Prisoner

by Skye Warren

  Nobody ever can.

  I sit up straighter. “Never mind. I’ll stay.”

  Her expression clears. “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve gotten this far. I’ll finish it out.” There are just a few more weeks. I’ll ignore Grayson and focus on the journal. I’ll get it done and get on with my degree, with my life, and forget I ever met a prison inmate named Grayson.

  * * *

  I sit at my post in front of sixteen desks and chairs that will soon be filled with my students, including Grayson, who will take my chair and desk, as he did the last time. No, he won’t just take it—he’ll own it. He’ll watch me while he does it, enjoying every second.

  We’re doing private conferences today. The conference with Grayson will be hardest. I shuffle through their papers, marked in red but hopefully not too much. My heart pounds.

  The men are to read silently under Dixon’s watch—I’ve photocopied an essay by James Baldwin I thought they would enjoy, and I’ll pull them out one by one to discuss how their final projects might evolve from the seeds they’ve sown during the exercises. We’ll conference at the small table at the far side of the resource area. Not exactly private but removed enough to have a quiet conversation. I’m hoping to get through them fast so I can duck into the little office and hide out with a book.

  The clock hits 1:59, and I go to stand at the edge of the space. I’ve worn a suit jacket today. Armor. I hadn’t needed it until Grayson.

  I greet them by name as they file in. Jordan. LeShawn. Roman. Teke. They take their usual seats.

  Grayson’s always at the end of the line. At first I thought it was because he likes it that way, the bad kid sitting in the back of the bus. Now it occurs to me that it lets Dixon keep a closer watch on him. Like Grayson is dangerous, or some kind of escape artist or something, so big and brutish and insolent.

  He comes around the corner, fixing me with an amused gaze. I look down at his thick wrists, chained loosely together, and at his muscular forearms and the white scars etching his skin. Raised scars, and it’s definitely a design. Did he do that? Or did somebody else? My heart pounds as I imagine what it would feel like if I touched it—smooth? Rough? Hard? He seems hard all over, but of course there would be soft parts of him too.

  My cheeks heat.

  “Hello, Ms. Winslow,” he whispers as he passes by, and the intimacy of it steals my breath. Like he guessed my thoughts…and some dark part of me finds that exciting.

  I swallow it down.

  “Hello, Grayson,” I say, grateful that he’s under guard. He’s too big, too beautiful, too dangerous, too everything. He steals the show. He fills the room. He leaves a wake of pure energy in my belly as he continues to the front.

  I hand out the essays, and I relate the plan for the day, the way my professors sometimes do. “We’ll be conferring on which of the exercises to develop and polish. I’ll choose a few to be published in the journal—anonymously, and only if you want to be included.” I’ve said this before, but I want to make sure they understand. “You’ll get class credit for doing the work. Being published in the journal is just an extra, okay?”

  The sessions go by quickly. Griffin’ll be doing a piece on a collection of beer mugs he was given by an elderly neighbor. I encourage Teke to get deeper into the experience of the day his dad got out of prison. A few of them talk about becoming fathers. It makes me feel a little bad about the way I thought about dumping this project.

  Grayson’s last. He takes his chair, casually crossing his ankles like tree trunks between us, settling his hands onto his thighs. His heat fills the space. How does the prison even hold him?

  I smile nervously and cast my eyes to the other side of the space, where Dixon halfheartedly watches over the guys. Still, it makes me feel better, knowing he’s there.

  He’d protect me if anything happened. Wouldn’t he?

  I look back to find Grayson’s sharp eyes twinkling, lashes dark and thick, all that knowing allure. My breath speeds up, and my hand flies to my glasses as if to adjust them even though they’re perfectly straight. Sometimes I just need to do that.

  “Let’s see.” I shuffle the papers, finding his. For a second my gaze strays over to the corded muscles of his forearms, brushed with a smattering of hair. The strange design, like a white tattoo. But it’s not a tattoo. It’s a scar. Even chained together, his hands are muscular, massive, capable.

  I picture him standing in front of me and touching the bottom of my chin, lifting my face to look up at him, running a finger down my neck. I imagine his thick finger resting against the tender divot at the base of my neck.

  “I’m excited about the journal,” he says, startling me.

  I straighten. He sounds genuine, as though he really is excited about it. God, what am I doing? “I’m glad,” I say.

  He nods. “I like the idea of different voices filling the bandwidth. It’s what the fucking Internet is for, right?”

  I nod eagerly until I realize he’s just feeding me my own sentiments, crudely rephrased. I slide over his papers. “The journal is memoir. Not fiction.”

  He cocks his head. Regards me warily.

  “And what you’ve given me…”

  His eyes darken. His voice is husky. “You calling me a liar, Ms. Winslow?”

  My mouth goes dry. “I don’t think it’s a real story. Or at least, it’s not your story.”

  He looks at me long and strong, and my pulse goes into overdrive. I can’t read him, but it doesn’t take a genius to know he’s not happy with me. Again I look down at his hands.

  He finally speaks. “You don’t think it’s real?”

  I swallow and place my hands in my lap. “I don’t.”

  His massive chest rises and falls with his every breath. I wonder what he did. I wonder what happened to him. How can he not know baseball? Why does he have the scar design? What makes him seem so different from other guys?

  “You know why I’m in here?” he asks suddenly.

  I shake my head. “That’s not something they tell us.” I get the feeling he knows that, and that the question was designed to taunt. I glance again at Dixon, who’s out there talking with the guys in front of the block of desks. When I look back, I find Grayson eyeing my hands, still in my lap. Or maybe he’s just eyeing my lap.

  The line running between us pulls tight. I’m in charge, but he has all the power. I shouldn’t allow that. I shouldn’t like that.

  I remind myself that I know more than he does about stories. I know that when you tell a fake story about yourself, it’s because you’re protecting the real story.

  He seems excited about the journal. So I use it. “You’ll get credit for doing the writing, but you can’t get into the journal with anything fake.”

  His eyes glitter.

  Seven

  ~Grayson~

  The class is about getting out of this place. I remind myself of that over the three weeks we spend on what Ms. Winslow calls drafting. But I get into it a little.

  She’s standing beside the desk when we shuffle into the library classroom. I think it makes her feel safe and in control. She greets all us guys by name, as if to prove that she remembers us. That we matter.

  The sound of my name from her lips makes me tense, just like always. I never get tired of those pencil skirts. Does she know how the fabric hugs her? She couldn’t look hotter in a goddamned bikini. I want to run my hands over her hips, tracing her shape through the fabric. Wouldn’t even need to undress her. I could come just from that.

  I walk over and take my place at her desk. Take her chair. Her space. She doesn’t look at me, but I can tell she feels it—there’s something that connects us, like underground electric lines. My gaze rests on the tan canvas bag she brings to class every day, full of books.

  She heads to the side of the room. “Today we’re going to journal with a prompt,” she says, adjusting her glasses. It didn’t take me long to figure out they’re her protection, the way she pushes them
up on her nose when she’s nervous, shifts them while she thinks. “Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you’re falling. Is there a parachute? Where are you falling from? What do you see on the ground? How does it feel?”

  I close my eyes and imagine my hand sliding underneath her tight skirt, between her legs. Two fingers working the fabric of her panties over her clit. It’s become an obsession of mine, all the ways I could make her come without really touching her.

  Her sexy voice intrudes. “Do you feel scared? Exhilarated?”

  Yeah, both of those. It’s been that way my whole life, a feeling of falling. Sometimes I wake up at night with a jolt, arms raised to protect myself even though nothing’s there. No one’s been able to hurt me for a long time, and I keep it that way.

  Though lately I’ve been waking up with a hard-on. I have to beat off just to get some rest.

  So really, she’s the one who’s making me come without touching me.

  “Don’t take the first word that comes to your mind. I want you to really think into it, feel it. The right word is so important, you guys.”

  She walks up and down the side, eyes bright. She wants us to feel so much. She cares. It makes me want to shake her or something. Warn her about caring too much about people like us.

  Because sometimes we start to care back. And that wouldn’t be good for her.

  “The right word makes all the difference,” she continues, “and finding the right word has nothing to do with vocabulary. The right word is already inside you. You just have to dig in and find it. And I know you can. Don’t settle for a vague word either. You’re better than that. Go for the precise word. Dig deeply. Challenge yourselves.”

  She turns, strolls the other way, seventeen pairs of eyes following her ass. A strand of dark hair has fallen from her bun. I picture tucking it behind her ear, real gentle. That would be a challenge: being gentle.

  “Go ahead and write, then,” she says in her encouraging tone. She means it. So sweet my teeth ache. I want her to use that voice to say other things. Go ahead and kiss me, then. Go ahead and lick me, then.

  Go ahead and fuck me.

  Yes, Ms. Winslow.

  This is getting to be a problem. I’m in class for one purpose—to escape. Nothing kills my hard-on faster than thinking about captivity. I can’t stand walls. I don’t even like ceilings. The bars… I’m fucking allergic to the bars.

  I spent the first week in lockup in full-on panic. Shaking, throwing up. Yeah, it was a regular carnival ride. Then the public defender—he was a good guy, actually—started making noise about the situation, so they brought a psych in.

  That was the worst.

  They shot me full of so many drugs I couldn’t see straight. Couldn’t stop the nightmares from coming. The only thing I hate worse than lockup is being drugged, so I actually worked with the psych, doing his bullshit breathing techniques and saying this and that to myself. It works—most of the time.

  It’s not falling that scares me. At least there I’m out in the open. It’s the cage waiting for me on the ground that fucks with my head.

  I look up and find her watching me from the side of the room. “Question?” She pushes off the wall and moves toward me.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I say.

  “It looked to me like you had an idea.”

  “Not the kind that’s fit to print,” I say. “Especially not in a vignette, if you know what I mean.”

  I meant to put her off guard, like it was something X-rated, which partly it was, but she just looks at me, unblinking and unafraid. Again I have this feeling of knowing her even though I don’t. I wonder if she feels like she knows me too.

  “Can’t you imagine falling?” she asks.

  I don’t need to imagine it. I know how it feels.

  I look around, but everyone’s busy writing. “You know that game little kids play where they stand in a circle and one falls and the others catch him? Not one motherfucker in here would ever play that game. Any one of us would rather get punched in the face. So you think we’re going to be playing that game on paper?” I cross my legs. “No one here wants to think about falling. Giving up that kind of control.”

  “Including you? You won’t play the game, not even on paper?”

  I shrug. “You’re saying you want the truth, so…”

  “Are you refusing to do it?”

  “I’m being honest here. Giving you something you say you want.” Christ. She cares so much about guys being honest, she has me telling her something none of the other guys ever would. I feel like I’m in the mind-fuck hall of mirrors.

  But then her eyes change. Smile eyes without the smile. She appreciates it. “I guess honesty about falling is a little bit like falling,” she says finally.

  I snort, because she’s smart, and I like that. “Yeah.”

  “Trusting somebody to catch you,” she adds, looking at the far wall, eyes full of thoughts. I get the feeling that she’s talking about herself suddenly.

  Something lights deep inside me, like a wire sparking in the darkness. I seize it. I don’t know why; I just have to. “Will they?” I ask. “Will they catch you?”

  Her gaze finds mine, and something flares in me. Because I would catch her. And the hottest thing is that I think she knows it. Maybe nobody has ever caught her, but I would. I would catch her. I would keep her. Make her mine. As soon as I get the thought of her as mine, I can’t get rid of it. It fills me like a fire, and I need to tamp it down because this is a thousand miles off my plan.

  She nods at my forearm. The crossed battle-axes. “Did that feel like falling?”

  My mind goes back to us boys scratching away on each other in the basement. The pain felt like love and fury and freedom. “The opposite,” I say. “Exactly the opposite.”

  She seems about to say something, and then she stops and swallows, and God, I want to kiss that neck, breathe her in.

  “Does it have a meaning?”

  I look up at her. “Yeah.”

  She gets from my tone that it’s off limits, even to her, because she nods, then looks around, seeming to remember the rest of the class. She points to the notebook. “Just do your best.” She walks off.

  I stare after her, needing to follow. This thing between us is sizzling now.

  The other guys are still busy writing.

  I set my pen to the paper and do a few doodles. Then I raise my hand.

  Dixon is busy fiddling with his phone, so I cough and stomp my foot. He finally looks up and sees my hand. He didn’t know she left either, and anger flares inside me. He’s supposed to be protecting her from assholes like me.

  “What is it?” Dixon says, finally motivated enough to move.

  “I have to piss,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Wait until you get back to your cell.”

  “I’ll go right here.”

  Some of the guys snicker.

  If I piss myself in the library, they’ll probably throw me in solitary again. But only after Dixon takes me to the infirmary to deal with bodily waste cleanup and files a bunch of paperwork. I’ve seen it happen like that with other guys. In short, he doesn’t want me to follow through on the threat.

  “I’ve got seventeen of you,” he mutters, more to himself.

  “There’s a bathroom in the back office, right? So you’ll be able to see me if I tried to escape.” I make my voice casual. If you come right out and say it, people think you won’t do it. Some reverse psychology bullshit. But he does have a straight line of sight to the office door. Calling for backup to handle a potty break will take forever and probably annoy the controller of the east wing too. That’s prison politics for you.

  “Okay,” he finally says. “Go straight into the office. You’ll go to solitary for a month if you touch Ms. Winslow. Two minutes.”

  He’s lazy. He should never allow this, but I don’t say that. I nod and walk over to the office.

  I don’t have to touch her.

  There
she is, sitting behind the librarian’s desk…with a book in her hands. She’s reading? She expects us to spill our guts out there, and she’s in here reading the latest thriller or whatever the fuck. I want to be offended, but something about the way she’s hunched over raises the hairs on my neck. She’s hiding. Afraid. It’s the world’s nerdiest fight-or-flight reaction. I like it.

  She looks up, then, startled, and slams her book shut.

  “Sorry,” I murmur. At her questioning look, I clarify, “For losing your spot.”

  She stands up. “It’s okay. I’ve read it before. What…what are you doing here?”

  Now that’s the question. Because I should be out there working on the building blocks of my fucking escape plan.

  I step closer and watch her eyes widen. I take another step and another; I’m behind the desk. She backs up. The swivel chair spins out of the way. One more step for each of us and she’s against the wall.

  But I’m still not touching her. Her chest heaves. My gaze falls to her neck, where her pulse bangs away. I let her watch me watching it.

  Is she worried? Even without the threat of Dixon, I wouldn’t hurt her.

  “What are you doing, Grayson?” Her voice wavers, a parody of the authoritative tone she uses on the class. “Return to your seat.”

  “I will. But first…” I’m close enough that my breath ruffles the hair at her temple. Her body’s like a furnace in front of me, singeing my face, my chest, all the way down my body. Can she feel me too? As long as I don’t touch her, I’m not breaking any rules.

  One minute left.

  I breathe in deep, storing the honeysuckle scent of her away to examine later, when I’m alone in my cell. “But first,” I whisper, “you never answered my question. Will anyone catch you?”

  “It’s just an imagination exercise.”

  Liar, I think.

  Her irises are a crackle of brown and gold through the lenses of her glasses, pupils wide and wild. She can fake control, but not up close. She keeps her gaze on mine, as though she thinks looking away will be a sign of weakness—she has no idea how hot it is. I’ve never met a woman like her, and let’s just say I’ve met a lot of women.