Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (105 page)

“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 stock anything we needed for her poor, welted ass. I’d been a sorry excuse of a dominant.

I laughed at myself and put the lubricant back. That wasn’t going to work. I guessed I was within my rights to check Monica’s little pink box. We were married, after all, and it was for her own good.

I snapped it open. Little half used tubes of whatnot clacked around. Perfumey stuff wasn’t going to work. It would burn. Zinc oxide would be fine for a small area but this was a whole bottom that 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 the white plastic stick. A pregnancy test.

I didn’t have a nerve to my heart, 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 in something that had been inside a bag, inside a box, inside a cabinet.

One line.

Not pregnant.

I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t disappointed. I just realized how much I wanted there to be two lines, and how little control I had over it.

I slapped everything back in its place and went into the bedroom. She was still there, face down, 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 her lower back. Perfect.

I kissed a raw welt and she squeaked in pain.

“None of that,” I said, and 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 sunburm 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. 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 she and I, 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 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 wasn’t a word to describe her. She tightened around me, and my dick stretched my pants. I pulled my hand out, running 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 like she’d been fucked by a battering ram. The bruises were rising already, and she was deep red around the edges. I’d need to leave that part of her alone for awhile. “Tell me,” I said, kissing 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 travelling 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, and as if she spoke best on the edge of orgasm, and 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. Because you wouldn’t have asked. Not for awhile.”

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 what 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 in the morning wondering if I’d lied to please 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 as 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 goosebumped, nipples hard, skin golden in the lamplight.

“Spread your legs for me.” She did it, hitching her knees up. 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. “May I come?”

I pushed against her, going to 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 finished, drinking 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.

chapter 4.

MONICA

Jonathan loved me. I never questioned that. His love was in everything he did. I heard it in his voice and felt it when he fucked me. Even when he took me like a stranger and reveled in hurting me, there was love in his abandon.

I also didn’t question his desire to be married to me, or his commitment in what he thought were the last moments of his life. I was worthy of his love. I’d earned it, and he’d earned mine. We’d earned the easy part, and the hard part. Most couples don’t face life and death tests of their love until they’re old and grey, or until they had children in middle school, but he and I had been put through the fire unprepared and come out stronger.

Yet, we’d missed the basics.

“So, I hear you want to get moving on this before Mrs. Drazen goes to Paris?”

I sat next to Jonathan, on his couch, frozen in shock. “Paris? I didn’t say I was going?”

“You’re going. It’s a huge opportunity.” He turned back to the agent, who had a decal of a smile across the bottom of her face. “She’s the opening act for—”

“Nobody,” I interrupted. “I’m not going. So, anyway. No.”

The real estate agent’s name had been Wendy. Like any real estate agent in Los Angeles, she was perky, perfect coiffed, and blandly unthreatening. She’d come highly recommended for her discretion, her taste, and her ability to manage massive amounts of money seamlessly.

“What kind of house were you looking for?”

“Kind of house?” I’d asked, stalling. Jonathan had been out of the hospital a month and we’d spent it managing a heart transplant. Appointments. Doctors. Medical procedures I didn’t understand. Big pills in little boxes. A diet and exercise regiment that made me shudder. And Jonathan himself, my husband, feeling shaky and unsure. I woke up most mornings feeling unqualified to live my life.

“Era,” Jonathan had said impatiently. I heard the rasp in his breath. It was late afternoon, and he was going to need to rest. “Something modern. Fifties. I’m sick of leaded glass.”

“I, uh—”

“Did you have a neighborhood in mind?” Wendy interrupted me, making eye contact with Jonathan.

“The hills,” Jonathan said. “Beechwood, maybe.”

“Really, I think—”

“Great. How many bedrooms? Or do you just want to go by square feet?”

“Big.” Jonathan told her. “This house is cramped.”

“Cramped?” I interjected. I’d thought his house was palatial, but I’d grown up with eleven hundred square feet, and I didn’t like being bulldozed. They both looked at me, and I felt ashamed. And then I’d felt ashamed for feeling ashamed. It wasn’t that Jonathan and I disagreed on the style or size of the house that embarrassed me. It was the fact that we hadn’t discussed it.

“Wendy, I’m sorry,” I’d said, standing. “We’re obviously not ready to discuss this. Can we get you to come back some other time?”

“Of course!” she chirped, and was gone in a flutter.

“What was that?” Jonathan asked.

“We’re wasting her time until we can come together on something.”

He’d looked tired, as usual. He always looked tired in those first months. It had been why I didn’t talk to him about anything important. I didn’t want to exhaust him. I thought it was the best way to help him get better.

He leaned on the arm of the couch and crossed his ankles, the same posture as the night I’d gone to see him at his office..

“Whatever we get should be the exact opposite of what I had without you.”

“I think that’s reactionary.”

“That’s a big word that means nothing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Who were we, standing half a room away from each other with our limbs crossed? How did any of this matter? How did it become important?

If he wanted to pass the next ten years in a big modern house overlooking the ocean, who was I to say otherwise? Wasn’t that a small price to pay to be with him?

“I want you to go to Paris,” he’d said. “You’ve never been.”

“Who’s going to watch you? Who’s going to make sure you don’t forget to do what you’re supposed to?”

“If you want children to take care of, that can be arranged.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you don’t need to baby me.”

Love 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, and then he came to the studio and fucked me like an animal.