Resist (Songs of Submission #6) (7 page)

When his mouth slackened and his groans stopped, I said, “Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

I turned my head toward him and laughed at the absurdity of it. He caught on and laughed with me, holding my head close as we kissed, smiling. I untwisted myself and lay flat, joints and muscles loosened. I knew I’d suffer tomorrow from our fucking, as well as the promise I had no intention of keeping.

Chapter 14.

JONATHAN

I ordered breakfast from the diner around the corner, and when the delivery guy rang the doorbell, I was on the patio setting out plates. I heard the bathroom door shut. She was awake.

What Monica didn’t know, and what helped me sleep, was that her house had been swept twice for cameras while she’d spent weeks crashing on her friend’s couch. The place was clean, so I felt fine about giving her the roughest fuck I’d given anyone in my life. Even with Sharon, who’d suffered getting shit beaten out of her to the point of an emotional breakdown, I’d been more careful. She was breakable. Others had done a good job of proving that.

Monica, on the other hand, was made of tough stuff. That toughness was showing in her insistence on seeing my ex-wife. I had a gut feeling that by seeing Jessica on her terms and her turf, Monica would be walking into more than she could handle. She thought they would have a conversation, but it would be a game. The end result would be us separated by my ex-wife’s casual half-truths and outright lies.

The idea that I could keep tabs on Monica until the whole thing went away looked more and more impossible. I couldn’t suddenly restrict her. She was used to being her own woman. She had to work, and she had to play music. I couldn’t put a team of people on her when she’d just gotten over the cameras in the house. I had to make her not
want
to see Jessica, and the only way to do that was to make the trouble she was causing seem unimportant. It was a good strategy, and I was failing at it.

She came out as I finished putting out her tea. She wore a long-sleeved, black turtleneck and skinny jeans. She walked stiffly, but her smile was loose and relaxed.

“Good morning,” I said.

“The king sets the table.”

“He’s hungry.” I put my hands at her neck and kissed her. Her lips tightened. I pulled back and saw what had made her flinch—a tiny smear of reddish-grey where my fingertip had touched her jaw. Stroking her collar away, I saw that her neck was covered in bite marks and bruises. “Jesus Christ.”

She refolded the collar until her neck was covered. “I didn’t know whether to show you or not.”

“Up.” I tugged at the hem of her sweater. She bit her lip. “Come on.”

“The last time I looked like this, you felt too bad about it to fuck me.”

I pulled up the shirt. She lifted her arms, her face contorted in pain. I pulled the sweater off completely, and she tucked her head so the collar would expand around her. She stood before me, naked from the waist up, looking as though she’d been beaten in a back alley. The curves under her breasts were deep red where blood vessels had broken under my teeth, and the mounds themselves were bruised. The bend of her neck had the same beaten mottle. Her biceps were blackened in fingertip shapes. I touched them lightly, drawing my fingers down to the striated ligature marks on her elbows.

“Your knees?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Matching marks on those. You tied me really tight.”

“You said it felt okay.”

“It did.”

“Your thighs? Your ass?”

“I’m fine.” She put her hand on my face, but I didn’t want to be comforted. I unbuttoned her pants.

“Come on,” I said. “Let me see.”

She slid her pants down, pain on her face. She’d have to put them back on and that would hurt, but it was too late to undo the order. I kneeled, sliding the jeans over her legs. Her thighs were a mess, and her knees did indeed have matching marks from when I’d tied the joints together with an extension cord.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, stroking my hair as I kissed her bruised legs.

“I am.”

“I said not to be.”

“I don’t take orders.”

“You should try it. It’s amazing.”

From my kneeling position, I eased her into a chair and spread her legs, kissing the devastation inside them. I didn’t have a mother’s healing kiss on a scratched knee, but I had no other way to show her the pain in my heart at seeing her hurt and knowing that I’d done it and I’d do it again and again.

“You only came six times last night,” I said. “I promised seven.”

“I couldn’t take another.”

I probed her folds with my tongue. “Take it now.”

“I need my tea,” she groaned, running her fingers through my hair. I didn’t touch her with anything but my mouth. My hands had done enough damage. Though pain had been welcome a few hours earlier, the aftermath would be straight pain, without the accompaniment of pleasure. I wove my arms around her until her hands found mine, and I clasped them as my mouth worked in service to her. Gently. Without urgency. Her sweet, sore cunt tasted coppery, like raw flesh but got wet and responsive, her clit filling into a hard, slick pebble under me.

She groaned as I worked her with my tongue and lips, teeth tucked safely away. I looked up at the broken skin of her chest, making eye contact as her lips whispered my name, and I prayed to whatever deity would listen to please, please not take her away. She arched, clenched, gasped like the beautiful kitten she was. When I leaned up to her, fresh cunt on my lips, my phone dinged.

“You gonna get that?” she asked.

“When I’m done kissing you.” I put my hands on the arms of her chair and slowly put my lips on hers. I wanted an unrushed moment of forgiveness and gentleness.

“Can you make love to me?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?” She drew her legs around me. I knew it hurt.

“I’m flattered, but I’m simply not attracted to you.”

She had her hand on my erection before I could back away. “Really?” She smiled, kissing me, stroking me.

“That? That’s nothing. Something I left in my pocket.” She could stroke my dick all day, but there was no way I was taking her in the condition she was in.

“Please? I’ll beg.”

“Tempting offer. But I’m hungry.” I pulled away. As I went to sit down for breakfast, my phone dinged again, then rang.

“You’d better check it,” Monica said, pulling her sweater back over her head. “Could be a towering inferno at Hotel K and you didn’t know about it because you were eating eggs.”

I checked. Margie. And it was Sunday. I looked at Monica then pocketed the phone.

“Jonathan, I see your face. Take the call, would you?” She stepped into her jeans gingerly, eyes like chocolate coins, looking at me as if I was being serious over nothing.

“Save me some,” I said as I started to step away from the table.

“You got enough for an infield and everyone in the dugout.”

I slipped my phone out of my pocket and walked down the stairs to the driveway. With one look back at my goddess buttoning her pants, I answered the phone. “Margie. Working on the Lord’s day?”

“Your problems never rest, Jonny. Your beautiful and talented ex-wife wants a meeting.”

“Today?” I climbed up to Monica’s front porch, noticing the cracked, slipping foundation still hadn’t gotten fixed.

“Tuesday. And in other bad news, are you sitting?”

“Out with it.” I sat on the porch swing. It creaked.

Margie took a deep sigh of a breath, which she never did, because she was utterly unflappable.

“Come on. Speak. I’m sitting.”

“It’s Rachel.”

My brain stopped functioning.

“Jonny?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Why did you move her a month ago?”

I heard Monica getting plates and silverware together. If I could hear her, she could hear me unless I was careful. Even if I remained cryptic, Monica had enough intellectual curiosity to connect the dots into the shape of a web of lies.

“I moved her to protect someone.”

“Monica? Or yourself?”

“Yes. I’m a selfish prick. I have someone I don’t want to lose, and I needed to protect that. If I left her where she was, Jessica could have shown Monica where she was. I needed to maintain a little plausible deniability.”

I had panicked very badly when Debbie called six weeks ago and said Jessica had shown up at the Stock and said something so upsetting to Monica that she was visibly shaken. I’d been convinced Jessica insinuated things about Rachel. Because everyone in the world who had cared about her, and there were painfully few, thought she was dead.

She wasn’t. Not quite.

Jessica knew everything. At our engagement party, I’d been hypnotized as a party joke and remembered what the whiskey had blacked out. Rachel had survived the crash. She didn’t walk away. But on the night of the Christmas rains, she’d been pulled out of the ocean with a part of her brain intact. Jessica had helped me find Rachel and helped me move her. She’d helped me fail in finding her family. Mother dead. Father disappeared. Her stepfather had never been worthy of her. Jessica, by my side, had reminded me to man up and take responsibility for my part in her condition.

“Okay, I know you did your best,” Margie said, her tone promising bad news. “But people in vegetative states don’t travel well. I just got word from the new facility that she has pneumonia.”

“She’s had it before.”

“She’s dying, little brother. I’m sorry.”

Chapter 15.

MONICA

Jonathan left me with a lot of breakfast.

He'd come back without any color in his face, looking as if he was miles away. With no chance in hell of talking him into a good-bye screw, I walked him out.

“I’m going to be gone for a few days,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“We talked about this. You travel. It’s fine.”

He stood half on the porch, half on the steps when he turned back to me. “You promised you wouldn’t see my ex-wife.”

That was a hard comment to answer. If I told him I had every intention of seeing Jessica, he’d worry needlessly. If I said otherwise, I’d be lying. “Jonathan, honestly, promises made while I’m in a submissive posture shouldn’t count.”

He paused, looking at our clasped hands. “Probably not.”

Even though it hurt to lift my arms, I put my palms on his cheeks. He did not look well. His skin was cold. There really must have been a towering inferno at Hotel K.

“I have a meeting with her on Tuesday,” he said. “Can you wait until after that?”

“I don’t see why not.”

My sneaky non-promise must have been completely transparent to him. There was a pretty good chance the only time I’d get to see her was when he was out of town and unable to use his dick to lure me away. He knew it. I knew it. Pretending otherwise was absurd. Yet we did. Somehow, he was willing to take the chance and walk down the steps to his bike after a deep, soulful goodbye kiss that let me know he was still my master and king.

I cleaned up breakfast and dressed to rehearse. I had a lot to say about pain and its relationship to desire, glory, satisfaction. Maybe I had too much to say, because I wrote a seven-page ramble of a song with three alternating choruses and verses up the wazoo. I still felt as though I hadn’t scratched the surface.

My body ached. I was tired. I felt isolated. Jonathan’s touch stayed on me in the soreness between my legs, the rawness of my lips, the sharp bite of pain when I moved my arms. I pulled my collar up over my face to see if his smell lingered. It did, if only slightly, and I kept the collar up even though it increased the heat of my longing with every breath.

A couple of days. How could I last that long? How would I think about anything else? And what would happen on the next two-week trip? Did he think I would agree to come with him every time?

When I realized I’d been staring at the piano keys for twelve minutes, I shut off the metronome and crawled into bed. Our scents lingered on the sheets like the twin deities, pain and pleasure, lulling me to sleep with thoughts of their harmonized perfection.

Chapter 16.

MONICA

I woke when the sky was melting from light to dark, and the nest of crickets outside my window started screaming their mating call. Every living thing was trying to fuck, except me. My aches took on a new level of sharpness after a decent rest, and the smell of sex exhausted me. I stripped the bed.

I’d brought piles of clothes back from Darren’s. I hadn’t done laundry in his building unless it was absolutely necessary, but I was home now. The sheets needed doing, and the towels, and my clothes, obviously. The Bordelle underthings I hand-washed lovingly, caressing them the way he did.

I passed Gabby’s closed door a dozen times. That part of the house was as much mine as it ever was, but I still couldn’t go in without Darren. I still braided my hair for her. I still kept what little music she’d written to integrate into my mine, to save her name and her legacy.