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Yancy doesn’t love you. When you see him with his cut lip and cut cheekbone and that sharply cut furrow between his eyebrows as he stares sullenly off into a corner, he slices through you like open heart surgery.
“Ain’t no business o’ youse,” he says when you ask what happened. You hear Jimmy the Pickle got sent to a state prison for shanking one guard too many, but when you bring it up Yancy just pushes his chair away and tells a guard that he wants to be taken back to his cell.
Yancy doesn’t love you. The next time you visit he’s in higher spirits, talking about how the new inmates are a riot and explaining exactly what went down during the egg salad sandwich incident. When he grabs your hand to demonstrate how tightly he grabbed hold of that sandwich, you feel your chest squeezing too.
But as soon as you mention bringing your lawyer next month, he shuts down. Won’t make eye contact, won’t answer when you ask for more details about the infamous egg salad sandwich. He shoves your hand away and sits there with his arms crossed, head bowed, waiting for you to give up and leave. And you leave, but you can’t bring yourself to give up.
Yancy doesn’t love you. He’s more interested in flirting with you than listening to your lawyer, interlacing his fingers through yours and whispering dirty asides in your ear and staring aggressively at you while you squirm under the attention.
“Come alone next time,” he rumbles against your earlobe, and gives you a teasing nip which makes you squeak and catches the attention of a guard with a baton. You reassure the guard, apologize to your lawyer, and promise Yancy you’ll be back next visitation day.
Yancy doesn’t love you. When you both stand up and he suddenly grabs you by the waist and kisses you, you let him slip his tongue into your mouth. He tastes like cheap cigarettes and exile. Your face is burning when he pulls away, and his gaze is cold and sharp. When he turns away, his shoulder brushes against your outstretched palm, and he keeps walking.
Later when you’re in the car driving away, you spit the little pill capsule into your palm and stare at it. You find a safe place to pull over, turn on your blinkers, and unfurl the little scroll of cigarette wrapping paper. But it isn’t long before your hands start shaking and you can no longer make out the tight handwritten scrawl through your tears.
Yancy doesn’t love you. He’s getting the chair, and he’s not interested in fighting it. He doesn’t want no lawyers, doesn’t want no phone calls, doesn’t want no crying. He won’t see you again, doesn’t want to. He’s paying for what he did. He’s a criminal who don’t deserve no pity and who definitely don’t deserve to go free. “I don’t love you,” he writes, and that’s the end.
You rip up the paper. Hold the pieces in your shaking hands and ugly sob against your steering wheel on the shoulder of the highway till the police come and tap on your door to make sure you’re okay. But you’re not okay.
When you reassure the police officer and brush the paper scraps off your clothes, two of the pieces stick to your damp palms: “I” and “love you.”