I reach over and touch his penis. It’s big and as hard as a rock. I unbuckle his shorts and he slides them off him.
I look at the large vein that runs the whole way down it and the way it moves every time I give it a little squeeze.
I wait for him to push me to do it anyway, even without protection, but he surprises me. He doesn’t press.
Instead, he continues to play with my body, covering it in sand.
Laying me down on my back, he makes little mounds of sand on my stomach and in between my breasts.
The sexier he makes me feel, the harder I squeeze his penis. After a while, we both start to moan.
“I want to watch you pleasure yourself,” he says.
His words send a shock of electricity through my body.
My legs open as if on their own. I touch my breasts and then quickly make my way toward the center of my body.
The sand feels rough, but I manage to flick off most of the grains as my fingers find their way inside. The pleasure forces my butt off the ground.
When my eyes drift over, I see that he’s touching himself, too, watching me. His eyes are glued to my hands.
Watching him watching me pushes me over the edge. The warm sensation in the pit of my core spreads quickly throughout me. My hands move faster and faster and then a wave of exhilaration rushes over me. When I turn my eyes to Nicholas, his hips move faster and faster until he comes as well.
Afterward, we walk into the water, hand in hand and completely nude. The water isn’t very warm, but my well-heated body welcomes the refreshment. Nicholas takes me into his arms and kisses me again.
Then he leans over and whispers, “This doesn’t mean that you can go to Boston by yourself though.”
27
When he speaks…
The room smells like bleach and sharpened pencils. It reminds me of my sixth grade classroom, minus the wall decorations.
There are large plastic tables set up against the windows on the far end where the panel of judges sit. The parole board consists of four men and three women, all over the age of forty-five.
I don’t know what requirements you have to possess to get yourself this position but none of them really look like they could relate to the kind of upbringing that Owen and I had.
The only advice that Owen gave me when I was trying to figure out what to say was to speak from your heart. Not exactly useful.
Owen sits at a table directly in front of me with his attorney. This isn’t the same guy who represented him all of those years ago. After losing the case, that lawyer stopped returning his calls.
This one is a woman, who looks like she’s barely out of high school. She has a meek voice and she’s dressed in an outfit that’s way too big for her small frame.
The parole panel speak among themselves in hushed tones. The way they shuffle papers back and forth makes me wonder if this is the first time that they are reviewing his case.
The guards brought Owen in twenty minutes ago and no one has spoken yet. Unlike the inmates on television, he is dressed in his usual garb; hunter green pants and a matching button-down shirt with a white t-shirt underneath.
He has short light brown hair, cut short, as if he’s in the armed forces. Before prison, he had always worn it long, and the first time I saw him with his new haircut I worried that he had been forced to join some Aryan Nation gang.
When I asked about it, he denied it. It’s hard to know if the person on the other side of the plexiglass is ever telling the truth, so I would scan his body for tattoos hoping to find out the truth. No swastikas or other hate symbols appeared so I decided to take his words at face value.
Under the harsh fluorescent lights, everyone’s skin is sallow and pale, including Owen’s. But otherwise, he looks healthy. Well-rested even.
He gives me a big, white, toothy smile as soon as he sees my face. I know that no matter how long he spends in here, no matter how old we get, that smile will always remain the same. It will always belong to the happy go lucky little kid who never used to have a worry in the world.
Owen was convicted of armed robbery. He didn’t stick up the liquor store but he was in the car waiting for his friends who did. This whole time he’s maintained that he had no idea that they were going to do that.
They had all been drinking. After running out of alcohol, they drove down to the Five and Dime. It was after two a.m. and the cashier was busy watching television.
He didn’t speak much English so his friends thought it would be funny to just take some stuff. They lined their pockets with chips and soda and anything else they could find.
They were laughing and joking around too loudly and the guy at the counter noticed that they were trying to sneak out. He pulled out a baseball bat and started yelling at them in Korean. Two of them dropped everything they had, but one of them pulled out a gun from his back pocket.
The video they showed in court didn’t have sound, but it did capture the fear in the guy’s face. Being a convenience store clerk on the graveyard shift is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Suddenly, the gun went off. The bullet missed the target and lodged itself in the wall behind the cashier.
After gathering the stuff they’d dropped onto the floor, they ran out and told Owen to drive. He didn’t even know there had been the robbery. Of course, that’s not the way the prosecutor had put it. To him, they had planned this whole thing out. They went in there to steal five packets of chips and four bottles of soda. And they were all in on the shooting. The jury gave them all the same sentence. If the cashier had been killed, Owen would have probably received life in prison.
After shuffling the documents in front of them from one person to another and familiarizing themselves with my brother’s case, they give him the floor. One of them asks him to go over what happened that night.
I don’t see why this is necessary, but Owen isn’t fazed. He starts at around seven o’clock and the drinking.
“And why did you decide to stay behind in the car?” the oldest parole board member asks.
Because it was freezing and he didn't want to leave the warm car or turn the engine off. That was what Owen always did whenever we went anywhere together. He hated running errands and would always prefer to stay inside the vehicle even if the shopping trip would take an hour.
“I had a hunch as to what might happen,” Owen says.
My eyes open wide. What?
“Can you please elaborate?”
“It was late and we were all joking around and had been drinking quite a lot. No one mentioned doing it directly but I had my suspicions,” he says.
“And you didn’t want to stop them?”
“I wasn’t sure. Those guys say a lot of things.”
His attorney nudges him. She whispers something into his ear and he starts to elaborate. He tells them that they have never done anything like this but they were talking about it for a bit back at the house.
This answer isn’t satisfactory. One of the members flips through his file and then asks, “Why did you say during the trial that you wanted to sit in the car because it was cold out?”
28
When I speak…
Because that’s the fucking truth!
I want to yell out and have to bite down on my tongue to stop myself. My hands start to tingle and I rub one with the other. My stomach feels heavy like I had just eaten a five-course meal even though I had nothing but a power bar this morning.