Read Online Thief by Maureen Gibbon - Free Book Online Page B

and walked toward the guard’s table.
    When he came back to the chair, he was carrying a small white slip of paper.
    “Are you in trouble?”
    “It’s just a warning,” he said.
    “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
    “It isn’t your fault. I knew better.”
    And though he tucked the slip into his pocket, it took a moment longer to push it from his mind and compose his face.
    “It doesn’t mean anything, Suzanne. It’s just a write-up.”
    And then they called, “Breville, five minutes,” and I knew I would have to leave soon.
    When Breville and I hugged in the taped square that day, it still felt awkward to me. Though I felt the warmth of his body,
     there was no ease in the embrace, no naturalness. With any other manI’d spent so much time talking and writing to, I would have already had an intimate knowledge— sex was a way I got to know
     a man, not a culmination. But with Breville there was nothing. As I held him I couldn’t get over the idea that I didn’t know
     anything about his body— not the way his chest curved into his belly, not the way the muscles of his thighs were braided,
     not the feeling of his scalp under my fingers— nothing. Even though I’d thought Breville was good-looking from the first time
     I’d come to Stillwater, I hadn’t thought of touching him until that moment. But just then I wanted nothing so much as to kiss
     him and find out what his mouth tasted like. If my lips even touched Breville’s, though, let alone if we’d French-kissed and
     touched tongues, he’d get thrown in the hole. The hole— he’d told me that was the punishment, solitary confinement for a kiss.
    But I felt concern for him, over the white slip of paper and for what I knew his life to be, and that was part of my embrace
     that day. I know I tried to let that feeling travel out through my arms and breasts and hands. And I believe Breville must
     have felt it from me, because when we parted and began walking away— him back to his cell and me back to the locking cage
     and the waiting room— we both turned to look at the other. I nodded a few times and tried to show something with my eyes,
     and Breville did the same, nodding and saying goodbye with his eyes, and then he put his hand out at waist level, palm down,
     and made a smooth pass through the air, as if to say he was fine, that what ever feelings he had were smoothed over, that
     he was steady. That he would remain so until I came again.
    In the air in front of the guards, that was what he told me with no words.

13
    IN HIGH SCHOOL , Cree and I usually parked out at Brommer’s old farm house, but a week after I was raped, we broke into the Boy Scout camp
     in Rock.
    It was Cree’s idea. He wanted the night to be special, I think. All week I asked my mom to tell him I wasn’t home when he
     called, and I think he was worried he was losing me. Or maybe he just wanted to be with me someplace new.
    All the way out there, I kept thinking,
I should tell him now, I should get it over with
. I practiced it over and over, but I couldn’t say it. The word rape wasn’t even in my mind because I thought I had brought
     everything on myself when I consented to go out with Keil Ward. If I had done what I was supposed to and stayed at home like
     a good and faithful girlfriend, nothing bad would have happened and I wouldn’t be sitting there with a raw and seeping vagina.
    I knew I had to at least tell Cree about the infections. And yet I could not bring myself to say those words, either.
    “Did you miss me this week?” he asked as we took the dirt road up to the cabins. The road twisted through the woods and the
     trees met overhead. The forest went for miles out there.
    “I missed you,” I said.
    “Thought you were still mad at me.”
    “I was. But not anymore.” I didn’t say that it seemed like a long time ago that I was mad at him for disappearing, for not
     calling. It didn’t seem to matter anymore.
    “Come here,” Cree said, and I