Chapter 31 #2
I think several hours have passed, but there’s no fucking window, just a small window panel in the solid metal door and concrete walls.
Total isolation.
I don’t know where my brothers are. Don’t know if they are okay.
The florescent strip light doesn’t fully dim even though it’s probably the middle of the night.
It’s giving me a headache, though that might be more to do with the head injury that at least has stopped bleeding.
No one mentioned it during processing, just gave me a bandage and hauled me into this cell.
We’ve had no word from Blossom. She’s not come, which part of me logically knows it’s the middle of the night and she might not even know where we are. Plus there are the kids, the bail hearing isn’t set until tomorrow. She needs a lawyer.
But, what if this is too much for her? Maybe her father, that cunt Wilson, was right and we’re no good for her. Maybe she sees that and has decided to cut her losses.
She’s not like that.
The thought whispers in my mind, but on the back of it, another, darker thought. The stone that won’t leave me, and sits there, waiting for me to feel its weight.
The officer that hit me. The one who says racist fucking bullshit to Nox.
Those are the type of men who Blossom handed two hundred thousand dollars to.
Men who think like Wilson Devonshire, who would use their white privileged connections and money to put three innocent men in jail because they didn’t like them.
Who would treat them as lesser because they could.
Who would see them not as humans, but as animals.
I know why Blossom did what she did. I know this is not the same. I know that I’m choosing her.
The stone doesn’t budge though.
It sits there, heavy and immovable.
I stare up at the ceiling, releasing a breath that still feels trapped in my lungs.
I love her.
And it still sits wrong.
Leaning my head against the cold concrete wall, I close my eyes and wait for morning.
“BONES” BY IMAGINE DRAGONS
NOX
This fucking shitty cell makes my skin crawl. Barely seven by five feet — I’ve been pacing it since I was thrown in here so know exactly how small it is. There’s no privacy even to take a shit if I needed to, bare concrete walls and a metal door with a tiny window telling me I’m trapped.
And I hate fucking being trapped in small rooms.
Dark memories keep trying to surface, and no matter how hard I push them down, I still want to claw my own fucking skin off.
Fucking dirty thugs.
Fucking filthy animals.
That shitstain of an officer’s words float back to me, stinging like a hornet that won’t leave me alone. I should be used to the slurs. Should be used to the degrading talk. It should be like water off a duck’s back. Sticks and stones and all that.
But they still pierce my skin every time, because I’m human.
And the fact I couldn’t say a single thing back, let alone beat him to the ground adds salt to a wound that never fully heals.
It’s like adding another log to a fire that’s burned my whole life. A fire that I now will use to keep me warm until I can retaliate. Until I can show all the fucking pigs exactly what this filthy animal is capable of.
I finally stop pacing, sinking onto the thin mattress that does nothing to warm the metal platform that is my bed for the night.
She hasn’t come.
The thought hurts in the way only one can when your expectations aren’t met, no matter how unrealistic. I know it’s the middle of the night. I know she has to think about the kids.
But still, she’s not come, or called or anything.
I feel her absence like a missing tooth.
I’ve spent my life building walls so that needing someone could never be used against me. The last time I needed someone they sent me to a small room and let countless men rape me.
But Blossom, my Petal and Princess, found all my cracks and slowly dismantled every brick, finding herself a home in the jagged rubble.
And now she’s not here, and it’s like I can’t take a full breath.
Despite what she did before we met. Despite the hurt that will probably never go away from that.
I need her to breathe and she’s not fucking here.
I’m sure she’s trying. She wouldn’t just leave us here.
I almost believe that. Almost.
“HUMAN” BY RAG'N'BONE MAN
ANATOLE
I sit on the hard as fuck bed, in this uncomfortable orange jumpsuit, and my mind keeps replaying images from tonight like I’m stuck in a rerun of a horror movie.
One replays most often. Not of Blossom, though that’s up there, but of Jus.
Jus’s face when he saw them cart me away, take me from him. Again.
Jus, who I promised we’d be staying. Over breakfast and with my heart so full it felt like it was going to leap from my chest and land on the pancakes.
Eight fucking years of fighting the system to keep that promise, and just when I finally lowered my guard, thinking we’d made it, the system won anyway.
Rich men like Wilson fucking Devonshire swept it all away like it was lint on his expensive tailored suit.
And just like most of the past eight years, Jus is in a house and I can’t reach him.
The only saving grace is knowing Blossom is there too. Knowing that she’ll take care of him, even if I’m stuck in here.
Not to mention even if we do somehow get out, the kinship application for guardianship will be fucked if the charges stick. If this goes on my record. It will be the final nail in a coffin they’ve been building round me for eight long ass years.
Spiraling won’t help, so I breathe deep knowing that Blossom will do everything she can to help. She will throw everything she has at getting us out, at getting the charges dropped. I know that as well as I know how to breathe. It’s bone deep. She will not abandon us.
The image of Blossom going down on the gravel and Jus following flashes in my mind, and I flinch, trying to breathe through the fact no one was there to catch either of them. I wasn’t there to catch them.
We’re coming back.
I have to believe that.
We’re coming back.