BLIND: A Mastermind Novel Read Online Free Page A

drunken musings she sighed, slightly unburdened by her journalistic exorcism, and quite liquored up and loose.
    She tweaked the document for no good reason. The wine had made her brain fuzzy and she had to actually pause and consider the grammar in some cases. It wasn’t like anyone was ever going to read it, but still, she held herself to a certain standard, being a teacher. Plus, this was good shit.
    “You and your standards, ” she mumbled, hiccupping as she made her way back from the kitchen with another bottle of wine and two aspirin for the morning.
    As her eyes became heavy, she flopped back on her pillows and rested. Her laptop slid onto the mattress and she sighed. Journaling was good. It was a therapeutic exercise, a reminder that she was vindicated in holding out for what she wanted. It didn’t solve anything, but clarity was there somewhere beneath the haze of Merlot.
    She toyed with the idea of letting Nicole read it, but quickly shelved the thought. There was no reason to justify her choices to the married population who would never understand what it felt like to fill her shoes at this age. Beside, this wasn’t justification. It was more a matter of clarification.
    As a matter of fact, it was time someone stood up for all the single ladies out there, dredging their way through the swamp of unrefined bachelors that would never grow up. It was time someone spoke up for the thirty and single as a whole!
    Motivated by her one-woman rally, she lurched from her pillows, waited for the room to steady, and retrieved her laptop. There was a columnist by the name of Roxy who wrote for the opinion section of the local paper on all things involving romance. It was a cheesy column, but that was exactly where epiphanies like this belonged. Cheesy or not, she was about to gift Roxy with sheer brilliance from the mind of a fed up single woman.
    In a matter of minutes she was on the paper’s contact page, clicking on Roxy’s email. Scarlet copied and pasted her kick ass letter. There was a window requesting a name. After pausing for only a second, it came to her, the nickname she’d had as a teenager, Lettie Red Riding Hood. She shortened it to read L.R. Riding Hood .
    “Bring on the big bad wolf, bitches. ” Her finger snapped down on the send option and she grinned with satisfaction just before she fell back and passed out.
     
    ****
     
    The weekend concluded with a hangover no good person deserved. Scarlet needed to call Nicole to make sure everything was okay with them, but she couldn’t bring herself to take the first step. Her friend’s words still hurt.
    The truth hurts, Scarlet.
    The morning after their disagreement, Scarlet berated herself for drinking too much wine and accepted her penance in the form of a killer headache and blank spots in her memory. In hopes of finding temporary comfort, she wasted a good hour Googling sex toys. That market must be a goldmine, as even the little toys cost close to fifty bucks. And what the hell was a vagankle ? To think, her friend thought her expectations were weird. There were people out there fucking synthetic feet. Gross!
    After her disturbing browse through pornographic props, she opted not to buy, and took a break from all thoughts sex and dating related. Saturday passed with long moments of cuddling Thor while watching a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon and nursing her aching head. Sunday, utterly fed up with her pity parade, she cleaned—not that anyone was coming over.
    When she came across her laptop, she deleted her search history and found her journal entry. Embarrassment over her private little rant left her mortified. It was pure drunken nonsense, a pathetic proclamation of desperation. She deleted it immediately. Good God, what had she been thinking? What if a bus hit and killed her, and friends had to gather her possessions, and stumbled across that drivel? She shivered at the thought.
    After showering, she tucked herself into bed by eight-thirty and