Sloth (Sinful Secrets 1)

She writes me back.

I didn’t expect that.

She tells me she’s a lover of chicken pizza and video games, a hot sorority girl with the nickname Sloth. She wants to know something about me in return. She says I owe her.

This is how she saves my life. She doesn’t even know it. We’ve never even seen each other. But I need a reason. Just one reason to continue. She becomes mine.

The anonymity is good. She doesn’t need to know me, but I need her kindness. We both live our lives: a letter here, a post card there. For three years, I escape my demons. And then one day I’m pulled back in.

I’ve resigned myself to what I know is coming. Until the girl I’m spanking gives her safe word: Sloth.

And then the lie I’m living starts to unravel.

Sloth is an erotic romance. It’s a dark mystery, so if you’re sad, read another book. This one is real, and hard. Not that kind of hard. (That kind of hard, too). Consider yourself warned.

P.S. The book ends on a beach. That’s all I’m saying. As for an HEA, you’ll have to read and see.

To Jamie Davis—

For Much Slothing

I MIGHT AS WELL BE a vampire. That’s how much time I’ve been spending in my closet lately. Being a college girl, constantly surrounded by dumb college guys, I can already hear all of the dumb-college-guy-caliber comments, so let me say, for the record: I’m not gay (I still fly the flag), and I’m also not rubbing one out.

I’m in here writing letters I then shred, and packaging one of the Seven Wonders of the World into Mason Jars. Also, obsessively Googling the name “Robert,” paired with a few key phrases.

Weird, I know. But weird is not a bad thing.

The letters are personal. Private. I don’t write them very eloquently, but that’s okay, because no one is ever going to read them. I can’t seem to make myself mail any of them. It’s a good thing, I guess. A practical thing. But every time I listen to the grinding sound my shredder makes, I find myself rubbing my chest, because it hurts a little.

The name “Robert”—well, that’s personal, too.

As for the wonder, and the Mason jars... it’s business, baby. My business.

Yeah. I have my own business. I’m proud of that. I never have to ask Mom or Grans for money. I never have to want for anything material. Sometimes I buy things I know my sister Mary Claire wants, pull off the tags, and mail them home, posing them as “second-hand.” One day soon, I hope to set up a Chattahoochee College grant for a hearing impaired student from my hometown. Yeah, you guessed it: Mary Claire.

I do business on the black market, but I keep it as classy as possible. When I deliver orders, I have everything all cute and tidy: product inside a baggie, tied at the top with a little strip of ribbon (sometimes I even do different sorority colors), then the baggie tucked into a Mason jar with an adorable colored lid. (Sometimes, I make the lid match the ribbon—if that’s possible, given my limited selection of colored Mason jar lids).

Like most things I do these days, I make dealing drugs look effortless. And it is—mostly.

For the record, it’s not really “drugs.” It’s weed, which is legal in some states and will probably be legal everywhere in another decade. That makes me a trailblazer.

Getting my cute Mason jars organized and ready to blaze is no easy task. For starters, my bedroom is the size of a square of Chiclet chewing gum, and located in a sorority house, which is officially drug free. Even worse, it’s wedged between the bedrooms of Milasy and Stephanie—my sorority’s president and vice president, neither of whom, you might have guessed, is showing up for any pro-marijuana rallies.

So yeah. I have to be covert. And that means packaging in my closet. It’s not a big closet. It’s where my desk is, and also where I keep my LELO. The walls are bright pink, courtesy of the last Tri Gam treasurer.

Right now, I’ve got less than thirty minutes until our Wednesday night chapter meeting, and here I am: slaving away over my precious buds. Picking out stems and seeds that Kennard told me wouldn’t be there this time. Freaking Kennard. Medical grade my tight, tanned ass. This shit is barely even mid-grade. Bitches like Holly and Neda will probably try to get a discount. I can’t do discounts. Not this week or any week.

I look down at myself: at my Seven jeans, my Gucci boots, my pink Kors sweater. These things don’t buy themselves. I need money to survive here, in this lifestyle. Without my dealing, I’ve got nothing but a scholarship and a room down at the mold-infested swamp dorms. I might have good grades, and I might go to a lot of trouble to keep myself in good physical condition, but you think the campus’ most exclusive sorority would let me in if I wasn’t forking over giant quantities of the green stuff? (Not that green stuff. I’m talking about Benjamins). Not a chance in hell.

People here think I’m a rich girl. A rich, delinquent girl who likes pushing boundaries and breaking rules. It’s so not true. I was the girl found crying in the first grade bathroom because I wasn’t coordinated enough to put one foot right in front of

the other as the students in my class filed, in a line, from our class room to the lunch room.

My mother is a seamstress, and my dad died when his eighteen-wheeler rolled over, hauling logs from Dawson up to Memphis. Mary Claire gets free lunch at school. I did, too. And it was fine—for high school. I made up for being poor as dirt by being reasonably well-put-together and doing really well in gymnastics and concert band. Oh, and dating Brandt Kessler, a doctor’s son. But college is different. Poor girls don’t rush, and on my campus, girls who don’t rush have a hard time getting noticed. After a lifetime on the outside, window-shopping, I want to be an insider here at Chattahoochee College. So when I graduate, I can start a life that doesn’t include a sewing table.

I place the last of my Mason jars in a little row on the edge of my desk and mentally tick off my regulars. My sorority regulars, that is.

Holly buys half an eighth a week, and so do Megan, Kelsey, Lora, Chole, Amber, Ricci, Katy Peterson, Hannah, Solena, and Lindsey. They all get charged $65 instead of my regular $70. Greek discount. Neda only buys a three-fourths of a gram, because she says when she smokes at the same time she’s Vyvancing, she gets a rash. I charge her $50, because geez, I’ve gotta make some money off her. And then I’ve got a bunch of quarter-ounce customers. I walk my fingers over these jars: Julie, Sarah, Molly, other Molly, Forrest, Anna Maria, Christy, Elizabeth, Joanna, and Jordan. These chicks are where I make some real money. I make them cough up $145 a jar for a quarter of an ounce. More, when the weed is really good.

This week, it’s pretty much my norm: some barely mid-grade diesels, purchased from Kennard, my old across-the-street neighbor down in Albany. Chattahoochee College sits right on the Alabama-Georgia line—about one hundred miles southwest of Atlanta, and one hundred miles northwest of my hometown of Albany, Georgia. Every Sunday afternoon, I drive an hour and a half home in my ancient, white Mazda Miata, and drive back up with several grocery bags full of my Grans’ cookies and brownies, plus a pound of bud concealed in patterned Tupperware.

I peek into the portable cake carrier on my closet floor and cringe.

Just like last week, I’m running through my stash too fast. I take the Ziploc freezer bag out of the cake carrier and sit it on the scales that stand on the carpet, in the nook under my desk. These are adjusted for the weight of the bag, and...

Shit. After I get rid of all my Mason jars tonight, and if I sell about a fourth a pound tomorrow at the bars, I’ll be running really low. And I still have to make it through the Friday frat parties, and there’s a home game this weekend, which means I could make a mint at Saturday tailgates. But I’ll almost definitely be out by the Saturday night post-game frat bashes.

It happened last week, and I used up all my emergency, just-incase-Kennard-dies-suddenly stash.

I guess I should be glad. I’m growing my client base. Instead, I feel anxious.

I pick up my phone and scroll to “K.C.,” but I don’t dial. K.C. is this sketchy guy I met at a bar last year. When I get really low, can I buy a few ounces from him, but I don’t like to. He’s not like... cop sketchy. He’s more the looks-only-at-my-boobs kind of sketchy. Let’s just say I don’t want to be alone with him in a broken elevator.

I rub my lipsticked lips together and decide I won’t call K.C. unless I get a surprise order tonight. At this point, almost all the girls in my sorority and our BFF sororities know I deal, and so do some of their boyfriends, so I’ve got about a dozen frat clients. I also deal to some people from my classes. Add that to a handful of townie adults, plus my yoga instructor and a few guys at the ten-minute oil change place downtown... and I’ve got a pretty big client list. For a one-girl operation.

I look once more at the digital clock on my desk, then grab my Kate Spade overnight bag—the one that looks like a big, straw purse—and dump its contents—a tube of toothpaste and some PJ pants—onto the floor. I grab the PJ pants and put them back in, because I just remembered these dumb jars always clank together. I add a sleeveless shirt and some running shorts to the bag, to keep the Mason jars from bumping each other as I move. Then I hustle out of my room, into the shared living area of the “officers’ suite.” It’s empty except for our leather couch and chair, the fluffy rug, the round coffee table. Because everyone else is already downstairs at chapter.

Oops.