He grunted. “Yeah, I know your ass. You’re one of them little boys who wants to be all gansta, but you aren't dark enough to be.”
Logan wasn’t interested in arguing with the man; he’d seen his kind over the past seven years, and they were all the same. They all wanted to be the next Eminem, and thought pretending to be black and date black chicks was the way to get there. He laughed. They were fucking douche bags. As far as Logan knew, Eminem may have acted black, but his ass married and knocked up a white woman.
Katie had sat by the phone waiting for it to ring for the last two days. She felt ridiculous, but at this point she didn’t care. Held up in her house since Valentine’s Day night, she had way too much time on her hands. The editor would most probably have her manuscript for another week or two, and Katie had already cleaned her house from top to bottom . . . twice.
Teal had called a couple times to schedule a breakfast, lunch, or dinner with her, but she pretended to be too busy. Although Katie was mad—no, she was livid that they had once again tried to control another aspect of her life—she tried not to let Teal see the pain it caused her. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to confront her dad about it. She already knew how that would turn out. Her father had a way of making Katie feel like a needy child, and she supposed she only had herself to blame for that. Growing up, Katie didn’t fit in, so she leaned on her parents for companionship.
When her mother married Jan-Erik, she had only been eight. Jan-Erik moved his new family to Northern Virginia in an affluent suburb and placed Katie in a private school. She’d notice the differences between her and her classmates almost immediately, and if she hadn’t, they had no problems reminding her.
As if the obvious outward differences weren’t enough, Katie had to deal with going back to her old hometown to visit family for the summer three years later. Her friends had all gone to public schools and seemed so different than her, or at least that’s what they’d told her when they’d called her names like: bougie, stuck up, and Bougetto. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out what any of those names meant in reference to her, but one in particular stuck with her from childhood until now, and that was Oreo.
Of all the names she was called as a kid, Oreo had to be the most confusing. She was not mixed and she didn’t think she “acted white”. She would always ask, “How do you act white?” It made no sense that speaking properly and not using slang was looked at as “acting white”. Especially since Katie thought she was just speaking the English she was taught in school.
When Katie realized that her friends from the past, as well as the new students of St. Augustine's Preparatory School for Girls, weren’t interested in her friendship, she turned to the only two people who accepted her—her parents.
Katie wasn’t sure how long the phone had been ringing, but as soon as her inner thoughts released her from the past she grabbed the receiver and squeaked out a greeting. “Um . . . yes, hello?”
Anxiety heightened, she listened as the automated voice explained, “You are receiving a collect call from Crashaw Correctional, Inmate #92510.” The recording stopped, and the voice she’d been waiting to hear came on the line as he said his name to the recording that would play for her. She didn’t have time to think much about the gruff, rumbling voice on the other end of the line.
Since the automated operator cared nothing about Katie needing to calm her nerves, it continued, “If you’d like to accept these charges, please press one. If not, please hang up the phone.”
Before Katie could think, or even second-guess herself, she pressed one and covered her mouth, hoping to trap the nervous squeal bubbling in her chest. The line was silent for a moment before Scott’s southern accent filled the line.
“Hello?”
Katie hadn’t been sure what to expect from Scott’s voice since she’d never set foot in his hometown. She heard as he cleared his voice and tried again.
“Hello, Kristen?”
The fake name she’d given him surprised her, and she almost wished Kristen were her name. She found her voice just in time to sound like a fool. “Um . . . yes, this is her—I mean, I . . . I’m Kristen.” She slapped her forehead, but his warm chuckle stopped her embarrassment and heat blossomed in her chest.
“Sounds like someone is nervous,” Scott teased.
Katie laughed and swallowed her nerves. It was just a phone call, why was she acting so ridiculous? “Just a little,” she admitted.
“Well now, what’s there to be nervous about?”
Katie could hear indistinct noises in the background, and she assumed that Scott wasn’t alone in the room. After all, he was in prison and she’d seen the phone pods before. There were eight if she remembered correctly, and since he was in the minimum-security ward, they were free to come and go as they pleased.
“Honestly, I don’t know.” And that was the truth. Katie had lingered by the phone like a crazy person waiting for this call, and now that he’d phoned she was lip-locked.
Scott’s voiced lowered. “Well, can I start this conversation out by saying you have a beautiful voice?”
At that, Katie let out a short burst of snorting laughter, which she was sure would change his mind about her “beautiful voice.”
He laughed as well. “No, seriously. It’s soft and sweet, the way a woman should sound.”
Blushing profusely, Katie smiled. “Thank you, Scott. I like your voice, too. I wasn’t sure how you’d sound, but I like the light Southern accent.”
“Shit, honey, you should hear me when I’m angry. I can make every word one syllable and a paragraph turns into four words.”
She laughed. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I honestly thought you’d sound more Southern, ‘cause you said you were from Virginia.”
“Yes, I am, but I’m from Alexandria. It’s far up north, close to DC, so I don’t really think I have an accent. If you go further down around Suffolk, Virginia Beach, or even to the west, like Clarksville, you’ll hear a bit of the South.” Katie relaxed a bit as she talked to Scott about her hometown.
Though while growing up, the place was stressful, it was still familiar and helped erase a bit of the stress in her life. “Now, if you go north all the way up to New York, they’ll call you a Southerner, but if you head down to South Carolina, they’ll call you a Yankee!”
She and Scott laughed, and Katie couldn’t help but enjoy the timbre of his voice. Heavy and deep, the sound traveled through the phone and settled in her ear, pleasing the part of her that missed a man’s voice.
“You don’t sound the least bit Southern to me.”
Katie scooted back in her chair and got comfortable. The muscles in her neck loosened, and she took a deep breath. “Of course not, Mr. Kentucky, you are west of Virginia.”
Logan chuckled. “True.”
There was a moment of silence, and Katie almost panicked, but instead she thought back to the letter he’d sent her. “Hey, why did you really want me to tell you a deep, dark secret? Planning to use it against me later?” She chuckled nervously. If Scott ever found out that Katie was the warden’s daughter, would he use her words against her?
“Yeah, about that . . . Kristen, I just thought you might need to talk to me about something. I say this because, when a woman reaches out to a stranger, a convicted felon no less, there might be something behind it. You told me you had friends, so I’m wondering what’s going on in your life that has you reaching out to a stranger instead of your friends.”
Good question. “Hmmm . . .” She didn’t really have to think about it, but she needed to stall for time. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him. However, Scott was smarter than she gave him credit for and called her out.
“What’s this, ‘Hmmm’? You know what it is, and I think you want to tell me.” Scott’s voice lowered, and if possible got even sexier, but Katie ignored the warmth in her belly and focused on his words. At her silence, he added, “You want me to go first?”
Her
mouth moved before she even knew it was happening, and she whispered, “Please.”
He wasn’t silent long, but she still felt his hesitance. “Shit, honey, I’m not even sure if these calls are recorded or not.”
“Yes, they are.” Katie knew this for a fact.
“Okay . . . but I’m still gonna do it. I’ll still tell you because I can’t expect it from you and not do the same in return, right?”
“Right.” Katie was nervous for her turn, but curiosity about Scott and his maybe dark deeds excited her to the core. He was in prison, and Katie could think of a million things he could confess to her. “Don’t tell me anything illegal, Scott,” she pleaded. She wouldn’t tell a soul, but she also wouldn’t be able to talk to him anymore.
Gruff laughter emerged from the phone. “Honey, I wouldn’t sully your ears with more of my crimes if I had any. You aren’t a priest, and I ain’t asking for your forgiveness. Just your time and your honesty.”
Katie didn’t speak. Actually, she was relieved he was so frank with her.
Scott coughed, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Okay, a deep, dark secret. After this call, I’m going to go back to my cell, lay in my bed, and think of what it would be like to make love to you.”
Bumbling idiot that she was, Katie dropped the phone . . . and in her several attempts to pick it up again, she pressed about twenty buttons. Once the phone was back to her ear and she’d settled down, she expected to hear Scott laughing, but was greeted with silence.
“Shit, I hung up on him,” she whispered dejectedly.
“No you didn’t, sweetheart. I’m still here.”
Katie wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or hang up. “Oh, okay.”
Still, there was no chuckle on the other end. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just being honest.”
Katie took a deep breath and placed her head down on the desk. “I appreciate that, Scott, but my secret isn’t that I want you in my bed, it’s darker and more painful than lust.” And with that, Katie hung up the phone.
“Shit.” She slammed the receiver down again. Of course all he wanted to do was talk about sex. He was a freaking criminal who’d been hard up for several years. He didn’t give a damn about Katie, and she was a damned fool for ever believing that he did.
Yep, he deserved that, but her anger didn’t stop Logan from redialing Kristen’s number twice until she finally picked up the phone again. Only this time, she wasn’t the shy, demure girl who was so nervous that she rambled on and on about his accent.
“Scott, I’m not sure what you think this is, but it’s not that. No, not at all,” were the first words out of her mouth when she accepted the collect call.
He thought to apologize, but from experience he’d learned that saying ‘I’m sorry’ could oftentimes make the situation worse, so he just listened and waited.
“You told me you wanted to form a connection, and I assumed you meant in the way of a friendship . . . at least that’s what I had hoped you meant. But if you think that I’m going to be on this phone with you talking— speaking to you like that—you are seriously mistaken.” Her tone was sharp, and Logan considered himself duly chastised.
He waited for her to catch her breath before he spoke. He owed her a truth after fucking up so badly. “When I was eighteen, I moved to a small town in Kentucky from Lexington because I’d gotten arrested for possession. Before my mother kicked me out and sent me to live with her drunk of a brother, she asked me what made me try weed since, as she knew it, I’d never tried it before. I was so pissed at her for siding with my stepdad to get rid of me, that I told her I’d been smoking weed and I’d tried meth twice.” He heard her breath catch.
“Jesus, Scott.”
“Yeah but, Kristen, my secret is that I’d never done any of that shit.” He’d always thought the day he told his mother that lie was the day it sealed his fate.
“Then, why? Why would you tell her that if it wasn’t true?” Her voice was so soft and comforting that Scott actually told her the truth.
“Because I wanted to hurt her the way she was hurting me. I wanted her to feel like a shitty parent, because at that point, that’s what she was to me. There was no worse person in my life.”
“But—” Katie abruptly stopped, as if thinking about what to say next. “Scott, being a parent can’t be easy. What if she was just trying to help by sending you away from what she thought was a bad situation?”
The curiosity in her voice kept Logan from getting upset. Most people had pity for his mother. They’d say, “Well, she probably did what she thought was right.” Scott knew the truth, but over time his anger had subsided and he’d put the past behind him. It’d taken years, but he’d done it.
“No, my mother remarried. From the start, he and I didn’t get along, and it wasn’t for my lack of trying. The man was a hard-ass. He was in the military and I wasn’t used to that shit, but I still tried. Nothing was ever good enough, so over time I stopped trying—period.”
“Was it that you just couldn’t live up to his standards?” she asked, but Logan could hear the understanding in her voice. Maybe she’d gone through some of the same shit, but he wasn’t about to ask her. Any personal information she gave him would have to be voluntary.
“Something like that.”
“What about the drugs? Why did you have them?”
Logan laughed. “Now, I’ve done told you that I take responsibility for my own actions, right?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I was holding for a friend when I got pulled over. I’m no damned snitch, so I just told the cop it was mine. Now, by this time I’d been living with my asshole stepdad for a few months, and when the cop said he wanted to call my father to pick me up, I let my anger get in the way and told the cop to take my ass to jail.”
“Geez, that was stupid!”
“Well, I was eighteen and dumb. What I didn’t realize was that the cop was trying to do me a favor that night. Instead, I ended up with a drug charge. So, that’s my secret. I’d never done drugs, yet by telling my mother that, I all but made sure her ass sent me away.” Unsure of what to make of Kristen’s silence, Scott didn’t say anything.
“I was dating a guy named Roman for two years, and I thought he’d pop the question eventually, so I never bothered him about it, but then my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I guess after hearing that— I mean, I don’t know, I just fell to pieces. Roman was there for me and all, but something wasn’t right with him.”
Logan didn’t want to interrupt, but he needed to know. “What do you mean, ‘something wasn’t right?’”
“He was distant and aloof. I foolishly thought I could solve it with sex, because at that point we knew that my mother wasn’t going to make it, and I couldn’t stand losing Roman and my mother at the same time.”
The word ‘sex’ hadn’t gone unnoticed by Logan. “Death is hard, but a part of life.” He hoped he didn’t sound insensitive. “I mean, what about your father? Didn’t you have him still?”
“Yeah, but he handled it differently. He’s from Sweden, and he would always say Europeans mourned differently. I think it’s silly, but I wanted to keep everyone in my life. One night, I came home to Roman packing. I freaked and tried everything I could to convince him to stay. I thought keeping him with me would numb the pain. However, it was too late, and he wouldn’t stay. Even when I found out I was pregnant, he told me to figure it out.”
Logan wasn’t sure what her secret was, but he was starting to get a clue. “What happened next?”
Kristen sighed and continued on a shuddering breath. “Fast forward two months later, my mother is going into the hospital for the hundredth time, I was reeling from keeping my pregnancy a secret, my friend Teal was juggling college and work, my father wasn’t accepting the fact that my mother had signed a DNR, and I was so stressed that I’d lost ten pounds and hadn’t slept in days. One night, I woke up and was bleeding. I panicked, but there was no one I could call
. No one knew about the baby, and I couldn’t call an ambulance for fear my neighbors would call my dad. So, I drove myself to Mercy General.”
Mercy General? Scott had wondered if Kristen lived in Vermont because of how fast he’d gotten her letters. He knew there was a Mercy General in Vermont. “You had to drive yourself to the hospital?”
Logan could hear the sadness in her voice. “Yeah, I had a miscarriage that night.”
“And you had to handle it alone?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
After a beat of silence, he said, “Thank you, Kristen.”
On a sigh, she asked, “For what?”
“For forming a connection with me. For telling me your secret. Thanks.” Logan really had wanted to form a relationship with her; however, his earlier comment about thinking of sleeping with her had been true as well. However, after listening to Kristen’s sincerity and honesty, Scott wasn’t thinking with his dick as much; he was actually content with just getting to know her.
Katie poured another glass of ice water and handed it to her father. She knew the day would come when he found out what had happened between her and Joe, and she was ready for it. Not ready for an argument, or anything like that. She was actually ready to apologize.
Jan-Erik sat at the dining room table, and his coat jacket hung off the back of the chair. He took of his suit coat and stood.
“I got it, Dad.” Katie took his coat and hung it up in the hallway closet. “I hope it stops snowing soon,” she called over her shoulder as she hung it up.
“There’s a storm coming in the next few days.” Katie walked back into the dining room and sat in the chair across from him. “Maybe you should pack a bag and stay over at the house with me.”
Her father’s statement may have seemed innocent enough, a father looking out for his daughter, but to Katie, it felt like he was trying to keep her under his thumb. She had lived on her own since college, and had already lived through quite a few snowstorms. But it never failed, her dad always wanted to keep her close during a storm, which was understandable, yet Katie knew she could take care of herself.
Incarcerated: Letters From Inmate 92510 Page 5
