by Gabi Moore
“Zack! Hey… easy tiger.”
Even though she was a tough woman who had made a career of pretending never to be scared, I heard the flit of fear in her voice all the same.
My hips were now unleashed, something wild and unnatural uncoiling inside me, curling pump after pump of rage into her, so hard that her own hips were knocking into the wall in front of us, her belt buckle clinking and scratching against the rough brickwork.
“Zack, you’re hurting me,” she mumbled.
I could scarcely hear her. My world was sinking underneath a pall of black smoke. It sunk like fog into my tired, fearful body. Seeped into my hands as they held her down, pinning her there for the brutality I poured into her, stroke after stroke after stroke. I didn’t stop. I could smell her fear. Her dark excitement. And I kept going.
She thrust her hips back against mine and groaned in the same pleasure-pain that had taken me over. I felt her greedy little body pucker and convulse around me as she tried to steady herself. Even in a woman like this, an animal like me could find deep pockets of depravity. I fucked her harder, lifting her up onto her toes. Just raw meat. Just bodies. Fucking. The haze curled round us both, and closed over like an envelope.
When I came to, we were still in that grimy alleyway. She was hastily buckling herself back up again and re-braiding her hair, a strange look on her pretty face. I tried to give her the shameful roll of notes I had prepared in my pocket, but she waved them away and frowned.
“Save it for therapy, buddy,” she said, tucking her shirt back in. “You need it.”
Chapter 1 - Madeleine
It had all started out as a joke.
I never really meant for it to actually go anywhere, but what can I say… I have a habit of getting myself into trouble and not having the balls to get myself out again.
“So what do you think?” I said. “It’s not just me, right? He is cute, isn’t he?”
My long-time friend and occasional co-conspirator gave me an amused look and then examined the photo on my laptop screen one more time.
“Well?” I pushed. “For a prisoner, I mean. He looks sweet, right?”
She laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know, Maddy. He looks a little… prisoner-ish.” She scrolled down to read the rest of the bio.
“You think so?”
“Well, he’s wearing a jail uniform and everything.”
“It’s not a jail,” I said, and grabbed the laptop from her again, “it’s a correctional facility.”
She crunched her eyebrows at me and took a sip of her tea.
I loved Annie because she was everything I wasn’t: tough, perfectly put-together and the kind of woman that grown men fawn over because she ‘gives as good as she gets’. She called a spade a spade and even though I’d done my best to convince her that this was an ‘inmate social network’, she could see right through it for what it was.
A dating site for prisoners.
“Anyway,” I said, “stop being so judgy, it’s mostly just a joke anyway. I was just curious.” I pulled up the modest photo album belonging to inmate 487 290, Zack J. Hunter.
Annie took another sip of her tea as she had a good look at the handful of photos he had uploaded. Most of them were on the small side, and it was hard to see him clearly. My fingers stopped swiping when we landed on a bigger, clearer picture.
Zack J. Hunter, standing outdoors somewhere in a bright, overexposed afternoon, his khaki prison uniform unbuttoned and rolled down to his hips to reveal a seriously built chest and abs that looked chiseled from bronze.
“Ah… now I see what’s going on here,” she laughed, and zoomed in on the photo. “That man is just a little more than ‘cute’, Maddy.”
He had wild coils of wheat colored hair that were frozen mid-flutter around his smiling face, and though he was shielding his eyes from the sun, they still peered out from the laptop screen at us, sparkling with a kind of mischief that almost made me feel that he magically knew Annie and I were ogling him just at that moment.
“I know, right? What was his crime, being too hot?”
It was a joke I had already decided to make, well before Annie came over for her weekly tea and to visit Jasper. But I was glad to see that I was right. The guy was gorgeous, and it wasn’t just me making poor life decisions again.
“Well, what is he actually in prison for?” she asked.
Jasper’s pink triangle nose was always the first part of him that you saw, and when I saw it poking out from under the table, I was grateful for the distraction and reached down to pick him up.
“Hey, little one, do you want to see the hot guy as well? What do you think?” I held him up in front of the screen, his little kitten legs dangling limply. Jasper was unamused and wriggled out of my hands, then saw his chance to explore the table top and hobbled over it, poking his nose here and there.
“Well?” she insisted.
“Well what?”
“Is he like… a murderer or something?”
I sighed and flopped back in my seat.
It was, admittedly, the single question that had been gnawing at me ever since I had sent that first ‘just curious’ email. He had responded immediately, and the opportunity to ask him never seemed to arrive.
What exactly had he done?
I had scanned the same set of pictures over and over again, looking for clues. Were those the veined forearms of a burglar? Or the well-formed mouth and chin of a drug dealer? When I looked at his broad hands, his square jaw, his strong thick neck, my irresistible thought was to wonder: which precise part of him was responsible for breaking the law? His hands? His eyes? Something else…? He certainly didn’t look like the tax-evasion type.
In any case, it wasn’t a thought that I followed too far. I didn’t like where it went. Besides, none of this was very serious. I was newly single, he was stuck in jail, and I needed the company. Well, human company, that is. It was a Sunday morning and my animal-tally was currently sitting at eighteen dogs, five cats (including pink-nosed, black-furred Jasper) thirteen birds, a pair of chickens, a rabbit, a fancy rat and an aging ferret who had terminal stomach cancer.
“I’m sure it’s none of my business anyway,” I said.
“What? You’re not curious? What if he’s a rapist or something?”
I slammed the laptop closed.
“There’s no way he’s a rapist, for god’s sake.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he just, he would never do that…”
Annie gave me a long, hard look. I guess it did sound lame, especially coming from someone with my track record.
“Maddy, how long have you been emailing this guy anyway?” she asked slowly.
I shrugged and nervously tried to find a way to sip my tea when it was quite obviously finished.
“Maybe a few months? I don’t know, not that long…”
“A few months? OK whoa.”
“Oh god, you’re being judgy again, Annie.”
“I’m not. I’m just curious, what happens now? When does he get out?”
Annie had a way of asking, all at once, the very same irritating questions I had taken at least six months patiently avoiding asking myself.
“I have no idea.”
“I don’t get it. Would you meet him if he was released?”
“I don’t know, Annie. Jeez, so many questions. Anyway, maybe I like the idea that he’s stuck in there and that’s the end of it.”
She nodded and smiled knowingly.
It was true. When you thought about it, a prisoner was almost the ideal boyfriend. He’d never hit you up for money, and couldn’t really cheat. Plus, you’d never need a restraining order, so there was that.
“When I said you should start dating again with a new guy, maybe I should have been more specific,” she laughed.
We sat in silence for a while, wondering if the day needed another cup of tea, or whether it was time to call our visit complete.
“I did mean to as
k you about something, though,” I said changing the topic. “Jasper’s food is nearly done.”
Just because I was a vet, and just because I had a home full of abandoned animals that would rival Noah’s ark, didn’t mean I had the cash to pay for every little abandoned kitten that blew my way.
Annie was an old, old friend, and was going through a long-winded divorce. She would be moving out of her temporary flat in a little while, she promised me, and she’d take Jasper back, eventually. But I was beginning to feel taken advantage of.
“Oh shit, is it really? Are you sure? He eats so little. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’ll be in the new place next week for sure and then I’ll just take him off your hands, so there’s no point getting new food till then, right?”
I gave her a thin smile. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that his food had actually been finished for a week already and that I was feeding him out of pocket from the other cats’ food. I certainly didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had already promised me she would take him back two weeks ago, and that he wasn’t even meant to be staying with me in the first place. But what was I going to do, let Jasper go to a high-kill shelter just because Annie and her husband couldn’t sort their lives out and rehome him?
“Hey, do you want some more tea?” she asked.
I shook my head.
No matter how many hurt animals you save, you’d better believe that there are millions more waiting to take its place. Later, as I saw her out, she hugged me and kissed me and laughed, saying, “try not to take in any more strays while I’m gone, OK Maddy?” and I felt a hot little flush of irritation.
I smiled and waved her off. One day I would quit being such a pushover and put my foot down.
Not today, though.
In any case, maybe I didn’t care if he was a murderer.
Chapter 2 - Zack
Zack: You should tell her the truth!
I stared at the words on the computer screen for a while, realizing how I could have easily written them for myself.
Maddy: I know I should :( I’m such a softie though. I guess because Jasper’s such a sweet little guy I could never say no to him, you know?
Zack: But that doesn’t mean you can’t say no to HER.
I like instant messaging because it really isn’t instant at all. It gave me just that little bit of extra time to think. To write a response, carefully. Hell, if I had that little time lag in real life, with just an extra spilt second for me to think before I spoke… well, let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be here in a steel reinforced computer lab, supervised by four guards and using my day’s internet time to chat to a woman I met on Soulinmates.com.
I liked the way the logo on their page had two little brackets around the ‘in’ part of inmate, so that only the “mate” was left. That’s why I was here anyway, right? Some parts of humanity need to be sectioned off from the rest, just so everything else can make sense. And that part was me.
Maddy: I think I have a hard time with that. I don’t know how to be kind but at the same time not let people take advantage of me.
It was another sentence that could have easily been written by me.
Zack: I just err on the side of not being too kind ;)
I hit enter and stared hard at the winking face. I had avoided it till now. I couldn’t flirt to save my life, but whatever, I was all the way in here, and she was all the way out there. Nothing would come of it, so why not? In a way, she was the perfect girlfriend already. She didn’t expect anniversary gifts, she had no choice but to give me my space, and if she got mad at me, well, I was already in jail, right? How much more wrong could I get?
Maddy: I don’t believe it for a second :) I bet you’re just one of those big sweethearts on the inside. The fact that you like animals proves it.
Zack: Speaking of which, how is the old brood?
Maddy: They’re good. The chickens are molting in the heat these days but they’re happy. I think Gingko is on her last legs though.
The cursor blinked idly at me from the screen. It had been months and months of this. Easy, pleasant conversation.
Madeleine Bright had become a sweet spot in my bitter, incarcerated days. Every morning we’d meet at 7am sharp for a chat, and sometimes, she’d leave me an email that I could read in case one of the cats or dogs needed her and she wasn’t able to make it for 7am. And the clunky old machines in Blantyre House Correctional Facility’s only ‘computer lab’ became a strange confession booth for me, and from out that void her and I somehow forged a gentle friendship.
She never judged me. Never asked me awkward questions. She was just touchingly, delicately female… a respite each day from the dirty concrete floors, the clank of steel bar gates slamming shut, and from all the young men smoking furiously because if they didn’t, their hands would soon find their way into fists instead. She was my rest from the drudgery of each day that looked exactly like the one before it.
She told me about her animals and her work. At first, she had assumed I was a vet as well. I had laughed and told her ‘not that kind of vet!’ and she had felt so embarrassed. It was pretty cute, our running joke. She never even asked where I had been stationed, or anything else. I was glad. I certainly didn’t need to talk about any of that again. In fact, I would rather have listened forever to how she had to trick the cats into taking their medicine by hiding it inside cheese, or how people called her a crazy cat lady when she was only 28, or about nothing at all.
We did other stuff, though.
Once a week, she’d send me a picture. The first had been of her, posing at a friend’s wedding, done up and smiling in heels inside a flowered arch. The one after that I liked better. She looked good au natural, with her wavy brown hair loose and snaking over her breasts. It made me think of fairy tales, her hair. She had a big, easy smile; a spray of freckles and a kind of goofy uneasiness about her that made you want to just hold her.
The first time she sent me a sexy one, she asked, “is this OK?” I had stared long and hard at that picture, and the cursor had blinked for ages, like it was blinking now.
It was a grainy selfie, and in it she was kneeling on her bed and peering nervously up at her phone. She was in a pink lacy number, but angling herself to conceal as much of her ample body as possible.
She definitely wasn’t a slender woman. She was all circles and arcs, and the freckles on her collarbones faded out down towards very large, pillowy breasts. Her hair looked kind of girlish and wild. She was so white on her belly and thighs she was nearly translucent.
All my exes had been thin. Tall and big, but thin. She was the opposite… small and fluffy.
“It’s more than OK,” I had answered, and soon she sent me more, one picture a week, each one going a little further than the one before it.
Admittedly, I had screwed every one of my exes within days of meeting them. I was a third date or bail kind of guy, back then. Younger, stupider me might not have seen the point of all of all this chatting and emailing and back and forth. I was never going to fuck the woman, so why bother, right? And yet I did bother. Somehow, she never stopped seeming interesting. Every week, the prospect of a single, static image of Madeleine Bright posing in her bathroom mirror, or modelling a new bra or whatever… every week was a thrill for me.
Another message came through.
Maddy: Aren’t you wondering what this week’s picture is?
I smiled. I watched as a little icon appeared and the painfully slow Internet connection got to work pulling it from out of the ether.
I opened it.
She was completely naked.
I threw a glance over my shoulder and then leaned in closer, trying to hide the screen with my thankfully large body.
I didn’t know where to put my eyes. Her hair was loose and wet, and she was standing in front of her shower. Even with a background of tacky cartoon ducks on the shower curtain, she looked like a queen. She was playing at being sassy, but the most endearing thing about
the picture was how fragile she really looked. How shy.
Despite her coy posture, her breasts were full and low. Dark nipples. The curve of her flanks dipped dramatically at her tight little waist and swelled out again into two substantial hips. The hair at the ‘V’ above her thighs was sparse, but of the same carefree, light brown as on her head. She was beautiful. Beaded with water, buffed pink, a little coy, and completely, utterly beautiful.
I was instantly hard.
Fuck.
Maddy: Well? Haven’t had a heart attack have you? Please excuse the wee bit of extra holiday padding :D
I really hated that. Why couldn’t she see how gorgeous she was? She was almost 30, why was she acting like an insecure teenager, fussing about her weight like that?
Zack: …
Zack: You know I have to go out in public now? Standing up right now is going to be …a little awkward.
Maddy: Oh…? :p
Zack: You know, it sounds like you’re almost proud of yourself.
Maddy: I am a little! I like the idea of you getting all hot and bothered on my account.
Zack: You’re evil!
Maddy: Don’t say that :) I could always send you a picture of Ginkgo next time if you prefer.
Zack: Now hang on just a second… Gingko is a good-looking ferret. Nobody could ever say otherwise. But I much prefer your beautiful body.
I watched the cursor blink. It had been a long, long time since I had flirted with anyone. A long time since I …well, let’s just say that the last time I had to try and hide a raging erection was sometime in grade school. And wondering whether any of this was turning her on was making the situation even worse.
