Love Under Glasse
Page 1
Triton Books
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Burnsville, NC 28714
www.tritonya.com
Triton Books is an imprint of Riptide Publishing.
www.RiptidePublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.
Love Under Glasse
Copyright © 2019 by Kristina Meister
Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design-portfolio.html
Editor: May Peterson
Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at tritonya.com, or at marketing@riptidepublishing.com.
ISBN: 978-1-62649-875-4
First edition
August, 2019
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-876-1
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El Glasse’s mother controls her life. What she does, who she dates, even what she’s allowed to say. El only has two ways of holding onto her freedom. One is her popular anonymous blog, hidden from Mama Glasse. The other is what she so often blogs about: her feelings for Riley, the girl who works at the ice cream parlor. Riley is fierce, free, and rides a killer motorcycle, and El cannot help but love her. But Mama Glasse can never find out about her sexuality—unless El is willing to rebel.
When El runs away, Riley feels responsible. She knows what it’s like to be alone, and she can’t deny her deep desire to learn El’s story. In a move she might end up regretting, she makes a devil’s bargain with Mama Glasse to hunt El down.
Riley isn’t trying to bring her home though, because she knows an evil spell when she sees one—a spell of fear and shame El is finally starting to break. This huntress might lose her own heart, but it’s a risk she’s willing to take.
For my little sister Val, who is sensitive, ferocious, and daring. You never cease to delight and amaze.
About Love Under Glasse
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Dear Reader
Acknowledgments
Also by Kristina Meister
About the Author
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The girl slid down the tree trunk, her coat tumbling up over her shoulders in a mantle of black and deep greens. Knees peeking from her torn jeans, she reclined against the roots. As if dismissing the world, she inserted earbuds with the flick of a wrist. Seconds later, she was mouthing lyrics, kissing the humid air with a pout.
El’s skin tingled and her pulse rattled in her veins. She was never going to run out of reasons to stare at Riley.
Never.
She pressed against the classroom window as the girl performed a recumbent dance move, face dappled in shade. She moved as if every single tiny gesture had a deeper meaning, and all of it could be decoded if set to music.
There was just no other way to think about Riley. Her face was always composed. Her eyes were always glittering with awareness. She didn’t hide in the shadows she could make for herself. Her height and shape were perfectly defined in the mind of every person around her, because like her or hate her, Riley Vanator never folded herself up for anyone . . .
“Elyrra!”
Startled, El’s forehead cracked against the cold glass and woke her to reality. At once, she felt small again as a heavy arm fell across her shoulders to the tune of a mean-spirited laugh.
“Hey, I’m gonna pick you up today, okay?”
Shrugging uncomfortably, El clutched her notebook to her chest and tried to look as if she’d been doing something more productive than yet again fantasizing over the gorgeous figure beneath the tree.
“Why?”
Jay was fresh from gym and ruddy, but even physical exhaustion couldn’t wipe the perpetual smirk off his face. “Because you’re my girlfriend, and I want to take you out.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s cool! I already cleared it with your mom.”
“I don’t—”
“Look, you haven’t been out with me in a couple of weeks.” His arms coiled around her waist. He clung to her like some kind of sweaty sloth and tried to fondle her. “I’m starting to think you don’t like me.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it was the first time she wanted to spit her agreement in his face. He didn’t want a girlfriend. He wanted an orgasm. El shoved at him, but there was no disentangling, and not a soul in the quickly emptying study hall seemed to care. While he rooted around in her neck like a pig, she leaned against the glass and rolled her face to the view below.
Riley was sitting cross-legged, eating a small snack before she went to work as she always did right after school. Her thin fingers picked it apart delicately. When her tongue slid out and cleaned them each in turn, El sighed, and the boy attached to her body like a leech gave himself a congratulatory snicker.
“You’re gonna have fun tonight. I promise.”
“What if I don’t?” she whispered.
“What’s that mean?” He pulled back and stared at her, brows drawn together in a confusion of wrinkles that somehow painted a perfectly predictive image of his face in twenty years, after he’d done a failed stint in the Army, or bought a car dealership, or something.
Why wouldn’t El like him? Jay was the boy. The one everyone fought over, the one that the other girls would slander her to obtain, if not for the fact that El was demure and had a powerful family. He was the boy that could do no wrong. He was the boy who just had to be left to be, because boys were boys.
“I don’t want to go out t
onight.”
“Uh . . . but we are.”
That was that. His smug grin said it all. He’d long ago figured out that if he went to her mother, it meant that he held the power. El could never get in a moment of defense, because Jay kept her safe. And that came with certain sacrifices.
As he sauntered away, she pictured her mother’s face, perfectly feminine makeup below her meticulously highlighted hair. All the little smile lines around her mouth would harden. Her eyes would turn to lead. Her lips would pinch over words that were harsher than anyone else could ever manage.
Why wouldn’t El want to go out with a boy, especially that boy? Didn’t she like boys?
Her mother could make doubt into a knife, and carve out the truth like she was delicately eviscerating a quail in her neon pink hunting jacket. Life was bad enough already without the distractions of her sister’s pageants and admirers, with her mother downing two bottles of wine a night to counter the stress from the election, with school about to be out. El was alone and center stage.
She hated it.
El packed her things, the world around her blurring in and out of focus. Normal sounds were harsh. Skin numb, feet thudding like dead weights, she dragged herself out into the sun. Her chest ached. Her stomach always seemed to quake. Her heart was constantly trying to claw its way out. Every day was an exhausting dance between blending in and biding time, politics and patience. Every night she went to bed like a narcoleptic, and every morning she woke like a soldier in an air raid.
Soon it would get much, much worse, because Riley, the beautiful respite from the rest of her life, would be gone. Riley didn’t have time for this place. She was an explorer. She would move on, and El would be left behind. But that was the way it should be.
Riley was untouchable.
A thrill went through El’s body, as Riley’s beloved motorcycle growled at the world. Its lithe mistress was astride it, about to charge into battle instead of her shift at Sam’s ice cream parlor. Her seamless black helmet was more like a crown. As her high boots coaxed the feral machine backward out of its parking space, Jay leaned from his car window and hurled a wadded-up bag at her. It bounced to the ground lamely, the victim looking after it in a stoic gleam.
“Next time it’s a rock, dyke!”
His car jolted, cutting off the motorcycle, but Riley was unperturbed. Slowly tipping at the waist, extended to her full length like a dancer, she plucked the litter off the ground. The boys cackled, but Riley didn’t move. Beneath her faceplate, El hoped she was rolling her depthless eyes, wearing that crooked grin that turned her mouth into a beckon. While Jay screeched to the head of the line, Riley squeezed a tighter ball in a gloved hand, tipped forward, and torqued her wrist. Before El could blink, the bike was beside the carful of idiots, the wadded-up bag was bouncing off Jay’s face, and the girl was shooting past them, protected by a wall of sound like a legion of demons.
The boys sat for a moment in shock, but there was nothing to be done. It was Riley, and nothing she did was at all surprising, because every glance and word from her was a warning. Jay would have to tackle his hurt pride by himself, because divinity had no time for foolish boys.
El’s taut smile was reflexive. She wanted to open her notebook and transcribe every second, but her mother was already there, tapping her watch and making faces.
The car was like a walk-in freezer. Patriotism and bigotry were boxed side by side in every seat and the windows were crowded with campaign signs.
“Come on, Elyrra! I have an appointment at headquarters. Your father has a photo shoot with some magazine.”
The radio buzzed with angry voices, debating each other’s fitness to live. Someone maligned the local favorite and the host called him “liberal scum.” While El sketched her day in ciphers, her mother muttered under her breath in unintelligible venom.
“Mom, can we turn the station?”
“I’m listening to the news,” was the flat reply.
“All it does is make you angry.”
The smile could be disdainful in the wrong light, but there never seemed to be a right one. “Spiritual warfare doesn’t break for your feelings and God doesn’t listen to excuses.”
Excuses. She’d never really made excuses to God. To herself, sure, but to God? No point. If there was anyone who’d watched her whole life twist into this painful thing, it was God. Which was probably why she was beginning to resent the idea of Him.
As she watched the town drift by in the charm of previous centuries, El realized she measured her life in a series of acquiescences. Every moment was an instance of defeat and compromise, and every day, she became more skilled in being faceless. She was sure that no human could be happy if it came to lying to one’s self. It seemed impossible that that could really have been the intent of God.
The radio cut off.
“I sent your camp fees in today, sugar!”
Something about the cheer in the voice was wrong, but then again, there was nothing right about the situation. Three months of perfect girls all wearing bathing suits around the waterfall, ignoring her because she was famous. Three months starved for touch, lonely and cast out into the forest, being bullied by those far more comfortable in their identities. Three months of torture while her mother had a peaceful house and could get all her interviews about family values done without the bother of her family.
“You’re gonna have a great summer! I think you’re gonna like this camp. It’s much more for the artistic types!”
El’s instincts cut in with a warning. She had never declared herself artistic. That would be strategic suicide, because it would mean she could think creatively. Her mother’s award-winning works on how to raise godly children in the modern era specifically warned parents about how to sculpt the imagination. Fairy tales were fine so long as they glorified God, but fiction was a kind of lying and so the storyteller had to have a firm hand. El would have done better to pick up the Bible from the center console and slap her mother across the face with it rather than to be “artistic.”
Swallowing, she tried to sound content. “What’s it called?”
A manicured hand swept the question aside. “Fair Meadows or something. I can’t remember. But it’s just perfect for you.”
“It is?”
“You need to learn the skills of making healthy friendships!” Exasperation dripped from every word. “You need support! You need to really examine yourself and measure yourself by God’s standard and learn to channel everything you feel into a better relationship with Him. You need to rekindle your faith!”
El needed no help with faith, whatsoever. She had plenty, but her holy words were in her lap in a made-up shorthand. Her worship service took place every Friday evening at an ice cream parlor, where she prayed in daydreams. Her hymns were silent, but her congregation thousands strong—the population of a city hanging on every homily she typed. She needed no fellowship but reblogs and comments, no communion but likes and notes. Her blog of her adoration and suffering was the only religion and a secret sin.
God had apparently only made a few people in His image. The rest were fodder for the Devil.
“So! Jay and a date! I think he has something special planned!”
Something in El’s soul began to vibrate like a rung bell. She felt it deep in the center of her abdomen. Soon it filled up her esophagus and was in her mouth before she could stop it.
“He wants to have sex with me. You know that, right?”
Her mother blinked into the silence. El watched that face, fighting to catch her breath, fighting with an unspoken hope that for once, this woman would do right by her. The conflict raged in the air, and then was dashed aside with yet another chemically paralyzed smile.
“The Lord never said a man and woman couldn’t be a man and woman. He simply said you have to guard your chastity. You have to demonstrate your virtue to Jay too. You have to learn to strike a balance between your lust and your self-control! That can’t happen without testing
yourself! You can’t beat the demon if you don’t ask for the Lord’s help.”
But the demon wasn’t a demon. It was a boy who already wrestled at a professional level. It was disgusting whispers in her ear. It was helplessness. It was fear of being mocked by buxom cheerleaders, or worse still, by boys. It was losing herself to guard herself.
“Why doesn’t he have to be chaste?”
“He does, Elyrra, but men have urges.”
“And if he dumps me for it? If he makes up stories about me—”
Incredibly, her mother turned in the seat and glared at her. “Stop it. Jay is a clean-cut boy. He is going to make some woman very happy one day, and it might as well be you.”
The car coasted to a halt at the curb. The church sat back from the street like a red brick castle. El latched her eye on it forlornly.
“So what’s wrong with Jay?” Mama demanded.
“I don’t like him . . . I mean he—”
“You’re too picky! You won’t meet a prince.”
Closing her eyes, she took a breath. “You love Tom. You never say one bad thing about him. So I guess Rose found a prince.”
There was a loud hiss. “Yes, but you’re not your sister! She’s a beauty queen. And there aren’t that many men like Tom! The way you carry on . . . the way you dress—”
“You buy my clothes.” El stared at her notebook, caressing its cover. “What if I don’t ever want to get married?”
Her mother’s eyes were wide and blank. Her lips were parted, but petrified. It was as if she was having a premonition of a life without the herd of grandchildren she could parade across the internet for the world to use as a metric of her worthiness. Ever since her father had been elected and her mother’s website had gone viral, all she cared about was her reputation. Every week was a list of Mama’s radio appearances, podcasts, or website statistics. The whole Christian world knew the faces of Rose and Elyrra Glasse—test subjects of their devoted mother and living proof that God still possessed the heart of modern hedonistic America. Without progeny, the whole experiment was a shambles.
“It’s a woman’s duty to have a family. The Bible says a woman does not have authority over her own body—”