by Salome Wilde
You can probably figure out the rest. It’s not every night. It’s not even most nights. But occasionally, when I get out of the shower, I keep a towel up over my eyes, just in case. It’s ridiculous. I don’t want a criminal to break into my house and take advantage of me. I don’t want to be handcuffed to my bedpost while you do anything and everything you’ve imagined alone in your cell. But the idea of you doing it makes me wet. I’ve masturbated to thoughts of you, too, Mallory Clinton.
I can’t believe I’m blushing as I write this. I’m a cop, goddamn it. I haven’t blushed since grade school. And it’s even worse knowing you’re probably sitting in your cell smirking like a lunatic. Well, ha-ha, have your fun, convict. I’m taking my car to the mechanic’s on Wednesday, and it’s probably going to take ALL. DAY.
In regards to the censors, you don’t have to worry about that. Yes, they are reading our letters because that’s the way this works. But when our letters took the turn they took, I got in touch with someone. Let’s just say she owes me a favor. So we don’t have to worry.
Even though it’s safe, it feels odd knowing they’ll read everything we write. But fuck it. They’ve probably read worse. I hope they get a cheap thrill off it. I hope you get a cheap thrill off it. But however delightful the fantasy, don’t even think about doing what you wrote. Escape, and I will hunt you down. Even if you get out of jail for good behavior, you will knock or you will find yourself dealing with a world of hurt.
Girard
PS. The cat is a boy. His name is Leonard Cohen.
Girard,
Just…fuck, woman. I hope you know what that did to me. Believe me, I got a lot of mileage out of that fantasy. I acted it out with my cellmate and she agreed that it was totally hot, even if I did call her by your name. I realize I haven’t mentioned my extracurricular activities since we started this “cards on the table” conversation. My cellmate and I occasionally have sex. She claims to be straight, that she’s only doing it to take the edge off, but I don’t know. Whatever gets her through the night. It’s not a relationship, and if we were freed tomorrow we wouldn’t carry on with it. I hope that doesn’t bother you. I wouldn’t dream of stopping you from having a lover given our situation. That said, if I got out of here tomorrow I’d head straight to your place and I’d…well, I would knock to let you know I wanted to sneak in later. Your fantasy definitely jumped to the top of my bucket list. I just hope I can wait ten years to actually make it happen.
I don’t know what to say now. I can’t tease you with my own fantasies because I’ve spent the last few days trapped in yours. I would tell you about what’s going on here, but I doubt that would be as sexy. I really just want to tell you that you’re driving me crazy in the best way possible. Maybe that was your plan all along. You wanted to make my incarceration even worse by adding a bit of the forbidden fruit. If so, very cunning. Diabolical, even. Ten years has never seemed so long.
I’ll write again in a few days. For now, just remember to keep the back door unlocked and your handcuffs within easy reach.
Clinton
* * *
I was escorted into the visitation room by Harriet, my favorite guard, and took a seat at the same table Girard and I had used for our last visit. In the six months we’d been exchanging letters, she had sent a few pictures, but I’d forgotten how beautiful she was in person. There was a flush in her cheeks as she looked up at Harriet, and I could guess what she was thinking as she watched the guard walk away.
“She’s not on mail duty.”
“Huh?” Her eyes snapped back to me.
I smiled. “Harriet doesn’t read the incoming mail, so she’s never read your letters. She doesn’t know what you’ve said to me.” I draped one leg over the other and smiled at her. “So have you finally come to your senses? Are you embarrassed by what you wrote? Did you come here to tell me to burn the letters?”
“You kept them?”
I nodded. “Of course I kept them. We don’t have much in the way of porn here, and you’ve written some very…serviceable material, Detective Girard.”
Her blush deepened and she rested her elbows on the table. She covered her face with both hands, then sat up and pushed her fingers through her hair. “I can’t believe I really wrote those things. I must have been out of my damn mind.”
That was disappointing. “So you do regret it?”
“No.” She held my gaze. “No, I don’t regret it. As embarrassing as it would be if word got out, it was so freeing to share them. At work, I’m buttoned down and completely focused. Half the guys I work with would be surprised to know I have a love life at all. They know I’m gay, but I keep my private life private, so they haven’t seen any evidence to back it up. To them, and sometimes even to myself, I’m a robot. An ice queen. But then I sat down to write to you about my sexual fantasies and I…I…” She shook her head. “I found it very enlightening. I came here because I thought we needed to have a discussion about where we’re going. I didn’t want to wait for the mail.”
“Okay,” I said. I realized I was picking at the thumbnail of my right hand, so I folded it under my fingers. It was all fun and games until someone wanted to know where the relationship was headed. What if I wanted more? That wasn’t fair to her. It was selfish of me to ask for anything further, but we’d agreed. Nothing but pure honesty, even if it hurt. And I had to admit that I would be hurt if she was there to tell me to stop. No matter what my subconscious intentions were when this started, it had turned into something real. I was embarrassed at how sincere I sounded when I finally spoke. “I want it to continue.”
She breathed out sharply. “Me too. Oh, definitely, me too. And I don’t mind that you and your cellmate…” She made a vague gesture with one hand.
I nodded. “And if you were to go out with someone and take her home, I have no say in that. We’re not dating. We’re not in a relationship. We’re just…”
“Friends.”
“Very good friends.”
Girard nodded. “And just because I want to put my foot between your legs under this table…”
I raised an eyebrow. “Detective…”
“No touching.” She flattened her hands on the table. “But we can still talk about our fantasies. Looking at you right now, I’m trying to remember what you look like so I can use it later on.”
“What color is your underwear?”
“Uh…” She had to think for a moment. “Blue.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, imagining it under her clothes. I dropped one hand to my lap, my fingers in my crotch, and I began to rub in a gentle and subtle rhythm.
“When you leave here,” I said, without opening my eyes, “I want you to go into the bathroom and take the panties off. I want you to put them in your pocket and leave them there until you get home. Then I want you to take off all your clothes, put the panties back on, and I want you to masturbate thinking of me. Will you do that for me, Detective Girard?”
She cleared her throat and spoke quietly. “Yes. And what will you do for me?”
“Whatever you want, Grace.”
She tensed, took a deep breath, and said, “Be good.”
“What?”
“Be good. Get a crystal clear record for yourself, and then request special dispensation. Be so good that they’ll grant you things that would otherwise be completely off-base. Like field trips. You were a nonviolent offender, so they might give you a day pass under the strict supervision of a law enforcement professional if you were willing to assist the police with certain cold cases. You’d be allowed out into the world for twenty-four hours, maybe longer, and the rules would be a lot easier to bend while you’re out there.”
I leaned back in my seat, thinking of the possibilities. “So all I would have to do is be good.”
“Comport yourself like a model prisoner. Behave, obey the guards, follow the rules. But when it comes to the letters, be as bad as you want to be.”
I couldn’t resist smiling. Her cheeks
flushed adorably, and I drummed my fingers on the tabletop.
“Following the rules? It’s not exactly my forte.”
“Well.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “If you’re bad while you’re under my care, I’ll be forced to punish you, two-one-two-seven-one-four.”
I leaned in to match her posture. “How exactly would that go, Detective?”
“Sure you don’t want to wait for the letter?”
“We have fifteen more minutes. Just give me the broad strokes. And be warned that the longer we sit here and the dirtier you are, the more inclined I’ll be to break the rules.”
“No touching,” she reminded me.
“No touching each other,” I corrected.
Girard smiled, looked around to make sure we weren’t being watched too closely, and began to explain just what she would do if I crossed the line.
Never Coming Back Here Again
by Kannan Feng
We didn’t talk about the date I’d marked on my Birds of North America calendar. I got it in January and marked off the date that same day. Then I let the pages flutter closed over it, didn’t look at it anymore. The two years that came before were long. The nine months I was staring down were longer.
Judy didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t use calendars after her first five years, but it wasn’t until ten years in that she really stopped giving a good goddamn, or that’s what she told me. Judy was on the long ride, what the women of Naylor called a lifer. She gave me a single look when they put me in the cell with her, my face all bruised up as I hugged the prison-supplied single blanket to my chest, and she snorted. She saw right away how soft I was. I’d been unlucky, caught holding the bag for my asshole ex, and the other inmates would have eaten me alive if Judy hadn’t rolled her eyes and started showing me the ropes right away.
I liked it. I always liked it when big butch women helped me out. They had my whole life. It was like they took one look at little fragile Mia and they turned into the knights in those shows that I saw on TV sometimes.
They weren’t always nice about it. Judy definitely wasn’t. Sometimes she would call me a dumb bitch. Sometimes she would get mad I wasn’t moving fast enough and give me a real crack across the ass with her hand or with the mop handle. I squalled, but I liked it too.
I do like guys. I like guys like all the other girls from my neighborhood liked guys. Guys can be hot, but none of us would trust them farther than we could throw them. With Judy and with women like Judy, by contrast, I always knew where I stood, even if it was clutching my ass because she had walloped it so hard.
I didn’t understand until later that helping me was a risk for her. Lifers make enemies like no one’s business, and she could have said, “Go fuck yourself,” and found someone who could carry her own weight. She didn’t, though, and at least I repaid her by being a fast study.
I probably would have survived Naylor without Judy, but I would have been fucked up by the time I got out. She was the one who taught me that it wasn’t just the inmates I had to watch, it was the guards, too. She told me how to score the good tampons, how to keep my teeth in good shape, and how to take it when people got in my face. She also taught me how to fuck so we didn’t get caught slipping from one bunk to the other, doing it quick and hard with our hands not even pulling down our pants.
She started it one day, grabbing at the waistband of my pants while the guard wasn’t looking and shoving her hand down between my legs. She squeezed hard, and then looked at me defiantly. I don’t know what she would have done if I’d said no, but I was saying, “yes, yes, yes.”
“Doesn’t make you queer,” she grunted one night, after I had to clamp my teeth into my palm to stop my own yelling.
“I don’t care,” I responded, slithering back up to my bunk. My hand smelled like her, and I liked it. I slid it back into my own pants later that night, when her breathing evened out to the high whistling snore I got to know so well.
Maybe at other places it was different, but the inmates of Naylor were really big on not being queer. Sex with women was just stress relief, or desperation or putting a girl in her place. Maybe some of them really weren’t queer, but I was. Judy and I just didn’t talk about it.
She’d gone in when she was just twenty-five. Now she was pushing fifty, strong as an ox, and gray-haired with a bit of her old black in it. There was no telling what she would be if she had been out the whole time. She was the kind of woman who would have caught my eye when I was out, though I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to do anything about it.
No one at home knew I was queer. I kissed other girls at bars, I cuddled with my girlfriends at sleepovers and I loved their pretty bodies and hot lips, but they weren’t what I wanted. I had to go to Naylor to get what I wanted. I wouldn’t have traded my freedom for a chance at a hot butch with a hand like a wooden paddle, but that’s what how it happened, so I made the best of it.
You do your time. I did mine.
One of the lessons I learned really early on was that you couldn’t look at the time left like a race to run. That was how you lost your mind, looking over weeks and months and years. That was how you ended up fucked up, in ad seg, otherwise known as solitary, staring at nothing. Instead, you looked at your feet. You did your time, and you did it one day at a time. That day just happening to be connected to others. That’s what Judy taught me. That way the calendar pages started falling away, and the days got crossed off and in time…well, then there were none.
We didn’t talk about it, not until the night before. My stomach was wound up tight, as I stared up at the crack in the ceiling. My brain told me that they were never going to do it, never going to let me out. They were going to keep me. They’d found out about something new and now I’d have to stay another five, another ten, forever. My last night was almost as bad as my first at Naylor, and just like that first night, Judy rapped her knuckle against the bottom of my bed.
“Come down here.”
I went. It was almost four a.m., quiet enough that you could talk for a while, face-to-face and in one bunk, if the guards skipped a round or two.
She pulled me to her roughly, and she put her face in my hair. I wondered if she was going to say something about missing me, loving me. I’d heard girls do that on the last night.
Instead, she just breathed in the smell of me hard, her arms wrapped tightly around me.
“You’re not coming back,” she said, her voice flat.
“Never,” I swore, and she chuckled.
“Smart bitch,” she growled. “Say it again.”
“I’m never coming back,” I said obediently, and she grabbed me by my hip, pulling us crotch to crotch. She rubbed against me hard, and for the first time in the nearly three years I had spent in our cell, there was something desperate about it. It wasn’t just need to get off or about teaching me a lesson. There was something else going on, and I was silent, afraid it would end.
She snatched at my hips, narrower than hers. “Built like a boy,” she’d said the first time we’d really done this.
Her big chapped hands wrapped around my ass, dragging me to her as if we could be pushed into one person.
“Say it,” she hissed.
“I’m never coming back. I am getting out of this shithole, and I am never coming back,” I whispered, my voice a chant.
“Damn straight you’re not,” she said, biting my earlobe. The first nip was gentle, but the second one was hard enough that I flinched. She was rough, and I liked that, but there was something else beneath it. My heart beat a little faster, a little harder, and I put my hand on her tits, rubbing rough, the way she liked.
“I’ll never come back,” I said again, to encourage whatever was happening here.
She bit my ear so hard I was surprised she didn’t draw blood, and then she was licking it. The shock it sent through my body was almost too violent, and I had to flatten my palms against her body to stop from squirming right off the bunk.
&
nbsp; “Get on your stomach,” she said, and there was something dark there, something that wanted me, maybe loved me, but probably hated me a little too. She was in for the long ride. She was never coming out, and I was never coming back. Maybe a smarter woman wouldn’t have done it, but I was me. I wanted Judy, had since I first saw her, and that hadn’t changed over the three years we spent together.
As quietly as I could, I rolled over, and she rocked to one side to let me stretch out on the bunk. With one rough hand, she pulled my pants and my underwear down to my knees, making me hiss as the cool air hit my ass. She grabbed two big handfuls of my cheeks, squeezing so hard I had to bite the blanket under my face. I bucked my hips, not sure if I wanted her to stop or not, and she chuckled throatily as she pulled them apart.
I tightened up, almost involuntarily, and when I did, she pinched me hard, just under the curve of my left cheek. It was going to bruise, and that sent a hot jolt through me, landing straight between my legs. I was so wet.
“What do you want, Judy?” I asked softly. “You thinking about tanning my hide? You wanna smack me?”
Her laugh was soft, but maybe less dark than before.
“Honey, sometimes I just want to beat it ’til it’s hamburger. Can’t do that now, but there’s something I can do. Something you’ll remember…”
I heard the sound of a package tearing, and then something cold and liquid was drizzled on my spread hole. You could swipe lube from medical, but it must have cost her. I shivered as she worked one hard, blunt finger into my ass, leaning over me to bite my shoulders.
“You like that? I bet you like it; you’re getting all wet…”
“Yes…yes,” I whined, pushing up against her hand. My hands were fisted in the sheets, and I knew how I looked. I knew how it would look if the guards did their jobs, flicking on the light to find us like this, trapped with her fingers inside me. That thought made me buck against the mattress again, and she chuckled.