“Is that okay to say to you?” He thought he had possibly upset me.
“It’s just strange to hear someone say that about me.”
“Anna, you’re truly breathtaking. The first time I saw you, I couldn’t look away. Every time I see you, I find another interesting facial expression of yours. I wish I didn’t have to be blocked by this stupid screen.” His eyes became angry and sad as he and I both realized that we were still sitting in this prison being completely blocked from having true contact with one another.
“I find you so fascinating. I want to get to know you better, know everything about you and everything you’re thinking. I think it’s intriguing that you’re sitting here across from me yet again. You’re either out of your mind or you have the same strange kind of attraction for me, too.” The realization of it all hit me hard just then. The feelings had been there all along, but I had never been able to put a label on it before. I was attracted to this estranged criminal sitting before me. I liked him more than any other guy I had come into contact with in my entire life. He was gorgeous and muscular on the exterior and yet seemed to be so kind and thoughtful, too. But he was also an inmate, and the pieces didn’t seem to fit together like they should. He didn’t belong here, yet here he was, and here I was with him, too. This was all so wrong, yet all so very right at the same time.
“I know I have absolutely no right saying these things to you, especially like this, in here.” He looked around at the walls that caged him in. “I’ve tried not to think of you, tried letting you go, but you keep racing through my thoughts. I’m being selfish, I know, by pleading with you to keep coming down here, and I’d understand if you felt the need to run far, far away from me right now.”
I felt so mesmerized by what was happening. This was not what I had expected to go on today. He was pouring out his heart to me in this exact moment, and I didn’t know what to say back, because the truth was that I felt the exact same way, but I had never actually told myself these things, I just tried to get around them, but the obsession was still there, the need and want to see him, the longing of the days that passed when I couldn’t see him and the ache that filled me, even now, knowing that I had actually felt jealous when I had heard that he had once been married before.
“This is so totally wrong,” I whispered, tears filling my eyes.
“I know. I’m sorry,” he whispered back in a sad, serious tone.
“No,” I stopped him. “I just didn’t expect this, that’s all.” I looked up at him then and knew he could see my tears, but I didn’t care. “I do feel the exact same way, Emry. I do want to be near you, get to know you. It just seems so unbearable to do it like this.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t keep contacting you.” “Please stop apologizing. I’m not sorry for any of it. It’s the only good thing I have going for me right now,” I blurted out. I saw him stare at me puzzled, but he didn’t question me any further about what I meant by it. “It’s just so unfair to have met you under these circumstances.”
“I agree.” He sighed again, and I thought he was about to look away, but he was still looking straight into my eyes, concentrating very hard on all of my reactions through my facial expressions, reading me like an open book. I suddenly felt very vulnerable. Emry was breaking down my walls one by one.
“One minute!” the officer shouted out to everyone.
“Ugh!” I exclaimed. “So frustrating.”
“I know. It is.”
I looked from his freckles back to the blueness of his eyes. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.” He didn’t say anything, only nodded.
I stared at him for a few seconds more and then put my palm up to the plastic screen. I watched him
put his hand directly across from mine on the other side, his so much larger. It seemed like such a cheesy gesture, but I didn’t care. It was the closest I had to physical contact with him. I pretended there wasn’t a screen, that for just a moment our skin would be allowed to touch, and I’d be able to feel the warmth of his hand against my own.
“Let’s wrap it up, people!”
The moment was instantly over as I gathered up my coat and stood. Emry just sat there watching me. “Goodbye.” I mouthed the word knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear me anyway. He didn’t say or do anything back. He just sat there, watching me walk away.
Chapter 5
I was actually looking forward to Friday. I had it all planned out in my head. I would go to Buck’s house, eat his food, make chit-chat, ask more questions about jail procedures and so forth, not get too close and go home. It would be simple and it would get me out of the house.
“You’re going to lock up then?” I asked my mother as I glanced around the store one more time to see if anything else needed to be done.
My mother nodded her head slowly as she chewed on a large bite of donut that she had just stuffed in her mouth. She put the donut down and dabbed her lips with a small white handkerchief. “Okay. Well, I guess I’m going to head out. I’ll be home sometime later then.” I put on my coat and gloves and wrapped a purple knitted scarf around my neck and pulled it up over my chin. She took a sip of water and set the Styrofoam cup down in front of her on the countertop. “Have fun, hun. Say hi to Buck for me.” She smiled. I was becoming accustomed to that look she gave me, so full of hope that something was sparking between Buck and I. She so desperately wanted me to be happy and what better way than to fall in love with a policeman that just so happened to be a member at the same church where my father was the pastor and who also had grown up in Seneca, had graduated from the same high school and lived just a short distance away?
I just didn’t see it the same way. To me, growing up with Buck wasn’t a good thing from my point of view. He had no mystery. You couldn’t really hold a conversation about your past because you already knew their past. I guess I had always assumed I was meant to always live with my parents and share a home with them. The friends I had had in high school were already married and some had little kids. Those that still remained single I held no interest for.
Why Buck had decided suddenly he wanted to show an interest in me, I wasn’t sure. What I supposed though was that he was simply trying to settle. He viewed me as a prospect to be with because we had similar backgrounds and maybe he thought that would be enough, but to me, I hadn’t known any sort of passion or needing to be with anyone before, but what I felt when I thought of Emry or actually saw his face in person, this powerful kind of longing and happiness all at the same time, made me realize that I could be passionate about someone in this lifetime, and that someone was definitely not Buck Brady. I would not settle for anything less than the feeling I got from my beautiful inmate.
I saw Buck peek out of his front window when I pulled up in front of his house. It was just a small place on the corner of the street that had once belonged to his grandmother before she passed away. He had moved in here only a few months after graduating high school. I had never been in the house before, but it was a common place to drive by. I put my gloves back on and hoped he had not gone to too much trouble with dinner. There had better not be any candles lit on the table, I thought to myself.
A warm gush of air greeted me as Buck opened the screen door to let me inside. I instantly smelled the aroma of chicken cooking and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on, some sort of sauce.
“Smells good.” I flashed him a quick smile as he took my coat from me and put it on the back of a nearby chair.
“I’m actually trying to cook. I’m using one of my mom’s recipes.” He looked at me for a moment and then raised his arm gesturing to the living room. “Make yourself at home.”
I watched Buck dart back into the kitchen which was around the corner and out of sight. I began looking around at the tiny living room with its wooden rocking chair and pale gray loveseat with faded yellow flowers dotting it, the very worn orange colored carpet and light green drapes hanging loosely on the only single window in the
room. It was tidy though and much better than I had anticipated with a bachelor living here.
I walked over to a large bookshelf that consumed the entire side wall of the room and my eyes swept over a row of encyclopedias that had probably been there since his grandmother had lived here and a few pictures that were beginning to collect a fair amount of dust. They were mostly photos of Buck holding up fish, a deer that he held up by the antlers that he had just shot and another one of him and his brother, Jackie. I had forgotten about Jackie. It had been years since I had seen him. He had been in the military and had married a girl from Venezuela. The last I had heard they were living somewhere down south, possibly Florida. I couldn’t recall the exact details. And the last picture was a close-up of his grandmother’s smiling face.
“Are you doing all right in there?” Buck hollered out to me. “I’m fine, Buck. Do you need help with anything?” I strolled into the kitchen to see what he was up to. The kitchen was very much similar to the living room. Outdated cabinets, multicolored checkered linoleum floor and golden countertops from the 1950s.
Buck stood over a pot on top of the stove furiously stirring as it bubbled away. I immediately found the correct knob on the stove and turned down that particular burner. “Thanks,” he mumbled.
“What is it?”
“It’s fettuccine Alfredo, and there’s chicken in the oven.”
The Alfredo sauce is what I had initially smelled coming in but I hadn’t been sure what it was. “Looks almost done. Can I help set the table or anything?” I quickly looked around to find the table and was relieved that there were no candles. There weren’t even any dishes on it yet.
“In that right-hand top shelf there,” he told me, pointing. “Yeah, right there. You can use those plates.” I set the table quickly and poured us each a glass of ice water as he brought over the food. It did actually look appetizing, and I hadn’t realized how hungry I actually was until I saw it. I had skipped over lunch today and had only had a small bowl of cereal for breakfast before going to the store this morning.
Buck sat down across from me and grinned, proud of himself for actually putting together this meal. “You don’t get a homemade meal often, do you?” I asked him, taking a sip of my water. “Does this dinner count?”
“No.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Then no, I don’t, and when I do, I’m not the one to have made it.” “Can’t wait to taste it, Buck.”
He said grace quickly and then we filled our plates with pasta and chicken. The meat was a little dry but the fettuccine Alfredo was surprisingly really good, so I just smothered my chicken in the sauce so I would be able to swallow it more easily.
We didn’t talk about much of anything during dinner. We ate until there was not much left, and I helped him rinse off the dishes and put them in a small dishwasher he had hooked up beside the sink. “It was really good. I have to admit, I’m pretty impressed,” I said, seeing him instantly glow with pride.
He dried the water from his hands and tossed the towel onto the counter. “Why, thank you. That was a definite first for me.” “You should try cooking for yourself more often. It beats fast food every night.” I followed Buck into the living room. He sat down on the gray loveseat. I glanced around. I didn’t have many choices to sit. It was either the uncomfortable-looking, hard, wooden rocking chair or the other side of the loveseat, so I sat down next to him, but tried to position my body in a manner that was away from him at the same time.
He smiled and his hand moved toward the remote and then the TV flickered on. “So, I forgot to go to the movie store after going to get groceries today,” he started to explain. “I don’t have very many DVDs. Maybe something good will be on a movie station.”
I watched him go through stations one by one and read the titles at the top of the screen as he searched for something to watch. I knew he had been secretly kicking himself for not grabbing a movie on his way home today. The TV offered very little choices as well.
“So, are you enjoying your week off?” I asked, anxious to get the conversation revolving around the jail.
A news channel popped up and Buck rested the remote on the arm of the loveseat as he thought about the question momentarily.
“Yes and no.”
“No? You’d rather be working?” I asked, surprised. But then again, I liked to keep busy, too. He was probably the same way. He repositioned himself on the couch so that he could be slightly closer to me. “Well, I just get bored sitting around here all day. There’s only so much sleeping I can do before I’m just not tired anymore.” He chuckled at his own little joke.
“I know what you mean.” I thought about all the questions I wanted to ask and then tried to focus on the ones that I could ask. “So how exactly does your schedule work? Do you switch shifts?” “It really depends on the week. Mostly I am always daylight, but sometimes I get a few third shifts in there where I’m working till 7:00a.m. If I work so many days in a row, I get a few off as comp time.”
This was going to be more difficult to follow than I had thought. He didn’t seem to really know all the times he was working, so how on earth was I going to know when he was there or not there? Maybe I could just start looking for his car, but the jail was so large and there was a parking garage. Were there special places allotted just for police staff to park?
“So what do you do?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, putting his arm up on the back of the loveseat, the smell of his spicy deodorant filling my nostrils as he did so. “Well,” I began slowly. “Like are you always at the jail when you work?”
“Sometimes there. Sometimes in the car driving around with my partner, Rod. Have you ever met Rod?” He paused to think for a moment. “No, I guess you wouldn’t know him. He’s something else. He’s a riot.” He thought about something in his head, Rod I supposed, and then laughed about whatever it was he was thinking about. “Your dad was actually down the other day passing around those pamphlets of his again.” He stared at me, waiting for a reaction.
Great, I thought. He had just completely turned around the conversation and aimed it directly towards me. “Did he?” I didn’t particularly care.
He nodded. “How are things going at home with all of that?” I took a deep breath and found myself playing with the silver bracelet dangling from my wrist. I had suddenly realized that my father had given that bracelet to me a couple of birthdays ago and fought the urge to rip it off my wrist right then and there. “They’re fine.”
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
“Because I don’t want to.” I found myself losing control, as if talking about this with Buck, who had seen it with his own eyes, would push me over the edge. I wished he had never been there. “Calm down, Anna. I just think you need to talk about it, get it off your chest.”
What did he know about anything? It infuriated me that he thought he knew what was best for me. “I don’t need to get it off my chest. I need to forget it ever happened.”
“Can you do that though?” “Do what?” I found myself still on the verge of almost screaming at him. I hated how he was making this his business.
“Forget about it?”
He didn’t seem the least bit concerned that I was on the edge of making a scene and didn’t seem to want to end the conversation. He just wanted to pry and dig his fingers deeper into the wound. “Of course not!” I yelled out, jumping to my feet. “I hate that I know this. I hate that he’s done this to us, to my mother!”
Buck quickly stood from the love seat and took a few steps toward me. “He acts like nothing’s wrong! He puts on this big show as if he’s some perfect pastor who can do no wrong and everyone just goes along with it. I didn’t even know anything was wrong, so how can I blame anyone else for not seeing through his little act? He’s out visiting Mrs. Anderson, helping Mrs. Anderson, sleeping with Mrs. Anderson!” The tears came on strong, stinging in my raging eyes and streaming heavily down my cheeks.
“Hey, now
,” Buck whispered, pulling me in closer to him. He hugged me tight and I let him, not knowing what else to do. All I could think about now was my father, and I was so angry that I had allowed these feelings to overwhelm me, yet again. “Listen, you don’t know what you think you saw is what is actually going on.”
I pushed Buck away from me. “How can you defend him like that? It makes me honestly sick. How can you even go to church on Sunday and listen to him preach about God and about being a good person and doing all these good things when you saw it the same as I did? I have to be there, but you, you continue to go, but why?” I screamed out, continuing to cry.
He took a step closer to me again, and I reacted by going backwards. He threw his hands up in the air as if surrendering and didn’t attempt to move closer. “I honestly don’t think your dad is capable of something like that.” He paused for a moment to assess my reaction. All I could do was just stand there and clench my hands up into fists, the nails digging in my palms. “I’ve thought about it. Believe me, Anna, I have. Pastor John James is a good man, one of the best.”
I let a noise of disgust escape from my throat. He was fooled, too. “I can’t believe this. You’re taking his side. You saw what I saw and you’re taking his side.”
“Anna, I’m not taking his side. I just don’t want you to be upset over this, because I really don’t think it’s happening the way you’re thinking it is.”
Buck was such an irritating person. He threw his opinions around and wanted me to just go along with whatever he said. “I know what I saw. How else would you or could you explain it?” “I don’t know exactly.” He looked at me, not sure what to do or say next. “Have you tried talking to him about it at all?”
“Of course not!” I cried out. “I can’t have that conversation with him. I would probably want to kill him if I heard him actually admit to it.”
Strange in Skin Page 7
