The Filthy Series: The Complete Dark Erotic Serial Novel by Megan D. Martin Page B

mourning her. The people who would never know the things I had done in the bathroom just up the stairs.
    I’d cleaned myself up to some sort of semblance of decency, though I didn’t really succeed. I knew I looked like hell. I was in hell, so there was no avoiding it. The conversations that took place after that all blurred together. Maybe it was the coke, the sweet drug that carried me through the rest of the afternoon making everything surreal. It seemed impossible everyone didn’t know. That the house didn’t crumple from the weight of my sins, from the filth that clung to my skin.
    “You okay?”
    I glanced over at Rhett. He sat in the driver’s seat next to me. Sarah had gone home early, catching a ride with someone else, leaving me to ride home with Rhett alone.
    “Yeah, right.”
    He nodded. “Yeah…rough day.” The fire and hate that had been in his eyes earlier were gone.
    I snorted. “You’re telling me.”
    We were both quiet for several minutes. I let the silence permeate my skin. I soaked it in, letting the soft rumble of the car and the hum of the radio dance around in my mind. But then the song changed to that song. The one my mom had been singing the last time I saw her. The last time I stared at her in her pink workout clothes, mixing a smoothie in her kitchen. “Lights” by Journey.
    I reached over and turned it up. The smooth melody washed over me. When Steve Perry started singing I turned it up louder and started singing along, letting the words fill me up. The words she loved. It had been her favorite song and I could remember being strapped in my car seat as a kid, with the song blaring from the speakers and her and I singing along at the top of our lungs.
    I glanced over at Rhett and the perplexed look on his face as he stared back.
    “She loved this song,” I said loudly.
    Something flickered across his face before he turned back to the road. A sad smile, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen him smile in such a long time I couldn’t be certain he was capable.
    But then he started singing too. His voice carrying right along with Steve Perry’s. I rolled my window down and cranked the radio up as loud as it could go and started belting the lyrics to the world, shouting them to the sky, to the heavens if my mom had found some way to get in there. It didn’t sound pretty. But I didn’t care, and I knew she wouldn’t care either. My mom had never been able to carry a note. Neither of us had. But we would sing this song and not give a care in the world. It was moments like that. Those little moments that made my whole shitty life as her daughter worth it. They made me remember that she was just a flawed human being, a selfish person who didn’t know how to love anyone but herself. But it didn’t change the fact that she was my mom. Like the demon inside myself I couldn’t change it, no matter how much I wanted to.
    When the song ended, I looked over at Rhett again. His window was down too, and I had the distinct feeling that he too, had been belting the lyrics to heaven and hell alike.
    He reached down and turned the radio off. “Tell me the story about the song.”
    I considered telling him no, but then I realized I wanted to tell him. I needed to tell someone. “She loved it. Ever since I was a kid. She would turn it up and we would sing it like it was our last time.”
    A smile crooked his lips. A real one, one so handsome it nearly made me forget how angry I was at him.
    “She had it on a cassette tape and would rewind it over and over so we could listen to it.” Tears pricked at my eyelids. “And you know how finicky those tapes were. You had to rewind it just right to get it right at the beginning of the song.”
    He nodded. “Or you’d have to listen to half a song you didn’t want to because you didn’t want to deal with fast-forwarding it again.”
    A laugh escaped my lips the same time a tear dripped onto my cheek. “When we lived at home and it was just me and