BookRix

We both sobbed and clutched one another. We kissed again, our faces wet with tears. A long, kiss moving our hands all over each other. I opened my eyes. Marty's brown eyes stared into mine, smoldering.

The next morning, the car was loaded up, behind it a pick-up truck with dilapidated furniture on it, and that was the last I saw of Marty for years. We wrote and kept in touch, talked on the phone, but not a lot, living in different parts of the country.
He was upstate for a while, then in the Carolinas, then Florida.
We never really got together. I was always busy, and so was he, but we kept in touch.
The passion slowly quieted down. I guess we put in on hold, or buried it, too hard to carry around. Every time he or I would get a new job or promotion, or on holidays, I'd call, or he would.

He won a needle point championship for small tapestries and country scenes. He started a business selling what he made, but had to charge too much to be very profitable.

He applied for a clerk's position in a small prison Just outside New Jersey. Six months later doing more than others, he got promoted to become the warden's assistant. The warden had a heart attack shortly after his training.

"Because bureaucracy is incompetent." He chuckled. "I am appointed warden." Realizing he knew little about running a prison, he read every book he could find on the subject. Before long, he was so organized, his secretary and assistant did most of the work. With a lot of spare time on his hands, he began to take an interest in the prisoners. He asked them about their lives, treated them with kindness, and offered them advice on a multitude of things including how to stay out of prison.