Coda (Songs of Submission #9) (5 page)

“I missed you,” she said, and I knew what she meant.

“You barely knew me.” I rolled her onto her stomach. I wanted to tie her up, but I couldn’t. I had in the studio, but I’d kept thinking as I stroked her back,
what if the heart rejects me and she’s tied down?

She tucked her hands under her thighs. “How much do I need to know you to love you?”

“Put your hands on the headboard,” I said, pulling her hair from her face.

She stretched her arms and turned to face the big glass doors onto the patio. The beach on the other side was private, and that slice of sunset was ours alone. Her eyes were blasted light brown in the dying sun, and they followed me as I stepped back and looked at her.

She was long and beautiful, with hair like a turbulent ocean. She was my songbird, my goddess, my slice of control in a world of chaos.

Ten years with her was better than sixty with anyone less.

I picked her legs up by the ankles and bent the knees, spreading them apart. Her cunt was wet, and her ass was welted pink. I looked back up at her face. Her eyes were closed tightly, wrinkles in the skin around her wet lashes, and I remembered how hard I’d hit her. Six months’ worth of frustration. I’d never hit her out of anger, only arousal, but maybe the two had gotten mixed up somewhere.

“This hurts,” I said, hovering my hand over her ass.

“Yes,” she said, eyes open into the sun again. “Thank you.”

She wasn’t trained to thank me for spankings. No one had told her it was how a submissive was supposed to please their master. She simply thanked me because she’d gotten something from me she couldn’t give to herself. How could I not love her?

“Wait here.” I kissed her cheek and went to the bathroom.

I snapped open the medicine cabinet. I had a shaving salve and a lubricant. Abandoned hair things. Toothpaste. Band-Aids. Monica had a pale pink box of who-even-knew under the sink. The movers had taken everything and brought it from my house to this new house, and my wife and I had been too distracted and too vanilla to note where we kept the salves for her poor, welted ass. I’d been a sorry excuse of a dominant.

I laughed at myself and put the lubricant back. That wouldn’t work.

I snapped it open. Little half-used tubes of whatnot clacked around. Perfumey stuff that would burn. Zinc oxide would be fine for a small area, but her whole bottom needed attention. I clicked open a smaller box. Ah. Sunburn ointment and Neosporin. Perfect.

I checked a little velvet bag with a drawstring. I didn’t know what I was hoping for, maybe the home-run of ass lotions or a magic unguent that would make her able to sit for more than five minutes without flinching. I just opened it and slid out a white plastic stick. A pregnancy test.

The nerve to my heart had been cut during the transplant, so I couldn’t feel it stop and seize up. Couldn’t feel the squeeze in my chest. But I knew it was there.

I turned the plastic wand. Not breathing. Not thinking about the fact that I’d been snooping into something that had been inside a bag, inside a box, inside a cabinet.

Not pregnant.

I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t disappointed. I just realized how much I wanted a different result and how little control I had over it.

I slapped everything back in its place and went into the bedroom. She was still there, facedown, hands touching the headboard, bathed in the sunset. It would be dark in a few minutes, so I turned on the little lamp by the bed.

“I found these in your stuff,” I said, holding out the tubes.

“I think the Neosporin’s expired.”

I flipped the tube. “Next month.”

“Yes, sir.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “Ass up.”

She shifted, arching just enough to get her pelvis off the bed.

“Goddess, when I say ass up, I mean ass up.” I put my hand under her and jacked her up until her ass was in the air.

She groaned. I spread her legs under her and pressed down on her lower back. Perfect. I kissed a raw welt, and she squeaked in pain.

“None of that.” Though my words were cruel, I didn’t want her to hurt right then. She’d earned her pleasure.

I squeezed a lump of the sunburn cream onto my finger. It was cool to the touch, and when I put it on the pink skin, she breathed easily.

“Now,” I said, “we have a problem. Fucking you in the ass isn’t going to solve it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First off, we need to drop the sirs and thank yous and all that shit until I say otherwise. We’re off scene. Verbally. But the ass stays up, or I’ll welt your welts.”

“Fine.”

“I want you to talk to me.” I dragged a mound of clear cream over the curve of her ass, watching it get smaller in the seam between her and me, disappearing into a cool coat.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Everything is fine. I think, just… I think I needed this. What you’re giving me now.”

I ran my fingers on the inside of her thigh until there was no cream on them, and I slipped my middle finger between her legs. Her eyes fluttered closed.

“You’re not fine. You’re wet as fuck.” I put my fingertip on her clit. “You’re so close I shouldn’t even touch you. But fine? You’re not fine.”

“I am. I—”

“You don’t tell your husband you’re not happy and an hour later tell him you’re fine because he fucked you hard enough.”

I slid two fingers inside her. Wet didn’t describe her. She tightened around me, and my dick stretched my pants. I pulled my hand out and ran it over her clit again, front to back, touching every surface, waking it up.

“Jonathan, I can’t talk to you like this.”

“You don’t talk to me, period.”

“I want to come.”

“You’ll come.” I gingerly spread her ass cheeks. She looked as if she’d been fucked by a battering ram. Bruises were rising already, and she was deep red around the edges. I’d need to leave that part of her alone for a while. “Tell me.” I kissed her lower back while stroking between her legs. “Tell me how it’s been for you.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to upset you. I just want you to be okay.”

“I am okay, except that you’ve been closed to me.” I put three fingers in her, and she bucked. “Stay still. You can take your hands off the headboard.”

She tucked them under her.

I slowly removed my fingers. “Tell me one thing you think of that makes you worry.”

She sighed.

I put my hands on her thighs and kissed her clit. “Tell me.”

“I love you.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She paused. “And I wonder if you’ve taken your rejection meds.”

“I know you’ve been checking the bottles.”

“When I’m here.”

“Exactly.” I gave her a long stroke with my tongue.

She groaned but stayed still. Such a good woman. “I told you I’d stop traveling if you wanted.”

“I don’t want.”

“Why?”

I sucked her clit because it tasted good and because I wanted to please her, but mostly because I didn’t know how to answer her question. She’d just accepted my encouragement and never asked why it was there. I felt the muscles of her thighs tremble and tighten.

As if she spoke best on the edge of orgasm, she continued. “You throw me away. We have such a short time together, and you kick me out. Jonathan, if you don’t want me, let me go. Don’t stay out of obligation. Not for ten years of misery with me.”

I pulled my face away. “Oh God, Monica. You can’t mean that.”

I’d intended to torment her for as long as it took, then bring her to orgasm with my tongue until she begged me to stop. But she broke me with those words, and I changed the plan. I got on my knees and pushed her onto her back. Her hair made a ladder across her face, and I brushed it away. Her eyes were wet, and her face was creased from being pressed to the sheets.

“I mean it,” she said. “That heart has ten years in it, and you can’t spend them with the wrong person just because you got married under pressure. It’s wrong.”

“Would you have married me if I’d asked you under any other circumstances? If I’d taken you up to Mulholland and asked you under the stars, with a ring and a few nice words?”

“I would have said yes.”

“Why?”

“I love you is why. But that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to stay now. Because you wouldn’t have asked. Not for a while.” I must have had a look on my face or made a sound that hit a button, because she blinked, and tears ran down the side of her face. “I’m not trying to make it about me, and I’m not looking for reassurance. But if you deny it…”

“I’m not denying it. I would have asked you… I don’t know when. After a few birthdays. There are no rules for the way it happened.”

“I want you to think about it,” she said.

“About what?”

“About if this is what you really want.” Her voice was sober and cold. “If I’m who you really want to be married to.”

“Goddess…”

“No, I mean it. If you want to be together but not married. I just want you to have what you want. I want you to be sure.”

I almost answered. I almost reassured her and told her how I felt about her. I almost made metaphors with the sky and stars, weaving threads of certainty into a gauze of confidence. But even if I got her to believe it for a second, she’d wake up wondering if I’d lied to appease her.

So I kissed her cheek. “Will you stay?”

She nodded, and I felt the insecurity in it. She’d never been insecure with me, and it unmoored me at the same time it filled me with a feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.

I unbuttoned my shirt. She reached up and helped me, pulling it off and throwing it across the room. I got my pants off and stood over her naked body. Her magnificent tits were goose bumped, nipples hard, skin golden in the lamplight.

“Spread your legs for me.”

She did it, hitching up her knees. There was so much between us. I would have married her in an instant, under any circumstances, and as I wedged myself between her legs, I knew my job wasn’t to reassure her with pretty words or gifts but with actions. She’d believe it, or I’d die trying.

I put her hands over her head and leaned on them. “Look at me.”

Her eyes went wide, looking up at me. “May I come?”

I pushed against her with the rhythm of slow torture. “Quiet now, goddess. Don’t ask again.”

Her face went from pleasure to constricted concentration as she tried not to come. I fucked her harder. She pleaded with me without saying a word. Her face begged for release, her beauty crunched into pain.

“Say my name,” I said.

“Jonathan.”

“Monica.”

“Jonathan.” She cried it, sobbed, breaking herself into pieces to say it.

“Come, my wife. Come for me.”

She came in two strokes, arching and twisting. I held myself back until she’d finished, and I drank in every cry, every moment, every shudder.

My purpose in life had been simple up until then. Live. Just live. Now I had a resolution. Love her until she believed it.

MONICA

L
ove was easy. Love, the way everyone else defined it, was the fun part. But every hell, every conflict, every bit of miserable anxiety in those first six months had been born of nothing but love. I’d thought that was my new life. Ten years of it at least, until his heart gave out and he had to find another. Then another ten. Or more. Or less. Or not. Or maybe. I was playing Russian roulette with God by being away so much, but I thought he wanted me away, and he thought I wanted to be away. I didn’t know whether to jump or crawl those first six months, then he came to the studio and fucked me like an animal.

The morning after he’d reclaimed me, with my ass aching and my cunt as sore as it had ever been, I woke up forgetting to wonder about his pills and his life. Just for a second. In that crack in my wall of concern bled something else I hadn’t thought about since Sequoia. It had needled me every time I saw Declan and disappeared behind the buzz of death seconds after Jonathan’s father left the room. Now that I thought of it, while in Jonathan’s arms with the sound of the ocean outside, I couldn’t go another second without telling him, even if it meant it was our last together.

His eyes were closed, light lashes casting darker shadows. His chest rose and fell under me, and his scar was hard white beneath my hand.

“Jonathan,” I whispered, hoping he was asleep.

“Yes,” he answered, eyes still shut, as if he was wide awake and had been listening to my thoughts.

I got my knees under me, the pain of every movement reminding me of how many times he’d brutalized me and how consistently I’d begged for it. “I need to tell you something.”

He opened his eyes. Had they always been that green? Or was it a trick of the light and my fear of losing him?

“Okay, go ahead.” He stroked the top of my breast.

I pulled his hand away and held it in my lap. I paused. A hundred years passed, and he said nothing. Not a word of encouragement or doubt. I could have hanged myself in the amount of time he’d wait. As always, he was a patient man in all things.

“When you were… I mean, you weren’t yourself,” I started, “and you were dying right in front of me. I thought you were second on the list for a transplant. It was like… I thought that was it.”

His brow creased as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about. God, there were so many little details, and I wanted to tell this story fast and dirty so I could get it over with.

“You hate your father already, so it’s not like this will make it worse. I went to him because I wanted something.”

“What did he want in exchange?” His voice was hard and cold, and the implications of his assumptions justified the tone.

“Forgiveness from you. Enough to get your mother back to him.”

He put his hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. “That’s what that whole thing was about. I barely remember it. I was in and out of consciousness ten times in a minute.” He patted my hand then rubbed my fingers. “What did you want?”

I balled my hand into a fist. I didn’t want his affection. I couldn’t bear to feel it stop when I put the pieces together for him. “So I saw Brad’s list. I didn’t understand how it worked. So I thought what I was seeing was… you were second, and I thought it meant you were going to die. It seemed like a guarantee. And Paulie Patalano was brain-dead and right on the fourth floor.” Unable to stand the weight of his gaze, I looked in my lap, where his hand rested in mine, our fourth fingers still circled by the cheap silver key rings. “I thought your father could get me access to Paulie’s room.”