Secret Sins: (A Standalone)

Secret Sins

by

CD Reiss

Copyright © 2016

ISBN: 978-1-942833-30-7

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Cover Art designed by the author

Thank you to Jean Siska for help
with legal traditions and terminology.

1982

“How old are you anyway?”

The guy asking had long strawberry-red hair and wore only shorts and a single sock. He’d tattooed a treble clef on his Adam’s apple that started a symphony of notes all over his chest and abs. His name was Strat, and whenever his shirtless torso showed up in
Rock Beat
, Lynn went crazy trying to play the song he’d had drawn on his body. It sounded like crap.

“Eighteen, asshole,” I snarled, letting loose a yard-long cone of cigarette smoke. I stamped out what was left of my cigarette. “You going to call or what?”

He and Indy snickered. I saw them look at each other over their cards. They thought they had my bra off next. They were wrong. Only two hands beat a full house, and if one of them had a straight flush or four of a kind, I was tits to the rail.

“I’ll raise you.” Strat tossed a ten in the center of the table.

We’d been going for four hours already. Indy had met me on the beach and, after a short chat, invited me to play poker. Yoni and Lynn were already in the hotel room for the possibility of a threesome, which was how I’d ended up on the beach alone. But poker? I could do poker.

My friends hadn’t lasted long. Yoni and Lynn had passed out when they ran out of cash. Keeping up with a couple of cash-rich rockers who didn’t know what to do with their first chunk of advance money was hard.

Indy/Indiana McCaffrey played guitar for Bullets and Blood. I’d met him on the beach first. I’d stayed cool even though he was completely gorgeous and charming, but when Strat came into the hotel suite, I almost had a coronary. I was a huge fan. I’d played their debut album,
Kentucky Killer
, for two weeks straight until Dad took my cassette. Took the Walkman too. I bought another of each but hid them.

“Call,” I said, tossing in my ten.

Indy threw down his cards. “Y’all are too rich for me.”

Indy had sun-kissed brown hair and a ginger beard. He was down to his skivs and a bandana around his neck, toned and tan from head to toe. I’d taken all of his money, and Strat and I had been pretty equally matched. Now I was going to break him.

“Too rich and too young,” Strat said, popping a peanut.

Lynn coughed on the couch. Stretched.

God, please don’t let her puke.

“I told you. I’m eighteen.”

I don’t know if I mentioned this. I wasn’t eighteen. I won’t say if I was younger or older. You can go figure it out.

Strat laughed. “Flygirl…”

Flygirl was a pretty common way to address a girl in the eighties, crossing race and geography, but I still felt as if it made me attractive to him. Strat chewed his peanut as if it had the mass of a pack of gum, chin up, looking at me in my bra. I felt naked.

I
was
naked, but I hadn’t felt like it until his eyes swung around the curves of my body. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but he finished before I could get a mental jacket on.

“You got a mouth like an old lady,” Strat said.

His stare froze me in place. The backs of my thighs got sticky on the pleather.

“Never heard a girl talk like you.”

Green was the rarest eye color, and his looked like precious Chinese jade.

He was so hot.

A hot rock star.

I put my cards down, snapping each one in the fan as I laid them out. “Aces full of sevens. You got anything in your hand besides your dick?”

Indy whooped. “She’s got you, Stratty-boy. The pot and… what do you have left? Pants and a sock, bro. Go for the sock.”

Indy was an amateur. He was beautiful and brilliant, but he didn’t act twenty. He acted like the guys my own age.

Eighteen.

Or whatever.

Strat hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Hadn’t even glanced at my full house. Didn’t even look down when he laid his cards on the table. I couldn’t move for too many seconds. His look wasn’t a look. It was a black hole. All gravity.

I tore myself from his gaze and looked at his cards.

Four deuces.

Fuck.

Losing to deuces was insulting.

Strat leaned back, the coils of his song all over his ripped body. The pot was his, but he didn’t reach for it. He just worked me over with his eyes, arm over the back of his chair, knees apart, daring me to search for the bulge in his shorts. I breathed deeply but couldn’t get enough air. My lungs had shrunk.

Indy looked at me under the table. “No socks, man. Shit. You’re down to not too much.”

I was in over my head. Way fucking over. Yet I liked it. More than liked it, I was comfortable when I was out of my depth. All the moving pieces, the inconsistency of the cards, the mess I was making excited and soothed me, a contradiction that translated into
belonging
.

I could fix it. I fixed it every time. My grades were amazing. I was the liaison for the Suffragette Society. I ran the school stage crew like a military operation. It was too easy. If you wanted an omelet, you had to break some eggs.

I’m not saying I chased musicians around after the sun went down because I sat on the edge of my bed and decided to make a mess of my life in order to fix it back up. Insight like that is no more than Monday morning quarterbacking.

I stood and put my hands behind my back, reaching between shoulder blades.

Strat licked his lips, taking his eyes from my crotch and leveling them on mine. I looked right at the motherfucker and pinched my bra hook. He was going to see my tits. The nipples were already hard from his attention. I had pretty good odds on a little damp spot where my panties had been on the pleather.

“Why don’t you stop for a minute there?” he said.

I stopped. I didn’t have to. Rules were rules. The bra came off. But he was effectively changing them.

Also, I didn’t want to take my bra off.

Strat leaned forward a little. A blade of copper hair slid off his shoulder and swung in front of his cheek.

“What?” I asked. “Scared of a little tit?”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Cinnamon.” I flicked my head a little, and my own red hair got out of my eyes. “But you can call me Cin.”

“Yeah. No. You got backstage last week from the admin office. I know you didn’t fuck Herve Lundren to get there either. Then you and your friend show up places you shouldn’t be. The loading dock behind the Wiltern. The thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner at Vilma. And Indiana here fucking stupids right into you.”

“Stupid’s not a verb, asshole,” Indy said.

Strat didn’t get distracted. Indy could have broken into the “Star-Spangled Banner” and it wouldn’t have snapped the drum of energy between Strat and me.

“Cinnamon’s not even a name,” Strat added.

“Your mother name you Strat?”

“
Rolling Stone
revealed my name three months ago.”

“Stratford Gilliam,” I whispered.

He leaned back again, but he didn’t spread out. He crossed an ankle over a knee. “Something’s up. You have cash. Enough to play with us. No eighteen-year-old has a wad of twenties inside hundreds.”

“I’m a fan. I like your music.”

“What’s your name?”

“You deaf? Cinnamon.”

“I can call you Cin.”

I touched my nose.

“Tell me your name,” he said, “and you can keep the bra on.”

He’d read me like a street sign. I didn’t want to take that bra off. I wasn’t ready for what that would lead to.

Yet I’d wanted to see if I could get out of it.

Dad asked me once why I loved trouble. Why I seemed to enjoy it so much. Why I made my own if I couldn’t find it in the wild. I had no answer. Still didn’t.

I didn’t want it to get out that I was in a hotel suite with Bullets and Blood. If I told this guy my name, I could get into trouble, and not the enjoyable kind.

“Your name.” The word
name
was silent on his lips.

My hesitation didn’t seem to bother him. He played me at the right tempo, continuing when I thought I’d break and just snap my bra open.

“I’ve seen enough tits in my time,” he said. “But you. Maybe you’re a fan, but it’s something else. You’re different.”

Show him your tits.

My fingers twitched on my sides. I was throbbing everywhere. My body wanted him, and my mind was running a four-minute mile in the other direction. I’d lost control of the situation, and as much as I dabbled in trouble, I never lost control of it.

Lock it down. Don’t even think your name. Don’t even think it. Don’t even.

“What’s your name?” he asked again.

I swallowed and decided to take off my bra. He’d try to fuck me, and we’d see where that went. I’d fought off men before. My hands crawled to my lower back.

He blinked, and in that split second his jade eyes were hidden from me, I changed course.

“Margaret Drazen,” I said, putting my hands on my hips and leaning hard on one foot. “You can call me Margie.”

“Nice to meet you, Margie.” He lazily picked up the deck of cards. “Your deal.”

Five things about being me.