GLASS: A Standalone Novel

by Arianne Richmonde

  What he said unnerved me, but I licked my lips, which he took as a cue to condom-up. He rolled the thing on and I wished we didn’t have to use it. It spoiled the aesthetic nature of the scene—no wonder you never saw them in the movies. Still, I had to be careful, just in case his blonde bimbo denial was a bald-faced lie.

  He went down on his knees again and yanked me toward him, edging open my thighs so I was splayed out wide. He prized them even further apart. Lying on top of me, he rested the crest of his massive dick at my entrance, tickling me teasingly, gently prodding me but not entering.

  “Please, Daniel.”

  “Please what?”

  “I need you inside me.”

  “How much? How much do you need me, Janie?”

  I moaned and writhed about, bucking my pelvis as close as I could get so his cock pulsed inside me a touch. But he drew back, his willpower strong. He wasn’t about to enter me in a hurry. “Tell me you need me.”

  I didn’t say a word, just grabbed his ass and thrashed my hips up at him. He was on an ego trip. Wanted to hear how desperate I was for him, and I didn’t want to admit it, although once he started rubbing his thick erection against my clit, massaging his huge cock up and down, I was squirming for more.

  “Please fuck me, Daniel. Pleeease.”

  He kept up his torture until I was on the edge, desperate to come. He kissed me—a deep, long kiss that spoke of sex and lust, and dare I say it? . . . love. And then the actual words that I’d been fantasizing about for years spilled from his lips right into my mouth:

  “I love you, Janie. I do.”

  Why couldn’t I believe him? I wanted to . . . but feared what he said was in the heat of the moment, a moment which I needed to accept for what it was . . . hot sex.

  “Tell me you love me,” he goaded. His ego-trip again. What he’d told me about not being ready for a relationship flashed through my brain. But I craved this; to be able to disassociate the sex from my psychological need for him.

  I shook my head in the negative—I knew getting love and sex mixed into one lethal cocktail was a big mistake. “Just fuck me,” I answered, my tone unintentionally cold.

  “You really want to fuck, Janie, is that it?” Then his raspy voice softened and he added, “You want to fuck or you want me to make love to you?”

  “I want you to fuck me really hard,” I whispered into his mouth, this beautiful mouth that was on me now—lips on mine, tongue inside me, eating me alive.

  He plunged himself inside me on the word “fuck” and started pounding hard, filling me up with his size, groaning with each stroke. This was hot.

  I hooked my legs around his thighs and my arms around his torso to give myself leverage. He was fucking me like I was a whore, grinding into me ruthlessly, groaning about how hot and tight and wet I was. I suddenly couldn’t handle it. Not one bit. I wanted to be his plaything but there was no way I could go along with it.

  “Please stop!” I cried. Tears were streaming down my face.

  He did. Immediately. Then he pulled out, which was even worse. I felt bereft and lonely and started sobbing hopelessly. But he gathered me into a hug, so close against his chest I felt the steady rhythm of his heart.

  “So stubborn, Janie. So, so stubborn, it’s a joke!” He kissed the tip of my nose and my forehead, and squeezed my sobbing little body tight, cocooning me inside his muscular arms. “We don’t have to play this silly game, you know,” he said, “we can talk all this through.”

  I cried a good deal more, feeling like a fool to think I could handle Daniel Glass and his huge great cock without getting emotionally involved. Of course I couldn’t just fuck him. Impossible. I wanted his soul. Which was also impossible. I was screwed up in the head. And way too needy. The situation was useless.

  “I love you, Janie,” he said unexpectedly.

  I looked up at him in disbelief. He was trying to make me feel better, which was sweet of him, but “love” was a strong word and one I was sure he wasn’t truly ready for.

  “You’re convinced I’m still in love with Natasha Jürgen, aren’t you?” Weird . . . to call his wife by her full name.

  “It’s normal,” I said. “It’s only been—”

  He cut me short, “We were going to get divorced, you know.” He carefully wiped away my tears with his thumb.

  I looked at him, bleary eyed. “But you were crazy about each other.”

  “That’s what the papers say, but in reality? Our marriage was a sham.”

  “What?”

  “She betrayed me, Janie. She had a lover.” He punched out the word lover.

  Impossible! Who, in their right mind, would chose another man over Daniel! No, no! He had it wrong; his own paranoia—jealousy perhaps—for being married to such a blonde bombshell.

  “I doubt it,” I said, a wry, knowing smile playing on my lips. Impossible.

  “Janie, I’m not making this up, it’s a fact.”

  I breathed in his scent: sex, soap, a musky Daniel Glass smell that was unique to him. “Who? Why? Why did she have a lover when she had you?”

  “I couldn’t offer her what she needed—or wanted.”

  “But the baby!” I gasped, “Natasha was pregnant.”

  His eyes flashed sharp—a flinty, gleaming pain. “How do you know about that?”

  I was about to say ‘Wikipedia’ but realized how stalkerish that sounded. “Rumor, I guess.”

  “Well rumor was right. She was pregnant with another man’s baby.”

  “I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t sorry, I was secretly gleeful. Maybe now I could lay to rest the ghost of the perfect, stainless, impeccable Natasha Jürgen. I still couldn’t believe he had his facts right, though. “How do you know it wasn’t yours?”

  “They did a paternity test, a DNA test on the dead fetus, at my request.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, meaning it this time. The word ‘dead’ hit it home to me. A poor innocent baby: dead.

  We lay there together, our pants around our respective ankles after our disastrous coupling, listening to each other’s heartbeats and finding solace in a new-found friendship based on trust. I wasn’t the only one who had a heart made of glass. The idea that Daniel could be damaged, vulnerable, and wounded by someone, had not ever occurred to me. That’s why he wanted to know if I was in love with him. Not to feed his ego, but to ensure himself that my feelings were genuine. I saw him in a whole new light.

  He continued to open himself up to me, revealing his past, his hurt and grief—never for a moment feeling sorry for himself, though, but more like clarifying why he hadn’t felt ready for another relationship. Natasha dying had made things even more complicated, he explained. Emotions bubbled over, he said: guilt, anger, sadness, a sense of failure. He told me how Natasha had wanted a glamorous lifestyle and he’d deduced—after she took up with a billionaire, Argentinean polo-player—how she must have married Daniel primarily for his money, but then felt let down when he didn’t provide the swanky lifestyle to go with it.

  “Not my style,” he said.

  And I, being so in love with him, found this inconceivable, but I also found it inconceivable that men had cheated on Marilyn Monroe. The human heart is hard to fathom; people’s behavior can be bizarre.

  Everything made sense to me now. The reason for Daniel pulling back, diving into the pool, that time, to cool himself down after our kiss. He wanted me, but didn’t trust himself not to hurt me. The film had acted as a catalyst to pull us together, something he hadn’t been entirely ready for. He had been left a broken man. Maybe too broken to fix. I didn’t want to be his rebound.

  “Do you still feel angry with Natasha?” I asked. Wounds like these left scars.

  “It is what it is,” Daniel said, not giving anything away. He got up and put his clothes back on. I watched his every movement, gauging his mood, second-guessing his thoughts.

  My doubts crept back, nestling in my gut like an incurable virus. I pulled up my panties and then m
y jeans. I felt less vulnerable dressed. “Were you crazy about her?” I asked warily, not wanting to hear the answer, yet not being able to tear myself away from this insidiously fascinating subject: Natasha Jürgen.

  “I guess I was dazzled by her, but the truth is we were incompatible from the word go.”

  “Is that why she went looking elsewhere?”

  “No. Her relationship with Ricardo had started before we were even married.”

  I felt a stab to my chest on Daniel’s behalf. “What? That’s insane! What was she thinking?” Heat rushed to my ears. Fury at her cruelty.

  “She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Ricardo was married—you know what those Latin American Catholics can be like—and his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. Natasha was his lover and he took her all over the world—private jets, super yachts, helicopters, Gstaad and Mustique in winter, Patagonia in summer. His wife momentarily grabbed his attention back by getting pregnant. That’s when Natasha married me. She swore it was over between them, but it wasn’t. Her goal was to win him back, give him a son so she could recapture his heart, once and for all.”

  “She sounds like a real number,” I said, “using you that way. And the baby? Could they tell what it was? Was she going to have a boy?”

  “It was a girl, apparently. Lost her poor little life at the same time as Natasha—no oxygen to the brain, nothing could be done to save either of them.”

  The way he said it sounded as if he missed Natasha horribly. “Did you love her?” I asked outright. Again, the seed of jealously replanting itself. Ready to sprout.

  “I loved the person I thought I knew. But it’s hard being in love with a lie.”

  My heart beat fast as I prepared my next question. I had to know. “So where does that leave us?”

  He pulled me into a tighter embrace. “It leaves us free from lies,” he told me. “Free to really get to know each other, to learn to trust one another, and to work together professionally without fear. Do you trust me, Janie?”

  My pulse pounded, more blood rushing to my head. Total trust? That was a tall order. I decided to be honest. “I’ve spent all this time being so in love with you, Daniel, and terrified about you hurting me, so trust is something you’ll have to earn from me. Does that make sense?”

  He cocked a small, resigned smile. “It makes perfect sense.”

  “Could you be faithful to me?” I quizzed, my eyes searching for the truth in his answer.

  “I’d never do to you what Natasha did to me, so yes, I can be faithful. I’m not the cheating kind, anyway.”

  “You swear, then, that it’s just gossip about you screwing all those Natasha Jürgen lookalikes?”

  He roared with laughter, the skin at the edge of his blue eyes creasing with mirth. “Natasha Jürgen lookalikes? I can assure you the real thing was bad enough, I won’t be seeking more of the same. Who started that crazy rumor?”

  I didn’t want to put Star and Jake in the middle of it, so I didn’t let on. I thought of Cindy Spektor, whom I had also silently accused. “That’s what people say, that all the women were blond, busty, Natasha Jürgen lookalikes.”

  He was still smiling. “Just for the record, she wasn’t that busty in reality. She had a lot of help in the wardrobe department.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Janie, and, no, I’m not into huge breasts. I happen to love yours just the way they are, so don’t get it into your head to go all Hollywood on me and change yourself.”

  Although his compliment bolstered me up, my head was still immersed in Natasha like a submarine submerged in water, refusing to come up for air. “She may have been far more beautiful than me, but I can top her in the loyalty stakes.”

  He took both my hands in his and kissed them. “Janie, why, why, why, have you no idea how ravishing you are? Isn’t it completely obvious when you look in the mirror each day?”

  I shook my head, my lack of self-confidence showing through the cracks of insecurity. I thought of how I’d broken down in tears just ten minutes before while having sex—I was as good as a novice. I wouldn’t even be able to say I now belonged to the Mile High Club. “It’s all about big round butts these days and curves and I’m just a—”

  “You’re a true beauty, my precious Janie. Did Audrey Hepburn have a big round ass and huge great tits?”

  An amused smile at the thought of my icon, Audrey, with a sexy big butt, lifted the corners of my mouth. “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  A knock at our cabin door took us by surprise. “We’re getting ready for landing, Sir, Ma’am, please buckle up.”

  “Thank you,” Daniel called out. “Janie, we’ll continue this conversation at the hotel, after you’ve found your brother.”

  “By the way, my brother’s . . . different,” I wavered, not finding the right adjective for Will.

  “Like how?”

  “You’ll see. He’s kind of unpredictable. Whatever he says or does, though, please go easy on him.”

  “Alright.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  3

  I HAD ONLY BEEN to Vegas once before, when I was really little. My parents took me to a Grateful Dead concert; a reunion of the band, at the height of summer, sometime in August. If you could imagine the hottest day you’d experienced in your life and then put a hairdryer to your face, that’s how stifling it was. They were giving out Gatorade for free, which impressed me, and everyone was going around with plant sprayers full of water, to spray on their bodies and faces. There was a hose on, full-time, to cool people down. It was all happening in the open air during the day. I guessed it went on until the evening, too, but I was in bed by that point. The main thing I remember is people laughing their heads off. All day long. Wild, jaw-aching laughing, giant smiles splitting their faces in two. Years later, I realized that people were high on ecstasy or acid, or whatever. My mom admitted to me that Dad had taken magic mushrooms.

  Daniel dropped me off at my hotel and left to go to his own. He had told me he owned a string of them, but one in particular he favored, as close as you could get to a “boutique” hotel in this crazy town. I was relieved—I didn’t feel comfortable enough to share my family with him. Not yet, anyway.

  It wasn’t roasting hot here in Vegas, now, and dad wasn’t running around grinning and high on hallucinogenics, but I was still dealing with a man who was less than responsible. I spotted him from afar, wandering around the huge swimming pool, cellphone in hand, a forlorn little-boy-lost look on his handsome, chiseled face. My dad had the look of a 1950’s movie star—vintage handsome.

  My father’s lustrous brown eyes searched the surrounding area keenly, as if Will would be by the pool, picking up chicks in bikinis, instead of out on a mission to test his skills as a gambler. So far, Will had shown no interest whatsoever in girls. It was as if he’d been mentally arrested at the age of eleven, although physically everything was more than normal. In fact, Will was downright gorgeous to look at. It had gotten us into some interesting situations in the past; girls trying to hit on him, clueless as he was. Once he’d invited a very pretty nineteen-year-old to “stay over.” His idea of staying over was full pajamas, a midnight snack, and a horror movie. When she tried to kiss him he’d said “gross”, wrinkling his nose and wiping her kiss off his face.

  “Dad,” I called out, racing up to my father and encircling him in a bear hug. “I’ve missed you!”

  “Honey, thank God you’re here. I’ve been worried sick about Will wandering around Vegas, losing money in some . . . some crazy gambling hall.” It was now five o’clock, he’d been missing for twelve hours. Dad’s restless eyes flickered over my shoulder. A waiter walked by with a tray full of drinks.

  “Have you called the police?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but they pretty much laughed. A twenty-one-year-old guy loose in Vegas? They have bigger issues to deal with, like murder and rape.”

  “Did you ex
plain?”

  “I reported him missing and they filed the details into their computerized local system—fat lot of good it’ll do—they made it clear that being a voluntary missing person is not a crime and any adult person can simply walk away from his or her family.”

  “Yes, but, Will isn’t—”

  “They told me because it’s not a crime, the law enforcement is limited on how they handle these type of investigations. If it were a result of a criminal act, they said, they’d take it more seriously. I told them it was endangerment to Will himself, and maybe to others, and that’s what got their attention, when they finally put him in their database.” Dad’s words rushed out in a breathy torrent. Will had been living peacefully at home, and in a twenty-mile radius, not venturing anywhere risky except for the fantasylands of his video games. This phenomenon of Will going MIA was new to us both.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up soon.” As I said this, my eyes focused on a scene in the distance at the far end of the pool, near a cluster of palm trees. A guy was lying face down on a sun lounger, surrounded by three bikini-clad blondes, apparently fawning over his every movement. I knew that body. Or did I? I shook the idea out of my head. The man was being massaged with sun cream; deft fingers traveled seductively down the backs of his firm legs.

  “What is it?” Dad said.

  “Dad, I’m going to the other end of the pool area to check something out, won’t be a minute. Meet you by the bar?”

  “Sure,” he agreed. “I could use some water.”

  “Get me a Coke, I’ll be right back.”

  I wandered over, in my flip flops, wondering if the vision I was seeing was my overactive imagination playing tricks on me. The way you do when you have something at the forefront of your mind . . . you see things when they aren’t really there. Because, unless someone had spiked my food earlier, I was seeing triple. I rubbed my eyes to make sure.

  I stood there, silently, feeling like a fool, as if everything I had been flipping over in my mind about this person in the last twenty-four hours was completely false.