Adrien
Present
My forehead drops onto the cold bars, my body folding in on itself because I swear I’m going to piss myself if nobody lets me out of the cuffs behind my back soon.
“Please,” I irritably repeat for the hundredth time to the one cop standing in front of the holding cell, who has been on a call for the entire hour I’ve spent here so far, leaning lazily against the desk like my existence is just a mildly annoying background noise.
Then, finally, for the first time, another policeman comes near the cell. A young one.
“Hey,” I grab his attention immediately. “Can you cuff me in front? I need to pee.”
He furrows his eyebrows as if he already regrets walking anywhere near me.
So I try again with a smile. “Either come hold it for me or uncuff me, pretty please,” I add with a wink to heighten my chances.
He leaves.
What the hell is this? Why am I even still cuffed? I’m in a cell. Jesus Christ.
I kick the bars to get the attention of the other one, and the metal rattles through the space loud enough that he looks at me. He hangs up the call he’s on and leaves, only to come back a moment later with two more officers.
Thank. God.
The old, small one opens the cell and steps inside, while the other cops stay by the barred door, watching me closely, one hand resting on their belts as if they expect me to suddenly launch myself at them like a rabid animal.
“Turn around, face the wall,” the old one mutters.
I do as I’m told and finally feel him unlocking the cuffs behind my back, the steel clicking open and releasing my hands.
“Don’t move.”
The cuffs come off my wrists and I stay still, flexing my fingers slightly as the blood rushes back into them.
“Take off the T-shirt and put it in the bag,” he commands.
I slowly turn around and see him holding a brown paper evidence bag open in front of me, waiting for me to drop the bloodied piece of clothing inside.
“Wait a second,” I blurt out quickly and jump eagerly toward the ugly metal toilet in the corner of the cell.
But when I’m about to open my belt, I notice the dried scales of liquid covering my hands and I stop mid-movement. It’s not just blood. It’s… mixed with other disgusting yellowish fluids.
Jesus Christ. What the hell did I do?
I can’t piss like this.
That’s fucking disgusting.
I step toward the small sink in an attempt to get rid of it.
“Hold up,” he shouts at me, his voice suddenly loud enough to ricochet through the narrow cell. “Shirt in the bag first.”
I click my tongue and step back to him, pulling my shirt off and letting the cold air instantly crawl over my spine.
“Don’t touch the bag, just drop it in,” he instructs me calmly.
As soon as I drop the shirt inside, he folds the top of the bag and closes it with quick practiced movements before leaving the cell again, leaving my hands free, fortunately.
I turn back to the sink and start rubbing off the dried blood and… whatever the rest of it is under the weak stream of the tap. It doesn’t come off at first, the dark flakes clinging stubbornly to my skin, and panic starts to tremble through my fingers as I scrub harder.
How much did she see?
I grab the small soap bar bolted to the sink and rub it over my hands for what feels like eternity until the icy water starts peeling the blood away, revealing a few shallow open cuts across my knuckles and palms.
That must be from the window glass.
I rub again and again until my hands are as clean as a priest’s conscience, and yet I keep going, scrubbing higher and higher, up to my forearms, then across my chest where the blood must have splashed, until I end up half washing myself in the tiny sink.
By the time I turn the water off, my skin is numb and I find myself fucking freezing.
Great.
After the long-needed release, my brain switches back to the more important stuff. I sit down on the hard metallic bed and start calculating, panicking, then calculating more, planning, then panicking again as the thoughts spin faster than I can organize them.
The cell smells like antiseptics and disinfectants.
And I smell like cheap soap.
I get up and rest my shoulder against the cell bars.
“Officer,” I call to the closest cop, who barely lifts an eye in my direction. “I need to make a call.”
He slurps his coffee and shakes his head. “After the booking process,” he says simply, without even looking at me.
“I really need the phone call right now,” I repeat softly, my forehead falling against the cold bars again. “I need to call my—”
“The booking process is not done,” he repeats, still without a hint of empathy.
I can’t blame him.
“And that will be when?” I call after him while he walks away, leaving the question hanging in the air without an answer.
I get back to the metal bed and drop down, letting my body spread into an angel pose. That’s when I notice how ridiculously minuscule it is. Almost half of my legs are still dangling down onto the floor.
I lift my head to inspect this disaster of a bedding arrangement. No pillow. No blanket. Just the smallest, hardest piece of torturous furniture imaginable and one thin plastic sheet.
I give up and cover my face with both hands to muffle the desperate groan before rolling onto my side and curling into a different position, trying to fold myself onto this Titanic-escape-situation piece of bed.
Is this how my dad felt all those numerous times he was in jail?
Well, this is technically not a jail. Yet. But I guess it’s close enough.
My mind drifts back to that evening years ago when I went to Kade’s place and we spent hours drowning in the prison files he had managed to dig out about my dad.
The first and last time anyone had ever managed to find anything about him on paper. The night I felt like I was getting to know my father all over again, piece by piece, through records written by people who had no idea who he really was.
The first record of his was when he was only nineteen — three months for statutory rape.
Reported by her parents, not by her, of course.
Apparently the Romeo and Juliet exception didn’t apply that day, even though she was seventeen.
And given that I was born a few months later, she could also theoretically be my mom.
But who knows.
The only thing he ever told me about her is that I am the child of the truest, deepest love.
And yet somehow I keep failing to hold on to that kind of love in my own life.
I roll onto the other side, crumpling in on myself again.
Every other sentence on his record was still relatively light—bookmaking, loan-sharking, and usually simple gang assaults and fights.
I was fighting all the time in school too. Maybe he saw it early, the little seed of something even more deranged than himself.
“You just hide how deeply deranged you are. Everyone knows that.”
Natalya might have a point with that. He saw it soon so he dropped me at Varners and ran for his life.
But self-pity makes me more nauseous than the things I did tonight, so I swallow those thoughts down before they can grow any further.
He was arrested so many times he was practically a regular there. Half the time someone anonymous bailed him out before things got serious, and the other times he was released after a few months.
Everything in those files indicated that whatever Rick told me back then was true. Damiano was part of some organization.
What an irony. Guess the apple didn’t fall that far from the tree after all. But I’m definitely better at staying out of the law, because somehow, miraculously, this is my first time in jail.
Was he also this scared every time?
Because I’m scared as fuck. Just not for the reasons I probably should be.
Was he also this cold, smelling like the cheapest soap ever?
Was he lying awake somewhere like this, staring at a ceiling just like this one, wondering what was happening at home? Was he thinking about me being there alone? The same way I’m thinking about her right now? Thinking about how I left her there after promising I would never do that again? Fuck.
She’s not alone though.
However, she’s still left with the last image of me being on a murder spree, and judging by how my hands looked earlier, I probably even went through the brain matter.
I keep digging through my memory, trying to recollect the scene, trying to piece it back together—when exactly did she appear there, how much of it she actually saw, how much she hates me right now, how badly I fucked it up again, how much further away from me I pushed her with this.
She’s acquainted with this part of me in theory, but it’s something totally different when someone’s darkest nature unfolds right in front of the other person’s eyes.
And today she saw all of it.
The sharp fluorescent light keeps buzzing above me, and since it already feels like the middle of the night, I assume they’re not planning to turn it off at all, just to add another small layer of discomfort to the experience.
I fidget around on the metal slab, but every time I try to find a position to put my body to rest, some limb ends up sticking out.
Eventually I just end up hugging myself, because I’m cold as fuck and shirtless, burying my face into my shoulder in an attempt to hide from the aggressive white buzzing glow.
It’s so… humbling.
This feeling of absolute misery caused only by the fact that some of my most basic, previously invisible privileges were suddenly taken away from me.
Only yesterday I was falling asleep in a bed big enough to roll around with her as many times as we wanted, big enough to make love in every position this universe has to offer, before eventually drowning in sheets that smelled like her hair.
I was the happiest person on this planet.
Only yesterday.
This is my personal record of how low I can fall in just twenty-four hours. How quickly and effortlessly a person can be stripped of his meaning by his own mistakes.
I learned my lesson. I won’t kill again. I’ll be good.
I’m corrected.
Let me out.
?
“Put this on,” the cop says with a smoked-out voice and hands me a plain white T-shirt.