Shards of Glass by Arianne Richmonde

undone me. I was a pathetic wreck. I hadn’t been raised that way, to put so much importance in a man. My mother had drummed it into me that I needed to be independent, earn my own living, to never rely on the male species. For anything. She knew. My dad was the unreliable type and she’d spent the best part of their marriage holding the reins. My younger brother, too, needed guidance, protection. “Women are the stronger vessel,” Mom always told me. “Hold onto your independence. Be a brick house, not a house of straw.”
    Yet here I was, back to square one, as if the last year without seeing Daniel had never passed at all. I was still the twenty-one-year-old, impressionable actress in my heart, eager to please. Desperate to earn his approval.
    My mind wandered back to dinner, earlier that evening. Star and Jake were so in love. I craved a relationship like that. They were alive, sparring with each other over who was the better actor, Al or Bobby— The Godfather or Taxi Driver . But they were laughing and joking, her daughter Hero asking silly questions that made us all laugh.
    “By the way,” I had asked, “who’s Rambling Rose ?”
    “Laura Dern was Rambling Rose . Great movie,” Jake said. “She got nominated for an Oscar.”
    “Why rambling?”
    “She was innocently promiscuous; mistook sex for love.”
    “She had rambling ways,” added Star.
    “Ah,” I said.
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Because Sam Myers decided I was like her,” I told them.
    Rambling Rose  . . . I lay in bed thinking again about Daniel’s erection the moment I straddled him. Surely he felt something for me—his hard-on proved it, didn’t it? He couldn’t forever mourn his dead wife.
    I wanted that role in the film after all. What had I been thinking to tell them no? Neither Pearl nor Samuel Myers had telephoned me back. I’d blown it. What an idiot! Lying here, I decided I would give my right arm to work with Daniel again. See his face every day on set . . . discuss my character’s motivation, listen to and follow his direction. I could feel the familiar heat between my legs. I’d pleasured myself so many times in the past I couldn’t count, fantasizing about Daniel fucking me. I hadn’t even dated other guys. Well, I’d tried, but never got past a kiss. Nobody turned me on. Everybody was anemic and insipid compared to Daniel. No, it was sad and pathetic for me to get myself off yet again tonight, always obsessing about Daniel Glass. I refused to allow myself torture my poor humiliated body anymore with someone I couldn’t have.
    I got up out of bed and walked toward the big glass doors of my bedroom. There was enough moonlight to see a little without stumbling in the dark. Stars were scattered like tiny jewels in the sky, and I fancied I could make out the Big Dipper—a saucepan in the midst of the deepest blue. I picked up my iPhone and, taking it outside with me, found the astrology app that tells you what the constellations are. I lay down on the sofa and stared up at the sky in a trance.
    A while later, fiddling with my phone and changing the angle, I suddenly realized there was a message. From Daniel.
    Phone me. NOW.
    Without pausing for breath I called, my heart racing. To my astonishment he picked up. What was he doing awake? I had his beautiful features in my mind’s eye. His intense blue eyes, his straight nose, with that very slight bump, and his full, sexy lips that I had imagined a million times licking me all over, electrifying my body into orgasmic bliss.
    “Janie,” he said, in a low seductive voice.
    “Daniel, I’m amazed you’re still up.”
    “I can’t sleep.” He paused. There was a beat of silence and he said, “I’ve been thinking about your kiss. You got me fucking hard, you know that, don’t you? Of course you do. It was embarrassing.”
    An arrow of desire shot to my core, remembering his hard-on. I had always pictured what his cock was like, but feeling it at the meeting