Chapter 11

At first, it had started out funny. Hilarious, even. The notion that I was in love with Abby had thrown me for a loop admittedly, but when I thought about it it seemed ridiculous; and I had a lot of time to think about it. Abby and I had become close, yes, but as friends. Aside from Damian, Abby was the only person here who didn't treat me like a prisoner.

A few of the guards – mainly Roberta and John, the guard who always accompanied me to Abby's office in the morning – trusted me enough to play nice with me, and sometimes even talked to me like I was an equal. I was the “good boy” of the prison, a lot like I had been my whole life. But they had jobs to do, and never let me forget that they had power over me in case I decided to change my reputation.

Abby never used power or authority over me. She never reminded me that she was the boss. Some days I would slip into feeling bad, and I would look over at her and see her making a funny face at me, as if she knew I would look at her at that exact moment. I could never keep myself from laughing. I never wanted my day in the office to end. I never wanted my time with her to disappear.

And that was when I realized it wasn't funny anymore. It became reality, at least that my feelings for her had grown into something beyond simple friendship. Damian never let me forget that he thought I was in love with her, but I still wasn't convinced it had gone that far.

I had myself convinced until a couple of months later. I had found my one weakness.

That day, during the first couple of hours I was in Abby's office, general population was let out for some time in the yard. The story was passed down through prisoners and guards before it ever got to me and Abby, but the one thing we knew was that a riot had broken out. It didn't happen here often, but with men cooped up like animals in cages it did happen.

It was obvious to most that it was gang-related; I counted seven prisoners that came into Abby's office during that time. For her, it was like a Friday night at the local emergency room. I had never seen her so frantic. Even by the time everyone and had been bandaged up and given the green light, her adrenaline was still pumping so hard that she panicked at the simplest tasks.

After the last prisoner had left, she was searching a hundred miles per hour through a stack of papers that I hadn't had time to organize for her.

“I have to take this paperwork down,” she said, panicking. “Oh my Judas, I can't find it. Where the hell did I put it?”

I smiled and calmly reached over and grabbed a manilla folder, knowing exactly what papers she was looking for.

“What would you do without me?” I joked as I handed them over to her.

She grabbed the folder from my hands. “I would die. You're an angel sent straight from heaven. I have to run, I'll tell you more about how amazing you are when I get back.”

She leaned down and gave me a kiss on the cheek before she rushed out of the room as fast as she could. In her flight, I caught a whiff of her perfume and the feel of her lips on my cheek. It was the most pleasant feeling I'd felt all day – and yet it felt like I had a pair of hands wrapped tightly around my throat.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. Five months in prison hadn't brought me to my knees, but it took two seconds for the scent of lily-of-the-valley and a simple kiss on the cheek to bring me down. Only figuratively, of course, but that fall was the hardest one I had experienced in a long time.

I wasn't sure if it was that moment that I had fallen in love with her, or if I had felt it all along and I really was the only idiot who couldn't see it until now. I just knew it hurt – I had fallen in love with a woman I wasn't allowed to touch. They might as well have handcuffed me to the door of death row and threw away the key.

A couple weeks later, I apparently had caught a bad flu. The months I had been unable to sleep and eat properly had caught up with me and compromised my immune system. I spent two days in Abby's office, under her constant care instead of working, barely able to move from the fever and the nausea. The time she spent cooling off my face with a wet towel and talking to me until I fell asleep made all that pain hurt worse.

Another two weeks later I was feeling better, but not entirely back to my normal self. I was able to work again, but Abby had put me on a constant round of medicine to try to get rid of the bug. For several weeks she had come to my cell every night with pills in hand trying to help me kick it – and she always said good night to me before she left.

Watching her walk away from my cell at night with a smile, knowing I wouldn't see her again until morning, made everything I had been going through unbearable.

Then, there was that Thursday morning. It seemed as normal as it had been of late – I woke up sore, nauseous, and had trouble eating even a couple bites of breakfast. I still hadn't kicked whatever this was, and mornings were especially excruciating. Papers were askew all over Abby's desk because I hadn't been feeling up to par lately. Her desk chair felt harder than it usually was, like sitting on rocks at the beach. I felt like Hurricane Katrina part two had hit me and my workstation.

“Coffee,” I said the minute John left that morning. Coffee, water, and juice had been the only three things that didn't still make me feel sick. “Preferably in a constant IV drip, please.”

She had a full coffee mug, her favorite mug, already in hand and smiled at me – but her smile had changed since I had been sick. She stared at me twice as long as she normally did, and her smile was laced with some bad emotion that she was masking.

“Keep them coming, barkeep,” I said as I grabbed the mug and sat down.

“I want to put you on a new medicine. It's a little stronger than what you're on now and you won't like it because it might make you more tired than you already are – but that flu has been kicking your ass for a month. It's time for us to start kicking back.”

I groaned. “More medicine. I'm constantly drugged up already.”

“I want you to get better – even if that means you being constantly drugged up. I'm worried about you. I'll be bringing the first dose to you tonight. The good news is that it should help you get some sleep.”

“You know,” I said, “I'm thirty-something years old. I am capable of taking medicine on my own.”

“Yes, well, given your history of treating medicine like Skittles, I'll keep bringing them to you myself, thank you very much,” she said with that same hurt smile.

Clearly she was upset, but it had nothing to do with me or my prescription regimen. When I looked at her closer, I could see she was almost in tears. She had picked up a yellow mailing envelope and stared at it.

“Abby, what's wrong?” I asked.

“Huh?” she asked, snapping out of the trance the envelope had put her in.

“What's wrong? You look like you're about to cry.”

“Oh, no.” She pushed off her feelings, trying to hide what I knew I had seen. “I'm not crying. My eyes have been hurting for a few days. It's my eyes watering. I think I might be coming down with something. Guess I need to medicate myself, too.”

“Both of us medicated at the same time,” I said, acting as if I believed her when I didn't. “Doesn't sound like a good idea.”

She chuckled. “Speaking of medication – I have a few meds to pass around this morning for the other inmates.” She sat the envelope down in the corner of the desk, farther away from the rest of the papers. “I trust you'll be okay here?”

“What am I going to do, dig a tunnel under your desk and escape? I don't think I have the energy to even try.”

“Good. You have such a history of being a bad boy,” she said, feigning a smile. “I'll be back in a few minutes. Try not to get into any trouble while I'm gone.”

After she had disappeared from the infirmary hall, I looked at the envelope. The damn thing teased me – the way she looked at it, I knew that whatever it was in that envelope was upsetting to her. She wasn't sick; she was lying. And if she was lying to me, it had to be something big that she didn't want me to know about.

I had to find out what was in that envelope.

I snatched it up off the desk and before even I knew I had done it, the envelope was open and I was pulling papers out of it. I contemplated the fact that I was probably committing a felony now, even though she had opened the envelope already. I didn't care – another couple of years, maximum, and that was if I got caught. I had to know what was upsetting her.

A crisp white paper stared back at me. Welcome to St. John's University! It had been the last thing I had expected, truthfully.

I read through the acceptance letter twice – then looked through the list of books she needed, the new student orientation notice, a handwritten list of school supplies she needed to pick up. She had beautiful handwriting.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice from the door caught me by surprise. The envelope that had been resting on my lap dropped to the floor, along with a few papers. The list and acceptance letter stayed stationary in my hands.

“Are you looking through my mail?” she asked me in surprise, looking me in the eyes.

I sat the papers on the desk.

“Not on purpose. I thought you needed me to file them.”

“The fact that they had my home address and weren't in the filing pile didn't tip you off?” She walked over to me and snatched the papers off the desk and the floor angrily.

“I was only trying to do my job. I'm sorry.”

“You wanted to know what was wrong with me – now you do.” The tears came back into her eyes. “Are you satisfied now?”

“When did you apply to St. John's University?” I asked. “And now that we're on the subject, why didn't you tell me about it?”

“Personal information, Lance. And boundaries, which clearly, you have violated.”

“You know, I'm going to completely ignore that, because that hurt. St. John's University – it's not Yale or Harvard, but that is definitely nothing to sneeze at, and yet I think I'm happier for you than you are for yourself.”

“Because I can't go,” she said, fighting back the tears unsuccessfully. “I can't afford to go. So if you could be a little less happy for me, I'd feel a lot better about it.”

She pulled a paper out of the stack and looked at briefly before handing it to me.

“I'm not happy because I can't afford to be happy. If you'd looked a little harder, you'd have realized that happiness costs a lot of money lately.”

I grabbed the paper out of her hand and looked it over. It was a list of the cost of two semesters of college – totaling an incredible amount of over $30,000.

“You're right,” I said, sobered by the number. “I guess when you graduate high school by mail traveling on a tour bus, you don't realize these things.”

“I guess when you graduate nursing school with the help of student loans, and a little bit of pocket change that your mom started sacking away for you in a coffee can when you were two, you don't realize how much a big college like St. John's will cost you in the long run.” She walked over and filled her coffee cup back up, and wiped a couple of tears away from her cheeks. “I still have student loan bills coming out of my ears because of all the interest charges.”

“But there are scholarships and grants out there.”

“Not for me.” She walked back over to me and turned to the second page, pointing at a list of numbers. “See all those zeroes? That's the amount they want to give me for college. There are a couple of grants available for me, but Lance, they're not enough. My mom saved up more in that coffee can than they want to give me.”

I stared at the list a little harder, trying to figure out how it could be possible that there was no money for Abby.

“That coffee can money is long gone,” she said with a sad smile. “And it looks like my chances of going back to school to get that degree in psychology went with it. Do you know how I knew I wanted to be a nurse?”

I didn't say anything, still baffled and frustrated by the papers.

“When I was eight, my dad went to prison. He had a gambling problem and lost too much money. It got to be too much to keep hiding from my mom, and he didn't want to lose her or me or my sister. So to hide all that money, he decided he would embezzle it from the company he had built with his business partner and best friend. His best friend caught him and pressed charges, and my dad got fifteen years. My mom was a nurse at the local hospital and for some reason I didn't know at the time, she quit her job at the hospital and went to work at the prison my dad was at. I truly thought she was crazy. I couldn't understand why she would want to leave a great job at the hospital and go to work with a bunch of criminals.”

“Misfits,” I said.

“Well, yeah, that's what she called them. At the time, I called them criminals. No offense, but her job at the hospital paid enough that we could have gotten by while my dad was away, and she left it to go take care of men that, at the time, I didn't think deserved the level of care that she could provide. She cut our income and she put herself at risk every day by being around murderers and rapists. I was mad at her. And all she could tell me was 'Abigail, money isn't everything. Faith in people is important too.' I tried, I really did. I didn't see it, I didn't understand. But then I started putting aside my anger and discrimination against the men she was around and I started seeing that she came home satisfied with the work she was doing. She was never that satisfied working at the hospital. I guess working with misfits gave her that.”

“And so you decided you wanted to be a prison nurse too. You wanted that same satisfaction your mom came home with.”

“I've been here for seven years and normally I'm satisfied with my job. But lately it hasn't been enough. Guys come in here with cuts and scrapes and bruises and I clean and stitch them up. But when they're in here, I notice something that I don't think my mom ever did – the inside wounds. The emotional pain, not the physical stuff.”

“Like when I came in here,” I said.

“You were depressed, hopeless, and angry – at everyone, including me. I helped you, but with my limited resources, I can't help them all. I want to. I want to do more than stitch up cuts the rest of my life.”

“And without this aid, you can't afford to.”

“Not even close. I've been applying for three or four months. I've Googled every grant, scholarship, and type of aid that I could think of. Some of them aren't for psychology students. Some of them require me to have more credit hours per semester than I can take. Most of them I make too much money to qualify for. It's funny that I make too much for most financial aid out there, but I'm drowning in student loans already.”

“I suppose that cutting your hours here at the prison isn't an option either,” I said.

“No,” she responded. “I still have to pay my bills and eat. Besides, I have way too much responsibility here. I'm close with a lot of these guys, and they depend on me. I can't let them down. I can't leave you here alone either.”

“I don't want you to stay here for me, Abby. If this is about me...”

She chuckled. “It's not all about you. You're only a small part of it.”

A pang of guilt cut through my chest, and I sat down in the chair and looked at the paper again, feeling frustrated.

She paused, then pulled over a chair and sat in front of me.

“I guess that's not true. Truthfully, Lance, a big part of it is that I can't leave until I know you're going to go home. I'm too invested in you. I can't leave until I see you go home to your daughter and back to a normal life.”

“Well, I think we have a problem, because now I have to see you go back to college,” I said.

She leaned in a little closer to put her hand on my cheek and smiled, but this time it was a truly happy smile.

“You're so sweet. I don't know how you managed to make it here. And you have a natural talent for making me put things into perspective. I adore you for it.”

She leaned into me and placed another kiss on my cheek. I felt her breath on my cheek; it was warm since I was still a little cold from a lingering fever. It made me turn my head around towards her as she started to pull back.

As I turned, she stopped pulling back and looked me in the eyes, inches away from my face. Everything in the room had changed so quickly. My cheeks felt flush, like my fever had come back.

Before I could think too much about my fever, Abby was leaning in closer to me. Within seconds, I felt her lips on mine. She lingered there for a few seconds and just when I expected her to pull away in shock, she pulled me slightly closer to her.

It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like it lasted longer. When she opened her mouth to mine, I could taste her lip gloss on my lips. I felt her breathe as she pulled away from me, still holding my cheek close to her face.

“I'm really sorry,” she whispered. “I crossed a line that I shouldn't have.”

She pulled away from, more quickly than I wanted her to, and sprinted over to to the counter to pick up a clipboard.

“I forgot to take my clipboard with me this morning,” she said. She avoided looking me in the eyes. “I should get back to work now.”

She walked out the door without a goodbye, and I was left in my seat frozen. I wasn't sure what had happened to change things between us so quickly. I sighed and reached up, wiping the rest of her lip gloss off my mouth.

I had to lay my head down on the desk before I passed out, and I wasn't sure it was because of the fever or the atmosphere. So many things had changed in a few months that I felt my head might spin. One thing I was grateful for was that Brayden was no longer the person on my mind the most. But now things with Abby had gone from uncomfortable to complicated; too complicated for me to deal with by myself, in prison. She wasn't the only one who was too invested.

One of the first things I had to do before dealing with my feelings was get her to college, one way or another. The problem wasn't knowing how or coming up with a plan, because I already had a plan – the problem was the rules I would have to break in order to get her there. It could compromise everything for me, being almost halfway through my sentence and so close to going home. If it went wrong, I could be here longer than I had ever intended to be.

But if it went right, it could make all the time I had spent here mean something. To me, that made the risk worth taking.