Burn (10 page)

With that, he strode off to meet Marsha by the counter.

“Handsome guy, I’ll admit,” Darren said as we watched Jonathan move across the floor as if he owned the joint. “And not half the asshole.”

“But Kevin’s better?”

Darren shrugged. “Kevin’s my friend at this point. And so are you. So for me, it seems natural.”

“Not to me.”

“I’m getting that.”

                                                  
CHAPTER 19.
 

MONICA

The room wasn’t a room. It was one of two suites on the top floor. I saw the skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows in every direction. The décor matched the lobby’s; matte blacks and dark matte woods with textured grains stained for contrast. I traversed the corners and expanses of the living area and bedroom, every step further proof that I was alone. The black leather couch was too big. Seating for six. Closet space for a family or clothes horse.

Something was missing. After the second time I circumnavigated the rooms, I realized that I didn’t feel as though I was being watched. I hadn’t realized the feeling stayed with me when I locked my door behind me, but in its absence, I grasped that it had.

I tried to call Kevin and got no answer. We were on international roaming. He’d probably off shut his phone. We needed him. He’d taken us on to energize the creative process, but the practicalities of an installation were beyond me. If he got held up too long, Darren and I would be in a world of shit.

 I pulled my jacket off, and the sleeve went inside out. The poly-satin undersleeve’s seam had split ages ago, but the loose threads and edges were invisible when I wore it, so I kept the thing, promising to fix it some day. Were our relationships jackets we wore? Every one was a manageable, condensed, digestible thing on the outside with a gaping wound on the inside. Then when we pulled ourselves out, they prolapsed, like a jacket sleeve, and exposed the raw, broken places we never got around to fixing?

I looked at the jacket a little too long. I was so fucking horny and pink, it was painful. Jonathan was right. We could fuck ourselves blue, but until we figured out how to be together, we were only using each other’s bodies for mutual immolation.

His room was likely behind the thick wooden door with the big lock. It sat next to the empty china cabinet that would probably be filled if I called the concierge and announced I was entertaining. If Jonathan wasn’t in his room already, he would be soon enough. He had to make a show of sleeping. I touched the door, trying to feel him on the other side. I lay my cheek against it. How I wanted him. If only he wasn’t carrying the baggage of Bondage Girl, the looks, the smart comments, the self-defeating turning of my own brain.

What if I rejected him completely, again? Like an addiction, the bodily ache needed to be broken first, then the habit. If I made it through this trip, I might get home ready to take on something new. Maybe date? Maybe meet someone nice? Like any addict, I couldn’t see a world outside the drug. But I knew there was one.

I stepped away from the door and got ready for bed in a haze. I hung up the dress and got out my work clothes for the next day. I’d done all right. My voice was an instrument for the piece. I’d recorded cleanly and done good work. I just needed to finish the job. Tomorrow. I had to focus on that.

I got into bed naked, feeling the brush of cool, hotel sheets on my skin, and immediately Jonathan was back on my mind. The drug. Putting his hands on me. Stroking my back, my ass, my thighs. He cupped my breasts, caressing them, then pinched and twisted the nipples until pleasure turned into a sharp bullet of pain. My hand followed the path my mind created for him, and I looked forward to release and rest. Arching my back into the imagined warmth of him, I spread my legs, giving my fingertips a place to land. I slipped them between my folds, pretending they were his, imitating the tenderness he showed right before the roughness took over.

I rolled over onto my stomach and slipped my fingers over my clit. I wasn’t ready. How could that be? I couldn’t go to bed frustrated. I wouldn’t be able to sleep. My mind needed to talk some sense into my body, but apparently, they weren’t on speaking terms. I put my ass up and felt a little tingle that might have been something or nothing, but I didn’t touch myself. I just imagined myself in his ready position, waiting, unsure of what he’d do next. But it was too comfortable.

I slipped down to the floor.

The carpet was grey wool, rough to the touch. It dug into my knees and palms as I crawled, naked, into the living area. My arms and legs kept a midtempo rhythm, head bowed in submission to someone who wasn’t in the room. Everything was taller. I was lower than the table, the couch, the chairs. My body’s reaction was almost immediate. Fluids collected between my legs, lubricating them against each other.

What a repulsive creature I was, unable to find arousal without crawling on the floor. Even my self-loathing turned me on so intensely I had to stop crawling for a second to shudder at the power of it.

I was alone. I was safe. No one was watching. I could allow myself to feel it, to do it, to be however I wanted. I got to the door between my suite and his. On my hands and knees, I put my lips to it, thinking his name over and over, tasting the flat flavor of wood and dried lacquer, finding his sawdust scent inside it.

Doubts came, but I washed them away in the knowledge that no one had to know. Only a locked door kept the company of my submission. My sexual abdication. The resignation of responsibility and control.

When I moved my lips from the door, I saw myself in the window, a translucent reflection of a lone, naked woman crawling to her master’s door. I fell to the carpet, put my cheek on the rough wool, and watched my reflection as I turned my back to the door, hoisted my ass up, and slid my hands between my ankles.

I was ready for him, but he wasn’t coming.

I spread my knees and slipped my hand from my ankles to between my legs. I gasped, then as I pushed through the layer of thick slickness to stroke myself, I groaned.

“Jonathan,” I whispered so softly I barely even heard myself, “my king.”

Knowing him, knowing how he played and how he fucked, I touched myself ever so gently, around the opening, over the tip of the clit. I placed my fingers at the tip and pressed my hips into them slightly, then back, anticipation and hunger in every move. Two sides of myself warred. The side that wanted to just rub and orgasm out of myself, and the side that wanted to lie there with my cheek to the floor and milk it for every second of pleasure. I wanted the milking side to win. So I stroked my clit with a single fingertip three times, then once hard, then three times lightly, then stuck two fingers in my soaking pussy.

Repeat.

I heard sounds on the other side of the door. A shuffle. A light clicking on. A drawer opening. A voice speaking a foreign language as if it was on the phone.

Right there. He was right there on the other side of the door.

I pressed my finger against my clit and drew it down, hard. It hurt, just a little, then exploded into pleasure so deep I had to lift my cheek off the floor. I rubbed it again. I’d jumped four stages of desire right into orgasm close. My thighs warmed. My folds shuddered when I touched them, and my back straightened. My face came off the floor, and I kneeled, legs spread, fingers between my legs and rubbing in a circle. A ball of heat wound tight around itself in my pelvis. I crouched, pressing the heel of my hand against my clit, and then bent my back. I drew my wrist, then my forearm, along my wet slit until my fingertips reached my lower back. The constant, single direction of pressure broke the coil of pleasure, and when I straightened, bringing forearm, wrist, and hand back over my clit, I exhaled in a clenched groan. I did it again until my forehead was on the floor, and I pulled back, my forearm now a slick instrument. My ass and pussy clenched repeatedly as I tried not to cry out loudly enough to be heard by the king on the other side of the door.

                                                  
CHAPTER 20.
 

JONATHAN

Sometimes, talking to people in Asia was enough to make me want to do bodily harm to myself or others. I shouldn’t have let that phrase enter my mind after what I’d revealed to Monica in the bathroom of the Gulfstream.

Sunshine and lollipops.
I thought the words so hard I almost said them in Korean as I explained to my VP of operations that the vision for Hotel M in Seoul was exactly the same as the ones in Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, and Chicago. The spirit of the thing was what mattered. Getting the exact same designer for Seoul as we had in New York was less important than getting the same
type
of designer.

I hung up, then looked at a calendar as if I could deny the truth.

I had to go to Asia tomorrow afternoon at the latest.

Fuck.

I wanted her so badly, and it took all my concentration not to take her too soon. I couldn’t lose focus. Too much was going on. But there I was, getting Jacques on the line and telling Aling Mira to pack. I had no choice. Putting business first was a habit I couldn’t break.

That was two weeks right out of the gate. Two weeks outside LA. Outside her sphere. I didn’t want to go away. I was so close with her. So close to getting her commitment, her heart, her promise, then some shit across an ocean threatened to explode into a fuckstorm of red lacquer shrapnel. I dropped my laptop and phone on the table. My jacket went over the chair. My tie got yanked off as if it had offended me personally. Shoes, kicked. Cufflinks, tossed.

I hadn’t intended to tell her about the suicide attempt. I didn’t like talking about it, and I didn’t like her knowing, but, the minutes in the bathroom between deciding to tell her and actually doing it were more intimate than anything we’d experienced. She’d peeled off my skin and seen the isolation inside. She couldn’t turn away from me now. Couldn’t.

The door between our suites opened with a keycard, and I had it. It was mine, after all. The wood was warm to the touch, and smooth. Dry. The moldings were curved by the most perfectly even paint job money could buy. Running my finger along the seam, I imagined the little bit of air seeping through was shared between us. We were conjoined by the molecules, the scents they carried, the temperature, from her lungs to mine and back again.

I peeled off my shirt in the dining room. I didn’t want to look at an empty bed, and I wanted to be close to the door for reasons that didn’t have words my mind could define. I didn’t want to waste the air, or something equally absurd and impossible to accept.

Wearing nothing but my briefs in a hotel dining room, next to an empty china cabinet, I put both my hands flat on the door, stroking it downward. I didn’t know what was coming over me, but that door became her body, and I wanted to touch it. Needed to.

Then, through the door, I heard it. Her voice. Singing.

                                                  
CHAPTER 21.
 

MONICA

My forearm had been covered in sex fluid, and I stank of the flight and fast food. After collapsing on the hotel floor, ashamed, exhilarated, and sexually satisfied until Jonathan worked his way into my sphere again, I needed a shower.

The bathroom was black with white fixtures, and I was alone. The four showerheads were powerful, and the water was scalding hot. The frosted, glass-walled shower stall was as big as a walk-in closet. I scrubbed with over-perfumed hotel soap, and as I rinsed, I started singing a song I’d started the day before in a pencil-dulling heat. I’d memorized the words even as I wrote them. As I leaned against the glass tiles, I worked out the bridge, over and over. I felt like I had it, and it had been sticking in my craw since yesterday.

I’m scared all the time

And I need all the time

I’m scared all the time

And I need all the time

I heard a click behind me, and a chemical infusion of fear made every vein in my body pulse. A man. In my shower. Uninvited. I screamed, or tried to, but because I’d forgotten to breathe, it came out a croak.

“Shhh,” Jonathan said. He wore nothing but boxer briefs that showed the glory of his erection.

“You fucking fuck.”

“Please.” He put his hands up in a gesture meant to show me he wasn’t going to touch me.

“What on earth would compel you?”

“You.” He leaned forward, and I stepped against the wall. His forearms pressed against the wall on either side of my head, and he got inches from my face. Water fell on his dry hair, running dark paths to his face. It dropped off his nose, his brow, his chin. “You. Goddess.”

Suddenly, the sexual satisfaction I’d achieved on my knees with the whole length of my arm was inadequate. “Take me.”

“Commit yourself to me. Be mine for all the world.”

“I already told you yes.”

“Make me believe it.” His eyes closed, slowly, as if he didn’t want to see my face. He was wet, his body a waterfall. The rushes of water accentuated every curve and angle of him.

“How?”

“What was that song? I couldn’t hear all of it.”

“I wrote it yesterday.”

He opened his eyes. “Would you sing it for me?”

His body still didn’t touch mine. I felt his breath on my shoulder and the presence of his erection, and I wanted it as much as I’d ever wanted anything. He wasn’t going to touch me. Not a finger. He was going to breathe on me and whisper in my ear, naked in the shower, until I burst.

“Please,” he said.

A part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off, but another part wanted to be close to him so badly that a song seemed as, if not more, intimate than sex. “Are you ready?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath and sang for him, my voice low, much the way I sang him my song of fears in his backyard. This time, I sang without shame or contrition.