Sing (Songs of Submission #7)(31)

“Anything that sounds like ‘no’ or ‘stop’ is effective. But you have to say it.”

He draws his palm across my ass in a hard slap. At that point, he hadn’t spanked me yet, so my surprise overwhelmed the arousal. I was immediately angry and defensive.

“You have to use your voice. Do you understand?”

He puts his left hand on my rib cage, fingertips brushing my breast, and slapped me again.

I am not surprised the second time, nor am I angry. The raw tingle is arousing enough, as is the stroke and grab that follow. But what really arouses me is letting him do it. I submitted to it, making myself beneath him, under his command and control. I want it. I want every sting, every brush of his fingers against my sensitive skin. He slaps the back of my thighs and I gasp.

“Monica, was that you?” he asks. I see him in the window, just behind me, his dark suit nearly invisible against the night city. I want him to take me, use me, f**k me like a whore.

He reaches between my legs and jams two fingers in my cunt. My knees nearly buckle under the weight of my arousal.

“You’re wet.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“You want me to f**k you?” He slaps my ass again, hard.

“Yes, please,” I reply in breaths.

“Say it.”

I can’t. I can’t engage my vocal cords. I can’t make sounds. My voice kills people, I am convinced of it.

He takes his belt off and loops it once.

“You don’t know the power you have,” he says, and then whacks me with the belt. God, it hurts. I am more aware of the presence and place of my cunt. I can feel it hanging between the raw singe of my ass cheeks. It’s heavy, bloated, engorged with desire. He hits me again, lower, the leather kissing my wet opening.

“Say it.”

“Please f**k me.”

“With your voice.”

Whack.

The sting is definite, lingering, burning as if I’d sat on a hot stove.

“You don’t know the power you have,” he hits me repeatedly on the word power, until my ass is on fire and my clit is so engorged the belt touches it when it snaps, and I scream.

“Monica, was that you?” He’s breathless himself.

I can’t make the noise again until he drops the belt and slaps my cunt twice, hard and fast, and the sting, then the rush of pleasure pulled one long vowel sound from my throat.

“There it is. That beautiful voice.”

Behind me, he takes his c**k out and places it at my opening.

“Say it.”

“Fuck me. Fuck me please.” The air from my lungs vibrates my vocal cords, and I can hear myself cry out as he rams into me. His hips touch my raw behind, making me feel every thrust as pleasure and pain, filling the spectrum of sensations, every thought, every cell, every warp of my soul feeling him move inside me.

He pulls me up. My hands leave the cold glass, and I stand again, draped over the city, Jonathan f**king me from behind. I see him in the window, and he knows what I’m looking at, my giant self over the basin, and he whispers in my ear.

“You’re not the same woman I met. You have control.” I realize I’m hearing him say it the way he said it to me the yesterday, when he was trying to convince me to cut that EP. That same weak, enervated voice that I’d infused with muscle in my mind. I had stolen it and pasted it into the scene like a collage.

His fingers slip between my legs. I am sopping for him, my clit a hard knob under his touch, and I watch my own face in the window as I open my mouth the yell with pleasure as he whispers in my ear.

“You don’t know your own power.”

I put my head by his shoulder and fell asleep for a few hours.

CHAPTER 31.

MONICA

I went to the cafeteria aching from sleeping like a pretzel. I felt like the ghoul of Sequoia whenever I walked in there, until I saw Declan. He was the ghoul, of course. I was an amateur.

He sat with a young woman who was twisting her long dark hair in the fingertips, making a single, lacquered curl at the end. They spoke earnestly, emotionally, much as he and Jessica had spoken the other day. Or, to be more accurate, she was talking, and he was nodding in the way a therapist might nod. He understood. He heard every word. He had answers posed as questions, but nothing would stick. He’d go home and forget it.

I sat at my usual table. I could have gone up to Jonathan, but I had business in the cafeteria, and I was perfectly willing to sit and work on a song until that business came to me.

Take these rolling hills

Shorn grass and dewy mornings

Dump a street on them

Shove a house, then ten times ten

Take this starry night

Clean air and sparkling skies

Spray paint it with poison

Send up bleating sirens

I’m gonna rise through

My jawbone on your throat

Gonna get black tarred again

My heels dug in

Feasting under the surface

Death on life, me on you

Claws dig, teeth cut

Locked in a forever f**k

I was considering changing the last verse to a chorus when I felt someone above me, and knew who it was without looking up.

“Mister Drazen,” I said.

“Miss Faulkner, or should I call you by your new name?”

“How did you know my last name?” I leaned away from my notebook, closing it so he wouldn’t see my anger spit up on the page.