---TWO YEARS LATER---

CHAPTER 51.

MONICA

The crowd wasn’t for me tonight. 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 my face out, 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 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, the counter had been wiped and replaced some time in the last decade, but I wasn’t there for a 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 grabbed a fingertip pinch’s worth of 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 to my wedding dress, a sleeveless silk/satin that hugged me on top, and went wild on the bottom, folding in on itself in twenty yards of lace and shine.

“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.”

“You’re husband’s roaming around the halls looking for you.”

“Get out!”

He grabbed his burger and kissed my cheek before slipping out. The door didn’t click closed completely, 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 it’s 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.


(My name is Monica. My life is complete and as it should be. Everything I experience, I own. It is mine to keep or give away or use as I see fit. Nothing is outside my purview. This all goes into the music. I am powerless to stop myself from being myself. I am a lion. I am the sea. I am a star in the sky. 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.”

“Do what, Goddess?” I groaned in response, opening my eyes to watch him caress my neck and shoulder with his mouth. “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 as I’d promised. I could have done it any time, and he knew it. We were married in the eyes of the law, but to us and the world, today was the day. Now came the name change. Now we called 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.”

He’d left that operating room a different person. You don’t just walk away from a heart transplant and continue as before. He was confused about who 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. We agreed our marriage wasn’t genuine because of the circumstances surrounding it, but we never suggested our love was anything but real. He bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and we moved into it. Two years, we said. If we could be together two years, we’d get married for real.

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 roared back like a lion. As if overnight, he became more aggressive, more demanding, more kinky, more dominant than he’d ever been. A year later, he got me an engagement ring of my own, a round canary diamond. He’d gotten on one knee all over again, and I realized the reason he’d been so much more sexually ferocious was because he was happy.

I unpinned my hair, leaving in the one, pencil-thin braid I’d demanded, and as it fell over my back, my dress slipped off.

“You are magnificent,” he said, twisting my hair in his finger. We faced the mirror, him in a blue shirt and tie he’d changed into after the reception, and I, bare-breasted up top, and in white lace garter down below. “All day, I wanted you.”

“I am yours.”

“Apparently not, Ms. Faulkner.” He loosened his tie. “Hands behind your back.” He must have seen me glance at the clock. “I have control of the time. Just do what I asked.”

“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 was going to sing at Darren’s encore, and help his career, but damn if I had to be late, I was going to 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 in the morning, usually 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 said, pulling 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 and said, “Step out.”

I stepped out of my wedding gown and he led 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. And Declan thought he’d played the funniest joke on me. Shitty hobby, as Margie said. When I explained it to Jonathan, he cut his father out all over again, but the transplant had put Declan 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, picking up a cup of fast food-approved carbonated beverage. He peeled the plastic top off, straw and all, and peeked inside.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “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 something off my makeup table. Then he came to the couch, pants open, dick out, kneeling between my legs with a tube of lipstick jammed between his teeth like a cigar. He pulled it out, leaving the cap in his jaw. He spit it to the floor like a watermelon seed.

“I’m going to write something down so you remember it, Goddess. Because 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.

He was writing on me.

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.

MRS. DRAZEN

Jonathan crouched over me, smiling, then put a hand on the arm of the couch, leaning over me. “Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered, tilting my hips so that his erection touched my wetness. He moved slightly until the head of his dick touched my opening just enough for me to 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,” he said. “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. “The 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.