Chapter 10
Jude
The camera above the day room door pans on a forty-second arc. Left wall to right wall, a slow mechanical sweep that covers every corner of the room except the eleven square feet behind the support pillar where the ceiling duct meets the wall. I've timed it across three weeks and fourteen sessions.
The pillar sits a few feet from the table where Hope conducts our sessions.
A structural column, concrete, too thick for the lens to see past when the pan reaches its leftmost stop.
At that stop, the lens holds for four seconds before it reverses.
Four seconds of dead zone. I've watched the angle from every chair in this room and the gap doesn't change.
Gage leaves the doorframe twice per session. Once to check the hall. Once to answer the radio call that comes in at roughly the twenty-minute mark. Shift change coordination, always the same voice, always the same length. Thirty seconds from doorframe to wall and back.
The dead zone and Gage's gap have never overlapped.
Until last Thursday, when the rotation schedule shifted and the new shift officer started pulling Gage away ninety seconds earlier than the old one.
I sat through the entire session doing nothing but confirming it.
Camera pans left. Gage steps out. For nine seconds the room has no eyes on the pillar side.
Nine seconds is more than I need.
Hope comes in at two with her notebook under her arm and her pen behind her ear.
She smells like coffee again. Three cups today.
I can track her mood by how much she's had before she gets here.
One cup is a good morning, two is a bad one.
Three means she didn't sleep. There's a faint stain on her left cuff where she spilled some.
"Afternoon." She pulls the chair to the table and sits. "How's the week?"
"You've had three coffees."
She looks down at her sleeve. Back at me. "That's not an answer."
"It's an observation. You look tired."
"I'm not tired. I had a lot of reports due." She opens to a fresh page. "Where are we today?"
"Here."
Her hand stops. She looks up, smiles and then moves on.
"Kent tells me the medication review went through. Same protocol, another ninety days."
"Kennedy gets what Kennedy wants."
"That's not what I asked."
"You didn't ask anything."
Her mouth pulls sideways and she tries to flatten it. Fails.
"How are you feeling on the current dose?"
"Functional."
"Is that the clinical answer or the honest one?"
"Both."
She tips her head. "George told me you've been teaching him the Sicilian Defense."
"George told you wrong. I showed him an opening. He turned it into a frontier dispute."
"A frontier dispute."
"He pushes his pawns to the center of the board, sits behind them, and refuses to advance." I lean back. "It's not a defense. It's stubbornness."
"And yours?"
"Take what you want and keep it."
I watch her hand move across the page, left to right, steady.
She holds the pen too tight. Always has.
Her index finger goes white at the second knuckle, and I've thought about that finger more than I should—thought about taking her hand and uncurling it, pressing my thumb into the knot until she lets go.
"I need to check your pulse." She reaches across the table and holds out her hand. "Resting baseline for the review."
I extend my arm. Her fingers find the inside of my wrist and press. Two fingertips on the vein. She counts. Her eyes go to the clock above the door and her lips move without sound.
Her skin is warm. Her thumb rests against the edge of my palm. She doesn't seem to notice that she's holding my hand in a room with a camera, a guard and a man who could close his fingers around her wrist and pull her across this table before she drew her next breath.
"Fifty-two," she says. "That's low."
"I've been told."
"Have you always run low?"
"Yes."
Her fingers leave my wrist and I want them back.
"You haven't eaten your lunch again," she says, not looking up.
"The chicken was gray."
"All chicken here is gray. You should eat it anyway." She glances at me over the top of her notebook. "I'm going to put a note in the file that says you're being difficult about food."
"I'm not being difficult."
"You've skipped three meals this week. I check the trays."
"Why?"
"Because it's my job."
"What I eat isn't in your scope."
"A patient who stops eating is."
I hold her gaze. "I haven't stopped eating. I just don't like the chicken. It's nasty."
Her mouth twitches. I can read her handwriting upside down. Patient expresses food preferences. Ongoing.
The chess set sits on the side table where George left it last session. The board is still set from the game we didn't finish. She looks at it.
"Whose move?"
"Mine."
"And you haven't made it."
"I'm waiting."
"For what?"
"The right moment."
The camera pans left. I track it without turning my head. The red indicator light on the housing sweeps across the room in a predictable, faithful arc.
She picks her pen up from the table and turns to a new page.
"Last question. Anything you want flagged for the record? Anything you need?"
I reach across and take the pen from her hand. My fingers close over hers and I pull it free, slow. She lets me. Her hand hangs in the air for a second after it leaves her grip, suspended, fingers still curled around nothing.
I set the pen on my side of the table. She looks at it. Then at me.
"I need that back."
"Come and get it."
Her eyes narrow. Amused, not afraid. She extends her hand, palm up, fingers open.
"Jude."
"Hope."
She laughs. Short, quiet. Shakes her head. "You're a pain in my ass."
"I've been told that before."
Behind me, Gage's radio crackles. I hear his boot shift on the floor, the leather of his belt creaking as he turns to answer. His voice drops—the tone he uses for shift coordination.
The camera reaches its leftmost stop.
I pick up the pen and stand. My height puts her at eye level with my chest and she has to tilt her head back to find my face. I hold the pen out, and she stands to take it, her chair pushing back against the floor.
"Behind you," I say.
She turns. The chessboard on the side table, next to the pillar. I take a step and she takes one with me, half-turning to see what I'm pointing at.
"George moved the bishop before he left. See it?"
She steps closer to the board. We're beside the pillar now. The dead zone. I don't need to look to know.
Gage is in the corridor. His voice is still low. The radio conversation has eight seconds left if the pattern holds.
I put my hand on the back of her neck.
My palm fits against the curve where her hair meets her spine.
Soft in a way that has no place in this building, against a hand that has broken more bones than I can count on both of hers.
My thumb presses the side of her throat and I can feel her pulse under the pad of it—steady at first, then faster.
She turns her head and looks at me, her eyes blue and clear and nothing in them that resembles fear.
I pull her in and do what I've been planning for weeks. I kiss her.
Her mouth opens under mine and the taste of her hits me low in the gut.
Coffee and clean skin and warmth, I'm hard before I finish the first breath.
I planned this. Every second of it. The angle of the lens, the length of Gage's absence, the exact position of the pillar and the number of steps it took to get her here.
What I didn't plan for was that she would kiss me back.
Her hand comes up and grips the front of my shirt.
She pulls me toward her. Her body presses flush against mine and my cock throbs against her stomach, she doesn't pull away from that either.
Her lips part and she makes a sound—quiet, barely there, caught at the back of her throat—my fingers tighten on her neck. A fraction too hard.
My grip tightens and her body holds where it is, warm and pressed against me. No alarm in her anywhere. No part of her brain telling her to pull free from a man who has killed eighteen people.
She kisses me back without hesitation.
I should let go. Step back.
But I kiss her harder. My tongue finds hers.
She opens for me and I swallow the noise she makes, my hand tightening on the back of her neck, tilting her head where I want it.
I'm so hard it aches, three years of nothing and now this, now her, and I want to press her against this pillar and slide my hands under her shirt and feel her skin against my palms. I want to drop to my knees and taste her.
I want to hear what she sounds like when she comes.
I can't. Gage is seconds from the door. The camera is mid-sweep. Nine seconds was all I had and I've spent every one of them with my mouth on hers and my cock pressed against her body, the plan burning down around me.
Her hand slides up my chest. Her fingers curl against the side of my neck and for one breath I'm not thinking. Just her mouth on mine and the fact that I don't want to stop. That's the part I don't know what to do with.
I pull back. Her lips are swollen and her eyes are half-closed and her fingers are still curled in the collar of my shirt. My hand is still on the back of her neck. Her pulse is racing now—I can feel it hammering against my thumb. So is mine.
I make myself step back before she looks down and sees what she already felt.
Her eyes open. She looks at me and I wait for the aftermath—the guilt, the recoil, the professional composure snapping back into place.
"Don't apologize," she says.
"I wasn't planning to."
Her mouth curves. Slow, and meant only for me. She releases my shirt and steps back. My hand slides free and the heat of her skin stays on my palm. She picks up her notebook from the table, tucks the pen behind her ear, and straightens her collar.
The camera begins its return sweep.
Gage stands in the doorframe.
I don't know how long he's been there, but the look on his face tells me he didn't just catch the end of it.
He watched me kiss her and he didn't stop it.
His hands hang at his sides, his weight sits square on both feet, and his teeth are locked so hard I can see the muscle jumping from across the room.
He's not looking at Hope. He's looking at me.
She hasn't turned around yet, unaware that the man in the doorframe saw all of it and is deciding what to do about it.
Gage and I hold eye contact over her head.
He saw all of it. My hand on her neck, her body pressed against mine, and every second he chose not to reach for his radio. What I see on his face isn't anger. It's worse. He's not furious that I kissed her. He's furious that it wasn't him.
I hold his gaze. I see you. You see me. We both know what just happened and neither of us is going to say it out loud.
He steps back from the doorframe and lets Hope pass.
"Thank you, Gage." She doesn't look back. Her footsteps are steady down the corridor, unhurried, the same pace she always keeps.
He watches her go. Then he turns back to me. His hand finds the edge of the door.
"Session's over," he says.
He pulls the door shut. The lock engages. Through the reinforced panel I can hear his boots behind her. Close enough to reach her. Far enough to pretend it's professional.
The room is quiet. The camera completes its sweep and starts again, left to right, faithful and useless. The bookcase against the far wall throws a shadow into the corner the lens can't reach. Smaller dead zone than the pillar, but enough for two people standing close. I'll remember that.
Gage will sit with what he saw tonight. He won't report it. Putting it on paper means answering why he didn't stop it, and that answer is something he can't look at too closely yet.
I kissed her and it was real. He saw it and it was real for him too. That makes three people in this building with something to lose, and I'm the one in the cage.
I've been planning my way out of this cage for years. She just became the reason to finish.