Secret Sins: (A Standalone)

by CD Reiss

  Chapter 25.

  1983 After Ireland

  Eighteen, give or take. Mostly take. I could get away with a lot because I looked and sounded like an adult, and in a lot of ways, I was. I didn’t take shit, and I knew my own worth. That went a long way, but I was still as greedy as a child. I craved experiences. New things. Broken. Unraveled. Unwound. I could test the world. See what I could make anew.

  I would have been a sociopath if I hadn’t learned to give a shit when I got back from the cold stone convent in the old country. I’d eaten the shit sandwich I’d been fed, shed my rock groupie skin, and I acted like the oldest of eight.

  The first time my mother put Jonathan into my arms, she looked nervous. She hadn’t wanted me to touch him for the first week. Anyone else could, but not Margie. Maybe because he was the precious only boy of her eight children, but she handed him over as if I’d drop him or something. Or my irresponsible behavior would rub off on him. I didn’t take it personally.

  Post-partum wasn’t properly diagnosed back then, so she was treated like a hysterical female, and I wasn’t treated at all. I felt as if my guts had been ripped out and replaced with sawdust. I didn’t eat. I didn’t talk much. We were both in deep pain and acting as if nothing had ever gone awry.

  Eventually I took Jonathan from the nurse while Mom napped. He was everything. He had a little tuft of red hair and crystal-blue eyes that would eventually turn green. I’d held just about all of my siblings, but there was something about Jonathan. And the smell. Baby smell wasn’t new, but his was different. It was the scent of heaven and earth. He held my finger with his tiny hand, and it didn’t feel as though he did it out of newborn reflex. His grip felt like a plea. A connection. A deal rubbed with the salt of the earth.

  I was going to make it my business to be there for him. To make myself useful if not to my own child, then to the brother born at the same time. I pledged it to him.

  I straightened out so quickly, my family got whiplash. I never spoke to Lynn or Yoni again. I didn’t make friends, but I made a few appropriate acquaintances.

  It wasn’t even hard.

  “Did you breastfeed any of us?” I asked as Mom popped the bottle from Jonathan’s mouth.

  He was three months old, and I was still acclimating to my new life. Or my old life, depending on how you looked at it. It was the life a normal person my age should be living, not the life of someone who’d been whisked away to a foreign country to be tutored by stiff Irish nuns so she could secretly give birth to a baby she would never hold.

  “Heavens, no. Why would I do that?” Mom handed the baby to the nanny to burp.

  Her name was Phyllis, and she held her arms out but looked at me. She and I had set a pattern. Mom left before the baby kicked up his milk, and as soon as she was gone, Phyllis handed him to me. I slung him over my shoulder and patted his back, pressing my cheek to him so I could get a whiff of his baby smell. Best in the world.

  I knew I was making Jonathan a replacement for the baby they gave away, but I couldn’t help it. He smelled so good.

  “I’ll protect you, little brother,” I whispered then put his little hand up against my own as if swearing on a stack of Bibles. “I pledge it.”

  I studied and behaved. I was a model of good and right behavior. I won my parents’ trust back by staying in, helping my sisters with their homework, and finding a deep well of ambition.

  You might think I was somehow browbeaten into good behavior. That I resented it. That I lost a wild part of myself to meet the expectations of others.

  But it didn’t feel like that. I felt wonderful. I helped Carrie and Sheila with their homework while Dad was off doing business and Mom was in her room. I wiped chocolate off Fiona’s hands when she found the baker’s cocoa in the back of the cabinet and ate the whole box.

  I did everything but feed Jonathan. Mom insisted on feeding Jonathan until he started walking, then she abdicated, like with everything else. She was a figurehead, and oddly, I was okay with that. I loved her arm’s-length parenting because she gave me room to fill my days with something meaningful to me.

  Daddy was not an affectionate person, but after he spanked me for getting knocked up, he was never closer than half a room away. Even when I struggled in the back of the limo on the way to my flight to Ireland, he left the manhandling to an Italian bodyguard. He watched from the seats across with his jacket in his lap.

  “One day,” he’d said as Franco held me down, “one day you’ll see this is for your own good.”

  I stuck my middle finger out at him.

  “Who’s the father?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

  I got my hand from under Franco’s arm and stuck up my other middle finger.

  “I’m going to find out.”

  All he’d have to do was dig around the groupie scene and he’d know, but he was so far removed from it, and I’d kept it so far away from my regular life, that I had hope he’d leave Strat and Indiana alone.

  He sat next to me during the whole flight over. Just him, and he scared me. He checked me into the convent and left. They sent letters Sister Maureen made me answer. I said nice things, but I was shut down until he and Mom showed up three months before the baby was due.

  “You look good,” Mom had said. She was farther along than I was.

  I felt gross being next to her like that. “So do you. How do you feel?”

  “Better than ever.” She smiled and rested her hand on her belly. She loved being pregnant. I didn’t know how she felt about raising children, but she loved carrying them. “We found a family for your baby. They live here. It’s a good home.”

  “Thank you.”

  I hadn’t fought that part of it. I didn’t want to be a mother at that point, and I had no choice anyway. I was sure they’d done all the diligence in the world.

  “Your friends miss you. They come by to let us know.”

  “Who came?”

  She rattled off a few girls I knew from the Suffragette Society and Jenn from the Chess Strategy Club, then she looked at Dad.

  He sat in the corner with an ankle crossed over his knee, staring at me. The movement of his head was barely perceptible, but he gave her a definite no to whatever she was asking. Mom was a lion when it came to everything except Dad. So she acted as though no one else had come, smiling as if our family dynamic was as normal as peas and carrots.

  I went into labor three days early.

  Dad was there when I gave birth, not Mom. I hadn’t expected him to be in the room. I tried to ignore him, and once the pain got really bad, I could pretend he wasn’t there. The midwife handed him the baby still slimy with goop.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” I’d asked, trying to catch my breath.

  He didn’t answer. No one answered. Sister Maura just shushed me, and Dad took it away. By the time I delivered the placenta, I knew they’d never tell me a thing.

  I’d flown home alone. My sisters had greeted me like a long-lost child. Even my mother had been overcome with happiness when I walked in the door.

  Dad seemed cautious. He treated me as if I were a museum artifact behind a velvet rope.

  When I got into Wellesley, he congratulated me with a handshake and a genuine smile, but he never touched me again.

  I had to hang up a lot of my family duties when I went to Stanford Law, but I was always there. I called teachers when Fiona didn’t understand her homework, chewed out Father Alfonso when he fire-and-brimstoned Deirdre, and tried to keep Jonathan inside the lines as he proved, time after time, that he could push every boundary with a cocky smile.

  By the time I was studying for my bar, I felt as if the eighties were behind me. My parents had done their best, and I had a good life ahead. Sometimes I even felt gratitude.

  Chapter 26.

  1982 – The night of the Quaalude

  I became enamored with the taste and feel of his nipples. The odd red hairs on his chest next to the brown ones. Quaaludes made you horny and happy, an
d we laughed a lot. I was getting ready to let him fuck me again. It hurt in a different way when he touched me. I was sore. But the internal pain had left.

  I laid back and bent my knees, swinging them, smoking a cigarette. The cheap quilt under me felt good. Soft. Warm. Made for my skin.

  And him. He was good. Very good. Kissing between my tits and down my belly. He was going to do to me the thing the girls had done with Strat. He was going to taste me. I tucked the cigarette between my teeth and put my fingers in his hair, spreading my legs for him.

  When the door opened, I looked to see who came in but didn’t move otherwise. I didn’t jump or act ashamed, and neither did Indy.

  “Dude,” Strat said.

  “Dude.” Indy propped himself up on his elbows. “You get rid of Hawk?”

  “Yeah. Party’s over.” Strat leaned down, plucked the cigarette from my lips, and put it between his own. He had no shirt, and the musical notations across his body curved around his nipples in a way I wanted to taste. “Said he gave you a blue lude. Looks about right.”

  “Yeah. Blue.”

  He blew out smoke.

  I looked down at Indy, and he looked back up at me with a wicked smile.

  “Naughty,” I purred, reading his mind. I turned back to Strat and stretched, elongating my body, luxuriating in my nudity. I knew it was the drugs, and I didn’t care. “You gonna give that back?”

  He put the cigarette back in my mouth, peering down at me, through me, making some kind of calculation. I inhaled the delicious nicotine without touching the cigarette. Just sucking. Then I jutted my jaw at Strat. He took the butt from me and stamped it out in the ashtray on the floor.

  “You’re both luded,” Strat said.

  “Yup,” Indy said then turned back to my belly.

  I patted the mattress, staring at Strat. His long copper-red hair fell on each side of his face, and his jaw was rough with a day and a half of growth.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” I said.

  Strat glanced at Indy, who looked back at him intently and said, “You heard the woman.”

  The singer hesitated, looking from Indy to me. I’d never seen him hesitate before.

  “I know you want to,” Indy said. “One less thing to fight over.”

  In the seconds that passed, those two men who had grown up together and sacrificed for one another had a conversation without words. There had been a pledge, I knew that. But what was happening now?

  I waited for what felt like hours but was probably breaths, and put one hand in Indy’s hair while holding out the other to Strat. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  I didn’t think about the role reversal until years later, when I read about his death in Rolling Stone. Even then I smiled. I could practically taste him.

  “Do what you want,” Indy said. “But I’m eating this pussy right now.”

  And he did.

  He opened my folds, exposing my clit. Even that felt good, but when he laid his tongue on it, my neck arched.

  “Oh, God!”

  As if called by my prayer, Strat leaned next to the bed and kissed me. Not just kissed. He put his tongue in my mouth and claimed me. Indy brought me to orgasm with his mouth while I cried out into Strat’s, a conduit from man to man. I lay there gasping, wanting more.

  “Yes,” Indy said, kneeling.

  Strat was over me, pants down, cock out. So fucking hard and straight, I had to reach for it.

  “You sure, Cinny?”

  “Yes.” I stroked him. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it couldn’t have been that bad.

  “I want your ass. I’ll try to make it good for you.”

  “I know.”

  Indy pulled me up to my knees, and I kissed him.

  “Say you’re sure to me,” he whispered. “It’s a lot for your first time.”

  “I want it now.”

  Behind me, Strat kneeled on the mattress and stroked my body. I felt his erection on my lower back.

  “What about you?” I asked Indy.

  “Yeah. But, Cin. Margie. I’m crazy about you. This doesn’t change that. I want to know you.”

  I didn’t tell him I wasn’t knowable because the ludes made me feel elated and open, with years ahead of me that were going to start with these two men, on this mattress—now.

  “Okay.”

  He smiled then got me under the arms and threw me on my back. “This is gonna be fun.”

  I laughed, and the next minutes were spent in some kind of heaven. The two of them covered me with their mouths and hands. Strat put his fingers in my mouth and I sucked them, groaning for him while Indy sucked my nipples to exquisite pain.

  “Wet, Cin. Make them wet.”

  I did, licking between his second and third finger.

  Strat pulled them out. “Good. You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t actually know what I was supposed to be ready for until he bent my knees so deeply, Indy had to get off my tits and my hips lifted off the mattress. I was completely exposed, and they looked at me. Both of them. Indy played with my cunt, and Strat rubbed my ass with his wet finger. They watched my face.

  The finger pressed forward, and my asshole yielded. I felt it everywhere. My entire body reacted with a shudder, tightening around him at the same time as my clit engorged. Indy slid two fingers into my pussy and leaned down to kiss me. I took the kiss, ate it, moaned into it, even when Strat got two fingers in me, burying them inside.

  “Going for three,” Strat said a million miles away. “Relax.”

  I’d never been so relaxed in my life, but that third finger broke through the high with a shot of pain. I tightened.

  Indy took his mouth off me and turned to Strat. “Lube, asshole.”

  Strat flicked his hand at the night table. The same one the girl with the luscious hips had opened. Indy opened the drawer and found the same bottle of baby oil. He handed it over.

  Strat popped it open. “Open up.”

  I lifted my knees, and Indy leaned over me and spread me wide. Cold, dripping oil fell on me, and the two of them spread it around, inside, outside. Making sure I was slick and ready, talking like two lawyers making sure every t was crossed and i was dotted.

  I felt like the center of the known universe, swirling a galaxy of pleasure between my legs.

  “Guys,” I groaned. “That’s so nice. Please.”

  “She’s ready,” Strat said to his childhood friend. He scooted back until he was sitting against the wall, cock out like a flagpole.

  Indy helped me up. “Okay, face me on your knees.”

  He maneuvered me until Strat was behind me and could get his hands on my waist.

  “Open,” Strat said. “Pull it open.”

  My ass cheeks were slick with oil, but I dug in and opened them as Strat put pressure on my hips to lower me.

  “Slow,” Indy said.

  “Slow, baby,” Strat said.

  Indy kneeled in front of me, eyes still dilated black, biting his lower lip as I went down until I felt Strat’s dick against my ass. It seemed no different than the last barrier I’d broken that night, so I pushed down.

  “Slow.” Indy demanded when he saw my face. “We have all night.”

  It was different.

  “Relax.” Strat reached around and gently rubbed my clit.

  Between the baby oil and my body’s arousal, I was so wet that I didn’t feel the least bit sore, and the pleasure relaxed me. My ass opened a little, and I bore down until the head was in. I stopped. Gasped.

  “Can you take it?” Indy asked.

  “Yes.”

  I got myself to a crouching position and lowered myself completely. Strat’s cock went in all the way, and I continued down, down, stretching, taking every inch inside me. A sharp breath shot out of me with a crack of pain, but I didn’t stop until he was rooted in my ass. Then I smiled, because I was stretched and full.

  “So hot,” Indy muttered, stroking his own cock.

  I raise
d myself, feeling the sensation against the walls of muscle, then I went down again.

  “That’s it, baby,” Strat said from behind me. “Take it. Take it hard.”

  “Indy?”

  He took a deep breath and leaned forward. We shifted, realigned, and got my pussy right to take him. One hand on the wall behind us, one on my shoulder, he got his dick in.

  It was a feeling I would never forget and one I never could repeat. All I had to do was stay still as they fucked me like two musicians with the same beat. One in, one out. Then both in at the same time.

  Complete fullness. Stretched to my limit. Desired. Loved. Fucked endlessly everywhere. Both goddess and vessel.

  “Touch yourself,” Strat said. Neither of them had a free hand in the balancing act.

  I jammed my fingers between Indy and me. I let out a long groan when I was close, but it was taking longer than I thought. It was too much. The pleasure wouldn’t center where it needed to.

  Indy put his nose astride mine and grunted into my cheek, exploding inside me.

  I didn’t think it was physically possible to feel any more pleasure or another slice of sensation, but I did, gathering vibrations between my fingers.

  “Come, baby,” Strat growled. “I want to feel it.”

  Indy pulled out and leaned back. His dick was slick with me and still stiff. “I got it.”

  He leaned down and flicked my clit with his tongue, then he sucked it hard as Strat pinched my nipples.

  That was it.

  As I screamed in pleasure, Strat pulled me down until he was deep inside me, and I came, ass pulsing around his cock.

  “Ah, that’s it,” he groaned. “Fuck yes.”

  My orgasm was barely over when he pulled me up then slammed me down. Three, four, five times, then he came into me.

  I leaned forward into Indy’s arms, and we fell together, resting for fifteen minutes before we fell asleep in a heat of slick, euphoric flesh.

  Chapter 27.

  1994

  “I thought you were going to be the easy one,” I said. The rain had lightened to dime-sized splats and rushing veins on the windshield. The inside of the car smelled of salt water and sticky tar.