COUNTY JAIL

~JULIAN POV~

County jail doesn’t look the way people imagine.

There’s no violence waiting to greet you, no spectacle meant to frighten you into submission. No shouting. No chaos. Just fluorescent lights that never fully turn off and walls painted a color designed to erase preference. Beige, drifting toward gray. Neutral enough to make everything feel temporary, even you.

Intake happens quickly.

My name is called without emphasis. A guard checks my wristband, then looks past me before I finish answering. Instructions come one after another step forward, turn, hands out, hands down delivered without irritation or interest. I follow them because there’s no reason not to.

Shoes off. Belt removed. Pockets emptied.

My things go into a plastic bin already crowded with other people’s lives: keys, loose change, wallets that won’t be opened again anytime soon. My watch goes last. No one comments on it. No one asks if I want to keep track of the time.

That feels intentional.

Fame doesn’t survive places like this. Neither does context.

They fingerprint me without conversation. The officer doesn’t look at my face long enough to recognize it, and I realize recognition would be inconvenient here. It would slow things down. The system works best when it doesn’t remember who you were.

A corridor opens up ahead of us, narrow and quiet. It smells like disinfectant and old air. Air that’s been recycled too many times. Our footsteps echo once, then disappear. The building absorbs sound efficiently.

This place isn’t built to react to you.

It’s built to contain you.

My cell is small, exactly as small as it needs to be. A narrow bunk bolted to the wall. A stainless-steel toilet half-hidden behind a partition that gestures vaguely toward privacy without committing to it. A sink with a push-button faucet that shuts off after a few seconds, as if reminding you that even water has limits here.

There’s no window.

No clock.

Time, apparently, is not my concern anymore.

The door closes behind me with a sound that isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t slam. It doesn’t echo. It just locks, final and uninterested.

I stand there longer than necessary, waiting for the moment to feel heavier than it does. Nothing happens. The room doesn’t respond to me at all.

Eventually, I sit on the bunk.

The mattress is thin, wrapped in vinyl, still warm from whoever slept here before me. That detail unsettles me more than the locked door. It reminds me that this space is shared, rotated, reused. Nothing about it is meant to be personal. I take off my shoes and line them up neatly beneath the bunk without thinking. Heel to toe. Order out of habit.

At home, that meant something. It meant preparation. Leaving again in the morning.

Here, it means nothing.

There is no morning to prepare for yet. No exit to anticipate.

That’s when it hits me not as panic, but as clarity.

I am no longer in motion.

Up until now, there was still momentum. Turning myself in had structure. Decisions followed decisions. Even the handcuffs had logic to them cause and effect moving forward in a straight line.

This is different.

This is suspension.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling. It’s smooth. Unmarked. No cracks, no stains, nothing to follow with my eyes. It doesn’t invite familiarity. It doesn’t expect me to stay long enough to matter.

Tomorrow, it will look exactly the same.

I think of Ava.

The thought doesn’t hurt the way it used to. It settles instead, heavy but stable, like something my body has already accepted even if my mind still resists it.

She didn’t leave because she stopped loving me.

She left because staying would have damaged the truth. Because proximity turns memory into motive. Because every word she spoke would have been questioned if she were still beside me.

She understood that before I did.

If she had stayed, everything she said would have been framed as loyalty. Love recategorized as bias, then sharpened into something the court could use against her. She chose distance so her testimony could stand on its own.

And I chose stillness so it wouldn’t have to carry my shadow. That doesn’t comfort me. But it does make sense.

I sit up, elbows on my knees, hands folded together. The posture reminds me of waiting rooms places designed to keep you still while decisions are made somewhere else.

For the first time in years, there’s no version of myself to manage.

No public image to calibrate.

No narrative to steer.

No damage control.

Nothing I say tonight will change what happens next.

A laugh echoes briefly down the corridor; short, sharp, already exhausted by repetition. Somewhere else, someone coughs. The sounds don’t threaten me. They don’t welcome me either.

They just exist.

That’s what finally feels strange.

No one here cares who I am.

Not even enough to hate me.

I lie back down and close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come. My body hasn’t learned yet that vigilance is useless. That there’s nothing left to anticipate except routine.

So memory fills the space instead.

Ava by the window, notebook balanced against her knee. The way she listened, actually listened without preparing a response, without softening what she was about to say. The way she looked at me like I was responsible for my choices, not broken by them.

I mistook that for intimacy once. I understand now it was something rarer.

Respect.

Tomorrow there will be a schedule. Lights on. Count. Breakfast. Count again. Lawyers explaining options that no longer feel like choices. A judge. Language designed to turn a life into manageable categories.

This isn’t punishment yet.

It’s containment.

Tonight, though, there’s only this room. The hum of electricity above me. My own breathing, louder than it’s ever been.

I picture Ava in New York. Walking streets where no one knows my name. Coffee warm in her hands. The city moving around her without pause.

The image hurts.

But it steadies me too.

Because it means at least one thing in this story is still moving forward.

I don’t pray.

I don’t ask for mercy.

I don’t ask for forgiveness.

I lie still and let the night pass honestly, without trying to reshape it. When sleep finally comes, it doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like agreement.

And when the lights never quite turn off, I let them watch.

There is nothing left to hide.