Page 22 of Deliver Me

Mia shrugged. “Probably Gabriel,” she admitted. “He swears a lot in his letters.”

“Seriously? You’re supposed to be encouraging him with your good habits, not picking up his sinful ones. I can’t believe you’re still talking to him and letting him be a bad influence on you. Is there something going on with the two of you?”

“No,” Mia shook her head sharply. She suspected that Lilly’s objection had less to do with worrying about her vocabulary and more to do with not liking Gabriel. “He’s never getting out of prison, remember? We’re just friends.”

The look Lilly gave her was skeptical, but she let the subject drop.

It took a few back-and-forth letters before he called her for the first time because it was harder to set up phone calls with an inmate than she’d anticipated. It wasn’t as simple as picking up the phone and dialing her number.

She’d had to register her number on a website for the Department of Corrections before he was allowed to call her and then he’d had to put money in a special account with an outside provider to cover the costs since cell phones don’t receive collect calls and her house didn’t have a landline. In fact, she didn’t know anyone whose house still had a landline, and they were both angry at the inefficient system long before they’d worked out all the problems.

In the end, despite his insecurities and all the obstacles, he told her he would call between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m. He couldn’t give her an exact time because inmates couldn’t use the phones during lockdowns or emergencies, so she pretended to have a stomachache and skipped class, instead sitting beside her phone nibbling at her fingernails. There was no way she was going to miss his call after all of the effort they had put into setting it up.

He didn’t keep her waiting too long, and her phone screen lit up, displaying an unfamiliar number, at 10:17 that morning.

She swallowed hard, and her hands shook as she answered it. “Hello?”

There was a brief silence so intense she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. Her body felt weightless and numb and her fingertips cold as she waited for him to answer.

“Hi, is this … is this Mia?”

Everything inside of her slid sideways at the sound of his voice. The images she’d had of him in her mind, the ones she’dcarried since she’d looked up his trial, shattered. He’d been a kid, long and lanky and awkward, younger than her and fragile for all the brutality of his crime. That was how she’d pictured him in her mind when she wrote to him, when she read his letters, when she thought of him and how he spent his days.

This … this was not the voice of a child, and the deep, rumbling timbre of her name on his lips shook her to her core. She hadn’t paid much attention when he’d mentioned his birthday and said he’d turned twenty-eight, but now it was painfully obvious that he was a grown man nearing thirty.

She pressed her thighs together against an unfamiliar sensation and cleared her throat. “Yes, it is. It’s nice to finally hear your voice. I feel like I already know you so well.”

He chuckled and she bit down hard on her lip, terrified that he could hear the way her breath trembled on the exhale. “I feel the same way. I’m not interrupting your classes, am I?”

“I stayed home today. Tummy ache.”

“Mia …” His voice dropped, got impossibly lower and her body was suddenly hot all over, a flush rising under her skin. She bit harder on her lip and tried to focus. He was her friend and nothing more.

It was obvious he didn’t approve of her skipping classes for his sake. They both knew the importance of her education, but she wasn’t going to apologize. “I’m not going to skip class every time, but this was important, and I didn’t have a specific time to expect your call. I’ll send you my class schedule, so you’ll know when I’m free for next time.”

“Next time? You mean you want me to call you again?”

She scowled at the walls full of his artwork. “Of course, I do. Do you not want to call me again?”

“I do! It’s just …” He paused and when he continued his words carried the weight of years of rejection. “No one else wants to talk to me.”

“I want to talk to you.” She was careful to keep her tears from carrying in her voice, knew he wouldn’t want her to feel sorry for him. “In fact, I’m hurt that you could think so little of me and just for that I’m going to eat your birthday cupcake next year, too.”

He exhaled softly, and she could sense the tension as it flowed out of him. “Thatiscruel and unusual punishment.”

“It really is, but you know you deserve it. Is it expensive?” she asked, changing the subject abruptly.

“The cupcake?”

She sighed. “No, calling me? Is it expensive?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t really matter. The one thing my mother does for me is put a monthly deposit into my general account. I use it to buy stuff from the commissary, but I have enough to spend on phone calls if I want to.”

“How often are you allowed to call?”

“I get twenty minutes per call, but a max of 300 minutes a month so that’s … uh, about three a week.”

“That’s good,” she said. Her foot tapped nervously on the floor. “I think I’d like to hear your voice three times a week.”

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