Officer in Pursuit by Ranae Rose

the
shadows on her bedroom ceiling and bracing herself for the sound of
a bang at the door, or breaking glass. For just one night, she’d be
able to relax.
    If she hadn’t been half-heartsick over
having to turn down Grey, she would’ve been downright
cheerful.
     
    * * * * *
     
    “What are you gonna do after work?”
Grey sat at a round, vinyl-topped table in the break room, sipping
a cup of the world’s worst coffee.
    On either side of him, Henry and Liam
were doing the same thing. The little table was like a piece of
doll house furniture – it hurt Grey’s back when he leaned over to
put his elbows on its surface. Why the prison administration
tortured its officers with such crap coffee and flimsy furniture
was beyond him.
    “Nothing special,” Henry
said.
    “Wanna come over to my place and work
out?” Grey held his breath and knocked back the last of his coffee.
The chunky grounds hit the back of his throat and almost made him
gag.
    “All right,” Henry said.
    “Let me lay down some ground rules,”
Grey said. “You’re spotting my bench press first, and if you leave
before I finish all my sets, you’re dead to me.”
    “Jesus.” Henry frowned, or maybe that
was just his usual facial expression – it was hard to tell for
sure, the two were so similar. “What do I have to do for you to get
over that – write a letter of apology?”
    “That’d be a start.”
    Henry took a huge bite of some sort of
fancy lunch Sasha had made him. It was a plastic container full of
yellow rice, red peppers and strips of chicken breast. It smelled
spicy and like coconut, and when Henry gestured with the container,
the smell wafted so strongly across the table that Grey’s stomach
growled.
    He’d brought two ham and cheese
sandwiches as his own lunch – in such close proximity to Henry’s
fancy food, they seemed depressing.
    “Are those leftovers from Harvest?”
Grey’s mouth watered as he thought of the restaurant where Grey’s
fiancée, Sasha, worked.
    Henry shook his head. “Sasha made this
for me especially, at home.”
    Grey took a bite of the first
sandwich, and a glob of mustard shot straight against the back of
his throat. “Damn it.” If he wasn’t careful, shitty food would be
the death of him.
    “I could ask her for the recipe, if
you want it,” Henry said.
    He still looked dead serious, but Grey
knew he was being a dick on purpose.
    “You know I’m shit at cooking.” The
breakfast he’d made Kerry the other day had been a fly by night
venture, and he’d been immensely relieved when it hadn’t caused her
to throw up. It’d been his best culinary effort ever. Normally, he
stuck to surefire meals for himself, like chicken breasts drowned
in store-bought barbeque sauce.
    “Anyone can cook,” Henry said, “all
you have to do is follow directions.”
    “Yeah, you say that as you shovel your
girlfriend’s cooking into your face. Why don’t you make your own
lunch if it’s so simple?”
    “Sasha wanted to make this for me.
It’s not like I asked her to do it. Besides, I always cook us
breakfast.”
    “I bet you have your own little apron
and everything,” Grey said, but the fight had gone out of him.
Halfway through his first sandwich, he was feeling down.
    Maybe it was the shitty coffee – he
wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was secretly decaf – or the
faint headache that was bothering him. Or maybe it was the fact
that the conversation had stirred up memories of the evening
before, when Kerry had cooked dinner for him.
    Consumed by a craving that had nothing
to do with food, he finished his lunch in silence.
    When the time to return to his shift
came, he left the break room’s undersized tables and lackluster
coffee behind, trading those sparse comforts for E Block, where he
and Henry escorted an inmate complaining of tooth pain to
medical.
    While he did that and a dozen other
things afterward, he looked forward to that weekend’s wedding.
Before, he might’ve found the