Dimly, Ashley wondered why she wasn’t afraid. She’d spent days in this prison, and weeks leading up to her incarceration here, terrified of being prison raped. She’d read that once you became a victim, you stayed one. If Jonesy got the best of her now, she’d be the bitch of every dyke rapist in this prison. And in the short-term, she’d wake up her other cellmates, and she’d already become rather certain these weren’t the sort of women who would empathize with her plight. They were friends of Jonesy, and had obviously made their peace with her appetites. Besides, even if a guard came, they’d not come in time to witness anything, and then she’d be a narc, which was even worse.
Yet she wasn’t the least bit afraid of it. She could take it, if she had to.
“Ooooh, you got some damn nice titties, College,” the woman said as she lifted her top to expose them. Pale as Ashley was, they practically gleamed in the dark cell. With no other course before her, she did much as she’d done these past months with the asshole, and lie there tolerating having her boobs sucked by some freak. It should have disgusted it to her core… but instead she felt nothing but the sensation of someone clumsily suckling at her nipples.
Of course, soon sucking wasn’t enough, and the woman got to nibbling—which soon became biting, practically chewing at Ashley’s nipples. It didn’t hurt—it should have, her brain told her it was hard enough to be painful, but… nothing.
Still, she was reaching the end of her patience. “Knock it the fuck off, Jonesy,” she warned.
Evidently her cellmates were light sleepers, because those few words were all it took. “OK, that’s it, I done told you not to eat into my beauty sleep, college bitch. Now you got to get taught.” The two women slid out of their beds and approached, their eyes glaring menacingly in the dark cell.
Jonesy quickly hopped down and hid in her own bunk. “Shouldn’t go makin’ noise, College, now you made it worse…”
Ashley hopped up to her feet, tugging her top back into place, and stood facing them. “You wanna kick my ass? Bring it. I got nothing left to lose. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna just let—”
Then the woman slugged her upside the head. Ashley went down in a heap, and the two women started kicking her over and over. Ribs, arms, back, even her head. “Bad idea, College, nobody likes bein’ talked at in here,” said Jonesy from her bunk.
It should have hurt. It should have bruised and broken ribs. Hell, maybe it did.
Yet Ashley didn’t feel a thing. She didn’t cry out in pain, which seemed to only motivate them to kick harder. Still nothing. Finally, as their legs tired out from kicking, they stopped. One of them spit on her as the pair turned back to their bunks.
“Don’t you ever spit on me again,” a steely voice behind them said. They turned, stunned to find the girl standing. For all the times they’d gotten her head, there wasn’t any blood on her face. Not even any bruising.
“What the…” One of the women reacted quickly, misdiagnosing Ashley’s state as just being too dazed from the beating to realize she was hurt, and should stay down. She grabbed Ashley’s head and slammed it into one of the bed posts. The metal was so thick it didn’t ring, it just made a thunk that everyone who heard figured meant the new girl was dead already on day four.
Instead, Ashley stood right back up. “You’re going to regret that.”
When the lights came back on in the morning, the guards discovered two inmates with severe bruises, maybe even concussions, both of them covered in their own blood. One was unconscious, the other merely incoherent, gibbering in terror. They were hauled down to the infirmary on the minute while another demanded answers.
One of the new inmates, a young white girl, grinned proudly. “I did it. They got in my face, so I beat them back into place.”
“You. You’re half that woman’s size, girl, and there’s two of them,” said the dubious guard. “Wanna tell me what really happened?”
“Just ask Jonesy there,” she said.
The woman was curled up in the corner of her bunk, pressed against the wall as far from College as she could get. “C’mon, Jones,” the guard coaxed, “tell us what happened.”
She shook her head. “No. No, if I tell you, she’ll get me too. No.”
“All right then, have it your way, new girl. C’mon, you’re going to solitary until we cane make sense of this.”
“Nah, I think I like it here,” Ashley said, sitting down in one of the newly vacant bunks.
“Don’t make us get rough with you—take your lumps like a big girl. We ain’t askin’ twice.”
“Don’t do it!” hissed Jonesy. “Whatever you dish out, College can take it. They hit her and hit her and… nothing. No pain you can give her she can’t handle.” The redhead grinned smugly, pure self-satisfaction on her face.
The guard looked at Ashley. They had a solution to trouble-makers who didn’t want to comply, and thought they were tough in a fight. “Yeah, well take this then.” In a swift motion he grabbed his pepper spray from his belt and gave her a blast right to the face.
The girl didn’t even flinch. Didn’t even close her eyes as it made contact with the eyeballs. Panicking, he kept spraying until her eyes should have been burned out of her skull. “What the fuck…!”
Ashley rose and calmly took the canister from the guard, who was too shocked to resist her. “Yeah, looks like you’re gonna need some stronger stuff.” She turned the can on him and got him mostly in the face. Even as he tried to cover his eyes, enough got through that he shrieked in pain as the spray blinded him. She stepped right over his wailing body and tossed the can aside casually.
“We’re not just gonna let you get away with that,” he called after her. “You’re gonna pay!”
“I’ve had to put up with a lot of shit,” she said evenly. “You know what? I think I’ve built up a bit of a tolerance.”