Hard Time Read online

  I’d do the same to you.

  “Praise Jesus.”

  I want that even more because then I could hear your voice. I want your hands on my head and my hair and you saying things to me. Anything. Just my name. Or you could tell me faster. Slower. Deeper. Lower. Use your hand Eric. I’d do whatever you asked for as long as you wanted it. With my lips or my tongue or my fingers. I used to be real good at that. Maybe you could teach me all over again.

  My body clenched hard. Teach me. This dangerous, hardened criminal wanted to be taught something by little old me? My arousal went from mouse to cat, fearful to wicked. I reached for the glass but found it empty. I licked the inside of the rim.

  I bet you taste amazing. I’d treat you so good just to taste even more of it. I’d make you come that way if you’d let me. I’d spoil you so good before I ever asked for anything for myself just so you’d know I care about you. Maybe if I did good job you’d reward me. Let me inside you. It’s been so long since I felt that. And you’d be so wet from what I made you feel. I hope I can say that word to you. Wet. That’s probably a rude word to say but I think about it. About making you that way and how incredible it’d feel. Being inside you.

  I’m hard now. Typing this. I’ve been hard since the part about kissing you. I never imagined I’d get hard from writing or typing. How about that. You really are a good teacher.

  When I think about being with you it’s always away from here. Outside. In the sunshine maybe by the lake.

  I changed my own fantasy, rereading everything he’d written, laying my back against the sand and grass instead of some narrow, metal bed. Warm sun on my face, warm dark hair clutched in my fingers. Same hungry man between my thighs, wanting to be taught.

  Sometimes I want you on my lap. Riding me. It’s been so long I bet I couldn’t last a minute. But at least that way it might be like you were doing that to me. Making me lose control. Or maybe if it was real I’d need to be on top. Like I’d die if I couldn’t move how I wanted. I’d try not to be too rough. Unless you like that. You seem like maybe you’d like for a guy to be gentle and romantic. I’d do my best to be that man. But sometimes I like it fast too. I’m not the nicest guy but I’m not an asshole either. I’d try real hard to be whatever you wanted.

  I’ve been typing for two hours and using an outlet in the TV room. All the guys are pissed off about the noise so I better quit it. Next week wear green and I’ll tell you more about what I think. If you don’t I’ll leave you alone.

  Yours,

  Eric

  PS I like feeling like I’m dressing you. I hope you like it too.

  I did. Especially when he said it like that.

  I wore green next week, that same spruce-colored top as my first day at Cousins. At ten of five he gave me two more pages without a word—just set them atop a slim stack of other inmates’ correspondence with a little nod.

  * * *

  Darling, I read an hour later, lounging on my couch in a silk camisole, hair down and sticking to the back of my sweaty neck. The Devil was whispering secrets, my grandma would say of the day’s humidity. And a man who was far from a saint had a few of his own to tell me.

  I don’t know what women think about when they think about sex, he wrote.

  I bet it’s nicer than what guys think about. So I won’t bother describing my dick or anything. Women probably don’t care about those kinds of details. We can talk about how stuff feels instead. I can tell you how my dick feels instead of how it looks. Hard. Harder than I think I ever felt before I had you to think about. Hot too. So hot I bet your hand would feel cool on my skin. I’d give anything to feel that. To kiss you while you touched me. I’d show you what I liked with my hand on yours. Slow and tight to start. Then faster.

  Fucking hell.

  I reread that first line.

  I don’t know what women think about when they think about sex . . .

  I smiled. This one thought about whatever Eric Collier told her to.

  That’s how I like fucking too, he wrote, and the room spun. Slow to start. But by the end you’d have me so wound up I can’t promise I’d be gentle anymore. But I kind of want to show you that. How bad I want you and how hard I’d have to work to stay in control.

  I wish you knew what it does to me when you wear the colors I tell you to. I didn’t know color could do that. Get me hot as a photo of a woman or someone’s actual hand on me. I was out for work release a few mornings this week by the airfield. I was only trimming the weeds but they had flowers planted around the front of this one building. Marigolds. Most were yellow and orange but some were almost the same color as the poppy on that shirt of yours. I saw that red and smelled all that grass and I thought about you. It got me all messed up in the nicest way and made me forget where I was and all the ways I fucked up to get there.

  I don’t think you’ve got any clue what it means that you let me write these letters. It gets me so riled up it hurts. But I like it. I imagine it’s some spell you’ve got me under. Makes me want to be all kinds of ways with you. Helpless sometimes. But darker stuff too. Like I want to punish you for making me this crazy. But nothing bad I promise. Nothing you wouldn’t be okay with. The kind of stuff lovers get up to. That’s how I think of you now. Like my lover. That sounds crazy but you have to understand I can’t even remember what it was like the last time I had sex. Not because of how long it’s been but because the stuff I imagine about you is just that real. So real it’s like I’ve got the crispest memories of it.

  I hope you don’t think I’m blowing smoke up your ass with these letters. Or that I want anything more than just to say this stuff to you. If I could think of a way to prove it I would. Since I know me being a convict won’t give you any reason to trust what I say.

  I’ve gotten way better at typing by the way. I still only use two fingers but I’m way faster. And copying it down on paper had gotten easier too. I thought it might make you happy to know that.

  Wear pink next week and I’ll tell you more. If you don’t I’ll stop bothering you.

  Yours,

  Eric

  PS Wear your hottest underwear too. I don’t care if it’s a thong or granny panties. Whatever makes you hot is what I want to imagine you in. Say the word and I’d slide them off real sweet and slow or rip them right down the middle. Whatever you wanted. Whatever man you want me to be.

  Whatever man I wanted him to be.

  One I could actually touch, and kiss, and be with? Or exactly who he already was, and trapped safely behind those bars? A couple of weeks ago I’d have said the latter—no hesitation. But things were changing. My bad idea felt real, now.

  I couldn’t say exactly what did it.

  Maybe, I’d show you what I liked with my hand on yours.

  Maybe, I can’t promise I’d be gentle. Whatever the reason, I slid my notebook from my bag.

  And I finally wrote him back.

  Eric,

  I just read your latest letter. I’m glad you write them, and I’m glad to hear it’s getting easier. And that doing it means so much to you. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to write to you in return, but I’m sure you can appreciate why I need to be careful. Though that’s not the only reason.

  When I was younger, I was with a guy who didn’t treat me well. I paused, wondering how foolish it might be to tell him this. Could a manipulative convict turn this into a weapon, surely as he might fashion a toothbrush into a shank? Fuck it. I had six days to come to my senses.

  He made me not want to be with men, for a long time. Not since you first got locked up, actually. I shut myself off from feeling sexual right around the time you got shut inside a cell. So we’ve both been missing these feelings. How about that?

  You said you’d try hard to be whatever kind of man I wanted. I don’t know what I want, to be honest. But I do know I haven’t desired anyone in five ye
ars. Not until you. I’m not making any promises to wait for you or for this to ever be anything real, but I like talking to you this way, in letters. I’m afraid to say too much. To promise too much. I’m afraid I’m being selfish, enjoying your attention, and using you to feel this way again. But I haven’t felt this in forever, and it’s hard to just shut it off.

  Like you said, we don’t know each other. Only how we seem to make each other feel. But sometimes that feels like enough. So simple and right, when real life can feel far too messy.

  He’d assumed I wouldn’t want to talk about crass things, about our bodies, but he was wrong. I wanted to tell him how I watched him from the office window, when he was exercising. But if someone searched his cell and read this letter, looking for contraband, too many roads would lead to staff, and to me. I’d have to fib, and assume he could read between the lines.

  I bet I know what your body looks like, when you’re out in the yard. I bet it’s beautiful, and I say that as a woman who’s not been all that preoccupied by shallow things, like the way a man looks. You make me care about that, somehow. Maybe because I know so little about you. And because our lives are so different. Maybe I want to understand your body because I worry I could never understand what it’s like, being you.

  I paused, wondering if that even made sense. Whatever. It was true.

  I bet when you’re outside, your skin is tan and shines with sweat. I bet you have tattoos, on your back and shoulder . . . I hoped he’d realize what I was saying. Hoped he’d feel my eyes on him from now on when he worked out on Fridays, a woman’s admiring gaze cutting through that sea of male hostility. I want to lie you down on a bed and trace my fingertips over those designs, whatever they might be, and ask you what they mean, and about the man you were when you got them. And if you’re the same man now, or someone else. I feel like someone else now, since you started writing to me. I feel alive and vibrant and excited in ways I didn’t even a month ago. I’m afraid of what I feel sometimes, but I like that better than feeling nothing.

  You said you didn’t know what women think about, when they think about sex. I can only tell you what I think about.

  My throat felt tight, my head dizzy. I felt as cloudy and wound up as if he were actually here, touching me.

  You think about us by a lake, on the grass. I think about us in your cell, sometimes. I can hear thunder outside. Are you in your cell now? Can you hear it, too? It must be such a lonely place, yet so devoid of any privacy. When I imagine it, it’s only us, and I bring all those things you miss into a place where you don’t get to feel them. I want to lie with you on your bed, and see your eyes from close up. I see fire in them from across a table or a room, and I bet if we were together on that tiny bed, I’d feel it on my face like actual flames. I want to kiss you and feel how hungry you must be for a woman, after all this time. I want to slide my hand between our bodies and find you excited. I want to make you feel a hundred things at once—powerless and aggressive, needy and pushy, grateful and greedy. Everything a man can feel with a woman.

  I want nastier things, too. Like you braced above me and your hips pumping hard.

  I took a deep gulp from my sweating glass of ice water, fever burning me alive.

  I want to see everything as it happens between our bodies, the way yours would fit with mine. How fast you’d go when you were working to please me. And how fast you’d go when your turn came. I want to feel how much you want me, I wrote, hand shaking, with your cock. Feel how hard and thick and hot you’d get for me.

  Should I tell him . . . ? No, I shouldn’t. But I did.

  That’s what I think about, when I touch myself. Your body. The way it must look when you’re in the exercise yard, and how it’d look, laboring for me. And the things you’d say, in that deep voice of yours. You think my accent’s all sweet and feminine. Yours is just the opposite to me. Dark and hard and male. I want to feel everything that’s different about us in the way we’d fuck.

  Christ, I was a mess. My fingers were slippery around the pen. I was wet between my legs, from nothing more than wording these thoughts. I couldn’t actually give him this letter—it would push our bizarre affair so far over the line . . . But I couldn’t not finish it, either.

  Six days to find my senses, I reminded myself. Six whole days.

  When I read your letters, I hear them in my mind, in your voice. And I play them back in my head, when I touch myself. I imagine the thoughts you’ve shared as much as any physical thing I might picture us doing. When I come I’m always thinking about the words you say, and your eyes staring down at me—the parts of you I know for sure. That’s what I think about, when I come. Your eyes and your words and your voice.

  I hope this letter’s found you well, or as well as can be expected. I’ll see you as the fates allow. Until then, I’m yours on these pages.

  Your darling. In whatever color you please.

  Chapter Six

  Six days, but I never came to my senses.

  I wandered even farther from my senses, in fact, and on Wednesday afternoon I made a trip to the mall a few towns over. I didn’t own any hot underwear, and for the first time in ages I thought maybe I’d like to change that. Sure, I’d be wearing it for myself. Unseen at Cousins and on my weird, dateless dates on my couch. But Collier had asked me to, and I liked doing what he said, in this safe way. I liked letting him dress me.

  Victoria’s Secret looked like a magical fairyland—a riot of patterns and flower scents and frilly lace and shiny satin. I wished he’d told me what color, what sort of style, anything. I didn’t have the first clue what made me feel sexy aside from his words.

  I wandered between the displays, waiting for something to catch my eyes.

  What would be the most exotic, to him?

  I thought of the poppy shirt, of that inciting, bright red. Nothing like the navy uniforms and the endless drab cinderblock of Cousins. So red, maybe . . .

  But no. I stopped before a very different option. Crisp spring green.

  There’s not much grass here . . .

  Green, the color of freedom, of summers by whatever lake he’d mentioned. Grass, the blanket he wanted to lay me down on.

  I’ve been learning all about plants.

  It must be nice, to get outside.

  It sure is.

  I grabbed a bra in my size, nearly plain compared to some of the other styles. A bit of lace at the tops of the cups, and lace panels at the hips of the matching panties. Not a thong—I didn’t think I’d like to work a long, sweaty shift in one of those—but not especially innocent in the back, either.

  Your personal garden to tend, Eric, I mused as I set them beside the register, feeling high and cheesy and happily dim.

  If only you could visit it.

  Though thank goodness you can’t.

  * * *

  Before I left for Cousins the next Friday, I sealed my letter and wrote Darren Heating and Plumbing on the envelope, with my own address beneath it. Added a stamp. Just in case Shonda saw it in my notebook. Oh, I’d say. I’d been meaning to pop that in the mail. Just had a leaky pipe fixed.

  Paranoid, scheming liar. That’s what I’d become. And an idiot to boot.

  The whole thing was foolish. Terrifically foolish. I’d remove the pages from the envelope before I handed over the letter, secreting it among some other papers, but I had no guarantee Eric wouldn’t show it to his buddies—or even to an officer, if for some reason he wanted to try to get me fired. Or threaten to get me fired, unless I did who knew what. I hadn’t signed it, hadn’t mentioned my job or Fridays or any other incriminating hints . . . But handwriting was handwriting. And rules were rules. You will not speak to or touch any inmate in an inappropriate way. You will not encourage an inmate to speak to or touch you in an inappropriate way.

  Double check.

  But he’s never even once asked me to write b
ack. He’d never angled to get his hands on anything he might use to take advantage of me. He’d kept the evidence flowing in one direction, with me safely upstream.

  Shonda didn’t so much as take the notebook out of my tote. She didn’t check my clothes, either, not the short-sleeved raspberry pink button-up I set on the table, or the flats that were slapping over the cement floor of the dayroom a couple of minutes later.

  Slap, slap, slap. Whore, whore, whore, they seemed to chant.

  Whores wear red, I told them.

  Pink’s just red with some cream mixed in, you silly slut.

  But underneath, grass green. Clean as spring. Yet so damn dirty.

  I found Eric’s face, just for a second. Guess, I told him with my eyes. Bet you can’t.

  He caught me earlier than usual during Resources that afternoon, and I wondered if he had any clue how nervous I felt. How terrified. Terrified of what I was about to hand him, and terrified that I might get caught. When he came over to where I’d just finished helping another inmate with a letter, I started shaking all over, like an honest-to-God train was rumbling through the building.

  “Hey there,” I said, and smiled. My anxiety had to be plain. I’m not afraid of you, I wanted to tell him. I’m afraid of me. What I’m capable of.

  “Afternoon.” He took the vacated seat across from me. He’d brought a book with him, an oversized blue paperback called The Essential Garden Maintenance Workbook.

  “Is that for your work release?” I asked, pointing to it.

  “Kind of. The guy who manages the program lent it to me. Can I ask you to help me read a couple things? There’s lots of words in here I don’t understand.”

  I nodded. “Of course.” I moved my chair to the end of the table and angled the book between us. His knee brushed mine, and even through two pairs of pants it was the most explicit contact I’d ever felt. I shut my eyes for a breath, heat burning my cheeks. Act normal. Act normal. I opened the book.