“Are you taking Monica to the Collector’s Board thing?” Margie asked outside the conference room. Her office buzzed with activity, but no one approached her when she was about to go into a meeting.
“Not going.”
“Good. I don’t want to get dragged. Dee and Emm are going.” Dee and Emm was code for Dad and Mom. The worst thing wouldn’t have been taking Margie but Monica.
“All the better.” I couldn’t tell her I’d walked off Monica’s porch with no intention of seeing her again. My sister liked her, and I didn’t want to disappoint her or explain my failings.
“You sleep at all?” she asked.
“Same as always,” I lied. I’d slept about three hours less than usual.
“You need to rest before you open your mouth in front of her lawyers. I can’t believe I have to tell you this again.” Her annoyance was a show. We needed to appear to be having an animated discussion when Jessica and her lawyers turned the corner. Margie and I had been in the same room since five in the morning when I drove to her house.
The car had smelled like Monica, and the mirrors were set to accommodate the angle of her beautiful neck. She’d put the seat too far forward and left the wheel turned too far to the left. Still, I wished I could lend her the car another hundred times, just not to see Jessica.
My ex-wife turned the corner, lawyers flanking her. Ryan Myers, who had overseen the divorce, was in his fifties, in a brown suit that matched his fake tan. He’d been ready to tell the neighborhood I beat Jessica for kicks. The other guy was in his thirties and wore a grey pinstripe three-button job with a magenta tie. I didn’t recognize him. Margie filled in the blanks without me needing to ask.
“Bennet Rinaldo. Litigator. Ass pain.”
“Why do they have three people and we have two?”
“Because you’re the aggressor, Jonny. You have to walk in here undermanned or you look like a bully.”
“She asked for it.”
“Say that any louder and you’re on your own.”
Polite smiles were exchanged between the five of us. We were having an informal meeting, yet no handshakes were exchanged. Margie held out her hand to indicate they should go in first.
The conference room had windows on two sides and a large wooden table in the center. Coffee and fruit had been laid out on the sideboard. Jessica found her place between her lawyers, and Margie and I sat opposite them.
Jessica was beautiful, and exactly what I’d needed when I was with her. She was sharp, and cold, and in control. I never thought I’d need anything else from a woman because I hadn’t yet become a man. I’d changed, but she hadn’t. She sat in the clear sunlight, hands folded in front of her. For the first time, she awakened not an ounce of longing, anger, or regret in me. I was glad she was out of my house, out of my bed, out of my daily concern. I wasn’t even pissed at her anymore. I didn’t think she could get me to hit her again because, somewhere in the past weeks, I’d let her go more completely than I’d imagined possible. A relieved smile crawled across my face, and she saw it before I could wipe it away.
“Gentlemen and lady,” Margie said, sitting, “good morning. I understand an order of protection has been filed against my client and is waived temporarily because the plaintiff’s lawyers are present.”
Legal formality and boring. I tried to keep my eyes off my ex-wife, but she looked like a stranger, and that fascinated me. Had I kissed her lips while she slept? Had I stroked her body languidly while the breeze came through our open window? Had I confessed everything to her in a heat of intimacy or brought her to orgasm with loving care and tenderness?
I couldn’t attach any feeling to the events I knew had occurred. I was sure they happened. I’d held her hand when her father died and wiped her tears away with my lips. We’d argued about silly things, like everyone, and we’d argued about serious things. I’d panicked when she told everyone about my kink because I thought I’d lose her. I remembered the fear, and when she told me she was leaving, everything that I was afraid of actually happened. I begged, on my knees, I’d begged her to stay. I remembered all of it as if I watched it on television or read about it in the paper, as if it was someone else’s story.
There was a sharp pain in my calf that felt suspiciously like Margie’s heel.
“Can you answer the question, Mr. Drazen?” said Rinaldo, the litigator, with a shitheel, superior tone that made me want to punch him.
I leaned forward. “You’re going to need to rephrase that.” I had no idea what the question was, and I needed him to repeat it.
“On November the twenty-fourth, what were your intentions when you met your ex-wife, Jessica Carnes, at your house?”
“My intentions? My intention was to go home and get some work done before a dinner meeting. She was already there.”
“You’re stating you did not expect her?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe your frame of mind?”
“No.”
“Mr. Drazen—”
“I have to agree,” Margie said. “You haven’t even filed civil charges, and you want to go into discovery? Or was there something else?”
Myers cut in. “There are circumstances under which we can drop civil actions, which would give the state prosecutor little to go on. We can advocate for thirty-days probation and a standing order of protection.”
“Describe the circumstances,” Margie said.
“All financial channels between Mr. Drazen and Ms. Carnes can be reopened, permanently.”
I looked at my gorgeous ex-wife, whose need for money must be deeply shameful to her. She didn’t look at me but kept her back straight, her shoulders relaxed, and her eyes on her lawyer.
“No,” I said before Margie, and I felt her heel again.
That was apparently exactly what Rinaldo wanted to hear. He opened a folder with full-color photographs that made me want to avert my gaze. My ex-wife’s welted behind, three red slashes across it. I had no idea I’d hit her that hard. I had been pissed off, and it was difficult to feel how hard I was swinging through a haze of rage.
“You admit to giving her those?” Rinaldo seemed to be in charge of the uncomfortable questions.
“I do.”
“Why?”
“We agreed to it beforehand,” I said.
“Are you saying she asked for it?”
“Not in those words.”
“And in the month previous, you broke her wrist during sex.”
“She fell.”
“Yes, I understand that’s the story. You left her in the emergency room as well, so you wouldn’t be questioned,” Rinaldo said.
“I left her because I had a plane to catch and her boyfriend showed up.”
“Your current girlfriend was seen last night with bruises. Did she ‘ask for it’ as well?”
I glanced at Jessica. Her eyes were in her lap. “You must really want this money,” I said.
“Your comment has been noted, Mr. Drazen.”
“Monica and I fell down a hill last night. I’d laugh about it if I wasn’t so banged up myself.”
“Bruises at the base of her neck are not consistent with a fall.”
Margie clicked her pen to get everyone’s attention and spoke in a tone that stopped Rinaldo and Myers in their tracks. “Thank you, Doctor. Unless you can produce photographs of these alleged bruises, I couldn’t care less about them.”
Rinaldo listened, then smirked. “We can send a forensic photographer to her right now. The State of California doesn’t need her to accuse him of anything.”
“The State of California cannot compel a woman to use her body as evidence in a prosecution. Do you have anything else?” Margie demanded. “Because I’m seeing precious little.”
Myers nodded to Rinaldo, and the young litigator’s shit-eating grin returned. “Ms. Carnes’s phone turned itself on to record when you threw her against the table.” He pressed a button on his phone.
It started with a scream when I pulled her hair. What a convenient starting point. I looked at Jessica again, and her eyes were glued to the phone. I felt her desire to look at me as her screams echoed through the room.
I demanded a safe word. She questioned its necessity, and I said,
“Question me again, and I’m fucking your ass so hard you won’t be able to sit.”
It sounded bad. Really bad. As if she didn’t know what a safe word was or why one was necessary, and I’d interrupted her with a threat.
“It hurts. You’re hitting me.”
Calculated. So calculated. Somewhere in my mind, I admired her. She would have made a truly impressive partner if she wasn’t such a cunt.
The clacking of my belt opening sounded filthy and violent, and my telling her not to yell when I hit her couldn’t have sounded more like abuse. Listening to the scene play out was as uncomfortable as it should have been. And it was quite possible a judge would hear it. The recording could fry me.
“Wait,” Margie interrupted. “Can you pause that a second?”
Rinaldo paused it, but the violence of the encounter lingered in the room.
“Where did that start again?” Margie asked.
“With a scream.” Rinaldo had a wonderful shit-eating grin on his face that would look great once it was wiped off.
“Funny,” Margie said. “I heard this one this morning. It starts much earlier.” She pressed her own phone. My voice came through.
“Jess, how are you?”
A vanilla conversation progressed into the lead in the pipes of her studio, her hurt for money, our history.
“And you’re saying you want to try it my way?”
“I want to. We’d need to set some boundaries beforehand.”
“No, my way. Right now. Then you tell me if you can take it.”
“Stop,” said Jessica. “This is fake.”
“No,” I said. “It’s exactly what happened. I’d swear to it.”
“Okay.” Jessica’s voice, soft and audible.
“That’s ‘okay, sir.’”
“Doesn’t that seem a little silly?”
“You want to do this or not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stand up.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Jessica whispered to Myers.
He whispered shhh and patted her hand as my voice came through again.
“Stop trying to look saucy. This is a functional matter and not for your pleasure.”
The next part was hard to hear, but Margie turned it up.
“This is what it is, this is the kind of sex you’re agreeing to.”
I commanded her to put her hands behind her back and face forward, then I checked on her, asking if she was all right.
I watched her reaction across the table. Her face flushed, and her jaw set. I hadn’t seen her blush since the first time I’d kissed her. The red deepened for the next part, which Margie turned up.
“I’ll undo your jeans. I’ll pull them down to the middle of your thighs so it’s hard to walk. You’ll be uncomfortable, and that will please me. Then I’ll get behind you, and I’ll grab a handful of your hair at the back of your head and bend you over that table. I’ll take off my belt, loop it once, and slap it across those sweet white cheeks until you’re pink as a rose and your face is covered with tears. I’ll stop when I can stick two fingers in your cunt and feel how sopping wet you are. Then I’ll fuck you until you beg me to let you come, which I may or may not let you do. That going to work for you? Didn’t think so.”
“Do it.”
I noticed for the first time how shrill and desperate her voice was. At the time, it had sounded like a controlled whisper. On the recording, it sounded like a child’s whine.
“Jess, really.”
“Do it! Start with the hair. Or the pants. Whatever.”
“No.”
“Do it!”
“Stop, Jess.”
“Are you a fucking man? Or do you just beg and cry for what you can’t have? Is that how you get off?”
Then the crash.
Margie paused it. “We’ve heard the rest.”
“Where did you get that garbage?” Rinaldo asked.
“You Tube,” Margie said. “It had seven hundred views this morning. But let me refresh. Huh. Got about forty-two hundred now. Funny what people find entertaining, isn’t it?”
“A woman asking for it,” I muttered. Margie shot me a look, but I was spared the heel.
“She stole my phone.” Jessica’s eyes bore into me.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The singer.”
“Go near her again, and I’ll kill you.”
Margie’s heel drew blood. I would have to buy her flats for our next meeting.
“Like you did Rachel,” Jessica said through her teeth. “Took sixteen years. But there’s no statute of limitation on murder, even manslaughter, Jon.”
Ryan Myers stood, closing his files. “We’re done here. Ms. Drazen, you and your client can consider our offer. Get back to me when you have an answer. The photographs still stand, as well as the possible pattern of abuse with his current girlfriend, which we’ll be sure to mention to the prosecutor.”
“Thanks for the warning.” Margie stood and shook his hand. Meeting over and, as usual, only the lawyers walked away unscathed.