Coda (Songs of Submission #9)(13)

So I kissed her cheek. “Will you stay?”

She nodded, and I felt the insecurity in it. She’d never been insecure with me, and it unmoored me at the same time it filled me with a feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.

I unbuttoned my shirt. She reached up and helped me, pulling it off and throwing it across the room. I got my pants off and stood over her naked body. Her magnificent tits were goose bumped, nipples hard, skin golden in the lamplight.

“Spread your legs for me.”

She did it, hitching up her knees. There was so much between us. I would have married her in an instant, under any circumstances, and as I wedged myself between her legs, I knew my job wasn’t to reassure her with pretty words or gifts but with actions. She’d believe it, or I’d die trying.

I put her hands over her head and leaned on them. “Look at me.”

Her eyes went wide, looking up at me. “May I come?”

I pushed against her with the rhythm of slow torture. “Quiet now, goddess. Don’t ask again.”

Her face went from pleasure to constricted concentration as she tried not to come. I f*cked her harder. She pleaded with me without saying a word. Her face begged for release, her beauty crunched into pain.

“Say my name,” I said.

“Jonathan.”

“Monica.”

“Jonathan.” She cried it, sobbed, breaking herself into pieces to say it.

“Come, my wife. Come for me.”

She came in two strokes, arching and twisting. I held myself back until she’d finished, and I drank in every cry, every moment, every shudder.

My purpose in life had been simple up until then. Live. Just live. Now I had a resolution. Love her until she believed it.

chapter 8.

MONICA

Love was easy. Love, the way everyone else defined it, was the fun part. But every hell, every conflict, every bit of miserable anxiety in those first six months had been born of nothing but love. I’d thought that was my new life. Ten years of it at least, until his heart gave out and he had to find another. Then another ten. Or more. Or less. Or not. Or maybe. I was playing Russian roulette with God by being away so much, but I thought he wanted me away, and he thought I wanted to be away. I didn’t know whether to jump or crawl those first six months, then he came to the studio and f*cked me like an animal.

The morning after he’d reclaimed me, with my ass aching and my cunt as sore as it had ever been, I woke up forgetting to wonder about his pills and his life. Just for a second. In that crack in my wall of concern bled something else I hadn’t thought about since Sequoia. It had needled me every time I saw Declan and disappeared behind the buzz of death seconds after Jonathan’s father left the room. Now that I thought of it, while in Jonathan’s arms with the sound of the ocean outside, I couldn’t go another second without telling him, even if it meant it was our last together.

His eyes were closed, light lashes casting darker shadows. His chest rose and fell under me, and his scar was hard white beneath my hand.

“Jonathan,” I whispered, hoping he was asleep.

“Yes,” he answered, eyes still shut, as if he was wide awake and had been listening to my thoughts.

I got my knees under me, the pain of every movement reminding me of how many times he’d brutalized me and how consistently I’d begged for it. “I need to tell you something.”

He opened his eyes. Had they always been that green? Or was it a trick of the light and my fear of losing him?

“Okay, go ahead.” He stroked the top of my breast.

I pulled his hand away and held it in my lap. I paused. A hundred years passed, and he said nothing. Not a word of encouragement or doubt. I could have hanged myself in the amount of time he’d wait. As always, he was a patient man in all things.

“When you were… I mean, you weren’t yourself,” I started, “and you were dying right in front of me. I thought you were second on the list for a transplant. It was like… I thought that was it.”

His brow creased as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about. God, there were so many little details, and I wanted to tell this story fast and dirty so I could get it over with.

“You hate your father already, so it’s not like this will make it worse. I went to him because I wanted something.”

“What did he want in exchange?” His voice was hard and cold, and the implications of his assumptions justified the tone.

“Forgiveness from you. Enough to get your mother back to him.”

He put his hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. “That’s what that whole thing was about. I barely remember it. I was in and out of consciousness ten times in a minute.” He patted my hand then rubbed my fingers. “What did you want?”

I balled my hand into a fist. I didn’t want his affection. I couldn’t bear to feel it stop when I put the pieces together for him. “So I saw Brad’s list. I didn’t understand how it worked. So I thought what I was seeing was… you were second, and I thought it meant you were going to die. It seemed like a guarantee. And Paulie Patalano was brain-dead and right on the fourth floor.” Unable to stand the weight of his gaze, I looked in my lap, where his hand rested in mine, our fourth fingers still circled by the cheap silver key rings. “I thought your father could get me access to Paulie’s room.”