AVERY (The Corbin Brothers Book 2)

by Lexie Ray

  Shadows to every light, and light to every shadow. I formed every word with my lips, tasting the rhythm of the idea. It meant—it meant that none of us was all bad, and none of us was all good. We had shades of both within us. No one was perfect.

  The flow of inmates in the hallway outside the cell let me know that it was time for dinner. I seemed to float there, buoyed by the words I’d just read. I hadn’t been able to understand all of it, but I’d understood enough to be enchanted. The inmate in the library had been right. This was magical stuff.

  When I sat down at my usual table, I found that I couldn’t keep quiet about the door in my mind that had just been opened.

  “Have any of you ladies ever read A Message to Jasmine?” I asked.

  “Fuck yes,” an inmate said intensely, grabbing my hand and making me drop my plastic fork. “That book changed my goddamn life.”

  “We’ve all read it,” another said. “Well, practically all of us. Don’t tell me you’re only just getting around to it.”

  “Guilty,” I admitted. “It just wasn’t on my radar. I picked it up at the library today.”

  “I want to read it again,” another girl moaned. “Will you hurry up with it so I can check it out next?”

  “I’m a slow reader, but I’ll do my best,” I promised. Honestly, I wanted to keep that book as long as possible. I wanted to savor every word of that rich language. It made me feel like a different person. It made me feel like anything was possible.

  The girls started chatting about their favorite parts of the book, but I wasn’t upset at the spoilers. It helped me to understood what I’d read in the time before dinner, made me look forward to continuing to read it. I hadn’t had anything to look forward to for a long time.

  Dinner was made even better with Tama not there. It made me relax. Even the food tasted extra good. I figured the book had something to do with that. My heart felt open to the poetry.

  After dinner, I went back to the cell and waited excitedly for Marlee. I wanted to tell her all about my day—the commissary, the GED class, and especially the book.

  “Have you ever read A Message to Jasmine?” I gushed the moment she walked in.

  “Who hasn’t?” she asked. “We passed it around like contraband when the library first got it. It’s quite a love story. Quite a life story, too.”

  “I’m reading it for my GED class,” I said. “It’s pretty much amazing, sugar. I’ve never liked a book this much. In fact, I usually hate reading.”

  “I’m glad you’re liking it,” Marlee said. She looked a little troubled.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you not have a good day?”

  “I’m worried about you,” she admitted.

  “About me?” I asked. “I don’t understand. I had a good day. I worked at the commissary and I went to my GED class. I’m—I’m going to your meeting tomorrow. I told you I would.”

  “It’s about Tama,” Marlee said. “I heard that she’s been pursuing you.”

  “She can pursue me all she wants, sugar,” I laughed, waving dismissively. “She’s not the first and I hope she won’t be the last.”

  “You don’t understand,” my cellmate said. “Tama wants you, and Tama always gets what she wants.”

  I frowned at that. Willow had told me something similar.

  “Well, I don’t want Tama,” I said. “I made that very clear today, sugar, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “That just makes her want you even more,” Marlee said. “She likes the hunt. You need to be very careful. Try not to be alone.”

  “Alone?” I laughed again. “This is prison, doll. You’re never alone.”

  “You are sometimes,” Marlee said, “often enough to make it easy for someone to jump you. In the showers. In the hallway, walking to work or to a class or something. I’m going to enlist some people to make sure you have an escort for the next few weeks.”

  “That sounds ridiculous,” I scoffed. “I don’t need any sort of escort.”

  “You will need one,” Marlee said, “unless you want to become Tama’s bitch. And she’ll make you her bitch. You can count on that.”

  “Nobody makes me their bitch,” I said, propelling myself off my bed. “Least of all that bitch. I’ll handle her, and I can handle myself.”

  “You don’t understand,” Marlee insisted again. “Tama always gets what she wants. There hasn’t been anyone who’s been able to resist her in the end.”

  “Has she ever come on to you?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

  “No,” Marlee said. “Tama has very specific tastes in women.”

  I eyed the differences between Marlee and me. She was thin, white, blonde. I was thick, black, dark haired.

  “You’re saying she likes big, black women,” I concluded.

  “You fit the bill,” Marlee said, throwing her hands up. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Well, she can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not interested. I’m not going to play that game.”

  “You can’t not play it,” Marlee said. “Don’t you see? This is prison. You’re locked up in here with her. For most women, it’s easier just to give in to her. Get it over with. She’ll eventually find another target and move on. If you drag it out, it’ll be worse for you. She won’t be able to help herself.”

  “I’m not just going to roll over and give it to her,” I said, wrinkling my nose with disgust. “There’s not a single person on this planet I’d do that for.”

  “Then you should accept the escort,” Marlee pushed. “Get Cheryl to walk with you to lunch. Buddy up with some of the GED girls—walk with them to and from class. Don’t be in the cell alone. Stick with Willow’s friends. You need to build a support system around you and fast. Tama won’t try for you unless you’re alone.”

  “Then I won’t be alone,” I said, resigning myself to the fact that it was time to develop allies here.

  “And don’t give her reasons to try to wheedle her way into your jumpsuit,” Marlee said. “Would you give it up to Tama for hooch? Be honest.”

  How fast did word get around here? The commissary thing had just happened this morning, and by dinnertime my cellmate was already grilling me about the details.

  I swallowed, irritated and uncomfortable with this line of questioning.

  “I don’t think so,” I said finally.

  “You don’t think so? Are you sure?” Marlee gripped her hair in both hands before letting it go. “I know I promised to leave you alone about it, Wanda, but this is textbook alcoholism. You’d be willing to sell your body for the chance at hooch? Really?”

  “It be nothing I wasn’t used to,” I said, glaring at my cellmate. “I’ve always used my body as currency. If it got me what I wanted, so what?”

  “Hooch,” Marlee said again. “That shit is nasty, Wanda. Think. Think, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I think I’m going to go to sleep,” I said coldly. I thought I’d exorcised all the accusations of me being an alcoholic with the announcement that I was going to attend the meeting tomorrow. Why couldn’t I escape it?

  Then again, that strange little voice inside me said, why was I seriously considering sex with Tama in order to get my fix? I wanted nothing to do with her. Was I really thinking about giving it up for some of that disgusting booze?

  The next morning, I walked with Marlee to breakfast. She found Cheryl and had me sit next to her. Cheryl seemed to understand the situation and escorted me to and from commissary. At lunch, I found a couple of girls from GED class. That took care of me until that tricky time in between class and dinner. A girl from class walked back to my cell with me, talking about A Message to Jasmine I hadn’t gotten the chance to pick it up again since yesterday, which irritated me. I couldn’t very well read with a chatty inmate keeping me company.

  Marlee, however, was waiting for me in the cell.

  “Perfect timing,” she said, smiling in a way that told me that the reason it was perfect w
as because she’d planned on being here. “You ready to go to the meeting?”

  “Oh, girl, I didn’t know you was in AA, too,” the GED inmate said, patting my shoulder. “That’s good. We can all walk together.”

  There was quite a crowd gathering in the common area, pulling chairs out from the tables and setting them in rows in front of a podium. I was immediately twitchy as people started greeting one another. It was like a sisterhood I’d never belong to. I didn’t want to be here at all.

  “Don’t chicken out on me now,” Marlee teased lightly, elbowing me a bit. “You’re here. It’s going to be fine.”

  “And I don’t have to talk,” I reminded my cellmate.

  “No, just listen,” she said. “Unless you decide you want to talk. Then you talk. Play it by ear, Wanda. Open yourself to it. Don’t judge it before you even know what it’s about.”

  It was about a bunch of people who thought they had problems with liquor. My only problem with liquor was that I didn’t have any at my disposal. I wondered how that would go over with the attendees. I probably wouldn’t be too popular. I might even lose some of my security detail. And then Tama would sink her claws into me and I might get that buzz I’d been promised.

  What the hell. I scratched at my scalp irritably, running my fingers through my hair. This was ridiculous. Not half a year ago, I was running a highly successful nightclub. Now I was in prison, trying to figure out how to avoid the advances of some inmate.

  Life was a bitch. That much I understood.

  “Okay, everybody, let’s get started,” an inmate at the podium said. “I’m Karla, an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Karla,” everyone said in unison. I winced. It was going to be one of those meetings.

  “Let’s start out with introductions. Will everyone new here raise their hands?”

  Marlee snagged my wrist and raised my arm for me. I scowled at her. I thought she said I didn’t have to participate. All I had to do was listen.

  “Hello, there,” Karla said. “Will you introduce yourself?”

  “This is my cellmate, Wanda,” Marlee said quickly.

  “Hi, Wanda,” everyone intoned. It was creepy.

  “I asked her to come and told her all she had to do was listen, if she wasn’t comfortable sharing,” Marlee said.

  “You’re welcome here, Wanda,” Karla said. “We’re all familiar with the AA preamble. I won’t bore us with it in its entirety, but Wanda and anyone else who needs a refresher should know that the only requirement of being a part of this group is the desire to stop drinking.”

  “Help me, Higher Power,” someone said.

  “Amen.”

  “We’re all alcoholics here,” Karla continued. “We want to stay sober, and help one another stay sober.”

  “We sure do!”

  “Amen!”

  This was beginning to feel like an old-school church revival. Was this how all AA meetings went?

  “With the abbreviated preamble out of the way, I want to go through the twelve steps,” Karla said. “I’m going to point to twelve people. You’re going to give me the steps, in order, according to where you are in the lineup. Ready?”

  Karla pointed at an inmate in the front row, who shot up like a rocket.

  “One. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

  She pointed to another inmate, one sitting in my row. She stood up and took a deep breath.

  “Two. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

  Another inmate stood, Karla’s finger like a magnet drawing metal up and out of those chairs.

  “Three. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

  I’d known religious people in my time, though none of them frequented the nightclub. It confused and concerned me that anyone would turn their lives over to the idea of a higher power or idea of one. How else could we be responsible for our own lives? It seemed much too easy to let some God take care of us.

  “Four. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

  Moral inventory? That sounded painful—and time consuming. I wasn’t sure I’d like what I found if I ever tried to make one.

  “Five. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

  The justice system was convinced that I had done wrong, and the prison system was worried that I was on a fatal path. Why was it that I didn’t think I’d done a damn thing wrong? Sure, maybe I had a little too much to drink on some occasions. Maybe I couldn’t remember everything that had taken place on those nights. But I’d been a businesswoman, and a damn good one at that. I’d been there for girls who needed me. I’d built a thriving empire on nothing.

  The nature of my wrongs? I was the one who’d been wronged by all of this.

  “Six. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”

  Ready, nothing. I didn’t have any defects to remove. That was ludicrous. Plus, I wasn’t so sure there really was a God. This program wasn’t going to work for me. I could already tell.

  “Seven. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”

  “Eight. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.”

  That gave me pause. If the justice system had been correct in convicting me—and this was just a scenario I was playing around with in my head—then I’d wronged a lot of people. Dozens. If I had to make amends to all those people, I’d be working at it for years. I wondered if Marlee had contacted all of the boyfriends she’d screwed over. How many of them had there been? Dozens, like me? Was she still working through them?

  “Nine. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

  I remembered that strange memory I’d had of the night that Cocoa left. I’d obviously been drinking that night, otherwise I’d have remembered something as big as that. Cocoa had been my right hand, after all, and losing her had been a blow. But were my memories of that night true? The gunshots, the screams, the crash of glass. If I’d injured Cocoa that night, would trying to make amends with her injure her any further?

  “Ten. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think anymore about all of this. I thought I’d understood what it was all about, thought I’d figured it out, but it kept making me think. Could it be possible that I was like the rest of these people? Was it possible that I actually belonged here?

  “Eleven. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

  It seemed like I was going to have to get up close and personal with the idea that there was a Higher Power or something. It was clear to me that the program hinged on this idea. Maybe, if I could convince myself to be open to the thought of God, it would provide me with greater clarity. Was I really an alcoholic? Did I really need help? Should I embark on this journey at all?

  Marlee was the twelfth inmate selected. Her voice rang out clear and true, not hesitating in the slightest.

  “Twelve. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

  “Amen!”

  Karla had said from the beginning that the only requirement to belong to this group was to want to stop drinking. That was a problem for me. I didn’t want to stop drinking. Even now, after listening to the twelve steps, I was craving nothing more than another taste of Willow’s hooch. I didn’t have any high hopes anymore for whiskey or any other liquor I’d had on the outside. I wanted hooch, plain and simple. It was attainable. I knew what I had to do to get it.

  “We’re going to jump right into sharing,” Karla said. “I know it
’s everyone’s favorite part.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Amen!”

  I peered around, trying to spot the “amen” inmate. Was she really going to punctuate every statement with amen?

  “Let me remind you that sharing can be no longer than five minutes,” Karla said. “Keep the focus on yourself, please. And please be respectful of your fellow alcoholics. Don’t interrupt during sharing. Now. Who’d like to begin?”

  Nearly every single hand in the room shot up.

  Why were people so eager to share? I could only assume that they were going to talk about their failings, talk about all the times they’d fucked up. Why did we have to witness that? Couldn’t we be content knowing that we’d fucked up ourselves? Why did everyone else have to know?

  “Come on up,” Karla said, pointing at the GED inmate sitting beside me. She popped up, beaming as if she’d been chosen to get a prize.

  “My name’s Desiree, and I’m an alcoholic,” she said, smiling as if it were some kind of good news.

  “Hi, Desiree.”

  “Hi,” she said again. “It’s exciting to share with someone new in the crowd.” She waved at me excitedly and I fought the urge to slump down into my seat.

  “Alcohol is the reason I’m here in prison,” Desiree said. “I accept that. I realize that it was harming me more than I realized. I was a party girl. I loved all sorts of alcohol, but shots were my specialty. Tequila shots. Tequila shots were my downfall.”

  Shit. The sweat prickled across my brow and I actually salivated at the thought of a tequila shot. There was such a ritual to it—licking your hand and sprinkling the salt on it, then licking your hand again. Expelling your breath and throwing the fiery liquor back, inhaling as you bit down on the lime. The acidity of the citrus cutting the curl of the alcohol in your stomach.

  I would spread my legs for Tama right now, in front of all these people, if I could just have a shot of tequila. One. Fucking. Tequila. Shot.

  “When I drank tequila, I felt invincible,” Desiree continued. “I felt like nothing could happen to me, that I could do whatever I wanted. One night, I nearly finished a whole bottle of tequila at the bar by myself. I knew the bartender—we fucked sometimes when I didn’t have the cash to pay. We called it my tab—just put it on my tab, Bob.”