Breathe (Songs of Submission #10)(12)

Jonathan had threatened to collar me five days before. We’d always been at war over the concept, and as I learned more about it, my opinion hadn’t changed. He owned me. He didn’t need me to walk around in a collar to prove it. And I didn’t need to feel owned in that way. A little humiliation was fine and part of the game, but a collar?

No.

Just no.

I wasn’t a dog, and though I was completely submissive, I wasn’t a slave.

End of.

Except….

Except when I let myself think of him pulling on it, or imagined how it would feel during the day, how it would remind me of him, or how it would feel to kneel before him and look up enough so he could see the symbol of my tender obedience.

I breathed into the bottom of my lungs, filling the widest part first, to the top, then exhaled slowly.

Darren whipped a quick beat on his drum. To my right, Harry, the bassist from Spoken Not Stirred, and Steve, the guitarist, was to my left. Evanie sat to the side, always an excellent sport when Monica Faulkner showed up to sing. It was because of Evanie that they’d gotten a deal and a little tour that would take them to Nashville right after they finished Thelonius.

They played a few notes, and the crowd quieted. I smiled. I loved that moment of expectation, anticipation. The vacuum I was meant to fill.

“You all know Monica Faulkner,” Harry said, putting his hand out to me. Applause. Whistles. “She’s gonna open with a classic.”

“Thank you, guys,” I said, looking at each of them. Darren had offered me this opportunity to work out my nervous kinks, and it had seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Still thinking this would be a fun tryout, I sang the first few words.

Oh, say can you see….

Harry popped the bass a little, but I was otherwise a capella. Then something I didn’t expect happened. Everyone stood and put their hands on their hearts.

You were supposed to stand. It was a rule. But the scraping of chairs and the good-humored salutes distracted me, because in the first second, I thought they were getting up and leaving. They were a bunch of freaking hipsters after all, not the most reverent type. So I faltered. They were leaving because I’d insulted their sense of irony.

But I was wrong. They were staying.

I adjusted to that, but in doing so, I diverted precious mental bandwidth.

And my voice went off the f*cking rails. A key is a bookmark. If you know where you are, you can travel up and down the scales accurately.

But I lost my place. I kept to the beat and knew the words, but the key was all screwed up. Before I even got to ramparts, I was fighting tears, and that was the hardest line. It led into g allantly streaming, which was flat as f*ck, and led into rocket’s red glare, which felt superhumanly sharp and high, and I had no way of getting there.

I got to the home of the brave and smiled, but I wanted to die. Oh sure, they clapped, because it was fun and unexpected and even ironic. But they didn’t get what a complete f*ckup that had been, and I’d almost done it in DodgerStadium.

I’d almost sounded like that in front of 55,695 people.

There were lists on YouTube of the worst game-time renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and I was about to be one of them.

I had to get out of this.

I shook hands and smiled and did all the things on my way to the back room. My stuff wasn’t in that room though, since I wasn’t a real act. My bag was next to my husband, and I was supposed to sit by him and have a drink and plan little adjustments to my song. But there were no little adjustments. There was my quitting and staying home with a beer and a flat screen on opening night, or there was a complete overhaul I didn’t have time for.

So I went into the back room where Darren had his shit, and I closed the door behind me. My hands were shaking as hard as my knees. I leaned against the makeup counter. The linoleum edge was chipped down to the wood. It looked like Mrs. Yuan’s piano where she habitually hit the fork. I pressed my thumb against the ridge.

What was she going to say? She’d seemed pleased with my progress, and now what would Sherri go back and report?

I wanted to throw up.

There was a knock on the door. I knew who it was.

“Jonathan, just leave me be.”

He came in carrying my bag. “You want to go out the back?”

“I want to die.”

“I didn’t give you permission to die.” He dropped the bag on the counter.

“How bad was it?”

He shrugged. “You’ve sounded better. But you psyched yourself out.”

“I should back out, right? Claim a sore throat?”

“No. Quitting’s not your style.”

Outside, Darren’s band started playing loud and fast.

I stood and grabbed Jonathan’s belt. “How about this?” I tapped my throat. “You f*ck my face so hard I can’t even speak. Really get it in there. Down the throat all the way. You’ll get your dick sucked, and I’ll get out of opening day.”

He started laughing before I was even done. Fucker.

“I can’t, Jonathan. I can’t do Dodger Stadium.” I pulled out his belt. “But this? Your dick? That I can do. I should have just stuck to that in the first place.”

He slipped his hands over mine and pulled them off his pants. “I’ve been annoyed with the whole thing, I admit. But I want you to see it through. I can take being a little annoyed. I’m a big boy.”