Secrets After Midnight

This is my entry for Midnight at the Lost & Found Author Challenge. It's a bit shorter than my usual story, but that felt right for these characters' stories; keeping a bit of the mystery to myself seemed appropriate.

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Gillan chattered happily as she put her coat and umbrella away, regaling me with the news of her workplace: her favorite paralegal's baby bump, a hush-hush case she shouldn't know about, a rumored assignation between two married partners. I stifled a sigh; this part of the day used to be my favorite. Sure, it was just inane office gossip, but the way she lit up about it always made me smile. Not anymore, though.

My pretty blonde fiancée turned to look at me with a bright smile and a bubbly laugh as she snarked about how obvious the alleged affair was, how she didn't know why she even bothered to call it a rumor. Then she saw my face, and her expression froze. Concern showed there, and love for me. How much of it was real? I'd probably never know.

"Hey, Gil. Come sit with me. I think we need to talk."

I'll give her this: she regained her composure almost immediately. Yeah, this was going to be hard, but her reaction only reinforced my resolve.

"Sure, hon? What's up?"

She sat next to me on the sofa. For a moment, I thought she might try to sit in my lap, but I guess that seemed too obvious an attempt to distract me.

"I know you've been keeping secrets from me."

A little tilt of her head, a brush of her hair behind one ear, a disarming laugh. "Terry, of course I have. I'm a lawyer! I can't talk about every detail of my cases with you."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it." She opened her mouth, but I shot her a glare that told her I didn't want to hear whatever bullshit she was about to spew. "I get that you need to keep secrets for your work. I do, too; hell, I've got my security clearance now, so I'm about to get involved in stuff that goes way beyond corporate NDAs. But that's not what I'm talking about."

She frowned. Practiced? Real? Who knows? "Is this about Janet cheating on Sal? I told you--"

"No, it's not. I mean, I'm not happy about that, either, that you'd keep something like that from me, but I don't know either of them that well, and Janet confessed to Sal. I understand you keeping a lid on that, since she planned to resolve it herself.

"And I don't mind... It's okay if we have little secrets from each other. Harmless ones, ones that can't really hurt each other or our marriage." Gillian brightened at the word. Our wedding approached rapidly, with only another month before we were supposed to say our 'I dos' to each other. "It's fine to keep other peoples' confidences. But this isn't about that."

"Terry, I don't know what you think--"

"I followed you to The Lost and Found a couple weeks back. The night it was supposed to close for good." Her eyes went wide. "I saw you there, hanging out in a bondage club with two fit guys, hanging all over them, for that matter."

"No, babe, that was Adam and Conner. They're gay! You've met them! I didn't do anything with them. With anyone!"

I nodded. "Yeah, I know. But you were supposed to be at a girls night out. You lied to me about where you were going."

"Terry--" She fell silent as I waved my hand to show I wasn't done yet.

"Here was the thing I didn't get at first: why a bondage club? You were dressed semi-appropriately for it, in that hot little latex minidress you're hiding in the box buried in the back of our closet. And you looked fucking amazing, Gil; you know that. But..." I chucked. "I'm not a prude. We've gotten up to that stuff in our bedroom before. So I know you weren't hiding it from me because of that.

"And you're right; you didn't do anything with Adam or Conner. You didn't do anything with anyone. You didn't even seem all that charged up at the club. That kind of surprised me, honestly. Tons of ridiculously hot people, most of them either barely dressed or wearing skintight clothes, almost all of them about one drink from fucking right there in the public area, and you mostly looked... amused. Not bored, but not excited about what was going on around you.

"I slipped out just after you went to the bathroom to change clothes, but I took my car home while you took an Uber. Got there about five minutes after I did, and then..." I shook my head. "You all but attacked me that night, remember? I went with it, because... Well, of course I went with it." She blushed cutely. God, I hated this.

"But then I stayed up all night thinking about the pattern that made me follow you in the first place. You'd go on a girls' night, I either stayed home or went out with the guys, and then when you made it back to our place, we fucked like the nukes were in the air and fifteen minutes out." Her blush went from rosy to fire engine.

"So, I knew you'd been keeping secrets from me, and whatever you were keeping from me got you incredibly fired up, but it wasn't The Lost and Found. Hell, I followed you again the next week, and all you did was go for a late night racquetball game. Not exactly the type of thing I'd expect to make you rip off the condom and beg me to breed you, but that's exactly what happened that night."

"Terry, I can explain."

"You don't need to." I pulled out a slim notebook from behind a cushion and threw it on the coffee table. "I found your journal."

Gillian growled, "How dare you! That is a gross invasion of my privacy! You don't have the right to--"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." She opened her mouth to shout, but I quietly said, "You lost the right to privacy when you lied to me about what you were doing."

"I did not! It's privacy! I had my reasons for not telling you where I was going!"

"Yeah, I know. Because it's your kink. Keeping secrets, I mean."

My fiancée turned her face away. "Don't call it that. It's not... That makes it sound so tawdry. It's not a 'kink,' it's a condition I live with."

"Right. Like I said, I read your journal. All the hand wringing and the fear that I'd find out, all the guilt over lying to me and trying to make the lies as... unobtrusive as possible. It looks like the most dangerous thing you did, in terms of things you wouldn't want to get caught at, was the relatively chaste outing to The Lost and Found."

She nodded silently, tears starting to form in her eyes. Her voice cracked as she said, "I don't want to hurt you. I couldn't- I'd never cheat on you. Never hide anything big. But I've been like this for as long as I can remember." Gillian shifted uncomfortably. "It's how I grew up, and it's turned into something I can't control. But I can... reduce the harm, you know? Little risks, little lies, ones that don't hurt anyone."

"Except us."

Her gaze snapped to mine. "Please, Terry. Please, no. I love you."

"I know you do, Gil. I know. And I love you. I told you that I understand keeping small secrets, harmless ones from each other. I only went looking for your journal because... well, because I needed to know. I needed to know that they were only little secrets. That I'd guess right about why you were keeping secrets in the first place."

The journal had contained a lot of information, but most of it confirmed either inklings I'd had for years or suspicions that I'd only recently started to hold. I knew both of her parents had cheated on each other before any of these new revelations. I knew that she'd gotten caught in the middle, the only person that knew they were cheating on each other, and that both of them begged her to not tell the other.

What does that do to a kid, the grownups in her life acting like that? But I guess I knew: they made a person like Gillian. Driven. Organized. Outwardly a little neurotic and inwardly a lot neurotic. Someone who needed love in her life, because she hadn't really gotten it as a kid. Someone who hated surprises but loved to throw surprise parties, that couldn't stand to be gossiped about but loved to be at the center of the rumor mill.

It made the woman I'd fallen in love with.

"Gil, I get it. I do." I picked up the journal. "I can accept this; I want to get you help, but I can accept this."

She let out a choking laugh, relieved. "Really?" Gilly squirmed on the couch, legs pressing together, breath quickening, a little bit of glassy-eyed joy edging onto her face.

"Really." But then I pulled out the other journal. "But I can't accept this."

This diary hadn't been haphazardly buried in her sock drawer where I was supposed to find it, but instead carefully hidden in a disused air duct in the floor of our vintage brownstone's bedroom floor. Even unscrewing the grate and shining a light in wasn't enough to find it. I had to use a telescoping magnetic pickup tool--the kind you use to get dropped screws out of tight spaces--to reach the pull rope on the tray she hid her journal on. Journals, actually, plural.

When I read through ream after ream of her past, her real past, it broke my heart. The broad strokes she told me and that I read in the fake journal had been true: having to lie for grownups, keeping their secrets with such ferocity that they became her secrets. She knew more of her parents than any child ever should, the way they had "friends" visit the house or office, even if she was too young to understand what that really meant.

She only kept the secrets her parents asked her to, at least at first. But then she began to keep other secrets; bank accounts and PINs, social security numbers of friends, affairs in her neighborhood. She never used the knowledge. At first, it was the having and the getting, not the using, that drove her. But drive her it did.

And, when she became a young woman, it drove her sexual urges as well.

Passage after passage talked about the sexual thrill of having a secret, keeping it from her lover, and then "accidentally" letting it loose into the world. It didn't have to be about him or her. It wasn't really about the secret at all, but about the power that secret conveyed. The power that came from choosing when to keep it hidden, and, more importantly, the power of breaking her silence. Her silence, and sometimes someone else's life.

I read about the rush that came from breaking her frenemy's confidence through a plausibly deniable whispering campaign. By letting the frenemy's boyfriend know about the lack of promised exclusivity in their relationship, Gillain made her frenemy to drop out of school. It also made Gillian cum so hard, over and over, that she lovingly documented the experience of masturbating to the feeling of power over two pages.

When Gillian was a sophomore in college, she edged herself both physically and emotionally by keeping secret the identity of a sexual predator on campus. She could have stopped him at any time. She didn't, though, until she'd had her fill, holding onto the secret, then letting one of the victims' boyfriends anonymously know the assailant's name. Then she had a new secret: the identity of an uncaught murderer that she'd helped create. She never let that one go, occasionally returning to the memories of that hidden knowledge to sustain herself in lean times.

I read through all her journals, seeing the sickening cruelties she had engaged in, the information that she kept hidden or let loose with no rhyme or reason other than what would amuse or sexually excite her. She destroyed peoples' lives--or didn't--purely on a whim. Her endless gossiping made more sense as I delved through the entries; giving away a little secret often yielded up a much bigger one. What I had taken as fun little bits of welcome-home chatter now took on a darker cast.

Most disturbing, though, was how normal most of the entries were. Days and days of lunches or business meetings, visits with friends, time spent with her boyfriend of the moment. Then, something like, 'Today, I let slip that my co-worker's husband was cheating on her while she was within earshot. The sex with Steve that night was fucking fantastic, even if I am getting a little bored with him.'

As I fearfully got closer and closer to the time of our relationship, I found passages that chilled me to the bone. Gillian and I had briefly met at a mixer, one of those pseudo-official meet-and-greets between corporations, NGOs, unspecified agencies, 'interested parties,' and the like. I'll admit, I was smitten by the charming, beautiful young attorney almost immediately.

She decided she wanted to get to know me, but instead of simply asking for my number, she'd systematically used her storehouse of dirty secrets and blackmail material to first gather intel on me, then nudge us closer and closer together. Not for any sane reason; any reasonable man would have been happy to pick up the phone to call her. No, she chose to manipulate the situation purely because that was how her mind operated.

That tidbit of information convinced me: she didn't just have a creepy hobby or a sick fetish. My fiancée had a full-on personality disorder, a mania that could get us both killed.

When she saw the second journal, Gillian's grateful façade fell away almost instantly. The relief, the tears, the faux anger and shame and sadness were all suddenly replaced by a jealous and terrifying rage. She screamed, "That's mine! Give it to me!" as she lunged across my lap to grab it. I gave it up easily enough; it had served its purpose.

Gilly clutched the true journal to her chest, hyperventilating and rocking back and forth as she tried to speak. "Mine. They're my secrets. I get to decide who knows my secrets, no one else. It's no one else's business but mine." Then she snarled, "You can't! You can't know! I'm too smart! Coded. They're coded. Whatever you think you know--"

I tried to sound comforting as I spoke; old habits die hard. "Gilly, you know what I do for a living. Your code took me about fifteen minutes to crack without even using a computer. And then, once I was in... Do you know what would have happened if anyone else had found that? Anyone besides me? You had schematics in there, love. From my work. Equations and algorithms, too. Gilly..." I reached out to touch her arm, but she flinched away like a feral animal. "The Agency would have killed you if they knew you had that."

"No! They were safe with me! Secrets are always safest with me!"

"... Until you decide they're not, hon. Until you decide you need to feel that rush, the one you wrote about. Or is that not your real journal, either? Is there another one, hidden somewhere else?"

Her eyes flashed as the wheels behind them turned. "Yes! That's it. And you'll never find it. This was a fake, too. I'm smart. I'm a smart girl. I know it. Daddy always said so. Mommy, too. 'Smartest girl in the world,' they said. Their secrets are safe with me. Everyone's secrets are, unless they don't need to be anymore."

Something resembling the girl I knew came back then, trying to claw its way free of the madness. Or maybe just trying to mask it again. "You are, too. You're so smart, Terry. So good at puzzles and ciphers and secrets. I know... I know we can keep secrets together. Keep all of them, together. Please, I know that you're frightened of being found out, but--"

A knock at the door made her sit upright. I kept up the comforting front as I stood. "It's okay, Gilly. It's okay. You're going to be okay. We both are." Tears started to fall from her bright blue eyes as I let my handler and some of his associates in. "We're going to take care of you. You'll be right as rain, and then we can be together again, once you're healthy."

"Please, Terry, please don't let them take me away. I can be good. I can! I promise, I--"

I knelt down and took her hand. "Gilly. You and I both know that's not true. I know you love me. I know you do, honey." She tried to speak, but I kept talking. "You're so smart, baby. You are. And you know I'm smart, too. You're right about that.

"Too smart to not notice how flimsy your 'girls night out' excuses were. Too smart to believe in a fake journal hidden in an obvious place. Tell the truth, baby. Please Gillian, please tell the truth. For both of us."

Her mouth opened and closed, still unable to admit to her madness, even in the direst of circumstances.

"The trips to the Lost and Found were a clue, weren't they? The journal was another, wasn't it, Gilly? Not a distraction. Not a way to throw me off the scent, but to put me onto it. You needed me to find out. To protect me, right?"

She nodded over and over, sobbing, "I love you! I love you, Terry! I'm sorry, I want to be with you, but I- I-"

I hugged her as the gentlemen with unremarkable faces and dressed in boring suits helped her to her feet. "I love you, too, pretty eyes. These men, they'll take you someplace safe. Get you healthy, and then we can be together again. I'll wait for you, okay?"

Gillian nodded once more. She knew I was lying to her, but I did everything I could to sell the lie. It was all I could do for her, to give her one last secret to hold onto as the agents led her from the apartment to a place she'd likely never see the outside of again. She knew I lied, and she could tell herself that only she was smart enough to see it. This was the only love I had left for her. I gave this lie for her to keep secret, just as she'd finally given me the truth. In her own way, at least.

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I hope you enjoyed it! I know I've been a bit quiet, but my real life has been an absolute shitshow for the past two months, so I've been taking a bit of an enforced break. Don't worry, though; there are at least two more stories coming this month, and a story and an essay minimum next month. Then? Well, we'll have to see.

In semi-related news, I've been nominated for Literotica's Most Influential Writer award for this year, which... honestly, you could have knocked me down with a feather! I've been told by oh-so-many people that it's a popularity contest, but that's fine! I like being popular, so I'd appreciate if you'd go vote for me. If you want to tell me to go hang, well, Harddaysknight is up for it, too. 🙂