Collection: A Submission Series Story Collection Read online

  Collection

  A Submission Series Story Collection

  CD Reiss

  RACHEL - first appeared as an email bonus.

  Copyright © 2013 by CD Reiss

  FIRST MORNING - first appeared on Becs Blog

  Copyright © 2013 by CD Reiss

  A VALENTINE - first appeared with the SubClub Books

  Copyright © 2013 by CD Reiss

  TWITTER CHAT - first appeared on Twitter

  Copyright © 2014 by CD Reiss

  BREATHE - Copyright © 2016 by CD Reiss

  Parts of BEAT first appeared in the Cocktales Collection

  Copyright © 2019 by CD Reiss

  COUNT - Copyright © 2020 by CD Reiss

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. I made up the characters, situations, and sex acts. Brand names, businesses, and places are used to make it all seem like your best real life. Any similarities to places, situations or persons living or dead is the result of coincidence or wish fulfillment.

  Contents

  Collection

  Rachel

  Rachel

  First Morning

  1. Morning

  A valentine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Love Note

  1. Love Note

  Twitter Chat

  1. Twitter Chat

  Breathe

  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

  Beat

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  COUNT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  IRON CROWNE

  APPENDIX - QUARANTINE COUPLES

  1. JONATHAN AND MONICA

  2. ANTONIO AND THERESA

  3. GABRIEL AND CARRIE

  4. CADEN AND GREYSEN

  5. ADAM AND DIANA

  Also In Kindle Unlimited

  Collection

  This is a collection of Jonathan and Monica bonus materials that are out of timeline. They fill gaps in the story or flesh out the ending.

  For a time, I had some of these in the back of the Complete Submission bundle, and they’ve been released in various, odd ways as parts of anthologies, or on blogs. Some were on my website, but then I screwed up the coding and poof, they were gone.

  Point is, you may already have seen them. In the end, keeping them in Complete Submission messed with the flow of the story, so I took them out.

  I didn’t want them to be forgotten, so I put this bundle together for you.

  I hope you discover a new piece of Jonathan and Monica to love.

  Rachel

  Rachel was released in 2013 as a bonus for my mailing list subscribers. If you read it for the first time that way… wow. Thank you for being one of my Original Goddesses.

  Its partners, Jessica and Sharon, has been completely folded into Tease, so I didn’t include them here.

  Rachel takes place during Jonathan and Jessica’s engagement party. The best part of it is the way the personalities of his sisters came through with the Drazen family dynamics.

  Since there was no place for it in the Complete Submission timeline, you may have missed it.

  Rachel

  Do people like you ever have wishes, Jonathan?

  What does that mean? People like me?

  People who have everything. Was there ever something you wanted but could only wish for?

  * * *

  JONATHAN

  I hated the word festooned.

  Festooned implied some kind of old-world family dancing around with ribbons, draping them over lamps and doorways, catching the flowers as they fell out of their hair. It brought to mind musical theater and swaying skirts. It felt Swiss Family Robinson. Mary Poppins. The Waltons. Good night, Jon-boy.

  Despite the sour taste in the front of my tongue and the bitter one in back, festooned was the only word that suited the house on this, the day of my engagement party. I wanted to drink far more than I had. I wanted to take that bottle of Jameson’s I knew my mother hid under her bathroom vanity and sit in a corner to finish it. I wanted to suck it dry. But I didn’t do that anymore. When I drank, I held a glass and sipped until the ice melted, never finishing before. Then I waited and eventually got another. I hadn’t been drunk since I was sixteen.

  And if I did drink that bottle? Who would care but my fiancé, Jessica? Or more to the point, whose opinion did I value besides hers? Who else did I serve?

  She wanted this event, and she got it. I couldn’t deny her anything, and really, it wasn’t such a big deal to throw a party. It was nothing to gather a team of people from Hotel A to festoon my parent’s Palisades house, send invitations to the right people, and make sure there was food. My staff were experts at managing women with exquisite taste, such as my bride-to-be. It was no burden to me whatsoever.

  The burden was having the engagement at my father’s house. The burden was explaining to him that the wedding would be at the my future in-law’s residence in Venice, and his presence was not requested.

  There were reasons for all of it, of course, spite not being the least of them. I understood spite, even enjoyed it on occasion, poured over cold cubes of guilt with a chaser of regret. But this spite was too old and too ugly to enjoy.

  “There you are,” my mother’s voice came from behind me. I’d been looking out toward the yard, watching subsets of staff ready it for the flood of people. “Have you seen Jess?”

  “She’s out with my sisters getting her feet and fingers done. Something tasteful, I’m sure. No need to worry.”

  Mom slipped her hands over my shoulders, her hands brushing the fabric free of some imaginary lint. “Are you happy?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You’ve seemed down. Is it Jessica?”

  “No.”

  “The thing with your father?” Mom didn’t look concerned as much as benign. She’d perfected that look of harmlessness over forty years, and she wore it well under light makeup and a strawberry blonde chignon.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s come to terms with it.”

  “Is the bar up? I need a drink.”

  She looped her arm into mine and we walked outside.

  * * *

  My father hadn’t ever actually come to terms with anything in his life, ever. He sat and waited until opportunities presented themselves. He was utterly non-aggressive in the way a cat is utterly still outside a mouse hole, waiting for the rodent to either forget he was trapped or get hungry enough to risk everything and leave.

  The party setup was going smoothly, people in tuxedos and bl
ack dresses gadding about with purpose. The hedges had been trimmed, the tennis court locked. The pool had been cleaned, repainted and decorated with floating flowers. No one asked me a goddamn thing about anything and I liked it that way. The bartender, an actor from the looks of him, was setting up glasses in neat rows. Behind him, the majesty of the Pacific Ocean stretched into a haze where sea met sky.

  “He told me he understood,” Mom said, continuing a conversation she assumed I wanted to have. “Business deals sometimes go bad and someone gets hurt.”

  “It’s fine, ma.”

  “You should talk to him about it.”

  “Hey,” I said to the bartender. “Two Jameson’s, rocks.”

  “I’m not having any,” Mom said.

  “They’re both for me.”

  She smiled and punched my arm. “Jon. Always the joker. Listen to me. This radio silence with your father isn’t productive. I mean, he did agree to have the engagement here.”

  “You insisted.”

  “To save him embarrassment. This thing with him has put me in the middle and to be truthful, it’s stressful.”

  She knew how to feel stress, my mother. The management of anxiety was an art form with her, necessitating the use of a cocktail of medications and hospitalizations when she misjudged her secret alcohol intake. Poor Mom. Really. A willing captive in a house as big as an island nation.

  It was my turn to flick an imaginary piece of lint off her shoulder. “He took my future in-laws for everything, blew a chunk of it and passed a few million back to them. Not enough for them to get a decent lawyer.”

  “It was twelve years ago and it was a legitimate business deal.”

  “Legal. It was legal. Not legitimate.”

  Despite earlier denials, she took the glass of whiskey, holding it but not putting it to her lips, as if it was a prop. I remembered she drank wine in public and whiskey in private. I was getting muddled already.

  “I know they’re your family now, the Carneses. But don’t forget where you came from, young man.”

  As if I ever could.

  * * *

  The last family party my father and I had attended together had been seven years earlier. Sheila’s birthday had an unfortunate proximity to Christmas, so every one of her birthday parties became Christmas parties. Her house in Palos Verdes perched on the edge of a sheer drop to the ocean. For a mile in each direction, a beach as wide as a sidestreet ribboned at the base of the cliff. But toward the end of that year, the beach disappeared under rushing tides as it rained for twenty days straight.

  Children toddled underfoot, with nannies running bent-kneed behind them. Extended family on top of extended family, most drunk or on their way there, myself included, even at sixteen. I did what I wanted, like all my friends. Nothing could happen to us that money couldn’t fix, so no one paid attention.

  I had no self-control at that point. I was a loose cannon of temperamental fits, drunken rages, and risky behavior. The last incident had been driving my father’s new Maserati into South Gate to drag my friend Gordon out of a meth house. I’d thrown him into the driver’s side and hit the gas from the passenger’s side to wake his sorry ass out of a stupor. We’d sideswiped his dealer’s Escalade, four-thousand-dollars’ worth, and in the end, Gordon had gone right back to using, but my addiction to nearly dying had been sated for a month, at least.

  Then, the week before Christmas, Sheila’s birthday. Los Angles had already had twenty-two inches of rain since school started. There was a rumor Death Valley would have a once-in-a-lifetime bloom, come spring. My friends and I were planning a road trip in Charles’s Hummer just to mow our path over fields of poppies.

  I was drunk already, bullshitting with my cousin Arthur over which Ivy League schools we were going to stroll into. Which had the best clubs, where the legacies were. Arthur was a douchebag. The last time I’d driven down Sunset with him, he leaned out of his BMW to make some noise at a girl, which was bad enough. But when she flipped him the bird he shouted, “Man, I bet there’s some guy out there so tired of fucking you.”

  “Arthur, really?” I felt like getting out and apologizing to her, but the light turned green and we were gone.

  “What, Jon? Look at her. All legs and shit. Fuck her.”

  That was the last time I went out with Arthur. But at a family party, as long as we kept to schools and baseball, I could hold a conversation with him.

  Sheila’s party graduated from family thing to some kind of pre-Christmas fuckall event, and the kitchen got crowded. I was less and less inclined to move. People I knew came in and out, most not related to me at that point, and aunts and uncles kissed me goodbye and left.

  I don’t even know what I was drinking. A bong went around. It was lead crystal and totally illegal, even if the bud wasn’t, and the liquid inside was chartreuse absinthe.

  Just because.

  The movement of the party shifted down the hall, through the library and into the living room, where I saw my father was still there.

  And Rachel had shown up.

  * * *

  Was there ever something you wanted, but could only wish for, Jonathan?

  I wish I wasn’t raised by crazy people.

  Something for the future. That you want, but don’t think you’ll get.

  Yes, I—

  Don’t tell me. That’ll ruin it.

  * * *

  Jessica was nowhere to be found. She didn’t answer my texts or calls. Margie, who had taken her out for the “girl thing” with three other sisters, said my fiancé had left the spa in her Mercedes the hour before.

  “Did she have an accident?”

  “I don’t know little brother,” Margie said, grabbing a glass of wine before the first guest arrived. “She seemed fine. The usual.”

  “What does that mean?” I felt a stab of anger. Seven sisters. A couple were bound to dislike my wife.

  “Charming and polite. Warm, even. But not.”

  “Howdy!” Leanne came across the empty backyard, grabbing a glass as soon as the bartender poured it. The emerald of her dress brought out the fire engine in her hair. “You should see Jess’s nails. She got a French with an airbrush. So cute.”

  “Did you see her out front?” I asked.

  “Nope. Are those the cufflinks you’re wearing?” Leanne fixed the flowers in her hair by the reflection in the window. She wanted to make clothes, so Dad had bought her a factory. Another money-losing proposition. Next to Deirdre, the still devout, chronically depressed Irish poet, she was the most creative in the family.

  “No,” I said. “I just wore these to offend you.”

  “He wants to know how Jessica looked.” Margie said.

  “Cool and collected. She’s a rock, you know.” Leanne squeezed my cheeks. “You did good.”

  Leanne, who was habitually single at twenty-six because she was a workaholic, had no business judging, even when I agreed with her.

  * * *

  I was fifteen, and Rachel was a year and a half older when we began seeing each other, if that’s what you could call it. Discretion was absolutely necessary, so she didn’t come to any family parties. I didn’t want her near my father, period. End of. She knew why. I knew why. No one else did. Her old affair with my father when she was too young and impressionable to know better was a secret bought and paid for with jewelry and electronics. I kept it for her because she wanted it that way, and though I would have loved to tell the world about what kind of animal my father was, the understanding between myself and a few of my sisters, was that Mom would break into a hundred pieces if what she knew in her heart was confirmed. My father was, so far, the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.

  Rachel and I were rarely seen in public together unless she went to a Loyola ballgame I pitched, or if I happened to show up at a play she was in. It was hard to stay away from her, but necessary. We didn’t talk about a future past the possibility that we could attend the same college, provided she got a scholarship.
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br />   We met in my car, late at night after Mom was passed out. Dad was gone often and he would have let me out the front door anyway. The staff didn’t care, or expected no less: another irresponsible rich brat, in a society full of them, slipping out to debauch himself on school nights.

  Rachel had a harder time of it. She had a tough home life. Her stepfather went into a controlling fits, locking her and her mother in the house at night. The windows were barred and the deadbolts had inside keys he slept with. In her closet, Rachel found a trapdoor to the crawlspace under the house. I met her on the corner. Seeing her walk even a block in the dark in that neighborhood twisted my stomach in knots, every time. I never got used to it. Usually, when she got into the car, I laughed from released tension and the sight of cobwebs in her hair.