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 ass**le’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.