by C. D. Reiss
CHAPTER 3.
MONICA
One hundred fifty seven dollars in smallish bills. God bless Debbie, I loved her. I put gas in the car, first thing. Then I bought a container of cubed cantaloupe at Ralph’s for dinner. I parked three blocks away so I wouldn’t have to pay for the lot, and walked. Night was falling and it was getting cold. I was bundled in a scarf and light coat, having forgotten a hat in my rush to get to work.
Sequoia was huge. Half the babies in LA were born there, and everyone else managed to die there. The charge nurse in the cardiac unit knew me by sight, and nodded at me and my cantaloupe.
“Hi,” I said when I walked into the room of bland pinks, beiges, hard edges and the smell of sickness and alcohol. I’d gotten him a little light-up Christmas tree for the table by the bed, and every night he made sure it was on.
“I thought you were working tonight,” Jonathan said. He was sitting up, reading by a single lamp. I’d seen him in that bed every might for the past week and a half, and he’d gotten better and better. I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t let him just walk out with a pat on the head.
“It’s raining. Debbie didn’t need me.” I sat on the edge of the bed taking his hand in mine while trying not to disturb the IV in it. Machines beeped and hummed. The stylus scratched on paper, tracing the lines of his heartbeat. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I want to punch someone. You?”
“The contracts are signed. Margie was a hero, seriously. I couldn’t have done it without her. I’m finalized to record tomorrow. I’m singing Collared with full production value.”
He took the cantaloupe container from me. “They getting the LA Phil in?”
“I know you’re joking,” I said, compulsively putting my hands out to help him open the container. But in the past couple of days he hadn’t needed me, so I pulled them back. “But yeah. Fifteen pieces. String-heavy. Like, real. Then, next week we’re doing Craven. I laid down some scratch on a few others and they’re going to pick two more for an EP.”
He plucked out a piece of melon and held it up. I leaned forward and opened my mouth. He brushed the juice on my bottom lip before letting it touch my tongue. “Orchestras cost a lot of money,” he said. “They must believe in you.”
I took the cantaloupe gently into my mouth and closed my lips around it, catching his fingers, sucking them on the way out.
“We’ll see.”
“Is this what you brought for dinner?”
“I ate stuff at home,” I lied. If he knew my fridge was empty and I didn’t want to spend Debbie’s money getting takeout, he’d worry. Or he’d lose his shit all over the hospital room. He’d already had a code blue over his mother trying to shut me out.
“You’re supposed to have dinner with me,” he said, feeding me melon. He wasn’t mad or scolding. He missed me during the day when his family was here and I hung around in the shadows. That was the deal. I didn’t have to be front and center with his sisters and mother, but I came to him at night, alone.
“What did the doctors say? Will you be out for Christmas?” I changed the subject, deflecting away from dinner, which would lead to talk of my financial distress. “I have no idea what to get you, by the way.”
He paused, picking through the fruit, eyes cast down.
“Well?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he answered, holding up cantaloupe. I took it, but I sensed he was hiding something. I chewed slowly. As if sensing my recalcitrance, he said, “I’m strong enough, but the arrhythmia’s still there.”
“It was gone yesterday!”
He shrugged. “Eat. I want that body ready for me when I get the hell out of here.”
That was Jonathan. Focused on getting the hell out of what he perceived as a prison.
“This body’s always ready for you,” I said, parting my lips for his fingers. He pulled the fruit back an inch, and I followed, then he let it touch my tongue, then pulled it back. We played the cat and mouse game with the melon until he popped it in his mouth and grabbed me by the back of the head, kissing me. Our tongues tasted of cold fruit. I kissed him as if I’d almost lost him, pushing myself into him as if he was a delicate creature, living only by the grace of God and modern medicine. His tongue wove around mine as if he was as healthy as ever. As if an elevated heart rate wouldn’t kill him, or at the very least, send nurses running in with paddles and carts of beige machines. He could deny what was happening all he wanted. He was getting stronger, but if his doctors were to be believed, every day without that graft brought him closer to another heart failure.
“Goddess,” he whispered. “I have to have you.”
“No fucking way.” We’d tried two nights previous, and the word disaster would be used if we were underplaying the results. I’d gotten an earful from Nurse Irene on the matter, and had cried for hours from the stress and the scolding.
He pushed his finger under my waistband. I could feel the tubes from the IV on my skin. “Undo these,” he said.
“No.”
“Open your jeans and pull them down.” He spoke as if I hadn’t just refused him, and the command send waves of lust below my waist. “I swear to God I won’t get my heart rate up.”
“I’m scared,” I said.
“I’m not. Come on. Trust me.”
His face was inches from mine, his hand on my cheek, stroking my lower lip. Every night I curled up next to him and slept for a few hours before I was asked to get in my chair. Every night I wanted him, and every night I worried. He’d gone from distraught, to annoyed, to depressed, to this. A feeling that he’d lost control. He was using me to feel like he had it for a minute. I just didn’t know if I could trust him to take care of himself.
I unbuttoned my pants. He sighed and put the container on the table, his eyes still locked on mine as I straightened my hips, put a knee on the bed and pulled my pants down.
“Straddle me,” he said. I was restricted by the waistband, but got a leg out and wiggled around the instruments and tubes to get myself on either side of him. I made no move to shift the sheets away or touch him. I only did what I was told.
“The door’s ajar,” I said.
“The curtain’s closed.” He whispered, feeling my ass. “You’re wearing this cotton shit again,” he said, his left hand, the one without the IV, stroking my lower back and finding its way under my panties.
“It feels silly to waste to good stuff when you won’t see it.”
“You miss the point.” He pulled me forward. “Put your hands behind me.” I placed them on the wall behind him. With his left hand, he reached between my legs, caressing me over the fabric of my underpants. “The idea is that during the day, I’m present where no one can see. You dress for the world, but under that, you dress for me. I own your softest places, and what touches them, is mine.”
“How can I think about that when you’re sick?”
“I need you to. It’s the only thing that gets me through the day. Knowing I own you even from here. Can you do something for me tomorrow?”
“Anything.”
“At three o’clock, when you’re in the studio. Exactly three. Put your fingers on your lips and think of me.”
“Yes. I can do that.”
He brushed his thumbnail over the crotch of my panties. My clit throbbed at his touch, and I gasped.
“Remember the office?” he whispered. “On the desk?”
“How could I forget? You were cruel.”
He stroked the nails of four fingers over the cotton he so hated. It was damp already.
“I wanted you so badly,” he whispered.
“You could have had me.”
“Anyone else, I would have just fucked. Not you.” He brushed one finger under my panties, stroking my opening. “You were so wet. So responsive. A quickie on a desk would have been such a waste.”
His finger ran circles around my wettest part, and again, his thumb touched my clit gently. When I thrust forward, he pulled it back.
“You were a bastard.” I spoke through gasps as his fingers teased me. “You could have let me come and fucked me later.”
He pushed two fingers in me. I closed my eyes and groaned.
“Look at me,” he said. I put my nose to his and tried to keep my eyes open. “I wanted you before my trip. I needed you motivated. I had to have you.”
“Have me,” I gasped as he put only the lightest pressure on his thumb while rotating his fingers in my hole.
“You were fantastic that first night. Unforgettable.”
Pulling his fingers out, he slipped them up my cleft, stroking my clit slowly, barely moving, every millimeter of movement a shot of sensation from my cunt out to my knees and waist.
“Oh, God.”
His right hand went to the back of my head. I knew he had his IV in that hand, but I wasn’t going to think about that. I only thought about the excruciatingly unhurried motion of his fingers. “Do you want to come, Monica?”
“Please let me come. I want to.”
He grabbed my hair. “I don’t believe you.”
“Please. Jonathan, please. Don’t let me walk away like this. Let me come for you.” My begging could not have been more sincere. The pleasure and tension between my legs was so intense, so heavy, it was almost painful.
“No.” He slowly dragged his fingers over my clit, then lodged them back in me and pulled them out, rolling around the outside, then pushed them back in again, all the while keeping my head still by holding a handful of my hair in his fist.
“Please,” I whispered.
“Why should I?”
“You love me.”
“I do.” But he didn’t say anything more.
“And I love you.”
“So?”
“I miss your body. I want to come for you. Please.”
He pulled the tips of his fingers over my clit. It was just enough to take me to the next level, where I couldn’t speak as the pleasure soaked my body, yet it wasn’t a full release.
“When you sing tomorrow, you wear something that reminds you of me.”
“Yes.” I would have promised him the World Series, but this, I meant. Under my clothes, he owned me. “Please.”
Rubbing my clit in earnest, he held my face close to his. “Who do you belong to?” Like a glass of water on a hot day, my cunt drank him, getting what it had craved, every inch of wet skin receiving the touch it wanted like the answer to a prayer.
“You. I am yours. Oh. I’m—”
“Come, darling.”
I bit back a cry as the orgasm ripped through me like a fire hose had been turned on, thrusting my hips forward, sending bullets of pleasure through my nervous system, squeezing the air from my lungs, shutting out every sense, but the sensation of his fingers between my legs, his breath on my face, his eyes on mine.
He slowed, but kept his hand on my stroking me down until I felt like I could think again.
“Again, goddess. And quietly.”
He pushed in me, gathering juices, then put his fingers to my clit again. The waters rose like a flash flood.
“Fuck,” I groaned, clenching, thrusting, a grunt stopped in my throat as I came for him again. My eyes closed involuntarily as I released, the fireworks between my legs taking up every sensory input.
A machine beeped. We froze. It double-beeped once, twice, then stopped. He patted my ass, and I knew what that meant.
I scurried off him and pulled my pants up, getting them buttoned just as Irene Kzowlicz, RN opened the door.
“Mister Drazen,” she said in her thick Hungarian accent. “You are okay?”
“We’re fine.”
“I didn’t know if I should be getting the crash cart again.” She joked, shuffling in on her clunky padded shoes, hands like risen dough pulling Jonathan to a sitting position so she could mess with his pillows. Her grey hair was cut short, and her lower lip seemed to extend a good seven inches from her face.
“For two beeps?” Jonathan said. “I’m going to start thinking you want me to live.”
“When I started to nurse, we had rules. No girlfriends in the room alone, with door closed. Now patients can make request. And request is like law, so I have machines beeping twice all night.”
“I don’t think it’ll beep again,” I said meekly.
She went to the computer and tapped away at it with two lightning fast fingers. “You ready for tomorrow, Mister Drazen?”
“Like any other day in paradise, Irene.”
She took his blood pressure and I sat by and held his other hand. “What’s tomorrow?” I whispered.
“Wednesday,” he whispered back.
Irene snapped the belt off his arm. “Okay,” she said, tapping his IV bags. “You’re fine.” She looked at me over her plastic trifocals. “You be a good girl.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
She scuttled out.
“I love how it was my fault,” I said.
Jonathan shrugged and held his left hand out. His left side was the side without IVs or tubes, and it was the side I’d slept on since the third night of his stay. I slipped onto the mattress next to him. I couldn’t move much on my slice of bed, but I didn’t want to. He turned the light out and I rested my head on his shoulder.
“I’m selling my house,” he said.
“Why?”
“I bought it with Jessica. It’s not relevant any more.”
“I have some nice memories of that house.”
Curled up against him, I could feel his smile in the dark. “Me too,” he said, voice heavy with those same memories. “We’ll make new ones somewhere else.”
“Where were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. Where would you like to go?”
The machines whispered dreams of a future I’d given little thought to, blinking lights of hope and trepidation.
“I live in Echo Park. If you stayed close, I’d like that.”
“I’ll stay in the basin. More or less. Not the west side. Too many people I know. And it’s far from you.” He turned his head, pressing his lips to my hair.
I didn’t think he could get up and walk me down the hall without collapsing, but he still managed to make me feel protected. That hospital room, that bed, his body next to mine, had become my world in the previous week. I came at night and when he turned the light off, he was my beautiful, healthy Jonathan again, and I his goddess. The troubles of the day melted away. In that dark room, with only the light pollution of Los Angeles coming in through the windows, he told me about a losing game he’d pitched at Penn, walking in home a run in the ninth. He told me about the out of control years before his suicide attempt, he and his friends drifting their cars on rainy nights in the Valley, breaking onto schooners on the piers of Seal Beach; and Westonwood, where he got into a fistfight over a French fry his first night and, over the course of the next months, learned to maintain the tight control over himself he exhibited to that very day.
I exchanged stories of my father, who couldn’t play a note, but who made sure I had everything I needed to make music; his gardening, his lust for life, and my mother.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” he’d asked.
“She doesn’t approve of me, and I won’t change into something I’m not to please her.”
“You live in her house. You could say hello.”
“It was by default. I was already there when she called Kevin a seducer and a slimeball. I just kept paying the rent and she kept cashing the checks.”
“It’s unlike you to be so passive.”
Every word expressed in that bed was said and heard without judgment, an unspoken rule that I’d been able to obey without trouble, until Jonathan implied I should see my mother. He’d felt me stiffen, and tightened his arm around me.
“It’s true,” he’d said. Back then, a few days before, his voice had been weak and breathy. He’d had oxygen tubes in his nose, and talking was difficult.
He sounded so much better now. Almost like his
old self. Soon, they’d give him the surgery he needed, and he’d walk out with a healthy heart. I could go back to work. He’d fuck me blind as often as I let him. All this would be over.
CHAPTER 4.
MONICA
Another nurse came at the 2am shift change to kick me out. She took Jonathan’s blood pressure and tapped on the computer. This happened every night, as if he didn’t need a full night’s rest. I slid off the bed, kissed him goodbye and left.
My studio time started at 11am, and I wanted to be fresh. I tried to pick up another hour of sleep, but succeeded in two things. Worrying about Jonathan’s arrhythmia, which would postpone his graft yet again, and thinking of new ways to add percussion to Collared, which needed some kind of thump with the stringed hum.
So freshness was a fail, but punctuality didn’t have to be. I decided to conserve the gas in the car by getting ready early and taking the bus to the studio. This would have been considered a major faux pas, unheard of, even shocking by most of my friends. One simply didn’t take the bus.
But it was a straight shot across Sunset, and I found looking out the window while someone else drove meditative enough to make it worth my while, and it wasn’t rush hour, so I wouldn’t be late. I didn’t need to bring anything but my vocal chords and my viola, so I didn’t need to lug instruments in the trunk. Just me, and my thoughts, and Los Angeles lumbering by my window.
I was imagining Jonathan naked, and tapping my thumb to a song without words, the tempo an expression of his curves and edges, the notes colored by the flavors of his skin, the dynamics became his voice when he commanded me for his pleasure. My mind curled into itself, conjuring a song from his body as the bus lurched and heaved to its own time, drawing me to a state of melancholy contentment.
The phone rang. I considered letting it vibrate my hip until it went to voice mail, but it kept ringing, and the protective coil around my song shattered, leaving me with the music, but not the mood. Might as well answer.
It was Margie. Up until the day before, I didn’t know if she was calling about my contract with Carnival, or Jonathan. I spoke to her more than I spoke to myself.