Monica (Songs of Submission #7.5)

Monica (Songs of Submission #7.5)
C.D. Reiss



JONATHAN

I brushed my thumb against her nipple, bending it, then I leaned down to suck it. She wove her fingers in my hair. I tasted the water of the shower on her, the tinge of soap on my tongue. Steam still fogged the room.

“Jonathan,” she whispered. “I’ll miss the plane.”

“No you won’t.”

I drew my tongue down her belly, flat and tight, stopping at the navel bar she still wore for me, then down between her legs. I bent one of her knees and put it over my shoulder, giving my mouth access to her.

“I haven’t packed yet,” she said, but I knew I had her. I opened her lips with my thumbs and licked her clit slowly, tip to hole and back again, tasting the fresh, clean skin and clear, rushing fluids.

“Pack fast,” I said. She’d be gone for a week. I wanted her before she left.

“I have to pack the Theramin and it’s oh, God,” she moaned when I sucked her, hitching her other leg over my shoulder. “Delicate. Jesus, what is with you lately?”

I stood up and wiped my mouth with my hand. She sat spread eagled on the bathroom vanity, wet and ready. She was mine, and I loved her.

“What’s with me lately?” I was in my underwear, which I didn’t bother taking off as I pulled my dick out. “Maybe I’m bored.”

“You could work again.”

“I could.”

I slid in nice and easy.

There was a feeling, as I f**ked her on the vanity, that something wasn’t quite right. Something was missing. She was wet. I was hard. Her tits bounced when I thrust and there was enough nudity between us to get my dick inside her.

But her arms. I didn’t know where they were going next. She moved in unexpected ways. I put my arms around her, holding her together and I leaned in close to kiss her, dragging my stubble on her cheek and the sensitive part of her neck. She whispered, ouch.

I felt suddenly powerful. I’d been f**king her for months with this borrowed thing in my chest, but when she said ouch, I wanted to more than f**k her. I wanted to tear her apart.

I lost my shit at the thought of it, coming in her the way I’d been since the hospital, without control or intent; just because I was ready.

Monica came a second after I started, and we gripped each other, quivering. The steam had barely cleared the mirrors when I kissed her shoulder and realized I had a problem in my arms.

***

I stretched out in the sun with my chest to the sky and felt that thing beating. The July heat baked me, muggy and sticky, sharing sweat with a stranger’s tissue, grateful to be alive, yet in a state of constant bewilderment, thinking, how the f**k was I pulled from death for this? I pondered it too often, and for too long.

“Hey,” she said, stepping into my sunlight. She wore a pale blue dress and clunky bracelets. “I’m going.”

I patted a place for her to sit next to me.

“I can’t,” she said. “Lil’s waiting.”

I flipped my sunglasses up so I could look her in the eye and with that gaze, let her know I was entitled to a minute of her time.

“Goddess.”

“I’ll call you when I land.” She bent to kiss me, and when her lips hit mine I held her head there an extra few seconds. She smiled and trotted away.

I had a problem. She was going to Caracas for three days to open two shows with some madhouse band, and I wasn’t going with her by doctor’s orders. Not yet.

The impulsive side of me wanted to follow her, and let the team of highly-paid specialists kiss my ass, but I stayed behind. There was no need to rush. Three more days wouldn’t change anything.

When I’d met Monica, I’d known what I was. Who I was. I knew what I was made of and I knew how to get what I wanted. I’d still been in love with my idea of my ex wife, but my goddess had cured me of that.

I thought being happy was what had made me demand control in the bedroom, but I was wrong, or at least only partly right. All the soul-searching in the world had led me to a false conclusion.

I’d been dominant because I knew myself, and in knowing myself, I had the confidence to bind and hit and hurt, because I’d know when to stop.

We got home from the hospital, Monica and I, and eventually made love again. Still, I wasn’t myself. I was mostly me and partly someone else. An alien piece of meat had been lodged in me. I didn’t know what it would do. Would it beat right for me, or for the person it was meant for? Would it skip a beat at the sight of some strange woman? Would it break over a different past or a lost present? I kept dreaming it jumped out of me like a frog on a frying pan, slapping to the kitchen floor with a splat, beating on the tiles, squirting yellow plasma. Once, I dreamed it bounced out of me and landed in the pool, swimming with Sheila in a trail of curly red blood. And I laughed, in my dream, but when I woke up, I ran to the bathroom mirror to make sure I had a scar instead of a hole.

I’d felt like a foreigner in my own skin, dragging around a sack of muscle and bone held together with medicine. Even after the doctor appointments dwindled and life returned to something that looked like normal, I still hadn’t adjusted to being two people in one body, and my wife knew it. She was drifting away like a bottle bobbing in the surf, tide by tide. She wasn’t Jessica. She’d never leave, at least not for someone else. But she’d leave with distraction and indifference. And at the thought of the lost intimacy, I felt a blade of ice cold rage so thick I had no room for a reaction or an emotion. My head was clear. The anger had pushed out all the clutter. She was mine to lose, but she was mine.