Page 1 of All That Glitters

ONE

Aplane crash ruined my life.

Do all survivors of that kind of trauma wake up screaming, tangled in their sheets with sweat pouring off them? I hadn’t been there with my parents when they took off, hadn’t joined them on the flight, but the nightmares put me in the seat beside them as we all went down. The alarms screeched, and my mom screamed in my ear, “We’re going to die!”

I always manage to wake up right before the private jet crashes nose first into the ground.

Tonight, it takes a while for me to fully wake, even as my blurry eyes latch onto the shadows of swaying palms outside my bedroom window.

The nightmares still take me by surprise, even when they shouldn’t, when they’re frequent enough to have me buying up makeup companies to try and cover the dark circles underneath my eyes.

It’s always impossible to go back to sleep after. I lay in bed with my gaze fastened to the ceiling, praying I haven’t woken Marcus.

I slap a hand to the frantic beating thing in my chest. It’s too raw to call it a heart, not anymore.

The tabloids got a hold of pictures of the wreck and published them without me knowing. The blood, the mangled bodies, the shards of metal everywhere; now, when I think about my parents, all I see is death.

It’s been three months since they left me, and two weeks since I turned eighteen.

The price of being part of the fabric of Hollywood, I’d been told.

To be expected.

Sucks, but what can you do?

The tabloids don’t give a shit that I’m an orphan.

The hand I swipe over my forehead comes back smeared with sweat, and I groan, swallowing convulsively as the images of the crash slowly start to fade.

Not today. Today, I have to keep things under control. There’s too much to do, too many eyes watching me.

A glance back toward the window shows me a sky that never truly goes dark, not in Hollywood.

The door to my room slams open and knocks against the opposite wall with a gut-wrenching bang, and I sit up, clutching the blankets to my chest. Marcus rushes inside in his underwear, his shoulders curved, and his hands curled into fists at his sides.

“What the fuck happened?” His voice is gravely from sleep.

He’s ready to fight, ready to do whatever he can to make sure the threat is taken care of.

I swallow again, a lump forming in the back of my throat.

“You were screaming.”

I bob my head, watching him walk, stalk toward me without making a sound. Every footstep sinks into plush carpet.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up,” I say. “It was bad tonight.”

“How bad?” he asks.

I don’t answer him. Worse than tired, I sound thready and fearful, as though the blood and bodies from my dreams will somehow morph into a reality worse than the one I currently live in.

“Well, fuck.” He glances out the door. “I thought someone broke in. I thought you were getting your throat slit or something from the way you were screaming.”

I swallow hard, the blankets still clutched to my chest.

Marcus sleeps in his boxers. I focus on the cut of the fabric, the design of silver playing cards against a black velvet background. The boxers are low on his hips, giving me the perfect view of the V cut of muscles and the curling black hair at his chest.

He shakes his head and drops down hard on the end of the bed, close enough to sit right on my feet and have me dragging them closer. I pull my knees up to my chest, arms wrapping around to make myself as small as possible beneath the sheets, like the movement will somehow make me feel less ashamed for scaring him.

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