by Reiss, CD
I untied her. She was like jelly in my arms. Droopy in subspace. I laid her on her stomach and kissed her everywhere before rooting around in my bag for lotion.
“How are you doing?” I asked, soothing her welted skin. I was tired, but I had a lot to do and this was my last chance to push it.
“Thank you.” She spoke in barely a whisper.
“You’re a good wife to put up with me.” I soothed her welted ass. She’d be like new in the morning. Fully markable and tender.
“I know.”
“I’m going to ask you a question it’s not fair to ask when you’re in subspace, because you can’t lie.” I snapped the lotion cap closed and tossed it across the room, making it right into my open bag.
“I hate you.”
Maybe she could lie.
“Did you tell Theresa why we were here?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mm-hm.”
I decided to believe her because, in the end, it wouldn’t matter.
Chapter 3
MONICA
TWO MONTHS BEFORE
Jonathan got a battery of tests every month and every month he got a stamp of approval. Between his diet, exercise, and medications, he was conscientious to fault. He only bent the rules when our daughter was sick, and went in to the immunologist when she was well again, just to check.
So, fuck anyone who blamed me for being surprised when his kidneys started failing.
“No,” I said after he told me. We were in the shady spot by the pool. Gabby was splashing around with Martha, floating with the help of some apparatus meant to get her walking. I was just back from a meeting about some opportunity I’d forgotten.
“We knew this was going to happen.” He opened his book and placed the bookmark on the table, next to his Perrier. Then, like whatever-not-a-big-deal, he started reading.
Reading. As if the people in his fucking book about some shit about business were even relevant.
“No!” I stamped my foot.
“Mama!” Gabby cried from the pool.
“See,” he said, turning a page (turning a fucking page). “You’re going to upset the baby.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“It’s fine. I’ll make some changes.”
“Is it because of your heart or the immunosuppressants?”
“Whoa, the doctor is in.” He didn’t take his eyes off the Goddamned book, and I was starting to think that was intentional.
“Which is it?”
“Both, obviously. ”
“Jonathan.”
He turned a page. “Monica.”
I snapped the book away because he was being a fucking asshole.
He didn’t look mad. No. Jonathan didn’t really get mad. He looked put upon. Irritated. Pushed a little too far.
And me? What did I look like?
I was sure I looked terrified.
“Wipe that look off your face, goddess, before our daughter sees.”
Sure enough, Gabrielle had her hands and balls of her feet on the tiles, crawling to me with straight knees and a big smile.
“Sweet heart!” Tucking his book under my arm, I picked her up and situated her at my hip.
“This isn’t finished,” I handed him back his book.
“Indeed.” He opened it and started reading again.
* * *
“How is it not a big deal.”
As soon as I’d gotten Gabby down for a nap, I called the doctor.
“I never said it wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “Not with the creatinine count. Did he not show you the test results?”
If I said no, the doctor would clam up. I sank into our red bedroom chair and lied watching Jonathan read a book by the pool.
“Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Now. I want to hear it now.”
“A small percentage of heart recipients present with renal failure after five years. That failure starts with a non-symptomatic condition called renal insufficiency.”
God damn her. I knew this from the fucking internet.
“Change his medication,” I barked.
“We don’t have any more options. The problem is the heart. It’s not delivering enough oxygen. Add the calcineurin-inhibitors, and the decline in function is irreversible.”
Below me, my husband put his book to the side and finished his water.
“He’s fine,” I said, contradicting my previous insistence that everything was shit. “Everything’s fine.”
“He may be asymptomatic for awhile.”
Jonathan stretched and stood, collecting his bottle and glass.
“What are our options?”
He crossed the yard and stopped, looking up at me from below. He was tall and straight-shouldered, with a simple grace and power that harmonized the space around him.
“Enjoy the time you have.”
When my husband’s eyes met mine, I shuddered.
He was—as always—every inch a king.
* * *
I didn’t bother him about it. What was the point? There was nothing anyone could do.
Right?
I was going to be mature and reasonable.
That lasted a few days.
Three, to be exact.
We were in the back of the car, facing each other while Lil drove us into Beverly Hills for an event. I never saw a man look as comfortable in a tux as he did. I touched up my lipstick and put my compact back in my bag.
“What?” I asked when I caught him staring.
“The lipstick didn’t need fixing.”
“It’s this new stuff. Lasts eight hours no matter what.”
“Speaking of things that last—”
“Oh?” I made a point of glancing at his crotch.
“I heard from Erik,” he said.
My arms broke out in goosebumps. I was as fearful for a Dutch man’s health as my own husband’s.
“How is he?”
“Great, apparently.”
“No rejection?”
“Not even a little.”
Nothing turned me on a like functioning artificial heart. I slipped my foot out of my shoe and ran it up his leg.
“Jonathan.” I slid down in my seat until my toes reached his forming erection, bracing my other foot against his seat.
“Monica.” He took both my knees and opened them. “Is there something on your mind?”
“Your cock.”
“Show me. Wrinkle your dress.”
The hem reached my knees and flowed easily. All I had to do was pull it up to show him my satin garter and stockings. He pushed my knees away and I held them close, bent and wide. He reached forward and easily unsnapped the crotch of the panties, then leaned back, observing my erotic degradation.
“Remember the first time Lil and I dropped you off at your house?”
“The night you went to see your ex wife?”
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
“The night you comported yourself like a woman in control.”
With a brush of his middle finger off his thumb, he flicked my clit. I nearly exploded.
“I remember.”
“I wanted you to fail.” He flicked me again. “I knew I could love you and I didn’t want to.” Flick. “I was the one who failed.”
“You suck at not falling in love with me.”
He laughed and sat back, looking out the window as he undid his belt.
“We have a few minutes.” Cock out, he fisted it like a threat. “Let’s see what that lipstick’s made of.”
I kneeled between his legs and took him in my mouth. He touched my shoulder gently. Usually, he’d take me by the back of the head and drive me down, but he read my mind. The up-do I’d gotten for the evening would never go back into place.
“All of it, goddess. Take all of it.” I took him down my throat until my lipstick touched his balls. I came up for air with spit
on my chin.
“How’s it look?”
“Worth every penny.” He snapped a linen handkerchief out of his pocket. “Get up here and ride me.”
We moved our clothes out of the way and I straddled him as he wiped my chin.
“You feel so good,” I whispered.
“When I come inside you, don’t clean up.” He pushed my hips down hard. “I want it dripping down your leg while you’re sipping champagne with that perfect lipstick.”
He jerked up as he pushed me down.
“Yes, sir. Can I come?”
“No.”
His movements were quick and hard. He dominated me even as I rode him, controlling the rhythm with his thrusts. I was blinded by the orgasm I had to hold back.
“Please,” I whined into his neck. “Please. I can’t hold it.”
“Not yet.”
He fucked me so hard I couldn’t think about music, baseball, or algebra.
“Please.” It was barely an entire word. Just a vowel sound after the pop of the p.
“Come with me.”
His permission smashed the dam and a wall of pleasure poured out. I pulsed on him, my senses going dark as the climax took over.
When I opened my eyes, we were a block from the event, and as I smoothed my skirt over a dripping cunt, Jonathan wiped his forehead.
He was sweating. Breathing harder than usual.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He got his dick in his pants. “I prefer it when you leave a little lipstick behind.”
The car stopped at the crown of the circular driveway. The front door thupped as Lil got out.
“Jonathan.”
“What?” he snapped.
“I think we have to talk about going to Switzerland.”
“I’m not dead yet.”
“Don’t even say that.”
Lil knocked before opening the door. Jonathan knocked back.
“I’m fine.”
He got out when Lil opened up, and stood with his hand out for me as if I needed help getting out of the car.
Chapter 4
MONICA
two months later
We’d just gotten to Zurich from Italy and Jonathan’s medical team had started the tour right away. Their plans to open-source the design per their agreement. The success of the artificial heart. The technology they could upgrade non-invasively, the prep they’d done on their second build.
Jonathan’s build.
Erik swam as if he still had all the parts he was born with sixty seven years before. Seventeenth lap in an Olympic half size. He wasn’t fast, but he was steady, arm over arm.
“He’s going to die of something and that heart is still going to beat,” Dr. VanDerWaal said in his tweedy jacket and blue jeans. His wire rimmed glasses had dots of water on them from dense condensation of the indoor pool. “We’re going to have to take it out and shut it off.”
“How long are we going to watch this?” Jonathan asked, putting Gabby down. He couldn’t hold his daughter as long as he used to, but wouldn’t admit it. She still wasn’t walking, so she couldn’t go far. She stood by him with an arm around his leg, bouncing and pointing at the water lapping over the pool ledge.
“He insisted,” Dr. VanDerWaal said, beaming proudly. “He wanted to show you how well it was working.”
Jonathan watched the test subject of the artificial heart he was funding.
He couldn’t swim like that. Not any more. In the two months since the doctors had found his kidneys failing, he’d been a grouch.
“I think we should do it,” I said. “Now.”
“It’s ready,” VanDerWaal said. “Right size and shape.”
“I thought you wanted to wait five years,” Jonathan grumbled more to me than the doctor.
“We got three and a little bit,” VanDerWaal shrugged with a smile. “If you want to…you can.”
Erik stepped out of the pool and slid his goggles up. He gave us a thumbs up, then a fist of power, before diving back in.
I watched my husband’s face to see if there was any hope he’d say yes eventually, because he was sure to say no by the pool. But his face didn’t change from denial to hope to the word no. It went from denial right to shock then directly to speeding past me so fast I didn’t have time to move.
He was in the water so quickly I didn’t know if he was trying to kill himself or out-swim Erik. I went to pick up Gabby, who had been clinging to the leg that had just landed in the water, and came up empty.
“Gabby!”
It all came together in the split second it took me to call her name. The way her bear-crawl had made her soundlessly sploosh into the water. Jonathan’s leap. Erik’s dive back into the pool.
Jonathan came up with our daughter just as Erik made it there and I was just standing like an open-mouthed fly-catching-dumbass.
That all happened in a hundredth of a second.
The doctor lifted Gabby out of her father’s arms. She cried and vomited pool water. I cried watching him pat her hard back to empty her lungs before putting her in my arms soaking wet. She cried as I kissed her and cooed.
She was as scared as her mother. Otherwise, she’d be fine.
But Jonathan?
He was out of breath, not quite strong enough to lift himself out of the pool on the first try.
* * *
That was that, really.
It was one thing to not be able to fuck me as hard as he wanted as many times as he wanted. It was a different thing to not be able to lift his baby daughter out of a pool to save her life. He didn’t even try to argue that he’d done it once so he could do it again. He knew he might not make it the second time.
* * *
Jonathan’s shirt was open two buttons, sitting on the floor, holding a hand out to Gabby. She tapped the underside and he flipped it, clapping his other hand with a slap. She laughed, delighted as he put his hand out again.
“We have to go,” I said. “They’re waiting.”
They repeated the game for the thousandth time. Martha and Lil would wait in the front of the little house in Zurich for as long as we needed. The surgical team wouldn’t.
Jonathan purposely missed his other hand and Gabby broke out in a high peal of laughter.
“Daddy!” she cried when he moved his hand just enough for her to miss.
“Okay, try again.”
Slap.
“Jonathan.”
“One minute.”
“Please.”
Slap.
“Please. We have to—”
“I said one minute!”
His tone broke the idyll between him and his daughter. He never yelled in front of her, and her face fell from laughter to tears in a hot second. I picked her up.
“What’s your problem?”
He sat cross-legged on the rug, fists balled tight enough to hold and hide whatever scared him.
He was going to the hospital in a foreign nation to have his heart removed and I was snapping at him like a harridan who wanted the lawn mowed and the garage cleaned out.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He got up and plucked his jacket off the back of a chair.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not. I guess I’m nervous too.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“You shouldn’t be. You have to see her first steps, right?”
Gabby put her arms out and leaned for her father in the perfect transfer dance between two parents and child. He took her.
“If I didn’t trust these doctors I wouldn’t be doing this.”
“Then what is it?” I had to hear the lies he told himself.
He pushed his face into Gabby’s cheek and made loud kissing sounds. Tears forgotten, she laughed and pushed him away. I didn’t move toward the door. I waited for him.
“I love this little girl so much,” he said. “As much as I love her mother.”
That didn’t feel like a final statement to be punct
uated by my own sentiment, so I waited.
“All my heart.” He tapped Gabby’s nose and addressed her. “Daddy’s going to be part robot.”
“Jonathan…”
She didn’t understand, so she tapped his nose back.
“Daddy’s going to love you with a plastic heart.”
“Please,” I pleaded. “Don’t.”
She squeezed his cheeks toward the center of his face.
“Dada.” She kissed his puckered lips. “Mah!”
His smile broke the pucker, looking at his daughter with adoration. I rested my hand on his arm and he put it around me, squeezing us into a triad.
“Promise me something,” he said.
“Anything.”
“If I don’t love you enough after this…” He broke off, unable to finish.
“You will.”
“If I don’t…you deserve more.”
He wouldn’t say it. He’d never tell me to leave him or find what I needed outside our relationship because it was ridiculous. The whole idea. A part of him knew it and another part needed to know I’d be happy if this succeeded but his love failed.
“I promise you,” I said. “There will never be anyone else. Never. Half your love is more than anyone else has to give.”
He squeezed me and hugged Gabby so tightly she squirmed.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”
* * *
I had to look at him through a window for a week. I’d forgotten what it meant to remove a man’s heart and put in another one. I knew the facts. I remembered the bags of blood and the medically-induced coma. I remembered the dozens of doctors whose names I’d never use consistently. They told me how he was doing, but I needed to hear it from Jonathan’s mouth, in his commanding voice. Stats and reassurances from anyone else were hollow.
On day seven, they let me in the room, but I couldn’t touch him. I watched his unconscious body rise and fall with the rhythm of the machines that kept him alive.
I’d forgotten the fog of despair and the core of hope. I’d forgotten how, when he looked too weak to live, that I felt the sea rend from the sky. No matter how well the doctors said it was going, the horizon was pulled taut at the seam.
