Her eyes dropped to the vanity’s tabletop. Quite suddenly, she swung her hand wildly, sending the perfume bottles crashing to the floor. She then dropped the point of the stiletto to the vanity’s wood. She began to carve, the wood issuing a rough, gravelly moan as three jagged letters were etched there.
She stared at them with wicked affection, the shadow of a smile brushing onto her face. Then, with sudden and disturbing violence, she slammed the stiletto into vanity’s surface. It plunged in to the thick wood all the way to the hilt, neatly dissecting the centermost letter. She then relinquished the blade and stood.
She approached the closet, putting a hand to the knob and pulling the door fully open. She stepped forward and removed a painting hanging from the wall inside. She beheld its canvas, peering at the image of the woman painted there. She then backed out.
Grasping the door by its edge, she stood there for a timeless moment. She recalled the vile superstition haunting the door… then violently hurled it shut.
CHAPTER 2 – JACK PARKE
Jack Parke was lying in bed on his side, gazing deep into the face of the woman sleeping quietly beside him. The soft moonlight seeping in through the windows illumined one side of her face, casting its pale hue on her long brown hair and the rise of her shoulders.
He was doing his best to suppress it, but he was being overcome with an inexplicable urge to reach up and caress her. He thought that odd. Very odd. Such urges rarely seized him, especially after intimacy, and even when they did, he’d easily snuff them out long before they had a chance to germinate and grow. But not this time. Strangely, the urge was not only persistent, but insistent.
He brought his hand up and, as carefully as he could, smoothed back the hair curling along her cheek. He then let it rest there. She was soft and very warm. He waited to see if she would be roused from sleep, but she did not move. Slowly, very gently, he began to caress her. He kept eyeing her face, ready to yank his hand away at the first sign she might be stirring. She did not.
His hand kept moving, gliding over the woman’s dark and supple skin. He was keenly aware that he should stop this foolishness, but he was no longer certain that he could—or that he even wanted to. With every stroke, a perplexing bliss seemed to radiate more brightly within him. For the first time in his thirty-eight years of life, Jack actually felt like he was encountering something bigger than he was.
And perhaps that was why he failed to see that one of the woman’s eyes had slipped open.
She watched him, at first in drowsy confusion, and then, when she realized what he was doing, with utter astonishment. She had longed to see a moment like this, a day when the hard shell softened and the soul inside bared itself. A part of her had always feared what she might find, but looking deep into those startling blue eyes, what she thought she saw there—could in some way almost feel with every pass of his hand—made her almost tearful with joy.
Then she saw his eyes cut toward her own, and the hand abruptly stopped. Surprise suddenly marked his face. He had realized she was awake.
He watched dumbly as the woman’s lips thinned to a pretty smile. He made a clumsy attempt to pull his hand away, but she quickly reached up and clasped it in her own. She gave the hand a soft kiss, cradled it in her bosom, and, clearly contented, closed her eyes once more.
Jack cursed inwardly. What the hell had gotten into him? What was it, the excitement of the party? Fatigue? Stress? He lay there brooding for several minutes more. When the woman’s breathing had returned to the steady rhythm of sleep, he slowly eased his hand from between her breasts. He rolled over and gazed at the answering machine on the end table. 1:05am. Then he noticed the mostly empty bottle of wine sitting nearby—and a fitting explanation for his blunder. Too much wine, he thought. Just too much damned wine.
He slipped from bed and moved through the bedroom, pawing murky objects in search of his robe. He found it slumped haphazardly over a chair and put it on. He stepped into a pair of slippers.
He was about to depart when he heard the woman rustling behind him. He looked up, catching her reflection in a large mirror mounted high on the wall opposite the bed. She was groggily rolling onto her stomach. Some of the covers had pulled away, offering him the teasing burlesque of a nude back and the length of a leg. He stared at her, baffled.
Jack Parke was owner of the top modeling agency in the world. It was his company, Parke Studios, that represented no less than six of the world’s top ten supermodels. Three of those Jack had discovered himself: one while having lunch at a market in Napoli, the other in a New York subway station, and the third on a crowded hospital elevator while visiting a sick friend in Rome. Because of this propensity for discovering gorgeous women, the industry now referred to him as the “Man with the golden eyes.”
To some, however, particularly those who worked for the gossip rags, Jack’s eyes were not the only golden part of his anatomy. Rumors were rampant that he had bedded most, if not all of the models he signed. Both the Enquirer and Globe, every three to four months, found it profitable to run feature stories detailing his libidinous doings. Most of these tales were stretched to the point of absurdity, but that did not mean they lacked a morsel of truth. No, Jack did not make it a point to sleep with every model he signed, but neither was he immune from occasionally sampling one of them.
In most cases, his dealings with signees never went beyond a handshake and a business contract. To those, he showed no signs of being anything more than the consummate professional: kind, courteous, and at all times brutally honest. This tendency had far less to do with some deep-rooted ethical drive within him, and far more to do with his excessive tastes in beautiful women. The average model simply could not attract him. There had to be something unique about her appearance, something exotic or special; the elusive color of her eyes, or perhaps the seductive shape of her lips. Sometimes it was the alluring tone of a woman’s skin, or the gracefulness of her limbs. But there always had to be something, some element that punctuated her appearance. For Jack Parke, mere beauty simply wasn’t enough.
Jack Parke wasted little time bedding those he did find attractive. But a serious relationship with the man was virtually impossible to attain. Because for him, the appeal of those marvelous eyes, those seductive lips, those perfect limbs, was always short-lived. The moment they lost their luster, Jack’s interest faded.
None of that, however, seemed to apply to the woman now occupying his bed. She had no unique or defining physical traits, nothing that stood out enough to attract him. Yes, she was beautiful, but not exceedingly so, at least not in his eyes. More than that, she wasn’t even a model but an actress, and Jack despised actresses, self-serving prima donnas that they were. And yet there she lay, sleeping soundlessly in his bed, perhaps the greatest anomaly of his entire life.
Why, he wondered? What was it about her? How was it true that even after two months his interest in her was actually growing, not fading as it had with all those who preceded her? Clearly she possessed something he had never encountered in a woman, but he had no idea what that something was. It puzzled him. He thought about it frequently. And all he could come away with was that she was different. Not special. Not unique. Just… different.
He turned from the mirror and departed the bedroom. He moved down the hallway toward a lavish bathroom on his right. Reaching it, he turned and descended a long, elbowing staircase. He went through the foyer and entered an elegant living room. A few party streamers dotted the floor, which he angrily kicked aside, making his way to the center of an enormous bay window.
He stared meditatively out into the late-August night. It was oddly quiet: no wind, no cars, no movement whatsoever. Even the blue-black sky, which stretched above the silhouette of houses on the horizon, seemed strangely devoid of stars. He wondered at the silence, the darkness, the remarkable stillness of it all.
He was startled when he saw the woman standing on the path outside his house. Shadow and moonlight had leeched her skin of col
or, leaving behind only an eerie ashen hue. She seemed to be staring up at him, brandishing a smile so ghoulish it made his skin crawl.
He squinted, taking note of the woman’s long blonde hair, her peculiarly youthful face, and the elegant black dress clinging to her tall but slight frame. He relaxed a bit, now realizing who she was. None other than Portia Childress.
Ordinarily, he would not have been surprised by Portia’s arrival, even at such a late hour. A number of former lovers had made virtual fools of themselves with their surprise late-night showings. They would arrive either drunk, or angry, or just lonely and in need of Jack’s greatest gift: temporal comfort. And whether drunk or angry or lonely, Jack would gladly oblige them for the night, promise to call the next day, and politely never see them again.
But this time it was Portia. And this time it was different.
He and Portia had dated for four very long and torrid months—dating being her term, not his. Undoubtedly, she had thought him the perfect gentleman: caring, considerate, and unusually romantic. What she didn’t know was that the whole thing had been a ruse, a carefully conceived stratagem to get her in bed.
The ploy did not work, however, because he had so grossly underestimated one facet of the woman’s character. Portia Childress, the renowned former supermodel, fantasy of literally millions of men, was something he could never have believed true. Portia Childress was a virgin.
In the beginning he thought it was all just part of some sexy game, a hard tease meant to make the taking of the pearl that much more difficult, and, consequently, that much more pleasurable when it finally occurred. The very notion that a woman of such extraordinary beauty could live on this planet for thirty years without ever once being touched, struck Jack as the height of absurdity. She simply had to be lying, toying with him, teasing. But after a full month, without event, without consummation, he realized the inexplicable truth.
He had remained undaunted, however. He’d seen this before, the proverbial good-girl routine. Such women, usually because of religion or upbringing, always made rigid claims about their commitments to chastity. Without fail, however, through a campaign of slow but persistent seduction, he was able to prove just how flimsy such claims really were.
He had expected Portia to be no different, but the woman showed unusual tenacity. Each time the heat rose and a hand roamed along a thigh or inched too close to a breast, she would push him away, sometimes standing and excusing herself. Still, he loved the challenge. He saw her virginity as a huge, wooden wall that he’d someday send crashing to the ground. He soon found, however, that the wall was not wooden. It was cast iron.
At some point he began to lose patience. Although he was making some progress, it was coming in insultingly small increments. Controlling himself was growing difficult, and he was becoming unruly during their so-called “kissing sessions.” In the day, he found himself fantasizing about her (something he hadn’t done toward anyone since puberty), and at night he was plagued by a recurring, increasingly erotic dream. Portia was now an obsession, an all-consuming vision that made his loins ache, tore at his mind, and made him more desperate than a penniless addict.
Finally, on that drunken night, now two months ago, when his passions had overwhelmed him, he had driven to Portia’s house, fully intending to take what he had so long been denied. Yet, even then, as he stood in her bedroom, he had been made the fool.
The next day, after he had sobered, he’d returned to her house and swiftly put an end to their relationship. He had not seen Portia since that day, until tonight, until she’d appeared outside his house.
So it was all very ironic, yes, perhaps even comical, seeing her standing there, in the same place so many others had, wanting the same thing. Who could have guessed that two months was the key? Two months without him and that chastity belt she so proudly wore would slip past her ankles and go clunking to the floor. She’d come back to beg, he understood, for scraps, for his scraps. And oh, how he was going to indulge her.
Now it was Jack’s face that bore a jaded smile. How fitting that tonight, on his birthday, he would finally get what had eluded him for so long. Already he could feel that familiar cloud of passion rising within. Already he could envision the act, her flesh pressed against his, their bodies convulsing in one orgasmic spasm after another.
But in an instant that vision departed. His smile faded. It was the thought of the woman upstairs, the woman in bed. Her name was Gabrielle. She was Portia’s best friend.
Jack’s nostrils flared with anger. No, he would not have Portia tonight. Not with Gabrielle so near…
And then something else struck him, something that might explain Portia’s haggard smile. Perhaps she wasn’t here to have a romp with the birthday boy after all. Perhaps it was something else, something far more sinister: she’d found out about his affair with Gabrielle. Maybe she had come here looking for a confrontation. And maybe, just maybe, she even meant to do them harm.
He moved away from the bay window, and headed toward the front doors. He could not be certain of Portia’s true intentions but he did know this: she had come here for a reason, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to find out what that was.
Jack Parke opened the door and eagerly stepped outside.
CHAPTER 3 – THE GIFT
The long ride to the Jack Parke estate had for Portia seemed much more desolate than on any prior night. The large, expensive houses on this luxurious strip of Long Island, all of them beautified by perfectly manicured lawns and well-tended landscapes, seemed to hide like cowards behind tall shadowy trees, as if somehow aware of the burning anger, the rage swarming around her soul like a hoard of angry bees .
She’d been told everything, of course. She knew about Jack, about her so-called friend Gabrielle, and their mutual treachery. And she fully intended to make them pay, with their very lives if it came to that.
She stood watching as Jack Parke’s shadow-strewn figure departed the bay window. A moment later, he stepped out of the front door and began approaching down the twisting cement pathway. His hair was disheveled (had Gabrielle been running her lusting little fingers through it, she wondered), and a robe draped his tall, toned frame like a shabby old shawl. She considered the stiletto she’d left pinned in the vanity… and using it to carve out his beautiful blue eyes. Her awful smile broadened.
Arriving before her, Jack mistook it for a gesture of good cheer. “A little late for a house call, isn’t it?”
The strange smile hung, and then, with a suddenness that struck him as odd, melted away to what now appeared to be sheepish innocence.
“I’m sorry,” Portia began, cowering a little. “I know this is awkward. I should go.”
“What are you doing here?”
Her mouth flinched towards a grin, but fell far short. “I… came to see you, Jack.”
“For what?”
“Well… it is your birthday, isn’t it?” She forced that grin to the surface. “You didn’t think I would actually let it pass without stopping by?”
“If you cared that much you would have shown up at my party, not in the middle of the night.”
“Well, you know I’ve never cared much for crowds.”
Jack looked at her suspiciously.
Portia said, “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
Jack’s eyes narrowed slightly, uncertain whether the comment was meant as mere etiquette or some veiled innuendo. “No,” he finally said. “No, nothing at all. How did you know I wouldn’t be asleep?”
“I’m a firm believer in the old saying, Jack.”
“What’s that?”
“No rest for the wicked.”
Jack flashed a big grin. Portia smiled too, not the eerie one that had marred her face only moments ago, but the bright and charming one, the one that Jack had once found irresistible.
“So, how was the party?” Portia asked, now seeming to have shaken her nerves. “Big get-together?”
“I enjoyed it. Mayb
e thirty or thirty-five people showed. Mostly the usuals from the studio: Howard Snell, Mark, Frank Devers, some of the models. Jamie Flax flew in from out of town. She asked about you.”
“Did she really?”
“She asks about you every time I see her,” Jack said, showing some irritation. “I’m not sure why she always expects me to know what you’re doing now that we’re not together.”
“Did Gabrielle show?”
“Gabrielle?” Jack questioned, caught somewhat off-guard.
“Yes. She mentioned she might come but seemed uneasy about the whole thing. I told her not to let what happened between you and I stop her. Besides, your agency still represents her. It’s not like you two don’t ever see each other.”
Jack said nothing.
“So, she didn’t show?” Portia persisted.
Jack paused, blinked. He got the distinct feeling that she was after something. Finally, he said: “No. She didn’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
Portia nodded agreeably, but the person who had informed her of the affair, the aforementioned Jamie Flax, had not only witnessed Gabrielle at the party, but had accidentally spotted a mildly inebriated Jack kissing her in one of the off rooms.
“I can’t say I’m not entirely surprised she didn’t come,” Portia said.
“Why’s that?”
“Gabrielle’s conscience. The smallest things seem to bother her. It’s what makes her such a good person.”
“Really? I would have never guessed.”
“You’d have to know her.”
“I guess so.” Jack eyes drifted downward, shamelessly moving over Portia’s figure. “Love the dress. Seems you’ve had an eventful evening as well.”
Portia shrugged. “Just dinner with friends. It’s the first time I’ve been out since… well, for a while.”
The Glimpsing Page 2