“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the doctor began.

“I wasn’t asking!” Carter yelled.

His head pounded from deep inside his skull. His eardrums had pulled tight enough to split, and, oh, look at that, little black dots were hovering and dancing in his periphery. Fantastic. He scrunched his eyes shut for one split second to gain his bearings, listing forward.

Jack placed his hands on his shoulders to keep him upright. “You need to calm down,” he murmured. “Just relax. You’ve been out for a while. You need to take it easy.”

Carter grasped the bridge of his nose to try to ease the throbbing behind his eyes. He’d never felt anything like it. It was like a goddamn circus had taken up residence in between his ears, and dammit all to hell if he didn’t feel completely drained. He couldn’t even fight Jack when he pushed him back against the pillows on the bed. He exhaled and frowned at the crowd standing and staring at him, as though waiting for him to explode.

“Does your head hurt?” the doctor asked.

Carter glared hard at the man, too damned exhausted to come up with any witty shit.

“I’ll go and get some painkillers,” the doctor muttered and scurried out of the room.

Carter was surprised to see the two guards also leave, glancing nervously at Jack as they did.

“Well, hell, at least I can still clear a room,” Carter muttered.

Jack pushed his hands into his pockets. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

Jack fixed Carter with a penetrating stare. “You know what.”

Carter’s head dropped back against the bed.

He was entirely too confused and still in a state of complete shock to talk about … well, fucking anything, least of all the huge revelation that had hit him in the head like a damn brick.

It was her. Peaches. The girl he’d dreamed about for sixteen years.

The girl he’d saved—

“Wes,” Jack pushed. “It’s confidential, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

“I’m not worried about anything, Jack. I just have nothing to say. Goddammit!” Carter fisted the bedsheets, wanting to tear them into small strips so they matched the tumultuous sensation vibrating through him.

The sound of a chair being pulled across the floor toward his bed reminded Carter that Jack was a stubborn and persistent son of a bitch who wasn’t about to let him off lightly without some kind of explanation.

Jack leaned his elbows on the side of the bed. “Wes, we’ve known each other a lot of years. We’ve talked, we’ve argued, we’ve sat in silence—but I swear to God, boy, you’ve never scared me as much as you did yesterday.”

Carter’s eyes flew to Jack’s tired ones to see only truth behind his words. His confession made Carter feel strange. He didn’t give a shit about other people’s thoughts or sensitivities usually, but knowing that Jack had been worried made Carter feel … something.

“Yeah, well,” he murmured with a shrug while looking at the ceiling, “I’m fine.”

“What’s Peaches?”

A tremor of anxiety swept up Carter’s spine, causing a wave of nausea to crash through him.

“No one important.” The words were forced, whispered.

“So Peaches is a person?”

Carter pushed his fingertips to his temples and closed his eyes. “Jack, please,” he groaned. “Leave it.”

He hoped that the desperation lacing his voice was enough to stop Jack’s persistence. Surprise crossed Jack’s eyes and Carter knew he’d dodged the bullet for the time being. He just didn’t have the energy or the inclination to try to explain something or someone he’d thought about every day since he was eleven years old.

He had to get his own head out of his ass before he could do that.

He had to get his own head out of his ass before Monday, when he had his English Literature session.

A one-to-one session with her.

With Miss Lane.

With Peaches.

* * *

Carter was sitting behind a wooden table when his Peaches entered with a wide smile at the guard. It dropped minutely when she registered Carter’s purposefully listless appearance, though her confident gait never wavered.

“Good afternoon,” she said, pulling books and papers from her mammoth bag.

Carter kept his eyes trained to the floor while his thumbs spun around each other on his lap. Fuck, he was sweating. She cleared her throat.

Carter lifted his head, praying his voice would work. “Good afternoon, Miss Lane.”

Her green eyes flickered with surprise at his uncharacteristically amenable greeting. He gave a small smile, trying to appear blasé. On the inside, Carter wanted nothing more than to hightail it out of the room like a pussy. He was sure she could hear his heart pounding painfully in his chest.

She pulled up a chair. “We’re going to do exactly what the class has been doing so you don’t fall behind.”

He kept his eyes on her, taking all of her in. He watched her movements and the expressions rippling over her face, trying to see the young girl he remembered like a crumpled photograph in the depths of his memory. Jesus. After sixteen years, she was sitting across from him, oblivious to their connection. Nevertheless, he knew she could feel his stare. He wondered if she felt the same way he did when she looked at him.

“This is the poem we’ll be looking at.” She placed a piece of paper in front of him.

He sat forward reading the title on the top of the page. “ ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’?”

“Yes,” Peaches said. “What of it?”

“Do those idiots in that class of yours even know who Chidiock Tichborne is?”

“They do now,” she answered evenly while she pulled the lid off her pen. “And what do you know about him or his poetry?”

Carter heard the challenge in her voice. He focused on that and not the sensation of the heat coming from her knee near his, under the table.

“I know enough,” he replied, crossing his arms.

“Please,” she offered with an open palm, “regale me.”

“Regale you?” he mocked. He rubbed his chin. “He was born in Southampton, England, in 1558,” he started. “In 1586 he took part in the Babington Plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and replace her with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. But they were shit out of luck. He was arrested and eventually hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

Stifling a laugh at her shock, he said, “This poem is the one he wrote while he was awaiting his execution. Kind of inappropriate to be studying this in a prison, don’t you think, Miss Lane?”

“You like history.”

Carter shrugged. “It’s okay. I prefer English literature.” He allowed his loaded answer to settle between them.

She wet her lips. “So, tell me about the poem.”

“He uses paradox and antithesis.” He trailed his finger across the page in front of him. “Opposites and contradictions. He does it to highlight the tragedy of what he’s going through, which, when you think about it, is pretty stupid.”

“Why would you say that?”

Carter laughed. “He made his mistakes, so he has to pay the price. His debt.”

“You sound like you know something about that.”

Carter raised his eyebrows and glanced around the room with large, obvious eyes.

“I know you’re paying for your mistakes. But he was so young, too young to die. Don’t you sympathize with Tichborne in some way?”

“Sympathize? No,” he answered firmly. “Envy? Yes.”

“Why do you envy him?”

Carter kept his eyes on the table between them. “The fact he’s about to die,” he muttered. “He begins to see things much more clearly. He has focus, clarity. I envy him that.”

“You want clarity?”

Carter smiled. “Wanting and needing are two very different things, Miss Lane,” he answered. “I need clarity. I need focus.”

Then he stared at her, because Jesus if there was anything else he could do or say at that moment. Carter knew that finding out who she was was the first step to him having any kind of focus in his life for years. And even though he spoke about Tichborne like he knew what the fuck he was talking about, it was only with his Peaches sitting in front of him that he truly understood his own need for it.