Murphy’s tension didn’t ease out, but he put the baton back in its place and escorted Furore and me to the front of the class.
Furore shot me a glance I understood without the need for words. I stood behind my desk and tilted so that my back was to Murphy and my attention solely was to Laius.
Just like the foreign feeling of fear for him and not of him that had snuck up on me and hadn’t made any sense, an urge, despite the tension and fright of the situation, nagged me so irritatingly it couldn’t be contained.
I gazed at him, and mouthed, “Good boy.”
CHAPTER 8
Furore
She’s just a job. That bitch is just a fucking job.
Why the fuck was my blood simmering when she was talking to that pig? Why did I want to rip his dick off when she said she was gonna have coffee with him? Why did I truly want to see those eyes, for myself not for the Lanzas, and look right into them when I was balls deep inside her? Why did I want to shelter them, not expose them? Why did I want to keep the privilege of looking at them only mine?
Why was I standing here, making a fool of myself for her pleasure, only so she’d be looking at me, teasing me with words that put a silly grin on my face and made my cock jump?
“Why am I in this class?” I started. It wasn’t to get distracted by a bitch. It wasn’t to stir shit for her sake. It wasn’t to get protective of her. It wasn’t to get a motherfucking erection when she put her hair down and did that thing when she flipped it a little off her neck. It wasn’t to want stupid things with her now or when I got out. A bitch like her didn’t end up with motherfuckers like me. Motherfuckers like me didn’t end up with a bitch like her. Didn’t end up with any bitch. Period. It was time I was reminded why I was really in Miss Meneceo’s class.
I opened my notebook and looked at the assignment I’d never written. The only words there were the ones that got her to blush that deep red that floored me. Making her uncomfortable, getting a rise out of her to see that redness to her cheeks was becoming the highlight of my week and my favorite source of entertainment.
“We’re listening, Laius. Why are you here?” she said.
I snorted and snapped the notebook shut. “You know what? Fuck this shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“I already told you why I’m here.”
“But we’d like to hear it from you, in more elaborate words as you followed the instructions. Please read what you’ve written so far. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect. What matters is that it’s honest.”
She knew I didn’t write shit. She wanted honesty? Fine, I’d give her honesty. How hard could it be to give her a sob story a young girl like her would believe when my life had been a series of those for over forty years? Fuming, I opened the fucking thing and pretended to be reading. “In a life like mine, the most dangerous feeling you can get is fear. Whatever you do, you can’t allow yourself to be afraid because the second it sneaks up on you, you lose.” The first lesson I’d ever learned on the streets. “You have to be numb to fear. Everything you do, every ride, every rush, every drag, every pussy, it’s all to push it down until it’s no longer there.”
Some inmates nodded their heads. Others just had those deep looks of the sorrow and pain we’d learned to bottle down inside on their faces. Jo was blushing again at my saying pussy, but she didn’t dare scold me for it. She’d pushed me into this shit. She didn’t get to complain.
“With time, you convince yourself you’re doing great,” I continued. “You’re the king of your own fucking world. You’re even fucking happy. Because every second you live when you’re not afraid, that’s what happiness is. The only kind you know.” I glanced up to the bars that separated me from everything I cared about. “Then you hold your baby for the first time, and you realize you’ve never been happy a day in your life. You’ve never been afraid a day in your life either. Because when I held my boy in my arms, I knew what it truly meant to feel both.”
My gaze dropped back at her. “Bless your heart, Miss Meneceo, you wanna know why I’m here? I’m here in prison because I was protecting my boy. Even if his fucking bitch of a mom lied and framed me again, even if he didn’t believe me, that’s what I was doing. I’m here in your class because my son won’t even talk to me. This shit you teach is the fucker’s favorite subject. He’s fucking brilliant at it. I thought, maybe, if I read the books he liked and learned how to write at his level, maybe, I could write him a letter good enough to get him to speak to me.”
Again, I’d been distracted from my goal. I was supposed to feed her a sob story to make her trust me and loosen up, but I was the one here standing like a fucking idiot, with tears in his eyes. “After four weeks of education, I haven’t gotten closer to my goal yet because he hasn’t responded to any of my letters. The skills I’ve learned so far filled my head with other men’s shit, got me insight into Shakespeare’s and Hemmingway’s heads, but not into my boy’s. The difference I feel is that my hands are more fucking tied every second I’m here and he’s out there, because I know he’s been hearing nothing but more of the lies she’s been poisoning him with, and he’ll just keep on hating me. The measures I’ll take to reach my goal?” I paused, sniffling. Then I wiped my face and nodded to myself. “Whatever it takes because what truly motivates me to keep going, and not just in the slammer but in life, is winning my boy back.”
CHAPTER 9
Jo
I wished I’d had a father like Laius. A man who wasn’t afraid to go to prison, who would have protected his children at all costs. Who was ready to be better for their sake and did everything in his power to reunite with them.
Tears pricked my eyes as I listened, but I had my sunglasses to veil them from him and every other soul in here. However, when I saw his own tears, I was going to blubber ugly and didn’t care what everyone would say.
But…just when I was about to lose all caution and fall for the sadness and pain behind his story, self-preservation kicked in. What if Furore was just as good as his son at theshitI taught? What if making up stories was a talent that ran in the family? What if this villain was trying to disguise himself in the tormented anti-hero cloak like he’d tried to sell me the jealous, possessive, student teacher crush narrative earlier? What if everything Furore had been doing to me since we’d met was a calculated measure to reach the real goal he was here for?
Fact check. Unlike the other students, he’d enrolled late in my class. It could be normal, but with his behavior, I was more inclined to believe otherwise. Perhaps he was never interested in taking my class or be better at writing to reach his son like he’d claimed. Perhaps he was ordered to take my class to have access to me. To discover the secrets very few people who lived knew. Had he not been trying to know things about me? He’d figured out I wasn’t Italian, and today he was trying to get me to show my eyes.
Or I was being paranoid, everything he’d said about his son was true, he did want to see my eyes for his perverted reasons or to just win the notorious bet, and he was only riling me up about my identity to get me to lay off his back because I was an insufferable bitch.
Which theory was the truth?
“You happy?” Furore asked.
