Secret Sins: (A Standalone) (3 page)

I took it all back. She wasn’t dumb as a box of rocks. She was dumb as a box of fox.

“I think tonight’s the night,” she said softly, leaning into me. She held up three fingers and twisted them around in a bastardization of “fingers crossed.” Code for a threesome, which the two boys were famous for and what she had been trying to get herself involved in for a week.

“It’s, like, fifty percent more romantic,” I said.

She blinked. Didn’t get it. I sighed.

“Yoni’s in for girl-on-girl,” she said. “I’d ask you but—”

“No thanks. Not tonight.”

Not yet. I wasn’t ready for that kind of thing. I’d done some low-level groping, but nothing close to the intensity of what Lynn chased after.

Yoni poked her head out. Her furry blond bob was held up with a big lace bow, and she wore fingerless, elbow-length gloves with dozens of silver bracelets at the wrist.

“Lynn,” she said sotto.

Half the people on the smoking deck turned at the sound, then back to what they were doing.

“What?” Lynn asked.

We stepped to the door, and Yoni came out.

“They have a suite upstairs. Talking about a poker game. You got cash?”

“Yeah,” Lynn answered.

“I’m in,” I said.

Yoni’s gaze sizzled over me, and I realized my error. I was going to be a buzzkilling interloper.

I stamped my cigarette out under my short boot. “Never mind. I’m going to take a walk. See you guys later.”

I didn’t wait for a response. If Lynn wanted to screw one or both of those guys, I could get a cab home. I didn’t go to the street though. I went down the wooden steps to the beach. My feet felt the cold of the sand even through my boots. It had rained earlier in the day, and my steps made half moons of darker sand visible in the floodlights. I walked to the waterline out of reach of the light, not looking back, and sat with my knees to my chest, hugging myself against the cold.

The light disappeared and the night took over a few feet from the line where the sand got flat and wet, streaked with the movement of the tide and punctuated with intestinal piles of seaweed.

I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other about the orgy. I wasn’t interested. But I liked poker.

I dug my heels in the sand. Fuck this. I didn’t know what to do with my body, with my place in the world, with my family. I was trapped in all of it. The water broke, foaming and hissing, a few feet from me. I didn’t know if the tide was rising or receding. Didn’t matter.

I didn’t know what I believed in.

Desperation defined the lives of my friends. They were desperate to fit in, to make their families happy, or to decide who they were immediately. I didn’t understand the hunger for approval or validation. The backstabbing and garment-rending over people with dicks made me uncomfortable. Men motivated tears and anguish that seemed unjustifiable. Weird. Out of character. I had friends who were normal one minute then started to have a freaking embolism when their bodies changed.

I felt it too. But we all took the same courses in school. We’d all known it was coming. Why act as if it was a shock?

I’d backed away slowly until I didn’t have friends who couldn’t cope. No one knew what to do with me. I didn’t even know what to do with me. I knew I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t care. Maybe it was my version of rich girl ennui. Maybe I was just too smart, too good at too many things. Or too acerbic to make those warm girly relationships. I depended on no one. Didn’t feel useful.

I felt as though I had more going on in my head than most people, then I thought I was out of my mind for believing that. So I reached out, trying to make more friends. Then I realized how empty relationships were. I realized I really did have more going on in my head than most people, and I started the cycle over.

Lynn had disappeared into the club, on her way to the suite to have a threesome or foursome, and I was left on the beach. I could have made it a fivesome, and why not? What would be the difference either way?

Screwing one or ten people didn’t need to be an earth-shatteringly meaningful experience, but I should know why I wanted to besides boredom.

“It’s not ennui then,” I said to myself.

My face squeezed tight, reacting to having sand thrown in it before my brain fully registered that two shirtless men had run past me, kicking up sand. They dove into the freezing surf.

God damn. Los Angeles was pretty warm in March, all things being equal, but the water was fucking cold.

They swam to the place where the waves rose cleanly and treaded water, looking toward the horizon. When a big one rolled in, curling at the top at just the right moment, they flattened their bodies and rode it in. They got lost in the white froth, then they came up sitting. They high fived. The wave they had ridden continued past them, past the boundary of wet sand, to the dry line six inches from my boots.

Tide was coming in.

One of the men came toward me, pants heavy with water, hair dripping, short beard glistening in the lights of the boardwalk. “Got a towel?”

“No.”

“Fucking cold.”

“Shoulda thought of that before you went in.”

Behind me, the other guy snapped a white hotel towel off the sand and gave it a shake before putting it around his shoulders. He had music tattooed all over his chest. That would be Stratford Gilliam. Unbelievable in person. Even in the dark.

“She’s got a point,” he said and darted back to the club.

The guy with the ginger beard was Indiana McCaffrey, and he was supposed to be fucking Lynn and Yoni. Instead, he was standing over me, shivering.

“I have fire,” I said, handing him my cigarettes and lighter.

He took them and sat next to me. “Thanks.” He pulled out two cigarettes, handed me one, and lit both with trembling hands.

“You should probably get inside.”

“I like being cold.”

“Sure. That’s why people move here.”

He blew out a stream of smoke. It took a hairpin turn two inches from his lips when the sea breeze sent it behind him.

“You from here?” he asked.

“Los Angeles born and raised. Fermented in Pacific brine and air-dried in the California sun.” I flipped my hair so the wind blew it out of my face. He was more beautiful in person than in any magazine. I didn’t know how I got to be sitting on the beach with Indiana McCaffrey, but once the cigarette was done, he was probably going to split. Every second counted. “Your Southern accent’s mostly gone. You could be a newscaster.”

He nodded, or he could have been shivering. “My father didn’t like me sounding like a hick, so he beat the accent out of me.”

“What else did he beat out of you?”

He glanced at me. “Besides the shit?”

His pupils were dilated eight-balls with blue rings. He was on some sensory-enhancing drug. Quaaludes maybe. Supposedly the blue capsules made you horny and happy enough to melt the awkwardness out of the threesomes. That’s what Lynn said. She got blued whenever she could. I kept away from blues. I didn’t need to be any hornier or happier.

The top layer of his hair had dried, and it fluttered in the wind as he looked down, rolling the tip of his cigarette against the edge of the sand.

“Shit’s the first thing to go,” I said.

He smiled, looking up at me with a cutting appreciation. As if I’d touched him in a way I hadn’t even tried. Asked him something real. I’d just been fucking around, but I’d hit a nerve, so I didn’t shrug it off and ask something different or dismiss the question.

“Came a day,” he said, putting the filter to his lips. “Came a day I stopped feeling anything good or bad. He’d beaten that out of me good. I like or don't like things. But everything else?” He flattened his hand and cut the air straight across our eyeline.

“I get it,” I said. “I have the same thing. No beatings though.”

“Everything’s better with a beating.”

I laughed, and he laughed with me. For a guy who had no feelings, I kind of liked him.

“I saw you play the KitKat Lounge the other night,” I said. “And the party after.”

He twisted his body to face me and looked me in the eye. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was pretending to not know who you were.”

“Fair enough.”

“But you don’t have to stay here to be polite. It’s cold.”

He shrugged. The shivering had slowed, and his skin had dried. “My friend’s upstairs with a couple of girls, and I’m not in the mood tonight.”

“I think those girls might be friends of mine.”

He turned back to the ocean, mimicking my posture: knees bent, elbows wrapped around the peaks of his legs, shoulders hunched. “You want to go up there, it’s room 432.”

“I was on the beach to avoid that scene.”

“Why’s that?”

“Wanted to see if you two idiots would get hypothermia.”

He turned to me again, chin at his bicep, hair bending over one dilated blue eye. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“We’re getting a poker game together at midnight. You in?”

I had nowhere to be until morning. And because I didn’t give away my hand with my voice or body, I was very good at poker.

“I’m in.”

1994

The copyright case was pretty simple. Bangers, a UK-based pseudo-pop-rap band, had used a few bars of Haydn in their breakout song. Haydn wasn’t protected under US copyright, obviously, but Martin Wright was, and he claimed Bangers had used his recording of Opus 33 repeatedly in the song.

Bangers countersued for libel, denying the claims and producing proof that they’d hired a string quartet to play the piece. Martin Wright couldn’t prove it was his recording since he claimed they changed the speed so that they wouldn’t sync up.

“By way of introduction, everyone, this is Drew McCaffrey,” Thoze said.

Drew nodded at everyone, and I thought he lingered on me, but maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I lingered on him.

“Mister McCaffrey is here from the New York office, where he represents the interests of… god, how many musicians?”

“All of them, if I could.”

Ellen giggled, sighed, caught herself. She was newly divorced, in her mid-thirties, and suddenly giggling. She was tall and attractive. Well put-together in her daily chignon and Halston suit. Closer to Drew’s age and expertise. I had the sudden desire to lick him so I could call him mine.

Thoze continued. “Martin Wright, the cellist, was LA-based at the time of recording, and he’s trying to bring this through a favorable court system. Thank you for bringing this to us, Mister McCaffrey, but no one has a case.” Thoze closed his folder. “I say we send Mister Wright on his way.”

“They stole it,” Drew interjected.

“You can’t prove it,” Peter Donahugh said, brushing his fingers over his tie to make sure his double-Windsor knot was still where it ought to be. “No one can. The cost to the client would outweigh the award.”

Drew put his pen on the table, taking a second of silence to make his case. I’d known a musician puffy from drugs and alcohol. The guy across from me, taking three seconds to get his thoughts together, had the same blue eyes, but he also had a law degree. He still had guitar string calluses on his fingers and a tattoo that crept out from under his left cuff.

The
Rolling Stone
piece I’d read hadn’t gone past Indy’s devastation over Strat’s death. I never heard about Indiana again. Didn’t know his career choice post-mortem.

God damn. This suited him.

He pressed his beautiful lips together, leaned forward, and turned his head toward Thoze the Doze. I could see the tendons in his neck and the shadow the acute angle of his jaw cast against it.

I remembered how that neck smelled when I pressed my face against it.

“It was the most popular recording of Opus 33 when the song was mixed.” Drew laid his fingertips on the table like a tent. “These guys, Bangers, didn’t have a peanut butter jar to piss in. Moxie Zee charged an arm and a leg to produce, but he’s a lazy snake. He billed the band for hiring a quartet that never existed, and I know him. He isn’t searching out the least-used version of Haydn’s Opus.”

“A case is only as good as what you can prove,” Peter said.

Drew kept his eyes on Thoze when he answered. “He’s produced a bunch of paper. Not one actual cellist.”

“We’re not in the business of proving what isn’t there.” Thoze wove his hands together in front of him. “Absent something that proves malfeasance, we have nothing.”

“What am I supposed to tell Martin? We don't care?”

“Tell him we’re looking for something we can act on.”

Thoze stood. His assistant stood. Peter and Ellen stood. I took the cue and gathered papers. I looked up at Drew to see if he was going to react at all, and he was reacting.

He was looking at me as if I had an answer. I couldn’t move. Ellen tried to linger in the conference room, but in our shared stare and shared history there sat a thousand years, and Ellen didn’t have that kind of time.

She cleared her throat. “Margie, can you grab me a coffee from the lounge on the third floor?”

“There’s coffee right there,” I answered from a few hundred miles away.

“It’s better on three.”

“I’m going for breakfast,” Drew said, not moving. “I’ll grab some coffee. Donuts too.”

“Send the clerk. That’s what they’re for.”

Was Ellen still talking?

“She can come.”

Ellen paused then slinked out.

As soon as the glass door clicked, Drew spoke. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I had no idea you had a brain in your head.”

It really was amazing how his lips were so even, top and bottom. How had I not seen that? Or the way his eyes were darker at the edges than the center?

“Things changed a lot since then.”

I was feeling things, and now with his voice sounding like a cracked sidewalk, I knew he was too. That wouldn’t do. It made me uncomfortable, as if my skin was the wrong size.

“I’m sorry. About Strat. I know you guys were close.”

I’d broken the spell.

Drew pulled his gaze away and put his briefcase on the table, snapping it open when he answered. “Thank you.”