“You left your sheet music here,” Sherri said.

“The ‘Star-Spangled Banner’? Keep it.”

“It has a phone number on it?”

Damn. That was the number for Gary, the pregame coordinator. I could have gotten it again from Maura, and looked like a complete incompetent, but I was drawn to a question I needed answered.

I inhaled, pressed my lips together, then let the question out anyway. “Is she like that with everyone?”

“Like what?”

Like what?

What was I asking? Was she always so honest? Was she always so accurate? Or was the better question, was Monica always such a fucking baby?

“I’ll come by tomorrow.”

“I’ll leave it on the piano.”

She hung up. I’d been fine until then. I’d taken the whole episode with Mrs. Yuan in stride. Shit. She had a bird in her hair. She probably couldn’t teach me.

But when Sherri hung up, it just cracked me. By being so businesslike, so factual, so careless, she had forced me to stop seeing myself how others saw me and start looking at what was really there.

And I was not happy.

four.

MONICA

“Take your clothes off,” he said, standing in the middle of the bedroom in his suit.

He’d just gotten back and had a bottle of Perrier and two glasses sent up. I’d spent the intervening forty-five minutes trying to find my way around the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

I’d discovered just how much I needed help.

“Okay,” I said, yanking at my long dress, “but—”

He took a step forward and grabbed the back of my hair before I’d hit the vowel.

“Not a word,” he growled in my ear. “I know your schedule better than you do.”

Fluid rushed between my legs. It was almost painful, the speed of my body’s reaction to the way he showed me that he didn’t care on one hand, and made me feel safe in his respect of my work in the other. He wouldn’t jeopardize anything important to me to fuck me. But he would fuck me.

“Yes,” I said, intentionally leaving off a word.

“Yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

He knew what it did to me to verbally submit. My God, we hadn’t even started and I was losing myself in it.

He let go of my hair and stepped back. “Again. Take your clothes off.”

He sat on the couch and watched as I stripped down quickly and efficiently. No seduction. No sway of the hips. Just me obeying him. That was the way it went down.

As I pulled off my socks, he tapped his finger on the arm of the couch, and I admired the angle of his jaw against the long perfection of his neck.

“Leave the underpants on.” He said it as if he was bored, but he had a tidy erection under his suit pants. I wanted to put it in my mouth.

I stood there, perfectly still, watching him. He took his time opening the Perrier, placing the cap on the table. Pouring it. Letting the carbonation settle. Pouring more. Putting the bottle down. Picking up the glass. Sipping. The ice clicked.

“On the bed,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “On your knees. Hands on the footboard. That ass better be up, or you won’t be able to sit down at dinner tonight.”

I got on the bed. He watched me. Everywhere his eyes landed felt exposed, vulnerable, alive. My nipples stood on end and he hadn’t even touched me, and from that raw place, everything spilled out. I sniffed. Swallowed. Tried to hold my shit together, but I knew if I clammed up, he’d see it. In the quarter note’s time it took me to try to clamp down on the tears and fail, my eyes filled and my lips made that horrible weeping grimace.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to spit out. I had no choice but to surrender to it.

“Monica, what—?”

“It’s not you.” I gripped the footboard railing, ass not up, legs barely spread. I wanted him to correct me, to push me into place. Turn chaos into order.

He sat on the edge of the bed and put one hand on my back and the other on my face, pulling me toward him.

“No,” I spit, my chest heaving with hitched breaths. “Just do it. Finish. I want it hard, and I want it to hurt.”

“I will not.”

“I need it. Please. Whatever you had planned.” I couldn’t see him clearly through the tears, couldn’t read his face or intentions. “I need…” Breath. Hitch. Breath. “I need to get out of my own head.”

“About what?”

About what? My incompetence and lack of talent. My play at being something I wasn’t. If I told him what was going on, he’d try to support me and say nice things. And I didn’t want that, because it was all lies. Even if he, in his ignorance, believed them, they were lies I’d told that he was repeating back to me.

“Monica, what is it?”

“Jesus fuck, Jonathan. Do it. Do something! I’m on my knees already!”

He stood. “I’m sorry, goddess. It doesn’t work like that.”

I got up on my knees. “What the fuck do you mean it doesn’t work like that? How is it supposed to work?”

“It’s not safe.”

I didn’t know what I’d expected him to say. I didn’t know what he could have said that would have adequately soothed my loneliness. But he knew damn well he was safe, so what he was saying was that I wasn’t safe. Not only was I a lying faker conwoman, I was somehow a danger to him. Or I was doing it wrong.

No, that was it. That fit. I was doing it wrong. I didn’t know how to sub to the only Master I’d ever known. I was shitty at submitting. Shitty at fucking. I was going to get someone hurt.

Right? Wasn’t that exactly it? What was I good at? Where was my core competence if I couldn’t even please my husband? Not just please him, but submit. Meaning do nothing. I couldn’t even sit still correctly.

I couldn’t take it. My own head betrayed me. I was going to have a complete nuclear meltdown, sitting on a bed naked, because my husband wouldn’t fuck me.

“Monica,” Jonathan said from the next galaxy over, reaching light years to brush my cheek. “It’s because—”

“Stop talking.” I think I growled it before I slapped his hand off me. “And don’t touch me.”

I hopped off the bed. I think he was talking, but I couldn’t hear shit past the whoosh in my ears and the yacking in my head about how he didn’t want me, and how I couldn’t sing, and it was all over. I wasn’t a singer. I wasn’t a goddess. I was a failure. A fraud. A waste.

I pulled my dress on as if I wanted to rip it apart, and I jammed my feet in my shoes.

Jonathan caught my arm at the door. “Where are you going?”

I didn’t want his hand on my arm. It was the source of all my rawness. That hand. Not his soft eyes or his gentle look of compassion. No, all that was a lie. It was pity. I was beneath him, and he felt sorry for me. Fuck him.

When I glared at him, he lightened his grip, letting his fingers slip down my arm.

I had a split second of clarity.

I could fall into his arms, into his green eyes. I could break down without a beating and a fucking and just tell him how worthless and shitty I felt. I had a classic case of the Freudian Slips. Gabby’s term.

And I got mad at myself again, because I’d also failed to take care of her when she needed me. The clarity went out the window.

“Monica, what is it? Talk to me. Sit down and tell me—”

He let go of me to gesture to the tea table, a comfortable place to sit and dump all my shit on him. I took the opportunity to not talk about anything.

five.

JONATHAN

She just walked out. She even closed the door.

I was torn between the desire to wrestle her down and demand an explanation and the need to just let her walk out so she could cool off. I didn’t know which I wanted and I didn’t know which she needed.

She was in the car before I decided none of that mattered and I had to get her. And it was too late. She screeched out of the driveway and down the hill, and I was left there wondering what the fuck had happened.