Protection (5 page)

“Shakespeare didn’t know everything,” Gabriel muttered. Cooper’s story sounded authentic. Worse, it felt authentic, in the hidden chambers of Gabriel’s heart. Educated at Oxford by benefit of scholarship and lacking family connections, Joseph Cooper had found himself at the mercy of a well-respected man and paid the price. Two hundred years ago he would have been strung up on some convenient tree branch for his trespasses. Nowadays he was buggered by the British justice system and sent to Wentworth to marry the man with the most cigarettes.

Which is me
, Gabriel thought, ever aware of his tobacco stash, the currency of his world.
Poor trusting bastard who never committed a crime at all. And I reamed his ass like he fucked an entire girls’ academy.

A memory returned to Gabriel, something he’d never confided to anyone. An Easter Sunday when he was six years old and his grandmother had surprised him with a fuzzy yellow duckling. Gabriel had been enchanted. He’d adored the duckling’s softness, its orange beak, its intelligent black eyes. For half the day he’d fed it, carried it, talked softly to it. Then the MacKennas had gathered for the afternoon meal. Afterward, six-year-old Gabriel had forgotten his duckling. Caught up in some impromptu game with the other boys – jumping over the back step while slamming the door – he hadn’t expected the duckling to dart into the kitchen at the wrong moment. Gabriel, the most vigorous player, had slammed the door on the duckling’s neck.

He’d cried and cried until his Da, impatient with weeping girls and infuriated by weeping boys, had threatened to peel the skin off his ass. Choking back his tears, Gabriel had prayed for God to heal the duckling. Gabriel had never meant to hurt it; he would have gladly maimed himself in penance. It didn’t matter. The duckling had died and Gabriel’s Da had made him bury it, saying, “Boy, you’re too great a fool to be entrusted with any living thing.”

“Oh, Christ,” Gabriel muttered, seeing Cooper curled up and weeping on the shower floor.

“Go ahead.” Cooper sounded defiant.

“What?”

“Call me a liar. Isn’t that what you said? Every inmate claims innocence?”

Gabriel finished his Pall Mall, dropping the dog-end and grinding it beneath his heel. “When I came here, I said I’d never turn prison queer. I bit off Carl Werth’s dick and that was the last of any man trying to force me. But turns out that was only half the battle. You can only imagine fucking women for so long before your body needs relief. So I took a girl – Lonnie, the blond from the infirmary. You know him?”

Cooper nodded.

“Pretty lad. Brains of a gnat. I never did have him,” Gabriel said. “Was saving myself, don’t you know, like a good Catholic boy awaiting the altar. Awaiting a man who deserved what he got. So I could fuck him into next year and not give a damn what it did to him. And being the sterling judge of character I am,” Gabriel forced a laugh, “I picked the only innocent man this godforsaken place has ever seen.”

Cooper’s gaze dropped. He hugged himself, trembling, fighting back more tears with all his strength.

“Cooper. Joseph. Did – did I hurt you so bad?”

The twist of those red lips was answer enough. Gabriel blew out a sigh. Of all the sins he’d committed, venal or mortal, when he was most ashamed, Gabriel remembered that duckling’s neck, crushed by a slamming door.

“Fair enough. Joseph,” Gabriel said, wishing the other man would look at him. “Some wrongs can’t be undone. I wronged you in the showers. I know that now. I’ll never use you that way again. But we can start over as cellmates. I meant what I said about protecting you, Joseph. I—”

“Joey.”

“What?”

“My name. It’s Joey.” The younger man let out another bitter laugh. “You’ve had everything else from me. Might as well have that, too. Everyone calls me Joey.”

“Joey.” Before he knew he would do it, Gabriel tilted the other man’s chin up and pressed their closed lips together. It was just as he’d fantasized – an electric shock, a jolt from his mouth right to the tip of his cock. But the kiss was one-sided. Joey’s lips didn’t part. His whole body went rigid, eyes shut tight as if in pain.

“Joey.” Gabriel pulled back. “Look at me.”

Joey obeyed. Gabriel saw the other man’s eyes in the mirror-reflected light. They were blank with terror.

“Joey,” Gabriel said again, trying to curtail the emotion in his voice. “What I did in the showers won’t happen again. I mean it. But the hard fact is, I’m only human. The price of protection is simple. You have to let me touch you. Kiss you. Not every time the lights go out. Not every night of the week. But – enough.”

Joey didn’t react. Didn’t agree. Didn’t resist. Looking into those wide gray eyes, Gabriel had the sudden suspicion the other man was fading, slipping away.

“Joey!” Gabriel shook the other man until he jerked free.

“Stop!”

“It’s no good if you go away inside.” Gabriel knew he had no right to be angry or frustrated, but he preferred both sensations to abject shame. “When I touch you, when I kiss you, you have to know it’s me.”

Joey covered his face with his hands. He had nothing left to give, Gabriel realized. If he pushed any harder, the younger man might break altogether.

“Away with you.”

“W-what?” Joey asked, returning from far away.

Gabriel pointed at the top bunk. “Tonight’s kiss is paid up. Away with you. And not another peep ’til morning.”

* * *

S
ince his realization at age fifteen that he would be a physician, Joey Cooper had read everything he could get his hands on concerning anatomy, biology and pharmacology. But after his sentencing, he’d given away most of his possessions, including his science books. As for the prison library’s nonfiction stacks, he avoided them. Daily life held enough bitter reminders. But unable to survive without books, Joey had thrown himself headlong into fiction, choosing novels set in remote times or places. Within two weeks he’d read
David Copperfield
,
The Last of the Mohicans
,
Cimarron
,
The Sea Hawk
and
The Good Earth
.

“Hard road for those Chinks,” Gabriel had commented when he saw Joey with
The Good Earth
. “My grandmother used to say it’s no life fit for pigs, being a lass. After reading that, I think she nailed it.”

Joey hadn’t known how to reply. Whatever traits he’d imagined in Gabriel, compulsive reading wasn’t among them. During those early days Joey never spoke to Gabriel unless he had no choice. But protracted silence during the hours of confinement was hard to bear. And Gabriel was surprisingly easy to talk to, quick-witted and intelligent. More than shrewd, as Joey first assumed, Gabriel was self-educated in many areas. He knew the Bible like a seminarian, quoting it chapter and verse, and could recite several poems from memory.

“Ah, but I’m a man who likes the sound of his own voice,” Gabriel said when Joey was startled by his word-perfect rendition of “The Tyger.” “A poem’s no poem at all ’til you deliver it with an Irish lilt.”

Joey’s first two weeks under Gabriel’s protection took some getting used to. Few inmates spoke to Joey without first receiving a silent assent from Gabriel. No liberties, not even joking offers or lascivious remarks, were tolerated. One day a G-block Lovely named Petrocelli had offered Joey “something sweet to suck on.” Before Joey could decide if he should feign deafness or hurl back an insult, Gabriel steered Petrocelli to one side, talking quietly to the man while Gabriel’s F-block cohorts hovered just out of earshot. To Joey’s relief, no physical violence ensued. But it was a very near thing. White with fury, Petrocelli had shambled off. Then Gabriel reappeared at Joey’s side with fresh perspiration on the back of his neck and damp patches beneath each armpit.

“What did you say to him?”

“Never you mind.” Gabriel sounded unconcerned. “Fetch your supper and think no more on it.”

The story of Gabriel’s conviction came to Joey in multiple forms, none of them dovetailing sufficiently explain why Gabriel was serving two life sentences, yet hadn’t gone to the gallows. Joey was curious, yet refused to ask. Asking was expected. Inside Wentworth, asking was the universal connection: hearing a man’s story of how his personal liberty had been lost, squandered or in Joey’s case, stolen. But Joey couldn’t make that ritual gesture. The moment he asked Gabriel how he’d come to Wentworth, he might as well have declared it was no hard feelings between them, water under the bridge, a bad moment in the showers and best forgotten. And Joey wouldn’t do that. It was one thing, answering a direct question about a novel, or a meal, or who would shave first. But the idea of behaving as if he and Gabriel were friendly, much less friends, made Joey want to jerk the blade out of a safety razor and open his own wrists.

And maybe he’d do that before long, anyway. But not just yet.

Joey, expected to sit beside Gabriel during common time, learned to endure the hand on his knee, the smiles, the quick kiss when the guards’ eyes were elsewhere. Joey had thought it over endlessly, weighed the cost and decided in order to survive Wentworth, he’d have to accept conditions that would have been unbearable in his former life. After the rape – except he couldn’t call it by that word, it made him feel too weak; inside his head he simply called it
what happened
– Gabriel’s little ways of publicly declaring ownership seemed small indeed. Joey had needed four sutures after what happened. Then the first time he shit he burst two and had to have them redone. The humiliation of lying on his belly and letting Dr. Harper repair his intimate injury had pained Joey almost as much the memory of Gabriel forcing himself inside.

“You’re too pretty for your own good,” Dr. Harper had said, stripping off his gloves and tossing them in the rubbish bin. “Let me give you a piece of advice, Cooper. Next time it happens, bear down instead of clenching tight. I don’t enjoy putting in these sutures any more than you enjoy receiving them.”

Dr. Harper hadn’t meant to be cruel. Neither had he meant to be kind. He was simply imparting information. That first night locked in a cell with Gabriel, Joey had been too shell-shocked to think rationally. But afterward, the logic was simple. The most dangerous man in Wentworth had offered him protection. Joey would not be beaten, raped or killed by the other prisoners. Gabriel had even promised not to revisit what happened, but on that score, Joey didn’t believe him. Sooner or later, Gabriel would expect all the sexual repayment Joey could give. Still, the conclusion was obvious: appease one man, remain alive and uninjured. Or anger that man, make an enemy of him and take on all of Wentworth in the bargain.

To Joey, the greatest irony was, if it hadn’t happened, if he’d met Gabriel during common time and received the exact same offer, he probably would have accepted. Joey had never been squeamish about sex. And given all the male advances he’d fought off in his boyhood – including the vicar, the green grocer and a professor of English literature – homosexuality was no foreign concept. Joey had long ago decided if he were ever seriously tempted, he’d try it. But there had always been plenty of girls available to keep him busy. And the men bold enough to try and seduce him were much older, convinced they could buy him with fine dining, liquor and gifts. Joey had felt sure any real temptation would come from someone close to his own age, well built and attractive. And if not for what happened, Gabriel would have fit the bill.

Gabriel was six feet tall, compactly muscular and handsome. That was a surprise, that Wentworth’s resident devil could look so angelic when he willed it. His dark brown hair was always neat, never overdue for the prison barber. His hazel eyes could be soulful or soulless, depending on his mood. Gabriel’s working-class background, coupled with his strong native intelligence and adoration of the English language, made him all the more compelling. Once upon a time, Gabriel would have been exactly the sort of man Joey might have experimented with, even made love with. But after what happened …

Until that morning in the showers, Joey had never thought of himself as a coward. He’d grown up fatherless in a village that never let him forget it, taking odd jobs to supplement his mother’s income as a laundress. Sometimes the other children teased him, throwing his natural father’s name – Lionel Coates – at him, calling Joey a bastard and his mother a whore. It didn’t help that Joey grew up so closely resembling Mr. Coates’s daughter, Virginia, they might have been twins. The similarity led to a fresh line of harassment – village children pretending to mistake Joey for Virginia, asking why he was in trousers instead of a frock. During his early life Joey developed a knack for sensing which insults should be ignored and which required a rebuttal or a swift physical response. Decent with his fists, he also learned there were worse things than being knocked about, and that friendships frequently arose from scuffles. By his teens Joey was well liked throughout the village. No one teased him about his natural father or his pretty face anymore. And for his part he learned to hold no grudges, not because he wasn’t tempted but because they were utterly without value.