scribblinlenore (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scribblinlenore) wrote2009-03-22 06:58 pm
scribblinlenore) wrote2009-03-22 06:58 pm
Entry tags:
Crossover Fic: Probably they're against all the odds, but hey, anything could happen
Title: Probably they're against all the odds,
but hey, anything could happen
Fandoms: CSI New York/Law and Order (also really bandom)
Pairing: Chester Byron/Marty Dressler (aka Pete/Patrick as seen on your network crime drama)
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~6,500
Summary: What happens when these two cons meet up on the inside.
Notes: By the time CSI New York went off, this story was already taking shape in my head. There was no way I could resist writing it.
Warning: Everything I "know" about prison, I "learned" from watching Oz.
Disclaimer: Not true. Not mine.
Probably they're against all the odds,
but hey, anything could happen
By Lenore
In the end, everything comes down to probability. Marty believes this the way some people believe in God. Chances that the oatmeal will be scorched at breakfast? 2 to 1. That the library will actually have the book he wants? 7 to 1. That CO Thorson will stop being a son of a bitch for five seconds? Infinity to 1.
The odds of causing three people's deaths and getting away with it? Not so good, in retrospect.
All this trivia floats through Marty's head alongside the numbers that really matter: Rodriguez in C-block fifty bucks on Cleveland with a three-point spread; Daniels thirty down on Diamond Dancer in the third race at Aqueduct; Fargnoli a hundred on Jeff Gordon to win at Talledega. There have been raids on five different cells in the last week alone, the flacks searching for markers, for records, for something that will help them bust the highly profitable prison-wide bookmaking operation. Marty hides in plain sight behind his thick-rimmed glasses and his stooped shoulders, smirking when the guards aren't looking. The evidence they're so eager to find is all in his head.
"You gonna eat that?" Tiny's enormous paw hovers over the bowl of inedible slop on Marty's tray.
Marty shakes his head. Tiny helps himself. Across the table, Sturtz stares into space, slack-jawed. Nelson gives the appearance that he loses IQ points merely by breathing. Marty's colleagues are not the sharpest thugs in the drawer, but they are geniuses at busting heads. That's all he needs them for.
"Huh," Tiny grunts.
This is his interested noise, and Marty glances up, to see what's caught his attention.
"New guy," Sturtz murmurs, the way someone else might say sixteen-ounce ribeye or hot fudge sundae, like he can already taste it.
The new guy shuffles his feet, his dark eyes slitted, unfocused, a somnambulist in a predatory jungle. His lank black hair falls into his face, and he looks like he needs to be scraped clean, mere soap and water not powerful enough to take the stink off him. None of that hides the fact that he's every con's substitute wet dream, short and slight, with a full jaw that makes his face softly pretty, and thick, suggestive lips that seem to invite violation.
There are three ways to survive in prison: with your fists, your brains or your ass. From the yawning vacant sign in the new guy's eyes, he's a man without any other life preserver than his body. Marty automatically calculates the odds of who will be the one to break him in: Jenkinson 3-1, Romanoff 11-1, Steinhoffer 5-1, and from the spittle glistening at the corner of Sturtz's mouth, he's the favorite at 2-1.
New guy grabs a tray and goes through the line and plunks down at a table opposite Caruso, who has biceps so bulging he has to cut the sleeves of his shirt, devil horns tattooed on his bald head, and a pitted, scarred face that would surely make small children cry. He glares get the fuck out of here at the new guy, who just smiles blandly and keeps on shoveling down his food.
Marty whites out the earlier betting line in his head and calculates instead the odds that the new guy will turn up dead by morning.
***
Probability doesn't eliminate surprises, of course. Marty walks into his cell after his afternoon work detail and finds that the new guy is his new cellmate. In fact, he's taken over the place like a one-man plague of locusts, sprawled out on the bottom bunk, getting his grubby sneakers all over the blanket.
"Hey, dude," new guy says, looking slightly more alert than before. "I'm Chester. You're Marty, right?"
"That's my bunk," Marty tells him stiffly.
"Oh, yeah? My bad, dude." He hauls himself to his feet.
There's an indentation in the shape of his butt left behind, and the blankets are a wrinkled mess. Marty can already tell they're going to have irreconcilable differences. Chester looks like a strong wind blew the clothes onto him, shirt tail straggling past his thighs, collar askew. Marty wears his uniform as if he used a ruler when getting dressed, shirt neatly tucked, buttons down all the way up to his collarbone, creases in his trousers as sharp as he can get them without an iron.
Chester looks from Marty's displeased expression to the bunk and back again. He breaks into an amused smirk. Normally, Marty isn't one for getting his hands dirty. That's what he has Tiny and Sturtz and Nelson for. But there's something about Chester that makes him want to wipe that smirk off his pretty face with his own two fists.
"Dude. Hey. Let me." Chester swipes his hand over the covers, straightening out the blanket, although not nearly well enough to suit Marty's exacting standards. "So. Us being roomies and all, I thought we should get to know each other. I'll go first. Born and raised in Queens…"
Marty snatches up his Wired magazine that he'd come to fetch, turns on his heel and leaves Chester there talking to himself.
A wry "so, yeah, we can finish this later" floats out after him. Marty updates his mental stats on Chester with the very real likelihood that he'll be shanked by supper.
***
Knowing the odds isn't the same thing as knowing the future. The improbable does happen every now and then. A week goes by, then two, and Chester hasn't made one visit to the infirmary, hasn't been paraded around in drag by an Aryan skinhead, isn't being pimped out daily for cigarettes.
His story gets around--everyone's does eventually--how he landed in prison, the bizarre tale of heroin made out of bodies. It's not clear if Chester did the actual cooking or if he was just an opportunist looking to make a buck off the finished product. Chester doesn't volunteer any information, doesn't make any boasts, doesn't deny anything. His silence is enough to convince most guys he was only recently boiling someone's spleen on the kitchen stove. All the brutal things the men here have done, and they still give Chester a wide berth. Someone who merchandises corpses just isn't right, they probably think, even more not right than all the other thieves and thugs in the place.
It's not until the third week that the stunts start. Someone festoons the infirmary with rolls upon rolls of gauze. A ladle stolen from the kitchen ends up atop the guard station like a jaunty statue. A toothpaste fresco decorates a wall of the day room. No one gets caught, but rumors whisper through the cellblocks. Chester becomes a folk hero of sorts. All the pranks are perfectly harmless, but it doesn't matter. Cons love any fuck-you to the system, and even Marty has to marvel at what a surprisingly slippery piece of business the guy must be to have gotten away with all of that.
Chester seems likewise impressed with himself. He struts around with a cocky grin, a gaudy cult of personality in search of an audience, and the most unlikely thing of all happens: he develops a following. The men who get pulled along in his wake are all bigger and meaner and more seasoned in the ugly ways of criminality than he is. This doesn't seem to matter. Chester plies his minions with an unlikely combination of charm and flirtation and fraternity boy hijinks, and they eat it up. Marty concludes that you can con a con man, a whole passel of them, in fact.
Marty ignores Chester as much as is humanly possible given that he's sharing an 8-by-10 world with him. Something about the guy gets under Marty's skin. He's not sure what. He just knows he doesn't like it.
***
"You're going to have to talk to me sometime," Chester declares out of the blue one day, lurking at the end of the bunk.
Marty would beg to differ, but he doesn't want to encourage Chester even that much. He flips the page of his magazine without looking up.
"You're a stubborn little fucker, you know that?" Chester glares.
He moves until he's standing right over Marty, blocking out his light.
"Go away," Marty says, his jaw clenched.
"No," Chester says stubbornly.
Marty pushes at his shoulder, but Chester holds his ground, surprisingly immovable for such a tiny little shit. Marty kneels up to get better leverage, and Chester shoves his hand down Marty's pants. Marty freezes, unable to say or do anything, except to get hard in Chester's hand.
Prison is a never-ending spiral of deprivation, and worst of all is the hunger for skin, for a warm body, for just a little something to remind you that you used to be a human being. Marty keeps telling himself that being a geek who was never too smooth with the ladies was good practice for life on the inside. He's used to having only his own right hand for company. For the most part, he's managed to believe that touching himself is just as good as having someone else touching him.
Chester debunks this myth with the first pull of his hand. He has long, nimble fingers and a callus on his thumb that he rubs against the little scar where Marty was cut as a baby. His knuckles brush Marty's belly on every upstroke. Marty's thighs tremble, and his stomach aches hotly, and he's going to come all over his clothes. At the last moment, though, Chester produces a tissue for Marty to finish into.
Marty sucks in a shallow breath, and then it hits him: Chester planned this out in advance. His face goes hot with rage, his hands curling into fists as he waits for the demand, for Marty's mouth or his ass, some kind of carnal quid pro quo. That's how this game works in prison.
Chester leans in, so close their noses nearly brush. His eyes are as hard and bright as agates, fixed on Marty. "Just give me the fucking time of day, okay?"
He straightens up and stalks out of the cell. Marty is left staring into empty space.
Survival instinct is still survival instinct, and Marty goes through the next few days warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The only thing that happens, though, is that Chester materializes at Marty's table one day at lunch, eyebrow raised like a question mark. Marty considers it a moment and then nods permission. Chester ducks his head to hide a smile and plunks down onto the empty chair. Tiny frowns at Marty in confusion. Stutz stares at Chester like he's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Nelson, as usual, looks like he has rocks in his head. Marty scowls at them all. They go back to eating lunch.
Chester doesn't make a constant nuisance of himself. Just occasionally he'll turn up at Marty's side, and Marty will tolerate him. Marty has no idea why this matters to the guy.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, Marty plays chess in the game room before dinner. Chester surprises him one afternoon, sliding into the seat opposite him.
"Rack 'em up," he says.
Marty sighs. "That's pool."
Chester laughs.
It's a feint, Marty soon discovers. A dozen moves later, Chester has him seriously on the ropes. Marty would have calculated the odds of this as approximately impossible to none.
"Check mate," Chester declares five minutes later.
Marty stares at the board as if he's lost time and can't figure out how he got here.
"What?" Chester gives Marty a look, smolderingly flirtatious. "You don't think I know how to make a move?"
He walks away grinning.
Marty doesn't think any more about it--except to occasionally boggle over the fact that sleepy-eyed Chester bested him at a game of actual strategy. A few days later, though, he's taken up his usual position against the wall in the dayroom, open for business for anyone who wants to place bets. He's surprised to see Chester approaching. He's never shown the least sign that he's interested in gambling, but hey, Marty figures there's a first time for everything. Chester's arm brushes Marty's, and Marty waits for him to say "twenty on Dallas" or "Hard on the Rocks to place in the Preakness."
But Chester has a talent for defying expectations. He whispers against Marty's ear, like a promise, "Gonna show you my moves. Tonight. Be ready."
He drifts away, and Marty rolls his eyes. He has no idea what that's supposed to mean. He only knows that Chester is an attention-whoring little drama queen. A person needs about five minutes with him to figure that out. He's probably hoping that Marty will spend the rest of the day thinking about him, wondering. Marty is determined not to give him the satisfaction.
Lunch, work detail, library, dinner, TV in the dayroom…and nothing happens. Marty doesn't even see Chester until they return to their cell for lock down. He raises an eyebrow, but Chester only smiles mysteriously.
Marty shakes his head. "You are such a fucking fraud."
"Be ready, man. Be ready," Chester tells him, smirking.
Marty settles down with a magazine until it's time for lights out. He brushes his teeth and takes a piss and strips down to his t-shirt and underwear. The buzzer sounds, and a second later the lights turn off with the reverberating mechanical click that Marty will probably still hear after he's dead. He slides under the covers and goes through his nightly routine of reviewing all the current bets on the table, for the relaxation value, not because he actually needs to exercise his memory.
He's just starting to drift off when Chester slides down from the top bunk, his bare making a soft, fleshy thud as he lands.
"Come on," he says urgently, scrambling across Marty into his bunk.
"What--"
That's as much as Marty manages before Chester shoves his hand into Marty's boxer and starts jerking him roughly. Marty gets so hard so fast there's no breath left in his body. Chester grunts approvingly, pushes down his own boxers and flips over to face the wall. All Marty can do is stare. He's not entirely convinced he isn't dreaming.
"We've got fifteen minutes before the guard comes back," Chester hisses. "I've timed it. So hurry the fuck up."
He reaches back for Marty's dick and guides it to his hole. Instinct takes over, and Marty pushes in. He has to smother a cry against Chester's shoulder. Chester is so hot and tight and, fuck, wet inside. Marty imagines him doing that, getting himself ready, opening himself up with slicked fingers. It really doesn't matter that they only have fifteen minutes. They're not going to need nearly that long.
Chester's back hitches, and Marty can feel the tension in his thighs. He knows it must hurt, but Chest rocks back against him anyway, taking Marty's cock deeper. Marty squeezes his eyes shut and grits his teeth and thrusts. So good, so fucking good, better even than he remembers sex with women. He hears the soft fleshy sound of Chester jerking himself off, and that's it, that's all he can take. He finishes deep inside Chester's ass. Chester keeps pushing his hips into Marty's and jacking off, and then Marty feels Chester's body clenching around his cock.
They lie together for a moment afterwards, Chester's sweaty back plastered to Marty's chest, Marty's forearm resting across Chester's throat. He can feel the fierce thudding of Chester's pulse against his skin. Then Chester kicks into motion, untangling himself from Marty's body, scooting off the bunk and levering himself back up top just before the guard passes by their cell, flashing a light over them.
They don't talk about it in the morning. Marty doesn't even make eye contact with Chester. The smart thing is to pretend it never happened. Even smarter would be to never do it again. The odds that Marty is going to be stupid are, unfortunately, rather high.
***
Marty has never been sentimental. Weeks turn into months becomes a year, and at no point does he call this thing with Chester a relationship, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts. They share an 8-by-10 world tolerably well and argue about movies (because Chester has truly execrable taste) and sometimes in the chinks of time between the guard's rounds they fuck. It's just a warm body, just something to remind Marty that he used to be human.
Still, there's a calendar lurking in the back of his head, with pages steadily being torn off. Chester is in for three; maybe with time off for good behavior, he'll be out in two. Marty will be lucky if he rolls away from this place toothless and in a wheelchair instead of being carried out in a pine box. The difference between soon and probably never makes Marty really hate doing the math for once.
It's Wednesday, Marty's day to swing by the exercise room. Not that he particularly cares for lifting weights, but the prison gym is to his shady enterprise what the country club golf course is to corporate America. It's where business happens.
He waits for his turn at the free weights, does some desultory arm curls while he scopes out the landscape, looking for opportunity. What he sees, instead, is Chester lounging against the wall over by the Nautilus machines with a new minion fluttering around him. The kid is vaguely familiar, fresh off the bus by the looks of him, pretty in a vacant kind of way, with soft blond hair that falls in his face and big, blink-blink blue eyes. Half the guys on the cellblock have probably already had a piece of him, but the way he stares at Chester is sincerely adoring, gooey-eyed with longing. Chester's mouth quirks into a faintly smug smile. If he were holding a sign that read "I've had my dick in that" with an arrow pointing to the blond kid, it couldn't have been clearer.
Just a warm body. But still, Marty starts to pay closer attention. What he sees doesn't especially please him: the blond kid sitting with Chester at breakfast, following at his heels like a puppy, pressing so close to Chester in the TV room he's practically in his lap.
Being a businessman isn't a job. It's an instinct. And there's no such thing as being off the clock. Marty reacts to the blond kid the way he would to anyone else trying to move in on his territory--with brutal efficiency. All he has to do is wait for an opportunity, and Nortello, the half-witted first lieutenant to the biggest drug dealer on the cellblock, hands it to him. A simple distraction, and Marty is able to lift a package of heroin unseen. He calls in one favor to get it planted in the blond kid's mattress and another to start the rumor that the kid has ambitions about becoming a player in the drug trade.
The guards find him in the shower with his throat cut.
Chester tracks Marty down in the exercise yard later that day. Marty is standing at the fence, staring out at the horizon, his fingers hooked around the links. Feeble, he knows, but it's the only taste of freedom he's probably ever going to have. Chester lines up at the fence next to him. For the longest time, he doesn't say anything, and when he finally does, it's only, "Not necessary."
Marty stares straight ahead. "Are you accusing me of something?"
"Nope. Just sayin'. Not necessary."
That night, Chester comes to his bunk, and Marty fucks the hell out of him. He bites Chester's neck, hard enough to leave a mark. Chester won't be able to take a shower for days for fear of anyone seeing it. When Marty comes, he's so deep inside Chester it's like he's trying to climb inside his bones.
He pulls out, and it's completely impulse, pushing Chester onto his back, going down on him. He's never actually touched Chester's cock before. That's not how this thing between them works. But what the hell. Stuff changes. Chester stares down at him with huge, desperate eyes. Marty flicks his tongue around the head of Chester's cock. Chester bites his hand to keep from shouting out and comes in Marty's mouth. It doesn't taste bad, not really, and Marty quickly swallows it down. He lifts his head. Chester is dazed and smiling. He reaches out to touch Marty's face, fingers trailing along his cheek, wiping away a smudge of come.
Just a warm body, sure, but he's Marty's warm body.
***
Since they don't have relationship, they get to avoid all those discussions that people in relationships seem to feel are necessary, about exes and romantic histories and sexual track records. It's pointless anyway, to talk about a world they're no longer a part of.
So Marty doesn't quite know what to do when he comes into the cell one afternoon and finds Chester slumped unhappily on his bunk, scowling at the letter he's reading. Marty is vaguely aware that there's a girl in the picture. Chester keeps him awake sometimes scratching out pages to her by the emergency lights. But, yeah, that's all he knows. He loiters in the doorway, shifting his weight awkwardly. Maybe he should just turn around and pretend he was never there, but he doesn't.
"You okay?" he says.
Chester shrugs, not looking up. "She found somebody else."
I'm sorry, but he's not, so he doesn't say it. "What-- who--"
Chester's head snaps up. His eyes shine with anger. "Fucking Jesus, man."
Marty's forehead scrunches up in confusion. "What?"
"She found Jesus. And I'm a heathen, so she doesn't want to have anything more to do with me."
Marty tries to form his mouth around words of commiseration, of comfort. A simple what a stupid bitch will probably do, but what comes out is laughter, loud and gut-heaving, the kind of laughter that feels bottomless.
Chester's eyes go wide with surprise and then bright with outrage. He sits up sharply. "Shut up. It's not funny, you fucker." He clenches his hands into fists.
Marty can't stop laughing.
Against all the odds, Marty and Chester have never taken a swing at each other, but this may be the thing at last that spoils their perfect record. And then ,just like that, Chester's fists uncurl, and the corner of his mouth twitches up. "Fuck, Marty. She dumped me for God." And then he's laughing, too.
Marty moves over to the bunk, leans against it. "That's one thing I promise you'll never have to worry about with me."
The moment it's out there he wants to clamp his hand over his mouth, but Chester leans closer, his expression at once softer and more serious. He's so beautiful that it still has the power to surprise Marty sometimes. Now is one of those times.
"Hey. So here's something I wonder about," Chester says softly. "Would you ever, you know, let me do you? If we weren't in this shithole, and there was nothing to be afraid of, and we could be alone, just you and me." His voice goes even lower. "Would you let me?"
Chester regards Marty intently, his eyes big and dark and curious. His lips are softly parted and faintly wet-looking. Marty doesn't answer the question, but he doesn't look away, either. The moment seems to bloom forever.
***
The odds of winning the Powerball grand prize are 195,000,000 to 1. Cashing in on the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes 505,000,000 to 1. The chances that a criminal defendant will prevail on appeal, Marty figures, are somewhat northwards of that.
"Reversible error," Marty's lawyer says three minutes into their meeting. It's the first time he's seen the guy in nearly a year. Color Marty surprised that Mr. Cahill in his J.C Penney suit and lunch-stained tie has actually bothered to do something for him.
Marty sits there, turning those two magic words over and over in his head. Reversible error. Nothing has ever sounded so pretty. "Exactly what does that--"
"There'll be a hearing. Nothing's guaranteed, of course. But." Mr. Cahill clears his throat. "But the case could be dismissed with prejudice. We've got a good chance of that."
There's a shade in his expression. Marty only needs a second to place it: fear. Of the holy shit, I may actually end up setting this psycho free variety. That's when Marty starts to believe. He breaks into a wide smile.
Marty goes back to his cell with the lawyer's parting words echoing in his head. When it happens, it'll happen fast. Be ready.
Chester looks up from the Playboy he's thumbing through. "Good news?"
Marty shrugs. "Usual bullshit."
Chester nods sympathetically.
When it happens, it'll happen fast. No point in stirring the pot before then. Marty is a big believer in just ripping the bandaid off when the time comes.
"I'm going to the library," he says.
Chester nods absently until he realizes that Marty is asking him something, and then his eyebrows lift all the way to his forehead. "Really?"
Marty has never actually solicited Chester's company before. Chester just turns up when he feels like it. That's their balance of power. But nothing stays the same forever.
"You do know how to read, right?" Marty says with a dry little smirk. "I mean, you're not always just looking at the pictures?"
"Fuck you," Chester say cheerfully. He jumps down from the bunk, his sneakers making a sharp squeak on the linoleum. "Let's go do some fucking reading."
They sit across from each other in the library, immersed in their respective books, Nietzsche for Marty, a torrid-looking romance novel complete with ripped bodice for Chester. They don't play footsie under the table or touch at all or even look at each other. In prison, someone is always watching, and you can never be too careful. But occasionally Marty will glance up at Chester's bent head and know that there's a hidden smile that's meant for him being directed down at the page. Marty has never been sentimental, but hey, he needs a reminder he's human as much as anyone else.
Marty tries not to think about his appeal. It will just happen when it happens, he tells himself, and in fact, Mr. Cahill proves entirely prophetic. One stray Thursday afternoon, Marty is working the lathe in the machine shop one moment, and the next, a CO is tapping him on the shoulder and escorting him to the warden's office.
There's not much to pack, a few books and some clothes. He's nearly finished by the time Chester comes skidding into the cell.
"When the fuck were you going to tell me?" he demands.
Marty folds a t-shirt, neatly creasing the fabric with his thumbs. He doesn't answer.
Chester strides over to him, eyes flashing, and Marty think now, now Chester is finally going to take a swing at him. He thinks maybe he even deserves it. Chester yanks him by the collar and forces their mouths together, hard and wet and more than a little angry. It's their first kiss. Last. Only.
You just have another year. Marty doesn't say it. A year is an eternity when one of you is on the outside and the other is stuck in this hellhole.
"I'm glad you're not going to fucking die in here," Chester says, his voice a rough whisper against Marty's ear.
He whirls around and leaves as abruptly as he came. Marty goes back to packing.
***
Freedom doesn't suck as much as prison, but it's not exactly transformative, either. Marty takes a crappy job working customer service. The office is huge and sterile, white walls and dull gray carpet that could make a chipper person feel clinically depressed. He spends seven and three quarters hours a day in a gray-walled cubicle, tethered to his desk by a headset, answering questions about vinyl siding. The company is run like an iron-fisted third grade classroom, everything strictly regimented. An actual bell rings to announce time for a fifteen-minute break, half an hour's lunch, time to go home, time to breathe, piss, contemplate suicide or better yet, a homicidal killing spree to take out whey-faced co-workers and smarmy middle managers.
Marty doesn't call Chester, doesn't write him. What would he say? He tries to put Chester out of his thoughts altogether, tries to lose himself in get up, get dressed, drive to work, pretend to care, one foot in front of the other. But in the back of his head, there's a calendar with the pages being torn off until the date with the big, red circle finally rolls around.
"Excuse me, Marjorie?" Marty hovers in the doorway of his boss' office.
She glances up from her computer. Her hair is piled on top of her head in chunky braids like Heidi, although she must be in her late forties at least. Her face is heavily powdered, her eyebrows drawn in with pencil. She flashes a bright, lipsticked smile at him, all forced cheerfulness. She's the kind of person who makes niceness terrifying.
"What can I do for you, Marty?" She puts on an I'm listening expression. On Marty's first day of work, she'd made a big point that her door was always open.
"Something's come up, a family thing," Marty says, figuring the truth will be less convincing than a lie. "I've got a few days coming to me. I'd like to take off Tuesday."
Marjorie purses her lips thoughtfully. "Gee, Marty, I'd really like to help you out, but Glen's already scheduled to be out that day. Besides, requests are supposed to be put in two weeks in advance."
"I know, but this just came up," Marty tells her, as pleadingly as his trampled sense of dignity will allow.
"Like I said, I wish I could do something for you." She makes a helpless little face, as if it's completely out of her hands. "Procedure is procedure. It wouldn't be fair to everyone else if I bent the rules for you."
Marty goes back to his desk imagining all the unpleasant ways Marjorie could die. He takes a breath and lets it out. Maybe it's better this way anyway, he tells himself. Chester probably has people waiting for him, family or the girlfriend who found Jesus. Anyway, it was just warm bodies, something to remind them they were human. Marty puts his headset back on and picks up the next call.
Tuesday rolls around, and Marty does the usual: gets up, gets dressed, drives to work, one foot in front of the other. He puts on the blinker for the exit to his company, starts to change lanes, and then…doesn't. He zooms past, staying on the highway that will take him upstate. Looks like he just quit his crappy job. He starts to laugh.
It's a five hour drive to the prison. This is Marty's only plan, just to go and hope he can catch Chester. He presses down on the gas, and the shitty old Datsun starts to shake. The radio doesn't work, and Marty sings or just rambles out loud to himself to pass the time. The heater puffs out lukewarm air only half-heartedly. Marty makes two stops for coffee to defrost.
The closer to the prison he gets, the queasier he feels. When he hits the county limits, his chest clenches like he can't breathe. He feels even more like he might start to hyperventilate when he imagines having to walk up to the prison gate and talk to the guards. He doesn't know how else he can find Chester.
Out of the corner of his eye something catches his attention, a dark head, the angle of shoulders, intimately familiar. Marty's heart pounds. He slams on the brakes and turns around and heads back to the bus stop, slowing down as he draws close. Chester is dirty and unshaven and greasily rumpled as if he's been living in those clothes for years rather than just released this morning. Marty has no idea how someone so beautiful can so often manage to look like death only half warmed over.
Marty stops the car, rolls down the window. "Need a ride?"
Chester blinks, several times, and finally breaks into a smile. He scrambles into the car. Marty heads back toward the highway. Chester slumps in the passenger seat, his dusty sneaker propped up on the dashboard. Marty watches him out of the corner of his eye. He calculates there's three days worth of scruff on Chester's face, with this little bare spot on the under side of his jaw where his beard doesn't grow, a twinkle of pale skin. Marty wants to kiss that place so badly his stomach hurts.
"So. What've you been up to?" Chester asks after they've been on the road a while.
Marty tells him, although he leaves out the part where he traded in his job for this spur-of-the-moment trip upstate. Chester looks decidedly unimpressed.
"I've got plans," Marty insists. "Big stuff. I'm just…waiting for all the pieces to fall into place." He hesitates and then asks the question he's been wanting to, "Um. So. I thought maybe you'd-- I mean, I know there was that girl--"
Chester snorts. "She's too busy to give a fuck about me. Off saving souls. I guess she doesn't have much hope for mine."
Marty would say sorry, but he's really, really not.
There's silence for miles, and then Chester says quietly, "I don't have anywhere to go."
Marty's throat clenches tightly. "Yeah. Yeah, you do."
They stop for food at a grimy roadside diner, and by the time they make it back to Marty's place, a by-the-week motel on the outskirts of Yonkers, it's well after dark. Marty leads Chester inside. "It's shitty, but it's home."
Chester glances around at the water-stained wallpaper, the puke green carpet, broken down furniture, ancient console TV straight out of somebody's 1970s basement, the thin aggressively floral polyester bedspread.
"Okay," Marty concedes. "So, it's just shitty."
Chester shrugs and drops the brown paper bag that contains all his worldly belongings onto the floor. Marty stalls, as if his feet are stuck to the gummy carpet. He hadn't thought this far ahead, hadn't considered what he'd do if he actually got Chester here.
"Fuck it," Marty finally says. He grabs Chester by the shirt and yanks him close and kisses him like he's been waiting his whole fucking life to do this.
"Oh, thank Christ," Chester murmurs against Marty's mouth.
He's all over Marty in an eyeblink, kissing messily, hands snaking under Marty's shirt, his hips rocking needily into Marty's. Chester kisses Marty's neck, uses his teeth, makes Marty's skin sting. "Shit. I fucking missed you so much."
They take off their clothes. They've caught glimpses of each other's bodies in the past. That's inevitable when you piss and shit, dress and undress, sleep and wake in a world that measures 8-by-10. But they've never really been naked together. Marty runs a hand along Chester's bare side. He's slender muscles and inked skin, dark penny nipples and thick cock, already hardening just from the touch of Marty's gaze. Marty feels the pudginess of his own body more than ever.
"Fucking finally." Chester kisses the inside of Marty's elbow, the hollow of his collarbone, the line of his sternum. "Wanted to see you. Wanted it so bad."
He tugs at Marty's arm and falls back onto the bed, pulling Marty with him. They bounce on the cheap mattress. Chester laughs. Marty threads his fingers through Chester's hair, brushing it off his forehead. He's smiling so hard the muscles in his jaw ache. Chester loops his arms around Marty's neck, and they're all over each other again, kissing desperately, hands groping, Chester's cock rubbing against Marty's belly, Marty's cock sliding sweetly in the notch of Chester's hip. It's good, so good, and Marty could come just from this. But. But.
"So." Marty lifts his head to look at Chester, biting his lip nervously. "So the thing is. I would. I'd let you."
It's cryptic maybe, a conversation picked up months and months later, but Chester knows exactly what he means. Hunger flares in his eyes, hard and bright. Marty grabs for the nightstand drawer, clumsily feeling around in it and coming up with the lube. Maybe he's imagined this moment a time or two and wanted to be ready. He slicks his fingers, pushes them into his ass. Maybe he's practiced this, just in case.
Chester watches intently, his chest rising and falling sharply. Marty kneels up and swings his leg across Chester's body to straddle him and sits down on his cock.
"Fuck!" Chester cries out.
Marty would probably be cursing too, but all the air is ripped out of his lungs. The burn and pain of being penetrated makes his eyes water. Finally he can taste freedom, the real thing, the freedom to feel, to hurt like hell, to throw yourself into something without really thinking, to grab with both hands at what might be the worst idea of your life just because you want it. Marty takes in a shaky breath and sinks down, down until Chester is all the way inside him.
Chester stares up at him, his eyes bottomlessly dark. Marty starts to move, rising and falling awkwardly. His thighs burn from the strain. Chester strokes his hands over Marty's hips. Sweat glistens on Chester's forehead, and his mouth trembles. "I love you." He says it like it hurts.
This knocks Marty off his rhythm. Chester takes over, curls his hands around Marty's thighs, and pushes up into him. Marty grabs his dick. One fumbling pull, and he's coming, and Chester is coming inside him.
They nestle together afterwards, naked, the sweat drying on their skin. Chester pillows his head on Marty's shoulder. Marty idly strokes his hand down Chester's arm and over his hip. He spreads his fingers and fits them to the hollow of bone. All these months, all the plans he's dreamed up, and he's just been waiting for the last piece to fall into place.
"Hey, you know what I said before?" Chester nuzzles Marty's jaw. "Wasn't just 'cause I had my dick in your ass. I meant it."
Marty calculates the odds that they could actually make something of this, that one of them won't end up stabbing the other in the back like the pathological opportunists they are, that they won't get each other killed out of stupidity, that they won't wind up right back where they started in an 8-by-10 box. Roughly, he puts their chances at sucky to none.
He threads his fingers through Chester's hair, presses a kiss to his forehead. "Me too. I do, too."
Probably they're against all the odds, but hey, anything could happen.
but hey, anything could happen
Fandoms: CSI New York/Law and Order (also really bandom)
Pairing: Chester Byron/Marty Dressler (aka Pete/Patrick as seen on your network crime drama)
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~6,500
Summary: What happens when these two cons meet up on the inside.
Notes: By the time CSI New York went off, this story was already taking shape in my head. There was no way I could resist writing it.
Warning: Everything I "know" about prison, I "learned" from watching Oz.
Disclaimer: Not true. Not mine.
Probably they're against all the odds,
but hey, anything could happen
By Lenore
In the end, everything comes down to probability. Marty believes this the way some people believe in God. Chances that the oatmeal will be scorched at breakfast? 2 to 1. That the library will actually have the book he wants? 7 to 1. That CO Thorson will stop being a son of a bitch for five seconds? Infinity to 1.
The odds of causing three people's deaths and getting away with it? Not so good, in retrospect.
All this trivia floats through Marty's head alongside the numbers that really matter: Rodriguez in C-block fifty bucks on Cleveland with a three-point spread; Daniels thirty down on Diamond Dancer in the third race at Aqueduct; Fargnoli a hundred on Jeff Gordon to win at Talledega. There have been raids on five different cells in the last week alone, the flacks searching for markers, for records, for something that will help them bust the highly profitable prison-wide bookmaking operation. Marty hides in plain sight behind his thick-rimmed glasses and his stooped shoulders, smirking when the guards aren't looking. The evidence they're so eager to find is all in his head.
"You gonna eat that?" Tiny's enormous paw hovers over the bowl of inedible slop on Marty's tray.
Marty shakes his head. Tiny helps himself. Across the table, Sturtz stares into space, slack-jawed. Nelson gives the appearance that he loses IQ points merely by breathing. Marty's colleagues are not the sharpest thugs in the drawer, but they are geniuses at busting heads. That's all he needs them for.
"Huh," Tiny grunts.
This is his interested noise, and Marty glances up, to see what's caught his attention.
"New guy," Sturtz murmurs, the way someone else might say sixteen-ounce ribeye or hot fudge sundae, like he can already taste it.
The new guy shuffles his feet, his dark eyes slitted, unfocused, a somnambulist in a predatory jungle. His lank black hair falls into his face, and he looks like he needs to be scraped clean, mere soap and water not powerful enough to take the stink off him. None of that hides the fact that he's every con's substitute wet dream, short and slight, with a full jaw that makes his face softly pretty, and thick, suggestive lips that seem to invite violation.
There are three ways to survive in prison: with your fists, your brains or your ass. From the yawning vacant sign in the new guy's eyes, he's a man without any other life preserver than his body. Marty automatically calculates the odds of who will be the one to break him in: Jenkinson 3-1, Romanoff 11-1, Steinhoffer 5-1, and from the spittle glistening at the corner of Sturtz's mouth, he's the favorite at 2-1.
New guy grabs a tray and goes through the line and plunks down at a table opposite Caruso, who has biceps so bulging he has to cut the sleeves of his shirt, devil horns tattooed on his bald head, and a pitted, scarred face that would surely make small children cry. He glares get the fuck out of here at the new guy, who just smiles blandly and keeps on shoveling down his food.
Marty whites out the earlier betting line in his head and calculates instead the odds that the new guy will turn up dead by morning.
***
Probability doesn't eliminate surprises, of course. Marty walks into his cell after his afternoon work detail and finds that the new guy is his new cellmate. In fact, he's taken over the place like a one-man plague of locusts, sprawled out on the bottom bunk, getting his grubby sneakers all over the blanket.
"Hey, dude," new guy says, looking slightly more alert than before. "I'm Chester. You're Marty, right?"
"That's my bunk," Marty tells him stiffly.
"Oh, yeah? My bad, dude." He hauls himself to his feet.
There's an indentation in the shape of his butt left behind, and the blankets are a wrinkled mess. Marty can already tell they're going to have irreconcilable differences. Chester looks like a strong wind blew the clothes onto him, shirt tail straggling past his thighs, collar askew. Marty wears his uniform as if he used a ruler when getting dressed, shirt neatly tucked, buttons down all the way up to his collarbone, creases in his trousers as sharp as he can get them without an iron.
Chester looks from Marty's displeased expression to the bunk and back again. He breaks into an amused smirk. Normally, Marty isn't one for getting his hands dirty. That's what he has Tiny and Sturtz and Nelson for. But there's something about Chester that makes him want to wipe that smirk off his pretty face with his own two fists.
"Dude. Hey. Let me." Chester swipes his hand over the covers, straightening out the blanket, although not nearly well enough to suit Marty's exacting standards. "So. Us being roomies and all, I thought we should get to know each other. I'll go first. Born and raised in Queens…"
Marty snatches up his Wired magazine that he'd come to fetch, turns on his heel and leaves Chester there talking to himself.
A wry "so, yeah, we can finish this later" floats out after him. Marty updates his mental stats on Chester with the very real likelihood that he'll be shanked by supper.
***
Knowing the odds isn't the same thing as knowing the future. The improbable does happen every now and then. A week goes by, then two, and Chester hasn't made one visit to the infirmary, hasn't been paraded around in drag by an Aryan skinhead, isn't being pimped out daily for cigarettes.
His story gets around--everyone's does eventually--how he landed in prison, the bizarre tale of heroin made out of bodies. It's not clear if Chester did the actual cooking or if he was just an opportunist looking to make a buck off the finished product. Chester doesn't volunteer any information, doesn't make any boasts, doesn't deny anything. His silence is enough to convince most guys he was only recently boiling someone's spleen on the kitchen stove. All the brutal things the men here have done, and they still give Chester a wide berth. Someone who merchandises corpses just isn't right, they probably think, even more not right than all the other thieves and thugs in the place.
It's not until the third week that the stunts start. Someone festoons the infirmary with rolls upon rolls of gauze. A ladle stolen from the kitchen ends up atop the guard station like a jaunty statue. A toothpaste fresco decorates a wall of the day room. No one gets caught, but rumors whisper through the cellblocks. Chester becomes a folk hero of sorts. All the pranks are perfectly harmless, but it doesn't matter. Cons love any fuck-you to the system, and even Marty has to marvel at what a surprisingly slippery piece of business the guy must be to have gotten away with all of that.
Chester seems likewise impressed with himself. He struts around with a cocky grin, a gaudy cult of personality in search of an audience, and the most unlikely thing of all happens: he develops a following. The men who get pulled along in his wake are all bigger and meaner and more seasoned in the ugly ways of criminality than he is. This doesn't seem to matter. Chester plies his minions with an unlikely combination of charm and flirtation and fraternity boy hijinks, and they eat it up. Marty concludes that you can con a con man, a whole passel of them, in fact.
Marty ignores Chester as much as is humanly possible given that he's sharing an 8-by-10 world with him. Something about the guy gets under Marty's skin. He's not sure what. He just knows he doesn't like it.
***
"You're going to have to talk to me sometime," Chester declares out of the blue one day, lurking at the end of the bunk.
Marty would beg to differ, but he doesn't want to encourage Chester even that much. He flips the page of his magazine without looking up.
"You're a stubborn little fucker, you know that?" Chester glares.
He moves until he's standing right over Marty, blocking out his light.
"Go away," Marty says, his jaw clenched.
"No," Chester says stubbornly.
Marty pushes at his shoulder, but Chester holds his ground, surprisingly immovable for such a tiny little shit. Marty kneels up to get better leverage, and Chester shoves his hand down Marty's pants. Marty freezes, unable to say or do anything, except to get hard in Chester's hand.
Prison is a never-ending spiral of deprivation, and worst of all is the hunger for skin, for a warm body, for just a little something to remind you that you used to be a human being. Marty keeps telling himself that being a geek who was never too smooth with the ladies was good practice for life on the inside. He's used to having only his own right hand for company. For the most part, he's managed to believe that touching himself is just as good as having someone else touching him.
Chester debunks this myth with the first pull of his hand. He has long, nimble fingers and a callus on his thumb that he rubs against the little scar where Marty was cut as a baby. His knuckles brush Marty's belly on every upstroke. Marty's thighs tremble, and his stomach aches hotly, and he's going to come all over his clothes. At the last moment, though, Chester produces a tissue for Marty to finish into.
Marty sucks in a shallow breath, and then it hits him: Chester planned this out in advance. His face goes hot with rage, his hands curling into fists as he waits for the demand, for Marty's mouth or his ass, some kind of carnal quid pro quo. That's how this game works in prison.
Chester leans in, so close their noses nearly brush. His eyes are as hard and bright as agates, fixed on Marty. "Just give me the fucking time of day, okay?"
He straightens up and stalks out of the cell. Marty is left staring into empty space.
Survival instinct is still survival instinct, and Marty goes through the next few days warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The only thing that happens, though, is that Chester materializes at Marty's table one day at lunch, eyebrow raised like a question mark. Marty considers it a moment and then nods permission. Chester ducks his head to hide a smile and plunks down onto the empty chair. Tiny frowns at Marty in confusion. Stutz stares at Chester like he's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Nelson, as usual, looks like he has rocks in his head. Marty scowls at them all. They go back to eating lunch.
Chester doesn't make a constant nuisance of himself. Just occasionally he'll turn up at Marty's side, and Marty will tolerate him. Marty has no idea why this matters to the guy.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, Marty plays chess in the game room before dinner. Chester surprises him one afternoon, sliding into the seat opposite him.
"Rack 'em up," he says.
Marty sighs. "That's pool."
Chester laughs.
It's a feint, Marty soon discovers. A dozen moves later, Chester has him seriously on the ropes. Marty would have calculated the odds of this as approximately impossible to none.
"Check mate," Chester declares five minutes later.
Marty stares at the board as if he's lost time and can't figure out how he got here.
"What?" Chester gives Marty a look, smolderingly flirtatious. "You don't think I know how to make a move?"
He walks away grinning.
Marty doesn't think any more about it--except to occasionally boggle over the fact that sleepy-eyed Chester bested him at a game of actual strategy. A few days later, though, he's taken up his usual position against the wall in the dayroom, open for business for anyone who wants to place bets. He's surprised to see Chester approaching. He's never shown the least sign that he's interested in gambling, but hey, Marty figures there's a first time for everything. Chester's arm brushes Marty's, and Marty waits for him to say "twenty on Dallas" or "Hard on the Rocks to place in the Preakness."
But Chester has a talent for defying expectations. He whispers against Marty's ear, like a promise, "Gonna show you my moves. Tonight. Be ready."
He drifts away, and Marty rolls his eyes. He has no idea what that's supposed to mean. He only knows that Chester is an attention-whoring little drama queen. A person needs about five minutes with him to figure that out. He's probably hoping that Marty will spend the rest of the day thinking about him, wondering. Marty is determined not to give him the satisfaction.
Lunch, work detail, library, dinner, TV in the dayroom…and nothing happens. Marty doesn't even see Chester until they return to their cell for lock down. He raises an eyebrow, but Chester only smiles mysteriously.
Marty shakes his head. "You are such a fucking fraud."
"Be ready, man. Be ready," Chester tells him, smirking.
Marty settles down with a magazine until it's time for lights out. He brushes his teeth and takes a piss and strips down to his t-shirt and underwear. The buzzer sounds, and a second later the lights turn off with the reverberating mechanical click that Marty will probably still hear after he's dead. He slides under the covers and goes through his nightly routine of reviewing all the current bets on the table, for the relaxation value, not because he actually needs to exercise his memory.
He's just starting to drift off when Chester slides down from the top bunk, his bare making a soft, fleshy thud as he lands.
"Come on," he says urgently, scrambling across Marty into his bunk.
"What--"
That's as much as Marty manages before Chester shoves his hand into Marty's boxer and starts jerking him roughly. Marty gets so hard so fast there's no breath left in his body. Chester grunts approvingly, pushes down his own boxers and flips over to face the wall. All Marty can do is stare. He's not entirely convinced he isn't dreaming.
"We've got fifteen minutes before the guard comes back," Chester hisses. "I've timed it. So hurry the fuck up."
He reaches back for Marty's dick and guides it to his hole. Instinct takes over, and Marty pushes in. He has to smother a cry against Chester's shoulder. Chester is so hot and tight and, fuck, wet inside. Marty imagines him doing that, getting himself ready, opening himself up with slicked fingers. It really doesn't matter that they only have fifteen minutes. They're not going to need nearly that long.
Chester's back hitches, and Marty can feel the tension in his thighs. He knows it must hurt, but Chest rocks back against him anyway, taking Marty's cock deeper. Marty squeezes his eyes shut and grits his teeth and thrusts. So good, so fucking good, better even than he remembers sex with women. He hears the soft fleshy sound of Chester jerking himself off, and that's it, that's all he can take. He finishes deep inside Chester's ass. Chester keeps pushing his hips into Marty's and jacking off, and then Marty feels Chester's body clenching around his cock.
They lie together for a moment afterwards, Chester's sweaty back plastered to Marty's chest, Marty's forearm resting across Chester's throat. He can feel the fierce thudding of Chester's pulse against his skin. Then Chester kicks into motion, untangling himself from Marty's body, scooting off the bunk and levering himself back up top just before the guard passes by their cell, flashing a light over them.
They don't talk about it in the morning. Marty doesn't even make eye contact with Chester. The smart thing is to pretend it never happened. Even smarter would be to never do it again. The odds that Marty is going to be stupid are, unfortunately, rather high.
***
Marty has never been sentimental. Weeks turn into months becomes a year, and at no point does he call this thing with Chester a relationship, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts. They share an 8-by-10 world tolerably well and argue about movies (because Chester has truly execrable taste) and sometimes in the chinks of time between the guard's rounds they fuck. It's just a warm body, just something to remind Marty that he used to be human.
Still, there's a calendar lurking in the back of his head, with pages steadily being torn off. Chester is in for three; maybe with time off for good behavior, he'll be out in two. Marty will be lucky if he rolls away from this place toothless and in a wheelchair instead of being carried out in a pine box. The difference between soon and probably never makes Marty really hate doing the math for once.
It's Wednesday, Marty's day to swing by the exercise room. Not that he particularly cares for lifting weights, but the prison gym is to his shady enterprise what the country club golf course is to corporate America. It's where business happens.
He waits for his turn at the free weights, does some desultory arm curls while he scopes out the landscape, looking for opportunity. What he sees, instead, is Chester lounging against the wall over by the Nautilus machines with a new minion fluttering around him. The kid is vaguely familiar, fresh off the bus by the looks of him, pretty in a vacant kind of way, with soft blond hair that falls in his face and big, blink-blink blue eyes. Half the guys on the cellblock have probably already had a piece of him, but the way he stares at Chester is sincerely adoring, gooey-eyed with longing. Chester's mouth quirks into a faintly smug smile. If he were holding a sign that read "I've had my dick in that" with an arrow pointing to the blond kid, it couldn't have been clearer.
Just a warm body. But still, Marty starts to pay closer attention. What he sees doesn't especially please him: the blond kid sitting with Chester at breakfast, following at his heels like a puppy, pressing so close to Chester in the TV room he's practically in his lap.
Being a businessman isn't a job. It's an instinct. And there's no such thing as being off the clock. Marty reacts to the blond kid the way he would to anyone else trying to move in on his territory--with brutal efficiency. All he has to do is wait for an opportunity, and Nortello, the half-witted first lieutenant to the biggest drug dealer on the cellblock, hands it to him. A simple distraction, and Marty is able to lift a package of heroin unseen. He calls in one favor to get it planted in the blond kid's mattress and another to start the rumor that the kid has ambitions about becoming a player in the drug trade.
The guards find him in the shower with his throat cut.
Chester tracks Marty down in the exercise yard later that day. Marty is standing at the fence, staring out at the horizon, his fingers hooked around the links. Feeble, he knows, but it's the only taste of freedom he's probably ever going to have. Chester lines up at the fence next to him. For the longest time, he doesn't say anything, and when he finally does, it's only, "Not necessary."
Marty stares straight ahead. "Are you accusing me of something?"
"Nope. Just sayin'. Not necessary."
That night, Chester comes to his bunk, and Marty fucks the hell out of him. He bites Chester's neck, hard enough to leave a mark. Chester won't be able to take a shower for days for fear of anyone seeing it. When Marty comes, he's so deep inside Chester it's like he's trying to climb inside his bones.
He pulls out, and it's completely impulse, pushing Chester onto his back, going down on him. He's never actually touched Chester's cock before. That's not how this thing between them works. But what the hell. Stuff changes. Chester stares down at him with huge, desperate eyes. Marty flicks his tongue around the head of Chester's cock. Chester bites his hand to keep from shouting out and comes in Marty's mouth. It doesn't taste bad, not really, and Marty quickly swallows it down. He lifts his head. Chester is dazed and smiling. He reaches out to touch Marty's face, fingers trailing along his cheek, wiping away a smudge of come.
Just a warm body, sure, but he's Marty's warm body.
***
Since they don't have relationship, they get to avoid all those discussions that people in relationships seem to feel are necessary, about exes and romantic histories and sexual track records. It's pointless anyway, to talk about a world they're no longer a part of.
So Marty doesn't quite know what to do when he comes into the cell one afternoon and finds Chester slumped unhappily on his bunk, scowling at the letter he's reading. Marty is vaguely aware that there's a girl in the picture. Chester keeps him awake sometimes scratching out pages to her by the emergency lights. But, yeah, that's all he knows. He loiters in the doorway, shifting his weight awkwardly. Maybe he should just turn around and pretend he was never there, but he doesn't.
"You okay?" he says.
Chester shrugs, not looking up. "She found somebody else."
I'm sorry, but he's not, so he doesn't say it. "What-- who--"
Chester's head snaps up. His eyes shine with anger. "Fucking Jesus, man."
Marty's forehead scrunches up in confusion. "What?"
"She found Jesus. And I'm a heathen, so she doesn't want to have anything more to do with me."
Marty tries to form his mouth around words of commiseration, of comfort. A simple what a stupid bitch will probably do, but what comes out is laughter, loud and gut-heaving, the kind of laughter that feels bottomless.
Chester's eyes go wide with surprise and then bright with outrage. He sits up sharply. "Shut up. It's not funny, you fucker." He clenches his hands into fists.
Marty can't stop laughing.
Against all the odds, Marty and Chester have never taken a swing at each other, but this may be the thing at last that spoils their perfect record. And then ,just like that, Chester's fists uncurl, and the corner of his mouth twitches up. "Fuck, Marty. She dumped me for God." And then he's laughing, too.
Marty moves over to the bunk, leans against it. "That's one thing I promise you'll never have to worry about with me."
The moment it's out there he wants to clamp his hand over his mouth, but Chester leans closer, his expression at once softer and more serious. He's so beautiful that it still has the power to surprise Marty sometimes. Now is one of those times.
"Hey. So here's something I wonder about," Chester says softly. "Would you ever, you know, let me do you? If we weren't in this shithole, and there was nothing to be afraid of, and we could be alone, just you and me." His voice goes even lower. "Would you let me?"
Chester regards Marty intently, his eyes big and dark and curious. His lips are softly parted and faintly wet-looking. Marty doesn't answer the question, but he doesn't look away, either. The moment seems to bloom forever.
***
The odds of winning the Powerball grand prize are 195,000,000 to 1. Cashing in on the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes 505,000,000 to 1. The chances that a criminal defendant will prevail on appeal, Marty figures, are somewhat northwards of that.
"Reversible error," Marty's lawyer says three minutes into their meeting. It's the first time he's seen the guy in nearly a year. Color Marty surprised that Mr. Cahill in his J.C Penney suit and lunch-stained tie has actually bothered to do something for him.
Marty sits there, turning those two magic words over and over in his head. Reversible error. Nothing has ever sounded so pretty. "Exactly what does that--"
"There'll be a hearing. Nothing's guaranteed, of course. But." Mr. Cahill clears his throat. "But the case could be dismissed with prejudice. We've got a good chance of that."
There's a shade in his expression. Marty only needs a second to place it: fear. Of the holy shit, I may actually end up setting this psycho free variety. That's when Marty starts to believe. He breaks into a wide smile.
Marty goes back to his cell with the lawyer's parting words echoing in his head. When it happens, it'll happen fast. Be ready.
Chester looks up from the Playboy he's thumbing through. "Good news?"
Marty shrugs. "Usual bullshit."
Chester nods sympathetically.
When it happens, it'll happen fast. No point in stirring the pot before then. Marty is a big believer in just ripping the bandaid off when the time comes.
"I'm going to the library," he says.
Chester nods absently until he realizes that Marty is asking him something, and then his eyebrows lift all the way to his forehead. "Really?"
Marty has never actually solicited Chester's company before. Chester just turns up when he feels like it. That's their balance of power. But nothing stays the same forever.
"You do know how to read, right?" Marty says with a dry little smirk. "I mean, you're not always just looking at the pictures?"
"Fuck you," Chester say cheerfully. He jumps down from the bunk, his sneakers making a sharp squeak on the linoleum. "Let's go do some fucking reading."
They sit across from each other in the library, immersed in their respective books, Nietzsche for Marty, a torrid-looking romance novel complete with ripped bodice for Chester. They don't play footsie under the table or touch at all or even look at each other. In prison, someone is always watching, and you can never be too careful. But occasionally Marty will glance up at Chester's bent head and know that there's a hidden smile that's meant for him being directed down at the page. Marty has never been sentimental, but hey, he needs a reminder he's human as much as anyone else.
Marty tries not to think about his appeal. It will just happen when it happens, he tells himself, and in fact, Mr. Cahill proves entirely prophetic. One stray Thursday afternoon, Marty is working the lathe in the machine shop one moment, and the next, a CO is tapping him on the shoulder and escorting him to the warden's office.
There's not much to pack, a few books and some clothes. He's nearly finished by the time Chester comes skidding into the cell.
"When the fuck were you going to tell me?" he demands.
Marty folds a t-shirt, neatly creasing the fabric with his thumbs. He doesn't answer.
Chester strides over to him, eyes flashing, and Marty think now, now Chester is finally going to take a swing at him. He thinks maybe he even deserves it. Chester yanks him by the collar and forces their mouths together, hard and wet and more than a little angry. It's their first kiss. Last. Only.
You just have another year. Marty doesn't say it. A year is an eternity when one of you is on the outside and the other is stuck in this hellhole.
"I'm glad you're not going to fucking die in here," Chester says, his voice a rough whisper against Marty's ear.
He whirls around and leaves as abruptly as he came. Marty goes back to packing.
***
Freedom doesn't suck as much as prison, but it's not exactly transformative, either. Marty takes a crappy job working customer service. The office is huge and sterile, white walls and dull gray carpet that could make a chipper person feel clinically depressed. He spends seven and three quarters hours a day in a gray-walled cubicle, tethered to his desk by a headset, answering questions about vinyl siding. The company is run like an iron-fisted third grade classroom, everything strictly regimented. An actual bell rings to announce time for a fifteen-minute break, half an hour's lunch, time to go home, time to breathe, piss, contemplate suicide or better yet, a homicidal killing spree to take out whey-faced co-workers and smarmy middle managers.
Marty doesn't call Chester, doesn't write him. What would he say? He tries to put Chester out of his thoughts altogether, tries to lose himself in get up, get dressed, drive to work, pretend to care, one foot in front of the other. But in the back of his head, there's a calendar with the pages being torn off until the date with the big, red circle finally rolls around.
"Excuse me, Marjorie?" Marty hovers in the doorway of his boss' office.
She glances up from her computer. Her hair is piled on top of her head in chunky braids like Heidi, although she must be in her late forties at least. Her face is heavily powdered, her eyebrows drawn in with pencil. She flashes a bright, lipsticked smile at him, all forced cheerfulness. She's the kind of person who makes niceness terrifying.
"What can I do for you, Marty?" She puts on an I'm listening expression. On Marty's first day of work, she'd made a big point that her door was always open.
"Something's come up, a family thing," Marty says, figuring the truth will be less convincing than a lie. "I've got a few days coming to me. I'd like to take off Tuesday."
Marjorie purses her lips thoughtfully. "Gee, Marty, I'd really like to help you out, but Glen's already scheduled to be out that day. Besides, requests are supposed to be put in two weeks in advance."
"I know, but this just came up," Marty tells her, as pleadingly as his trampled sense of dignity will allow.
"Like I said, I wish I could do something for you." She makes a helpless little face, as if it's completely out of her hands. "Procedure is procedure. It wouldn't be fair to everyone else if I bent the rules for you."
Marty goes back to his desk imagining all the unpleasant ways Marjorie could die. He takes a breath and lets it out. Maybe it's better this way anyway, he tells himself. Chester probably has people waiting for him, family or the girlfriend who found Jesus. Anyway, it was just warm bodies, something to remind them they were human. Marty puts his headset back on and picks up the next call.
Tuesday rolls around, and Marty does the usual: gets up, gets dressed, drives to work, one foot in front of the other. He puts on the blinker for the exit to his company, starts to change lanes, and then…doesn't. He zooms past, staying on the highway that will take him upstate. Looks like he just quit his crappy job. He starts to laugh.
It's a five hour drive to the prison. This is Marty's only plan, just to go and hope he can catch Chester. He presses down on the gas, and the shitty old Datsun starts to shake. The radio doesn't work, and Marty sings or just rambles out loud to himself to pass the time. The heater puffs out lukewarm air only half-heartedly. Marty makes two stops for coffee to defrost.
The closer to the prison he gets, the queasier he feels. When he hits the county limits, his chest clenches like he can't breathe. He feels even more like he might start to hyperventilate when he imagines having to walk up to the prison gate and talk to the guards. He doesn't know how else he can find Chester.
Out of the corner of his eye something catches his attention, a dark head, the angle of shoulders, intimately familiar. Marty's heart pounds. He slams on the brakes and turns around and heads back to the bus stop, slowing down as he draws close. Chester is dirty and unshaven and greasily rumpled as if he's been living in those clothes for years rather than just released this morning. Marty has no idea how someone so beautiful can so often manage to look like death only half warmed over.
Marty stops the car, rolls down the window. "Need a ride?"
Chester blinks, several times, and finally breaks into a smile. He scrambles into the car. Marty heads back toward the highway. Chester slumps in the passenger seat, his dusty sneaker propped up on the dashboard. Marty watches him out of the corner of his eye. He calculates there's three days worth of scruff on Chester's face, with this little bare spot on the under side of his jaw where his beard doesn't grow, a twinkle of pale skin. Marty wants to kiss that place so badly his stomach hurts.
"So. What've you been up to?" Chester asks after they've been on the road a while.
Marty tells him, although he leaves out the part where he traded in his job for this spur-of-the-moment trip upstate. Chester looks decidedly unimpressed.
"I've got plans," Marty insists. "Big stuff. I'm just…waiting for all the pieces to fall into place." He hesitates and then asks the question he's been wanting to, "Um. So. I thought maybe you'd-- I mean, I know there was that girl--"
Chester snorts. "She's too busy to give a fuck about me. Off saving souls. I guess she doesn't have much hope for mine."
Marty would say sorry, but he's really, really not.
There's silence for miles, and then Chester says quietly, "I don't have anywhere to go."
Marty's throat clenches tightly. "Yeah. Yeah, you do."
They stop for food at a grimy roadside diner, and by the time they make it back to Marty's place, a by-the-week motel on the outskirts of Yonkers, it's well after dark. Marty leads Chester inside. "It's shitty, but it's home."
Chester glances around at the water-stained wallpaper, the puke green carpet, broken down furniture, ancient console TV straight out of somebody's 1970s basement, the thin aggressively floral polyester bedspread.
"Okay," Marty concedes. "So, it's just shitty."
Chester shrugs and drops the brown paper bag that contains all his worldly belongings onto the floor. Marty stalls, as if his feet are stuck to the gummy carpet. He hadn't thought this far ahead, hadn't considered what he'd do if he actually got Chester here.
"Fuck it," Marty finally says. He grabs Chester by the shirt and yanks him close and kisses him like he's been waiting his whole fucking life to do this.
"Oh, thank Christ," Chester murmurs against Marty's mouth.
He's all over Marty in an eyeblink, kissing messily, hands snaking under Marty's shirt, his hips rocking needily into Marty's. Chester kisses Marty's neck, uses his teeth, makes Marty's skin sting. "Shit. I fucking missed you so much."
They take off their clothes. They've caught glimpses of each other's bodies in the past. That's inevitable when you piss and shit, dress and undress, sleep and wake in a world that measures 8-by-10. But they've never really been naked together. Marty runs a hand along Chester's bare side. He's slender muscles and inked skin, dark penny nipples and thick cock, already hardening just from the touch of Marty's gaze. Marty feels the pudginess of his own body more than ever.
"Fucking finally." Chester kisses the inside of Marty's elbow, the hollow of his collarbone, the line of his sternum. "Wanted to see you. Wanted it so bad."
He tugs at Marty's arm and falls back onto the bed, pulling Marty with him. They bounce on the cheap mattress. Chester laughs. Marty threads his fingers through Chester's hair, brushing it off his forehead. He's smiling so hard the muscles in his jaw ache. Chester loops his arms around Marty's neck, and they're all over each other again, kissing desperately, hands groping, Chester's cock rubbing against Marty's belly, Marty's cock sliding sweetly in the notch of Chester's hip. It's good, so good, and Marty could come just from this. But. But.
"So." Marty lifts his head to look at Chester, biting his lip nervously. "So the thing is. I would. I'd let you."
It's cryptic maybe, a conversation picked up months and months later, but Chester knows exactly what he means. Hunger flares in his eyes, hard and bright. Marty grabs for the nightstand drawer, clumsily feeling around in it and coming up with the lube. Maybe he's imagined this moment a time or two and wanted to be ready. He slicks his fingers, pushes them into his ass. Maybe he's practiced this, just in case.
Chester watches intently, his chest rising and falling sharply. Marty kneels up and swings his leg across Chester's body to straddle him and sits down on his cock.
"Fuck!" Chester cries out.
Marty would probably be cursing too, but all the air is ripped out of his lungs. The burn and pain of being penetrated makes his eyes water. Finally he can taste freedom, the real thing, the freedom to feel, to hurt like hell, to throw yourself into something without really thinking, to grab with both hands at what might be the worst idea of your life just because you want it. Marty takes in a shaky breath and sinks down, down until Chester is all the way inside him.
Chester stares up at him, his eyes bottomlessly dark. Marty starts to move, rising and falling awkwardly. His thighs burn from the strain. Chester strokes his hands over Marty's hips. Sweat glistens on Chester's forehead, and his mouth trembles. "I love you." He says it like it hurts.
This knocks Marty off his rhythm. Chester takes over, curls his hands around Marty's thighs, and pushes up into him. Marty grabs his dick. One fumbling pull, and he's coming, and Chester is coming inside him.
They nestle together afterwards, naked, the sweat drying on their skin. Chester pillows his head on Marty's shoulder. Marty idly strokes his hand down Chester's arm and over his hip. He spreads his fingers and fits them to the hollow of bone. All these months, all the plans he's dreamed up, and he's just been waiting for the last piece to fall into place.
"Hey, you know what I said before?" Chester nuzzles Marty's jaw. "Wasn't just 'cause I had my dick in your ass. I meant it."
Marty calculates the odds that they could actually make something of this, that one of them won't end up stabbing the other in the back like the pathological opportunists they are, that they won't get each other killed out of stupidity, that they won't wind up right back where they started in an 8-by-10 box. Roughly, he puts their chances at sucky to none.
He threads his fingers through Chester's hair, presses a kiss to his forehead. "Me too. I do, too."
Probably they're against all the odds, but hey, anything could happen.