But it was enough to make me remember a conversation I’d had with another prisoner not too long ago.
What I wouldn’t do for a goddamn Snickers.
I’d told that to the man in front of me, all the while I’d been very much aware of the guard at my back.
Blaise.
Goddamn, but she was surprising.
I picked up the snack size Snickers bar and ate it whole.
CHAPTER 3
Whatever. I’m getting cheese fries.
-Blaise’s secret thoughts
BLAISE
Six months later
My heart was hammering as I made my way on shift.
Today I would be in the same unit as Sin.
It didn’t happen all that often.
In fact, it happened so rarely—once a month—that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to have butterflies until I saw him.
The moment I did thirty minutes later, I felt my heart rate go from controllable levels to you might die if you allow this to keep up levels.
Licking my lips, I tried not to let either my attraction to the man, or my need to see him, show on my face.
And I went to work, patrolling the yard while I surreptitiously watched the man of my dreams work out.
When I’d first gotten into the yard, he’d been running around the fence.
Now he was using the weight bench to lift an unseemly amount of weight.
He had every single plate that could fit onto the bar on it, and he was squatting it like it was featherlight, and not who knew how many hundreds of pounds.
He would squat down, and the unshapely orange pants would finally hug him around his ass, showing off his perfectly formed backside.
I stopped when I realized that in my daydreaming, I’d gotten too close to another guard.
The one that liked me. The one that kept asking me out despite me continuously saying no.
“Drummond.” I nodded as I tried to continue past him.
“Wait, Blaise,” Drummond called as I tried to bolt before he could say anything. “I wanted to ask you something.”
I felt my insides turn to dust.
“What?” I asked, resigned.
“Would you like to go to a wedding with me?” Drummond asked. “It’s next weekend. Formal. I can’t find anyone that wants to go with me. Nobody likes going to formal things.”
That, or maybe they just don’t want to go with you because you give off really weird vibes.
Or maybe that was just me.
Whatever the reason, I was about to turn him down gently when an inmate who’d heard our exchange chimed in.
“Listen,” the inmate drawled as he walked past. Not running like Sin had been, but walking and still looking just as sweaty. “You’ve asked her like a hundred different times to go out with you, and she’s said no every single time. There comes a point where you need to just take the hint. You gross her out. Just like you gross everyone else here out. Take the fucking misery elsewhere, because it’s getting exhausting.”
The inmate started to continue to walk, but Drummond got pissed and shoved him. Right into another inmate that had a touching issue.
That’s when shit degraded.
Fast.
One second, everything was calm and collected, and the next shit just… hit the fan.
Inmates started fighting. Guards started protecting themselves.
And before I could so much as process what the fuck was going on, he was there.
Protecting me once again.
I sighed. “I can handle myself, Sin.”
He backed me up until the fence was at my back, and he was at my front.
And all of his hot, sweaty, I want to put my mouth over every square inch of it body was pressed against me.
His skin was still bare.
He’d taken his shirt off at some point in between when I’d arrived, and when all the fighting had started, and now there were so many inches of bare skin for me to enjoy that I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.
“I know you can,” Sin drawled. “But there are about two hundred men out here pissed off because they’re being caged like animals, and there are about ten of you guards. I don’t want you getting a face full of fist like the creep guard is getting right now.”
Drummond was getting a face full of fist, but he was trading punches with the inmate who’d called him on his shit. He wasn’t being ganged up on by the inmates.
The riot alarm started sounding and shit really hit the fan then.
At one point, shit got so out of hand that even I was starting to get scared.
Men were just… everywhere.
One inmate was using the forty-five-pound weights off the weight bench to bash another inmate in the face. While another one closer to us was using the bar to jab people hard in the biggest body parts, taking them down with one single blow.
Then there was someone all the way across the yard that had what looked to be his shirt around a guard’s neck and he was choking him.