The Paper Swan(79)

“Nice scarf,” mumbled Damian.

Monique was wearing a bright floral scarf around his head and sporting a pair of dainty pearl earrings.

“Bitch please,” replied Monique without lifting his eyes from his spaghetti. “You ain’t ever getting a piece of this action.”





“DAMIAN, YOU HAVE A VISITOR.” A correctional officer stopped by the Release and Receiving area where Damian and Monique were painting a mural.

“Praise the lord.” Monique raised his palms to the ceiling. “Take this useless piece of shit away. He’s been messing with my field of corn.”

“It’s corn,” said Damian, putting his brush away. “Not some phallic representation of corn.”

He followed the guard through heavy steel doors with plexiglass windows. Each door buzzed a warning, opened with a puff of compressed air, and slid shut behind them with a definitive fffphut.

Damian walked into the visiting room and looked for Rafael. In the year that he had been there, Rafael had been his only visitor. Damian monitored his business from behind bars, and Rafael followed through with his directives. Sometimes they sat out in the adjoining patio, which had patches of green grass, and caught up on their lives. Damian was going nowhere, but Rafael’s visits gave him glimpses of the outside world.

“They told me no strapless or halter tops. And nothing more than two inches above the knee.” Rafael was always ribbing Damian about his unlikely friendship with Monique.

Damian wondered what wisecracks Rafael would make that day, but there was no sign of his friend. Half of the little seating areas in the room were occupied by visiting kids and families. He glanced at the guard manning the podium.

“Outside,” said the guard.

Damian stepped onto the patio and froze. Sitting on one of the bolted-down benches was Skye, more beautiful, more real, more everything than he remembered. She had her back to him and he felt a pang of pure agony because her hair was almost at her waist now, because he had missed a whole ticker tape of moments—what it looked like when it reached her shoulders, when it grazed past her breasts, when it curled into the hollow of her back. The sparse, soft down of hair on her arms was almost silver-white where the sun fell on it. It gave her an aura of brightness that lit up every dark, dusty corner of his heart.

He would have stood there indefinitely, paralyzed by the sight of Skye, but one of the guards prodded him along. Damian stood behind her for a moment, trying to find the words, when she turned around, sensing his presence.

Skye had been expecting something different. A small booth, a glass barrier, a phone through which they would communicate.

Distance.

She had been expecting distance.

She had replayed the scene in her mind, over and over. Fluorescent bulbs overhead, a closet-like space, surveillance cameras monitoring their interaction. She would sit down. He would be brought in. That’s what she had envisioned, that’s what she had prepared herself for. But there was no glass between them, nothing to confine the raw emotions crackling between them, nothing to contain the pull Damian still had on her.

“Sit!” one of the guards called out, breaking their bittersweet scrutiny of each other.

Damian slid onto the bench across from her. A small, rectangular table separated them.

“I—”

“You—”

They stopped at the same time.

“You first,” said Damian, thinking of another time they had interrupted each other, and the mad kisses that had followed in a dark hallway.

“They told me I was on your approved list when I asked to visit,” said Skye.

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

They stopped talking because they were too busy looking. Skye had braced herself for the worst, but Damian was a survivor. He had survived El Charro and Caboras, and he was surviving prison. If anything, his chest was broader and his shirt hinted at muscles that had grown bigger and stronger. But his face was leaner and his eyes were different. They had shifted yet again. Still black, yes, but with the darkness of loss, of possibilities embraced and then turned to ash.

“How . . .” She swallowed, trying to hold up under the intensity of his gaze. “How have you been?”

“You look good,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her, as if the sight of her was overwhelming all of his senses. You look so, so good.

He wasn’t talking about the fact that she’d put on some weight, or that her breasts were rounder under the long-sleeved blouse, or that her cheeks had filled in from the last time he had seen her in court. He meant that she looked good to him, no matter where, no matter when.