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It’s just after lunch that Carl gets a bit of a surprise. Charlize has come to see him, does he want to see her? Pete has fucked off, making it impossible for Carl to figure out the harmonies on their latest song, so he thinks what the hell and goes with the guard. He’s accustomed, by now, to Pete flaking off periodically like this, and he really doesn’t want to be there when he comes staggering back. He’ll just fall all over Carl, and not understand why Carl is so pissed off.
It’s been three months since he’s seen her, but she’s already alien and foreign, her shape fitting weirdly in his hands, soft and curved. She’d been arrested together with all of them and the last time he touched her, without surveillance anyway, was when their fingers had brushed around the blade he’d used to cut both his skin and the coke they’d shared. They’re under surveillance now, in this conjugal space, as he unwraps the presents she’s brought him. She explains that they’re partly from her, and partly from his mother, (who unfortunately couldn’t come see him, and had asked her to come instead, he finds out), a carton of cigarettes, several guitar picks and a book of psalms.
They’re allowed to fuck, she hasn’t visited before after all (and she won’t visit again—Carl will write to his mother and tell her they’ve broken up), and so they do. Unlike Before, she’s virtually silent, grabbing at his sweat-slick shoulders with her nails, breathing quick and damp against his neck. Everything about her doesn’t fit here, she’s too soft, too quiet, too feminine, even if she was none of those things outside, and Carl’s orgasm is unsurprisingly both disappointing and unsatisfying. He tries to blame it on the early-morning blowjob Pete gave him, but trying to explain that to her is worse than just playing along and asking her to send his love to his mother whilst watching her do up the buttons on her blouse.
The guard who leads her away, Wolfe, smirks at Carl and makes a rude gesture with his fingers. In another place it might be interpreted as a shared misogynistic bonding moment, but here just makes Carl cross his arms protectively across his chest while he waits for escort back into the (safe) world of the jail proper, away from the pastel-shaded public side. He prefers, really, the overwhelmingly white world (not black and grey, not anymore, it’s humane now) where he knows his place.
Even before he makes it back to the cell, he’s stopped off in the toilets, where he finds Peter sitting on the floor of one of the cubicles, eyes dilated black, only open the barest sliver. Carl loses book and picks, and half-squashes the cigarettes in helping Pete to his feet. It doesn’t matter that Carl smells like sex because Pete is far beyond noticing and Carl is really virtually carrying him. He leaves Pete sitting on his bed, propped up against the wall, having unwrapped Pete’s clinging arms (I love you, I love you Carlos—hush, Peter, hush) from around his neck.
The bars, the beds, Pete when he’s like this, everything is hard, angled, and none of it feels any more right than Charlize’s softness, her curves. The only thing that feels right to Carl right now is the way his blood looks, seeping around the edges of his improvised blade.