by Reiss, CD
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s a flower.” I pushed her bra straps down her arms and let it drop. “A camellia. And you’re getting a stroke just for that.”
She sighed again when I ran the ridges of my fingers over her hard nipples. “When I was a kid, my mother played a song about a camellia. It’s in Portuguese.”
“Sing it for me. Just for me, while I undress you.”
She nodded and took a breath. Her shoulders fell back and her chin lifted. When my wife made music, she bore herself like a queen. With the first note, I slid my hand below her waistband, letting the pads of my fingers trace her spine, then the damp secret where her back split into her ass. The words were in a language I didn’t speak—but the notes and rhythms were made for her voice.
I pulled down her pants to reveal what she’d worn all day, just for me.
The black satin garter crisscrossed her hips to hold up her stockings with clever gold buckles. Her beautiful sex was protected by underwear that came off with two tiny snaps at the sides, and the drawstring around her wrist was a siren call to my darkest imaginings.
I wanted to rip it all off, but I wouldn’t. Not yet. I planned to make it hard to finish the song, not impossible.
As she crooned, I kneeled in front of her, drawing my hands over her ass as I kissed her belly and hips, unsnapping the underpants. She took a breath in a half-gasp but didn’t stop singing, even when I kissed between her legs.
She was so good. Such a good—
An urgent knock at the door brought the singing to a halt, then the sound of Tamara coughing on the other side made me look up at my wife.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Monica said, music gone from her tone.
Those words held a few pages of warnings typed out from the best doctors my wife could demand.
Mister Drazen. The artificial heart cannot be attacked by a virus, but the tissue attached to it can be severely damaged. Since the heart can still be rejected at any time, you are still immunosuppressed. You must take all the same precautions, for the same reasons.
Please hang this notice wherever you are most likely to feel invincible.
Eleven doctors and clinicians had signed the bottom and presented it to me—already framed—at the dinner celebrating the success of my second transplant. It was half joke, a quarter serious recommendation, and a quarter appeasement of Monica.
We’d hung it by the bed.
“I’ll take an IOU on six orgasms.” I stood and handed my wife her robe. “Or six strokes. I never decide until the last minute.”
“Is that what you do?”
I kissed her on the lips, and once her belt was tied, I opened the door.
Tamara coughed into her elbow, holding up her finger to get us to wait. “Sorry. This came suddenly, and she’s up. I don’t want to get her sick.”
“Thank you for letting us know right away.” Monica pulled me away from the door in case an errant germ strayed from the nanny’s elbow, and looked at Tamara’s face with real concern. “You should get some rest.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to leave you with no help, but I don’t want Mr. Drazen to catch this.”
“Mommy!” Gabby’s voice came from the other side of the hall.
“It’s fine, we have her,” Monica said, striding to her daughter’s room.
Chapter 11
MONICA
Gabby slept between us with her lips half open and her spitty thumb dropping out of her mouth. Her hair looked black in the moonlight as I stroked it.
“It’s just constant,” I whispered. “Always moving. Making decisions. It’s not fun anymore. And without you… without what we do together… my brain gets like someone untied me from the dock and I floated out to sea.”
“How did you manage before we met?”
“I was destructively ambitious.”
The faint light from the street cast Jonathan’s face in shadow, and he paused as if he wanted to say something but decided to lean toward me, over our daughter, getting almost close enough to kiss.
“I fell in love with that,” I said.
Beneath us, Gabby stretched and twisted, putting her chubby fingers on the headboard and making a na-na-na sound before settling. Jonathan and I parted, dropping back to either side of our daughter.
“What do you want?” I asked. “From me? If you could choose?”
He stared at the ceiling, more lost in the question than the logistics of the question required.
“If you don’t know—” I started.
“I don’t,” he said, turning from the ceiling toward me. “You started with a record contract, then it was that thing in London. And the national anthem at Dodger Stadium. Now the world tour.”
Was he complaining? Was keeping up with me getting to be a pain in the ass? He’d known who I was the minute we met and he had no business complaining about it now.
Or was I being defensive? He loved me. I couldn’t assume malice, and if he was truly troubled by my ever-expanding ambitions, I had to just listen before springing at him.
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“You achieve a goal and move to the next one. It’s incredible to watch you.”
“Incredible is a good thing?”
“Yes.” He laughed gently. “But there’s something else.”
My heart squeezed the chambers into tight little rooms and my lungs expanded without filling.
Don’t say it, I thought, batting away all the old arguments about my agency and the limits of his dominance over my life. We’d resolved the parameters of our marriage and it would be wrong of me to replay them without letting him finish his thought. I had to clamp my mouth shut as if the words had a life of their own and needed to be trapped behind the prison bars of my teeth.
“All I’ve wanted,” he said, “was to make sure I didn’t hold you back.”
“You haven’t.”
He touched my lips, forcing them open. I took two fingers, and he pushed my defenses to the back of my throat.
“Good.” Slowly, he pulled his fingers out and I sucked them. “You’re my goddess of light and beauty. You know that, right?”
The mm-hm of assent vibrated against his knuckles as he pushed back in.
“I need to want things again,” he said.
When he put a third finger in, my back arched with arousal.
He cupped his palm and pulled me to him, whispering in my ear, “Something besides getting inside you. You understand?”
I nodded because I knew how he felt and was cognizant of the unspoken fact that I couldn’t help him with it.
“You’re teaching me how, but not what.” He removed his fingers but kept close so we could speak softly. “I have to do that myself. And I have to start now. Before I start resenting all the gifts you’ve given me.”
He wasn’t threatening me. He was telling me his fears without showing even a hairline crack in his dominance. When he decided he needed to want something besides my body, he reminded me that he was a king.
“You know I support you, right? Whatever you decide?”
“I do.” He brushed the moisture on his finger along my lower lip. “Now go somewhere in the house she’s not going to hear us and wait for me to fuck your mouth.”
Gabby was asleep, but she’d wake if we both got up at the same time. Gently, I rolled off the bed, tiptoeing across the room in the plain, fresh T-shirt and underpants I’d put on when Gabby came in. He watched me. I knew he wanted to tell me to strip down to bare skin, but couldn’t risk waking our daughter to tell me. So, being the brat I was, I stepped out of my underpants but left the T-shirt on as I went to the kitchen.
I set my bare knees far apart on the tile floor, clasped my hands behind my back, and when I heard him coming, I opened my mouth in wait.
He passed right by me and went to the drawers. The benches on either side of the breakfast table scraped on the floor. When he came back, I had to face forward and pretend I hadn’t moved.
He stood over me, cock already out with a glistening drop at the tip.
“You inspire me,” he said, squeezing my mouth open wider. I wanted to tell him what he meant to me, but he laid his dick on my tongue so I could taste his pre-come. “I want you to have it all.” He fisted the hair in the back of my head. “Are you ready to take it all?”
Opening my throat, I nodded once, and he pushed his cock down.
“That’s my girl,” he said, pulling out.
I sucked in a breath, mouth open, letting spit drip down my chin as I looked up at him in supplication.
“You’re so perfect. It’s hard to want anything besides you.”
“You have me,” I gulped air and gave voice to my devotion at the same time.
“I know. You’re mine, no matter where you go. No matter what you do. No matter how many songs come out of this pretty mouth, it only opens for me.”
He thrust his cock between my lips, and I took him while he fucked my face and moved my head for his pleasure. He let me take a breath, then pushed inside so far my nose pressed against him and came down my throat so deep I didn’t taste the sticky result of his release.
Pulling out, he put his hands on my shoulders and bowed his head. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
I wasn’t lying. Satisfying him calmed me, brought me to center, liberated me from stress as much as my own orgasm which—judging from his expression—was imminent.
He untied the drawstring he’d coiled around my wrist. “Crawl to the breakfast table benches. Put one knee on each and clasp your hands behind your back.”
On my hands and knees, I turned and found he’d pulled the white benches away from the breakfast table. They were so far apart that when I put a knee on each, my folds spread open and my clit dangled like a hanging light bulb.
Jonathan looked down at me as he unwrapped the drawstring from around his hand. I raised an eyebrow and shot a glance behind me, telling him that if he intended to tie my hands behind my back, he oughta get on with it.
When he leaned over me, I thought he would do just that, but he doubled the string, letting it dangle behind me from one hand. With the other, he reached between my legs to grab the string and yank it to the front until the length settled in the tender split between my legs. He ran it between my ass cheeks and up the front, twisting it around his index fingers.
“Comfortable?” he whispered with his chest against my shoulder.
“No.”
“Good.”
Slowly, he pulled the string back, running it against every nerve ending between my clit and my ass. By the time he drew it in the opposite direction, my arousal was right back where it had been in the dressing room.
“You’ve been denied twice today,” Jonathan said. When he pulled the string back, it was soaked and warm—so slippery with my juices, it didn’t feel like a foreign object anymore. “Your body’s going to resist, then fall apart.”
“Take me apart,” I groaned.
My inner thighs ached with the effort of keeping myself upright, but I knew that was part of his plan. Pain pushed orgasms away until they were so powerful, they were unstoppable.
He sped up incrementally, playing me like an instrument of his own invention, yanking the string every third or fourth slow stroke, keeping the stimulation too unpredictable to match with the rotation of my aching hips.
“Please,” I cried.
“Please what?”
“Let me come. Let me.”
“Six more. Count with me.” He pulled the string all the way back. “One.”
Then to the front so slowly, I mewled like a kitten when he stopped.
“Two,” I said, and when he jerked fast in the other direction, I cried out in near-rage. “Three!”
Four was fast.
Five was faster.
The route to six was torture. He pulled to the front with unhurried deliberation and more pressure than before.
“I can’t…” I whined.
“Not yet, goddess.”
“Five and a half.”
“Not yet.”
The string was all the way to the front, with the length in the back so short his fingers could hold it and reach between my cheeks, touch the entry to my ass—which was wet from the string—and push inside while the string in the front flicked my clit side to side.
“Six,” he said, flicking harder and faster while penetrating my ass. “Come.”
I came with the power of two orgasms denied and one so artfully fashioned, I saw colors and heard music before dropping into his arms like a bag of Jell-O.
He held me up as he always did, then picked me up and carried me to the bathroom. Instinctively, we got visual confirmation that Gabby was both alive and sleeping like the dead.
Our shower had a shelf on one side that was deep enough for sitting. He placed me there, and I flopped against the wall like a rag doll. Once the water was on, he pulled off the T-shirt that was sticking to me. Whispering gentle instructions, he washed my body, between my legs, kissing every place he was about to soap up. By the time he tenderly rinsed me and carried me out, I was both more awake and more relaxed.
I picked up the gray silicone spatula that sat on my vanity. “What’s this doing here?”
“I brought it from the kitchen.” He took it away and set it back.
“Why?”
“Because I did.” He patted me dry with a fluffy white towel with care, possessing everything he tended with control that wasn’t cold or distant, but loving.
At his most dominant, Jonathan was awe-inspiring.
“I know you,” he said. “I know what you want and why. I know what you don’t want. What I want…” He put the towel over my head and dried my hair.
“I thought you didn’t know,” I said from under the plush terrycloth.
“I don’t know my purpose without you, but I want something with you.”
I clapped my hands to my head, covering his. “We talked about this.”
“Gabby’s three. You’re getting—”
“Don’t you say it.” I pulled the towel away, leaving waves of black hair over my vision.
“More beautiful every day.” He cleared the obstruction from my sight.
“Good save.”
“I want more children.”
Pushing myself back, I sat on the stone vanity, feet dangling, comfortably naked with him. “I know.”
“And?”
“And Tiffany Brooks toured pregnant and nearly miscarried.”
“Which might have happened anyway.”
“I miscarried once.” I laid my hand on his chest. “What if it happens again and you’re not around? I can’t go through that without you.”
His fingertips settled under my jaw as if he was holding up my head to marvel at. “You said touring was too much.”
“It is.”
“You could slow down.”
My husband was so rich and privileged, he had no idea that most of the world couldn’t write their own ticket, and no matter how much money an artist had, their career could die from bad timing or a twenty percent increase in complacency. Living in his own skin made him so sure a person could have anything they wanted, any way they wanted it. He didn’t mean to take it for granted any more than he could help it.
“I’m afraid to,” I said.
“But do you want to?”
With my husband’s face taking up the whole of my vision, I had to ask myself for the truth in my heart, not the easily excitable part of my mind that jumped at everything like a puppy pissing on the linoleum.
Did I want to slow down? Cut out some dates? Leave my schedule open for a year or more?
I didn’t have to say a word for Jonathan to hear the answer.
“You are a goddess,” he said. “Never be afraid to demand what you want.”
He was repeating a few words spoken so long ago in the back of his car while my legs were spread for him. We’d been nothing to each
other, yet he already saw who I was and what I needed most.
I kissed him, answering his call to take what was mine, eat the meat and spit the bones as if the world was a buffet replenished for my sustenance.
“What about you?” I asked.
“Purpose doesn’t have a study guide. There’s no test. No license. So I don’t know. I’m only telling you what I do know. I want you to have another baby with me.”
“Can I think about it?” I asked.
“You can. Let me clear your head for you.” He pushed gently on my shoulders. “Lean back on your arms and put your legs up. Come on. Show me.”
I did as he commanded, throwing my head back in surrender as I bent my knees. He helped get my heels up on the counter.
“Look at me.” He held the silicone spatula and studied my reaction when he tapped the spatula between my legs.
I gasped, brows knotted at the sting that promised pain but didn’t deliver enough for catharsis.
“You want it again?”
“Yes. Please. Make it hurt.”
He tapped gently.
“Harder.”
He fought a smile as he used the spatula almost sweetly, reminding me that I was his property to be used any way he saw fit.
“How?” he asked, smacking inside my thigh. The thwap sound stung my ears.
“However you want.”
“What do I want?” he said rhetorically, bending the spatula back in front of my quivering pussy.
I gripped the edge of the counter and he let go. The slap was audibly wet, and the cry that filled my throat was caught behind a bitten lip. A second later, the pleasure flowered so fast I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Bursts of orange and white exploded behind my eyelids.
“Again?” he asked.
“Please.”
He did it twice more, leaving me just slightly on the line between pleasure and pain.
Jonathan pulled me to the edge. He got inside my sore, wet cunt until I enveloped every inch of him as he wrapped his arms around me so tightly we became one person. When he whispered permission to come, I gave him my ecstasy completely, still sure it was all he wanted in the world, despite everything he’d just told me.
