by Ashley Love
His eyes are still vacant and stuttering about the room, his hand reaching back to check the locks on the door in an unsure way, and something just isn’t right.
I say his name again quietly, “Lex,” my voice shaking as I call his attention, and he finally focuses on my face. His gaze is intense, as if he hasn’t seen me in the room before now, his wild eyes reaching deep inside and stealing my breath, and I can barely catch it before he closes the space between us, threading his fingers into my hair and crushing his mouth to mine.
The pressure of his lips on mine makes me whimper as he kisses me over and over, breathing out deep sighs as our lips separate. But he never waits long before claiming them again, and again, and again, and it’s all I can do to hold on to him, touching him, tasting him, living in him and in this…in us. And it finally hits me that he’s here...he’s here. I try to wrap my brain around it. Jail…the arrest…they took him away…how is he…
“What are you doing here?” I finally breathe out against his mouth, my voice barely above a whisper, one hand coming up to his face as my eyes search his desperately, fear and confusion paralyzing me, rooting me to the spot. No…no, he can’t be here.
He holds the back of my head with one hand, the other pressed to my cheek and we’re nose to nose. “Don’t worry about that,” he replies quickly and hushed, stroking my cheek with his fingers and they’re trembling against my face, his eyes glazed over and lost in mine, and he’s not himself. Something happened to him…something happened to him in that place and I don’t want him to go back…but how…how is he here?
“Lex…Lex, what’s going on?” I shake my head, my eyes turgid with fear, trying to dislodge this block in my brain that’s preventing me from understanding anything about what’s happening right now. How did he…why is he…there’s so many questions.
“I love you.” He silences my brain and I think I stop breathing for a moment but he speaks again, “Leala, everything is gonna be okay. I love you.” There it is again, and my heart jumps into my throat and he kisses me before I can speak.
He kisses me over and over and I’m dizzy from his words and his mouth and this is so much, but I never expect to hear what comes next.
“Leave with me…”
Silence.
“Leave with me, Leala.” He says it again and my heart skips a beat, my voice and breath caught in my throat.
I choke on my words. “Wh-what?”
He looks behind him warily, glancing out the small window that gives a view of the parking lot through the thin sheer curtain. “We need to go. We have to go somewhere. We need to go now.”
I sigh and shake my head. No…no, no. How can he expect me to just leave without any questions? And what is he running from anyway? “Lex, I—”
“Leala, I promise…God, I promise I’ll stop, just leave with me.” He grabs my shoulders, shaking me a bit and I gasp at the wildness of his eyes, the desperation there. Something is wrong. “I love you. I love you and I’m sorry and I’ll stop…I promise I’ll quit. Say you’ll go with me.”
I freeze. I think my heart stops. This is…this is unreal. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to hear. I’m so full but empty at the same time because something in the pit of my stomach tells me this isn’t right. I push it aside.
“Lex—” I start, but I'm cut off as I hear something in the distance. I glance out the window, that same window he was looking out of. The tension in the room keeps telling me something is wrong.
“Say it!” he shouts and I whip my head back around to him, and the sound is louder. “Tell me you’ll go. I love you. I love you so much and I want us to be together. Go with me…leave with me. Let’s just go.”
“Now?” I shriek and I can still hear the sound. Louder and louder.
Sirens.
It finally becomes clear. The red and blue lights flicker in the window, changing the colors of the curtains and faintly splashing across his face. I don’t even have to look out the window to know what’s there, why he’s here…that he shouldn’t be here.
His features calm. He nods. “Now.”
I look into his eyes. Calm. He speaks again.
“Now, Leala.” He touches my face, and I nod in agreement. Now. I can barely hear him over the sounds, but he says it again. “I love you.” And the sirens drown everything out…
The sirens…sirens…ringing…they’re ringing and—
Shit.
I open my eyes and the room is blurry for a moment as I blink and focus my vision, and the ringing is the phone. The goddamn phone.
I pick it up. “Hello?”
“Hey.”
Kyle.
I rub my eyes and squint at the clock, the sun threatening me through the blinds. Six-thirty in the morning. Is he insane? “Hey. What are you—”
“I talked to Lex last night,” he cuts me off before I can finish.
“Wait…he called you?” He was supposed to call me. That bastard.
“Yeah, he needed me to take care of his attorney shit. Listen…I think it’s gonna take a while to get him out. He should’ve only been there overnight, maybe a day, but they don’t wanna release him because he’s on drugs and shit and that lawyer I talked to said they’re gonna drag their feet getting him in front of a JP to set bail.”
“Where is he?” My voice shakes a little as I sit up in bed.
He doesn’t stop talking, babbling on about appointments and court shit. I throw the covers back and pace into the living room, half-listening. I peek out the small curtain, I check the locks on the door. I think I hear the sirens in the distance, but I shake my head to clear it. What a fucked up dream. I come back to Kyle and realize he’s still going on. “When this guy goes to talk to him—“
“Where is he, Kyle?!” I finally shout.
He’s silent for a moment. “Men’s Central.”
I stop dead in my tracks. I hear him swallow hard in the silence before I find my voice. “W-what?”
“He’s in Men’s Central, Leala.”
A chill runs through me, a cold hard shiver and my chest feels tight. “He can’t stay there.” I shake my head, beginning to pant, my hand shaking as it holds the phone to my ear. No, no this isn’t happening. “Kyle…Kyle, he has to get out. He can’t stay there.”
“Calm down, okay? This lawyer knows what he’s doing. We’re gonna get him out, everything’s gonna be fine. Okay? Leala, okay?” He’s trying to stay calm, but I can hear the panic in his voice when I don’t respond. How can I respond? What do you say to some shit like this? Getting arrested is bad enough, but Men’s Central?
“I can’t do this…I can’t….fuck, I’m like having an anxiety attack,” I breathe out the words, my chest in a vice, lungs squeezing and pleading for air. I pace about the room, see the news reports flash in my mind’s eye and I see Lex there…in that place…and I can’t take this. “People get killed in Men Central, Kyle!”
“Leala, c’mon—“
“And you know with Lex's temper…Kyle, he’s gonna piss someone off and—”
“Stop, Leala. Cut that shit out and calm down, okay? It’s gonna be okay. They can only keep him there until he can get in front of that JP, and that’s what this lawyer guy is trying to do, okay? You just need to calm down. There’s nothing we can do…you hear me? Nothing. There’s nothing you can do for him.”
I’m silent for a moment, letting the gravity of the situation swallow me up and pull me down. I pace back into the bedroom. He’s right. For once in my life I can’t save him. There is nothing I can do. I try, I try and think of something, anything, a suggestion or an answer but I have none. Once again when it comes to Lex I just have no answers. Just let it go.
So I sink down onto the end of the bed, defeated, and say the first thing that comes to my mind.
“I wanna see him.”
Kyle sighs. “I can guaran-fucking-tee you that he doesn’t want you coming to see him in jail, Leala. Think about
it. You know how he is. He doesn’t wanna do this to you, and you know it. He just…he just fucked up, okay? He knows that, you know he knows that. Don’t act like you don’t know him anymore…I know you two better than that.”
And it’s true. Kyle’s been with us since the beginning. The diner…the 7-11…Kyle’s been there since he was sixteen fucking years old and Lex and I were just two crazy kids who couldn’t get enough of each other. But that’s another story…
It’s quiet again, both of us just breathing, and he finally speaks, softly, and I’m still thinking about that sweet sixteen year old boy and why things just can’t go back to the way they used to be.
“Leala? Are you gonna be okay? I don’t need you whigging the fuck out on me about this.”
“Yeah…yeah, I’m…I’m okay,” I speak slowly, numbly, and I nod as if he can see me, but I don’t know if I’m trying to convince him or myself.
“He’s gonna be fine. He should only be in there for a few days, half a week at most. You know he wouldn’t do anything stupid to get himself whacked. He’s not gonna just leave you like that. We just need some time to get this shit worked out, and you don’t need to be running around like a crazy person while we’re at it. Okay? Promise me.”
Good ol’ Kyle. I swear to God I don’t see how this kid with a heart of fucking gold ever got mixed up in all this shit. I sigh at the thought. “Okay, okay…”
“Promise me, Leala.” I hear the lilt of question in his voice and I smile. He knows me too well.
“I promise,” I breathe a little easier, swallow my pride, and know that sometimes you just have to let things work themselves out.
“Just hang out at your place…wait for a call from this guy, his name is Robson Blair, he’s the guy who worked with Felix and—”
“Wait…Felix?” I try to stop him, but he keeps going on.
“As soon as he meets with Lex he should be calling you about bail and all that shit, okay? Just hang in there. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
“Why the fuck do you always talk over me when I ask questions?”
I hear him laugh. “'Cause I know you’re about to blow up over some shit and I’m trying to distract you.”
I roll my eyes. “How in the fuck did you get any information outta Felix when he’s—”
“I had to go through Tony.”
“You what?!” I shriek, almost dropping the phone.
He sighs. “How the fuck else am I gonna get any information? You want me to just call up to the state prison and ask to speak to a Felix Amostra in max security? And it’s not like I talked to Tony myself. I know people who know people…”
“I just don’t understand why he’d wanna help Lex out, and what the fuck kinda deal is this lawyer gonna be able to cut if he couldn’t keep Felix off ice?” I shake my head.
“You know damn well that Felix should be doing a lot of fucking time right now, and this guy got him five years. I think the odds are good that he can get Lexa break.”
I nod. Truth is, Felix Amostra, older brother to Tony Amostra, used to run shit in the L.A. drug business. He ran with the hardest criminals and took the fresh-faced kids just looking for somewhere to turn to under his wing. He made them his family, which is exactly what he had done with Lex years ago. But Felix didn’t fuck around with dealing; he left that up to others. He was a supplier, where the big money was. He had gotten Lex into the game and set him up like a fucking king and life was good until the armed robbery. Felix pulled some fast shit and didn’t expect to go down for it. He just didn’t know who he was fucking around with.
Felix went down hard and ended up in state prison at Lex’s hand, leaving his proverbial throne to only be taken by little brother Tony, who then had a score to settle with Lex. The L.A. drug scene became a battle of divide-and-conquer for Tony and Lex, now foes rather than family. But Lex didn’t have many boys to turn to. Everyone in their crew blamed the fall of Felix on Lex alone, and he became the outcast. But the bottom line was that Felix was in prison where he belonged and Lex had his boys, the few who knew Lex had done the right thing.
“I just don’t know why Felix would want anything to do with Lex when he’s the reason—”
“Don’t worry about any of that. It’s not like he can beat Lex’s ass from a prison cell. Besides, you know all that shit was Felix’s fault anyway.”
He’s right. What happened between Lex and Felix was the fuck-up of the century on Felix’s part. All Lex did was try and do the right thing...well, he did the right thing by law, but not by Felix’s or Felix’s boys’ standards.
“But Lex burned a big bridge when all of that went down. Him and Felix were supposed to be boys…”
“Which is exactly why Felix shoulda never done what he did in the first place. Just promise me you’re gonna chill out. All this shit just has to play itself out. There’s nothing we can do now.”
I just nod. “Okay…okay, I’ll wait it out.”
14
“Hey, can I get some goddamn meds in this place?”
Sweaty and nauseous, Lex grips tight in his hands the bars of cell 261, leaning on them a bit for stability. A restless few hours of sleep has left him dissatisfied, and his stomach is in knots, his vision beginning to blur occasionally from the pain of the beginning stages of his inevitable withdrawal.
“You can go see a medic after breakfast,” the hall guard offers curtly and Lex scowls.
5 a.m. breakfast is rather uneventful. Lex wanders off to a table by himself; no sense in trying to make friends here considering he hopes to not be staying long. He should’ve been out of this fucking place last night, he thinks, as he sits down to a plate of colorless room temperature pancakes, which upon tasting resemble something along the lines of pressed cardboard discs, he assumes, if he had ever tasted cardboard before. The Cheerios are stale and even the 1% milk, which he has always refused to drink and referred to as “white water,” can’t salvage them. He gives up and stares at the plate, shaking hands folded in his lap, his misshapen apple sitting gloomily on the corner of the square tray, and it disappears before his eyes as he feels someone cross behind him.
“HEY!” he shouts, turning abruptly, and it’s not like he was gonna eat the sorry excuse for produce anyhow, but it’s his apple, goddammit. He stands from his seat. “Hey, you sorry motherfucker!” His rage tempered with underlying anxiety of being in this place and lacking the drugs he needs at this point simply to function gets the best of him.
“Sit the fuck down, kid,” he hears an officer call out calmly from a few feet away, seeing exactly what happened and doing nothing. Pick your battles, that should be a motto in jail.
Lex doesn’t listen, taking a few quick steps to follow the guy. But before he can react he feels a forearm chop against his throat and he’s on his back and he hears a few gasps and shouts, but mostly everyone is engrossed in their meal, and frankly, he assumes, no one is terribly shocked when people get hit around here anyway. He looks dumbly up into the face of one of his cellmates, Ramero, who he had learned today, is in MCJ for attempted rape and assault with a deadly weapon, and had just now laid his ass flat out without a second thought.
He sits up slowly, waiting for someone to come to his defense, waiting for a guard to step in, but nothing happens. A few men look at him, wait for him to get up, and he does. He looks around and no one does anything, no one does a fucking thing, and it builds in him and he snaps, lashing out to strike Ramero across the cheek, and only then do four other guys jump up and run to the scene. But rather than helping Lex, they hold him. They hold him back from hitting Ramero and one guy holds Ramero back because Lex is sure that he would kill his ass just as fast as he dropped him to the floor without a blink.
“I think it’s time you learned your place in here, motherfucker.”
“What the fuck do you know about me?” Lex roars in response, struggling against the tight grip of two men, one holding each of his arms, and it doesn’t take
a minute for an officer to appear between Lex and Ramero.
“That’s enough!” he shouts.
The men holding Lex release him and he stands stock still, fuming, ready to strike again because that’s all he knows. Fight until someone backs down. And he’s rarely the one to back down. Ramero throws him a glare which holds a promise that what just happened is far from over, but he obediently turns and takes his seat. Lex remains standing.
“Sit…the…fuck…down.” The guard’s voice is low and threatening close to Lex’s ear as he pinches the thin skin of his back, right between his shoulder blades, twisting, and it takes all of Lex’s willpower to show no reaction but to simply take his seat. He waits a second for a calm to settle back over the cafeteria before he steps away.
Lex goes back to staring at his breakfast, feeling eyes upon him from around the room, but he doesn’t look up. He simply sits and waits for the guard to call mealtime and escort everyone back to their cells. Just wait. The voice in his head tries to calm his instincts to fight. Just wait.
“You’re a fuckin' dumbass.” He hears a voice suddenly from farther down his table and he looks up slowly.
His steel blue eyes meet large round brown ones, doe-like eyes, and the face of a boy who can’t be older than him, hair shaved down close to his scalp, eyebrows notched with bare strips at the far corners but he’s young, far too young to be locked up somewhere like this, Lex thinks.
“You talking to me?”
“Nah, the other tatted up white boy sittin' at this table…yes, I’m talking to you.” The kid chuckles, shaking his head, pushing a piece of deep-browned, almost-burnt toast past his lips and he talks as he chews. “You’re a dumb shit, startin' somethin' like that around here, sittin' by yourself. I bet you think you’re a hardass motherfucker.” He smirks and Lex doesn’t respond, continuing to look the kid over, studying the eagle tattoo wrapping halfway around his neck, the swastika on his forearm, the way his eyes are hard. “Name’s Jed.” He leans down the table, extending his hand. Lex doesn’t touch it, looks at the dirty fingernails, looks back into the hard eyes, wants to vomit, wants to be out of this place. “Not much of a talker, huh?”