Free Find Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book Two) by Rachel Dunning

trying to score
any points with you here. I’m telling it like it is. Because burning-bottles-catapulted-through-windows doesn’t happen because you were
Santa’s helper and forgot to give him his milk and cookies on
Christmas Eve.
    But let’s not blame my chauvinism only. I
mentioned already that Gina Moretti was well ahead of her years
physically. And I mentioned that she was (I thought at the time)
perhaps a little unready emotionally.
    Did I mention where she was at intellectually ?
She was a straight A honors student, two years running.
    I barely made Ds in most of my classes.
-10 -
    “ The way I see it, she took the A because
she wanted to take it,” Blaze says now.
    “Ultimately, yes. I guess.”
    Blaze looks away, thoughts clearly raging away in her mind.
“Fine, I won’t pretend to understand until you finish. Carry
on.”
    “We ‘dated’ for about three months. And by
that, I mean, well...had, uhm, sex...mostly.”
    “ I’m not naïve. I figured that already. You
don’t need to be all worried about it when you tell me.” Blaze
grits her teeth.
    I can’t even begin to imagine what she must be going through
listening to me tell her this story.
-11 -
    In all honesty, we fucked like rabbits. It
was then that I noted I might’ve made a slight mis-adjudication as
to Gina’s plans with me that night we first slept together
at The
L . Because she knew damn
well what she was doing when we fucked.
    Now, get this, I even asked her if she’d been
a virgin before. And you know what she said? “Oh, Deck, of course.
You were the first!”
    Now, I’d never taken a girl’s virginity. I’d slept with
experienced girls and inexperienced girls, but never a girl for the
first time.
    The way the sex ran later in the
bedroom—blowjobs with tremendous amounts of bobbing the head and
slurping sounds—either Gina Moretti watched a lot of porn, or she
had one hell of a closet sex life.
    We did it— (“OK, Deck, I think I get it
now. Next,” Blaze says.)
    Gina started wearing darker clothes—not the down-in-the-dumps
Gothic look. More like the Kate Beckinsale in Underworld look—confident, bad. Sexy.
    She got popular at school. She was the
teacher’s pet because of her grades, and the High School queen
because of her attitude. And now also because of her
boyfriend.
    There is one thing you must believe in all this, because it’s key. In all this
time, I had a few thoughts in my mind constantly: Mom. Drugs. A
close third was football.
    I really didn’t notice the changes in
Gina. I noticed very little about her actually. When we went out,
we dropped. Simple as that. I didn’t notice that she started
dropping more often. I didn’t notice that two Es became four,
six, ten !
    I didn’t notice the speed. The lines of Big
C.
    But I did notice the A. Who couldn’t?
    She dropped it without telling me. She’d told
me many times she’d wanted to try it, mostly during soaring moments
of sextasy. I knew little about A. All I knew is it wasn’t
something I was ever gonna do. It’s not a drug to escape with.
    I needed my escapes.
    I told her this. I told her we could have
a good time with E, with speed. With good ol’ Columbian Herb. I
told her that hallucinogenics weren’t my thing. I never done
shrooms and I ain’t never gonna do A. I told her that sex on A
would be weird.
    “ I don’t want it for the sex!” she said. “I
want it for the experience!”
    By now, she was sourcing her own goods. She
didn’t need me for that anymore.
    She took a dot. A fucking dot for her
first trip! They only took dots on their first trips in the
seventies! And they were fucking lunatics back then!
    S he never came down from it.
    She dropped it at ten P.M., was peaking by three. Paranoid by
four (saying things like “You’re a devil, aren’t you, Deck? In his
body and here to take me to into the sewers with you, right?”) I
called Trev at six A.M. to try and help me calm her
down.
    By seven, she was screaming. We