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One inconspicuous and dreary Tuesday there’s a letter in between the usual suspects of bills. She stares at the return address long enough to feel disconnected. His letter. Who else would write to her from inside the penitentiary system? Who else would split her world apart at its atoms?
One letter turns to two becomes three and then Jennifer Melfi stops counting. The content of each is sparse and the prose leaves something to be desired. Minimalist not by conscious design. She should throw them out – she shouldn’t even read them – but they possess some sentimental value, some peculiar affluence, and so instead of recycling the paper or throwing the letters into the garbage, they settle comfortably in the darkness of her night drawer.
Do not obsess, she reminds herself.
Determination keeps for a year.
The first time she visits him, anxiety ripples dauntingly beneath her skin. The prison looms, gray towering concrete, squashing her resolution as much as it certainly squashes every human being imprisoned here.
The guard that takes her through the institution is towering too; tall and solid with a square jaw and bulging muscles beneath his uniform. Nothing gets past him. A decade younger, she wagers, his balbo beard neatly trimmed. He throws her a cocky smile rifling through papers, tapping on the computer to confirm her identity on whatever roster they have for visitors.
Come along, Dr. Melfi, I’ll show you the ropes.
Jennifer, she corrects him.
The ropes consists of rules:
Don’t hand the inmate anything unless approved.
Don’t wander off.
Don’t engage with the other inmates.
Don’t…
The list continues. She can’t focus, her will wavering. There is still time to change her mind – to flee. The visitation center is cushioned in the quiet murmur of conversation, a backdrop that she finds solace in. She’s not alone. The guard places her in an uncomfortable rigid chair at an empty metal table and she sits like every other visitor; family, friends, lovers, lawyers, neighbors and whatnot, and what is she?
Obscured by the table she wrings her hands. A familiar anxious tic; one that’s hard to overcome at this very moment.
“Ooohhh, there she is,” Tony Soprano sings out with hostility when he enters, his eyes focused on her with heavyset anger.
“Anthony,” she greets him quietly, startled by the brash emotion that twists his face.
He sits down opposite her, the guard leaving them to stand watch in the corner. There’s still the buzz of conversation in the air but now it feels intrusive; someone complaining quietly in the corner, another bouncing an unsettled baby on their knees while somewhere to her left someone talks distinctly like a lawyer.
And in front of her: Tony Soprano.
Oh yes, he is angry; he fills out her entire vision with his anger. The set jaw, the narrowed look, all coiled tension that he directs at her with a flat stare. She hasn’t seen him in two years, his appearance is leaner and similar to when she first met him. Balding and gray, stubble on his chin, the shadows of it surprising.
Prison doesn’t soften men.
“I call and call, and finally, she answers.”
His smile is all teeth.
“I’m here now.”
“And she speaks,” he continues, on a rage streak she’s more than familiar with.
“You are not my responsibility,” she tells him in a lowered tone. “They’ve got psychiatrists and therapists at your disposal here.”
That doesn’t change a single line of anger in his expression.
“I’m not your doctor,” she whispers, emotion putting a strain in her voice.
He ignores her attempt, albeit clumsy, to deescalate. “Took you long enough to show your face. A whole fucking year, huh. You too embarrassed to be visiting me in prison? Is that it? It’s beneath you? You’ve washed your hands of me? You got your money’s worth.”
Anger is easy to hide behind, and hers is ready in the wings and all it takes is a little nudge.
“Fuck you,” she replies, her voice heated; she’s taken back to that disastrous meeting in the cafe in what feels like a different lifetime, telling him the same – an agitated out of body experience, and she still, years later, wonders why no repercussions had been meted out back then.
All the signs are there now: her anger against his, and out spring the little subtle tells she has spent seven years analyzing and she braces for impact, instinctively clued in on his disposition and then unsurprisingly he flies off. Still one second and the next he moves his frame into sudden action with his broad hands around the chair and he flings it up against the wall. People scatter away from the nearby tables, chaos erupting. She flinches at the loud sound but otherwise she keeps still. His hands looks bare, she reflects. No golden ring on his little finger, no golden bracelet around his wrist and no expensive flashy watch.
The two guards overseeing visitation come to the rescue very swiftly. Not that he’s going to do more; the air of rage has already left him.
The guards topple him to the ground easily, their hands rough around his neck as they press his face into the floor.
“Stop resisting, scumbag,” the smaller guard angrily growls.
He’s not resisting.
The heavyweight guard leans across his body with a painful knee on his lower back. Excessive force, she thinks detached, watching his expression twist into a pained grimace.
His gaze never left hers even when he flung the chair, and his eyes are still focused on her; even with his face pressed against the concrete floor, his nostrils flaring and an exasperated sound leaving his mouth when the guard presses the knee deeper.
It feels like the walls are closing in on her.
She stands up and walks away from the table, toward the exit. He calls out, the sound muffled but she doesn’t listen to him; there’s the overwhelming sound of a stun gun and then followed by grunts of pain.
She closes her eyes, takes a deep unsettled breath. What did he say? A feeling of ginger ale in his skull?
Twenty years.
The second time she visits him it’s the same guard that chaperons her through the institution. ‘No worries Ma’am, he’s gonna be sweet like a little pup’, the guard says, his eye once again lingering on her form, his intonation clinging to her skin.
She’s filled with apathy; clothed in an oily film of apathy outside and in, and so she can’t even bring herself to care about the guard’s wandering eye.
This time Tony Soprano is already at the table. Subdued in his demeanor – or at least that is the facade he presents. A show of deference to the guard? She sits down, rearranging her hands in her lap, the feeling of apathy persisting; his face is half shrouded in the shadows of bruises, angry lines of blurred excoriations and discoloration. It looks uncomfortable.
She welcomes apathy because she can’t bring herself to care about his hurts.
“You came back,” he says, emotionless.
No apology for losing control. Why he keeps on sending her letters, she has no idea – she’s too afraid of the answer and so she stubbornly puts it away, a dark cobwebbed drawer at the back of her mind. Last month the letter had arrived with an arrangement of colorful flowers; a bouquet she’d angrily thrown out, and then later, during the middle of the night, she’d found herself in the garbage bins, hysterical and in tears, hiccoughing out some sorrow at having thrown his flowers out. The bouquet ended up on the window sill in her bedroom.
Yes, she’s back. Why, she doesn’t know.
Silence lingers between them. Uncomfortable, dense, filled out to the brim with unspoken issues. The old alliance is gone; dead and buried. She waits. She wills silence into a gleaming fortified weapon.
“You never showed up at the trial.”
“It wasn’t for me.”
His anger has dampened considerably but it’s not gone. A default maybe; anger hides vulnerability. He can’t afford to be vulnerable in prison, can he? She can’t afford to be vulnerable either – not in front of him. He’s a shark.
His eyes narrow slightly and then he echoes her words, “Wasn’t for you?”
She crosses her arms. “It would have been unwise.”
It’s one very valid explanation; showing her face in public at the trial of the century and she would have been outed instantly. Tabloid fascination gone awry, and everyone would have known and where would that have left her in terms of safety?
Now he’s silent, mulling over her answer. There’s a heavy furrow between his brows.
She doesn’t want to talk about the trial.
“You’ve been fighting?” she nods at his face, the discoloration.
“Power-plays,” he grins but it only makes his face look skeletal.
They sit in further silence.
“How are things?” he asks her then, his eyes going over her body without invitation. Not that he’d ever gotten one.
“Gloom is my business, and business is good,” she parrots.
“I mean you. Not the business.” His eyes are zeroed in on her, the appearance of something that could be misinterpreted as softness.
She sighs, long and dragging.
“You’ve been very persistent about me visiting you, Anthony. What is it you want to talk to me about? Surely not my social life and well-being?”
“I’ve got all the time in the world in here,” he says cryptically, “and it makes me think.”
She gives a short scornful laugh.
He sours instantly.
She leans closer. “How do power-plays give you time to think?”
There’s a hard ridge to her tone; it’s sarcastic, she realizes. Is he defacto boss? Is he running the whole organization from the inside? Is he protected? Or is he abandoned by everyone and everything, a solitary soldier without a cause or a war? She can’t bring herself to look up anything where it concerns his criminality, his sentence or what ties he still claims; out of fear, maybe, or is it shame?
His face closes off.
She leans back, a feeling of spite infusing her from the inside, hot and molten. Apathy and anger; much easier to cling to because on the other side, there is only a deep treacherous gorge for her to fall into – and if she falls, she will never get up again.
“You look angry,” she states, her body riled up with erratic adrenaline. “Like you want to smash my face in?”
There’s too much history.
His anger transform; it’s by design now, turned into a blade sharpened.
“I would never ruin your beautiful face,” he bites out between his teeth, his smile dark when he adds, “I could break a leg or two but I’d keep you face untouched.”
She wants his anger, she realizes, as much as she wants her own; a consuming maelstrom that feels freeing. It’s like waking from slumber, her entire body tingling with the prospect of it being unfurled.
“Your face is far from untouched,” she bites back, and her excitement feels perverted. “No one offered to set your nose? It’s going to heal like that, crooked and ugly. It’s not pretty to look at.”
“I don’t need to be pretty,” he sneers at her.
She sneers back.
The third time she visits him is insulated in broiling silence; ten excruciatingly long minutes of it, of staring angrily at him and of him staring angrily back at her, every thought in her head washed in prickly anticipation. It’s essentially a childish contest of patience as they both wait for the other person to cave; and she’s not going to give him anything, at all.
“I had a panic attack when I first got here,” he breaks first. It’s a success that taste bland. His expression is contorted into aggravation like he doesn’t want to talk about it. “They had to fucking sedate me.”
Maybe she spent seven years with him using up all her capacity for compassion?
“I don’t want to hear about that,” she says, flicking off invisible lint from the sleeve of her suit jacket.
Exasperation is easy to discern in his expression, his mouth half opening and then closing.
“Okay,” he then says, tasting the word, slowly like he doesn’t believe it – doesn’t believe her.
She averts her eyes; the guard’s eye briefly connect with her, encroaching on this little tableau of pretend privacy. The visitation room doesn’t offer privacy. Prison is stripped of privacy.
“They tried to put me on that, Anafranil, the one you mentioned. You remember? Before you kicked me to the curb for what was it,” his voices changes into a low pissed off pitch, “defacing your departures magazine.”
A convenient displacement at the time.
“I think you should refrain from any disclosure about your treatment plan,” she tells him, still avoiding his gaze. Her voice lacks everything.
He exhales angrily, “Then what the fuck are you doing here? You don’t want to listen to me?”
She shakes her head.
They sit in silence again, both stewing in their own space – and that might have been it, the end of everything, but they both stay for the duration of the visit. That has to mean something?
The guard follows her out, even though she doesn’t think it’s necessary.
She drinks lukewarm coffee from the offered styrofoam cup, the taste bitter; it’s been sitting too long on the pot. She wonders where all her anger is coming from.
“He invites trouble, you know,” the guard tells her conspiratorially, his eyes on her lips. Rick, he introduces himself. Rick with the wandering eye. She flirts back, her mind elsewhere.
Tony Soprano is trouble, yes.
The fourth time she visits him she feels restless but in a drunk, distorted way. An apprehensive feeling of readying up for something that is imminent on the horizon; another fight? He doesn’t look angry today. Her own anger seems to appear whenever the walls of the prison closes in on her; it’s tingling at her fingertips, ready on the tip of her tongue.
“You’re the only one who visits me,” he says.
She doesn’t believe him.
“You know, regularly,” he elaborates.
“I’ve been here four times, it’s hardly a pattern,” she disagrees even though she’s lined him up in her calendar for the year; every month the first Tuesday, like the scab on a wound she keeps picking at.
“You’re mad at me,” he states, a curious look of understanding in the depths of his eyes. “Join the line, everyone and their mother is mad at me.”
She is so angry that she can barely stand to look at him.
“Carmela doesn’t visit?” she throws it out, watches it land with a heavy blow.
“She divorced my sorry ass.”
She should feel sad for him and maybe she does, a tiny spark of compassion, but it’s overshadowed by a very weird and foreign emotion; unchecked schadenfreude – all the suffering he has inflicted on the world, and now... now he’s suffering.
When did she cross the line from nonjudgment into this wild chaotic terrain?
“But you,” he gesticulates at her with a peculiar grimace, “you’re more mad than the whole fucking bunch. You look like you wanna sucker punch me square in the face, you know. Anyone would think you were the one I’d cheated on and lied to.”
Spot on: she wants to land her fist squarely in his face, break his nose again.
She can almost taste her own anger; a palate cleanser for any other emotion. It’s a rush, she understands that now.
“You sure act like it,” he says harshly.
“Act like what?”
Back to anger for both of them; this fizzling, energetic field of potential in the air between them, volatile and electric. Who will explode first?
“Like my fucking wife,” he snarls.
It’s degrading – in a good, painful way. Like the last time he insulted her with that analogy; it drains her of rationality, sparks animosity.
They contemplate each other in silence.
She’s never shared anger like this before; it feels symbiotic.
“Why are you here?” he asks after enough time has passed.
“Why do you want me here?” she retaliates.
Stalemate.
The fifth time she visits she feels almost at ease. The corridors are familiar now, the visitation room too. He’s familiar; the way he sits across from her, the way his eyes always roam across her body before they settle on her eyes. All the anger from the last four visits seem to have cleared a path, forged ahead through the wilderness, and now here’s a clearing.
“I had a dream,” he starts, a glint in his eyes that prickles her skin.
“Oh. What was it about?”
“You.”
Here comes the stone.
“You were out in a garden, gardening and shit, on your knees in between tomato plants, your hands dirty.”
He smiles wide; one of those that she takes for genuine joy because it lights his eyes up, wrinkles the lines around them.
“I was watching you in the dream. Your ass in the air. I wanted to do you doggy style. Take you raw.”
And back to the stone.
He quiets then, an arrogant smile tugging at both corners of his mouth, one she’s very well-acquainted with.
“That’s all?” she counters.
He shrugs, pretending nonchalance.
“I had a dream about you once,” she tells him, the words tumbling from her before she can rethink her decision to bring this particular emotion into the fray.
He looks interested.
“You were a rottweiler.”
That’s the thing that persists from that dream: the morbid fascination with which she’d enjoyed it, watching; the sharp teeth of the canine – of his teeth - tearing out the entrails of her rapist. Even now, a distant memory of a dream, it’s a blessing.
He grins, entirely unaware about the sub-layer to their conversation. “You dream about me being at your beck and call? Huh? Betcha you’d let me sleep in your bed.”
She shows her teeth. “I don’t like dogs.”
“They are very loyal, dogs,” he replies, an urgency in the tone that implies some kind of desperation.
Does he even understand the genuine groundwork that builds loyalty?
“How’s your anxiety?” she asks him, steering away from the subject of loyalty before it becomes too much. Away from the slimy, greasy path in her cortex that has been threaded thin by nightmares. Imprisonment is enough of a nightmare in itself.
The change in the topic shifts his expression.
“Twenty years in the slammer,” he comments with a hollow grin.
“Everything you feared has come to pass,” she comments. Loss of family and freedom; loss of his organization?
“Freeing shit, isn’t it,” he tilts one shoulder at her, his grin even larger now, “I’ve got time to yak with you, don’t I.”
She waits, and slowly his smile fades.
“I thought my anxiety was off the table,” he says then, clearly annoyed with her beneath the cheerful attitude, “You tore my head off the last time I mentioned anything about my, you know, situation.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I hope I dream about you again,” he continues, this time his smile has sharp, prickly edges meant to hurt. “Someone told me you can direct your dreams, lucid dreaming or some shit. I’d go back to that garden and your ass in the air.”
His stupid dream dislodges the last fragment of distress in her, and it disappears, thankfully, but in its stead everything is centered around that idiotic dream now. The ghostly impression of hands firmly around her hips, the scent of tomato plants and soil.
No one touches her anymore.
“I’d take control.”
There’s no control in prison.
The sixth time she visits and he finally admits it; his countenance uncharacteristically tender. The little lines around his mouth and eyes softening, a subtle tell for only her to acknowledge. No one else would describe him as tender. Hardened, they would call him.
“I missed you.”
The context is not lost on her. His tone is rough and his stare flat but beyond that there is the color of softness for her to reign in. Maybe if she pulled hard enough, she could unravel him entirely? Start from scratch?
He continues, “Talking with you, like this. I missed it. I’ve missed you terribly ever since you kicked me out.” He rubs his hands across his forehead, wearily. “Christ-sake, I’m getting fucking emotional.”
She’s missed him too; it’s evident in her chest, that heavy feeling of burden whenever she thinks about him, the way it lessens after each visit.
“I am a good listener,” she says, sarcasm biting on her tongue. “Most people like being listened to. Being heard and understood. That’s what you needed, and wanted, in therapy.”
She whispers the word therapy. She should ask for clarification; how much is still confidential, how much is she allowed to say. But he hasn’t said anything; and she doesn’t want to ask him.
“That’s not it,” he disagrees, annoyance clear in his expression. She wants his annoyance – his anger too – wants him to douse her in it till she feels sated and devoid of emotions. An avalanche of it; maybe it will kill this growing sprout in her heart. Hope feels too vulnerable.
“You do understand this here now, it’s not the same as therapy?” she needles him.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m not paying you and you actually get to say something too. I know this is not therapy, c’mon, I’m not a fucking idiot.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“You’ve always been like this?” he wonders, his eyes searching.
“Like what?”
“Full of thorns.”
No.
The seventh time she visits, the guard’s gaze follows her heatedly. Rick with the balbo beard and the flexing muscles beneath the starched uniform. Rick who informs her how much he benches, casually as he leans against a wall, watching her walking into the visitation center. Her entire body is heated too; by conflicting emotions she can’t understand, or control. Something else closes in the moment she steps inside the prison walls, the resounding click of a locked gate; not anger.
“You look good,” Tony Soprano says for a greeting, his eyes definitively on her cleavage. “Soft, you know.”
He’s trying to throw her off; it’s all he has for entertainment.
“Soft?”
“Curvy, voluptuous,” he grins like wolf. “You fill out nice, is what I’m saying. New dress?”
The fabric of the dress is tight around her body, the hemline professional, but she agrees, it is more revealing than anything she’s ever worn in front of him. She doesn’t have time to go home and she’s got an appointment in the city after this – or maybe, that is simply a convenient excuse?
“You dressed up for me?” His smile is insolent.
“Do I look fuckable?” She feigns innocence; she can throw him off too.
“Jesus. What the fuck?”
“I’m going on a date later,” she continues with a smile, her tongue briefly on her bottom lip. She’s enjoying it more than she should. “After you. Dinner, drinks…”
She lets the rest hang in the air between them.
“Fuckable,” he repeats, his eyes locked on her cleavage for a prolonged and heated moment. When he looks back up again, there’s a whole storm brewing in his expression.
He’s always wanted to stick his dick in her; another form of power-play.
She smiles wider, watching him watching her; there’s a noticeable twist to his smile that makes her feel light-headed.
“Ah, yeah, you look fucking good enough for me. I’m gonna cum with my hand around my dick thinking about you later in my cell,” he growls then, his eyes meeting hers with heat. His crass honesty surprises her.
Twenty years in prison, and only on year two.
They stare at each other. She is excited and he is a mirror.
She pouts at him on purpose, the lipstick she chose a deep red, and then she leans forward, aware of the changing angle. She whispers, “Do you think my date will approve of my matching underwear?”
She bites down on her bottom lip, his eyes zeroed in on that with greed.
“Christ-sake,” he moans out loud, and then surprisingly, he stalks off. She watches his broad back as he disappears.
Rick the wall of a security guard lifts an eyebrow. She pretends she doesn’t know with a shrug.
She wants to win every round; this time a right hook.
She goes out of the prison feeling exuberantly drunk with the feeling. It settles into something weird when she does fuck her date later on; this feeling of something very pointy and sharp, something that keeps being turned into something sharper till all is zoomed in on the tip, and then she imagines Tony Soprano’s face when she fucks Steve the Thoracic Surgeon. Steve with the generous hands, used to the tools in the surgery, nimble fingers that do make her come – extra hard when she imagines they are someone elses.
Her climax seems to untangle something heavy within her, the aftermath leaves her in tears.
The eight time she visits him it hits different; hard like a punch to the stomach when she realizes she’s close to an anniversary of sorts – a year of visits. It has lost the veil; it can’t carry the excuse of being a farewell. It’s evolving, dynamic.
“You’ve been in another fight.” It’s a statement.
He briefly looks askance; at Rick.
“Disagreement,” he spits out roughly from the side of his mouth, still avoiding eye contact.
“Very recent too,” she ventures, her eyes on the color. “Yesterday?”
“What the fuck does it matter?”
She really should look it up; his status. It would help, wouldn’t it? Knowing whether he is trying to reform himself? Not that she believes the current rehabilitation of the justice system leaves much room for personal growth. Richard would be able to tell her; Elliot too. She hasn’t talked to either men in two years.
“Why are you fighting, Anthony?”
“Defending myself,” he grits out. “Why shouldn’t I?”
She hums. She feels less apathy; the visits seem to wean it off.
Her hand is on the table, restless.
Tony Soprano’s eyes soften.
“I try to get back into shape,” he says, his eyes on her hand on the table, halfway between them. Is it a concession on her part? “I tell you, some of the guys in here, they are fucking built.”
“Hierarchy.”
He nods, still watching her hand.
She wants to touch him; his cheek with her thumb, a slow caress, and it’s such an intrusive urge that it leaves her speechless, even more so when she realizes that what she really wants is for him to kiss her thumb. Kiss the soft pad with his lips. That ultimately she wants him to brand her with a form of a physical link.
Twenty years.
Her anger is whittling away; smoothed and softened, and it’s no longer a weapon.
“I used to make you laugh,” he says, his hand on the table now, close to hers. Close enough that the heat of his skin is more than just her imagination.
“Once upon a time,” she agrees, watching his fingers. The little sprinkle of hair, the thick digits, the wrist and the muscles that look strong. Prison has weaned him off fat; bone, sinew and muscles is left.
“And now?”
Now he makes her cry.
Ninth visit; it’s routine now. The car drive, the check in, the guard – her emotions, the chaos, it’s all routine.
“Meadow’s pregnant,” he says.
“Oh.”
Grandfather Soprano; he doesn’t look grandfatherly. Proud, wistful; conflicting emotions in his eyes, but in his orange suit, the weathered look of a veteran criminal with no soft lines, he doesn’t look grandfatherly.
“I read up on generational trauma,” he tells her, leaning across the divide of the table; he wants to bring her into the circle.
She is surprised and any reply loses its form.
“One of those books you kept pushing at me, remember? There was this big ridiculous book, and you kept you know, dropping it into my lap. By professor whatshisname, something that sounded french or some shit. You remember?”
Melancholy; that’s it, that’s the feeling around her senses. She remembers taking various books off her own shelves and placing them in front of him; he’s the only patient she has ever permitted to loan from her private library. He never took them home though. He barely wanted to leaf though the pamphlets she gave him.
“Anything interesting catch your eye this time then?” There’s a tremble in her voice. She sounds shaky, unmoored.
“Nah. I just opened it. On page one.”
“It is a brick of a tome, the prose rather long-winded, yes,” she agrees; she instantly knows which book he’s referring to. French name indeed, she thinks with a wry smile.
“Things take time.” He sounds weary when he says it.
‘Twenty years it’s plenty of time’ but she doesn’t say it; he knows.
Instead she says, “If you get to page thirty, you’ll notice some interesting things.”
“Yeah?”
She nods.
“I can read thirty pages,” he agrees with a nod as if they’ve made a deal. Maybe they have? A deal to unburden and complicate everything all at once.
“I’m gonna need a fucking dictionary, but what the hell.”
“Time,” she smiles, softly and unrestrained.
He smiles back; a little crooked, a little dangerous, but mostly overflowing with warmth and directed exclusively at her.
Another heavy thing dislodges from inside her chest cavity.
The tenth time she visits him she feels greedy; she wants the visit to absorb her fully and follow her all the way home. The link between the letters in her night drawer and the visits in prison.
Rick gives her a cup of coffee, warm this time and freshly brewed. She brings it to the table, sipping, watching Tony Soprano entering. He sits down. His eyes go to the cup, they narrow.
“You’re getting comfortable,” he says. He doesn’t look in the direction of the guard but it’s too forced; she feels strangely aroused, and absently she thinks about what else rests in her night drawer.
She drinks coffee, smiles at him.
“Didn’t know Barney over there shared his breakroom with you.”
Jealousy is a peculiar palette.
“My day was harrowing,” she says. “Maybe he took pity on me.”
“Harrowing?”
She brushes his concern and interest away with a hand. “No matter.”
“My day was fucked,” he says.
“Yeah?”
He nods, his eyes on the coffee.
“I brought you this,” she says, pointing at the box on the table in front of her.
She nudges the object over to his side of the table.
He observes it for a long time, looks up, questioning.
“A box of madeleines,” she clarifies.
“You’re bringing me cookies now.”
“It’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it.”
She will not change her schedule for him; it’s going to be the first Tuesday every month; not a day before or after.
“And you want me to reflect on my life?”
So he does remember some things.
“Yes,” she says.
He smiles.
“Hope comes in many forms,” he says in a dry tone.
She laughs; she can’t help it, a burst of it. Maybe he remembers more than she gives him credit for.
His smile fills his entire expression, softens every line and for a split agonizing moment he looks young and carefree. His freedom is stripped, yes, but maybe in there lies another kind of freedom. A little sprout of possibility.
“You’re something else,” he says with warmth, watching her with a tender look.
“Happy birthday,” she smiles.
Greed yes, because ultimately and desperately she wants his touch. More than anything.
The eleventh visit nestles with a sweltering affinity between them; she can feel it, this hot tingling sensation that runs throughout her whole body from one look once his eyes meet hers. The familiar wrinkles in his face that she wants to trace with a finger; follow the lines of age, of a life lived, and she wonders what lines will appear in another year? And the year after that? Does he trace the lines in her face too?
“You remember, you said I don’t love people.”
“I said you were not respectful of people. There’s a distinction.”
Goosebumps break out on the skin of her arms. There is a peculiar warmth in his gaze and it makes her feel vulnerable.
“Yeah, but what you meant was, you wasn’t sure I could love other people.”
It tingles beneath her skin, flutters in her heart and stutters her breath; it reflects in his irises. Love. What does he know about love except the absence of it?
“Anthony,” she sighs in protest – it sounds intimate, like a moan.
He looks delighted, his eyes on her mouth.
“You seeing anyone?” he asks her, his curiosity trying to blend in. It stands out like a sore thumb.
“On, off,” she replies.
“You don’t ever miss a visit,” he grins. “With me.”
She looks away but she can’t keep the smile from appearing.
A whole year of visiting him in prison and she feels strangely at peace. It has settled now; it’s her life, his life, this new connection. Her anger is gone, replaced and pushed to the side.
She smiles at him, watching him enter and sit down opposite her.
“They are relocating me,” he says, no filter, no warning.
The world disappears from beneath her feet and she’s flung out into the dark void of space. Cold, disoriented, numb; dead at impact. The empty space left behind by her anger, filled up with something dreadful.
“They do that with high risk inmates,” he continues, sounding heartrendingly rehearsed. “They told me today.”
The walls seem to close in around her again.
“I mean, I know this. It shouldn’t be a surprise,” he explains but something is off with his pitch. He sounds far away, but maybe it’s only the rush of blood in her ears.
He slides his hand closer to her side of the table, upside with his palm open, waiting. They haven’t touched yet; the last time he touched her, she can’t remember, but it’s years ago, and not any touch she ever initiated.
He gives her a very intense look.
She stares at his open hand.
“Where?” Her voice sounds normal, only it echoes inside her skull. Her thoughts are lost at sea, drowning, and she’s trying to gather them all back into her arms. They slip from her grasp.
“I don’t know,” he sighs.
Briefly he looks away and in profile he looks mean: the short buzzcut, the slight stubble, the harsh lines of his face, the crooked nose.
“C’mon,” he urges her when he looks at her again, a meaningful glance back and forth between his hand and hers.
She doesn’t respond.
“Jennifer,” he says her name like it’s declared as ‘fragile, handle with care’ cargo.
Something in his voice makes her act; she grasps his hand, hesitantly at first, but then it closes around hers with warmth and she expels the breath she’s been holding.
“That’s it,” he smiles, and it softens his face considerably.
“When?”
“Ah, I’ve got a two weeks notice, or something,” he rolls his eyes, and then his face settles into a somber expression. “I don’t think you should visit me anymore.”
She wants to cry.
“You should be free of me,” he says. He gives a squeeze to cement it.
Neither of them talk for the rest of the visit. There is nothing to say, and at the same time, everything to say.
Afterwards, on the way out, impulsivity paves the way.
It’s even easier than she had imagined, and without much prompting she finds herself in the restrooms, straddling the guard – Rick. She feels so overcome with emotion; even with the man’s big dick in her, the position uncomfortable in the small stall. She buries her head in the crook of his neck to mask the tears, and eventually pleasure overrides every other emotion in her body.
She thinks about all the times he’s left her before.
Rick the guard morphs into him; and she thinks about riding him instead, his hands on her skin, his mouth on hers. The guard is pumped and hard, stretches her out with every roll of her hips, his big hands digging into her flesh. It helps, and her arousal is thick and saccharine; she slides up and down, coated, and she comes with a whine.
Afterward everything is deliriously empty inside her head.
The new place is remarkably the same as the old. It’s an entire road trip to visit him now; every third month. The guard that takes her through the procedure is even younger.
“You gonna fuck him too?” Tony Soprano hisses angrily, his eyes sourly on the guard watching the small visitation room.
She forgets to breathe.
His eyes narrow on her.
He knows.
“Although he’s a little young, like fucking a spring chicken.”
His jealousy excites her.
“Do you want me to?” she whispers back, her entire body tingling.
He grimaces.
She wants him to think about her to the point of torture.
“Last time you said I shouldn’t visit you,” she prods him, licking her bottom lip.
His regret wash across his face, devastating.
“I was reacting. To the relocation.”
True.
“And?”
He sighs, “And you deserve more, you know, more than this shit anyway.”
“And what do you deserve?” she asks him.
“Not you.”
Afterwards the hotel room feeling particularly lonely, she finds a bar out in the godforsaken city close to the prison where no one knows her, and then she brings a random man back to her hotel room. It’s the only thing that makes her feel empty-headed; being fucked by a stranger.
He continues to write her letters; some time during the third year, they progress. He’s using a dictionary, she thinks, going over the words with her finger, his scrawl still untidy. Something about mistakes, regrets. Sorrow, she finds herself feeling, but it’s peaceful. It’s the sorrow of what could have been – not what is.
Twenty years.
“You look beautiful,” he says, his eyes warmly on her.
“You look tired,” she says, not unkindly. Seven years of him dressing up for her, and now he always sits in the same washed out jumpsuit. In this place it’s tan. So what if she dresses up for him?
“Someone got knifed last night. I spent the whole night in my cell with a shiv, ready to defend myself. Didn’t get much sleep.”
“Anthony, if they catch you with a homemade knife, it’s,-” she feels anxious. It’s the thought of additional years; of twenty years becoming more. It’s the thought of him dead; in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He interrupts, “I’m stuck in solitary. I know. Don’t worry, I’m an old man. I stay out of trouble.”
She sighs.
“Hey, I promise,” he says, and she believes him.
“You got the flowers?” he asks her.
She nods. A beautiful bouquet for her birthday, the note too intimate. Jason had eyed it with mistrust when she’d hurriedly snapped the note out of his nosy hand. He must have read some of it, because he’d whined, ‘Didn’t know you were dating mom.’
“They were beautiful,” she replies with a smile. She’d traced the petals with a gentle finger, she’d lifted them close to her face and closed her eyes and drifted off; day dreaming, the floral scent following her throughout the day and into sleep.
He smiles.
The whole visit is thirty minutes of smiles; weirdly softened by something she does not want to think about, his hand warm around hers.
“I had a dream about you,” he says.
She waits.
“Shit, I woke up so hard afraid I would cream my boxers.”
She shakes her head, regards him with a wry smile.
“Hey it’s a compliment. You’re really the only one who makes me that hard.”
There’s something about his crassness; it suits him, in here, with her, and she feels intoxicated by it. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes back; he’d make her come from a couple of touches, she thinks. This cocoon they’ve built around travesty; it’s so humid, it’s between her thighs.
She traces a finger across the back of his hand, holds his gaze.
“You staying at the hotel?”
She hums, still focused on the warmth of his skin against her finger.
“How’s the sheets?”
She looks up, “Soft like a second skin,” she pauses and then in a lower register, she hums, “I sleep naked.”
A little twitch; at the corner of his mouth, his thumb across hers.
“Yeah?” The tone is low, breathless.
She licks her bottom lip.
She dreams about him too.
She wants to introduce him to the other Tzu; she writes him a note to accompany, tucked into the book. The guard glances at the note, at the book, uncomprehending. But it goes through security unharmed and without a hitch.
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
“I don’t need the whole universe,” he says when he looks at the note.
She tilts her head.
“You surrendering, that’d be enough,” he grins boyishly.
“We’ll see,” she says, and she hears it too; the agreement, the promise.
His grin broadens.
She smiles back.
Her heart feels at peace.