Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (74 page)

I couldn’t have. I never would have allowed it, and neither would he.

I had just gotten home when my phone blooped. I dug around my bag and found it, hoping against hope that it was Jonathan. An outsized level of disappointment flooded me. It was Jessica.

—I’m at Make on Echo Park and Baxter. I believe you’re nearby?—

That presented a problem. It was a block and a half away, but I had to get there. I believed Santon when he said I wasn’t being watched, but Jessica was. That meant something or someone would stop us from meeting in that block and a half.

Fuck it.

I looked out the back door. My house was built on a lot that was nearly vertical toward the rear. A retaining wall of cinderblock held the hill at bay, barely. Behind it, untouched chaparral stretched five hundred feet to a walkable dirt alley kids used to get into trouble. The whole stretch was unlandscapable without a bunch of money, which Dr. Thorensen had, apparently. His plot was terraced into vegetable gardens, private spaces, and a little utility area with a shed. My part of the hill, naturally, had fallen to scrub and brush. A hundred-year-old ficus with exposed roots was on the downslope, and wildflowers bloomed in spring. In the first weeks of December, dead thorns twisted around the trees, weeds turned to sticks, and brown was the new black.

I’d have to go through that to get to the path, then get spit out onto Echo Park Avenue. Of course, it wouldn’t work. I’d get bitten by a rattlesnake or something. Worse, Santon, who’d probably taken a vow to never sleep again, would be waiting for me on the street.

I dug my old cowboy boots out of the back of the closet, and a pair of jeans I didn’t care about. I’d spent the whole day trying to get this done, and I wasn’t giving up yet.

My yard needed some love. I hadn’t trimmed anything at the end of summer, so the flagstones and garden patches were covered in dead leaves and detritus. I tossed the pink and orange balls back over the fence to the Montessori school and made for Dad’s tangerine tree. He’d planted it for me before he and Mom moved away, saying it would feed me if I got hungry. It just kept growing and was high enough to hug the spaghetti of power lines crisscrossing the sky. I used it as leverage to climb the wall onto the overgrown slope.

It was pitch dark back there. The path was no more than a right-of-way between the backs of houses. Echo Park and Silver Lake were full of untended spaces. Staircases built during the Depression, forgotten paths that were never lit or patrolled that were taken over by residents for extra garden space or burial grounds for unwanted cars.

I grabbed saplings and vines to pull myself up the hill. There was garbage everywhere. Just as I was thinking about how I had to get up there in the daytime with a few plastic bags and clean it out, I was pushed into the ficus.

“Where are you going, goddess?” His voice came from behind me.

His breath in my ear, his scent in my nose, the feel of his chest on my back, the way he fit like a puzzle piece… I didn’t even want to ask him what the fuck he was doing in the woody part of my backyard.

“You didn’t call.” I leaned my head back and exposed my throat. He made me forget everything when he unlooped my scarf and put his mouth on my neck, his lips a lightning rod for the electricity to my core.

“I was busy. I’m sorry.” His teeth found the place where my neck met my shoulder, and he gifted me a little crush of pain that translated directly to pleasure. I sucked in my breath. He ran his hands down my arms, to my hands.

“Apology rejected. Return to sender.”

Knotting his palms to the backs of my hands, he pressed them to the tree trunk.

“Spread your legs,” he said in my ear. I wasn’t fast enough. He kicked them apart. He was so fucking rough, and the precarious feeling of not knowing what he’d do next sent a gush of moisture between my legs.

How long would Jessica wait? Until tomorrow. Because Jonathan had appeared, and his hands were on my stomach, pushing up my bra. He pressed my bruised places gently while finding the untouched spots and pushing his hands against them until I groaned.

“You want something?” he asked.

“I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” His voice softened as if he meant it, and his hands drifted down to my waistband.

“Are you going to fuck me?”

He unbuttoned my jeans and unzipped without answering, pressing his cock against my ass. I ground against him. “God, I want to.” He took my right hand from the tree trunk and, still pressing my left to the tree, he slid it down my pants. “But it looks like you’re going somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“You wet?”

I ran my finger to my hole and felt the sopping, slick mass under it. “Yes.”

He removed his hands from mine but curved his body around me, his front to my back, his voice in my ear. “How wet?”

“Fuck-me-now wet.”

“Touch your clit. Do it so it feels good.”

I rubbed my engorged member with one finger, circling it, pushing myself into him.

“Two fingers,” he said, pulling away just a little. “Use two fingers on it, letting the center fall in the crease between them.”

I moaned.

“Feel good, goddess?”

“Yes.”

“How good?”

“Not as good as you fucking me.”

“Good answer. Hook your fingers. Put them in your cunt. Then drag them back out to your clit. Rub with the very tips.”

“Oh, Jonathan, please. Please fuck me.”

“Don’t you like this?” There was something in his voice, some sarcasm. As though this wasn’t foreplay, but him making an argument. I stopped and started to pull my hand out of my pants, but he grabbed my bruised elbow, making me flinch. “Don’t stop. Make yourself come.”

“I don’t—”

“Do it.”

I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t demand he explain what the fuck he thought he was doing because when he said
do it
, I wanted to. I wanted to please him, to submit, to
be his
. I was more than a submissive because submission implied a choice. I was his slave.

I rubbed my clit, gathering fluids, juice flooding between my fingers. I let out a high-pitched
ah
then choked it off.

“Let’s hear it, Monica.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

He moved to my side, crouching so his breath was on my cheek. I turned to face him, eye to eye, my legs spread, my left hand on the tree, my right hand in my pants. He still didn’t touch me, just breathed with me as my lower lip dropped and my lids hooded.

“You like it.”

“I like you better.” My breaths got shorter and hitched. My cunt was hot under my fingers, twitching, engorged, soaking.

“I bet,” he said.

“Take me.”

“Come.”

“Yes.”

The tingle ran from my knees to my waist, and my ass bucked as if Jonathan was still behind me. I cried out loud enough for the neighbors to hear, driving my hips into the tree as if I was fucking it. My chest rose and fell against the white bark, my cheek feeling its rough winter texture as I looked at him, just a shape in the darkness.

“That was okay?” Jonathan asked.

“More, please.” I took my hand from my pants.

“You’re insatiable.” He kissed my wet fingers. “I’m glad you like it, because that’s your life if I go to jail. I’m not one of those nice guys who will tell you to date other men. I’m the guy who owns you whether I’m in jail or not.”

“Tell me what you think she’s going to say.”

He leaned on the tree and put my index finger in his mouth, sucking it clean. “Is it so wrong to want to keep you away from the ugliest parts of my life?”

“Yes.” The feel of his tongue as he sucked my fingers was arousing me again. I leaned my shoulder against the tree, bracing myself against the drop down the hill with my boot heel.

“It’s wrong to want to protect you? To keep you above my shit? A goddess?”

“Yes. It is wrong. It can’t last. If you make me into some perfect thing that’s separate from your life, we’re going to disappoint each other. And that’ll be it. We’ll be over.”

“I don’t think so.” He finished with my fingers and knotted our hands together.

“Yes, Jonathan, yes. We’ll be over. I love you. I love your past, no matter what it was. I love your present, and I want to be your future. But lying will break us. One day you’ll wake up and realize I don’t really know you, and it’ll be too late to bring me close. That’ll be it, whether you leave me or not. We’ll be over.”

“My secrets might be out for public consumption very soon. So let’s have
now,
before you run away.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“No.”

“Then I have to go meet someone.” I dropped my hands and grabbed a branch, hoisting myself up the hill.

He put his hands on my biceps and pulled me back. “Don’t. Just give me time.”

“No.”

I said it, twisting a little to face him, and lost my balance. I fell back, my weight on him. He lost his footing, and we tumbled down the hill, all elbows and feet, complete with
oofs
and screams and the sounds of cracking, rustling brush. My world blurred into a spinning, dark vortex before I landed in a heap at the top of the retaining wall. Jonathan fell onto the flagstones in the backyard, his back slamming against the low wall bordering the tangerine tree.

“Oh!” I shouted, scrambling up. “Jonathan!” I jumped the wall and landed by him.

“Are you okay?” he asked, though I was standing and he was prone.

“I’m fine. I’ve fallen down that hill a hundred times.” I pulled him up. He cringed.

“Are you sure?” He picked a twig from my T-shirt, and I brushed his collar. He turned his head and grimaced.

“Could I be any more bruised than I am already?”

He smiled, then I smiled, and we laughed. He put his hands on my cheek, and we kissed through our laughter. He bent his neck and drew a long breath.

“I think you twisted your neck good,” I said. “You should have just let me go meet her.”

“Never.” He kissed me again, keeping his neck straight. I kissed him back, deeply, because I was about to disappoint him.

“Now,” I said. “And if not now, tomorrow.”

“I’ll take you to bed.”

“I thought I was too beat up to fuck?”

“I’ll make it work.”

“Every day between now and when you’re ready to talk to me? Your whole plan for dealing with Jessica can’t be to keep me in the dark? She’s going to get you declared incompetent. This is all right with you?”

He went to put his right arm around my shoulders and stopped himself, groaning.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine. It’s not that big a hill.”

“But you fell on a bunch of pavestones.” I put my arm around his waist and helped him to the back door. “And you’re not that young any more, you know.”

“Oh, you are getting such a spanking for that.”

“Not if you can’t lift your arm.”

“I’ll spank you with my dick.”

He barely got through the sentence before he started laughing. I joined in because the visual was so close to a pornographic Monty Python skit that we couldn’t hold it in our heads without laughing. We were still cracking up when I sat him in a kitchen chair.

“Ow!” he complained between laughs. I kneeled in front of him and unbuttoned his shirt. “Not now, baby. I’m too tired.”

I pushed the shirt as far over his shoulders as I could. “Can you get out of this?”

“Are you making a pass at me? Because I’m already taken by a brown-eyed goddess.”

“Can you just do it, please? My God, you are a pain in the ass.”

He leaned forward, and I helped get his shirt off. The left sleeve was the hardest on him. Even though he smiled through it, his arm was stiff and he moved gingerly. The T-shirt under the button down was easier. I pulled out the good right arm, stretched it over his head, then dropped the whole thing over the stiff left arm. His bicep was swollen and red, and his shoulder blade had a red bump the size of an egg growing on it. He bent his arm.

“Not broken,” he said, grimacing.

“But you’re going to have some nice bruising from your neck to your elbow. Welcome to my world.”

“Mine don’t come with the memories.”

I kissed him. He put his right hand on my cheek, and I put my arms around him, still treating him tenderly. I opened my eyes while I kissed him because I wanted to see his eyes closed in surrender to me, and I had that blissful sight. Jonathan, enjoying my kiss, in that slight abdication, made my heart flutter. I sighed. Then his eyes opened just a little, as if he wanted to see the same thing, and we smiled.

“Sit still. Let me get some ice.” I stepped to the freezer where Gabby and I had kept compresses for fingers and arms that ached after hours of practice.

“Why don’t you just take me to bed?” he said as I put compresses on his neck and arm.

“Not a bad idea. Get up.”

We walked to the bedroom, and I propped him up on pillows, happy that I’d changed the sheets. His arm was getting stiffer, and by the time I’d set up the compresses, he could barely move it at all.

“Guess who’s not driving tonight,” I said, holding out my hand. “Give me your keys so I can put your car in the driveway. There’s alternate side parking tomorrow.”

“I can afford a ticket.”

“But if the car blocking the sweeper in the morning is my guest’s, Roger across the street puts all the garbage in
my
front yard. He did it with Darren, like, a hundred times.”

He reached into his right pocket and pulled out his key. “You need to move to a better neighborhood.”

“I know what you’re thinking”—I swiped the key—“and forget it. I’m not a kept woman.”

“We’ll see about that.”

I pocketed the key and went to my bathroom. Stepping onto the toilet, I reached the top of the vanity where I kept bottles of pills hidden from Gabby: painkillers I’d been prescribed for an extracted tooth, muscle relaxants for painful menstruation, and Xanax a friend had given me for a short bout of insomnia. I took them to Jonathan, who was dicking with his phone with his good hand.

“I have painkillers.”

“Why? You in pain without me?”