Author's Note: Yay, chapter 2! Everyone who's been reading will be happy to know that I'll probably update pretty frequently and quickly; I have most of the story already written. Also, thanks for the reviews! I appreciate them all, even when they're pointing out mistakes I've made with the Russian (I'm plugging phrases into an online translator, which is probably painfully obvious to anyone who's actually familiar with Russian). Anyway, reviews, favorites and follows are great; keep them coming, and thanks for watering my ego flower. Heh heh heh.
Breakdown
Red shifted restlessly on her cot, turning around to glare at her sleeping bunkie. Piper Chapman's mouth hung open awkwardly, and her breath wheezed as she unconsciously inhaled and exhaled. Chapman's snoring had driven Red round the bend when the girl had first installed herself in Red's cube. It got to the point that the older woman had debated the pros and cons of smothering her bunkmate as she slept. Over time, Red had gotten used to the noise, but tonight, for some reason, it was especially distracting. Red glanced around, her gaze falling on her shoes on the floor, and she briefly considered grabbing one of them and throwing it at Chapman's head.
Instead she took hold of one of her pillows. Holding it to her chest, Red sighed wearily and turned over to face the cinderblock wall. Assaulting her bunkmate would gain her nothing, especially since she knew good and damn well that Chapman's snoring, disgusting as it was, had nothing to do with her restlessness. In truth, she hadn't slept well for almost a month. Not since that day in Healy's office, when she had made what she considered now to be one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She almost laughed at the irony of it. She was incarcerated because of her involvement with the mafia, she had allowed a mob boss to stash God only knew what in the freezer of her quaint little mom-and-pop market, and yet here she was, clutching a pillow to her chest, reflecting on how disappointed she was with herself for kissing a man.
Not just kissing, Red thought, her cheeks flushing and her stomach flip-flopping. She had been prepared to go so much further. If Caputo hadn't interrupted them, she would have let Healy have her any way he wanted her. Red turned onto her back, throwing her pillow on the floor in frustration. She could feel the heat spreading from her cheeks down to her neck, and she knew that it had nothing to do with the stale, humid air inside of the dormitory.
I almost fucked Healy, she allowed herself to admit, shaking her head at the ridiculousness of it. This had been her internal struggle in the weeks that had followed their interlude in his office. She could barely understand why she had behaved as impulsively as she did, why the feeling of his mouth and hands on her still lingered even though she had been carefully staying out of his way for weeks. What was it about her middle-aged, overweight and not-conventionally-attractive prison counselor that made her blush like a schoolgirl? Had it really just been too long? Maybe twelve years of forced celibacy had simply turned her into a hormone-crazed animal.
Red rejected that theory, mostly because she wanted to believe that she was a more rational creature than all that. She supposed it had more to do with personality and the camaraderie that had always existed between them. Despite his flaws (and Sam Healy had many), he was a good person. He genuinely cared, and he tried his hardest to be the best man he could be. He wasn't particularly shrewd and he could be a bit naïve, but he was smart, enough that he could keep up with her and stimulate her intellectually without actually exceeding her in intelligence, which Red's domineering nature responded well to.
Furthermore, he treated her with respect, and not in the way that her fellow inmates did. The other women respected her because she terrified them. Healy was slightly afraid of her as well—Red knew this and even reveled in it to some extent. But his trepidation sprung less from a fear of retribution and more from a desire to impress and please her. Red appreciated that, because it meant that he saw her not as another inmate or counselee, not as a responsibility, but as a person, and, as she had realized more recently, as a woman.
It had been so long since anyone had looked at her that way. She had been at Litchfield for twelve years, and even before that, she had lived with a husband who hadn't touched her in forever. Not that he hadn't loved her; she had always known that Dmitri's affection for her was real. But, he had never been a wildly passionate man, and, as the years had gone by and the children arrived one after the other and the market consumed their lives, there had been little time or energy for either of them to focus on anything else. Her marriage, for all intents and purposes, had been over before she had ever been sent to prison.
Red wondered, briefly, if the novelty of having a man actually want her was part of the attraction. Yes, she decided, that was certainly a factor, but there was more to it than that. Sam elicited feelings that she had never had with Dmitri, or any of the other men who had come before him. She genuinely did find him handsome, in his own way, and she enjoyed talking to him. Even if he could sometimes be homophobic and downright misogynistic, he also seemed to be open to new ideas, and receptive when she occasionally challenged his opinions. She suspected that most of his prejudices were not the result of real hatred but rather of a lifetime of rejection and pain. At his base, Sam Healy was a good man, and Red loved him for it, and that was the problem.
She couldn't have a relationship with him, not in the way that she knew they both wanted to. She had been in Litchfield for a lot of years, and she had seen every possible type of relationship between inmates and staff from beginning to inevitable catastrophic end. Even had these kinds of pairings not been highly illegal and perilous for both the prisoner and the staff member involved, the very nature of the system made successful prison partnerships an impossibility, even if real feelings were there.
And then there was the sheer danger of it. If they were ever caught—and they would be, if they allowed themselves to follow the path that she had started them on that day in Healy's office—the consequences for both of them would be dire. He would take most of the heat for it; he would be carted off to a jail cell of his own and left to rot there, and his life would be destroyed beyond repair. Red was a tough woman, and she could be downright rigid and perhaps excessively harsh at times, but she was far from unfeeling, and when she loved, she loved fiercely. She loved Sam Healy, and she knew that seeing his life ruined and knowing that she had been his downfall would break her.
There would also undoubtedly be consequences for her. She had seen women get years added onto their sentences or get thrown in solitary, "for their own protection," for messing around with guards. She had also seen prisoners walk away from these dalliances scot-free; hell, she had even ensured that outcome in helping the Diaz girl. But Red knew that, in a similar situation, she would not be as lucky. For one thing, she was past childbearing age and would certainly not have a pregnancy that she could use to gain sympathy, and there was also the fact that she was no wide-eyed, innocent-looking little girl who could play the victim. She was an old woman who had been around for years and should know better; no one would feel sorry for her. She only had two more years left on her sentence. After the eternity she had already spent in Litchfield, two years should have seemed like nothing, but right now, it felt like forever.
Two years, she mused silently. Would he be willing to wait that long? Could they wait, even if they wanted to? And, if they did wait, what would the waiting do to them, and would the feelings still be there at the end of it? Red couldn't see her way through this one; she couldn't punch down all the walls and barrel through the way that she normally did, and she hated the uncertainty.