Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(3)

“Nothing close to the bone,” Teke adds.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to dance like a trained monkey for some teacher,” I say. More than that, I would never tell anybody about my past. They wouldn’t believe it if I did.

Teke eyes me. I’m pushing his buttons, but I can’t stop because Ms. Winslow is at the other end of it. What is it about her?

“Telling some f*cking sob story.” I move to one-armed pushups. Five sets of one hundred pushups, and then I’ll move on to jump squats.

Teke goes back to his notebook.

I burn through my set, but I can’t get Ms. Winslow out of my mind, peering over the top of her book with those searching brown eyes, scared, maybe a little bit excited. And then that flare in her gaze when I tasted her name on my lips. Ms. Winslow.

My pulse kicks up. How would it feel to push her? To undo her? To break her f*cking glasses? Because I got the sense she might like her glasses broken.

Yeah, the distance between prim and primitive is not so very motherf*cking far. I wonder if Ms. Winslow knows about that.

I finish my set and collapse.

The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of Teke and the other guys telling Ms. Winslow personal stories.

“Stupid high school stories,” he explains, maybe taking my silence for judgment of him.

I grunt.

“I don’t give a crap,” Teke continues, not that I asked. “Let all those f*ckers on the Internet read it. See what I care.”

My gaze rivets onto him. “What f*ckers on the Internet?” None of us have access to the Internet.

“Our stories. They’re going in this journal she’s putting together. The Kingman Journal.”

“To go on the Internet?”

Teke shrugs. “Who’s going to read it?”

I pat my forehead with the cloth, trying not to look like every cell in my brain is buzzing. She’s putting the stories online…for the outside world to read. It’s exactly the break I need.

“Maybe I’d like to write my memoirs,” I say.

“What? You?”

I shrug. “Why the f*ck not?”

“Too late. Class is full.”

“Maybe there’s room for one more.”

Teke gives me a disgusted look because he knows I’ll find a way in.

I put in my earbuds and crank the music, mind spinning.

I wait a day to try to get permission to sign up for the class, until Dixon is on duty. I go up to him at lunch. The newest guards on this wing, they’ll say no to anything because they’re scared *s who don’t want to look soft. The old-time guards want to break your balls. But a guy like Dixon, he’s been around enough that he’s done establishing his cred, but he hasn’t put in enough years to erase the hope that people can better themselves.

He eyes me under his tan cap. “You suddenly want to take a class? You up to something?”

I shrug.

“An English class. You want to take an English class.”

“What? I read. You’ve seen me reading.” I know he has.

He twists his lips and pulls out his iPad. Every guard has one now. He turns it so I can’t see and slides his thumb across the screen a few times. Maybe he feels protective of poor Ms. Winslow. Maybe he sees what I see—a woman so carefully put together, she’s just begging to be messed with. But that’s the last thing on my mind. I’m planning to be a star student.

“Guidelines say twelve to sixteen.” He looks up. “I’m seeing sixteen. And it’s already started.”

“You can’t stick another in? Maybe ask her…” Because guidelines are made to broken. Like rules. Like people.

He looks back down. “What about modern lit? That one’s not full.”

“I’m more interested in contemporary memoir,” I say. That’s Ms. Winslow’s sixty-four-dollar name for the class. Contemporary memoir.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I wait. If he asks her, she’ll say yes, and we both know it.

When you’re inside, everything has a certain value, and if you want it, you have to trade for it or fight for it. Cigarettes, protection, information, fresh air. If this guard was a fellow prisoner, I could strong-arm him a different way. But he’s a guard, and so we bargain.

“Fifty bucks…”

“Guidelines say sixteen students,” he says.

Damn. “A hundred.” It’s all I have.

He shakes his head. No.

This is dangerous. He knows I want it bad. He smells it—the guards have a sixth sense like that. But I have to get in. Teachers like Ms. Winslow don’t last long; I’m betting The Kingman Journal won’t make it past the first issue. And I need to put a little something in that issue.

I pull my iPod out and slap it onto his desk. My music. It took me months to save for the thing. Even more to buy a few good songs from the shit selection they have at the canteen. No Internet, remember? Well, that’s about to change.

Dixon pulls out the jack and takes the iPod, leaving me with the earbuds. And just like that, I’m in.





Chapter Three




Abigail


The English department hallway smells like dust and aging paper. I breathe it in, and my heart rate slows. This is a far cry from the cold, gray prison.