Burn (3 page)

Boundaries. The whole act was about tightly controlled boundaries, and she presented them as if they’d be concessions by me toward her. It was bullshit. The whole conversation. Her whole sudden pursuit of me. She was hiding something, and if she stayed tightly wrapped up, prim and proper, she’d never reveal it.

“No,” I said. “My way. Right now. Then you tell me if you can take it.”

She bit her lip. I didn’t know what to hope for, but the longer she waited, the clearer my plan became.

“Okay,” she said softly.

I didn’t move. Not a blink or a hair. “That’s ‘okay, sir.’”

“Doesn’t that seem a little silly?”

“You want to do this or not?”

“Yes, sir.” A nervous smile played on her lips. Part of me would have loved to wipe it off with my dick. The rest of me didn’t want to touch her.

“Stand up.”

She stood, leaning on one foot and jutting her hip out, hands on her waist. All attitude. It would take some poor soul ages to train the woman.

“Unbutton your shirt.”

She stuck her tongue in her cheek and swung her narrow hips, unbuttoning as though she was in a strip show.

“Stop trying to look saucy. This is a functional matter and not for your pleasure.”

Oh, the look on her face. I don’t think I could have forgotten it. When she told every mutual friend we had that I wanted to beat her and take away her right to say no, when she told them I had rape fantasies and that I hated women, she’d had no idea. The damage I could have done—but wouldn’t have—wasn’t to her body.

She unbuttoned her shirt completely and started to take it off.

“Stop.”

I could have told her how I wanted her to stand, how I wanted her to look, where her hands belonged, but it would have been a waste of my time. I got behind her and untied the bandana on her neck.

“This is what it is,” I whispered in her ear. “This is the kind of sex you’re agreeing to.”

As I slipped off the bandana, I considered binding her at the elbows like I’d done with Monica the night she got her voice back. But Monica could handle it. Even though I told Jessica I was going to show her what she was agreeing to, in all its pain and messiness, I had no intention of doing so. It would probably damage her psyche forever. Then she’d call the cops. Mostly, I really didn’t want to put my dick anywhere near her. I did, however, want to figure out what she wanted.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

She turned her head when she “obeyed.” Jesus Christ. Two commands and she’d exasperated the hell out of me. I never would have felt an ounce of control with her.

“Face forward, Jess.”

I didn’t tie her at the elbows. The wrists would have to do. I moved around to face her. Her open shirt showed off her white cotton bra and flat stomach. Her shoulders drooped. I couldn’t have tied her hands more comfortably, yet she looked awkward. “How does that feel?”

“Okay so far,” she said. “A little weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“Jon, seriously? What’s
not
weird? I’m standing here with my shirt open and my hands tied behind my back.”

“Is your cunt wet?”

“Do you have to be vulgar?”

I stood close enough for her to feel me whisper. “Yes. It’s about communication. It’s about saying what you want and don’t want, clearly, and sometimes with a filthy mouth. So let me get you on board with what you just agreed to.” I kicked her legs open. I righted her when she almost fell, but the annoyance on her face made me want to drop her. “The answer to my question is, ‘No, sir. I’m not wet. This sucks.’ I’ll tell you I don’t care how much this sucks for you. Then I’ll prove it.

“I’ll undo your jeans. I’ll pull them down to the middle of your thighs so it’s hard to walk. You’ll be uncomfortable, and that will please me. Then I’ll get behind you, and I’ll grab a handful of your hair at the back of your head and bend you over that table. I’ll take off my belt, loop it once, and slap it across those sweet white cheeks until you’re pink as a rose and your face is covered with tears. I’ll stop when I can stick two fingers in your cunt and feel how sopping wet you are. Then I’ll fuck you until you beg me to let you come, which I may or may not let you do. That going to work for you?”

The color had drained from her face.

“Didn’t think so,” I said, stepping away.

“Do it,” she whispered.

“Jess, really.”

“Do it! Start with the hair. Or the pants. Whatever.”

“No.”

“Do it!” she said.

“Stop, Jess.”

“Are you a fucking
man
? Or do you just beg and cry for what you can’t have? Is that how you get off?”

I threw her over the table. She fell onto it, bending at the waist with a grunt, ass out and arms bound by her own scarf. God, how many times I wanted to hear her grunt, to cut through the thick layers of refinement and find a woman past careful words. The woman I met so many years ago, before she’d built her walls.

I stuck my knee between her thighs and yanked the hair at the base of her neck. Her mouth hung open, and her chest heaved. She wasn’t aroused, that I could tell, and I didn’t care.

“Choose a safeword, Jessica.”

“Do we need—?“

“Question me again and I’m fucking your ass so hard you won’t be able to sit.”

I almost heard her teeth grinding. “Declan,” she said.

“Interesting choice.. Avoid it all and tell me what you really want, coming here. I’ll stop for either the safeword or that, but nothing else until I’m satisfied.”

I undid my belt after turning her head so she could watch me snap it out of the loops. I put her cheek to the glass. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a sharp triangle of white porcelain by the chair leg. One of the broken plates had missed the broom the morning after I made Monica recite “Invictus.”

“No yelling, Jess.” I shifted to her side, still holding her hair and my belt. “No crying. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered so softly, she was barely audible.

I hit the edge of the table with a
smack
of my belt. She jumped at the sound.

“Yes, what?”

“God, Jon—” I hit her ass. The belt landed with a satisfying
thwack.
She stiffened and ground her teeth. “It hurts. You’re hitting me.”

“You asked for it, Jess.” I pulled her hair in my fist. “And that’s, ‘It hurts,
sir
.’” I laid into her ass again, and she yanked her head, making a sound like a bad brake shoe. “Now tell me what you want.”

“I want you.”

“Bullshit.” I whacked her again. That was three. Too many. And I wasn’t holding back much. They had to hurt. “This started a month ago. You chased Erik away. Why?”

“You.”

I pulled back my arm, yanking her hair She screamed.

“Fuck, Jess. Stop lying!”

I pulled her hair and looked in her face. Her cheeks were wet with streams of mascara-colored tears. Her lower lip quivered. I had been a white hot ball of anger. If I had been thinking, I would have stopped. A dom should never, ever have an ounce of anger in his heart when spanking a sub. That wasn’t fun. That wasn’t all right. But between losing Will’s services and Debbie’s advice about Monica, I wasn’t functioning. I was a panting, heaving mess looking into my ex-wife’s tear-filled eyes.

“You used to have such a tender heart,” she said through her sobs. “Do you remember when I miscarried? You took me to the hospital, and you were joking the whole way? Trying to make me laugh. But when we got there, you were crying. And you fell asleep in the chair next to me with your head on the bed.”

“What do you
want
, Jessica?”

“I want to go home.”

I pulled her up and untied her. She was miserable from the experience, and so was I. She wasn’t ready for something that hard, even if she’d had any proclivity in that direction, and I wasn’t sexually stirred in the least.

“Go take Erik back. He’s good for you.” I handed her back her bandana. “You know the way out.”

I didn’t look back when I went through the house, bolted up the stairs, and closed my bedroom door.

My god. Three strokes. That was stupid.

                                                   
CHAPTER 5.
 

MONICA

Working with Kevin and Darren had been intense, and I was grateful for the distraction from my beaten wreckage of a love life. We fought. We drank. We made music and art. I brought my pain to the table, using it to color and nuance a work of art that was basically about heartbreak, loss, and grief.

When we’d had breakthroughs, I couldn’t have been more content. And then, one day, we realized we’d done it. Though plenty of it could use a tweak or ten, the piece was generally finished and not a minute too soon.

Standing in the center of the draft room, listening to my viola playing Kevin’s lullaby, forty some odd tracks of my voice in wordless harmony, over Darren’s techno thumping, I laughed. I felt drunk, melancholy, miserable, high, blissed. For two weeks, I’d cried every night and put on a customer service smile every day, but when I worked with the guys, I was myself.

When the thing was finished and photographed, we lounged around on a circle of couches in Kevin’s backyard and drank cheap beer out of the bottle. Darren and Kevin had gotten wrapped tighter than the old amp cords at the bottom of a duffel. They called each other when they weren’t working. As far as I knew, Kevin was still into women, and Darren was at least marginally involved with Adam, but I often felt like a third wheel to a marriage of kindred souls.

Kevin made broad intellectual pronouncements. Darren shot him down. Kevin pulled reasoning from the rubble. Darren told him he was full of shit. Over and over. By the time we’d documented every track, sound, and scrap of material in the piece, the two of them had become white noise.

I hadn’t gotten over seeing Jonathan looking so hale the other day. So polite. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.” Asshole. But my meeting with Eddie had hardened my resolve. I never, ever wanted people looking at me like that in a meeting, and the only way to change it was to lose the song and Jonathan. I had to do what I’d been trying to do for two years: focus on my career.

“Earth to Planet Mon,” said Darren, waving his beer around.

“Yeah.” I barely snapped out of it.

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“National Orphan Feelbad Day,” I said. We clinked bottles and drank.

“Did you get a flight to BC?” Darren asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. Darren and Adam were going a day early to hang out in Vancouver. “Same plane as Kev.”

“And your passport?” Kevin pushed his longish black hair back for a second, lowered his hand, and it flopped below his eyes again.

“Done. Do you need me here for the breakdown and pack up tomorrow?”

“No way,” Kevin said, worrying the label on his beer bottle. “Pros do that. They’ll have it boxed by noon and at the B.C. Mod in a week. We just show up to put it all together and look pretty for the preview exhibit. Black tie. All rich guys. Just like you like them.”

“Fuck off.”

“Agreed.” Darren stood and took a last swig from his beer. “I gotta blow.”

“So to speak,” I shot back.

“Hilarious. See you on the couch.”

“You’re joking,” Kevin said. “You’re still sleeping on this asshole’s couch?”

“If it happened to you, you’d feel uncomfortable and violated too.”

“The P.I. said the cameras were gone.”

“But I don’t know who put them there. Once I know, I’ll go back.”

“And how are you going to know?” Kevin asked. “I mean, you dumped the guy who hired the P.I.”

They couldn’t see my face go fire-engine red in the dark, which was just as well. They knew I’d split with Jonathan but not why. Kevin had a point, and Darren and I had gone over it all a hundred times. I should have told my mother to sell the place. Just pull it from under me. It wasn’t like I’d ever call it home again.

“On that note—“ Darren tossed his bottle in the recycling. “This city’s bouncing with parties in honor of National Day After Thanksgiving Day, and I’m being dragged to the gay half of them.”

“Hey, wait!” Kevin said. “You guys have to sign the copyright papers.” He ran inside, and he came back out again as if they’d been right by the door. After setting a stack of papers on the crapped out old bar he’d salvaged from an empty lot, he handed Darren a pen. “Right here.”

“Dude, you got me signing papers by candlelight.” Darren put his face nose-close to the page, and Kevin laughed. Darren signed. I got up and did the same. I felt as though we were sealing a deal, probably because I was half tipsy, and the outdoor space, candlelit and cool, added a coat of profundity to the proceeding.

“To us—,” Kevin held his beer aloft. “The Nameless Threesome.” We clicked bottles to our collaborative name. We were a cooperative, the future of creation, the new trend in authorship. Collaborators. Teams. Kevin had seen the trend and made sure he was a part of it. Kevin was a visionary, even to the detriment of his own ego.

It had been fun. More fun than I’d anticipated, and for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel anxious and alone.

When Darren left, Kevin held up his bottle. “Another?”

“I have to be at work at nine-thirty.”

He handed me another anyway. “This is a small show, but it was a good idea. I’m glad we did this.”

“Yeah. It was good. And I’ve never been that far north.”

“You’re smart, Monica, and you get it. You get what it is to make art I’ve been meaning to say something to you.”

“You’re not going to get maudlin on me, are you?” I leaned my elbows on the bar behind me, bottle dangling from one hand. The beer was going to my head.

“I was wrong. The way I treated you. Calling you Tweety Bird. Marginalizing you. I denied the world your beauty, and it was wrong to you and the world.” He stroked my cheek with his thumb. I was slow to react, and if I was being honest with myself, the human contact felt nice. He leaned in, his nose close to my cheek, and I caught his malt and chocolate smell. “You were right to leave.”

“Kevin, I—”

He put his full lips to mine, and my body responded by twisting. He held me. His tongue tasted of beer. I pushed him away.