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I told myself all of this, but it was no use as my body wasn’t listening to me as I lifted it off the rail.

Christ, it was warm. I couldn’t think of a single explanation for that beyond the obvious one, which was that it had come off his body a very short time ago and been hung there behind my coat.

But how?

How had it been put there only moments before I arrived, past a dozen officers and a locked gate, by somebody who knew exactly which locker was mine?

Because it hadn’t been him. It couldn’t have been. He was behind three sets of locked doors and a wing full of uniforms, which meant one of those uniforms had done this for him.

But what was worse, it smelled of him.

I knew that because I stupidly raised it to my nose and breathed in, like the insane woman I was. It also didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t just the shirt now in my hands that carried his scent but so did my coat. I had never allowed myself to think back to the way he smelled, but as the scent hit me a second time, so with it came the triggered memories of yesterday.

Clean skin and soap and something underneath it, warm and male and specific, and my stomach turned over in exactly the way it had in the dark of my apartment at one o’clock that morning. But as I held it clutched to my chest a second time, I heard the crinkle of paper and realized that wasn’t all he had left me.

I pulled it back and shook the material slightly, enough to allow for cheap prison-issue paper to float to the floor. The kind they give prisoners for letters home, this one written in a hand I had never seen before. It was beautiful. That is the only honest word for it. Elegant, looping, unhurried script from a hand that had been taught properly, and it was somehow worse coming from him than a haunting scrawl would have been.

I found my legs refused to work anymore, so I deflated onto the bench before opening it up and reading what he had left for me.

‘My Dear Little Nurse,

It seems unfair that I have a piece of you and you have nothing of me.

Now you do.

I see they have given you something to wear around your neck. Good. I would rather you felt safe when my hands can’t touch you.

As for my shirt, use it however you need and on the nights you can’t sleep. I already know what your hands do when you think of me, little nurse.

After all, I enjoyed breathing you in, with my hand around my cock and your smell in my lungs, as I came thinking of your mouth. So, consider my shirt as the other half of the trade. Use it the way I have used yours.

Until next time, my beautiful prey.’

My heart felt like it was trying to claw its way up my throat. I read it three times with my hand clamped over my mouth to stop any sound that may escape. Now whether it would have been a gasp of horror or a shameful moan, I didn’t know but I wasn’t going to risk it.

He had pleasured himself while smelling my scrubs. His own fist around his cock while a piece of me was pressed to his face. Suddenly, the memory of when he rubbed the material all over me had new meaning. As for his assumption that I was going to do the same thing with his shirt or speculating that I had already found pleasure when thinking of him, my mind didn’t go to horror like it should have.

No…

It only fed the dangerous hunger.

14

A SOUVENIR OF MY OWN

ANNA

Ididn’t take it home.

Of everything I did that week, that was the one decision I would still stand behind. That I was most proud of. Because I stood in that locker room with his shirt in my hands and every part of me wanted to put it into my bag. Yet with one final shake of my head, I tossed it back in there with no care at all.

And I did it feeling like it was the only power I had left. That was what I told myself while sitting in my car afterward with my hands not quite steady on the wheel. He hadn’t just gotten into my locker, but he had gotten into my head too and what was worse was that he knew it. His letter had said as much.

A letter left in a padlocked locker, telling me he already knew what I did in the dark, and he had done all of it without even being in the same room as me. Which left exactly one thing still mine to decide, and that was whether I carried any of it out through that gate.

So, I didn’t.

I drove home with nothing of his on me instead.