Thief by Maureen Gibbon

me, and I could feel how, even though we were talking and
     laughing and enjoying each other’s company, there was another level to what was going on that had nothing to do with our stories,
     but rather to do with watching each other and the keyhole neckline and Breville’s legs stretched out on either side of mine.
    “Did he ever get the job? Your dad?”
    “He went back the next day and took the test,” I said. “I don’t remember if he got the job or not.”
    “You should ask him,” Breville said. “Ask him and tell me.” There was nothing intimate in what we were saying to each other,
     nothing intimate at all— and yet everything between us had that feeling. Everything. It didn’t matter if I was talking about
     my dad, or about how I used to like to lie on the roof and look up at the pink Brooklyn sky— every detail was personal, charged.
     I can’t explain it. Yet even though I knew something was happening between Breville and me that day in the visiting room,
     and that everything we said that day was itself as well as more than itself and other than itself, it wasn’t until we were
     saying goodbye that I understood how much had been traded back and forth between us. The guard monitoring our bodily contact
     for illicit exchanges could watch for a packet being passed from hand or mouth to shirt collar, but there was no way to monitor
     the real exchange that happened when Breville and I touched that day.
    After I kissed Breville’s cheek and he kissed mine, we stood holding each other in front of the guard for the few seconds
     permitted. As we pulled away from each other, Breville traced his hand— the one the guard could not see because our bodies
     blocked it— down the small of my back and over my ass and along the out-side of my hip. The whole thing probably took only
     two or three seconds, but it seemed much longer as it was happening. I felt the weight of Breville’s hand against my skin,
     but I also felt the heat of his hand. The thing seemed to burn, and the places where he touched me seemed to burn.
    It was only my imagination, but the burning went on even after I exited the huge front doors of the prison, and as I slowly
     walked the leaf-filled blocks to my car. Certainly the risk was real: Breville could be sent to the hole for the wrong kind
     of touch in the visitingroom, taken off the good-behavior wing where he had his own cell, a TV, and a morsel of control.
    The burning sensation stayed with me as I got into my car and for a good many miles of my drive back north. And if it was
     laughable when I said that Breville did not seem like a rapist, this next statement will be laughable, too: that day was the
     first time I knew Breville could hurt me.

18
    WHEN I FINALLY TOLD JULIAN I was driving four hours back to the Cities every week to go to Stillwater, he told me I was crazy.
    “I thought you went up to that cabin to get away from this,” Julian said the day I stopped by after visiting Breville. The
     way he waved his hand as he said “this” took in the sound of the traffic drifting in the window as well as the glass of bourbon
     he had in his hand. And he was right: when I left on the last day of school, I broke my lease, disconnected the phone, and
     left no forwarding address or number. As much as I could, I disappeared.
    “I did want to get away,” I said. “But visiting here is not the same as living here.”
    “And now you’re involved with a convict,” Julian said. “Why do you always have such a taste for shit?”
    “I’m working through something,” I told him. And there was nothing he could say to that.
    Still, I knew better than to say anything about the Paris perfume, or the keyhole dress, or the sexually explicit letters
     I’d begun writing Breville. There would have been no way to explain those things to people, or to explain that it was exactly
     because Alpha Breville was a rapist that I was interested in him. He’d helped meunderstand my own