Chapter Sixteen
To: Bo Porter
From: Peyton Turner
Dear Bo,
You’re right. This is a bad idea. This isn’t how I usually live my life. If my best friend were doing this, I’d tell her to stop. I’d tell her to open her eyes and come back to reality. Because all of this seems like a dream.
A daydream.
This only happens in my books and books usually have a happy ending.
Unlike life. You could very well have nefarious intentions.
You probably had them all along. Maybe this was all a ploy to lure me in.
So you could either ask me to send you money in the next letter or to run drugs for you to your buddies. But I don’t think that’s your plan.
First, I don’t have any money; I’m a college student and you already know that.
And if me running drugs for you was your ultimate goal then reading pages and pages about my mundane life for months is just too high a price to pay.
Plus in order for me to run drugs to your friends, I kinda need to know who your friends are.
And I don’t.
You never tell me.
Now that I think about it, I hardly know anything about you. Anything personal, that is. Except your crime and your name. Oh and that you’re a cowboy with a deep love for the horses. Which could be in itself a point against you but I think I’m going to take my chances with you.
Besides, if I didn’t, you’d never know that some of what you imagine is right.
I do smell like flowers. But it’s my perfume.
I borrowed it from my best friend years ago and loved it so much that I’ve been using it ever since.
My hair’s long and thick and yes, I usually have it up in a bun or a ponytail.
Mostly because I find my hair annoying and it’s always in the way.
And as for the nape of my neck, I have to admit that I never thought about it a lot.
What it felt like or looked like. I never thought anyone would be interested.
But I touched it for you. I ran my fingers over my pulse and I think you may be right.
The nape of my neck is soft and warm. Most of all though, it’s ready.
For a roughened con to touch me with his rough fingers.
For you.
You said that you want soft things but I’ve lived my entire life being all soft and docile. So my hunger runs for hard things. Things with sharp edges. Things that bruise and bite.
I think your fingers could do that, grip me, grab me, wrap my long hair like rope around your wrist. I think your fingers could leave their mark on me and so to answer the question you didn’t ask: I want your hands on me, rough and strong.
Rough and strong, when it comes to you, doesn’t scare me as much.
Which is a surprise because of how my daddy was but yeah.
What I’m afraid of is that I don’t want you to stop there.
I don’t want you to just put your hands on me. I want something else too.
I want your mouth.
I think your mouth will be soft. It will be just as soft as the rest of your body is hard.
In fact, your mouth will be so soft that I’ll wonder how a man so hard can have a mouth so plush and hot and oh so wet.
But then you’ll show me. You’ll show that it’s not about the texture of your mouth; it’s about how you use it.
You already know that I’ve never been kissed.
Not once in my life. Which means I’ve imagined my first kiss about a million times by now even though I pretend that I haven’t.
And every time I’ve imagined it, I’ve imagined it to be demanding and passionate.
Possessive and owning. And I think that’s how you’ll use your mouth on me.
Even when you’re going slow, it’ll feel like you’re going fast. And when you’re going fast, it’ll still feel like you’re being thorough.
What I’m really afraid of is that you won’t want to.
Kiss me, I mean. Because I’ve never been kissed before and there’s a reason for that. A very good reason and some days I think why should you be any different? Why should you look at me differently than the rest of them?
But then again, this is a daydream, right? None of this is real. None of this will ever happen. I’ll probably never see you and you’ll probably never see me. So maybe you could be my first kiss, after all.
Until next time,
Peyton
PS: You know what they call a daydream? A reverie. And reverie, along with daydream, is my favorite word.
To: Peyton Turner
From: Bo Porter
Peyton,
What if I do have nefarious intentions? What if I’m playing a really long game? A game where, as you said, I lure you in and then ruin you. Although if I really was, I wouldn’t tell you.
Like I never tell you about anything else. Other than my crime and that I’m a cowboy. Or was. I was a lot of other things too but they don’t matter anymore. In here, I’m just a number in an orange jumpsuit. So maybe you already know everything there is to know about me.
Another thing to know about me: I’m not like your daddy.
I’m not going to hurt you. Not physically at least. My rough hands may leave marks on your body but they won’t be the ones you’ll cry over when you look at them in the mirror.
My sharp teeth may bruise your skin but only because you asked for it.
I’m also not like all the other motherfuckers out there. Those little college-going pissants who don’t know their asses from their elbows. I’m torn between beating the shit out of them until they stop existing for making you feel the way you do and letting them live because their loss is my gain.
Even though I haven’t been on the outside for eight years now and things may have changed, I know some things remain the same.
A man getting to put his rough hands on a woman whose soft skin has never known any other fingers is one of them.
I thought I knew hunger. I knew craving.
I knew what it’s like to starve in a place like this.
But I didn’t know the first thing about it until your last letter.
Hunger is when there’s a deep ache in your stomach.
When every breath you let out hollows out your gut and leaves it clenching.
Craving is when your fingers shake while standing in the chow line, and your fucking knees tremble in the exercise yard.
Starving is what happens when the slightest thought of you makes my body sweat. And hard.
I’ve been so fucking hard all week.
You want hard things, don’t you? Well, here I am: all hard up and in pain.
And I may sound like a big man right now, boasting about taking it slow; taking my time with you, absorbing you, dissolving you on my tongue; strumming you and stirring you with my fingers, but I already know it’s going to be a struggle.
It’s going to be a struggle to control myself.
So maybe it’s a good thing that I may never get to see you because if I do, I don’t think I’d stop with just a kiss on the lips. I’d want things from you that you probably aren’t ready to give.
Bo
PS: A reverie, huh. So maybe that’s what you are: my reverie. My dream girl.