“I have to go.” He groaned. I didn’t want him to leave. These precious moments were few and far between.

“I hate this.” I lamented.

“I hate it more.” Cohen kissed me until my lips bruised. I knew in my heart there was more he hadn’t been telling me, and for whatever foolish reason I trusted him. When he fixed his suit, he straightened out my scrubs and fixed my hair.

“Soon?” I asked.

“I’ll see you soon,” he promised and that was that.

We lingered at the doorway peppering kisses as if they could solve our problems. I knew getting that information was the only way no matter how much Cohen opposed the idea with good reason.

Some days I felt like the target on my back grew tenfold since my incarceration. If people only knew about us my days would be numbered, literally. I wouldn’t survive the onslaught of angry inmates eager to take down a pet, a rat, an insider cheating them. I swore people could tell he’d fucked me by the way my hair stood up on end and the way my attitude changed. Having Cohen inside me gave me a confidence I hadn’t expected and a little jaunt in my step. When my shift at the library was over, Officer Pettigrew returned to walk me back to my cell.

“There’s a group scheduled for the showers in five minutes if you want to go.” She said looking me up and down. Was it obvious I had sex? We didn’t talk much so I nodded and gathered what I needed for the shower. My shampoo and flip-flops were essential.

“Are you sure about this?” Stopping, I turned back to Officer Pettigrew who looked bored. She urged me inside with a shrug of her shoulders and a hand resting on the holster of her taser. I didn’t have a reason to not believe her. She’d done a few of my room inspections and had always been decent with me.

“Where is everyone else?” There should have been other women in here, but the stalls were empty.

“They’re coming from the recreation room. Looks like you’ve got a few minutes by yourself. You want to wait or what?” She questioned impatiently. I supposed the privacy would be nice, rare and fleeting like a unicorn.

“No, I don’t want to wait. Thank you.” I told her and she grunted walking away. I could hear the other women coming and quickly got under the shower. The hot water never lasted long enough to feel relaxing as it pounded down onto the white and yellow chipped tiles from rusted chrome shower-heads. The prison was easily twice that of my nineteen years with everything stuck several decades in the past. The muscles of my back, legs, and shoulders were sore from the sex on the library table, but I felt fulfilled for the first time in a long while.

This thing with Cohen could be fleeting at best. I didn’t know what was happening from day to day, and I let my thoughts run freely, ignoring the negative ones, and letting them flow down the drain with the water that sluiced over my body. Out with the old, in with the new, wasn’t that the saying?

I rubbed the shampoo in my hair, making it foamy and fragrant. I thought about fields of strawberries in dark dirt and juicy summer fruit, which made my mouth water. Sadness filled me, thinking I would miss the summer being incarcerated. There would be no country fruit to pick outside the city limits to bring back to make tarts and pies like I did with my mother. There would be no beach trips to Galveston in my shitty car with my unreliable co-workers when the bar closed for its annual week off. There were so many things I didn’t realize I would miss. I could give up coffee, chocolate, and any number of things, but the appreciation for things like clean underwear and sleeping a full night through were new novelties.

A sound inside the shower room startled me. A door slammed shut followed by an eerie silence. I shut the water off with a high screech from the pipes and grabbed my towel. My red flip-flops squeaked and flapped against the water and floor leaving wet prints on the tile. A chill made goosebumps on my legs as water droplets ran down the length of them pooling underneath me.

“Hello?” No sound came back except my own voice and heartbeats. I leaned out in the bathroom where I was alone. Hair rose on the back of my neck as I fought back the wave of terror. I smelled the cloying scent of roses before I saw her face.

“If it isn’t the bitch Benedicta… the little tattletale.” Evangelina and three of her Red Tribe members took up the space between me and the closed door of the showers. They circled me like sharks going in for the kill blocking me from leaving. They paced around me in a dizzying crescendo.

I scanned the room for an exit but the only one remained blocked.

I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Where’s the guard? Where’s Officer Pettigrew?” I asked trying to see beyond them. A guard was supposed to be here always.

That was the rule.

How quickly I’d forgotten few rules were followed inside.

“Bitch got paid, she don’t care about some prison pussy.” Meaning the Red Tribe bribed her. I choked down my fear. The only way out of this was to fight. I wasn’t a good fighter, I wasn’t even a decent fighter. All my moves were formed in desperation and four against one looked like shitty odds not in my favor. The only ending here ended in injury or death.

I wrapped the towel tighter around my body. It would be the only protection between me and whatever they had on them. My mind prepared to fight my way out of here while my physical body tensed. I hadn’t been in a fight before with the exception of that day in the yard. No schoolyard frays, no hair-pulling throw down in hallways. I was fresh blood, and Evangelina and her crew had it out for me.

“What do you want, Evangelina?” Her eyes narrowed. I wasn’t supposed to be asking the questions, but too bad.

“I want the stupid snitch cut.” She looked at her girls snarling a crooked tooth smile before tilting her head down at me in disgust.

“I’m not a snitch.” Not yet at least.

“Evie girl, she got some brass balls this one.” One of her thug sidekicks laughed.

“I bet she misses real balls. You see the way she watches the warden.” The middle one full of revelations commented.

“Bitch is heat for him.” The smaller of the bunch said taking a threatening step toward me.

I let the comments go hoping to avoid this escalating to no avail.

Evangelina grabbed me by the hair and pulled me close to her face, spitting words. “I can smell his cum dripping from inside you.”

I should have been shocked by her vulgar words. I wasn’t. I wouldn’t put it past her to have paid everyone in here on our block to report my every movement to her. There was a lifeline inside the prison and communication was the currency. You were either in the know or about to screwed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I filed the lie away easy, protecting myself as best I could. No one was coming to save me.

“You’ve been a real pain in the ass since you got here, chica. You and that other puta snitch we put in the hospital.”

“What?” I had no idea what Maris had to do with this.

“Didn’t your warden dick tell you she wasn’t coming back?” Evangelina cackled and her minions echoed.

“Maris?”

“Bitch was a word whore spreading her lips to the warden.” Shock coursed through me. What? That meant that all this time Cohen had someone working for him on the inside. He knew. He knew about Maris. He knew Maris was the snitch and she was the one who must have gotten Hector in trouble.

I stepped back, my ass against the wall while they stood their ground taunting me. “What does that have to do with me?”

“Grant was supposed to get rid of you. Dumb shit couldn’t do that right.” She spit at my feet the fluid hitting my thigh making me cringe. It was disgusting. I didn’t know anything about Grant or his plans except that somehow I got fucked by getting his unwanted attention twice now.

“Well Grant’s dead, so fat lot of good it did him after all.” I sneered. I was done being their punching bag.

Evangelina stepped forward with menace in her eyes when one of her gang-girls spoke. “And now Hector is in custody no thanks to this rat.” She poked me in the shoulder with her sharp nail nearly breaking the skin.

“I’m not a rat.” My shoulders hunched, I focused on doing what I needed to do to get out of here. My heart and head pounded blocking out the dripping faucets and the cool air that puckered my skin like chicken leather.

“Eye for an eye, don’t you think?” She snickered and her bitches moved in, hitting, punching, and kicking me to the hard floor. Everything hurt as I curled up in a ball trying to protect myself. I screamed. I cried. I tried to fight to back but I was no match against hardened girls with a vendetta.

Banging on the door made them pause for a second. They would kill me, given half the chance.

“Shit, those guards are supposed to be changing shifts right now.” Evangelina hissed.

“Didn’t you pay that female guard enough?” One yelled.

The banging on the door became louder, like someone or something was trying to break it down. All I could focus on was keeping myself conscious so I could tell whoever was coming what happened.

“The south entrance at the laundry isn’t supposed to be monitored right now. Fuck the shipment.” Evangeline scoffed.

“I thought they had the laundry van coming?” I had no idea what her goons were yelling about because each word seemed to be punctuated by a kick or a hit to my body with a heavy sock filled with whatever they could use to hit me with. I covered my head and face while they concentrated their blows on the rest of my body.

I wanted to ask questions, I wanted to coax them, taunt them if I must into dropping more information. I was already on the floor now broken and bloodied, I figured I ought to make it worth it.

The door banged again, and pandemonium filtered into the shower area as guards rushed in to subdue the fight. I lay where I was, unmoving.

Evangelina shouted, feet stomping and slipping in the puddles of water when another guard put her down, handcuffing her. “God damn that Garcia. He screwed us over.”

My last thought before oblivion was that maybe, just maybe that’s what Cohen wanted to know. The rat wasn’t an inmate, it was a guard, that pervert Garcia.