Broken Glass Read online

  Broken Glass

  J. D. Mason

  Spirit In The Dark Publishing, LLC

  Contents

  Other Books By J.D. Mason

  Acknowledgments

  Broken Glass

  Pick Up The Pieces

  Two Sides Of The Same Coin

  Still Shining

  Looking For Something

  A Little Something

  Come My Way

  Looks Good To Me

  Take Everything In

  Hard to Breathe

  Tragedy

  Lean In

  Get Used To You

  Why?

  Outside Words

  Have It All

  Mending, Blending

  From Inside

  Better Left Unsaid

  Circle In The Sand

  Talking Old Soldiers

  Sugar Honey

  Let It Rain

  Serves Him Right

  Bout You

  The Wreckage

  Besides

  Sinking Ships

  Don’t Turn Around

  Sweet Dreams

  A Woman Like Me

  Salt On My Wounds

  The Train

  Tomorrow

  Through The Fire

  Baby Bird

  Grown Folks Business

  The Water’s Edge

  Bad Moon

  Poison Mind

  Wreckage

  Pusherman

  I’ll Bleed

  Words I Never Said

  Other Books By J.D. Mason

  And On The Eighth Day She Rested

  One Day I Saw A Black King

  Don’t Want No Sugar

  You Gotta Sin To Get Saved

  Somebody Pick Up My Pieces

  Beautiful Dirty Rich

  Drop Dead, Gorgeous

  Crazy, Sexy, Revenge

  The Real Mrs. Price

  Seducing Abby Rhodes

  The Woman Trapped in the Dark

  Without A Song To Sing

  Acknowledgments

  Writing Broken Glass is a bittersweet experience for me because I’ve recently announced my retirement from the literary world, and it’s likely the last novel I’ll ever write (deep down I know better and will never say never).

  I started my first novel, “And on the Eighth Day She Rested” twenty-six years ago. In those twenty-six years, the first thing I’ve thought about when I opened my eyes in the morning was writing, and it was the last thing I thought about before closing them again to go to sleep. In between, I had a family and worked a “regular” job like most people, but becoming a published author was always my dream. It came true, but now it’s time to move on.

  Admittedly, I didn’t reach the decision to leave the industry, overnight. I thought long and hard before making it official and the more time that passes, the more I’m convinced that I’ve made the right choice. I have given a thousand percent in each and every story I’ve written, and I’ve loved them all. I wrote what was in my heart. I wrote the kinds of stories I wanted to read, and I wrote for all of you, hoping that I offered you something brand new or even, perhaps, a different take on a familiar story. My job, all these years has been to entertain you, and I hope that I have served you well.

  I want to thank each and every reader out there who’s ever read one of my stories. I especially want to thank those of you who have been with me since the beginning. Know that I could not have lasted as long as I have in this industry without you. Never take for granted how important you are to writers. Your support means absolutely everything, so I encourage you to support your favorite author with Amazon reviews, buying books, or checking them out from the library. DM or email your favorite authors to let them know, personally, how much you enjoyed their story. Your encouragement goes further than you can ever imagine. I know that it kept me going for many years.

  I’ve enjoyed every moment of my literary career and have absolutely no regrets. Along the way, I’ve met some amazing folks that I hope to stay in touch with for as long as possible.

  To Sara Camilli, my agent, you and I will always be friends. Thank you so much for all the support you’ve given me all these years. Your faith in me has truly, filled my heart.

  To Monique Patterson, my editor for the bulk of my career. It has been an honor working with you and knowing you. You’ve taught me so much and the next time I’m in NYC or you’re in NOLA, I hope we get a chance to get together, my friend.

  To Carol Hill Mackey, thank you my lovely friend. With Black Expressions, you gave so many of us authors space to soar and because of you, the world “saw” us.

  Ebony Danielle Goodrich, thank you so much for editing Broken Glass, and I’m honored to have been your very first customer.

  Tina V. Young, you are a beast of a proofreader, and I’m so happy to have been able to work with you.

  And a very special thanks to my beta readers, Jemina Harris and LaRael Tunson-Chapman for your time and invaluable input.

  In closing, I have to say that, though I have retired from the literary industry, as a storyteller, I can NEVER quit telling stories and I won’t. I’ll just be telling them in a different way.

  Stay tuned.

  Broken Glass

  “You fake, sneaky, no-class, bad-acting, two-faced bitch!”

  There was no moment in her life more sobering than watching, in slow motion, as a $650, red Jimmy Choo stiletto soared across the room, aimed at her face. She slightly leaned to one side, like Neo in the Matrix, watching as it whirred past her, barely avoiding impact.

  “I did- didn’t,” Terri muttered in disbelief as the missile shoe flew passed her.

  The scene unfolded like a dream or maybe a sitcom.

  The beautiful, cinnamon colored woman with long, expensive, virgin blond tresses cascading to her waist, literally crawled on top of the table, arms outstretched, and inch-long talons clawed space to get to Terri.

  “You had no right to tell my business! No goddamn right!”

  “I thought she knew,” Terri said haplessly, scanning the room for the producer, the one who assured her it was okay to have this conversation with this woman. The one who vigorously insisted on Terri broaching the subject, but the little cow was nowhere to be found.

  Camera’s rolled. A big brute of a stagehand came out of nowhere, grabbed that wild woman around the waist and lifted her off the table, suffering the torment of her driving her one remaining heel into his shins.

  “Th-they told me-” Terri stammered.

  A vortex of confusion and disbelief swept Terri up and away to Oz. This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t happening… was it?

  The sound of laughter behind her caught Terri’s attention.

  “Told you she was shady,” the one Terri thought liked her said to the woman standing beside her, a woman who’d hardly spoken a complete sentence to Terri during this entire season of filming.

  “It’s the quiet ones, girl,” another woman said. “The ones with no fuckin’ life.”

  The word ‘fuckin’ would be bleeped out for television. Terri had no idea why that mattered in this moment, but it all flowed in slow motion, so details were magnified.

  “This is ridiculous,” she heard herself say, backing away and shaking her head.

  Terri suddenly stumbled, shoved aside by another sister wearing the most impeccable white pant suit she had ever seen.

  “She didn’t have to tell me shit, ‘cause I already knew!” that woman shouted, bounding toward the one shoed woman twisting and fighting to free herself from the grasp of Gargantua. “You still want him! You still throwing your desperate, fat ass at him! Bitch, he don’t want you! He never wanted you!”

  Another brute grabbed this one and held her back. Arms flailing, legs kick
ing at air, mouths spitting and cussing. An explosion of ridiculous chaos filmed for the world’s entertainment and humiliating embarrassment, as Terri stood like a statue, wide eyed, mouth gaped open, forced to face the mess her career had become.

  The magic of make believe.

  The magic of Terri.

  She used to believe in both but not anymore.

  Being an actress was the only thing she ever wanted to be, the only thing Terri Dawson ever thought she could be. Sure, she waited tables, took the occasional temp job to pay the rent, but she’d never committed. Terri knew that Plan A was the only acceptable plan there was, and that Plan B was for losers. Acting was her passion, her dream, but this? This wasn’t acting.

  She got her first big break twenty-three years ago, landing a small, but recurring role on a weekly detective show, Streets of Vegas. Terri played a rookie cop with a sharp wit and occasional brilliant deduction who sometimes revealed golden nuggets to the stars of the show. Nuggets that usually led to the capture of the bad guys. She was on that series for six years before they killed off her character. The producers were flooded with angry fan mail for months after that happened, but of course, there was no way for them to bring her back, and they wanted to, but Terri had moved on.

  A year later she won her first feature film, not a leading role, but still… a sci-fi flick about a spaceship on a science expedition. The ship falls into a black hole, catapulting the crew into a whole other dimension. Terri played a scientist who ended up getting sucked out into space trying to save the crew, but the film grossed more than fifty-million and she had a whopping, twenty-seven minutes of screen time before she died.

  But it was when she landed a part as a regular on a daytime soap opera that Terri really hit her stride. She played Claudia Braxton, a widow and new doctor at the hospital in Ashford, Wisconsin, holding a deadly secret close to her heart. The secret was that she’d murdered her husband using an untraceable drug she’d slipped into his cocktail. But it wasn’t Claudia’s fault. He was abusive and she thought she was just giving him a sedative to keep him calm. Somehow, the sedative had been switched and what should’ve been a small dose to put him to sleep, ended up being lethal. Terri played Claudia Braxton for eight years before the character’s past finally caught up with her and she was sent to prison.

  Commercials, a six-month stint as a daytime talk show host, voice-over work and too many bit parts to count, blurred together in one murky, shit-brown colored career. Terri made enough to keep the lights on, but that big break she’d hoped for, the one with her name at the top of the movie poster, the one that resulted in her walking up to receive that Emmy or Oscar, never came. But reality television did… and she answered.

  Boring? Did Terri hear that right?

  “That’s a bit harsh, David,” her agent, Roxy Stewart argued in Terri’s defense.

  Vivacious Vixens of Atlanta was cable network’s highest rated reality show, and Terri had just wrapped up her first season. It was the most brutal thing she’d ever done. Between those vicious women, manipulative producers and ridiculous storylines, every time she was on screen Terri felt like she’d been bathed in cow manure, but she pushed through. Terri showed up on time, repeating the asinine lines they fed her to keep the drama flowing without fail or complaint. “You’re firing me?” It was Terri’s voice, but she couldn’t believe those words had the nerve to pass her lips. She’d been in this business for damn near a quarter of a century and never once had anyone complained about her talent, work ethic, or commitment to her craft.

  “Viewers can’t connect with your storyline, Terri, because there isn’t one,” David Randall, the show’s producer responded, his once inviting green eyes, now cold and merciless.

  He’d turned somersaults when she agreed to be on this show. The network had even hosted a cocktail party in Terri’s honor, touting her as that breath of fresh air needed to take the show to new heights and add a new level of class. Bloggers, YouTubers, and network entertainment news shows gave Terri more press than she’d ever had in her life, and just like that, she was relevant again. But it wasn’t class they wanted. It was trash. They wanted her to make a fool of herself like the other cast members, to roll around in the reality world like a pig in slop, tainting her hard earned and respectable legacy.

  The truth was, she never wanted to do the show. Roxy begged her to do it, convinced Terri that reality television was a way to resuscitate her fading career. The women on that show were laughable, overly made-up creatures with small, forest animals for eye lashes, thousand-dollar wigs and stuffed, oversized booties. Terri was the only real actress among a cast of women famous for embarrassing displays of over the top, low down, oily drama.

  “How can they connect with her, David, when Shannon and Dee Dee get all the screen time?” Roxy continued. “She can’t build a storyline if the only time she’s on screen is with those two drama queens.”

  He laughed, “What do you think this show is about, Roxy? Drama. And Shannon and Dee bring it better than anyone, especially better than Ms. Dawson, here.”

  “She’s a respected actress. Surely, you don’t expect her to make a fool of herself like the other nobodies on that show.”

  “That’s exactly what I expected,” he said, without hesitation. “Transparency is everything on a show like this, ladies. It’s called “reality” television for the authenticity cast members bring to the show. That sells it. Viewers want the low-down-dirty-in-your-face-unapologetic ridiculousness of whatever that means. You knew that coming in.”

  “She’s only been on one season,” Roxy reminded him. “She deserves a contract renewal, David. Another chance to—”

  “Viewers want unscripted reality, Terri. You didn’t bring it.”

  “Unscripted?” Terri huffed at this well-dressed clown. “Do you hear yourself?”

  The show was anything but unscripted. Oh, sure, some conversations were organic between the cast members, but when producers felt things were becoming a little too tamed and sensible, they’d find a stick to pick the shit with, feeding vomit inducing lines to attention hungry women who’d swallow anything to be relevant.

  David slumped back in his chair and sighed, “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, you mean when your fuckin’ little minions crawl around on their bellies whispering shit, conveniently off camera, telling me what to say? Or, maybe it’s all the text messages blowing up my phone from some little assistant snot-nosed producer reminding me of all the things being said about me by all those other bitches behind my back, egging me on about how pissed I should be? You mean that kind of unscripted? This isn’t fuckin’ high school, David.”

  His jaws tightened. David glared into her eyes like he hated her. “No, it’s reality television, Ms. Dawson. Lucrative, with a formula that works for anyone willing to get off their high goddamned horse and work with it. Obviously, that’s not you.”

  A week later, Terri’s life was summed up by a half-eaten family sized bag of Lays potato chips, a nearly empty package of Vanilla Oreo Thins, and a two-day old container of fried rice and sesame chicken littering the bed she’d been in since that meeting with David. Remnants of a junk food overdose ushered in a painful revelation; one she could no longer ignore. Her career was over and had been for longer than she wanted to admit.

  The day Terri got fired, Roxy left her with an empty parting promise, “I’m your agent, T, and I’ll keep looking for new opportunities until something comes up that’s worth the time for someone with your talent. Trust me. The perfect script is out there, and we’ll find it.”

  Terri forced herself out of that bed and stood looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, finally coming to terms with her new truth. She made the gut-wrenching decision to walk away from a career that abandoned her long ago. There was no place left for Terri Dawson in this industry and she was tired. She was mentally and spiritually exhausted.

  A normal life. For as long as she could remember, she’d run from the very
idea of such a thing and had no clue of what it could look like. Terri thought of her parents, two hardworking people who got up every morning and headed out, rain or shine, to the classroom for her mother, and the insurance office for her father. Normal had been all they knew, and they reveled in it. People did that. As odd as it seemed to Terri, there were folks in the world who were quite comfortable with the nine-to-five existence for forty years of their lives before retiring quietly to fishing trips and rocking chairs.

  The idea of routine had always soured in her stomach. She lived for the magic, where she could be anybody and do anything. The world of make believe had always been more interesting to Terri than the real world ever could.

  “Not anymore,” she murmured, filled with mourning.

  Tears flooded her eyes and blurred her reflection, washing away the idea Terri always clung to of who she was… who she thought she was.

  Maybe now it was time for her to learn who she really was. Whatever that meant.

  Pick Up The Pieces

  Three months after being fired, Terri left Atlanta in her rearview mirror. She headed to Houston and the sanctuary of her best friend, Nona’s, guest house to hide her shriveling soul from the rest of the world until she could figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up.