Chapter 3 Dex
CHAPTER THREE
DEX
“What’s wrong with your face?” Pete asks. I look up to find him hanging down from the bunk above mine, his blond hair flopping down toward me.
“Nothing. I’m just practicing,” I tell him. Then I smile as big as I can. “How’s this look?”
“For scaring babies? Perfect.”
“No, for when I meet Wren.”
A long, annoyed sigh comes from the bunk across from mine… Sly. “Why are you worrying about that? We’re never going to meet her,” he says in exasperation.
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug before practicing my big smile again. “Maybe not.”
“You look like a creep. Smile like that at her and she’ll run in the other direction,” Pete says as he drops down from his bed and picks up the book I’ve been reading.
“The Gentleman’s Guide to Love,” he reads with a snort. “Dude, really? This is probably from the fifties. And haven’t you read it like ten times already?” He drops it back down, and I just shrug, practicing different smiles, hoping that after a while, one of them will start to feel more normal.
“Treating a woman properly never goes out of style,” I tell him, before lifting the book and re-reading the part I’m on.
A genuine smile is the first step to winning a woman’s trust. When you smile, it shows warmth, confidence, and approachability—qualities women find attractive. Practice in front of a mirror until your smile feels natural and inviting.
Genuine was the part I was having trouble with.
I smiled often, but not to show warmth or approachability; normally, it was the opposite—a grin of triumph right before I threw the winning punch, or a smile of excitement when I found my target.
But how to smile at someone like Wren? I had no idea how to do that; I needed practice.
“I think I hear the mail cart!” Pete practically squeals, shoving his homemade shiv down the back of his pants as he moves to the front of our shared cell.
I try not to groan as the excitement of getting a letter hits me right in the dick. I watch him press his face against the bars like a kid waiting for the ice cream truck.
Me? I grab the frame of the bunk above me and crank out a few pull-ups. Part workout, part distraction. Mostly distraction. Because nothing kills a hard-on like pretending you’re training for another brawl in the cafeteria.
Except it doesn’t work. My dick’s still saluting at the thought of a letter. That’s right. I’m officially the guy who gets horny over mail. Put that in the prison handbook: symptoms include sweating, restless nights, and random boners whenever the mail cart squeaks by.
And it’s all because of her. My Wren.
Her letters are like rays of sunshine shoved through the bars. The first time she wrote us, she thought we were foster kids.
Foster kids.
I almost laughed my ass off. Figured she’d stop once she found out the truth, but nope. She wrote back a week later, acting like being penpals with prisoners was totally normal, and boom! Just like that, I was hooked.
Now? Every letter drills straight into my chest cavity and sets up camp there. She didn’t just worm her way into my heart; she jumped in with both feet and redecorated the place.
The squeak of the wheels gets louder, and Pete bounces on his toes. “It’s coming!”
Bowman, the guard who always delivers the mail, finally rolls up and smirks. “She never misses a week, does she?” He passes four envelopes through the bars.
“Nope,” Pete says, grinning like a loon.
Bowman snorts. “You’d think she’d have better things to do than write to your sorry asses.”
Pete fires back, “Aw, Bowman, you like our asses? Sorry, but we’re not into guys.”
The guard just shakes his head in amusement as he pushes the cart past. As far as guards go, he is pretty decent.
Pete tosses the envelopes to each of us, and I snatch mine like it’s made of gold. Sitting on my bunk, I lean against the wall. Across from me, Sly and Jagger do the same, letters in hand, all of us like addicts about to shoot up.
Carefully, I open mine and sigh. There it is; her handwriting. The cure to all my problems and the cause of a whole new set.
To my dearest Dex,
My heart does this stupid lurch thing. Every time she writes that, I feel seen. Yeah, my standards are low.
Thank you so much for the birthday letter; you have no idea how much I needed it. Robert forgot my birthday. Not just refused to celebrate, like in the past, but he never said a single word about it. I thought maybe today he’d let me have something fancy for breakfast, but no such luck.
What’s your favorite breakfast food? I bet you’d eat half a dozen eggs and a stack of chewy bacon. Maybe one day, when you get out of there, I can cook your favorite meal for you?
Tonight was actually a pretty strange one. I might have had my first date.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
She’s twenty-six! How the hell has she never been on a date? And more importantly, who the hell is this guy? I grip the paper tighter, scanning for more clues as to who the dead man is.
Robert made me have dinner with his friend, Ivan.
He sort of implied it was a date, but I’m not sure.
The guy is older than my brother and gives me the creeps.
Although Robert tells me that my gut instincts are off, so maybe he’s not so bad?
Is it wrong for me to wish that it were the four of you here with me instead?
I bet you wouldn’t make my skin crawl with unease just from a look. If you kissed my hand, I don’t imagine I’d spend ten minutes scrubbing it clean—and yes, I did do that tonight. Is that weird?
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I snuck out and came to see you. Would I get in trouble? Would you turn me away? I don’t think I could handle that. The letters from you and your friends are the only thing I look forward to.
Am I broken, Dex? What’s wrong with me that I don’t care about playing the piano or ballet? All I think about is you, lying there in your cell, only a few hours from here.
Even now, as I write this, it’s ten p.m. on my birthday, and I wonder if you are sitting on your bed like I am.
Can you see the moon? No… You told me you have no window in your cell. I’m gonna draw one on the top of this page. You need to hold it at night, three nights from now, and look at the moon I drew, knowing I’m looking at the real one and thinking of you.
Take care, Dex.
Your Wren
XOX
Yeah. I’m a goner.
My chest squeezes so hard I might actually keel over. I trace my finger over the moon as Pete jumps down between us, having read his letter above me in his own bunk.
“Who the fuck is Ivan?” Pete blurts out, his eyes wide as he scans his own letter.
“He’s a dead man,” Sly says, calm as hell—but his hands are clenched so tight the paper crunches, ruining his usually pristine letter. His eyes shine bright with murder.
Jagger jumps down, letter in hand, teeth clenched with pure rage. He’s not just mad, he’s seething. Something about this news has affected him to his very core.
“She told me Robert made her go on a date with him. That he kissed her hand.”
Pete practically foams at the mouth. “The fuck?!” He growls, turning to look at me.
His eyes burn holes in the back of my letter as if he wants to know exactly what’s written there.
But we’ve all come to an understanding with the letters.
We never touch or read each others, and it’s up to us if we want to share anything.
We know we all care about her—obsessed with her more accurately—and that she seems to like all of us. That’s enough for us. The letters are too crucial for what’s left of our sanity to give up.
“She made him dinner,” Sly grits out.
Pete runs his hands through his messy blond hair, pacing. “What are we gonna do?”
“What can we do?” I mutter, shoulders slumping. If there were a way out of this place, I’d be at Ivan’s throat already—probably her brother’s, too.
“We can ask Mugs to do some research,” Sly suggests, referring to our next-door neighbor who has the internet privileges we lack.
“We don’t have his last name, unless you guys do?” Pete asks, looking at us hopefully. I recheck my letter before shaking my head. “No.”
“Me neither,” Sly says with a sigh as Jagger just stares at the wall silently.
Pete sighs, cleaning his nails with his shiv like he’s prepping for a date with murder. “You know, I’m really starting to get pissed about being locked up for a crime I didn’t commit.”
“Join the club,” Sly says, putting his letter away neatly, trying to gently smooth out the creases. Unlike my pages, his were pristine. I didn’t need the pages to be perfect to feel close to my girl. I accomplished that by shoving the letters in my pants while I jerked off to thoughts of her.
Of course, it was a little difficult to picture her when I’d never seen her, but I knew she had black hair and sort of resembled snow white, with pale skin and blue eyes.
When she first wrote to us, we thought it was some sort of trap to make us confess to something or get information from us, so we had Mugs look into her online, thinking she couldn’t be real. She had no social presence, but she did appear to be a real person, a real looker, too, according to Mugs.
And since she never seemed to pry much into our pasts, we quickly realized she was who she said she was—a twenty-five-year-old woman from upstate.
Why she continued to write to us, I’ll never know. What I do know is that one day, she’s bound to wise up and meet someone who isn’t currently incarcerated. She’ll get married, move into a big house with a white picket fence and two-point-five kids. She’ll move on.
And I’ll still be here. Sitting in my cell. Holding a letter she wrote as if it were the most valuable thing on Earth.
Because to me? It is.