One Year With Him Read online

  “How you coming?” Jonathan leaned in the doorway, his jacket falling on his shoulders in a perfect expression of some kind of victory over gravity. Over everything. If owning a doorway just by standing in it was possible, or beating the shit out of a space by existing within it, he did. His concern over what was happening in my house had a physical presence. It emanated from him in a dense aura of worry, making him seem bigger, more present, more powerful. I was suffocating under the weight of it.

  I glanced down at the envelope. His name faced down. “Thirty seconds or less,” I said. He didn’t move, making me nervous. “Shoo. Girl stuff.”

  He slipped out of the doorway, and I breathed again. I slipped the envelope into my top drawer, slung the bag over my shoulder, and walked out of my room with my head down.

  Chapter 20

  MONICA

  Telling him about my conversation with Jessica, and the song, weighed heavily on me. I couldn’t think about much else. I couldn’t do it in a neutral space. I couldn’t just tell him and walk out. It was late. My house was overrun.

  Jonathan put his hand on my thigh as his other hand rested on the steering wheel. “They’re going to be out of there by tonight.”

  “Yeah. It’s a small house. Yours took how long?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  I looked out the window. I still felt invaded. “If there’s nothing there, you’re in trouble for making a big deal about it.”

  “We’ll work out a suitable punishment.” He didn’t look as though he expected to be punished, though. He looked as though he was placating me. I didn’t care for it. I would have given anything for it to be yesterday again.

  We waited as the gate opened. It seemed to take forever, rumbling and clacking in a way I didn’t remember it doing before. When Jonathan took my hand and looked at me, he seemed tired. Gorgeous and powerful as always, but wrung out.

  “I don’t want you to worry,” he said.

  I squeezed his hand. “I’m fine.”

  “But I want you to think about who might have done this.”

  “Something tells me you have an idea.”

  He didn’t say, but I knew he thought it was Kevin. The fact that Kevin had nothing to gain from watching me notwithstanding, anything evil in my life, and stalking me was truly evil, could only be one person’s responsibility. Career going poorly? Kevin. Art show hits a snag? Kevin. Bad day at work? Kevin. Camera trained on my front porch? Kevin.

  When we got inside, he dropped my bag and put his arms around me. I rested my head on his shoulder. We rocked together, entwined, fitting together like puzzle pieces. He kissed my cheek, my jaw. A tingle of heat pooled between my legs. I looked up, giving him access to my neck. He was going to take me again, and it would be slow and sweet and generous. His hands worked up my back, and I put my fingers in his hair as he kissed my shoulder.

  My body screamed for him. Just once. Before telling him anything about Frontage. Just a little bit of comfort. Just to be enveloped inside him. I didn’t need a fuck. I needed to make love, and the way he touched me showed me he understood.

  “Jonathan.”

  “Monica.”

  “Wait,” I groaned.

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “You’re mine.”

  “Tangerine.”

  He stopped and stood back, looking me in the eye. His hair was mussed, and his eyes hooded with heat. “Okay, little goddess. What is it?”

  “I have to tell you things. I can’t put it off anymore.”

  “All right. Let’s get some fresh air.” He took my hand and walked me out to the backyard.

  We sat on the outdoor couch, in the near dark, which I appreciated. I didn’t want a bright light shining on our conversation. His hands stayed on me, stroking my palm, my thigh, soothing me.

  “So, you saw Jessica there tonight,” I said. “I don’t have to tell you that part.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saw us talking.”

  “Yes.”

  “She gave me her card and offered to tell me everything about you.” His expression didn’t change. “I said ‘no, thank you, if I need to know about Jonathan, I’ll ask him.’”

  He squeezed my hand. “You’re perfect.”

  “Well, maybe not. She asked if you told me about Rachel, and I said yes. She asked if you told me all of it, and I kind of went off on her.”

  “Really?”

  “I told her I didn’t know what she wanted, but she couldn’t have you back because you were too good in bed.”

  He laughed good and hard, throwing his head back and showing the night sky his face. His laughter filled the huge yard, and even I smiled a little, because really, what man could be upset at that? I wanted to end the conversation right there. If I crawled into his lap, he’d put his arms around me, take me upstairs, and we’d make love so sweetly. Just the thought of it made my arms tingle.

  “I haven’t gotten to the really uncomfortable stuff yet.”

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and leaned back, smiling, totally relaxed, his arm draped over the back of the couch. “Go ahead, then.”

  “You really are good in bed, you know.”

  “Thank you. It takes two.”

  “Right. Okay. There’s a song.” I said the last sentence as if I’d jumped off a cliff. There’s a song. Three words, and I was committed to finishing. I stared into my lap. I couldn’t look at him. “Jessica heard it.” I cleared my throat. “I wrote it after you called me submissive and before I gave you the list.” I glanced at him. His smile was gone. “I recorded it as a scratch cut, which is something passed around the industry as a sample. I hadn’t written a song in a while, and it was all I had. So, it came out good. One of the acquisitions guys heard it and wanted to hear me sing it. They came tonight.”

  “What was his name? The acquisitions guy?”

  “Eddie something.” Jonathan’s eyes closed slowly, and his mouth shut tight. “What?” I asked.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “The fucking song.”

  My heart beat so hard my ribs were going to break. My lungs quivered, filled, and seemed to empty only part way. I didn’t have an instrument to hide behind or a piece of paper with my requirements for him to read. I just had two minutes of pure, raw, fucking vulnerability in his backyard while he pondered not only what he thought of the song, but me, what he felt about me, what his ex-wife heard, and what she thought.

  “It doesn’t have a title yet.”

  “The song, Monica.” His voice was like a brick, blunt and hard, without nuance. He waited. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I realized the more time I took to start, the more crap would run through his head, and maybe that wasn’t a good thing.

  I sang it in my soft, jazzy voice. I didn’t look at him because I didn’t want to see his reaction. I just wanted to get through it. I started to crack in the last bridge, where I asked if I’d do the things to him he did to me, because the questions weren’t about sex anymore. The song revealed too much. Fuck. I hated music right then, as I sang the last line. I wished I’d never heard a note.

  His face was in his hands, and his elbows were on his knees. “What were you thinking?”

  “About you.”

  He looked up. “When you recorded it? What the fuck were you thinking?”

  I couldn’t answer. I had been thinking about myself. That it could be an opportunity. That it was a good song, and once it was a song, it was mine, no matter what it was about.

  Even in the dark, his face frightened me. I’d seen that expression before. On my father, just before he threw something or tore apart the living room drapes.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “I’m glad you’re sorry. But what are you sorry for? Exactly? Are you sorry you had to tell me or sorry you were so selfish in the first place? Because it’s not about you. It’s about us, and we’re not a big secret. Unless we split tomorr
ow, that song is about me and it will follow me wherever I go. Fuck, Monica, I know you’re ambitious. I don’t expect any less. What I didn’t expect was that you’d do something so stupidly self-centered.”

  Even though we were outside, I felt as if a box closed in around me. If he’d been wrong or if I had a leg to stand on, the box might not have felt as though it was filling with water and I was three seconds from drowning. But I had done wrong. I didn’t realize it when I first recorded the song, but I knew it when I played it in front of Jessica. I’d chosen my ambition over my respect for him, and there was no denying it.

  His expression was impassive, walled off. The box filled further, and I felt not only trapped, but alone and scared. If he said another word, I would lose my shit.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said before walking back into the house.

  Chapter 21

  JONATHAN

  When the screen door slammed behind her, I kicked over the glass-topped coffee table. It shattered. I considered doing more violence to the furniture, but I wasn’t angry at the furniture. I was angry at myself. I had no business feeling what I felt for Monica. I had no business getting involved in a kinky, emotionally charged relationship with an unpracticed submissive. Stupid. This, I’d earned.

  When I’d held Jessica’s hands down during sex, she told everyone I wanted to rape her. One slap on the ass, and I was an abuser. It hurt badly enough when she called me those things to my face. When she did it behind my back, it was worse. Later, I realized she’d had a rough time with men before me. I should have been more understanding, but it wasn’t like I didn’t have my own shit.

  When Monica sang her song in the husky voice of a fallen angel, I knew her intentions were pure. I also knew the results would suck. Enough of our social circle hated me already. Who knew what or whom her performance would affect. My business? My family? The possible repercussions came in flaming scenes of scorn and derision. Lost deals. Uncomfortable dinners, come-ons from the wrong women, bruised ribs from jocular elbows of men thinking Monica was my whore, or worse, available to share.

  Jessica had added humiliation to my confusion by confiding in our whole social circle and enough of my family to make Easter dinner a nightmare. I never dug out of it, and the song could just bury me further in a reputation I didn’t earn and didn’t want. I didn’t want an entire lifestyle of bondage. I didn’t want the clubs or the costumes. I wanted to be normal, except when I wasn’t. Yet again, I’d be branded.

  I paced around the pool. Monica had to go. She and her song and her god damn artistic aspirations had to get cut out before I got infected. I had to do it quickly and move on. I had to ignore any and all pleas for forgiveness. I had to forget my feelings, how she wrapped herself around me, how she’d charmed me and disarmed me. I needed to shock her out of my system.

  I stopped, and like a siren’s call, the pool invited me. I kicked off my shoes and dove in. The water was cold and heavy, and my clothes only made me sink lower. I swam to the surface, and the effort brought me back to my head. The panic and worry came back, but a lower grade. The usual stuff, not the all-consuming stuff.

  I navigated to the edge of the pool. I was afraid to get out because I would freeze my ass off, but mostly, I was afraid to deal with the woman on the porch, if she was even still there. I leaned my cheek on my forearm and said, “Monica, Monica, you were perfect.”

  I was sad to lose her, but I couldn’t be seen with her if she was singing that song, and she’d made clear I wasn’t to interrupt her work. I knew my little string of sadness would grow into a ball of yarn. I knew how much I wanted her, and why, and how. After knowing her only six weeks, I’d miss her.

  My phone rang. It had been on the glass table I’d smashed and apparently survived. I pulled myself out of the pool and dripped my way over to it, my pant legs sticking.

  It was Will Santon.

  “Hi, Will.”

  “We found five, with mikes, all over the house. They were on wireless, and they’ve been disconnected. Probably after she sprayed the car outside.”

  “We’ll need you to work on finding out who did this.” I wasn’t supposed to care anymore, but I found myself talking as if I did.

  “Any ideas?”

  “She’s working with an artist, Kevin Wainwright. They have a history.”

  “We’re on it,” Santon said.

  “Send my sister the bill.”

  “You got it.”

  I was about to hang up. “Santon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Any in the kitchen?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thanks,” I said softly and hung up. My relief dripped off me with the cold water. None in the kitchen. What did we do in the bedroom? I’d kissed her eyelids. Not optimum, certainly. Definitely a problem to be solved, because the fact they’d gotten inside at all was bad news, but nothing kinky got on video. At least if my private life was all the buzz, her dignity might be saved.

  I don’t know how long I stood there holding my phone, but when my teeth chattered, I went inside.

  No cameras in the kitchen. Monica’s imagination had saved me a shard of embarrassment. Meanwhile, she was having a huge crisis, and I threw a temper tantrum over something she apologized for. I had been ready to abandon her when she needed me to protect her because she wasn’t perfect. And why? Because I was worried about what people thought.

  They didn’t know what I knew. They didn’t know what it was to be completely in control of a woman’s body, her pleasure, her thoughts, her emotions. They didn’t craft moments the way a sculptor molds clay, tapping her consciousness during the day to create anticipation for the night, pushing her, crafting our climaxes not just as a pleasurable endpoint, but as a carefully timed, deliberate act. The culmination of my intention was what was most gratifying, and I couldn’t give up control any more than Monica could give up music.

  I had tried it with other women and failed or come up short. But not Monica. It wasn’t just what she allowed and how she obeyed; it was the ways she didn’t. Her moments of spontaneity came not in response to a weakness on my part, but the openings for surprise that I left her. Like the kitchen. The last place I expected to find her might have been the only safe place in the house.

  What we made together was greater than what I would have created myself. Monica was my perfect canvas. The rest would have to fall into place. She was mine. What we had was mine. I’d earned it.

  Fuck the rest.

  Chapter 22

  MONICA

  The blanket I’d wrapped around myself smelled of the old Jonathan. Sage. Fog. Jessica had chosen it for him, but I buried my face in it anyway. I stared at the open gate. A cab was on its way. If he didn’t show up before the cab, I would just fold myself back into the world and never see him again. It couldn’t be any harder than what I’d done before.

  I smelled him before I heard him. The leather-and-sawdust Jonathan. I looked back inside and saw him standing behind the chair closest to the door. His hair was wet, but his clothes were dry. He wore his trademarked mask of implacable amusement.

  “You waited.”

  “Cab’s coming.”

  He sat in the chair. “I’m sorry I went off on you.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I feel like I should explain.”

  “Look, you got mad. I know why,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.” He leaned back in the chair and crossed an ankle over his knee. “When I married Jessica, I was a nice vanilla guy. We had plenty of sex, and we thought we were just fine. We were. Except I always had this dark place because of what happened with Rachel. I was so young, and not ready. And my father… well, I couldn’t look at him. I still can’t. I never told anyone. No one knew about it, except Jessica. Her knowing made me happy, and being happy, well, I started getting ideas about how good it would feel to fuck her just a little harder. Hold her hands down. Tell her when to come. Slap her ass.” He paused, as if remembering some specific incident. “It
didn’t go over well. I didn’t know how to stop, and she didn’t know how to shut up. All her friends were convinced I got off on beating her up. They told their husbands, and before you know it—”

  “No one’s talking to you at the Eclipse show.”

  “Right. And I lost her. When you get divorced, you don’t just give up the person, you give up all the dreams you had with that person. Those are harder to let go of.” He uncrossed his ankle and put his elbows on his knees. “Now I’m with someone else, and she’s beautiful with me. But she sings this song, and everyone will hear it and think I’m trying to rape and abuse her. It all came back.”

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “You should cancel that cab.”

  “I really want to go home.”

  “You’re not going home tonight. They found cameras.”

  “Oh, God.” My chest felt as if a spike went through it. That was my house. It had always been my house. I felt myself breaking down and I had to grind my teeth to keep together.

  “It’s clean now. And there were none in the kitchen.”

  I laughed with relief. The episode on the kitchen floor was the first thing I’d worried about and the one thing I tried not to consider as a possibility.

  “We need to find out who did it. And now I really want to have you watched.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll stay with Darren.”

  “That’s not a long-term solution.”

  I got annoyed. He’d taken the conversation and made it his own. “Jonathan, stop it. Long-term solutions are my problem.”

  “How’s that?”

  I took a deep breath. I knew what I wanted to say, but after finding out about my house, and his story, I didn’t know if I had the strength. I curled deeper in the blanket. “I’m sorry, Jonathan. What I did with the song was wrong. I’ll do what damage control I can. I’ll record something else and get it to Jerry. I can’t make Jessica unhear it, but it’s not like she didn’t know about your preferences.”