Page 2 of Dirty Little Secret
She didn’t deserve to know any more than that. Not after what she and my father had done to me.
Their evil deed had left a hole in my heart. A hole that I knew could never be repaired.
Going out the front door, I took a seat on the top stair outside our apartment. The wind still blew a thousand miles an hour, making my hair fly all around me. The cold air chilled me to my bones, as I’d come out once again without so much as a sweater on to keep me warm. Only an old sweatshirt and a pair of jeans covered my body. It wasn’t enough to keep the cold out.
Fiddling with a hole in the knee of my jeans, I made it even bigger. The image of a baby made a brief appearance in my brain before I successfully pushed it aside.
No, I didn’t ever let things like that take up any space in my head. But when I fell asleep, those thoughts and images would sneak in, taking my dreams and turning them into nightmares.
Two days had already passed with little sleep. Waking up with tears on my pillow, I would get up and do anything I could to make myself stop thinking. Thinking only made it hurt worse.
Ten years have passed. Why does it still bother me so much?
Looking down at my left arm, I still couldn’t believe that I’d gotten so drunk three nights earlier that I’d gone and gotten a tattoo on the inside of my wrist.
Why did I do this to myself?
Why would I purposely do anything that would be a constant reminder of the one thing I tried desperately to forget about? Why would I put that on my body?
For the rest of my life, I’d look down and see “05/03/2008” written in baby blue ink multiple times a day. Why would I do such a hurtful thing to myself?
Only God knew why I would do such a thing, no matter what amount of alcohol I’d consumed. Or the devil. I wasn’t sure which had the strongest hold on me.
At times, it sure felt like the devil was the one who’d laid out the path my life would take.
Is there a way to change my path, or is it too late? Can there be a way out of this emptiness?
If there was, I knew now that I wouldn’t find the answer in Chicago. Of that much, I was sure.
I’d been dragged there against my will when I was just sixteen years old. When I left my parents’ home on the day I turned eighteen, I could’ve gone anywhere. I had ten thousand dollars that I’d inherited from my grandmother. She’d died when I was twelve, and the money had been left in a bank account in Charleston, South Carolina, where we’d lived most of my life.
When I turned eighteen, I gained access to that money and hauled ass out of the house I’d essentially been held captive in for two long-as-hell years. Without any other plan, into the big city of Chicago I went.
The bank card from the Charleston bank had come in the mail a few days before my birthday. It had my name on it. The accompanying letter said that it would be activated on the date of my birth and would be ready to use that very day.
I used it to buy myself a birthday present—a cab ride into town and then a week in a cheap motel. I found a job that very night at Underground.
My first roommate was a girl named Sasha who’d been working at the club for a few years. At twenty-five years old, the older woman took me under her wing, teaching me everything I needed to know in order to bring in big tips by being flirtatious and sexy.
A couple of years later she met some guy and moved out to live with him. She also quit working at the nightclub. That’s when I met a new friend. Taylor had come to work at the club when she was just eighteen, too. I was a little older by then and took her under my wing, letting her stay in Sasha’s old room.
Taylor didn’t need much coaching. She seemed to be a natural at flirting. And it didn’t hurt that she had absolutely no problem sleeping with any guy who wanted her.
I had issues with sex. My past made me it very hard for me to have any kind of eagerness for the act. It was sex that had gotten me into trouble in the first place.
As sexy as I dressed and as flirty as I was, it was all a performance. An important one, that helped me keep a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and a car under my ass to keep me going to and fro on my own.
Following the same routine for nearly a decade can grow tiresome. And boy, did I feel tired. Tired of looking at the same old buildings. Tired of driving down the same old streets. Tired of living with a bunch of overgrown adolescents.
The back pocket of my jeans vibrated, so I pulled out my cell phone. A smile broke the no-doubt forlorn expression my face must have settled into. As if by magic, Taylor’s name appeared on the screen.
She’d left a year ago, sparking my need to get a new roommate. I didn’t recall exactly why I kept letting people move in, but I had. I hadn’t heard from her in a good while.
“Hey, you,” I answered the call.
“Hey yourself, girlie. What’re you up to these days?” she asked me.
Shoving my hand through my hair, then holding onto it so the wind couldn’t blow it around, I sighed heavily. I didn’t know what to say. I had been up to the same old dreary thing. But to say that out loud seemed just too pathetic. “Not much. You?”
