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“Mathers!” Officer Midden was shouting, waving at him.

“Yeah?” Shane said, pulling his headphones out. He’d been listening to the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He paused his discman and sat up in his cell.

“Phone call for you,” Midden said.

That’s weird, Shane thought. It’s not Sunday…

He followed Midden to his office, hoping everything was alright. He rarely got unexpected calls apart from an occasional journalist, and the prison screened those out for him. To his surprise, Cody and Jenna did actually come visit him about once a month. They weren’t dating anymore, but had stayed friends. Sort of. And they made the trip for him.

Dustin and Jerry were his only regular contact. They phoned every Sunday, but Shane had to take his calls in a damned office, supervised, because Laney lived with them and it would be a violation of the NCO if he and Laney spoke. Which they would one hundred percent violate immediately if they weren’t supervised.

He was surprised when Midden smiled at him, and closed the office door, leaving him alone.

“Hello?” he said into the phone.

“Hi,” breathed the sweetest voice he’d ever heard in his entire fucking life. But then he immediately panicked.

“Laney, what are you doing?” he whispered. “You can’t call me here! I can’t talk to you! Not for another month! Please, we can’t mess this up, not this close – ”

“I was wondering why you didn’t call me first thing. I’ve been waiting since midnight,” she said.

“What are you talking about? Laney, I’m so sorry baby, but I have to hang up – ”

“Why would you hang up on me? The NCO expired today you idiot.”

Silence.

Deafening silence.

“What?” he asked, flopping into Midden’s shitty, squeaky office chair. He felt like he’d been tasered, a feeling with which he was now intimately familiar. “I’m in until September 9…”

“Yes, but the NCO expired as per completion of your original sentence.”

“Wait… what… I don’t understand…”

“I have a lawyer on speed dial if you want to confirm any of this,” she said, sounding annoyed.

“Are you serious, right now?” he asked.

She laughed, and the sound of it burned a hole right through the armour he’d cocooned himself in for the past year and a half.

It hadn’t been awful, prison. He was in for assaulting a police officer so he’d made friends easily enough in there. It was the guards to watch out for, but to his surprise, Ruta had come to see him at the prison. Apologized for everything. He was pretty torn up about what happened.

Shane had a feeling that Ruta had talked to the guards, told them to lay off, because the unprompted tasing stopped after that, and he was mostly left alone to listen to his books on tape and replay in his mind every second he’d ever spent touching Laney.

“So…” she said, sounding casual, “how ya been…”

He laughed until he cried, the tears streaming down his face for real, his ribs aching from how badly he missed her. He sobbed into the phone, doing his best to stifle the noise so as not to embarrass himself, but Laney hushed him, murmuring soothing words that he didn’t really hear, until his breathing slowed and he dried his eyes and sniffed.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Shane trying to send all the things he was thinking – there were so many thoughts – down the phone line, through space. He knew she could feel it because she sighed happily.

“I got my G.E.D.,” was the first thing he said out loud in over five minutes.

“That’s funny, I dropped out of school,” she said.

“I heard.” He may not have been allowed to have any contact with Laney, but Jerry mailed him every news article ever written about Laney and Dustin in New York. There were a lot of them.

“’The Mean One’, huh?” he mused.

“They think I’m a Grinch.”

“More of a bitch, really,” he said.

She laughed, and his heart swelled.

He didn’t know how long they talked, but when Midden appeared, a smile on his face, Shane realized that his ass was sore from sitting in one place for so long.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Okay… call me tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

“And the next day?”

“Okay.”

“And the next?”

“Yes, Laney. I’ll call you every day.”

“Okay,” she said.

They hung on the line.

“Alright, Mathers, wrap it up,” Midden muttered, sounding amused.

“I love you,” he said. He didn’t care that Midden was standing right there.

“I know,” she said, “I love you, too.”

Shane hung up, and Midden clapped Shane on the back. He was a good guy, never bugged the inmates who didn’t cause trouble, even slipped him a joint now and then that they’d smoke together in the yard at night when the other guards weren’t around.

“You look like you’re about to come in your pants,” Midden said.

Shane grinned. “Yeah… she likes that."

Midden snorted, and Shane felt like his prison sentence was already over.

One more month…