Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Gray

2 years earlier

“My commissary account balance somehow went from zero to the max of two hundred and ninety bucks,” Rip, my bunkmate, announced. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

I was glad my back was facing him. I continued to fold the laundry I’d just finished on top of my bunk. “How the hell would I know where the money in your account came from?” I lied.

I’d written a letter to Etta and asked her to fill his account a few weeks ago. She had access to all of my personal funds out in the real world. I’d been wondering if he’d gotten it.

“Maybe my Katie did it?”

I felt bad for giving him hope that his daughter had come around. But he wouldn’t take the money from me, and I knew he had a stack of letters he’d written her, but couldn’t afford to buy any postage. Rip and I had been bunkmates since the day I arrived. He’d already been here a few months, so he showed me the ropes.

“Maybe. But at least now you can pick up some of the gourmet foods you like so much,” I teased. “Ramen Noodles, prunes, Pop-Tarts.”

“Not everyone grew up eating caviar off a silver spoon, pretty boy.”

I chuckled. “What’s on your agenda today after dialysis?”

“Probably watch some TV. They’ve got a John Wayne movie marathon playing in the activity room this afternoon.”

“Ah. So a good long nap, then?”

He tossed a towel at my back.

Rip’s real name was Arthur Winkle. But he’d been nicknamed Rip because of his penchant to catnap. Rip Van Winkle. The guy nodded out in the middle of conversations, during dinner, and inevitably during TV time. He always denied being asleep, claiming to be “resting his eyes.” Whenever the inmates gathered to watch something, they all groaned when Rip joined them because he’d be snoring up a storm within ten minutes of the show starting.

“What time is your lady friend coming today?” he asked.

“Ten.”

Rip knew all about Layla and me. Mostly because I didn’t shut the fuck up about her, ever. Weekdays were basically a countdown to the weekend. And while Saturdays were always incredible, Sundays sucked because it was so long until I’d see her again. Her six months of community service only had another two weeks left, and I’d hesitated to bring it up because it felt wrong to ask her to keep driving here every week just to visit me, yet the thought of not seeing her for more than a year until I got out killed me.

“I think I’m going to write a letter to Katie and thank her for the money, then mail all these backlogged letters.” Rip wrote his daughter every week, like clockwork. She had never written back to him once.

“Sounds like a plan.” I looked at the time—ten to ten—then scooped up the apple I’d saved from lunch yesterday to butter up the teacher. “Better head down to class.”

***

“Tell me something you hated about your childhood.”

I sat back in my chair and folded my hands behind my head. Tell me something had become a weekly ritual for Layla and me. Each week one of us would ask a random question of the other. The experience of wanting to know everything about a woman was foreign to me.

Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t the kind of guy who went on a date and only talked about myself. I’d had conversations, but most of them were surface—talk about jobs, vacations, that type of current stuff. I’d never wanted to know about a woman’s childhood. It had never even dawned on me to ask that kind of a question.

But I wanted to know everything and anything about Layla—namely, what made this woman tick.

“Thursdays. I hated Thursdays growing up.”

I arched a brow. “Big test day at school?”

“Nope. It was the day my father left every week.”

She’d mentioned that she didn’t speak to her father anymore, but shied away from elaborating. We only had a few hours together each week, and I didn’t want to use them to pry into shit that might be bad memories if she wasn’t ready to share.

“Every week? Did he split his time for work or something?”

“He split his time between his families.”

“He had an ex-wife and kids?”

She looked down and shook her head. “No, he had a wife and kids. We got him from Monday night through Thursday morning. His wife and kids had the other four days out on the west coast.”

“Jesus. So your mom was his mistress?”

“Yep.”

“How long did that last?”

“More than twenty years. Until my mom died.”

“That’s fucked up. And she knew he was married?”

“Yep. And his wife knew he had a girlfriend. Everyone except me seemed to be okay with the arrangement. And I didn’t start to think anything was wrong with it until I was a teenager—because oddly, my dad was a great dad to me. Even though he was only around for a few days each week, he spent more time with me than any of my friends’ dads who were around all the time spent with them. Dad just had two families, and we didn’t talk about it. But once I got a little older, I couldn’t comprehend being able to love two people and need two families.”

“Did he grow up Mormon?”

“Nope. Catholic.”

I shook my head. “Well, I can see why you’d hate Thursdays.”

Layla blew out a deep breath. “You’re the only person who knows that besides my best friend since childhood.”

I held her gaze. “I’m honored you shared it.”

She smiled, then relaxed back into her chair. “My turn.”

“Pretty sure anything I share after that is going to seem boring.”

“Well, I think we could use something less depressing after that share. Let me think.” She tapped her finger to her lips.

God, I wanted to suck on those things so bad.

“Tell me the last lie you told.”

“Easy. I lied to my bunkmate a few hours ago.”

“Rip?”

“Yeah. I stuck some money in his commissary account and said I didn’t. He won’t take handouts.”

She smiled. “That’s sweet.”

“Except now I got his hopes up that his daughter did it.”

“They’re on bad terms?”

“Hasn’t spoken to him since he got arrested. Never came to visit once. No one has, as far as I know. His wife passed away a few years before his arrest.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah. He’s a good guy, too. Most of the guys in here are here because of greed. He’s in because he’s selfless.”

“You said he was making and selling Social Security cards. He’s in for federal counterfeiting, right?”

“Yeah. Owned a printing shop for forty years. Had a really sick granddaughter with medical costs, so he started making them for some guy who sold passports, licenses, and all kinds of fake documents. He sent her the money anonymously because he wouldn’t have had the money to give her by any legal means.”

“Oh, wow. And his daughter doesn’t talk to him because of that?”

I nodded. “Families do crazy stuff when the shit hits the fan.”

“Tell me about it.”

I suddenly felt her bare foot on my calf. She’d slipped out of her shoe and lifted my pant leg—one of the few touches we could enjoy without the camera. I loved the way her eyes twinkled when she said or did something she shouldn’t be doing. My eyes fell to her nose. I’d noticed it while she was talking, but hadn’t said anything.

“You didn’t cover up your freckles today. Did you do that for me?”

She smirked. “Maybe. Do you like it?”

“I love it. They’re sexy as hell, but the fact that you did that for me is more of a turn-on than anything.”

She rubbed her toes higher on my calf, and I groaned. “You’re going to give me a hard-on from a fucking foot on my leg.”

The light in her eyes danced. “Well, we have another hour before class starts. Might as well make it a good one.”

I squinted, unsure what she had up her sleeve.

“Remember when we played that little game where you described how you would kiss me?”

“Yeah, Freckles. Not much I forget about your visits.”

“Well, how about we play that again, but I describe how I would kiss you below the belt?”