The crowd wasn’t for me that night. 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 out my face, 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 during 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, and the counter had been wiped and replaced some time in the last decade. But I wasn’t there for the 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 pinched half a dozen 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 at my wedding dress, a sleeveless silk and satin number that hugged me on top and went wild on the bottom, folding in on itself in twenty yards of lace and polish.
“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,” I said.
“Your husband’s roaming the halls looking for you.”
“Get out!”
He grabbed his burger and kissed my cheek before slipping out. The door didn’t click closed, 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 its 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.
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,” I said.
“Do what, goddess?” he whispered, and I groaned in response, opening my eyes to watch him in the mirror as his mouth caressed my neck and shoulder. “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. I could have done it at any time, and he knew it. We’d stayed married in the eyes of the law, but to us and the world, that day was the day. Next came the name change. We finally could call 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.”
Demanding Jonathan.
He’d left that operating room a different man. A person doesn’t just walk away from a heart transplant and continue as before. He was confused about who he was. 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. I loved him. I hated him. I wanted to beat and kiss him. But I needed him as much as he needed me.
Though we’d agreed our union wasn’t genuine because of the circumstances surrounding it, we never suggested our love was anything but real. I renovated my place on the second steepest hill in Los Angeles and rented it out to one of Brad’s colleagues. Jonathan bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and we moved into it. Two years, we said. If we could live together for two years, we’d get married for real. If we couldn’t, I was taking my ass back to Echo Park.
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 had roared back like a lion. Almost overnight, he became more aggressive, more demanding, more kinky, and more dominant than he’d ever been. A year later, he got me an engagement ring of my own, a round canary diamond the circumference of a nickel. He’d gotten on one knee all over again, and I realized the reason he’d returned to sexual ferocity was because he was happy.
I unpinned my hair, leaving in the one, pencil-thin braid I’d demanded. As it fell over my back, my dress slipped off.
“You’re magnificent,” he said, twisting my hair in his fingers. We faced the mirror, him in the blue shirt and tie he’d changed into after the reception, and I bare-breasted with a white lace garter. “All day, I wanted you.”
“I am yours.”
“Apparently not, Ms. Faulkner.” He loosened his tie, snapping it through the collar. “Hands behind your back.” He must have seen me glance at the clock. “I have control of the time. Just do what I ask.”
“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 would sing at Darren’s encore and help his career, but if I had to be late, I would 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 every morning, usually while I was 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 pulled 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. “Step out.”
I stepped out of my wedding gown, and he picked me up and carried 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. Declan thought he’d played the funniest joke on me. Shitty hobby, as Margie said. When I had explained it to Jonathan, he bought my house from Declan and cut him out all over again. But the transplant put his father 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. He picked up a cup of fast food-approved carbonated beverage. He peeled the plastic top off, straw and all, and peeked inside.
“Jesus fucking Christ. 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 up something off my makeup table. Then he came to the couch, pants open, dick out, and kneeled between my legs with a tube of lipstick jammed between his teeth like a cigar. He pulled it out, leaving the cap in his teeth. He spit it on the floor like a watermelon seed.
“I’m going to write something down so you remember it, goddess. 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.
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.
Jonathan crouched over me, smiling, then put a hand on the arm of the couch, leaning over me. “Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
“That’s your name.” His gaze was meaningful, harking back to old conversations about the last woman to carry that name. Jessica was serving time for a murder she’d tried to pin on Jonathan. I hadn’t wanted her name, but he’d convinced me that the name was his and now was ours.
“I’m sorry, sir.” I tilted my hips so that his erection touched my wetness. He moved slightly until the head of his dick touched my opening just enough to make me 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. 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. “That 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. 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 felt 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?” he whispered.
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 never-ending sea. I clenched him as if 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. I loved seeing him in those moments, overcome with his 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 be 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. My assistant, Ned, a huge guy there more for my protection than assistance, said, “Ms. Faulkner?”
I pressed my lips between my teeth.
“Who?” asked Jonathan. “No one by that name anymore, Ned.”
“Monica?” Ned called. “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 as if someone had 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. He reached up, looping it around me not once, but twice. When I looked at him, he pulled the jewels, snapping it tight around my neck.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Yes.” 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 and called me by my first name.
Jonathan and I smiled as he opened the door. We walked through the cinderblock-lined hallways with 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 I 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, was about one thing only.
Jonathan.
Jonathan.
Jonathan.