It was too much. I simply couldn't ask for anything else from either of them.
I would merely have to do this on my own.
Worry twisted in my belly as I slipped the card into the clutch that had been mine once upon a time and turned away from the desk, eyeing the door I was supposed to walk through, a guard standing beside it looking bored, his gaze moving over me in a dismissive way I had come to know and accept.
Taking a breath, I pushed my shoulders back and made my way toward him, inwardly hoping my feet wouldn't betray me, wobble on my heels, send me face first to the floor, so unaccustomed they were to heels anymore.
"Don't come back, you hear?" he told me as he opened the door to my freedom.
I forced my feet forward, stepping outside.
Dreary.
That was how one would describe the day.
It was perhaps too much to ask for a bright, sunny day that would warm me, make me think that maybe I did want to do right, act right, get my life on track, never return to the cold halls of the minimum security women's prison that had been my makeshift home since I was eighteen.
A third of my life I had been in those walls.
Somehow, despite the outside world being vast, it felt like it was closing in on me as I forced my legs to carry me out, away, toward the end of the paved drive. My chest tightened. A hand curled around my throat.
It was pure stubbornness that pushed me forward, likely reinforced with the simmering anger that had managed to keep me sane all those years locked up with a revolving door of, well, a mix of nut jobs, general undesirables, and those wrapped up in an endless cycle of incarceration, making them hard and rough around the edges, made them grate on your softer skin.
A horn beeped as I made my way down the street toward the covered bus stop where I knew everyone who saw me board would know I had just been set free, would sit and wonder what I did, would maybe clutch their purses closer, move their children to the inside of the row.
My head turned to find a group of guys giving me knowing eyes and obscene gestures of the oral sex variety, making me sigh out a breath as I turned back away.
Sex - oral or otherwise - was hardly even on my mind. I knew it was different for most of the women inside who sat around and talked about the men they left behind, all the things they planned to do to them the moment they were free. It was a favorite pastime, really. Each tale more sordid and detailed than the last, leaving me a perpetual odd-woman-out.
Which was fine.
Because my plans did involve a man.
But there would be nothing sweet or sexy about it.
It would be rough. Ugly. Violent.
Bloody, even.
Hopefully.
If I had enough rage left.
If I hadn't burned through enough of it while locked up.
And if, well, I had the stomach for it. Which was possibly the most significant factor. I wasn't like the women the other inmates told me about from the medium or maximum security facilities, women who made you afraid to sleep in the bunk with them, women who shaved down their toothbrushes into shivs, women who thirsted for blood like the worst of any men could be known for.
No.
I was the kind of person who felt a bit queasy and had to look away when my big brothers fell out a tree or something and came home bleeding.
But I would harden up.
I had been doing it for years.
I had a feeling I would be doing it for many years to come.
Hard.
And stone cold.
That was what I would need to be to get through this, then through the repercussions afterward.
Eyeing the covered bus stop shelter bench, covered with half decomposed leaves from the past fall - brown and gold and auburn - along with the gritty texture of the salts from the past snow, and a single daddy long legs moving from one end to the other, I moved back outside, leaning against the wall, taking another breath, checking out the schedule, seeing which route I needed to pick from the ticket machine.
It wasn't that I wanted to go back to prison, of course. No one who went in actually wanted to go back once they were free. Sometimes - maybe most of the time - it was just the cycle of poverty or addiction. They couldn't survive on the outside without money, without support. They turned back to the drugs. Or they got desperate and went back to crime to make money to keep a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, clothes on their kids' backs.