Page 1 of Boyfriend on Parole: The Care of Broken Things Extended Epilogue (Breaking Free #2)

Broken Plumbing

There were only about ten minutes before the prison’s lights out before Samuel finally got around to opening the day’s letters.

He blamed Roach for the trouble. The man had gone and shit himself out in the hall, and they’d closed off the wall with all the phone booths for hours.

He hadn’t known it would be hours though, and so he had waited, and waited, staying in the library to work on illustrations for Mr. Quack’s Asthma Attack under the assumption that any minute now he’d get the okay to go and make his daily goodnight call.

In the end, he’d had only about thirty seconds for his call, getting only Hailey before he was forced to hang up because of what seemed like every inmate in the prison at his back waiting to make a call.

The old Ice Queen would have snarled at anyone who dared to interrupt him, but when he considered he had a beautiful sister, a best friend, and two adoring boyfriends waiting for him on the other side, it seemed obnoxious to be a brat about it.

He was the luckiest idiot ever to wear an orange jumpsuit, and the letter proved that.

He didn’t get far into it though. The first line jumped out at him with:

Go to the closet. I’m going to suck your cock.

He slapped the letter down, clamping it there in his lap, heart racing, as he jerked his eyes over the dorm to check who might have seen.

He needn’t have bothered. With only a few minutes before lights out, all his fellow prisoners who rushing about getting ready for bed—something he ought to have been doing himself, but pajamas were the last thing on his mind.

He had to remind himself to breathe, blood still roaring in his ears as he dared to peek at the letter again.

I just got done giving a similar treatment to your husband, and since I can’t draw the way you can, you’re going to have to settle for words—imprecise ones at that since your prude of a husband couldn’t even manage a proper description of what your cock looks like.

Honestly, five months of showers together and he can’t even point you out on a color wheel.

Pink, he tells me, as if that narrows it down.

Amateur. But you’ll draw me a picture of your cock, darling, won’t you?

A picture and some measurements, please.

Length and circumference would work. Make sure to get numbers for both the base and the head. I was thinking of getting us matching—

“You’re breathing weird,” said his bunkmate. Th sudden intrusion elicited a sharp clang! as his surprise had Samuel whacking his hand against the bed frame.

“ Christ , Rat!”

“Christ yourself. Why’s your face so red? Either they finally have the flaming hot Cheetos back in commissary, or you’ve got a nice secret there.”

He jerked his blanket over the letter. “None of your business!”

Rat snorted. “You know they’re not supposed to send porn, right? You could lose your letter privileges.”

“They don’t read my letters.”

“They have to read them. It just means Cruces is showing favoritism as always. You know, if she’s any nicer, she’ll have to adopt you. You’ll finally have a mom.”

He was dying to get back to the letter but didn’t quite have the gumption to read his porn with an audience. It made him both irritated and cripplingly shy. “I already have a mom.”

“Is she hot?”

“You want to fight Jethro for her?”

“Not if he’s as prickly as you. Besides, I have Maria. Did I ever tell you—”

“Only a trillion times.”

“I remember it like yesterday. She was wearing—”

“ Rat! ”

He laughed. “The Doc would have listened.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not here.”

“I heard about the phone hold-up. Did you get to speak to him?”

“No.”

“Ah. Tomorrow, yeah?”

So far as he knew, Rat’s own family rarely called, but the man showed no animosity, reaching up to pat at his leg. “Good job getting through the day, bud.”

That had him feeling embarrassed about being prickly, but not so much that he wasn’t dying to get back to his letter. Rat knew that though and left him alone. “Tell him hi from me when you have the chance,” he said as he climbed back down to his bunk. “I miss that guy.”

They all missed him. There was an unspoken rule that no one could claim Eli’s old bunk, so it sat unused mostly, except for the nights he slept in it, the only one allowed to break the rule.

He pulled the blanket down and lifted the letter back up to his eyes. The moment he did, the lights were shut off—the universe’s great cosmic joke. He sighed.

“Hey, Rat.”

“Hmm?”

“Give me your penlight.”

“What happened to yours?”

“Dead battery.”

“That’s what happens when you stay up late every night reading porn.”

Rat was a friend. He had to remember that.

The dear friend who had been at his side all the long and terrible years of prison life.

He kicked the frame of the bunk bed, the clang sending an awful shudder through the shoddy construction— one small prayer away from structural collapse. “You going to give it to me, or not?”

The letter was well worth staying up for, but also a torture.

Whatever Nathaniel’s complaints, he hadn’t seemed very constrained by a lack of ‘imprecision.’ If he’d been Forest Chuck, or pretty much any other prisoner in the dorm, nothing would have stopped him from enjoying the letter to the fullest, but because he was a prude, he needed the closet.

Or rather, he thought all he needed was the closet, but when he got there and finally got his pants down, the letter and Rat’s penlight in hand, he found he couldn’t do it.

Even there in the dark with no one as witness, he couldn’t.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t be roused. He’d been in a perpetual state of blue balls since the day Eli had come into his life, but there was damage there.

A damage he hadn’t quite realized the extent of until Eli had left, and now his dick would die the moment he thought about putting his hand on it.

“Shit.”

The Android was part of it. That infamous night in solitary combined with the knife scar that still ached whenever he over-used his shoulder. But he knew there was more to it than that. More to it even maybe than Mr. Edwards. Maybe he’d just been born with dysfunctional packaging.

He folded the letter back up and pulled up his pants. “Shit,” he said again, the trembling coming back into his hands a little. Afraid, again. Even when nothing was actively threatening him, he was afraid, always afraid, like his mind’s only purpose was to search for threats.

He made himself go to the phones. Usually, that wasn’t something he had to force.

His favorite part of his day. Unless it was a visitation day, of course.

But even then he liked to call. It was the best when he could be with them on the drive back home, as if he were going with them, being taken along.

But what right did he have to go along? A dysfunctional thing like him.

Broken toys went in the trash. They didn’t go back on the shelf.

He lifted the receiver.

“Sam. I was just thinking about you.”

It was a shock to hear that voice. The reason he’d been able to lift the receiver at all was because he’d known he wouldn’t get that voice. It was still far too early in the day for Nathaniel to be up. Eli could be when he went to bed early enough, but not his husband.

“Nat.”

Maybe the shock of that naming was in his voice, because Nathaniel laughed. “I’m so happy I pushed through with the papers. You can be my reward. How are you doing, sweetheart? Did you manage to sleep?”

The papers. Term papers. Nathaniel always had to grade them after finals were over. Days and days of work, though Nathaniel would often push through to finish in a single marathon session. It meant staying up late—very late—all night, even, when the house was quietest.

“You shouldn’t pull all-nighters. It’s not healthy.”

“I’ll just sleep during the day. Everyone will be at work or school anyway, and I’d just be waiting for them otherwise. You'll be my stay-at-home wife, won't you?"

Samuel was smiling already. Even with anxiety, it was impossible not to smile with Nathaniel. "I'll be whatever you want.”

"No, be whatever you want. I'm so crazy about you, Sam. I would have been even if you hadn't chosen me."

That should have had him leaping for joy. Instead, the pit in his stomach tightened further. “I have something to tell you.”

He heard the soft sounds of Nathaniel getting up from his seat and walking across the room.

He’d been shown pictures of the house, and Hailey had included a hand-drawn diagram in one of her letters, so he found he could imagine it almost perfectly.

He might even have heard the soft snick as Nathaniel locked the door and returned to his seat.

“Yes, I thought you might. I could hear it in your voice. Is it still nerve-wracking to tell me things? It’s just me, Sam. ”

“It’s because it’s you.”

Nathaniel laughed again, that sweet laugh that always felt like a hug. “Don’t seduce me while I’m trying to be a listening ear.”

Samuel trembled. He thought he might cry.

Worse was worrying Nathaniel might cry once he was told, and that was intolerable.

It was bad enough he’d made Eli cry that one time, and it would be worse with Nathaniel.

Maybe because he’d never seen the man cry otherwise, or because he was smaller.

Or simply because he was Nathaniel. Samuel couldn’t bear to hurt him. He refused to bear it.

"I got your letter.”

“Oh no. Did you get in trouble for it? Eli said I shouldn’t have—”

“No. I didn’t—I—” Shit. How to say it? “My body doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The way it does for other people. I think it might not be able to…”

“Sam.”

He needed the interruption. His voice had already begun to dissolve. “I love you so much. You know how much I—”

“Sam, it’s okay. Actually—not okay. I was thoughtless. Sending you such a thing with no warning.”