Текст книги "Sing"
Автор книги: C. D. Reiss
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 10 страниц)
CHAPTER 45.
JONATHAN
It was bright. The people around me had voices that spoke like robots to each other and in fake kindness to me. They narrated what they were doing, but all I knew was, I was strapped to a gurney, staring at the ceiling, with no way to see what was happening around me.
“Okay,” said a man somewhere behind me. “I’m Doctor Chen? How are we doing today?”
“Ask yourself half the answer.”
“Right. Okay. I’m going to put this mask over your face. You need to just breathe and count backwards from ten.”
“Wait.”
He bent over to look at me. Asian guy. Mid thirties. Cap. Hissing gas mask in his gloved hand.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Uhm...” He seemed put-upon by the question. “Three.”
“Exactly three?”
“One minute til.” He started to lower the mask again.
“Wait.”
I looked around the room as far as my position would let me. Five people stood around me in the light blue uniform of doctors and nurses, hands up with the palms facing toward their shoulders. More scuttled in the background.
“Unstrap me,” I said. “One hand.” I didn’t think it was loud enough over the ambient noise of the room. Dr. Chen, cleared his throat, and exchanged some silent communication with the other doctors.
“Mister Drazen—“ he began.
“Please.”
“You shouldn’t be moving, now—“
“Please!” The plea came louder than I thought I was capable of.
Dead silence followed. The clock ticked, and though I couldn’t hear or see it, I was aware of it in the beating of my fucked up heart. I had, maybe thirty-five seconds.
“Mister Drazen,” said Dr. Emerson. “You need to calm down.”
“I’ll calm down. Just do it. Please. Half a minute.”
I couldn’t see his face past the mask, but his eyes stilled, and he glanced at an instrument before turning back to me. “No flailing.”
“No. No flailing.”
He nodded to someone, and I felt movement at my left wrist. I didn’t realize how tense I was until they let it go. Overwhelming gratitude flooded me, and a helix of fear unwound from my torso, though my limbs. When it reached my fingertips I slowly raised my hand.
“Can you tell me when it’s exactly three?” I asked Dr. Chen.
He looked at the wall clock, and I noticed the rest of them standing, in silence, all looking in the same direction.
Chen counted down. “In four, three, two...”
I put my fingertips to my lips.
CHAPTER 46.
MONICA
I couldn’t sit in that room any more. I was used to dealing with pain and worry by myself. I wasn’t accustomed to group stress. When Dad died, Mom withdrew, aunts and uncles took off and I basically dealt with it myself. Having these sisters, who were mine only by dint of a forced union, wasn’t the dream come true I’d imagined. They had personalities, and needs I didn’t know how to meet, and I didn’t know how to ask them for what I needed, because what I needed was to be alone.
So I quietly withdrew. Declan wasn’t in the cafeteria any more, but upstairs with the women, sitting by his wife, not touching her. They spoke sweetly to one another, which all things considered, was an improvement.
I felt hopeful. They did nine of these a year. That was good. It was a lot, apparently. He was going to walk out of this hospital and we’d figure out what to do. I walked into the back parking lot, just seeking an open space under the sky, with a spring in my step, a little dreamy, hoping he’d want to stay married and move into the same house with me. The heart would last ten years, but maybe we could squeeze in another two, and maybe another one would come and buy us twenty years together. It seemed like forever. I saw Jessica’s Mercedes, then her, lowering the trunk. She saw me and waved, but went for the driver’s side door, the wave was all I was getting. I got to her just as she was pulling out.
“Hey!” I tapped on the window.
She lowered it. “Yes?”
“Thanks.” That felt ridiculous, thanking her for telling me how to kill someone. “For helping.” Still ridiculous. “I got a call on the way out and I put the tube back the way it was.”
She just looked at me like I was nuts. “He have a heart or not?”
“He’s in surgery. Do you want to stay? I mean, not for me, Lord knows. The family? They kinda consider you one of them.”
“No, but thank you.”
The window crawled up, and I stepped back as she pulled out.
I heard the squawk of police radios behind me, shocking me out of my reverie. Close. Coming for me. I turned around and found three uniformed cops running toward me, laden at the waist, fists on holsters.
I put my hands up.
A black and white came for me, sirens on. I put my palms on my head and got on my knees. Okay, they knew. I’d tried to kill Paulie Patalano. Fuck. Okay. Okayokayokay. Just submit. Just shut up and let them take you in and call Margie and let her work on it.
Right.
The car stopped, and the three cops blew past me, practically knocking me over. I cringed. There was yelling. Get out of the car.
I wasn’t in a car.
Obviously.
I slowly took my hands off my head and opened my eyes.
One cop had his gun trained on the driver’s seat of Jessica’s Mercedes. Another opened the door. More stood behind car doors. One cop stood over me, the woman who had guarded Paulie Patalano’s hallway.
“Not today, girlie,” she said.
“I was just—“
“Save it. Nothing to see here.” She shooed me.
I got up and backed away slowly, then quickly, walking fast, head down, navigating a newly-formed crowd when I ran into a man who grabbed my biceps. It was Will Santon.
“What was that about?” he asked. “You kneeling.”
I didn’t want to tell him. I wanted what I almost did in that room to disappear forever.
“I grew up in the ghetto. That’s what you do when the cops run after you.” He seemed to accept this, and released my arms. “But it was Jessica,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “What could she have done? My God.” Maybe they thought she’d been the one who twisted the catheter then fixed it. Maybe she was going to take an attempted murder rap for me. It made no sense, and I had to consider for a moment, would I let her?
“We’ve been working on this for weeks.” He whispered it and smiled. “Once we stopped having to follow you around.”
“It wasn’t her,” I whispered back.
“Yes it was,” he said with satisfaction all over his face. “She killed Rachel Demarest.”
“But...?”
“Swapped out her antibiotics. Trust me. We’ve been chasing her for weeks.”
I watched as Jessica had her hands cuffed behind her.
CHAPTER 47.
MONICA
More waiting.
I felt like I’d spent the past weeks doing nothing but waiting.
The cafeteria was quiet, for once. I stared at my tea, trying to absorb Jessica’s arrest. That had been Jonathan’s plan. it had been what my curiosity had kept him from executing. It seemed so petty now. I looked at my watch, checked my texts for word from Margie, and took out my notebook.
I opened it to the last page, the only one left blank. Much of what I had in there wasn’t even suitable to be put to music. I had drawings and staff notes, compositions for multiple instruments with no idea if there was even a possibility of matching words.
“Monica,” Brad sat down across from me with a prepackaged yogurt cup and toast wrapped in plastic.
“Brad.” I folded my notebook closed. “Thank you for that text. It was...it saved my life.”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” He unwrapped his toast. “You’re off the hook for dinner, you know. But I hope we can still be friends?”
“Of course. And you still need to yell at me for what I did.”
“I’ll give you an earful.” He bit the toast, wrinkled his nose and went for the yogurt. “What are you doing here?”
“Margie said she’d text me when he got out.” I looked at my phone, checking to make sure it was on for the hundredth time.
“How long has it been?”
“Six hours, give or take.”
He stirred his yogurt slowly. “That’s long.”
I took a second to absorb what he said, then snapped up my phone and texted Margie.
—any word?—
“If she forgot to text me I’m going to beat her senseless,” I said more to myself than Brad.
A text shot back immediately.
—Dr came out an hour ago. Issues with the aortic valve. Bad—
“Fuck.”
I didn’t say good-bye to Brad.
CHAPTER 48.
MONICA
That fucking waiting room, same as every other I’d seen when they wheeled him from unit to unit. As I exited the elevator I realized what a home they had become, with their greyed colors and worn seats. And I knew that no matter what happened, it would likely be the last day I spent in a waiting room, worrying about Jonathan.
They were all there, like a red-haired baseball team. Even Fiona had stopped blowing by long enough to hold her mother’s hand. They looked at me, eyes shaded from green to blue and back, and I stood by Margie’s seat.
“Sorry I didn’t text you,” she said. “I have other things.”
“Don’t worry about it. Did you hear about Jessica?”
“Yeah.” She waved it away as if she couldn’t care less. Her mouth was tight and she looked drawn and panicked. I never thought I’d see Margie this flustered.
Next to her, Deirdre stood.
They all stood, and looked at a set of swinging doors. Through the window, I saw an older doctor with silver hair take his cap off and pull his mask down. He turned to another doctor, a woman, and opened the swinging doors.
Another followed. An Asian man, snapping his gloves off.
Three of them. One. Two. Three.
They came to us, and the older doctor put his hand on the woman’s shoulder in a gesture of what? Condolences? Professional commiseration? And when the Asian guy cleared his throat? What was that? Gathering strength?
Hope dropped out of me an flowed down an emotional drain, leaving a black despair in its wake.
Shit.
Three doctors. If one took a blow, the other held the family member, one sister, down, and the third called security.
Wasn’t that how it was?
I glanced at Declan, and he must have seen the panic on my face, because he smiled. And then I became that sister.
CHAPTER 49.
CHAPTER 50.
–TWO YEARS LATER–
CHAPTER 51.
MONICA
The crowd wasn’t for me tonight. There was a relief in that. No pressure. I fluffed my dress and tucked my hair into place, fixing the web of pins and curls. The lights on either side of the mirror washed my face out, but I noticed it was rounder, healthier, happier than even that morning.
The dressing room at the Wiltern Theater wasn’t the cleanest I’d been in the previous months, hardly the most glamorous. The table was new, but had the same half-eaten fast food crap that I’d known musicians to eat my whole life. The couch was worn but not ripped, the mirror was clean, the counter had been wiped and replaced some time in the last decade, but I wasn’t there for a dressing room.
Darren blew in, sweating and panting.
“What the fuck?” I shouted. “You’re in the middle of a show!”
“We’re between sets. I had to make sure you were here.” He grabbed a fingertip pinch’s worth of French fries and stuffed them in his mouth.
“I’m here. I’ll be out to do your encore with you then I’m outtie.”
“Is that what you’re wearing?” He pointed to my wedding dress, a sleeveless silk/satin that hugged me on top, and went wild on the bottom, folding in on itself in twenty yards of lace and shine.
“It’s dramatic. Everyone knows I got married today. When I get up on that stage—”
“They’ll think you’re nuts for doing a song between your reception and your honeymoon.”
“I am. And I love you. It’ll be a show that lives in infamy. Get out.”
“You’re husband’s roaming around the halls looking for you.”
“Get out!”
He grabbed his burger and kissed my cheek before slipping out. The door didn’t click closed completely, and I rolled my eyes. Boys, even the sweet, bisexual ones were careless.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
My name is Monica. I stand almost six feet tall. I walk like an ocean wave and I sing like a storm. My voice is a force of it’s own, and I let it loose like a hurricane. I am safe. I own what I make. I am a creator. I am an artist.
(My name is Monica. My life is complete and as it should be. Everything I experience, I own. It is mine to keep or give away or use as I see fit. Nothing is outside my purview. This all goes into the music. I am powerless to stop myself from being myself. I am a lion. I am the sea. I am a star in the sky. I am an artist.)
I felt movement behind me, and knew from the scent it was my husband. He put his hands on my neck, where every nerve ending in my body was now located, following his touch as he stroked me, like the little magnet shavings under plastic I’d played with as a kid. When the pen moved, the shavings moved, and I arched my neck to feel more of him.
He kissed me at the base of my neck. His lips were full and soft, more than lips; they were the physical manifestation of every taste of longing, every tingle of desire, every scorch of ambition.
“We said we weren’t going to do this until we were out of the country.”
“Do what, Goddess?” I groaned in response, opening my eyes to watch him caress my neck and shoulder with his mouth. “No one knew where you were until I asked for Monica Faulkner.”
“You have to give the name change a little time.” It was a lame excuse. The fact was, I’d been too busy touring, recording, and taking interviews to do simple tasks, like changing my name as I’d promised. I could have done it any time, and he knew it. We were married in the eyes of the law, but to us and the world, today was the day. Now came the name change. Now we called each other husband and wife in public.
“Take your hair down,” he said.
I smirked. “I don’t think we have time.”
“I won’t wait.”
He’d left that operating room a different person. You don’t just walk away from a heart transplant and continue as before. He was confused about who he was, vulnerable, testy, physically weak, and overly cautious. He was also sexually vanilla, which I tried to accept. I didn’t think it would last, but with each passing day, I feared my kinky Jonathan would never return. I stood by him, helping him manage his recovery. We agreed our marriage wasn’t genuine because of the circumstances surrounding it, but we never suggested our love was anything but real. He bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and we moved into it. Two years, we said. If we could be together two years, we’d get married for real.
I inhaled deeply and put my hands in my hair, lifting my arms out of the way. He slowly unzipped the back of my dress, touching my spine as he went.
Six months after the transplant, Jonathan roared back like a lion. As if overnight, he became more aggressive, more demanding, more kinky, more dominant than he’d ever been. A year later, he got me an engagement ring of my own, a round canary diamond. He’d gotten on one knee all over again, and I realized the reason he’d been so much more sexually ferocious was because he was happy.
I unpinned my hair, leaving in the one, pencil-thin braid I’d demanded, and as it fell over my back, my dress slipped off.
“You are magnificent,” he said, twisting my hair in his finger. We faced the mirror, him in a blue shirt and tie he’d changed into after the reception, and I, bare-breasted up top, and in white lace garter down below. “All day, I wanted you.”
“I am yours.”
“Apparently not, Ms. Faulkner.” He loosened his tie. “Hands behind your back.” He must have seen me glance at the clock. “I have control of the time. Just do what I asked.”
“Yes, sir.” I cast my eyes down, submitting completely, and put my hands behind my back. Already a rush of fluid surged between my legs. I was going to sing at Darren’s encore, and help his career, but damn if I had to be late, I was going to be late. Jonathan wasn’t half as busy as me. He’d sold a bunch of assets, more than I could count, and started the Drazen Foundation for Arts Education. It took up about as much time out of his week as a typical DMV job. My co-chair duties took up a few minutes in the morning, usually tied to the bed.
My husband clamped my arms together, hard enough to make me gasp, and wrapped his tie around the elbows.
“Look at yourself,” he said, pulling my hair back until my head faced forward. Tying my arms at the elbows had the effect of jutting my tits forward. The nipples were tight and erect. The garter had tiny blue bows at the suspenders, my “something blue” for the occasion. “What you see, is mine. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t think you do.” He held me at the bicep and said, “Step out.”
I stepped out of my wedding gown and he led me to the couch, placing me so my head was over the arm, my arms draped below, and my lower back was on the seat. He opened my legs and unsnapped the crotch of the garter, then he stood back and observed his handiwork.
I’d really thought he was dead. When those three doctors came out, I wasn’t ready for them to say everything was fine. After what I’d been through, bottling it all up to keep enough control to kill Paulie Patalano, I lost it. They really had needed a third doctor to call security. And Declan thought he’d played the funniest joke on me. Shitty hobby, as Margie said. When I explained it to Jonathan, he cut his father out all over again, but the transplant had put Declan back in the good graces of the rest of the family.
With my pussy on display, tits sticking out and my head facing the ceiling, I saw Jonathan in my peripheral vision, picking up a cup of fast food-approved carbonated beverage. He peeled the plastic top off, straw and all, and peeked inside.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “What’s the world coming to?” He shook the cup. I heard the contents swish around. Crushed ice. Bane of my husband’s existence.
He put it down and picked something off my makeup table. Then he came to the couch, pants open, dick out, kneeling between my legs with a tube of lipstick jammed between his teeth like a cigar. He pulled it out, leaving the cap in his jaw. He spit it to the floor like a watermelon seed.
“I’m going to write something down so you remember it, Goddess. Because I know you’re busy being a superstar, and you forget.”
He put the stage-red lipstick to my left breast and dragged it across, then between them, then moved it over the right.
He was writing on me.
Carefully, he wrote on my rib cage, wearing the lipstick down to nothing. When he was done, he checked his handiwork. I glanced as far as I could to the mirror and saw what was written on me.
MRS. DRAZEN
Jonathan crouched over me, smiling, then put a hand on the arm of the couch, leaning over me. “Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, tilting my hips so that his erection touched my wetness. He moved slightly until the head of his dick touched my opening just enough for me to ache for it.
“Those crowds out there, they don’t own you. I do. I marked you with my name. This is who you are now.” He moved so his dick rubbed my clit ever so slightly. I jerked to feel more of him.
“No no,” he said. “Don’t make me pull up the extension cords and tie you down tighter. I’m not done explaining.” He put his face to my cheek, and ran his open mouth along my jaw. “The name is your bond to me. It’s your collar.”
“I’m sorry, I—“
“Shh. Tell me who you are.”
“Mrs. Drazen.”
His cock pushed into me, sliding in with no resistance, every surface of my body a firing bed of sensation. All the way, until his body slammed against my clit, moved, and pulled out.
“Who are you?”
“Your wife.”
He went in again, harder. Then again, grunting with the effort. He fucked the breath right out of me, then stopped.
“What’s your name?”
“Oh, Jonathan.”
“Nope. That’s my name.”
“Mrs. Drazen.”
He slammed into me. “I don’t think you believe it.”
“My name is—“
He fucked me for real then, putting a hand on either side of my head and taking my cunt repeatedly. He pressed his face to mine, rocking. I was close, so close he could sense it, and as was his way, he slowed down, dangling me over an ocean.
And I let him, because he owned me.
“Look at me.”
I did. His hips stroked me, stretching me, the friction between us a white heat. I was so close. I could feel the undertow of my orgasm on my legs. I wanted to get pulled under, I wanted to drown in it, but he was holding me back, a life vest I didn’t want.
“What’s your name?”
I gasped a few times, lost in the sensation between my legs. “I forget.”
“Perfect.”
He moved once, twice, three times, and I exploded, sucked down by the undertow, pulled out to the neverending sea, clenching against him like my body wanted to break him and fit the whole of him inside me.
“Ah, Monica.” He came right after, growling my name, then grunting as he never had before the surgery, before he came back stronger and better. I loved seeing him in those moments, overcome with is own pleasure, his connection to me complete and unbreakable.
“I love you,” I said.
“And I, you.”
“Can you untie me?”
He reached around me and loosened the knot. “First you decide to work on our wedding night, and now you nag me to untie you.”
“You’re a horrible brute,” I said, feigning offense. “I’m staying at my mother’s.”
He leaned up, and I stood. My new name was smudged on the bottom. Jonathan helped me back into my dress. My hair was a wreck and my makeup was worn off.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
“You look beautiful.”
“You have lipstick all over your shirt.”
He looked down at himself. “I look like I’ve been shot.”
“By the cheerleading squad.”
He laughed. “It’s dark on the plane, and I’m going to me naked and fucking most of the way to Paris anyway.”
“Really? What if I have a headache?”
“I’ll fuck it right out of you.” He buttoned his jacket, covering the lipstick stain.
There was a knock at the door. It was my assistant, Ned, a huge guy there more for my protection than assistance. “Ms. Faulkner?”
I pressed my lips between my teeth.
“Who?” asked Jonathan. “No one by that name any more, Ned.”
“Monica?” Ned called. “Listen, you’re on, whoever you are. Three minutes.”
“Coming!”
I straightened myself, rubbed mascara from under my eyes and fingerbrushed the bird’s nest on my head as Jonathan watched. It was hopeless. I looked like someone just fucked the shit out of me.
“I brought this for you,” he said.
He pulled a long chain from his jacket pocket. My lariat. I hadn’t worn it because it didn’t make sense for a wedding, but as it stretched across his hands, drooping between them, the encrusted berries on either side swinging and sparkling in blue and green, I wanted it around my neck.
“Thank you.” I looked at the ceiling, exposing my throat, and he reached up, looping it around me not once, but twice, and when I looked to him, he pulled the jewels, snapping it tight around my neck.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. I kissed him, as if for the first time, his lips the symbol of vulnerability in safety, pain and pleasure, passion and contentment, until Ned banged on the door again and called me by my first name.
Jonathan and I smiled to each other as he opened the door. We walked through the cinderblock-lined hallways of the back stages, Ned in the lead, another security guy in back. Strangers who didn’t expect me, techies and runners, roadies and Darren’s klatch of fans, all stopped and stared for a second. I smiled at them, because they’d made me who I was, and held my husband’s hand behind me.
Darren stood out there with his band, sweating in the spotlights, his sticks twirling in his fingers. It was hot, and I felt the lipstick inside the bodice of my gown, reminding me of my name. I went out when called to sing with them, each breath, each note, each word, no matter the song, about one thing only.
Jonathan.
Jonathan.
Jonathan.
–
THE END
