Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (102 page)

I felt suddenly powerful. I’d been fucking her for months with this borrowed thing in my chest, but when she said ouch, I wanted to more than fuck her. I wanted to tear her apart.

I lost my shit at the thought of it, coming in her the way I’d been since the hospital, without control or intent; just because I was ready.

Monica came a second after I started, and we gripped each other, quivering. The steam had barely cleared the mirrors when I kissed her shoulder and realized I had a problem in my arms.

***

I stretched out in the sun with my chest to the sky and felt that thing beating. The July heat baked me, muggy and sticky, sharing sweat with a stranger’s tissue, grateful to be alive, yet in a state of constant bewilderment, thinking, how the fuck was I pulled from death for this? I pondered it too often, and for too long.

“Hey,” she said, stepping into my sunlight. She wore a pale blue dress and clunky bracelets. “I’m going.”

I patted a place for her to sit next to me.

“I can’t,” she said. “Lil’s waiting.”

I flipped my sunglasses up so I could look her in the eye and with that gaze, let her know I was entitled to a minute of her time.

“Goddess.”

“I’ll call you when I land.” She bent to kiss me, and when her lips hit mine I held her head there an extra few seconds. She smiled and trotted away.

I had a problem. She was going to Caracas for three days to open two shows with some madhouse band, and I wasn’t going with her by doctor’s orders. Not yet.

The impulsive side of me wanted to follow her, and let the team of highly-paid specialists kiss my ass, but I stayed behind. There was no need to rush. Three more days wouldn’t change anything.

When I’d met Monica, I’d known what I was. Who I was. I knew what I was made of and I knew how to get what I wanted. I’d still been in love with my idea of my ex wife, but my goddess had cured me of that.

I thought being happy was what had made me demand control in the bedroom, but I was wrong, or at least only partly right. All the soul-searching in the world had led me to a false conclusion.

I’d been dominant because I knew myself, and in knowing myself, I had the confidence to bind and hit and hurt, because I’d know when to stop.

We got home from the hospital, Monica and I, and eventually made love again. Still, I wasn’t myself. I was mostly me and partly someone else. An alien piece of meat had been lodged in me. I didn’t know what it would do. Would it beat right for me, or for the person it was meant for? Would it skip a beat at the sight of some strange woman? Would it break over a different past or a lost present? I kept dreaming it jumped out of me like a frog on a frying pan, slapping to the kitchen floor with a
splat
, beating on the tiles, squirting yellow plasma. Once, I dreamed it bounced out of me and landed in the pool, swimming with Sheila in a trail of curly red blood. And I laughed, in my dream, but when I woke up, I ran to the bathroom mirror to make sure I had a scar instead of a hole.

I’d felt like a foreigner in my own skin, dragging around a sack of muscle and bone held together with medicine. Even after the doctor appointments dwindled and life returned to something that looked like normal, I still hadn’t adjusted to being two people in one body, and my wife knew it. She was drifting away like a bottle bobbing in the surf, tide by tide. She wasn’t Jessica. She’d never leave, at least not for someone else. But she’d leave with distraction and indifference. And at the thought of the lost intimacy, I felt a blade of ice cold rage so thick I had no room for a reaction or an emotion. My head was clear. The anger had pushed out all the clutter. She was mine to lose, but she was mine.

Three days.

MONICA

I missed two things.

I missed my freedom, and I missed slavery.

I got myself caught in a nether region where I couldn’t come and go as I pleased, and I didn’t feel protected.

I was being unfair and I knew it. What man could be expected to keep up Jonathan’s intensity for any length of time? No human could continue to be a raging lion after having their heart ripped out.

So, though we burdened each other with many things, I never burdened him with my longing for my dominant Jonathan. That man was gone. I loved the man who replaced him. He was everything I almost lost in that fucking nightmare of a hospital. He was funny and thoughtful. Gracious and wise. He was still the best lover I’d ever laid my hands on.

“Hello?” His voice was thick with sleep. The sun was just coming up over Caracas, tainting the sky brown.

“I’m coming back early,” I said as I walked across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. Jacques waved. His temp copilot for the day took my rolling suitcase and stowed it underneath.

“Really?” Jonathan sounded as awake as a gallon of coffee. “I have something for you.”

“But I have to go right into the studio,” I said. “Jerry wants me to work on
Forever
for this sampler idea he’s—”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ll walk in the door the same time as if I’d stayed here. I just wanted you to know what I was doing with your plane.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Goddess,” he said, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard in half a year. It stopped me on the steps up to the fuselage door.

“Yes.” I was shocked at the small sound of my own voice.

“I don’t give a fuck about the plane.”

“It’ll be fast. I’ll be home by lunch.”

“Text me where you’re going to be.”

“Why?”

“What?”

Fuck. I promised myself I’d never forget what Jessica did to him, yet here I was, serial-bailing on him and giving attitude about it.

“It’s the same place as always,” I said, backpedalling as I snapped my seatbelt on.

***

I ate a lunch of chicken fingers and a half a radicchio salad in the engineering room. I shot the shit with Jerry and Deshawn. We talked about promoting the sampler, getting beer thrown at me in Caracas as a sign of respect, the roaches in the hotel, the excellent food. Half an hour later, we were back to work. Executives drifted in and out to hear me. Eddie even showed up for fifteen minutes.

The phone had been face down on the baby grand piano; the sheen of it let me know when the glass lit up with a call or text. But I wouldn’t pick it up. I was in the middle of something. Only when I was done did I check it.

—I want to see you—

The text had come ten minutes earlier, when I was in the middle of recording
Forever.
It was based on a poem I’d written while Jonathan was in the hospital, and I was so angry I imagined myself in an eternal, raging battle with death.

I couldn’t take a text. We were trying to get the last two words right.
Forever fuck
. It had to sound like a powerful curse, but be muddled, and on key, and gravelly and transcendent, all at the same time. My feet hurt and the foam egg carton pattern on the walls seemed inverted, my brain and eyes were so exhausted.

I couldn’t possibly take a text, even from my husband.

—Where are you?—

Ten minutes later.

—You were supposed to be out two hours ago—

I scrolled through his texts. Jerry and the sound team packed up. I was going to have to deal with this. I had my career. He knew what it entailed. He didn’t have the right to harass me while I was recording.

I took a deep breath and called him from outside.

“Hi,” I said. The parking lot behind the studio smelled like sweaty asshole and stale cigarettes.

“You’re out?” Jonathan asked.

“Just finished up.”

“I have a surprise for you when you get home.”

Home. A house in the hills that already had too many painful memories. Medications. Falls. Fights. He’d been sick and pissed. I loved him. I’d never leave him. But some days, I felt like we were coming apart at the seams.

“The guys were going to dinner. I’m a little hungry.”

He paused. The silence seemed eternal, and though I imagined him staring into space with the phone at his ear, when I heard a car door slam, I knew he hadn’t been inactive.

“Jonathan, it’s—”

“Stay there.”

“Not tonight, I—”

“This sounds to me like you’re telling me no.” The calm, arrogant dominance in his voice was like a slap in the ass because I hadn’t heard it in six months. “For the sake of clarity, goddess, when it comes to me, that’s not in your vocabulary. I don’t hear it.”

I said
yes sir
with all the sarcasm of a spoiled adolescent, and immediately regretted it. Luckily, my husband had already hung up the phone.

JONATHAN

This shit stopped tonight.

I parked in the back and went into the building. There were a couple of doors ajar, behind which I could hear the laughter and mumblings of men. I heard her three down, her voice humming, piano strings getting hammered one by one, slowly.

I slipped into the engineering room and looked at her through the window.

She sat at the keyboard, scribbling something onto a notebook, then considering the keys again, back straight, neck as long and white as a swan’s, ebony hair braised and twisted to the top of her head. A goddess. She’d waited. I don’t know what would have happened with us if she hadn’t.

The engineering booth was empty and dark, and I watched her like a movie. I saw her bite a fingernail. Close her eyes. Tap a finger, then suddenly burst out with a word in one long note. It was
you
. She hit three keys, then three different keys, sang the word again, in a different register, and wrote it down.

It was as if I hadn’t seen the length of her neck in months, nor the delicacy of her wrists. I knew every inch of her skin, every curve of her body, yet, that day, when she’d said
no
to me, I anticipated the prospect of showing her why that wasn’t going to wash any longer with no little delight.

I went back into the hall, closing the engineering room door behind me.

MONICA

His scent cut through the dank musk of the studio before the sound of the door closing reached my ears.

“Hi,” I said without looking up from my notes. “Can we meet with those guys? Jerry wants to lay out a plan for Wednesday.”

His fingertips grazed the back of my neck, and I shuddered, closing my eyes halfway.

“No,” he whispered.

“I’ll meet you at home later, if you want.”

“Stand up.”

I looked up. He stood over me, hand at the back of my neck, face broaching no arguments. I don’t know what my expression said, but my mind went utterly dark for a second.

I stood, reaching for my bag.

He gently took it from me and laid it back down. I started to object but didn’t get past the first syllable before he had his fingers to my lips.

“Unbutton your shirt,” he said. We gazed deeply at each other for longer than usual, and I knew even before my fingers touched my shirt, that he wasn’t interested in a standard, sweet, encounter.

He brushed his thumb over my lips, across my jaw, and lodged it under my chin, fording me to look at the dusty fluorescent lights.

I undid my buttons in a businesslike fashion while he spoke.

“I haven’t told you this in a long time, so I want to remind you. You are mine. Any time. Any place. Without questions. You get on your knees when I say. You spread your legs when I say. You open your mouth and take whatever I put in it. Do you understand?”

He must have felt me swallow against the heel of his hand. He was back. I didn’t know when or how, but this wasn’t sick Jonathan getting pissed at his handful of pills. This wasn’t the guy who let me top him, or the man who made love to me fearfully and gently. That man was a good husband. Difficult, because he felt like his body wasn’t his own, but a good life mate by any standard.

For as long as I’d been married, I hadn’t felt safe.

Until then, staring at the ceiling, unprepared to hear the voice of my king again. Then, my insides vibrated like a piano string and I shut my eyes tight against tears.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Pull your pants down.”

I worried about the door. Was it open? And the door to the engineering room. Anyone could walk in.

This was a simple matter of trust, which I’d forgotten how to do.
Trust him. You’re safe with him
.

I opened my pants and wiggled them down. I wore lace and garter, which felt scratchy and uncomfortable under jeans, but I wore it because I promised I would, even if I’d promised a different man.

He slipped his finger under the straps. His touch had gone electric, exactly right, like when we first met. I felt it through layers of skin and muscle, to my bones.

“All the way off.”

I stepped out of my pants.

“Why are you crying, goddess?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your safe word?”

I blurted a laugh to the ceiling. “Fuck. I forgot.”

“Do you want a new one?” He slid his finger under my bra, pushing it up, releasing my breasts. The nipples were hard candies, ready for him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your choice.”

“
Invictus
.”

He pinched a nipple and pulled it to the point of delicious pain. “Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be, for my unconquerable soul.”

“Jonathan…” His name was a prayer.

“Turn around.”

I faced the piano, putting my back to him. He slid his hand over my neck and around my shirt collar, pulling it down my arms, drawing his hands over my skin.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he said, pulling my long sleeves halfway off. He twisted the sleeves around my arms, wrapping them around and tying them tightly at the elbows.

His pause long enough for me to say, “sir?”

“Are you happy?” he asked. I heard the distinct clack of his belt buckle.

I didn’t answer. He slid his belt out of his pants with a
whook
.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that the answer?” He gripped the back of my neck

“It’s confirmation that I heard you.”

With a sharp push, he pinned my face to the shiny black of the piano.