Chapter One #2
Eli wasn’t in the cafeteria when he returned, still receiving the grand tour, and that gave Samuel the opportunity to rid himself of his embarrassment.
He went to the barracks, and hunted around the empty beds.
Bottom bunks were more popular than top bunks, and that kept them full, but top bunks had their benefits.
He himself slept on a top bunk. It made him inaccessible to the others. Eli, he decided, was a bottom bunk man.
He looked around. “Tweaker!”
The man was picking at some balled-up tinfoil in his lap. Even among prisoners, he was an oddball. The man pointed at himself and tilted his head.
“Yes, you." As if anyone else wanted that nickname. "I need your bunk. Clear out.”
“But you don’t like bottom.”
“It’s not for me. Here. I’ll trade you.” He handed Tweaker all the shitty originals from the welcome kit along with some beef jerky and a package of honey buns. Tweaker’s face narrowed in suspicion. “All this for the bunk? ”
“And you don’t talk to the new guy.”
“There’s a new guy?”
He sighed. “Just move.”
He switched out the mattress (Tweaker didn’t shower enough) and set the bed with some fresh linens he stole off the laundry cart.
Eli’s bunk was strategically chosen to be near enough to see from his own bunk, but not so near he’d be tortured by the man’s smell and gleaming skin.
At least, he hoped not. Some images were burned worryingly deep into his mind already, but that was just the way of first impressions.
Soon the man’s glow would be eroded by the trials of prison, and he’d be just as gross and unlikable as the rest of them. Hopefully.
He was safely atop his own bunk when Eli finally came in. EYES DOWN , he warned himself, but swore he could still feel Eli looking at him, burning his skin like he’d taken a lighter to him. He felt his face heat and cursed his curiosity. He should have gone back to the library.
Eli was approaching.
He told himself to stay calm, but his hands were suddenly too big for his body, giant shovels swallowing his book. He kept his eyes on the page, but Raskolnikov was no longer speaking to him.
“Hey.”
His eyes snapped up from the book. Too quick. Too obvious.
“I just came to say thanks. Michael says you’ve really decked me out.”
The name skated over him, totally foreign, until he caught the grinning Rat in his peripherals. Michael. Technically, it was the man’s name, but nobody used it. Even his mother called him Rat now.
He dropped his eyes again. “It’s nothing. ”
But that didn’t send Eli away. “I’m not sure exactly when my commissary money will become available, but I’ll pay you back as soon as it does.”
He should have kept silent. He realized later that doing nothing would have been the surest way to be rid of him. But he didn’t do nothing. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry? Rat says you dropped two hundred bucks on that stuff.”
Could it really have been that much? Whatever the case, he was going to kill Rat. “He’s exaggerating.”
Eli shook his head. “I can’t accept it.”
“Course you can’t.” That came from Rat, who had snuck into the conversation. The bastard could exude a reptilian quiet when he wanted to. “It’s akin to a proposal around these parts. You asking him to be your bitch, Fuller?”
Samuel slammed his book shut. “Start running, bastard. You’ve got three seconds.” More like one and a half. It wouldn’t take long to get down from his bunk.
Whatever Rat saw on his face had him rethinking his attitude real quick because he said, “I’m joking, Fuller. Joking. Jesus. Everyone knows you’re the damn Ice Queen.”
“Ice Queen?” Eli was only modestly curious, but Rat was eager to share.
“Doesn’t fuck. Doesn’t even jack it, so far as anyone knows. He’s like one of those eunuchs. Sexless.”
He’d had enough. “Rat. For your own safety, I better not see your face for at least three days.”
“Gonna be difficult since we’re bunkmates.”
He tossed his book at him. The full weight of Crime and Punishment beaned the man in the head. “Figure it out.”
Rat didn’t give him any more idiocy, but his look was oddly piercing as he left.
He was about to give Eli some similar rudeness, but the man was already stooping for the book. “Do you like this one? My husband says Dostoevsky requires Ambien.”
Everything froze, the word so powerful he thought it would push the soul right out of his body. Husband. Eli had a husband.
Something must have shown on his face because Eli frowned. “You feeling okay? You’re a little pale. I noticed it in the hall, but it seems worse now. Are you coming down with something?”
With Eli’s height, it was simple enough to reach out.
In another moment, that big brown hand would be against his burning flesh.
He slapped it out of the air, the sound like a gunshot in the quiet room.
Eli blinked, then scratched his neck, embarrassed.
“Instinct. I’m a doctor, not a creep. I promise. ”
A doctor. A husband. With every passing moment, the man was becoming more and more impossible.
“We don’t get many of those around here.” He was pushing words out of his unwilling mouth the way one squeezed water out of a rag. “What did you do, illegal organ transplants or something?”
See? He wanted to say. I can be normal. I’m not afraid of you.
Eli chuckled, the sound like warm syrup. “Maybe that’s the story I should spread around. Think that would beef up my street cred?”
Nobody with street cred ever used the phrase “street cred.” The man was so suburban Ivy League it was making his eyes bleed. Eli stuck out his hand. “I should introduce myself properly. I’m—”
“Thompson, I know. I was in the cafeteria, remember? ”
Of course, the man remembered. He was just trying to be polite. But Samuel had no interest in playing nice when he was already in too deep. Why hadn’t he just shoved the welcome basket into the man’s hands and been done with it?
He ignored the waiting hand, climbed over the bars of the bed, and jumped down.
Again, that should have been the end, but his conscience kept his mouth moving.
“Don’t shower too early or too late. There are guys here who wouldn’t hesitate, even with a man your size.
They come in packs, or they jump you when you’re least expecting it.
Don’t assume you’re out of range. A bar of soap in a tube sock flies further than you think it will. "
“Sounds like you speak from experience.”
This time, the flush that came was anger.
It was the sympathy on the man’s face that did it.
A newcomer had no right to be looking at him with eyes like that.
Anyone else, he might have decked right there just to straighten out any assumptions.
He’d hit people for less. But somehow he couldn’t hit Eli, and that realization had the fear coming back stronger than ever.
If the man decided to take advantage of him, tried to screw him over and tear down everything it had taken him five years to build, what would he do?
“Just watch yourself. And don’t trust anyone. I mean it. No matter how nice anyone seems. The prisoners, the COs, the civilians. None of them. They’re all out to fuck you.”
“Literally or figuratively?”
He decided to leave the answer up to Eli’s imagination.