government. The government officials were also convicted. It was a high sentence for the crime, but the jury had decided to make an example out of Alderidge.
Despite the large fine Alderidge received, the guy was still dripping in money. According to Jamie, that money kept him safe while he was behind bars. He paid the toughest sons of bitches in that place to watch his back.
But Jamie had been keeping his ear to the ground, and some psycho little shit who tried to blackmail cash out of Alderidge decided he was going to shiv him. Jamie watched. Waited. And took the shiv instead.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to scream at him. He’d almost died! And that’s when it all came out. That there were guys who wanted to hurt him. As much as it killed his pride, he needed protection. It was the shiv, or his life wouldn’t be worth living, he’d said.
Thankfully, Jamie recovered, and his risk paid off.
Turned out Irwin Alderidge wasn’t someone who let a debt go unpaid. I also got the impression from what my boyfriend had told me that Alderidge genuinely liked Jamie. They shared varied interests, were educated, and were avid readers. They spent a lot of their time keeping each other sane. Jamie didn’t speak about it, but I knew he’d witnessed things in that prison that haunted him.
It wasn’t just isolation and injustice eating away at him.
It was the whole damn place.
That Thursday I waited impatiently in a booth in the visitation room, desperate to see him. He stepped into the room behind a guard and the constant ache in my chest bloomed, spreading through my whole body.
To say I missed him was an understatement.
I’d lost all the McKennas, and even though Cassie was a good friend, my family was gone. Sometimes it felt like I was just going through the motions. Wasting time until Jamie was out of prison.
He looked tired when he sat across from me.
I smiled and his eyes dropped to my dimple, his harsh countenance softening a little.
“Decided not to shave today?” I teased into the phone.
He scratched at his stubbled jaw with those long, big-knuckled fingers. I missed his hands. “It makes me look older, no?”
I grinned. “It’s very sexy.”
His eyes glimmered a little. “You’re very sexy.”
My cheeks flushed.
I missed sex with Jamie.
It wasn’t the thing I missed most. I missed his laugh the most. I missed lying next to him at night while he slept. I missed waking up to find him writing, tiptoeing out of the room so as not to disturb him. I missed the way he used to look at me, like I was the one who made the world turn. Like I was the sun and the waves and the moon.
I missed hearing him whisper, “I love you, Doe.”
I missed the feel of his arms around me. The way a Jamie hug made me feel safe and loved and needed.
But I missed sex with Jamie too.
I missed the hunger in his eyes. The way he’d bare his teeth as he fucked me. The way he murmured my name across my lips as he made love to me.
I missed Jamie.
“How are you?” I asked as I always asked.
“Good,” he replied like he always replied. “What’s been happening?”
I regaled him with the dull minutiae of my life. At least it was dull to me, but Jamie seemed to enjoy listening to me talk. I told him about how my friend Tom had just found out Cassie was seeing a guy fifteen years her senior, and Tom was jealous as hell. He’d asked Cassie out a bunch of times over the last year and she’d said no every time, and now he knew it was because of this older firefighter named Cal.
I was the only one who knew she’d been seeing Cal since our freshman year. Considering she was eighteen and he was thirty-three when they’d first started dating, they’d kept the relationship on the down low. But a few of her friends found out the longer their relationship went on, and now it was no longer a secret.
Tom was not happy.
“I think she’s afraid he’s going to tell someone. Cal might lose his job.”
Jamie’s brow puckered. “She’s nineteen.”
“Yeah, but people can be judgmental about these age gaps. He’s worried he comes off as some cradle-robbing creep.” In truth, Cassie had lied to Cal about her age when they’d first met. By the time he realized she was only eighteen, he