One Year With Him Page 13

  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 27

  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.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?” His face found my neck. I recoiled, hating that I was so hungry to be touched but only by one person.

  “I’m in love with someone. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

  He clamped both sides of my face. “I’ll live with it.”

  When he went to kiss me again, I scrunched up my eyes and lips, shaking my head. He held me fast. I did not like it. The sweetness of being touched was gone, replaced by a feeling of violation, like control of my body was being taken from me. I panicked.

  “Kevin, no!”

  “Do you need a safeword?”

  “What?” When I tried to pull away, he clamped his arms around me and shoved his knee between my legs, spreading them.

  “Monica,” he said with effort as I wiggled. “Calm down. What’s the—”

  I bit his shoulder, hard. He screamed, and when he pulled away, my teeth still had him. Skin broke. Blood soaked through his shirt. Faster than an insult, I felt a hard impact on my face, and I lost my bearings from the slap.

  He wore an expression both shocked and ferocious. I swung a full bottle of beer at it. The bottle didn’t break, but it hit his temple with a thok. I lost my grip, and inertia pulled the bottle out of my hand and onto the ground. It landed at my feet in a sunburst of suds.

  Kevin was crouched, holding his bleeding head. I didn’t know whether to help him or run away. I was shocked into inaction until he came at me. Then I ran.

  I ran into the studio, through the kitchen and his workroom, past the installation in its finished form, down the hall, and out the door. When I got to the front, where my car was parked, the metal front door didn’t slam right away. He was right behind me, his gorgeous face smeared with blood.

  “Kevin. Stop!”

  He didn’t stop. He grabbed my arm and threw me against my Honda.

  Fuck.

  My keys were in the studio.

  I swung. He ducked. I had my opening. I ran down the block and didn’t stop until I heard music.

  Chapter 28

  MONICA

  Like any self-respecting Angelino, I kept my phone in my pocket. The party I’d found was hopping with kegs and disorganized bottles on a paper-covered table. Art covered the warehouse walls, some of the silkscreens tilted from encounters with drunken partiers.

  I called work when I found a quiet corner..

  “Hi, Debbie? I can’t make it tonight. Something happened.”

  “What’s ‘something’?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “If you’re screwing my girls over, I get to know why.”

  I didn’t want to go through the whole thing. I’d already shown my manager enough unprofessional behavior. “I left my car keys behind a locked door. I’m trying to get my roommate on the phone, but he’s not picking up. I don’t think he’ll get here in time to get me to work.”

  She sighed and covered the phone to talk to one of the staff. “Where are you? I’ll send Robert.”

  Shit. I could feel my face throbbing where Kevin had hit me. I couldn’t go to work like that. “No, Debbie. I’m sorry. I didn’t tell the whole thing. I was in a fight. I’m not presentable.”

  “Stop arguing and text me where you are.”

  She hung up.

  My face was throbbing with the bump of the music. The warehouse space had been coopted for the night by German Benefactors, an artist’s cooperative just starting to make waves. The place was huge, and packed, and smelling of piss where it was dark. Though two outstanding DJs had been hired, no one had thought to bring in a Port-a-Potty.

  So I was forced out into the light, clutching some reddish drink, putting the cold plastic up to my face, avoiding people I might know.

  Which didn’t work. Ute Graden, a struggling actress of German descent with naturally white hair, found me sitting on a cinderblock wall by the street, watching my phone and the road for Robert. She and her four friends milled around, sipping, laughing, and talking about their work and dreams. They were part of my crowd. My world, and I felt so out of it.

  Ute and I made small talk about our careers, where I mentioned nothing about a song I had to pull from Carnival because I’d promised my ex-lover I would.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  “Fell on some bad sidewalk. Fucking Frogtown’s falling apart.”

  “Looks nasty.”

  “Hurts, too. Hey, what ever happened with that indie film you were doing? About the prostitute with the kids?”

  “Ran out of money, like, midway through. I’m ‘on call’ but...oh hello.”

  She was looking over my shoulder. I followed her gaze, and once a crowd of boys in turned caps and low-slung skinny jeans passed, I saw Jonathan across the street, waiting for cars to pass.

  “Oh, fucking fuckery,” I said.

  “Yeah. Head to toe. That’s a man.”

  “If nothing else.” God damn you, Debbie. You are such a yenta. What was her deal? Was she my boss or my mother? I was going to have to have an honest, respectful, non-job-losing conversation with her.

  As he strode across the street, I saw what Ute saw. He had on simple trousers and a sweater with a leather jacket. In contrast to the rest of the men at the party, who spent hours looking as though they didn’t care what they wore, Jonathan looked neat and put together, as if he cared. He was tall and lean and straight, with his hair brushed back off his forehead. He owned the world and everything in it. The difficulty of staying away from him was so past his looks, so past any single physical attribute, and fell into a new, undefined category of “right.”

  I set my back straighter and tilted my chin up. I thought Debbie would send Robert, but instead I’d have to pretend I was fine and my face wasn’t pounding.

  “He’s coming over here,” sa
id Ute, brushing her hair flat.

  “He’s my ride,” I said.

  Her eyebrows arched.

  I paused. Jonathan liked blondes, if his wife was any indication. Ute was beautiful. She’d do well with him.

  I thought about adding a short explanation. Maybe ‘I’m in love with him, but I left him’ or ‘he was my lover, boyfriend, master, king...’ None of it worked, and by the time I came up with ‘we were together for a while,’ he was upon us.

  “Hey,” he said, and that voice went right into my gut and ripped stuff out.

  I stood up. “Jonathan, this is my friend, Ute.” She had on a smile that wrapped around her face like a gag.

  “Hi.” He looked at Ute briefly, then back to me. “What happened?”

  “I fell. What are you doing here? Is Debbie being a yenta?”

  “I happened to be at the bar, and she couldn’t spare anyone.”

  “On Thanksgiving? You don’t have sisters to invite you to dinner?”

  “Dinner ended at eight, and the kids went to bed. Where did you fall?”

  “On my face.” I hadn’t seen a mirror yet, but his expression worried me. Was I going to the Vancouver opening with a big stinker on my cheek?

  He turned to Ute. “It was nice meeting you.” Nothing about his voice was nice. He put his hand on my back, between the shoulder blades, and guided me toward the street. It was a possessive gesture, and he had no business making it. When we were far enough away from the party, I shrugged off his hand.

  “Sorry, Jonathan. I wish she hadn’t sent you.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Tell me about your face now. And the truth this time.”

  The party had street spillage, sending pockets of people onto the sidewalk and neighboring lots. The light industrial district thrived on those parties, but Jonathan and I were constantly getting bumped and shifted by gaggles of half-drunk hipsters.