Breathe (Songs of Submission #10)(9)

He put his face to my cheek and owned me, breathing hard in my ear. His right arm was looped under my right leg, and he flicked my clit. Not one part of my body wasn’t aware of his presence.

I owned him. I made this beautiful man gasp in my ear. His pleasure was mine, and my pain was his.

“Hurt me, Jonathan. Hurt—”

He pinched my clit, and I screamed. Pain drove through me, and the orgasm was so powerful, such a braid of sensation from both ends of the spectrum, that I nearly lost consciousness. My ass clenched, pulsing around him.

“Yes. That.” He grunted and thrust deep, then stilled in his release.

When he took the last gasp, I rolled onto my back, and he slid his dick out of me.

“You’re amazing,” he said, kissing my face. His cheeks were rough, and I enjoyed the scratchy sensation. “Literally. You amaze me. How good you are.”

“I love you.”

“I adore you.” One last peck on the lips, and he stood, holding out his hand. “Let me take care of you.”

***

After the shower, he sat me on the cold marble vanity and had me spread my legs with my heels on the edge of the counter. The welts inside my thighs were an angry red, and looking at them made me want to get f*cked again.

“I did a number on you,” Jonathan said, rubbing a soothing cream over them. His touch was firm and gentle, healing and arousing.

“I needed it.”

“You going back for coaching?”

“No,” I said. “I think I burned that bridge. I can just practice. I’ll get it.”

He slid two fingers inside me, and I pushed into them.

“You’ll get it.”

“Oh, say can you see…” I groaned.

“I was saving your cunt for last.”

“Take it.”

He carried me into the bedroom and made love to me, healed me, brought me back to center. No one could hurt me with this man at my side.

nine.

MONICA

If you’re told you’re fantastic enough times, you start to believe it. And it was becoming a problem. I was at a plateau. I’d found where I belonged and was getting recognition from people with the power to make my dreams happen. It was their job to make sure I was happy and satisfied so that I’d continue working.

Unfortunately, they were businesspeople. They weren’t artists or fans. They didn’t know shit.

I could sing like the sound of a car screeching on asphalt, and it didn’t matter to them as long as I made money. “Sell it, don’t smell it” was the rule on the western end of Wilshire. And because I’d been traveling around with Jonathan, no one criticized me. My artist friends were back in LA, and I was too busy to just sit around making work with them. No one told me where I could be better. It was ass kissing time all the time.

Truth be told, I was really happy coasting. But the thing about coasting is that at some point, the energy goes out of the work, and I would have to push or grind to a halt.

“Should I wait?” Lil called back to me as she pulled me up to Mrs. Yuan’s warehouse in Boyle Heights.

“Yeah. I’ll be a second.”

She put the car in park right in the red zone and opened the back door for me.

“You probably don’t even have to turn the car off.”

I could have sent her up for the music. I could have stayed home even, and sent her while I worked on the national anthem in the privacy of my home studio. But I went myself for reasons I couldn’t even tell myself. I wanted to touch where the pain of the day before had been.

Yep. Pain. On the elevator, I admitted to myself that I’d been hurt, and I’d been hurt because I surrounded myself with businesspeople who didn’t know how to be critical. I hadn’t sat in a studio with a producer and had my ass beaten in two months. I’d gotten soft, and I bruised easily.

The door to the big white room with the black grand piano was open. I walked in, my shoes echoing. No one was there, but my stupid sheet music was on the piano.

Behind the door Mrs. Yuan had walked out of, I heard the snipsnap of an Asian language.

And on the lid over the keys was the black box.

I put the music back and opened the box.

A tuning fork isn’t an expensive item, but it was nestled inside velvet as if it were a jewel. I tapped the worn ridge of the piano and listened to the hum of A four forty.

Singing the note wasn’t something I decided consciously; it was something I did out of compulsion. I had to mimic it. Had to try it again. I couldn’t just let the vibrations hover in the air without matching them.

I put the bar to my ear and sang it low at first, listening for the wave oscillations I could pick out with stunning accuracy on the viola.

I heard nothing.

I tapped the fork again and committed to doing this stupid, pointless thing. I wasn’t trying to prove I could, or that I wasn’t as bad as she thought. I wasn’t trying to get it right even. I was trying to hear what she heard.

I sang louder. Maybe that was the issue. Maybe I just needed to sing louder to hear it.

Could have been I was screaming, or singing loud enough for Disney Hall. When the inner door snapped open, my sudden silence fell like an anvil over the room.

Mrs. Yuan stood in the doorway in a pale blue wrap. The chopsticks in her hair had little fans on them, and her mouth was a straight red slash. “Why do you come in here to torture my ears?”