Drake ✔️

Chapter 2

Shay

I step into South Bridge Prison with confidence and ease. I've been coming here for over a week now, and I've been in prisons before anyway (well, I visited Axel during his first stint in Juvie if that counts) so it's no sweat off my back. Places like this don't scare me. My pulse won't react to the faces of criminals or the yells and the jeers as I walk down the the hallway towards the visitation room. I don't feel like I'm in the presence of criminals. You don't get good and bad people, only people. Some of those people have done bad things, and most of them probably had good reason to. I don't see the crime, I see the haunted past of the person that committed it.

My cousin Axel included.

I sit down at my allocated visitation booth, just like the ones you see in the movies - plastic phone on the wall, bulletproof glass partition separating me from the plastic chair on the other side of the booth. He's gonna get open visits soon, apparently these closed off types of visits are standard protocol for new admissions. Soon, we'll be sitting within touching distance at a table with no plastic phones, no partition separating us, and I won't need to look at him through glass like he's a dangerous animal in a zoo. I'm excited about that. Every cloud, and all. 

I casually inspect my chipped black nail polish as I wait for Axel to arrive, and my mind drifts back to last week, to our first visit...

______

Within moments the door on the other side of the booth opens and Axel walks in. He's a vision in his orange jump suit, I gotta say. The colour doesn't suit him at all but the image only makes him look more badass than he usually looks. As much as I wanna cry over seeing him like this, I can't help but snicker as he pulls out the plastic chair opposite me, sweeping his messy, overgrown black hair out of his face as he reaches for the telephone receiver. I pick up mine simultaneously.

"Well don't you look like shit." I comment lightly. He runs his tongue along his metal-free bottom lip and shakes his head slightly while looking away from me. I know I haven't offended him. He's my blood and he's one of the only people on this hell we call earth that I actually care about.

"Orange is the new black, right?" His deep voice fills my ear and I swallow down the emotion threatening to leak out of my eyes. Just from the sound of his voice. He sounds good, he does.

"I would have come sooner, but -"

"Sooner? Shay, it's barely been twenty-four since I was arrested. You've been busy." He says like it's so obvious. "Honestly, I didn't expect to see you this soon."

"Are you kidding me?" I exclaim, horrified by his lack of faith in me. "Axel you're only in here because of me. If you hadn't taken the fall -"

"Shay." He silences me with a sharp glare and an inked finger tapping the phone receiver in his hand. Our conversation isn't private, of course.

"Sorry." I murmur down the line. "But you know what I'm talking about."

"I do." He deadpans. "And we don't need to talk about it. It's done and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. So how are you? How's your new life in North Bridge?"

I tense at his question and his reluctance to discuss the very reason he's the one sitting in the jumpsuit. I should be in here for shooting Jason, not him. But we can't talk about it as much as I'd like to. We can talk strategy though.

"Your lawyers have a plan, I assume?" I ask him with a raised eyebrow. He bites back a laugh and looks towards the ceiling before levelling his dark eyes with mine again. He doesn't wanna talk about the shooting at all it seems. I had a feeling he wouldn't.