Then, like a child testing her limits, she tapped the fork.

I thought I made it to her in two steps. I didn’t know what I was thinking, but I put my hand under her chin and pressed myself against her.

“You’re pushing me.” I was gentle on her neck, but she couldn’t move.

“I have something the first few days in March,” she said.

Those were her words. And though she was telling me all kinds of truths, the words were a lie because she wasn’t talking about her schedule. What she was actually saying was I’m not scared of you.

Which was fine. I didn’t want her to be scared. I just wanted her to stop answering in vocal exercises. I wanted her to submit. Abdicate. All of it. To me. And she hadn’t in a week. I’d topped her, but it hadn’t been that. She was a china doll.

I wanted to own her again, but since she started with this teacher, she’d been distracted. Yes, I respected her talent. She needed her career and her work to thrive as a human. But I was getting frustrated, and it came out when I spoke into her cheek in the low register of a command.

“You have plenty in March. You’ll be so sore you won’t be able to walk. But that first weekend, you show where I tell you to show, or I take you on a leash.”

Her jaw set against my fingertips, but her eyelids fell a fraction of an inch. I got my free hand under her skirt. She had garters on, and stockings that stopped an inch below her beautiful cunt. I short work of getting around her lace panties.

“You’re wet. Again.” I drew my fingers along the length of her wetness and back. “Was it the leash? The collar? Or knowing how I can hurt you?”

“You can hurt me after opening day.” A smirk played on the edges of her lips, then she gasped when I put my fingers inside her. “Save it up,” she groaned.

“I’m going to destroy you.”

Two strokes, and she clenched and came, toes curling so hard her shoe fell off. But she didn’t scream. She didn’t say a word. I put my fingers in her cunt and felt it tighten and release, then tighten again as I rubbed her clit with the heel of my hand. She threw her head back, exposing her bare neck.

That throat. The length of it. The curves and rises no less than a topography of possession.

I let her go.

She straightened her skirt, looked at me, and tapped her fork. “Do do do. Do do re. Do do mi—”

“What’s that?” I asked, grinding my teeth at this new pattern of offense.

“Intervals. You like?” She raised an eyebrow.

I was going to respect her talent and her music. I was going to give her space. I was going to be a supportive and good partner no matter what. Another six days. But she wouldn’t be finished with the word brave before I bent and broke her.

twelve.

MONICA

Mrs. Yuan hadn’t come to the club. I felt both good and bad about that. Sherri was there with a little klatch of Asian girls, but she didn’t look at me. I could only assume she was there to report back.

From the stage, I saw Jonathan sitting to the side with Leanne, who was talking on her cell phone while picking at her shoe, and Maura, my new agent. Eddie was there. Darren’s buddies were with his husband, Adam. Mostly though, the Thelonius Room was packed with strangers. Not fifty-five thousand of them, but scale wasn’t the issue. Singing this bitch of a song in front of anyone was the issue.

Jonathan had threatened to collar me five days before. We’d always been at war over the concept, and as I learned more about it, my opinion hadn’t changed. He owned me. He didn’t need me to walk around in a collar to prove it. And I didn’t need to feel owned in that way. A little humiliation was fine and part of the game, but a collar?

No.

Just no.

I wasn’t a dog, and though I was completely submissive, I wasn’t a slave.

End of.

Except….

Except when I let myself think of him pulling on it, or imagined how it would feel during the day, how it would remind me of him, or how it would feel to kneel before him and look up enough so he could see the symbol of my tender obedience.

I breathed into the bottom of my lungs, filling the widest part first, to the top, then exhaled slowly.

Darren whipped a quick beat on his drum. To my right, Harry, the bassist from Spoken Not Stirred, and Steve, the guitarist, was to my left. Evanie sat to the side, always an excellent sport when Monica Faulkner showed up to sing. It was because of Evanie that they’d gotten a deal and a little tour that would take them to Nashville right after they finished Thelonius.

They played a few notes, and the crowd quieted. I smiled. I loved that moment of expectation, anticipation. The vacuum I was meant to fill.

“You all know Monica Faulkner,” Harry said, putting his hand out to me. Applause. Whistles. “She’s gonna open with a classic.”

“Thank you, guys,” I said, looking at each of them. Darren had offered me this opportunity to work out my nervous kinks, and it had seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Still thinking this would be a fun tryout, I sang the first few words.

Oh, say can you see….

Harry popped the bass a little, but I was otherwise a capella. Then something I didn’t expect happened. Everyone stood and put their hands on their hearts.

You were supposed to stand. It was a rule. But the scraping of chairs and the good-humored salutes distracted me, because in the first second, I thought they were getting up and leaving. They were a bunch of freaking hipsters after all, not the most reverent type. So I faltered. They were leaving because I’d insulted their sense of irony.

But I was wrong. They were staying.

I adjusted to that, but in doing so, I diverted precious mental bandwidth.

And my voice went off the fucking rails. A key is a bookmark. If you know where you are, you can travel up and down the scales accurately.

But I lost my place. I kept to the beat and knew the words, but the key was all screwed up. Before I even got to ramparts, I was fighting tears, and that was the hardest line. It led into gallantly streaming, which was flat as fuck, and led into rocket’s red glare, which felt superhumanly sharp and high, and I had no way of getting there.

I got to the home of the brave and smiled, but I wanted to die. Oh sure, they clapped, because it was fun and unexpected and even ironic. But they didn’t get what a complete fuckup that had been, and I’d almost done it in DodgerStadium.

I’d almost sounded like that in front of 55,695 people.

There were lists on YouTube of the worst game-time renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and I was about to be one of them.

I had to get out of this.

I shook hands and smiled and did all the things on my way to the back room. My stuff wasn’t in that room though, since I wasn’t a real act. My bag was next to my husband, and I was supposed to sit by him and have a drink and plan little adjustments to my song. But there were no little adjustments. There was my quitting and staying home with a beer and a flat screen on opening night, or there was a complete overhaul I didn’t have time for.

So I went into the back room where Darren had his shit, and I closed the door behind me. My hands were shaking as hard as my knees. I leaned against the makeup counter. The linoleum edge was chipped down to the wood. It looked like Mrs. Yuan’s piano where she habitually hit the fork. I pressed my thumb against the ridge.

What was she going to say? She’d seemed pleased with my progress, and now what would Sherri go back and report?

I wanted to throw up.

There was a knock on the door. I knew who it was.

“Jonathan, just leave me be.”

He came in carrying my bag. “You want to go out the back?”

“I want to die.”

“I didn’t give you permission to die.” He dropped the bag on the counter.