CHAPTER 9 JORGE—THE HEARING
Shawn's gone most of the morning. Preliminary hearing, first one since the transfer, and Jorge spends the hours not admitting to himself that he's counting them.
He comes back different.
Jorge hears it before he sees it, the particular weight of somebody's feet dragging down the tier instead of walking it, and he's up off the bunk before the door even finishes its cycle.
Shawn doesn't say anything walking in. Doesn't look at Jorge. Sits down hard on the edge of the bottom bunk like his legs stopped being reliable somewhere between the courtroom and here.
"That bad?"
"Prosecutor's pushing the max." Shawn's voice comes out thin, nothing like the mouth Jorge's gotten used to over the last few weeks. "Twenty years. Said it right there in the room like it was nothing. Like it was a number you'd find on a menu."
"Your lawyer say anything?"
"Said it's unlikely. Said cases like mine, first offense as an adult, usually settle way under that." Shawn's hands are shaking, small enough that he probably doesn't know they're doing it. "He said unlikely a dozen different ways so I'd believe it, I think, and none of them stuck."
"Twenty's a threat tactic. They say it to scare a plea out of you."
"It worked." Shawn laughs, short and broken, nothing behind it. "I'm scared. Real good and scared."
Jorge sits down next to him. Doesn't think about it, doesn't decide to, just does it, close enough that their shoulders almost touch.
"You're not doing twenty years for a car."
"You don't know that."
"I know prosecutors bluff. Every one of them.
A number that big this early, they're trying to make you fold before they've got to prove anything.
" Jorge's voice stays level, deliberate, the same voice he'd use talking somebody off a ledge if he had any practice at that, which he doesn't, not really.
"Don't let a number they haven't earned live in your head rent-free. "
"Easy for you to say."
"Nothing about this is easy for me to say."
Shawn looks over at that, something in his face cracking further open than Jorge's seen it crack before, further than the GTA confession, further than the story about his mother. Real fear, unguarded, nothing performed about it.
"I keep thinking about twenty years like it's already happened," Shawn says. "Like I'm already living it. Can't stop doing the math on how old I'll be. What's left after."
"Stop doing the math."
"Can't."
Jorge doesn't have a fix for that. Doesn't pretend to. Just sits there, shoulder against Shawn's, offering the only thing he's got that isn't a lie: presence, plain and unglamorous, nobody's idea of comfort but the only version Jorge knows how to give.
"You're not alone in this cell," Jorge says finally. Quiet. Almost like it costs him something to say it. "Whatever else is true. That much is."
Shawn doesn't answer. Doesn't have to. He leans, just slightly, weight shifting toward Jorge instead of away from him, and Jorge doesn't pull back from it.
Down the tier, a CO calls count in five. Neither of them moves.
For the first time since the transfer, Jorge isn't in a hurry to put distance between them.