Secret Sins: (A Standalone) Read Online Free PDF

something
    What’s your name?
    Catholic Women’s Club
    Chess Strategy Club
    Then?
    Then?
    Then…

Chapter 7.
    1994
    “I know everything comes pretty easily to me compared,” I whispered to Drew/Indiana in the hall before swiveling into my cubicle. I had to pick up my things before doing Ellen’s donut run. “But I put some work into being here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention we knew each other eleven plus years ago.”
    “Am I so embarrassing?” He smirked as if he had me over a barrel.
    Typical man, thinking it was all about hard work now/today/this week. If word of our history got out, I’d be a slut and he’d be a hero. I’d be fending off advances in the copy room, getting censured for shit I did a decade ago, wondering why I never got the good cases, and he’d fly back to New York and get promoted.
    “It’s not shame and never was.”
    “That’s my Cinnamon.”
    “It’s Margie now.” I spun to face him, my back to my desk and spoke quietly. Terry, the other clerk, was a foot away through the grey half-wall. “Full-time. This is my life. Like I said. I have plenty of privilege but no dick.”
    “It’s 1994.”
    He said it as if we had entered the modern era and his dick didn’t make a damned bit of difference in the workplace. Only a man could think something so utterly incorrect.
    He must have seen me boil, because he put a hand up before I could explode. “I’m just giving you a hard time. I never intended to say a word about anything, but I’m in town for the week.”
    I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and got my purse out. “Fine.” I slapped the drawer shut.
    “Fine?”
    “I have no feelings about it one way or the other.”
    “Good to see you haven’t changed.” He winked and slipped out.

Chapter 8.
    1982 – Before the night of the Quaalude
    I didn’t have to remember E-Y-E-B-R-O-W or six-oh-six, which I happened to know was a Kentucky number from a friend at Carlton Prep. I got a beep in the middle of chess strategy with a Nashville call back number. An hour later, I was in the passenger seat of a Monte Carlo driving into Pacific Palisades. Strat was behind the wheel, and Indiana was in the back with Lynn and Yoni.
    I had no idea why I was there. I wasn’t the prettiest girl who hung around them. I hadn’t screwed either one of them, though apparently Yoni and Lynn had had a fine time with Strat before the poker game had gotten under way. I didn’t understand why I was there because I didn’t understand men.
    Yet.
    It came to me many years later, while reading Rolling Stone . During the interview, Indy was sitting in front of a mixing board they’d installed in the Palihood House (He was “producing” because that was always the story arc. Small-town beginnings>cohesion of the group>artistic satisfaction>commercial success>drug use>break up>The Bottom>redemption>rebuilding/branding). His hair was scraggly but intentionally so. His shirt was clean. He’d lost the puff around the eyes, and he was talking about Strat.
    “He was like a brother to me, but more. A partner. And when he died, man, it was like someone ripped me open.”
    In the passenger seat of the Monte Carlo, with the two of them still poker-playing strangers, I didn’t know they were like brothers. Years later, reading the Rolling Stone article, that Monte Carlo ride came back to me.
    I’d been so clueless about how close they were and how lonely they were.
    I always assumed I was brought into this world fully formed. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t understand people the way I thought I did. I chewed on that then forgot it, because it only turned up the heat on a cauldron of stew that had everything and nothing to do with the Bullets and Blood boys.
    Indy leaned forward and pointed at a locked gate closing off a road into the foothills of the Palisades. “Up here. Code’s fifty-one-fifty.” He turned to me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Wait until you see this