Page 154 of Wait for Him

The moment my hands close around her hips and I kiss her back, ten months without another woman catches up with me fast.

My tongue slides against hers, hungry enough that I hear her breath catch, and whatever technical distinction remained between considering the deal and accepting it disappears.

I've just signed an eighty-million-dollar contract with my mouth.

Very professional.

Her fingers grip my lapel, right over the breast pocket where I keep Rose’s card. The guilt hits hard enough that my hands tighten on Rian's hips to keep them from shaking.

She pulls away first. Her breathing is a little quicker now, lipstick smudged at one corner, but otherwise she looks infuriatingly composed.

"Congratulations, Marcus." She straightens my collar with two quick tugs. "You've just made the smartest deal of your career."

Then she climbs off my lap and reaches for her wine.

Rose

"Are you sure about this?" I ask myself out loud.

That's where I am in my healing journey now. Conversations with myself. Self-reflection. Self-accountability.

"Self," I say to myself, "we're doing this."

"Ma'am."

I look up to the burly security officer waving a hand at me from the other side of the metal detector.

"While I'm glad you've convinced yourself there, can you walk through the metal detector, please? You're holding up the line."

Right.

Prison.

I take off my backpack, place it in the bin and step through. I only half-listen as she runs me through the rules about where to wait, where to enter the visiting area and the limits on physical contact.

"I won't be touching him," I tell her, probably a little too aggressively. "It's not that kind of visit."

"I don't really care, lady. I'm just giving you the instructions. Walk through that door to your left and wait for your name to be called."

Well.

Good talk.

I've never visited anyone in prison before, and I'm not sure what I expected. Families are everywhere. Kids bored in plastic chairs, a few younger ones running around while their parents repeatedly tell them to sit down. People checking their phones. Guards calling names. Fluorescent lights humming overhead and a constant stream of PA announcements nobody seems to be listening to.

It's disturbingly normal.

I wipe my palms against my jeans for what has to be the fiftieth time.

"Rosalie Bennett for Wesley Finnegan, V82910453."

My heartbeat kicks hard enough that I can feel it in my ears.

I walk to the glass window and hand over my pass and ID. Some absurd part of me wants the woman behind it to look at me. Really look. See what it took to get me through those doors and tell me I'll be okay, that I won't walk back out of here with less of myself than I brought in.

She doesn't even make eye contact.

I'm another visitor. Another name. Another number attached to another inmate.