paper and started writing down the pros of each person in front of me. My handwriting was squiggled, almost indecipherable, but when I finally sat back and let my eyes sway from my list to the screen, there was really only one choice.
Mackenzie Relle.
She wasn’t much older than me—just enough to have finished law school and pass the bar. She had an impressive resume, practicing law at a firm and doing advocacy work on the side. There was no photo, but I pictured her as one of those do-gooder lawyers from that TV show, the one that was so popular, where everyone was so pretty. Silky blonde hair and a closet full of pencil skirts—that’s what I pictured her wearing. And heels, tall, stiletto heels. Something about forming the image of the woman with the resume, who fought tirelessly for those who’d been wrongly accused soothed me. Well just enough to reach for my phone and dial.
It went straight to voicemail.
While her voice, light and soothing, played I sucked in a deep breath and tried to bottle up all the fear, all the anger, and all loneliness that would color my voice with a shade of desperation if I wasn’t careful. The usual beep signaling me to leave a message had me trained like Pavlov’s dog.
“Hello Ms. Relle, my name is Mercy Graves, and I need your help.” I sucked in another deep breath without ever really exhaling, and my head went a little fuzzy. “He’s not guilty.” I realized how much I’d left out and stammered, “My boyfriend, Dantè. Dantè Rogue. He was convicted of a murder that I know he didn’t do.” That ever-present phantom hand squeezed on my heart. “He didn’t do it. Please…” The tears, my constant companions, came back. “I need you.” My voice was barely more than a whisper, but I managed to get my phone number out alongside the plea to call me back.
The second I hung up my heart sank and the tears fell. For the time being I could do nothing but stare at the screen and pray for a call back. Or a new letter. For forgiveness. And each of those things seemed as hopeless as my life had turned without him.
Six Months Later…
“Tell me again what you remember,” Priest asked as he handed me a dish from his soapy sink for me to dunk in water then sanitizer.
I kept my hands busy with the idle work I’d been assigned weeks ago, as I told Priest what I’d told the police, my lawyer, the jury. What I’d said over and over and ove
r again. What I’d said that no one listened to.
“And you were a good kid?”
“I mean, I was a kid.” I shrugged, hoping to slough off the sorrow that had slowly rotted to anger because at twenty-four, my youth was past tense. “I drank at the beach and tagged the side of a building or two. I raced cars on back streets. I did drugs and wasted more days than I want to admit at the skate park.” I sighed as I shoved the memories behind the barrier I was building between this life and that one. “But for the most part, yeah. I competed in skate and surf competitions, and I graduated college with honors despite paying my way. I was a software programmer with a future.”
Priest mulled over my words as he scrubbed one, two, three dishes. I silently dunked each as he handed them to me, trying to keep my mind blank.
“Do you think you did it?” he asked. “That you could have?”
The question had dulled, from a blade that sliced at me and begged for my blood, now closer to a simple club assaulting my stomach. Since I’d woken up with my hands covered in the rich iron red of Leo’s blood, only one other person had bothered to ask me that. Mercy. With her light and goodness in front of me, with the reminder of who I was and what I was fighting for, I’d been able to answer. To feel innocence in my heart. But now…
Well, suffice it to say, the possibility I had done it had wriggled into my mind as she had been shoved out. What could I say? Thinking about her was getting harder. At first, I just missed her. Full on and flat out. The pieces of myself I’d left in her safe keeping begged to weave us back together. Her smile, her smell, and her beautiful stars called to me from where they were hanging in my memory. But like a poison, her sweet had gone bitter as it reminded me of everything I’d lost. Everything I’d never have again. Everything I didn’t deserve. She was gone. The hope that had been, snuffed out. The love just plain lost. And somedays I hated her for loving me. I hated that I’d known the real thing and had it taken away.
I would have fought for her. I would have died for her. Maybe I killed for her too.
“I don’t know,” I finally answered. “I can argue it both ways in my head.”
“But…?” Priest sensed my hesitation underneath.
“But…deep down I don’t think I have it in me.”
“I’d put it in you,” Teddy Vasquez said from where he leaned against the kitchen door. He’d been trying to do just that since he choked me that first day in the yard.
“He’s off limits.” Priest cut him off.
“I’m starting to think otherwise.”
Priest stepped back and eyeballed me. His look said it all. Be hard, be ruthless, be vengeful.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said with a little bit of snark.
“What did you say?” Teddy shoved his chest into mine.
“That you must be fucking stupid.” I eyed him. “And that thinking too hard will likely kill you just as fast as fucking with Priest and his possessions.”
I knew it was coming. I’d been lifting weights in the gym every day when Priest told me how it would eventually play out. When Teddy sprung, I was waiting. I shoved his hands away and swung. My fist crunched into his face, another into his gut. He wheezed for a second but then barreled at me. I humphed as I fell to the tiled floor, the only thing breaking my fall was his arms behind me. We scrambled against each other, more a roll than a wrestle, as the inmates started jeering.
He landed on top and pulled away far enough to cock back and crush my nose. The blood spewed down my face and the taste was worse than acid in my throat. I spit it into Teddy’s face and used his disorientation to wrestle him under me. I let both my fists fly into his kidneys, one, then the other, over and over. I caught my cheek and the ridge of my eyebrow on a sink just above me but the deep, angry splice didn’t stop me.
“Hey, hey, hey. Break it up.”
The guards had their arms around me, yanking me roughly back along the concrete. I felt the grout between the tiles scratch at the skin beneath my fingernails as blood trickled down my face.
“Solitary. Now.”
They kept pulling me even as I surrendered my fight and let them. The last thing I saw before the metal door clanged shut on the yard was Priest’s gaze down his long, crooked nose from where his arms were crossed on his chest. I couldn’t tell if he was as pleased with me as I was.
I heard their voices that night like the ghosts of all the loved ones lost. Maybe it was the wind whipping against the building or maybe it was solitary. Priest wasn’t next door asking me random questions or passing his judgement. Maybe I’d just finally cracked.
“Fight, Dantè,” Danger murmured. “Fuck them, fuck fate, fuck everybody. And fight them for what you want.”
“Remember the sunshine, the sand, the surf. Simple things are worth living for,” Diego added.
“You were always the best of us. Don’t lose what made you, you.” I could see Rousse’s smile framed by freckles.
“I miss you.” It was the only thing I wanted to hear from Mercy, and by whatever trick this prison held, I heard it again and again and again that night.
I miss you.
She had only ever said that to me once. I’d only ever been away from her once.
“I don’t know why she couldn’t come in the first place,” I said, still bitter, as we drove from the airport back to our place.
“It was my birthday and I wanted a boy’s trip.” Diego used the same excuse for the thousandth time. “I didn’t want to spend the trip watching you two fuck in the pool or whatever.”
“I wouldn’t fuck her in the pool,” I scoffed.
“Oh yeah, you guys aren’t into all that kink.” Danger laughed from the backseat.
“If I had a girl like that, I’d let anyone watch. I’d want them to,” Diego snapped. “I’d want them to know she’s mine.”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t need to show the world she was mine. It was as simple of a fact as the sky is blue or the earth is round. When they looked at us—whether human or god or universe in its entirety—they knew.
“I think that’s for you.” Rousse slowed as we got close to the convenience store down the street from our house and jerked his chin toward the balled up girl on the curb.
Mercy sat on the concrete, her arms wrapped around her knees and her cheek turned to one knee cap. By the tilt of her shoulders I knew she was crying. Or had been.
I barely waited for the car to slow before I shoved out of the front seat and bolted to her.
“Are you all right?”
She gasped and her arms wheeled to wrap around me.
“Don’t leave me ever again.” Tears hung on her words.
“Your dad?” I asked simply.
She didn’t answer, but I saw the bobble in her throat just before she managed, “I’m not me without you.”
“Merce.” I wrapped myself around her and nuzzled in. Her warm tropical smell and radiating sunshine were more home than anything in that ranch style pit we called a house down the street. “You’re my other half.”
I lifted her up if only to feel the full weight of her in my hands. Her singular sob made that weight something closer to precious gems.
“Promise me,” she whispered.
“The sun, the moon, and all the stars that aren’t already yours.” I traced the freckles on her back that made Cassiopeia even where they were hidden by cotton. It was too easy to promise her. The oath was already etched inside me.
“Walk with me?” she asked without really unwinding from me.
And I did.
Hand in hand, we walked back along the road I knew too well. The boys had driven off so my world could exist solely in the way her hand held mine. Mercy and I traded off kicking a small rock in front of us as we walked home.
Until she veered off and pushed me back into the woods and up against the gnarled bark of a pine and fell to her knees.
“What are you doing?” I asked before my mouth fell open.
“You,” she answered
before popping her lips and opening my fly. “I need you.”
I was sporting a semi like I always did around Mercy. She swallowed it whole. The wet of her lips sent shivers down my spine but then the unbarred lust I felt for her constricted everything below my bellybutton. It was that need that tightened my insides and hardened my dick where her tongue cradled me.
“You should miss me more often,” I grunted as she reached her hands past my unzipped fly to fondle my balls.
She slid off me and popped her lips again. “I miss you the moment you leave the room. I crave the taste of you.”
The quip was just on the tip of my tongue when she started to do that thing with the tip of hers.
I could feel it again. Or the ghost of that night carried in on the wind. Her soft, wet lips. The feeling they instilled in me. My hard-on stiffened with the thump of my memory. I reached for myself then stilled. This wasn’t that night, my hand wasn’t her mouth. I might as well have been jerking off in the middle of a crowded room for how awkward I felt. She was lost to me in more ways than one.
A tear clustered at the corner of my eye; the first since Priest made me swallow them in the beginning.
“I miss you,” I murmured into the breezy cell then shoved the tears away.
I turned over only to stare rough cinder block. She didn’t belong here. Here in the dark where I fought for some semblance of a future. Even though human life was just a stain and sustenance to the building that housed us.
When I left solitary the next day, there was another form letter waiting for me. I didn’t need to read it. The prison administration had sent me nine since I’d been here. Another request from Mercy to see me. Another request I would have to deny.
Before the reasoning had always been for her. She shouldn’t see me like this. She should move on. She should forget me. But now, like the weights I was pressing and the tattoo of a cross I’d gotten that signified I was Priest’s, I had to protect myself too. I had to survive. And seeing Mercy would kill me.