Secret Sins: (A Standalone)

by CD Reiss

  “What do you mean maybe?”

  “People come over, and it gets hard to talk. So it’s cool.”

  I threw myself down the hall toward him, the weight of my bag pushing me forward, finger extended. “It’s cool?”

  He shrugged and looked back into the engineering room as if he was dying to get back in there. I’d never felt so alone in my entire life.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me you won’t make the time to talk to me. I’ve never asked you for a goddamn thing, you—”

  “That’s fucking right.” His tone was a cinderblock wall, and I shriveled inside even as I kept my own wall high and hard. “Look, if you’re gonna turn crazy, you won’t be the fucking first.”

  “What?”

  “I’d be surprised. You didn’t seem like the type. But before we ‘talk,’ I’m going to pull out what we said the night we met. Feelings aren’t real, so we don’t bother. Right? You’re not getting crazy. Right?”

  Crazy. The world and everyone in it was crazy. Because I had feelings. I didn’t know what they were or who they were even for. Maybe I had feelings for a way of life that was about to end.

  “Look,” he said, rubbing his lower lip with his thumb. A little swipe of discomfort. “We’re really busy right now. There’s no time for this.”

  Whatever my feelings were, Indy wasn’t going to help me sort them out, and fuck him. I didn’t need him or his help. He didn’t even know what to do with his own damned feelings.

  “Better get back to work,” I sneered.

  I took my crazy and went down the hall without looking back.

  Fuck him seven ways to Sunday.

  Fuck both of them.

  Chapter 24.

  1994

  The Audi cut through the rain like a machete, and Drew drove as if he lived in a place where it rained more than two months out of the year. I felt safe. Again.

  “I saw you in Rolling Stone,” I said as if I was just trying to make conversation. I flipped through a black wallet of CDs. Doubtless a small fraction of what he had at home.

  “That was such a joke.”

  “Too redemptive?”

  “I did half the drugs they said I did.”

  “That’s still a lot.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. There was plenty. It was the eighties. What can I tell you? I was a wreck. Sound Brothers was making a ton of money, and I was wrecked over Strat.”

  I slid a disc from the sleeve. Kentucky Killer. The album that turned me into a groupie and got them the deal that financed the studio. The one with the masters in the trunk of the car.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  He shrugged and looked in the rearview before changing lanes as if he needed something to do with his hands and mind. “Yeah, thanks. I just… I didn’t know. After you were gone, we started fighting. Bad shit. Fistfights. I don’t know what was wrong with him. Or me. Maybe it was me. I think about it a lot. Was it all really my fault? I mean, he blamed me for letting you go. He said he wouldn’t have. So I shut down. I didn’t even want to look at him. I got very involved with the studio. He had the business head, and I kept just wanting to do shit my way.”

  “You made the studio a real success.”

  “I never felt like that without him. Feels like I’m treading water most days. He said the studio should be passive. It should run itself while we made music, and I just kept getting more and more involved in the day-to-day. I could barely show up to our own sessions, and Gary had a kid, so he was checked out. Strat just lost it. Went back to Nashville.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It wasn’t. He had a bad heart. Congenital aortic valve something. If he knew, he might have decided to take too much heroin instead of amphetamines.”

  “Was that supposed to be funny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was.”

  I’d mourned Strat’s death. He’d died from only a slight overdose of uppers. His heart couldn’t take it. I’d thought about that too deeply, reading too much into a heart that couldn’t stand the exertion. I sought out details about his demise to avoid the sadness. I told myself he was a jerk, that he didn’t matter, that he was in my distant past. But it did matter. A haze followed me, because he was indeed my past. I’d owned that life, that past, those stories that built me, and it all went and died while I wasn’t looking.

  “He cared about you,” Drew said, glancing at me before he put his eyes back on the freeway. “We went to meet you on Santa Monica and Vine. And that neighborhood…” He shook his head. “Of all the corners to pick. We didn’t know if you’d been dragged into an alley and murdered.”

  I shot out a laugh at how close to the truth he was. “I’m sorry I flaked.”

  “You didn’t flake. We went to your house—”

  I sat ramrod straight, eyes wide, adrenaline flooding my veins. “You did not.”

  “Did. We got a lawyer to find out where you lived, and we got ten different kinds of runaround. Then a guy with a gun and a badge opened the door. He flashed an order of protection and made threats. We stopped coming around.”

  “They never told me.”

  Of course they hadn’t told me. I was indisposed and powerless.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, looking at my open hands as if I was trying to set the past free. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I…”

  Deep breath.

  This is important.

  “I just needed to start over.”

  “I was an asshole to you,” he said.

  “You were fine. It was me. I was in over my head.”

  “We figured you weren’t dead, so we just… well, we didn’t forget. I let it go, but I didn’t forget. Figured it was the way I’d talked to you the last time I saw you. Strat was pissed off. He was the one you called, and he insisted you sounded upset. I told him Cin didn’t get upset. Cin is together. She never lets her feelings get the better of her. But he swore up and down. He paid a detective to watch the house until the day he died.”

  “Eight months after I flaked.”

  “You didn’t flake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know you. If you needed to get away from us, I get it. That’s not flaking.”

  I made a breath of a laugh. He knew me. Sure. I always did what I said. If I said “meet me at Santa Monica and Vine,” then I was going to get off the bus at Santa Monica and Vine with my smallest Louis Vuitton suitcase.

  The rain pounded the windows, marbleizing them to opacity. The windshield wipers did nothing to break the stream. I gripped the edge of the leather seat because the red lights ahead of us got too big too fast.

  Drew snapped the right blinker on to get off the freeway. It was miles too soon, but it was the only safe option.

  He would have been a good father.

  I covered my face with my hands. Did I steal that from him?

  Note to self: “Not feeling” stuff doesn’t mean you’re not feeling it. Being unemotional and cold doesn’t mean you don’t have a pot full of emotions waiting to boil over. It means the heat hasn’t been turned up enough, and the pot just hasn’t been there long enough. It means the pot hasn’t reached capacity.

  But it will.

  And your heart will beat so fast and hard you’ll want to die. Your eyes will flush with tears, and your throat will close like a valve’s been turned. Regret will fill you on a cellular level until the very tips of your fingers tingle with self-loathing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He parked the car and shut it off. “You didn’t make the rain. Just give it ten minutes.”

  “No. I’m sorry I didn’t flake. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what happened. I’m sorry I left you there. I’m just sorry for everything.”

  “Margie? What’s happening?”

  He put his arms around me, but I pushed him away violently. Once I told him, he would be sorry he’d ever touched me.

  “I was pregnant.”


  I could see the entire diameter of his blue eyes as he looked at me in surprise, jaw slack, expression otherwise empty. Was it surprise? Was I wrong in thinking he already knew? Or was that wishful thinking?

  I swallowed putty, looked into the pouring rain, and ground my teeth until I could breathe enough to speak. “I was going to meet Strat and get an abortion because I didn’t want you to talk me out of it, and I was so damn mad at you. After I called, I tried to get to you. I climbed out of my bedroom window, but my parents caught me in the driveway and sent me away.”

  He shook his head, eyes narrowed as if I’d just dropped a bomb in his brain and he had to make sense of the pieces.

  “Do not pass Go,” I continued. “Right to LAX. A fucking convent in Ireland. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have called when I got back. But I was fucked in the head, and I couldn’t deal.”

  He got a white handkerchief out of his pocket, and I snapped it away to wipe my eyes. It didn’t even begin to do the job.

  “Where’s the baby?” he asked, pointing at the elephant in the room.

  “Adopted.”

  “Where?”

  “Jesus, Indiana! How the fuck should I know?”

  He looked out his side window, probably so he wouldn’t have to look at me.

  “My parents came to Ireland during my last trimester to set up the adoption, so the baby’s probably there.”

  Funny how I still thought of it as a baby. He or she had to be Jonathan’s age already.

  Drew looked back at me, all the surprise and distance gone.

  “My mom was really pregnant too, which was just great because she hated me for getting knocked up at the same time. She had her baby in the hospital, then I had mine in the convent, and Dad just took it. I didn’t even hear it cry. A week later, they took me home. Mom had post-partum. Dad acted like the whole thing had been a fun trip and the bad shit never happened. Which, you know, I’ll admit that worked for me.”

  The shadows of the rain fell on the curves of his beautiful face in an overlay of wrinkles and age. Yet he looked twenty again, an overwhelmed artist on the verge of a life of riches and fame. A kid with nothing but mistakes to make. He’d seen a lot. He’d lost his best friend. Faced the death of his father and the surrender of his mother. He’d been strong for his family even when all the perks and goodies of a life in the spotlight tempted him away.

  And I hadn’t given him a thought.

  I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems for eleven years that I hadn’t thought about what he would have wanted. Wasn’t he as much a part of this as I was? Didn’t he have the right to know? To claim what was his?

  Well, there was that.

  “It never occurred to me to find you," I said. "I was thinking about what was easy for me. And even when I saw you in the office… I was still thinking about myself. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t want him to speak, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? I’d never wanted him to speak. I’d wanted him to go away. In the front seat of his rented Audi, with the rain pounding the glass, that changed. I wanted to know what he thought. I’d suffer the slings and arrows he threw at me if he’d just say what was on his mind.

  He opened his mouth to speak, and I’d admit I flinched a little.

  I wanted him to like me, to want me, to love Cin again and learn to love Margie. I should have felt like a little whiney bitch for that, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy to berate myself for wanting to be wanted.

  “And…” he started, and I braced myself, “who were you thinking about when you invited me to a family dinner?”

  It was crazy to laugh, but I did. I wasn’t used to having this fucked up soup in my guts. I was off balance from the pendulum of emotion. Walking on a lubed-up balance beam. Of course I fell, but at least I fell on the side of laughter. If I cried another tear, I was going to have to wring out his hankie.

  “Me!” I said. “I wanted to spend time with you again, and I was totally thinking of myself. But you look different. And we can call you Drew and never even talk about what happened. They won’t know.”

  “But I’ll know.”

  I stopped in the middle of a lateral mood swing. Just froze.

  He wasn’t talking about the baby and whatever right he had or didn’t think he had to it. No. His face wasn’t hurt or victimized. It was rigid with rage.

  “Don’t pretend it’s about me,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.” I was almost screaming. I sounded crazy. Drunk on feelings.

  “It’s about you.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Did anyone stand up for you? All this time? Has anyone—”

  I couldn’t hear another word. I yanked the door handle. It slipped with a deep clack. I grunted and pulled it again, even as Drew reached over to close the door.

  Neither the downpour nor the unknown neighborhood slowed me down. I didn’t care about my work shoes or the cold rain that soaked my white shirt. I was sodden before I got three steps away from the car.

  I didn’t expect him to pull away and leave me there. I figured I’d grab a cab or find a payphone while he stayed in the car and followed me. Because who would run out into this shitstorm? What normal person would leave the car running, the headlights on, and jump into a fucking monsoon to grab my arm?

  “Let me—”

  “Shut up!” he shouted, already soaked, hair flat on his scalp, eyelashes webbed with water. His shirt stuck to him, translucent enough to reveal the treble clef over his heart. “For once, shut that mouth and listen. I never forgot you. Never. Not a day went by in that studio without me thinking about you. How you think. How you talk. How you felt when I was inside you.”

  “You shut up! You forgot me, and you should have.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I was nothing.” I jabbed my finger at him. “I was a short-term habit.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t even spoken, water dripping from the angles of his face, along his cheekbones and jaw, meeting at his chin and falling in a constant silver line. “When Strat died, I couldn’t save him. I wanted you there. I needed you. As soon as you called him that night, I should have had the balls to go right to your house and get you. Now that I know what happened, I know it was the biggest mistake of my life. I’ll always regret it.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “I am.”

  In the urban dark of the street, with only the headlights of the Audi illuminating the diagonal sketch marks of rain, I didn’t see him move, but I tasted rain warmed by the heat of his mouth. He was too fast and was kissing me before I knew what was happening.

  He kissed my breath away.

  He kissed my defenses to dust.

  His lips dared me to feel nothing.

  He turned me from solid to liquid.

  One hand cupped my chin, and the other pulled me close from the back of my neck, and fuck him fuck him fuck him because I put my hands on his chest again, to his shoulders, his neck, the back of his head. My fingers dug into his wet hair. I felt close to him again, as I had all the years before, when I held his heart in my hands and someone else threw it away.

  “I’m not abandoning you again,” he said between kisses, running his face over my cheek like the water that spilled over it.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Please. Let me earn this.”

  I pushed him away. His right eye was crystalline in the headlamps, bathed in light and rain.

  “You’ve lost it, Indiana.”

  “I have. Slowly. Since I saw you this morning.”

  My teeth chattered as I looked him up and down. I didn’t know what to make of him. I didn’t know what to feel.

  “I used you,” I said, speaking the truth to myself as well as him. “I was looking for bad things to do, and you were there. I used you to fuck myself up.”

  “I know.” His treble clef heaved under the wet fabric, a scar from a dream he’d once had. The footp
rint of a thing he’d loved and lost.

  “I can see right through your shirt,” I said. “It’s indecent.”

  He pulled me to him, and we ran back to the car. He opened the door for me, and I leaned over inside and popped open the driver’s door. It had barely closed behind him when he stretched across the seat and kissed me again. I put my hand on his wet chest, and he put his up my skirt. I let him, wrangling my body around his, opening my legs for his touch.

  “That’s not the rain,” he said, sliding a finger inside me.

  “God, no,” I groaned. “It’s you.”

  He drew his knuckles over my clit. “Look at me. Open your eyes and look at me.”

  His beard was soaked to dark brown, and droplets of water clung to his lashes. His hair stuck to his forehead.

  “You’re beautiful,” I whispered. Then as he rubbed me again, I groaned, driving my hips forward. “Take me.”

  I reached between his legs and felt him. He sucked a breath through his teeth.

  “We’re not done.” He yanked his belt open. “I’m going to fuck you right here, right now. But it’s not the last time. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  I would have promised him beachfront property in Nevada, especially after he took his dick out.

  I wiggled out of my underwear while he reached into his wallet for a condom. Good man. No need to make the same mistake twice. I swung my leg over him, positioning him under me.

  He pressed the head of his cock at my entrance with one hand, and with the other, he took my jaw. “This is not the last time. Say you understand.”

  “I do. I get it. I swear.”

  Was I lying? Maybe. But he was pressed against me, and every nerve ending between my legs vibrated for it.

  “Say it.”

  “This is not the last time.”

  He pushed me down, entering me slowly.

  “Look at me,” he whispered again.

  “You feel so good. It’s hard to keep my eyes open.”

  “Feel it, Margie. Feel it.”

  He pushed me onto him, driving down to the root, every inch a reminder of what we’d had and what we were—a reimagined beginning with a past that ended us.