Desire Behind Bars

by Salome Wilde

  “Nothing up my sleeves!” I gasped. “But you’d better make sure I’m not hiding anything down below.”

  Instead of pulling down my pants, or letting me kick them off, she tightened her grip, lifted me all the way off my feet and shoved me up against the locked door. Her knee came up between my legs, supporting my weight, while her hands gripped and squeezed and probed every inch of my hips and thighs. Visions of magnificent bruises flitted briefly though my head, vanishing in the urgent need to feel more of her. I rode her knee, bent my head to bite along her shoulder through her shirt, then lower, respecting her binder, yet coming back again and again to leave damp spots with my tongue where I knew her nipples were swelling into soreness.

  When, for balance, I had to grab Yev’s shoulders, her own mouth got busy with my breasts, telegraphing more and more need into my cunt, until I pushed off, landed on my feet, and got my fingers inside her waistband. “Fuck rough strife!” I panted. “Just…just fuck!”

  Yev was panting too, and maybe swearing—some of it was in Russian, some didn’t sound like words at all. With a twist of my body she could easily have countered, but didn’t, I got her to the tarp and we dropped down onto it, rolling over each other for the sheer joy of it. Knees, hands and mouths pressed into whatever warm hollows they found until the need for more focused intensity could no longer be resisted.

  Yev pulled my pants down and off with expert speed while I was still fumbling with hers. I gave up the attempt, lay back, and let myself be swept along by her mouth working hard at my clit and her big fingers demanding more and more space inside me. My hips arched upward for even deeper penetration. I clutched at her short hair, trying to tug her head down harder against me but she refused to be forced past the point where her tongue could move freely. She kept my desperate need mounting and swelling until my screams of frustration surged into incoherent cries of pleasure. Only in the afterglow did I realize that the full force of the storm had just passed over us, and Yev had perfectly orchestrated my climax to match the fiercest blasts of thunder.

  When I had breath to speak with, and some control of my body, I rolled on top of her, streaking her bare thighs with my wetness as I slid between her legs. I couldn’t even remember how her pants had come off, and I didn’t care as long as I could get into her musky heat to torment her for at least as long as she had done it to me.

  But Yev wouldn’t let me get away with that. Her powerful scent and taste demanded more than teasing licks and the hands pressing my head hard against her were too strong to resist, although I managed to make room for my own hand to work deeply into her heat and set up a pounding rhythm of thrusts.

  Sounds more growls than moans rumbled from Yev’s throat. Her walls clenched harder and harder around my fingers, her strong thighs gripped me until it hurt and her hips bucked so fiercely that I had to brace myself to stay with her. I managed to hang on, not easing up, riding the peak with her as growls became one long, rising howl, then descended gradually through harsh gasps to mere panting. By that time my head was pillowed on her belly, rising and falling with every deep breath. When I couldn’t resist any longer and moved my lips across her sweaty skin, over her binder, and up into the hollow of her throat, I felt as well as heard the words she muttered low in Russian, then English.

  “So long…such a long damned time…”

  I knew exactly what she meant. It had been a long time since I too had opened up to sex this intense. And it wasn’t over yet. With very little rest we worked each other into another burst of glorious spasms, and then, taking my time, I stroked and nibbled and licked her to yet another, only slightly more gentle. Just the sounds she made were enough to give me aftershocks.

  We lay there, nearly comatose, until I said, “We’ve definitely missed count. How screwed are we?”

  “Maybe a lot, maybe a little. So what?” She was quiet then for so long that I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes and grinned at me, more wolf than lion now. A supremely satisfied wolf. “You have not quite managed to kill me yet, although you came close! I have decided what you shall carve on my tombstone, just in case. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, now there’s a poet!” The lines she recited in Russian meant nothing to me, though the resonance of her voice stirred both my mind and my body. Then she translated, stumbling over a word or two:

  “Sorrow happens. Hardship happens.

  The hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.”

  “Carve it in Russian,” she said cheerfully. “There are better words for everything in Russian.”

  It felt just then as if words in Russian, whether I understood them or not, would forever zap me with surges of lust. How could I argue with that?

  Honeybun

  by Salome Wilde

  I’m getting too old for this, I thought, watching another woman (really no more than a girl) make her way out the door and through the final gate. She wore drab jeans and T-shirt instead of drab prison garb, but otherwise she looked like all the rest of the child-women who now stood around the fence in the sunlit cement yard, jumping and waving and shouting at her. My head pounded.

  “Good luck, you’ll need it!” snapped one well-wisher.

  “Don’t forget us, chica!” cried another.

  A third warned, “See you soon!” in a singsong soprano.

  Closing my eyes against the glare, I concluded that they were all right, in their ways. I’d forgotten my sunglasses, and one of the innumerable little rules in the pen was no returning to your cell once yard time began. But even with eyes open, the piglets (as my over-sixty ilk generally referred to the under-thirty crowd), were pretty much indistinguishable. Yes, this newest escapee would need luck. She’d certainly forget her cellmates as soon as she could. And the odds were high she’d end up back in the pen again if she didn’t have one hell of a support system waiting for her. I knew that from experience. I gave a quick, tight squint beyond the gate to the road and confirmed the likelihood we’d be seeing her sooner rather than later by the junker and its thuggish owner who came to pick her up.

  As final farewells quieted, I walked over to one of the few shaded areas in a corner of the yard to light a butt. My supply was low, but I needed a smoke to take my mind off the throbbing of my temples. I’d given up on better methods, like keeping ibuprofen in decent supply. Damn things were like gold at “that time of the month,” and it seemed like three-quarters of the ward got their period simultaneously.

  Now there was a thing I didn’t miss. I could still remember those last months, only a couple of years back, when I got less and less regular, then sporadic, and then dried up entirely. My bunkmates claimed to be envious, but it was clear none would have traded places for it. No one wanted to be an ancient fucker like me, and who could blame them? I’d spent many a day feeling the same way.

  Having community—however small a group—helped at times of self-loathing. We were a special breed: the old sows, as we called ourselves. There were only about a dozen of us in the whole prison, and only a handful who’d been in more than a decade. We stuck together, across boundaries of race, class and sexuality, talking more about what we had in common than what we didn’t. Staying healthy in stir was much higher on our list than where you grew up, who you fucked or even release dates. Together, we ignored the jibes and ignorance of the impossibly young inmates that surrounded us. We mostly just bided our time, quietly reading together, writing letters (if we had anyone left to read them), feigning an interest in crafts and talking nostalgia and other nonsense.

  That is, until I secretly skipped ranks and hooked up with Honeybun. Honeybun was named for the hooch she made and supplied to a select group of prisoners with something to trade, a foul mixture of fruit cocktail and glazed pastry left to sit in a jar of water for two weeks under her bed until it was “done.” Honeybun and her hooch brought me shameless lust, ungodly hangovers and more happiness than I thought I could still experience.

  My reverie was interrupted by a gru
ff voice snarling “Bicks was my bitch” as she shuffled past with a follower in tow.

  “I know, Reggie,” came the reply.

  “Damn early release program.”

  “I know, Reggie.”

  I inhaled deeply of my stale cigarette and wondered about that expression: “my bitch.” In the past of my preprison life, what might pass for relationships never entailed anyone being anyone else’s bitch. My lovers and I were generally fuckbuddies or fobs (friends with benefits), as the piglets say, or we lived together to save on expenses but never talked about the future. The closest I’d come to wanting to be a woman’s “bitch” was one of my first relationships, and definitely the worst, with unhappily married Bonnie constantly promising then putting off the day she’d tell her puffy old husband it was quits.

  But now, as I indulged in the joys of a revived libido with Honeybun, the question of whether I was someone’s “bitch” interested me. Just thinking about it gave me a rush of energy and I snickered aloud, one of those things that old sows do because we’re too far gone to care if anyone hears us. In so many ways, prison was like high school—all cliques and gossip and worrying about being popular and fitting in. After thirty-seven years behind bars, though, you had to mature out of that crap. You paid a price—people called you gross, wondered at your sanity, avoided you—but you chalked it up to life in the pen and just got on with living, what there was of it. And now there was so much more.

  As I stubbed out my half-finished cig that was doing little for my headache, I heard Judy call my name.

  “Bev! There you are,” she said, an accusation of sorts. The tone had become habit for her, as she constantly feared she was being avoided. Paranoia: another gift of incarceration.

  “Here I am,” I said, not getting up.

  With a groan that sounded a lot like my own did when shifting from standing to a sitting position, she crouched then dropped to the ground beside me. “My damn knees.”

  I didn’t respond as I tucked my stubbed butt back into the mostly empty packet. I knew about Judy’s knees—everybody did. And I was disinclined to engage in conversation. I wanted peace and quiet, to think more about me and Honeybun. A remembrance of her nails drawn down my shoulder enveloped me.

  Never easily discouraged, Judy shattered the moment by sharing the inside scoop on the evening’s dinner horror story. Every meal had something awful about it, and working the kitchen meant Judy knew the details. She made all she could of describing how yesterday’s bad hamburger was being crumbled into the centerpiece of tonight’s chili.

  I felt the bile rise and waved her off. “Stop, please! I’m feeling shitty enough as it is.” I knew I had nothing more to discharge, having offered up the contents of my stomach that morning before breakfast. From my first sip on our first encounter in the potting shed, Honeybun had warned me that I might get sick, especially because I’d never been much of a drinker. I didn’t care. It was a small, if disgusting, biweekly price to pay to spend time with Honeybun.

  Mercifully, before Judy could say more, the buzzer sounded for the end of yard time.

  Judy put her hands on the pavement and pushed herself up, ass first, with labored groans. “Come on, old lady,” she admonished when I didn’t rise immediately, and held out a hand to help me up. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I found that I resented both her words and gesture.

  I couldn’t say I wasn’t old, but I didn’t feel old now. We could all use a hand up every now and then, but I wanted to shout that I could get up by my damn self. Most of all, I wanted her to know I was no old lady, not since Honeybun.

  Instead, I held my tongue, reminding myself that telling Judy would be telling every old sow in the place, and anyone else who’d listen to her. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of our liaisons—far from it. Mostly, I was afraid that Honeybun wouldn’t want anyone else to know. I was a good customer, and we fucked when we got drunk together. I might see it as something more, something precious, but she wouldn’t. Pretty, full of energy, and due out in less than five years’ time, why would a forty-something Southern blonde bombshell want to make public that she was getting it on with a dried-up lifer like me?

  I took Judy’s clammy hand, got up, and walked with her to the door. We were greeted by Tam, another of our group, and Judy began her dinner tale again. I walked off, waving a farewell and fighting off nausea as my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lights. Nickerson, a balding thirty-something guard who paid special attention to the small number of elderly inmates—we all reminded him of his mother or some similar misplaced sentiment, no doubt—took my arm. “You don’t look good today, Miss Bev,” he said, and walked me back to my bunk. I welcomed neither his touch nor his condescension, but there wasn’t much to do about it. He thought he was being kind.

  “Can you mark me out for dinner?” I asked, deciding to take advantage of his solicitousness. “I need a little rest.” I hated that he’d think I was just old and frail, but having Nickerson take care of the matter would mean I wouldn’t have to go to the guard station an hour before mealtime to sign a “formal” request. I’d be able to sleep the afternoon away while my cellmates were off at their various jobs.

  “Sure,” he answered, with a gentleness that might have been sincere. Not for the first time I wondered how much he knew about what had put me behind bars for most of my life. I didn’t regret killing Sam, not for a single minute. Even though my mother had died four years back, I could still remember exactly how it felt to see the bastard beating her, to know how many times it had likely happened before when I wasn’t around, to take up the baseball bat and hit him and hit him until he stopped moving. Maybe Nickerson knew. Maybe he’d have done the same thing if it were his mother and stepfather. Or maybe it was just my imagination and Nickerson was simply a nice guy. I felt too ill to think more about it.

  Flopping down onto my bunk, I murmured, “I’m sure I’ll be fine by morning.”

  “I’m sure you will, Miss Bev.” Nickerson nodded and smiled, patting my ankle at the end of the bed. “Rest up now,” he offered solicitously before leaving me to the silence of my empty cell.

  I closed my eyes, picturing the way Honeybun looked when I lay between her thick, muscled thighs and made her come. I drifted off to dream of licking up blood from mom’s tiled floor that transformed into Honeybun’s ample flesh. I woke to the sound of my inseparable cellmates, Rita and Cayenne, returning from dinner. Neither their loud bickering over who’d snag the new piglet serving the bread at dinner nor my strange metamorphosing dream upset me. I knew nothing could keep me down as I glanced at the little calendar tacked to my wall, on which I’d circled a date one week and six days in the future. If I took a quick shower and went back to bed, it’d be one week and five.

  * * *

  I stood in the potting shed, part of a mostly abandoned rehab project, shivering in my coat against the coolness of the late fall evening. I’d picked up the flashlight Honeybun kept hidden behind one of the tables stacked with chipped terra-cotta pots. I didn’t need light to know she wasn’t here yet. Honeybun had an aura. You always knew when she was in a room. Even the first time we met, when she’d carried a battered but functioning TV into the rec room of my block to replace our broken one, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. Her wavy bleached hair was coiffed like a country-western singer, and her blue eyes sparkled with mischief as she took in her surroundings. She was in block C and I was in A, so we had no occasion to cross paths, especially as she worked in the machine shop and I in the library.

  I was no mechanic, and she, I soon learned, wasn’t bookish. Her biceps were as impressive as the rest of her as she put the broken television on the floor and hoisted its replacement onto the shelf. As she bent, I got an eyeful of her big, round booty. And when she peered between her legs and winked at me, I felt a jolt of arousal I hadn’t known in years. I still hated to think how hotly I’d blushed at her attention, and how I’d reddened once more when I got a note the next day from Sissy,
one cell over, who worked in the shop with her. Like hooch? the sloppy scrawl read. Pot shed, Friday at 6:30. Sneak off after dinner. Don’t tell no one else. Honeybun. She made the “o” in her name into a little heart. Despite myself, I was smitten.

  Remembering our first meeting kept me warm while I waited. But thoughts of sharp alcohol and soft tongues couldn’t keep away concern. Honeybun always arrived first for our trysts, stripping down to one of two pairs of contraband panties that couldn’t quite hold all of her ass or keep her belly from escaping. Somehow, she never got cold as she lay in wait for me on the ratty blanket that I tried to pretend was ours alone.

  Once I’d had a good swig of that foul Honeybun hooch, it was easier to convince myself she belonged to me—or that she wanted me to belong to her. She’d grip my short silver-gray hair with her strong, calloused hands and pull my mouth to hers. And while we kissed she’d slip her hand down my pants (never giving me time to undress properly) and finger me mercilessly. I loved the way she’d ignore my protests about going slow so it didn’t hurt. Lips crushed together and tongues working, she’d shove in a finger, sometimes two, and pump me, hard and fast, until I was soaked with pleasure. I’d whimper and moan into her mouth as she withdrew and slicked me up with my own juice so she could thumb my clit and keep fucking me with those strong fingers until I clung to her like the drunken fool I was and came and came again. She was so silent, so serious at her work, watching me for every sign of arousal, speaking only once, when she demanded I say her name—the nickname she got for the hooch she supplied—before she’d let me climax.

  Once I’d ridden the quake and the many aftershocks, dizzy with desire and more than grateful that Honeybun wanted me—or wanted to get me off at least—it was my turn to act. I’d crawl up between those heavy pale legs, kissing my way from ankle to inner thigh. She’d lean on an elbow and watch me then, too. I’d murmur words of praise as I went. So soft (despite the stubble), so sweet (despite the day’s sweat), so perfect (despite what others would call fat). I’d peer up to see her wide, satisfied grin as I offered tribute she no doubt saw as her due.