Burn (Songs of Submission #5)(11)

And also, her body was mine, regardless. Mine to kiss. Mine to f**k.

Mine to hit?

The contrast wasn’t lost on me. I’d spanked her ass pink with the intention of a harder, rawer f**k. And she wanted it, begged for it. He hit her in anger, on her face, and hard. But what was the difference? When and how did she become a punching bag for the men she was involved with?

Wainwright was two blocks away. I saw her car in the front lot before I saw the building. The poor street lighting left dozens of dark corners and blind turns, but it made it very easy to see that the front door was ajar. Music came from it. A stringed instrument over a hip-hop percussion line that seemed a little bit off. It was disconcerting, all raw nerves and tension.

I pushed open the door and slipped into a narrow hall with doors on either side. Music came from the big room at the end. A voice, layered over and over, with that single stringed instrument and hard percussion. Something was off about it, but it was definitely Monica. I saw her bag half falling off a table in the big room. I grabbed it, and when I turned, I saw the piece.

It stood complete. The sections had been labeled for transport, and the wood packing boxes stood next to it. Like the coalmine, it was a freestanding room with an inside and outside.

It was cut in two by a foot-wide horizontal wound around the circumference. Shingles covered the walls, and the windows, framed in the Craftsman style and broken where the wound intersected them, were painted in gold and silver. Curious, I went inside.

From the inside, the open jaw of wood and plaster in the horizontal cut looked more evil, more hazardous. Detritus spilled everywhere. Broken cinderblocks. Gum-stuck urbanite. Grassrooted clods of parkway. All of it was anonymous, generic, unwanted, ripped out, found but not rescued. On the walls was a huge screen print of an open wound. It could have been any body part, from some ravaging knife fight or a ten-hour surgery; that didn’t matter. It was three hundred sixty degrees around, and grotesque. On the other corner was an insect with a mandible and antennae that went around the walls.

Then the music made sense. Monica’s voice, her words layered so many times that their syllables and meanings were lost. The strings sounded a little off key and the bass riff was half a millisecond off time, then gradually more, until the core was a disconcerting cacophony that fell back into the correct beat, looping into a false sense of a more permanent rightness. Each corner of the piece accentuated a different vocal layer, and each speaker had a different tone.

“It’s good,” I said. I knew he was within earshot. “Music’s the same inside and out. But you hear it differently.”

“Reality’s the same inside and outside the relationship.” He stood in the doorway, which was too tall for the room. Two people could leave at the same time, but only if one was on top of the other. “Before and after, life sucks. What are you doing here?” The left side of his face was cut and bloody. He held a red-soaked bag of ice to it.

“She did a good job on you,” I said. “You deserve worse.”

“Come on, man. She’s a cocktease.”

“Not with me.”

“Fine, dude, whatever. What do you want?”

I walked past him and stopped. “Came to get the car. You let her walk out into a dark street alone. I don’t know what comes over men like you.”

“You know what? Fuck you. You’re just another rich guy with ownership issues. * like that’s never owned.”

I pushed him against the doorframe. The bag of ice dropped, breaking and spreading cubes and shards all over the floor. “You don’t—”

He pushed me back. We were evenly matched, physically, so when I pushed him back, we ended up in a lock in a doorway designed for one person, straining against each other, unmoving for our red faces and effort.

I slipped my foot behind his ankle and yanked his leg from under him. We fell, with me on top. I got my knee in his sternum while he was still disoriented. I got lucky. I kept my head. In that millisecond, I looked at that piece of shit and thought, One hard hit to the face, and I have him. Then the voice of reason chimed in. I wouldn’t have him. Knocking him senseless would do nothing but give him a headache in the morning. Worse, I’d lose Monica’s respect. She expected better of me, and we were too precarious for me to do something temperamental and stupid.

I had to remove him from her life peacefully and permanently.

“Listen to me,” I said, out of breath and knowing my upper hand wouldn’t last. “I’m going with her to Vancouver. We will both act like gentlemen. You will not speak about her like that to me or anyone else. Do you understand?”

“You don’t know her,” he choked out.

I dug my knee in his chest. He swiped at me, catching my cheek. “Do you understand or not?” I asked.

“Fuck you.”

I stood up. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

CHAPTER 8.

MONICA

I made sure I was facing the block Jonathan had walked down. He was taking too long. I knew Ute’s crowd by sight, name, or both, and under normal circumstances, I would have had a fine time listening to their Hollywood war stories. Broken commitments. Rich executives demanding endless hours of free work. All of the tales laced with hope hope hope.

I didn’t mention my meeting with Eddie, or his insinuation that if I’d just release a single song about being a submissive under the beautiful Mr. Drazen, I’d have a deal. A real deal, with a real record label. I just smiled and accepted condolences about Gabby. I talked briefly about the B.C. Mod show as if it was some little project that may or may not actually lead to something. I kept it vague and kept Kevin out of it.