Burn (Songs of Submission #5)(25)

“Jonathan,” I whispered so softly I barely even heard myself, “my king.”

Knowing him, knowing how he played and how he f**ked, I touched myself ever so gently, around the opening, over the tip of the clit. I placed my fingers at the tip and pressed my hips into them slightly, then back, anticipation and hunger in every move. Two sides of myself warred. The side that wanted to just rub and orgasm out of myself, and the side that wanted to lie there with my cheek to the floor and milk it for every second of pleasure. I wanted the milking side to win. So I stroked my clit with a single fingertip three times, then once hard, then three times lightly, then stuck two fingers in my soaking pu**y.

Repeat.

I heard sounds on the other side of the door. A shuffle. A light clicking on. A drawer opening. A voice speaking a foreign language as if it was on the phone.

Right there. He was right there on the other side of the door.

I pressed my finger against my clit and drew it down, hard. It hurt, just a little, then exploded into pleasure so deep I had to lift my cheek off the floor. I rubbed it again. I’d jumped four stages of desire right into orgasm close. My thighs warmed. My folds shuddered when I touched them, and my back straightened. My face came off the floor, and I kneeled, legs spread, fingers between my legs and rubbing in a circle. A ball of heat wound tight around itself in my pelvis. I crouched, pressing the heel of my hand against my clit, and then bent my back. I drew my wrist, then my forearm, along my wet slit until my fingertips reached my lower back. The constant, single direction of pressure broke the coil of pleasure, and when I straightened, bringing forearm, wrist, and hand back over my clit, I exhaled in a clenched groan. I did it again until my forehead was on the floor, and I pulled back, my forearm now a slick instrument. My ass and pu**y clenched repeatedly as I tried not to cry out loudly enough to be heard by the king on the other side of the door.

CHAPTER 20.

JONATHAN

Sometimes, talking to people in Asia was enough to make me want to do bodily harm to myself or others. I shouldn’t have let that phrase enter my mind after what I’d revealed to Monica in the bathroom of the Gulfstream.

Sunshine and lollipops. I thought the words so hard I almost said them in Korean as I explained to my VP of operations that the vision for Hotel M in Seoul was exactly the same as the ones in Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, and Chicago. The spirit of the thing was what mattered. Getting the exact same designer for Seoul as we had in New York was less important than getting the same type of designer.

I hung up, then looked at a calendar as if I could deny the truth.

I had to go to Asia tomorrow afternoon at the latest.

Fuck.

I wanted her so badly, and it took all my concentration not to take her too soon. I couldn’t lose focus. Too much was going on. But there I was, getting Jacques on the line and telling Aling Mira to pack. I had no choice. Putting business first was a habit I couldn’t break.

That was two weeks right out of the gate. Two weeks outside LA. Outside her sphere. I didn’t want to go away. I was so close with her. So close to getting her commitment, her heart, her promise, then some shit across an ocean threatened to explode into a f**kstorm of red lacquer shrapnel. I dropped my laptop and phone on the table. My jacket went over the chair. My tie got yanked off as if it had offended me personally. Shoes, kicked. Cufflinks, tossed.

I hadn’t intended to tell her about the suicide attempt. I didn’t like talking about it, and I didn’t like her knowing, but, the minutes in the bathroom between deciding to tell her and actually doing it were more intimate than anything we’d experienced. She’d peeled off my skin and seen the isolation inside. She couldn’t turn away from me now. Couldn’t.

The door between our suites opened with a keycard, and I had it. It was mine, after all. The wood was warm to the touch, and smooth. Dry. The moldings were curved by the most perfectly even paint job money could buy. Running my finger along the seam, I imagined the little bit of air seeping through was shared between us. We were conjoined by the molecules, the scents they carried, the temperature, from her lungs to mine and back again.

I peeled off my shirt in the dining room. I didn’t want to look at an empty bed, and I wanted to be close to the door for reasons that didn’t have words my mind could define. I didn’t want to waste the air, or something equally absurd and impossible to accept.

Wearing nothing but my briefs in a hotel dining room, next to an empty china cabinet, I put both my hands flat on the door, stroking it downward. I didn’t know what was coming over me, but that door became her body, and I wanted to touch it. Needed to.

Then, through the door, I heard it. Her voice. Singing.

CHAPTER 21.

MONICA

My forearm had been covered in sex fluid, and I stank of the flight and fast food. After collapsing on the hotel floor, ashamed, exhilarated, and sexually satisfied until Jonathan worked his way into my sphere again, I needed a shower.

The bathroom was black with white fixtures, and I was alone. The four showerheads were powerful, and the water was scalding hot. The frosted, glass-walled shower stall was as big as a walk-in closet. I scrubbed with over-perfumed hotel soap, and as I rinsed, I started singing a song I’d started the day before in a pencil-dulling heat. I’d memorized the words even as I wrote them. As I leaned against the glass tiles, I worked out the bridge, over and over. I felt like I had it, and it had been sticking in my craw since yesterday.