I go over the broad strokes.
“You’re lucky that you slipped out of there when you did,” Nicholas says.
This irritates me.
“I don’t need you to tell me that. I’m not an idiot.”
“I wasn’t implying that you were.”
Shaking my head, my eyes follow the seagull that wanders around the edge of the water looking for a snack.
When he puts his hand on my arm, I brush it away.
“I didn’t want you to go because I was worried that something might go wrong and then…” Nicholas’ voice trails off. “I didn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What do you care?” I ask. “I’m just your employee.”
“Why are you making this so hard?”
“Because you make me angry,” I say. “You put me into an impossible position. You refused to let me go back home and be there for my brother.”
“That wasn’t fair,” he says.
“You can say that again.”
I don’t know if he really doesn’t understand or if he is just trying to be difficult, but the emotional rollercoaster that I have just experienced is all because of that choice.
“It wasn’t really a choice. It was an unfair thing to ask me to do,” I continue. “You know that. I don’t have any other family but Owen. My mother is an asshole. She doesn’t care about me or anyone else but her. She won’t be there for him, and even if she were, what would she say? He’s all I have.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas says quietly.
“When you suddenly and arbitrarily, mind you, decided that suddenly I wasn’t experienced enough to do this job, I had to prove you wrong. I’m sorry I snuck out and stole your car but I did what I needed to do. I don’t have a fucking job anymore and you are going to pay me my first paycheck if it’s the last thing you do.”
The words fly out of my mouth without much editing for content, meaning, or impact. It’s almost as if they have a mind of their own.
“I was never not going to pay you,” he says.
I let out a mocking chuckle.
Nicholas scooches over to me. Our arms touch. He turns his body to face mine. Placing his finger under my chin he turns my face toward his.
“There is still a lot you don’t know about me,” he says.
I meet his eyes and don’t look away.
“But I always pay my debts.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Also…” He leans over and kisses me.
My mouth opens up to welcome him inside before my mind can stop it. He buries his hands in my hair. Shivers run down my body each time he tugs.
His lips are soft and powerful, devouring mine. Our tongues touch and intertwine. His hands make their way down my neck and to my back. They look for a way to my flesh, but I’m sitting on the bottom of my coat.
His hands find the belt and unwrap it moving quickly. When he pushes the sides of my coat off my shoulders and away from my body, he realizes that underneath I am dressed in that lingerie that he had showed me on the hanger.
His mouth waters and he licks his lips.
He positions himself right in front of me, and I spread my legs slowly for him.
My nipples get hard from the way he looks at them and the wind feels nice against the crease in between my thighs.
I’m completely exposed, surrounded by only the strings of the crotchless bikini, and now also somewhat covered in sand.
“Oh, wow,” Nicholas whispers, taking off his own shirt. I run my fingers down his hard body, pausing briefly over each washboard ab.
Nicholas leans over and picks up my leg.
“Lie down,” he says. “I want you to enjoy this.”
I do as he says and close my eyes.
His lips make their way from my toes up to my knees. Then up around the outside of my thighs before dipping down on the inside.
My body throbs for his. I arch my back and open my legs even wider.
Touch me. Touch me down there. You know where, I say silently.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he does the same thing up my other leg. When he reaches the inside of my thighs, his kisses get more frantically. My body burns for him even more. He reaches up, taking one of my breasts into his hand.
The other remains down below.
“I want you,” I say. “Now.”
He leans over me. His substantial package presses against my pelvic bone. I wrap my legs around him.
“Are you taking birth control?” he asks.
I was, but I’ve given it up. They always made me feel kind of off and bloated and I haven’t been having sex with anyone to make them worthwhile.
“No,” I say.
“I don’t have any condoms,” he says.
He tries to kiss me again, but I stop him.
“I can’t have sex without protection,” I say.
That’s a rule I haven’t broken since I became old enough to have sex.
I’m terrified of getting pregnant by accident or possibly getting some sort of disease. No matter how aroused I have felt in the moment, I have never broken this rule.
When, or rather, if I ever get pregnant it will be because I want a child. There are enough unwanted children in this world and I know that I couldn’t handle a baby that I didn’t really want to have.
“I don’t want to have sex without using anything either,” Nicholas says, lying down next to me.
I turn on my side, laying one leg over the other and propping my head up with my hand. He mirrors my position. Scooping up a handful of sand, he slowly releases it onto my thighs.
Some of it blows away in the breeze, but most of the grains land and either go down the front or the back of my body.
I reach over and touch his penis. It’s big and as hard as a rock. I unbuckle his shorts and he slides them off him.
I look at the large vein that runs the whole way down it and the way it moves every time I give it a little squeeze.
I wait for him to push me to do it anyway, even without protection, but he surprises me. He doesn’t press.
Instead, he continues to play with my body, covering it in sand.
Laying me down on my back, he makes little mounds of sand on my stomach and in between my breasts.
The sexier he makes me feel, the harder I squeeze his penis. After a while, we both start to moan.
“I want to watch you pleasure yourself,” he says.
His words send a shock of electricity through my body.
My legs open as if on their own. I touch my breasts and then quickly make my way toward the center of my body.
The sand feels rough, but I manage to flick off most of the grains as my fingers find their way inside. The pleasure forces my butt off the ground.
When my eyes drift over, I see that he’s touching himself, too, watching me. His eyes are glued to my hands.
Watching him watching me pushes me over the edge. The warm sensation in the pit of my core spreads quickly throughout me. My hands move faster and faster and then a wave of exhilaration rushes over me. When I turn my eyes to Nicholas, his hips move faster and faster until he comes as well.
Afterward, we walk into the water, hand in hand and completely nude. The water isn’t very warm, but my well-heated body welcomes the refreshment. Nicholas takes me into his arms and kisses me again.
Then he leans over and whispers, “This doesn’t mean that you can go to Boston by yourself though.”
27
When he speaks…
The room smells like bleach and sharpened pencils. It reminds me of my sixth grade classroom, minus the wall decorations.
There are large plastic tables set up against the windows on the far end where the panel of judges sit. The parole board consists of four men and three women, all over the age of forty-five.
I don’t know what requirements you have to possess to get yourself this position but none of them really look like they could relate to the kind of upbringing that Owen and I had.
Owen sits at a table directly in front of me with his attorney. This isn’t the same guy who represented him all of those years ago. After losing the case, that lawyer stopped returning his calls.
This one is a woman, who looks like she’s barely out of high school. She has a meek voice and she’s dressed in an outfit that’s way too big for her small frame.
The parole panel speak among themselves in hushed tones. The way they shuffle papers back and forth makes me wonder if this is the first time that they are reviewing his case.
The guards brought Owen in twenty minutes ago and no one has spoken yet. Unlike the inmates on television, he is dressed in his usual garb; hunter green pants and a matching button-down shirt with a white t-shirt underneath.
He has short light brown hair, cut short, as if he’s in the armed forces. Before prison, he had always worn it long, and the first time I saw him with his new haircut I worried that he had been forced to join some Aryan Nation gang.
When I asked about it, he denied it. It’s hard to know if the person on the other side of the plexiglass is ever telling the truth, so I would scan his body for tattoos hoping to find out the truth. No swastikas or other hate symbols appeared so I decided to take his words at face value.
Under the harsh fluorescent lights, everyone’s skin is sallow and pale, including Owen’s. But otherwise, he looks healthy. Well-rested even.
He gives me a big, white, toothy smile as soon as he sees my face. I know that no matter how long he spends in here, no matter how old we get, that smile will always remain the same. It will always belong to the happy go lucky little kid who never used to have a worry in the world.
Owen was convicted of armed robbery. He didn’t stick up the liquor store but he was in the car waiting for his friends who did. This whole time he’s maintained that he had no idea that they were going to do that.
They had all been drinking. After running out of alcohol, they drove down to the Five and Dime. It was after two a.m. and the cashier was busy watching television.
He didn’t speak much English so his friends thought it would be funny to just take some stuff. They lined their pockets with chips and soda and anything else they could find.
They were laughing and joking around too loudly and the guy at the counter noticed that they were trying to sneak out. He pulled out a baseball bat and started yelling at them in Korean. Two of them dropped everything they had, but one of them pulled out a gun from his back pocket.
The video they showed in court didn’t have sound, but it did capture the fear in the guy’s face. Being a convenience store clerk on the graveyard shift is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Suddenly, the gun went off. The bullet missed the target and lodged itself in the wall behind the cashier.
After gathering the stuff they’d dropped onto the floor, they ran out and told Owen to drive. He didn’t even know there had been the robbery. Of course, that’s not the way the prosecutor had put it. To him, they had planned this whole thing out. They went in there to steal five packets of chips and four bottles of soda. And they were all in on the shooting. The jury gave them all the same sentence. If the cashier had been killed, Owen would have probably received life in prison.
After shuffling the documents in front of them from one person to another and familiarizing themselves with my brother’s case, they give him the floor. One of them asks him to go over what happened that night.
I don’t see why this is necessary, but Owen isn’t fazed. He starts at around seven o’clock and the drinking.
“And why did you decide to stay behind in the car?” the oldest parole board member asks.
Because it was freezing and he didn't want to leave the warm car or turn the engine off. That was what Owen always did whenever we went anywhere together. He hated running errands and would always prefer to stay inside the vehicle even if the shopping trip would take an hour.
“I had a hunch as to what might happen,” Owen says.
My eyes open wide. What?
“Can you please elaborate?”
“It was late and we were all joking around and had been drinking quite a lot. No one mentioned doing it directly but I had my suspicions,” he says.
“And you didn’t want to stop them?”
“I wasn’t sure. Those guys say a lot of things.”
His attorney nudges him. She whispers something into his ear and he starts to elaborate. He tells them that they have never done anything like this but they were talking about it for a bit back at the house.
This answer isn’t satisfactory. One of the members flips through his file and then asks, “Why did you say during the trial that you wanted to sit in the car because it was cold out?”
28
When I speak…
Because that’s the fucking truth!
I want to yell out and have to bite down on my tongue to stop myself. My hands start to tingle and I rub one with the other. My stomach feels heavy like I had just eaten a five-course meal even though I had nothing but a power bar this morning.
“My attorney told me to plead not guilty,” Owen says and then stops himself. “No, I was pleading not guilty. And I lied.”
“Do you often lie to get what you want, Mr. Kernes?” one of them asks. It takes actual effort to not run over there and smack that smug look off his face.
“No, I don’t, but in that situation I did,” Owen says, keeping his composure. “I was a kid. I was scared. I was facing a lot of time.”
“It says here that the prosecutor did offer you a deal.”
“It would’ve required me to testify against my friends and put them in jail for a very long time. I couldn’t do that.”
“What about now?”
“The trial is over. They are serving their time. This is a parole hearing and I want to be as honest as possible. I want to apologize to the Kim family for causing them all of this distress. I know that Mr. Kim must’ve suffered severe PTSD from going through what we put him through and I am very sorry for that. My apology doesn’t come with any qualifications or explanations. I did a bad thing and that’s what I have realized after all of this time in prison."
I put my hand over my racing heartbeat but it doesn’t slow it down one bit.
Why is he saying all of these things? After all of this time, why is he lying like this?
Then I answer my own question.
Of course. How could I be so stupid?
He’s telling them what they want to hear.
If he comes up there and makes excuses for what he did or minimizes his role in the robbery then they will think that he hasn’t learned his lesson.
It’s a chess game and he’s finally playing to win.
I can still remember how much my tears burned while I begged him to testify for the prosecution.
They were offering one year in jail and three years probation. I pleaded for him to take their deal. They had everything on video and the law on their side. He had waited for them in the car while they committed the robbery. That meant that he was as guilty of whatever they did as they were.
But Owen refused. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe that he would be convicted. It was more that he couldn’t turn on his friends. But now that everything is said and done, now that he’s at his first parole board hearing, he can speak as freely as he wishes. Or rather, he can tell them whatever they want to hear.
After Owen finishes his statement with another impassioned plea, it’s my turn. I came here thinking that I would stand behind his old story one hundred percent and plead for them to let him go because he wasn’t really part of what transpired.
But now, as I walk up to the front, I have no idea what I’m going to say.
My hands shake along with the rest of my body. I am thankful for the blazer that I wore over my button-down shirt.
With every step I take, I
can feel the wetness under my arms spreading.
I have always been terrified of public speaking. Whenever I would see a podium set up in the classroom, my body would shut down and I would often pretend that I had some sort of illness. If I knew a speech was coming up, I would skip that class or school altogether. But right now, I wish to God I had a podium to lean on.
I stop in the middle of two tables. Owen and his attorney sit to my left and the prosecutor to my right. There are chairs set up behind the prosecutor for the Kim family but they are all empty.
I clear my throat and take a deep breath.
“I’m Owen’s younger sister. He asked me to be here as a character witness,” I start. That’s all that I can use from my previous speech.
Shit!
Okay, focus. Just speak from the heart. But don’t say too much that’s contradictory with what he has just said.
Shit! Shit!
“I came here with everything that I was going to say memorized, but now I just want to tell you about my brother. We did not have the best childhood. Our eldest brother died in a car crash sending our mother, who wasn’t much of a mother, into a downward spiral. Then our father went out to the store for milk and never came back. This crushed her even more and she stopped getting out of bed. She never really had a job or did any of the cooking or the shopping or cleaning so it was just us doing everything. I am not telling you this as an excuse for what Owen did, but I just want you to know what kind of world we were living in at the time. When Owen got older, he started hanging out with the wrong kind of people. There aren’t very many good types of people running around the streets of Boston late at night. He was young and didn’t think that anything could happen. Well, it did. I am very sorry to Mr. Kim and the rest of the Kim family for what happened. I know that he has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and I can imagine how hard it must’ve been for him to return to his job. My only consolation is that he was not physically hurt.”
29
When we listen to him…
Tell Me to Go Page 10