AN-Thanks for all the kind reviews! They really do make we want to write more and post faster, so keep 'em coming!
Chapter Three-SHUs and Boots
Piper found herself amazed at how the human mind can adapt to a routine, even one as limiting and distasteful as days spent in solitary confinement. Losing her freedom and becoming accustomed to life in prison had been a major adjustment, but that paled in comparison to the mind games required to survive the SHU. Her world consisted of a ten by eight foot concrete box with a single door and one ventilation shaft. She had a toilet and sink as well as a metal bed frame that she found more uncomfortable than the floor. She remembered the basics from her short visit at Thanksgiving. It seemed her destiny to spend the major holidays here.
With constant light and no clock, she tried to divide 'day' from 'night' with mealtimes. She stayed awake for three meals before allowing herself to sleep. Her routine was to eat 'breakfast' then exercise as best she could in her cell. Following 'lunch' she was taken out of her cell every day. One day would be a cold shower and the next would be her designated hour in the 'exercise' room, which was really just a slightly larger cage in a bigger space. There was no equipment in the cage and she was always alone, so she just used the opportunity to pace ten steps each way before coming to the wall instead of the six she could get in her cell. Then it was back to the cell to wait for 'dinner'. All of the meals consisted of mostly inedible mashed up loaves of unidentifiable substances, but she tried to choke down what she could.
At first she tried to keep track of the days. But as time went on, it somehow lost importance. She didn't have a good way to keep track anyway except in her frazzled mind. She knew it had been over a week, maybe two. Every day at some point she would panic that she had been forgotten, that no one knew she was there, or cared. Usually the panic attack ended with hyperventilation and crying, but once or twice she had joined several of the other women in the unit screaming and banging on the door uncontrollably. Once she had forgotten about her hand and had broken the splint protecting it. That had earned her a visit from the medic who had simply nodded when she asked him to fix it as slowly as he could.
Between the meals, exercise, time out of cell and sleep, Piper estimated she was filling up about fourteen hours a day. That left a mere ten hours every day to participate in her remaining activity, thinking. She used different words to mix it up sometimes, daydreaming, pondering, contemplating, considering, but it was all just time spent wandering around inside of her mind making visits to the past or jumping into some vision of a better future, anything to avoid the despair of the here and now.
Some days she divided her thoughts among her family and friends, trying to give each his or her due. Her mother didn't take long. She would be worried but quite capable of carrying on despite her daughter's continuing fall from grace. A second martini before dinner would probably suffice to stifle any unduly deep feelings. Cal would be genuinely concerned, and completely incapable of showing it or taking any action. But Piper liked to think that at least his emotions were honest. She just wasn't ready to think about Larry.
Polly would be scared for her and really really angry at her. Piper could see her face, with too tired 'I've been up all night with an infant and now I have to worry about you too' bags under her eyes. God she had put her best friend through so much, she hoped that she could make it up to her. In some of the future daydreams she could see herself free, hanging out in the park with Polly while she held Finn in her lap making him laugh. Piper liked those dreams. She would try to draw them out, imagine every little detail of the trees, the leaves, and the grass. How she would want to take Finn down the slide at the playground, but Polly would yell at her and tell her she didn't know anything about babies and Finn was way too little to do that yet. Although by the time she actually got released from prison he probably wouldn't be. It was those little jolts of reality that would slip in and ruin the spell and bring her back instantly to her hideous situation.
The after dinner time often seemed to drag on especially long. Her inner traveler would be worn down from a long day of reality avoidance and she would miss the 'Do Not Enter' signs and the 'Wrong Way' signs, and finally the 'Bridge Out Ahead' signs and suddenly she was plummeting through the darkness of her failed relationships and striking the cold waters of 'you shouldn't be with someone out of fear' and 'you may never come running to me again'. The wet freezing liquid enveloped her like she'd fallen from the deck of the Titanic into the frigid North Atlantic and its only minutes until she can't breathe and slips beneath the surface into the pit of 'I'm all alone and it's my own damn fault', and 'oh god won't someone throw me a lifeline', and sometimes her mind surfer takes pity on her.
Those nights an image from the past will take hold and she is lucky to have so many to choose from being a flirty blonde who doesn't limit herself to loving only half the population. The girls wanted her because she's good looking. The guys wanted her because she's good looking and because she tells them she likes girls too. But tonight it's a tall dark haired temptress with smoky eyes and a sultry voice that floats her away into blissful memory.
Piper had been with a woman before, but this was different. Alex had seduced her from the moment they met. Several dinners, clubs, drinks and more drinks had led inexorably to Alex's bedroom. More specifically it had led to Alex's bed where she lay with her legs spread wide and her faced turned into a pillow to muffle the succession of screams she continued to emit as Alex tongued her quivering clit into orgasm after orgasm. The woman between her thighs had a special gift and since Piper had always liked getting presents she wasn't inclined to stop receiving until she collapsed. Alex had assured her in that sexy voice that 'reciprocation could wait' so when that amazing tongue dipped lower to take on a more thrusting challenge, she figured she could muster up the strength for at least one more climax.
It had been an awakening of sorts. Sex had been fun, good, great even sometimes. But it had never been so intense that she craved it, and Alex had brought her to that place. And then when it was her turn, she found she enjoyed the giving back as much as the receiving and after that night the two of them couldn't get enough of each other.
When the blissful veil of memory lifted and her eyes again focused on the gray brick wall before her, Piper found her hand was reaching down in the waistband of her pants, but the splint got caught up in the material. She had tried masturbating with her left hand to pass the time, but even with the blanket spread out over her body she couldn't get past the fact that some pervert guard was watching her monitored cell 24 x 7 on a screen in a room down the hall. It just wasn't going to happen for her here.
When her door opened after breakfast one day she looked up surprised to see Caputo standing in her room. She had been sitting on the floor, her knees tucked up and he took a seat on the edge of the bed frame with a clipboard in his hand.
"I need to take your statement about the incident with Officer Healy. Do you remember what happened?"
Piper felt a little disoriented from the disruption in her routine that his presence created. "How long have I been here Mr. Caputo?"
"Ten days. I would have come earlier, but I had some time off over the holidays and other things that required my attention more urgently. I need you to tell me what happened Chapman. Can you do that?"
Piper was grateful that his demeanor seemed calm, almost sympathetic. "Yes. I was really upset at him for calling my fiancé. I got emotional the night of the pageant and I yelled at him. I never hit him Mr. Caputo, I never even touched him."
The CO wrote on his clipboard for a few minutes before speaking again. "The inmates in your dorm corroborate your story. Officer Bell also said she never saw you strike Healy, just yell at him." Caputo held out the clipboard and Piper saw he had written a brief paragraph summarizing what she had told him. "Is this accurate?"
Piper nodded. "How long will I be in here?" She knew better than to ask, but it was as if some unstoppable force propelled the words out of here.
Caputo stood up. "I can't say for sure, but based on everything I would say 4-6 weeks total. You know you can't do that, yell at the CO's right?"
"Yes sir. It won't happen again, I promise. I just want out of here." Piper didn't have to try to look miserable, her body radiated anguish.
"I'll keep that in mind when I recommend your punishment." Caputo moved towards the cell door. Just before leaving he turned back. "Chapman? You don't know what happened to Tiffany Doggett do you?"
Piper looked up and furrowed her brow. "Something happened to Doggett? When?"
"The same night as your incident with Healy. She was beaten, badly. I know there was bad feelings between the two of you. You don't know anything about that?"
"No sir. You know I helped get her out of psych. We were on speaking terms." Piper paused for just a second. "Is she ok?"
"She's alive. In a medically induced coma for now waiting for the swelling to go down before they can operate on her face. The doctors think she'll come out of it eventually." Caputo scanned her face carefully before heading out the cell door. "Hang in there Chapman."
Now that she knew Piper was in the SHU for the incident with Healy, Alex felt her anxiety level out to constant concern without panic. Women did stints in the SHU all the time and came back to 'normal' prison life. There was always a period of adjustment, and she had seen a few who had never lost that haunted look in their eyes, but usually it just took some regular human interaction.
Alex was determined to help Piper on her return, as her friend, whenever that occurred. She had been angry. Even if her ire was justified she didn't wanted Piper to get hurt. Twice now Piper had rejected and left her and in her resentment she had said and done things she regretted. First she had turned Piper in to the Feds in order to reduce her own sentence, and then she had turned Piper away and refused to help at Christmas and Piper had been forced to deal with Pennsatucky alone.
Caputo had brought several of the inmates into his office to ask about Doggett. When it had been her turn, Alex had said the same thing every other woman had said. Didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, don't know anything. Even the members of the 'born-again' posse had stayed quiet not seeing any benefit to passing along rumors and suspicions.
As she began another day of fluff and fold in the laundry dungeon, Alex wasn't paying attention to much of anything until she suddenly felt uneasy. When she looked up she found that Leanne had three friends with her, and no one else was in the space.
Alex was thinking 'oh shit', but what she tried to say confidently was "what do you want?"
"Heard your girlfriend is coming back pretty soon from SHU." Leanne stepped up to her as the rest of her little gang spread out, cutting off any easy exits for Alex.
"I don't have a girlfriend." Alex scanned around at the women surrounding her. "Looks like you have a few. What would Doggett say?"
Leanne sneered at her. "We know Chapman couldn't have taken Tiffany alone. Figured you helped your little rug muncher."
"Don't be ridiculous." Someone was bound to come in to the laundry if Alex kept Leanne talking long enough. "Chapman got sent to the SHU that night for attacking Healy. And I had nothing to do with Doggett picking on someone she clearly couldn't handle."
Leanne gestured and the other women circled in closer. "Oh, we know it was Chapman. Until she gets back we're going to give you a message for her."
Alex felt the first blow to her lower back, right in the kidney. She fell forward onto her knees and landed on the hands. From there it was all boots. Leanne just watched and one of the others served as lookout as the remaining two kicked her hard in the gut. "Make sure no marks show."
When Alex went down and tried to curl up in a ball they stomped on the left side of her ribs a few times until a noise in the hall sent everyone scurrying away.
"Remember this if you even think about protecting Chapman when she gets back. She's ours." Leanne just walked to the other side of the room where she worked the washers as Alex tried to stifle her moans and sit up with her back against the folding table.
"Hey Vause! It's my laundry day, where the fuck are you?" Nicky called out from the front counter.
Alex grabbed the countertop and pulled herself up until she was leaning on the table with her elbows. "Nicky. In here."
Nicky had heard a rumor in the hall that inmates were being sent away from the laundry. Even though she and Alex had not repeated their 'Christmas present' quickie, Nicky had to admit she cared for Alex. When she saw it was Doggett's group leaving the laundry she was immediately concerned about Vause, apparently for good reason.
"Aw shit." Nicky ran over to the tall woman crumpled over the table. "What happened?"
"They kicked my ass." Alex tried to stand up until the pain in her left flank made it hard to breathe. "More specifically they kicked me in the gut and ribs."
"Why?" Nichols started to lift up Alex's shirt asking permission with her eyes.
"Said it was a gift for Piper. How bad does it look?" Alex tried to lift her left arm to see the area below.
"Bad. The bruise is already coming up. Do you think your ribs are broken? If they are you'll have to go see the medic." Nicky prodded at the area carefully.
"Ouch. No, it hurts, but I can take shallow breaths." Alex pointed at a stack of sheets on an adjacent table. "Rip a big strip out of one of those and we can wrap my chest. No way am I going to report this."
Nicky got the sheet ready and helped Alex lift her shirt. "You could have just asked me to feel you up Vause; you didn't need to go to all this trouble."
Alex grimaced as Nicky wrapped the sheet just under her breasts. "Please don't make me laugh." When they were done Alex stood and found she could move around well enough. "Thanks Nicky. I owe you."
"We're family Vause. We'll make sure this doesn't happen again." Nicky growled. "I gotta get back to work."
Alex nodded as Nicky left. It had been three weeks since Piper had been sent to the SHU. Alex had been so worried about her in that horrible place she hadn't even thought about what might happen on her return. Maybe for now it would be safer for Piper to stay right where she was.