Paradise Child Book 3 (Imprisoned in my Heart trilogy...Larry)

Chapter 5

Ten minutes into a conversation with a burly man named Steve, who was going bald, had a friendly but decidedly squashed-looking face, and a tattoo of his wife and children’s name on his wrist, Louis realized that he was completely and totally mindnumbingly bored.

It wasn’t the first time he’d figured this out that day. In fact, four sessions in, and he was pretty sure the idea had occurred to him at least once in every single one. It just hadn’t happened quite so quickly before. Usually it had been within the last few minutes that he’d gotten bored and his mind had started wandering towards Harry and home and all the things he could have been doing rather than listening to sweaty men whine endlessly about their problems while he twiddled his thumbs and tried to make notes about them. But only halfway through, and already he hated Steve and Steve’s voice and Steve’s face and Steve’s life and everything about Steve and if Steve toppled backwards off the chair and cracked his head open and his blood spilled all over the floor in a disgusting red mess, Louis wouldn’t care in the slightest, he would probably break open a bottle of champagne and toast the man’s demise as he knocked it back.

He couldn’t be bothered with any of it any more. In a friendlier time, he might have gone looking for Harry and pulled him into the toilets or the office or down one of the more deserted corridors or cornered him in the cafeteria and they might have had the odd sneaky exchange in the dark which was a certain alleviant of boredom. If Harry was a reasonable distance away from the prison rather than god knows how many miles, Louis might have clocked off early or claimed the lunch break that he usually skipped or spent holed up in solitary confinement  in his office because he had no one to spend it with, and he might have taken Harry to the coffee shop around the corner and had coffee with him. Or pulled Harry into the porsche and stolen a couple of cheeky snogs on the back seat. As it was, the best he was likely to get would be a phone call.

Holding up his hand, Louis cut off the man’s boring bluster. “Listen, Steve, do you mind if we cut this short just for today? I really don’t think I can do this right now. I’m feeling a bit off, to be honest.”

“Oh. All right.” Steve stood up. “Tomorrow, then, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Louis agreed, rubbing his eyes wearily. “Yeah.”

He watched the man leave with a swirling whirlpool of relief wrapping itself comfortingly around him like an old blanket. Once he was blissfully alone once again, with no whining voice to grate on his ears, he slowly crossed the room and curled up in the old green chair that he’d never been able to bring himself to throw away. It held too many memories. He held Harry in his arms now every night, but he still felt an irrepresible amount of fondness for the chair that had been a cradle to the man he loved when his arms hadn’t been allowed to hold him yet. Before Louis had been trusted to keep Harry safe, the chair had done it for him. Sentiment towards a chair was more than a little silly, but Louis didn’t care much about that. He gave it a little pat and a stroke as he sat down in it, resisting the urge to bury his nose into the fabric. Harry’s smell was long since gone, chased away by the harsh scents of clinical soap and aftershave and bodies, the musk of a hundred other men who meant nothing to him.

His phone was in his hand and he had pressed the speed dial automatically without even considering what he was doing. And then Harry was answering on the first ring, and God his voice was so slow and husky and low and it sent a shiver of appreciation down Louis’ spine when he thought about the different pitches that voice could reach; deep or high or a thousand different octaves in between, and his fingers flexed around the phone and gripped it tightly as Harry said “Hello” and he replied “I love you so much, Harry” without even thinking about the words that he was tripping over as  they fell out of his mouth.