1. The Early Midlife Crisis
“Eric...” Jasmine’s sweet little giggle from under the sheet was beyond wonderful in the context of what was happening.
Eric grinned and pushed her head back down playfully. “Just stay there, and do the job of a future Countess, Jas.”
Jasmine laughed and murmured, “Countess?” before swallowing him down to the hilt.
It was the least she could do for ruining his otherwise great day by showing up.
Honestly, life had started off wonderfully that morning. Eric had woken up, enjoyed a “home-cooked” breakfast prepared by the family chef, Boucard, spent some time at the pool catching some sun, and then taken his father’s Lamborghini Muria down to the beachside strip district for some high-end shopping.
He had nailed an amazing wave on the beach while body surfing, and all in all, he had been enjoying his day from start until about six pm.
Then his day had taken a nose dive when his girlfriend, Jasmine, had swung by after her day of luncheons and shopping with girlfriends. She had let herself in, running up the stairs of his family’s palatial summer home on the beach to show off a scrap of cloth that served as a dress in some alternate Universe—frankly, Eric didn’t give a damn.
It had been sexy, though; it turned him on seeing her slim frame and voluptuous curve of enhanced breasts barely restrained behind the silken sheath. It had put on display a lot of long, tanned legs when she had turned for him in the garment with smoky blue eyes and a come-hither smile.
She called it a party dress; Eric had called it dessert.
That and she had brought along a fantastic stash of white powder party favors for their planned evening out.
He was flying high in every way, dark eyes rolling into the back of his head while her sloppy, wet mouth went to work.
Just another day in the life, when you were the Earl of Mardom’s only son.
He flipped the sheet aside and found the blonde kneeling sweetly between his thighs, and pushed his large, tanned hands into her tresses.
Eric accidentally caught a section of stitching somewhere in those lustrous depths with his signet ring, and Jasmine’s eyes turned up to him in annoyance, popping his dick from her pink lipsticked mouth before scowling at him. “Be careful of the hair, Eric.” She snapped it, and he put his hands up innocently, battling back a grin. “I literally just got it done today.”
“Sorry.” He barely meant it before he sat up in a smooth bunch of flexing stomach muscles, captured her face between his hands, and grinned. “Next time, tell them to hide the weave better from me.”
She squirmed, pouting at him prettily, but let him pull her up his body before wriggling over his straining cock, running her delicate, petite hands over his chest. “You don’t like?”
Eric again could give a shit about how she managed to look like she did, as long as she kept looking just this beautiful for him. Even on a bad day, Jasmine looked like a cross between a pornstar and a Barbie doll, and in their world, appearance mattered. “It’s fine, Jas. Hell with it. Just ride the dick, baby.”
He didn’t feel like he was asking for much more from her than exactly what Jasmine demanded from him. It was their unspoken expectation of each other that kept their shitty display of fake passion alive and well.
He kept up his body, his hair, and God fucking knew he paid for every damn date night, day out, trip, and bauble she put on. Three years they had been together, and deep down, it still surprised him when she would say something to him like, “My dog Benny just died.” And he would realize he hadn’t even known she had ever had a dog.
They were strangers feigning a relationship, and yet, they belonged together, or so the consensus was.
Their friends shared the same circles; Jasmine’s father was an oil magnate from South America, and on paper, they had all the same bullshit interests: travel, money, surface appeal. She liked his title and his cars...and his money, and he liked her face and body.
Still, deep down, Eric also hated her...just a little.
He hated her because when he looked at her, he recalled that all he had ever been and would be was equally as shallow, expectant, and as fake as the pink and white claws on her fingertips. They cheated on each other because they didn’t give a damn about one another, and all in all, their interactions were as false as her tits, lips, and hair, and it was depressing at best.
Part of him was ashamed he liked anything about their interactions, and the other half didn’t understand why he did. She was fun, in a bimbo blonde way; they got along when they didn’t have to have a deep conversation, and goddamn, but they looked amazing in a picture together.
At all times of every day, Eric felt like a stranger in his own skin; like he didn’t know anything about himself. Well, nothing except that when he was on the water, his heart sang with pleasure, and when he was alone, he found himself enjoying the solitude and the peace of his wandering thoughts.
The other day, he had snuck out without an entourage, without bodyguards, and without Jasmine –especially not her– and taken a driver down to the Maritime exhibit, something his friends would have mercilessly poked fun at him for.
He had loved that, though. Wandering through displays of old fishing boats and scavenged Viking vessels on loan from Norway for the centerpiece. He had listened to some old dude drone on and on about how the Barbarian’s of yesteryear had navigated and the tools they used to cross the Atlantic.
Dumb, useless, and a hobby that had no bearing on his life in any way. Unless it was the family yacht, his speedboats or jet skis, safe to say, he wasn’t hopping on some peasant’s fishing vessel anytime soon.
Still, he didn’t hate it when she slipped her wet pussy lips against him, playfully sucking in her plush bottom lip under before she leaned in to kiss him.
Maybe the best part of their relationship was that she was always down to fuck.
He exhaled a little shakily, excited when she sank down on him, and ran his thumbs over the petal-soft peaks of nipples she thrust into his face, and inwardly threw in the towel when he drove into her and let himself just be the shallow, self-serving monster he pretended he wanted to be.
And just like any other interaction with her, when she threw back her head and moaned for him, he was sure it was a pretty lie, and that was Eric’s life in a nutshell.
One day, Eric promised himself he might try to be a better man, but today wasn’t that day.
He grinned, rolled her over, and sank between her thighs with a playful chomp to her pretty neck. For a beautiful few minutes, Eric Rothman forgot all about his life, his family, his friends, and even Jasmine VanDaren herself while he lost himself in the pleasure of her body.
It was his only reprieve from the inner Hell otherwise consuming him, all while drowning in the glamor of a life of extreme luxury.
Irony at its finest.
~
Forty minutes later, Eric was tying his very fine Italian leather imports, impatience riding him while Jasmine finished adjusting her fake lashes in the mirror for the millionth time.
“Jas, we need to leave in twenty or we’ll be way beyond fashionably late.”
He stomped his foot down before standing, adjusting the cuff on his blazer, and drifting into his massive walk-in closet to scope his reflection out in the mirror.
A playboy stared back at him, and swear to God, he didn’t know the man in that mirror. Eric thought he had, and technically, he knew what he looked like, but for whatever reason, that night, he looked at his face and wasn’t sure he actually did.
He leaned closer to his reflection, running long fingers over the cut angle of his jaw, dark brown eyes dropping while he examined the lines of his straight nose, the width of his naturally curved mouth. He had just turned twenty-five the previous month of June. Twenty-five years on the planet, and it was like he was seeing himself for the first time or something.
Had he always had the dimple on his left side but not the right? Was that new?
Eric’s eyes flicked up and examined the arch of his brows, and suddenly, the handsome countenance he had spent so much time admiring in the past seemed like a stranger’s face. The long, wispy length of black lashes was actually a deeply dark brown, he realized; a near-perfect match to his chestnut waves of hair and his wingtip brows.
Even the brown eyes he thought he knew so well, he realized he had never known, had a slightly amber hue, streaks of the lighter shade spiraling within the rich chocolate iris like a pinwheel.
Huh. He blinked at his reflection, straightened, jarring out of his odd moment of introspection, and forcibly turned his eyes back to his wardrobe.
He looked damn good, at least. The dark brown Bonobos blazer was fine as hell paired with a black pair of Amiri brand slim-fit jeans. His boots were ASTON EDGEs, a captain style in a mottled, mocha colored leather with thin black laces. He had gone simple with a plain white tee that still had cost him a hundred and ninety dollars, if only because he thought the cotton was a decently soft fit.
His watch was a blindingly blinged, diamond, multifaced LUC that matched the tiny piercings gracing his ears, and the gold hue set off the sheen of the slim gold chain he had around his neck.
He looked like he did before heading out to every party: like he was worth a million dollars.
Eric smirked thinking about it, eyes flicking up cockily when he reminded himself to add three more zeroes to the end of that number.
Eric turned in time for Jasmine to finally come out from the bathroom, and if nothing else, she looked smoking hot.
She had curled her platinum blonde hair into loose, perfect waves; her smoky whore eyes were luminous from good drugs and skillful make-up application, shimmering with gray shadows and sporting cat-eye liner that was perfectly exotic.
The blue dress hugged her tits nicely, and she had paired them with a glittering pair of satin sapphire-shaded four-inch stilettos that made her legs look a mile long.
However, for whatever reason, that same set of metaphorical glasses he had just used to examine himself in the mirror lasered in on her as if he had her under a microscope.
Suddenly, he blinked at this woman and realized that the makeup looked a little trashy. Her cheeks were so gaunt that it was a little concerning, and then on top of it, she had highlighted that extreme sucked-in region with yet more contouring.
Her hips, he realized, were not just slim but skinny, and didn’t balance out her top-heavy fake tits, and in those heels, he could see the strung-out hyper-thin quality showing through in her thighs and overly muscular calves.
She was beautiful, exactly what his set strived for when seeking girlfriends to hit clubs with, and yet every single thing about her screamed fake to the rafters, including the bright white smile she flashed when she finished her spin for him.
He wiped it all off his face as soon as she turned back to face him. Jasmine had the gall to feign coyness when she perked happily and jiggled a tiny bag at him, packed with some seriously good snow. “You like?”
He slapped on a smile and held his hands out to receive her when she flounced over to him to put those lying lips to his, pressing up in a slather of suffocating nearness to spider around him possessively.
“I love it, baby girl. You look great.”
She tittered a laugh, flipped his blazer lapel up playfully before smoothing it back down, touched his chain, and glanced up at him from under her thin brows. “Just wait until you see me on our wedding day, baby. I’m going to wear one of those skimpy little silk dresses just to piss your mom off.”
He smiled, feeling vacant and almost alien in his own skin, nodded automatically, and just watched her turn and skip back to his vast King-sized bed. She sat on the red satin before cracking the baggie over the mirror they had already brought out before screwing earlier.
“Can’t wait.”
It was almost reflexive to say it. He headed over to partake and knew the whole time he pulled out his stash material for just this event from his bedside drawer that something had irrevocably changed for him that night.
Not sure how, when, or why, but suddenly he was a little annoyed with everything around him.
The lascivious personal quarters in this manor his parents were always traveling away from. Her, and her shitty influence over him, and the constant disrespectful comments about his mother and father, all while siphoning off their money through him vicariously.
Moreover, he was annoyed with himself because he was too weak to stop or change what he was doing.
He shoved it deep, waved her aside impatiently, ready to go be anywhere else but where he was, with who he was with currently, but arguably that was the night that Eric Rothman’s entire life flipped on its head.
~
He wasn’t sure what happened.
They hit the freeway in his beloved 1969 Shelby Cobra, and the whole time he put it into gear, he listened to Jasmine’s rapid-fire conversation in the passenger seat, but admittedly didn’t hear a word she said.
He glanced down and put it into fourth gear, revving the engine to greater heights to drown out the ceaseless sound of her high-pitched voice. Eric watched the speedometer climb, roaring to eighty, then ninety, with still more on the dial to pinnacle toward.
They had a twenty-minute drive down the coastline before reaching the club they were trying to get to for his friend Jared’s birthday party, and Eric was trying to reach it in half the time if he could.
He was tired of listening to her ramble on, and it was endless, just a drone like the buzzing of a gnat while she prattled on about sales, and future plans to the Bahamas, a new dog to get that she’d inevitably treat like shit too, and leave at home with her servants and help.
She said something about Jared, and how excited she was to see him that night, and Eric just gritted his teeth because he damn well knew she was fucking him too behind his back.
The speedometer hit a hundred, and the first splatter of rain hit his windshield like an ominous portent of the future ahead.
It was like he couldn’t stop.
He was a little spun out, teeth grinding, feeling like he was spiraling, while her mouth just fired off like a Gatling gun in the seat beside him.
He saw the crack of lightning hit the sky over the ocean in the distance, and the next second, thunder rolled like a moaning widow through the black sky with a warning that it was about to open up over the seaside city of Mardom’s capital, Bruxle, with a vengeance.
He swallowed and realized with a jolt that Jasmine had been saying his name for a minute, and sounded distressed when she finally reached out and touched his arm. “...Eric?”
He blinked and glanced at her, and saw her blue eyes wide with concern. “I’m sorry. What?”
She retracted her hand and glanced at his dashboard just as the rain began in earnest. “You’re going really fast, babe. Can you slow down? I don’t want to get pulled over with a stash on me, you know?”
He nodded curtly, forced a smile, and glanced down before taking his foot off the gas.
It was maybe the only reason they didn’t die that night.
Eric felt his engine seize before he heard something snap under the hood; the speedometer had just grazed back down to sixty, and at the same moment, the road curved ahead with a near switchback that at any other moment in time, his Cobra could have taken without a hitch.
Instead, he felt his clutch stall, and cursed violently with a lurch of terror, arm snapping out to catch Jasmine out of pure reflex alone when they hit that corner.
Past that, Eric only remembered a blur.
He heard thunder, he heard Jasmine scream, and the shriek of metal hit metal when they slammed sidelong into the roadside barrier.
He was briefly aware of the airbags deploying, her phone shooting out of her hand into his line of sight, and the shattering impact that spiderwebbed the windshield when they flipped to the side and went skidding out of control over the pavement.
The next moment, his forehead hit the airbag like he had been slapped with a brick, his vision flashed white, and then it all went dark.
A fitting end to the day he’d forever consider, the start of the rest of his life.
