He awoke again to the glorious sensation of her nails tickling seductive lines across his shoulder blades.
"Hmmmm.", he managed, still foggy with sleep but all parts of him stirring at the promise of her touch.
"Crews. Your back."
"Yeah. Feels nice. Don't stop.", he slurred.
"It looks like some loner kid's homeroom notebook the week before a high school massacre."
He snapped awake. "What?"
When he lifted his head from the pillow, he was dismayed to notice that she was wearing her sweater again. He thought he glimpsed a flash of black underwear too. Her hair was down. She was leaning over him part-dressed. Was she getting ready to leave? His dread returned.
"You have a fucking swastika on your shoulder."
She gawped at him, appalled.
He spotted that her bra was still on the floor where he had tossed it. She wouldn't leave that behind. She wasn't going anywhere right now. He let out the breath that he hadn't realized he had been holding.
"Ah, yeah. Told you I had ink."
She shook her head incredulous, yanking down the sheet he had pulled over them once the sweat had evaporated and a chill had set in.
He wasn't wrong. He was littered with marks, crude diagrams, smudged obscenities. Added to the various scars that criss-crossed his body he might have been some old school sailor fucked up by a pirate's cutlass.
"Jesus..."
"Turn off, huh? I'm sorry, want me to put a shirt on?", he smiled apologetically and started to get up to find his clothes.
"Hey, no. No. It's okay. It's just...a surprise, is all.", she frowned, feeling bad for making him self conscious.
"It's not like I picked them out at the tattoo parlor. I didn't do this to myself. It was done to me."
She could tell it pained him from the grit in his voice. She ran her hand over his back, imagining with horror how it must have happened, how many guys it took to hold him down while they scratched at his skin. She felt a mass accumulating in her throat and it took her by surprise. Dani had the reputation of being a tough cookie but some stuff just got to her; cases with kids like Jeannie Harris and now, apparently, this. She knew about his past and through her work she had a better idea than most people of how tough it must have been. But to see the evidence of it on him, the violence actually etched into his body, the seams on his skin where his bones had actually snapped and burst out; well, it very nearly made her cry. She swallowed it down before it had a chance to bloom. She wondered how much he fought before he was overwhelmed, whether he yelled for the guards. Whether they ignored him. How those people slept at night.
He looked down at a shitty little silhouette of a bird on his shoulder and winced.
"It's okay...I got myself tested, I was lucky, I didn't catch anything that I could pass on to you...", he added quickly.
That aspect hadn't even occurred to her. But he was right, he had been lucky.
'PIG CUNT FAG' emblazoned on a badly-drawn LAPD badge to the right of his spine. He wouldn't have let them do that lightly, which is where the scars came from, she guessed.
"So why keep them? They can remove tattoos these days, fade them at least. Laser treatments. Or get something less...I don't know...thuggish...over the top?"
"Can I get your name tattooed on me?", he grinned.
"As much as I'd rather die, that might actually be preferable to knowing that you're walking around like that."
Charlie's eyes lit up like she was giving him the green light.
"Don't you fucking dare, Crews.", she swatted him. "But seriously, you should get them removed. The swastika, especially."
He was quiet for a second; she thought he was considering what she was saying but really he was thinking about the fact she had called him 'Crews' at least twice since he woke up.
"You know that the swastika was a Buddhist symbol long before the Nazis got hold of it, right? It occurs in a lot of ancient faiths, actually; it hasn't always been about hate."
"Oh yeah? So it's a Buddhist thing? The other inmates at Pelican Bay were big on Zen too, huh? Looks that way, especially when you take the pentagram and the spiderwebs into account."
"Are you asking me to get rid of them?", he wondered hopefully aloud if her objection to his ugly tattoos was part of a bigger thing, part of her claiming his body for herself maybe. In which case he would get them removed immediately.
"No. I'm questioning why you didn't already get them removed. Why you allowed what they did to you to stick?"
"Because whether they are there on my back or not, they still did it, it still happened. Getting them removed won't change that. And every time I see them, or someone else sees them and is horrified, then I can use that feeling to make sure no one ever does anything like that to me, or anyone I care about, ever again."
His face was granite. It wasn't the first time he had explained that, she wasn't the first to ask. It kind of made sense to her but she wished he would have more respect for himself. She wished he would take care. She was consumed by concern for him all of a sudden.
"Did it hurt?"
"The tattoos? No, not really. Mostly I was already out cold when they happened."
She had been waiting for what felt like an eternity to ask him questions like this, for him to answer her honestly, but she realized that no matter what she asked him, she could probably never grasp what it had been like. He was so matter-of-fact about something so brutal.
He rolled onto his side and lifted an arm, exposing a series of small blue vertical lines in groups, one group crossed by a diagonal line.
"A tally?", she asked.
"Yeah. Seven lines. Seven times that a guy named Hayes and his friends knocked me unconscious during a fight. He'd celebrate by giving me another tattoo each time and use the tally to keep score. It was like a game."
"Sick fuck.", grimaced Dani.
"Not really. There were guys a whole lot sicker than him around. They'd do worse to you if you passed out in their company. This almost qualifies as prison humor."
"Hilarious.", she said. "Well, his artwork sucks."
"Some of these scars are his work too."
Dani traced the raised lines on his skin, starting with the biggest one which looped from his back, over his ribcage and finished up on his front.
"What happened here?" She noticed gooseflesh spring up where she had touched him.
"Ted."
"Ted did this?!", she spat.
"Of course not. Hayes and his assholes had started to pick on Ted. It wasn't a fair fight, so I got involved. One of them had a blade."
"And you got this for your trouble?"
"It was nearly number eight on the tally. I landed up in the hospital for a few weeks, broken ribs, internal bleeding from the beating and then the gaping hole in my side, then a stretch in solitary. But when I came out, Ted was still there and nobody bothered him any longer."
"So it was worth it?"
"Sure. Ted didn't belong in there. All he did was to delete numbers on a spreadsheet."
"It's called fraud. Grand theft. He broke the law. It's more than you ever did to wind up in there." She wasn't convinced.
"He didn't kill anyone. He didn't rape, he didn't run drugs, traffic people or abuse kids. He had never been in a fist fight in his life. White collar guy like that in there was as good as dead the second he arrived. The death penalty for fraud? That's not right, Dani. We wound up cellmates. He saved my sanity."
"That's questionable.", Dani joked but saw that Charlie wasn't laughing. "And Hayes stayed away?"
"Hayes now walks with sticks and calipers. He has a big number eight right here." Charlie pointed to his forehead.
"You did not..."
Charlie raised his eyebrows and she knew that he did.
"The game was abandoned at seven points to one. I lost but I also won."
"Jesus."
"You're right that I belonged in that place about as much as Ted did when I arrived. Difference is, I grew into it."
This was one of the things he would have been ashamed to tell his grandma. His face went hard and she knew that there was other bad stuff locked inside.
Charlie thought about the guard he killed, considered telling her everything right there and then; how a group of the bastards would regularly beat the shit out of him in the dead of night, how they locked him in the industrial refrigerator in the kitchens just out of range of the cameras, how they spat on him as he lay on the ground coughing up his kidney. How he snapped the neck of the ringleader once he got complacent enough to pick on Charlie when he was alone, without his pals and his fucking cattle prod. He remembered propping the guy's body up against a prison-catering-sized barrel of peaches once he realized he was dead. Like sitting him up like that would somehow have made it less barbaric. He wondered if she would understand if he told her that he felt absolutely no remorse. He decided he couldn't lay that on her, not yet, maybe not ever.
Her fingers on his stomach hauled him back to the now.
She pointed out some of his larger marks, mostly out of curiosity and to take advantage of his honesty while he was willing to talk rather than cover it all up with Zen and wisecracks. Also it was an excuse to run her hands over his body in a context other than them having sex. She liked how intimate it felt, even if the subject matter was grim. He obviously liked it too, she had him singing like a bird. He was full of stories. She learned that he had suffered a fractured skull. She learned all about terrifying improvised prison weapons. She learned which of his bones had been broken at the hands of the prison guards. She learned just what kind of an environment this man, who had been so gentle with her, had come from.
"And this one?", she rubbed her finger over stubble and a thin white line just under his chin that she had only just noticed today.
"Mac and cheese.", he replied.
"You fought someone over macaroni and cheese?"
"Mac and cheese in prison is a serious business, Dani. Second only to enchiladas, but we only got those on cinco de mayo."
"Someone stole your mac and cheese?" She knew Charlie liked to eat.
"No. I stole a guy's mac and cheese."
"You did? Why the fuck would you do that, Crews?", she frowned.
"It was one of Hayes' guys, like his bodyguard or something. The biggest one. I needed him out of the way so that I could even up that tally. So I started a fight in the dinner line in front of everyone, all the guards. He hit me with my own tray. It bled so much they thought he'd killed me. He got a spell in solitary for it."
"And while he was gone, you dealt with Hayes?", she finished his story with half a question, half a statement.
"Uh huh.", he confirmed.
"Jesus. You are a thug."
"Pretty much. Do you still like me?"
"Who said that I liked you?"
He grinned at her and didn't answer.
