Tiffany set to work mechanically, barely conscious of her movements. Her mind was too preoccupied with thoughts of Vicki.
“Finished yet?” she heard after a while.
Tiffany turned towards the shower room doorway where Vicki stood. “Oh, uh, no not yet. I scrubbed the sinks and counter, but I haven’t done the floor yet. I was just getting ready to do that now.”
Vicki strode into the room slowly, thumbs tucked in her pockets. She stopped just inches from Tiffany who held the mop in her hands. Then she strode even closer, sending Tiffany’s heart pounding in anticipation. Vicki leaned forward and kissed Tiffany on the lips, softly yet firmly, then stood back. “Ok. I’ll let you work your magic on the floor now,” she said with a smile, tucking her thumbs back in her pockets and turning to leave.
“O-ok,” said Tiffany with a smile as she gave a quick breathless laugh. Had Vicki really just kissed her?
She turned and mopped the floor, then headed out to find Vicki sitting at the desk. She rose upon her approach.
“All done?” Vicki asked.
Tiffany nodded.
Vicki unlocked the supply closet so she could put the cleaning supplies away, then led her to her cell. “Nighty night,” she said.
Tiffany nodded and smiled.
Although she would have loved to stay out of the cell to hang out with Vicki all night, she was quite tired. She peed, brushed her teeth, then slid under her blanket. She shifted around for a moment to get comfortable on the firm mattress, finally settling on her side, facing the door. A half-hour later, she heard Vicki make her rounds. She kept her green eyes shut tight as she listened to her go up the hall and back down again, stopping to pause a few moments by her door before continuing on back to her desk.
She awoke the next day bummed to know that it wasn’t visiting day for those in her building and that she wouldn’t see any family or friends that day, but thoughts of Vicki quickly compensated for her gloomy mood.
She did her best to avoid the other inmates. Not because she was afraid of them, but because she felt like she was with a bunch of first-graders when she was around them. Their behavior saddened her and she felt rather embarrassed for them as well. They were, for the most part, the classic example of your immature, brainless inmates. Most had no qualms about living up to that reputation, either. They did and said the most childish of things. They lied to each other, they stole from each other, and they carried on in ways that made her also pity them, for she knew these adult children would always be as they were, even if the bodies they inhabited would continue to age with time.
She wondered if Vicki saw her as one of them, failing to see that she was one of the few who were different. She was just a regular person with a regular life, regular family, and regular background, who had made a stupid mistake. With most of the other inmates, however, they were far from “regular” and she wasn’t sure which was which – did they deliberately keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over again because they wanted to? Or were they just that stupid? When had their mentality ceased to exist, she wondered, or had it never even existed in the first place?
When asked by friends and family as to what the other inmates were like, the answer was simple. “They get up and they scream all day. In between that, they’re regular little beggars and the only time they’re relatively quiet and out of my hair is when they’re either working, asleep, or have food in their mouths,” she’d tell them.
“She kissed me! My God, she actually kissed me!” she told Regina in her next letter to her.
Expecting Regina to be full of happiness for her in her letters and visits, she was surprised to find a note of concern in her voice instead upon their next visit. “I don’t know, Tiff,” she said. “There’s something not quite right about the whole thing.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean it doesn’t seem right for a guard to do this, even if the inmate wants her to. It just seems too much like a betrayal of authority, if you ask me. It’s just rather unethical. Think about it, girl, and ask yourself how you think she’d react if you suddenly decided to reject one of her advances.”
Tiffany contemplated the idea and then said, “Well, hopefully, I’ll never want to.”
“It’s the way she kicked that crazy girl’s ass that has me the most concerned.”
“Why is that?”
“Why do you think?”
“At first it had me wondering too, but this girl was both huge and crazy, so I think she really needed to do what she did.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Regina.
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