You never forget your first time. That's what everyone always told me. The clumsy awkwardness of it all, the way you felt, and how you... never had any fucking clue what you were doing. They always made it sound like such an embarrassing time, and it was a bit, considering I came twice, and spent maybe fifteen minutes inside her at most, but what they could never explain was how liberated you felt after. That might sound ironic, coming from someone locked up in federal prison for the next two years, but it was true. I felt like the world had opened up to me in a way I never considered before. I soon realized though, it wasn't the sex that made me feel like that. The sex was amazing, even if I felt like I'd underperformed, but there was something more than that. The sex was, to me - besides the most powerfully intimate act I could imagine, with the most beautiful woman I'd ever known - indisputable proof that despite everything against us, there was a future where Chloe and I could actually be together.
I wanted that future. It was all I could think about. Everything and everyone else seemed to fall by the wayside. Chloe had captured my heart, and after the hour or so we spent together in the library, I felt like I was a different person. If I was infatuated with her before, then the transcendent experience we'd shared had done nothing to sate me. She was on my mind day and night, and whenever I was near her, my heart rate seemed to jump. Even hearing that the new fancy lawyer my father had asked to look over my case was willing to take it on, that felt almost secondary to the many things I wanted to do with Chloe, and to Chloe, and... well you get the picture. I wanted her again. I wanted her badly. That promise of next time kept me in a near-permanent state of excitement. What's more, I knew she felt the same way. I don't know how exactly. I couldn't be 100% certain, but it was just how she smiled at me, whenever she saw me. It was different from her usual smile. There was just the slightest hint of a smirk, and her eyes would soften slightly when she looked at me.
Unfortunately, opportunities for intimacy were exceptionally rare. The library had seemed like a safe bet, given the secluded location up on the first floor of the admin block, the lack of staff and inmate presence during the dinner hour, and the broken camera, but it wasn't a sure thing. We'd made plans to rendezvous there two more times when she was posted there during dinner, but both times, other people were present. I stayed in the library though, just talking with Chloe, reading, and entertaining Goebbels, the cat. Neither Chloe nor I knew the cat's name, and so Fred - a 59 year old guy who murdered an FBI agent back in 1985 - had told us his name, as well as how he got it. Apparently about seven years ago, he'd been named after the Nazi chief propagandist by one of the skinheads who first started feeding him. And so after some cursory training, he didn't answer to any other name. Sure enough, calling the name Goebbels caused the much-beloved nine year old mackerel tabby to perk up.
"Didn't anyone else give him a different name at the time?" Chloe had asked, midway through the cat rubbing up against her legs.
Fred laughed. "A few guys did at first, until they realized he was neutered, and then they figured it was actually a pretty good name."
It took me a moment to get it, but when I did, it got a chuckle out of me. Chloe didn't get it though, and so I had to explain that it was a reference to an old soldier song. Specifically, one that made fun of various Nazi leaders for having missing or deformed testicles. That earned a good laugh from her too, and so instead of rutting like rabbits that evening, we talked for nearly an hour with a murderer who'd been in prison since the Reagan administration. I couldn't imagine being here for nearly forty years. He'd beat the chair somehow, and instead, had been given fifty years. The way he put it, he only had a decade to go, and his brother still wrote to him every few months, so it wasn't too bad. I found that insane. If I had to serve a decade, let alone five, it would certainly feel like a death sentence. Supposedly, he was eligible for parole, as he was sentenced back in '86, and federal parole was only abolished a year later. I wasn't sure how many more years he had to serve before he was eligible, or whether he was eligible already, but given he'd spent nearly two thirds of his life locked up, I had to wonder if he even wanted to get out. What was there for him if he did? A world so vastly unlike the one he once knew, it would leave him struggling to make sense of it.
Chloe and I didn't get busy that night, but talking to Fred and entertaining the cat - who'd only just started warming to me in recent weeks - didn't feel like time wasted. The other time we had planned to meet up was a dud as well, but this time it was much less interesting. Victor, the elderly resident librarian, was staying late to finish reorganizing a bunch of shelves. I knew him a little, as he was only a few doors down from my new cell, and I felt like I was being lazy just sitting about pretending to read whilst a seventy-something inmate with more hair in his ears than on his head was doing all the work, so I ended up offering to help. And so that night, instead of spending the evening entertaining carnal desires with Chloe, or even chatting with old-timers like Fred - who, despite being a murderer, was some of the most amicable company you could find in here - I was moving books around for Victor. I tried to act like I was happy to do it, but I think in reality, I just hoped we'd get done quickly, and he'd decide to head back down and leave Chloe and I with enough time to get down and dirty. We weren't that lucky though, and so Chloe ended up just watching him and I work, trying not to appear too disappointed.
It was nearly three weeks before we were able to meet up again, on Christmas Eve of all days, when practically all non-essential prison staff were at home for the holidays. That meant the warden, assistant warden, the counsellor, and a lot of administrators were gone, leaving some places unoccupied. Unoccupied, and in the case of the counsellor's office, fairly secluded, being in the same building as the library, but on the ground floor, right at the far end of the corridor accessible to inmates. It was also basically always locked, but when the person you're meeting up with is a CO, a locked door isn't much of an obstacle. The only obstacle was the camera in that corridor, the camera that would see the two of us enter a blind spot right at the end of the corridor, and not come out for a long time.
That camera was always recording, yes, but was it always watched? Chloe didn't think so, given she knew the CCTV controllers. She knew who would be watching what banks of cameras on what day, and she also knew that many of the controllers would be very bitter about not getting Christmas off, even with the double pay. Would they be watching cameras, and take note of a CO escorting an inmate past a random camera in the admin block, or would they be watching the TV in the corner of the room? The very same TV that should always be tuned to the local news station, but just so happened to have a little amazon fire stick plugged into the back of it. Chloe was fairly certain that with the warden and most of the supervisors home with their families, and with little to no chance of being caught slacking off, they'd be watching the TV.
We'd been waiting for this for three weeks, discussing meeting places covertly when we were sure nobody was around to overhear us. Finding a place to talk without being heard was one thing, finding a place to quickly exchange a kiss without being seen was another, and finding a place where we could be sure we were safe to get naked was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that. It was mostly Chloe though. I could be found naked somewhere, and while it would raise questions, and probably catch me a write-up, depending on where it was, it wasn't the end of the world. If she was caught with so much as her fly undone in my vicinity though, it could be catastrophic. The last thing I wanted was to get her in trouble, and I knew if what we were doing got out, she'd be out of a job before the day was done.
I'd considered ways we could get busy without having to undress totally, but whenever I imagined just ducking into a closet with her and slipping her pants down for a quickie, it felt wrong. I don't know why, but it felt... cold, and detached. It felt like it would be void of real intimacy, especially because for it to work, she'd probably have to be facing away from me, and that would just make it feel all the more impersonal. What could sex be, if not personal? It was probably the most personal and intimate thing for a man and woman to do together. The idea of diluting the experience by not being face to face, not seeing her bare, and not being bare before her felt dishonest. The idea of that also made me think about that awful night in the rec room cupboard, and I did not want for us to get together in some dingy closet somewhere and remind her of that harrowing night. I didn't want to miss out on hearing her soft, breathy moans as we became one, or seeing the way her eyelids fluttered ever so slightly when I managed to, for just a fleeting moment, find the right spot, the one that drove her wild.
While finding a place where we could be sure of absolute privacy and comfort was difficult, I didn't suggest anything else, and nor did she, because anything else was unthinkable. So that's how on Christmas Eve, we found ourselves kissing passionately on that stupid sofa/chair sunbed-looking thing that seemed to be a requirement in almost every therapist's office in existence. We had almost two hours, all to ourselves. I was missing the special Christmas Eve meal, but Chloe had two hours where all she had to do was do a single walk around the grounds. She'd done it already, logged the patrol, and now she had nothing to do until the end of her shift, an hour before lockdown at ten. Most other COs doing that rotation would usually head back to the locker room, grab their phones to sit in the staff room and then slack off until they clocked out. So nobody was expecting her anywhere, and we were expecting nobody to come anywhere near this building now, especially since the library had closed early.
So when we got through the door and the first thing she did was strip her belt and vest off and drag me over to the... chaise, I think it was called, though it looked a lot more like a sofa with an armrest missing and a slight curve to one end. Regardless, when we sat down on the... sofa, wrapped ourselves around each other, and immediately started a battle of tongues, I didn't have a worry in the world. I did notice one thing though, she hadn't locked the door. I broke off our kiss to mention it to her and she just shook her head.
"It doesn't lock from the inside." She said bluntly, before leaning back in to kiss me.
I pulled back though, concerned now. "What do you mean it doesn't lock from the inside? So, it's unlocked right now?"
She sighed. "No, it's- it's like a hotel door, you need the key to get in from outside no matter what, but it can always be opened from the inside. It's so you can't get locked in." She explained.
"But doesn't that mean you can lock yourself out, if you left the keys in here?" I asked, curious now.
She gave me a dry look. "You have no idea how many times I've had to open this because Suzanne locked herself out."
I grinned. "A lot?"
"Every. Fucking. Week." Chloe replied wearily. "Without fail."
I laughed. "Suzanne is nice! You're acting like it's the same as cleaning out a septic tank or something."
Chloe snorted. "She is not!" She shot back indignantly. "She is the most dishonest woman in the fucking world. I have no idea how she even got that job!"
I couldn't help but laugh now. I'd not had much experience with Suzanne, the prison counsellor, except for shortly after the beatdown in my cell, and then once or twice after I was brought back from the hospital. She wasn't much help, in my opinion, but then again, I didn't exactly open up to her. She seemed nice enough though, and she told me about the decade or so she was a CPS caseworker in New Jersey. She had some wild stories. I mentioned this to Chloe and she just scoffed.
