The first time I saw it was when Shemin was giving me a quick handjob in the laundry room.  I ran my hand down the length of his forearm and felt it there, hanging loosely around his wrist.  Glancing down, I had just enough time to notice that it was a spidery-thin silver bracelet before the sight of Shemin’s hand pumping my cock made me come all over his shirt.

The next time I saw it, it was lying on my pillow.  It had been placed there carefully, curled into a circle precisely in the center.  I swallowed an acid wave of nausea and flipped the pillow over before anyone else could see it.  When I stumbled to the door of my pod, Chris was sitting on the edge of his bed, smiling smugly down at me.

I didn’t even want to touch the thing, and not because I was worried about fingerprints.  Chris had taken a piece of jewelry off a dying man I had fucked.  In my mind I could still see it lying there on my pillow, crusty with dried blood.  I thought I’d probably be seeing it there for a long time to come.

I squinted up at Chris, sitting there with his chin resting in his hand.  I imagined him standing over Shemin’s dying body in the laundry room, admiring his butchery of a man who had dared to touch me, whom I had dared to touch, suddenly noticing the dull glint of silver at the end of one grasping, extended arm.  He had stopped before fleeing the scene and taken it off him, because teaching me a lesson was more important than anything else, even more important than evading capture.  This, this is how he shows me that I belong to him.  As if I needed to be shown.

*    *    *

Later, as I watched TV, he came up behind me and lifted the headphone off one of my ears to whisper into it.

“Everything okay there, Beecher?”

My face went hot as his lips just barely brushed the margin of my ear, and I snatched the headphones away from him and jumped to my feet.  He was still leaning way forward in his chair, shirt and sweatshirt riding up to expose the last few bumps of his spine.  I pretended not to notice and leaned down close to whisper in his ear.  “You’re one sick fuck, Keller.”

“Ain’t the first time I’ve heard that.”  He leaned back and scratched his chest lazily.  “‘Capable of fucking anything,’ right?”

I’ll never stop hating how easy it is for him to get the last word.  Dropping my headphones on the chair, I shot him a look that I hoped came off as disgusted and walked away.

*    *    *

The last time I saw it was just before I wrapped it in a wad of toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet.  I had known, since the moment I saw it on my pillow, what I was really going do with that bracelet.  The last thing I wanted was to have it in the same room with me as I tried to sleep at night, a souvenir of yet another death connected to the way I had lived my life, the choices I had made.

I wasn’t the only one who knew what I would end up doing with it.  I doubt Chris ever experienced even a moment’s worry about my intentions.  I had fantasized briefly about leaving it on his pillow and then instigating a shakedown, but the thought of anyone else coming across that bloody piece of evidence terrified me more than I cared to admit at the time.  One of these days, I thought, I may surprise him again.  But not this time.  Not today.

After it had been flushed away, I walked to the edge of the pod and peered out into the darkness, where I could just make out Chris’s shape.  When I moved closer, so did he, and, for the first time in a long time, his smile wasn’t smug at all.