“How can I think about that when you’re sick?”

“I need you to. It’s the only thing that gets me through the day. Knowing I own you even from here. Can you do something for me tomorrow?”

“Anything.”

“At three o’clock, when you’re in the studio. Exactly three. Put your fingers on your lips and think of me.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

He brushed his thumbnail over the crotch of my panties. My clit throbbed at his touch, and I gasped.

“Remember the office?” he whispered. “On the desk?”

“How could I forget? You were cruel.”

He stroked the nails of four fingers over the cotton he so hated. It was damp already.

“I wanted you so badly,” he whispered.

“You could have had me.”

“Anyone else, I would have just fucked. Not you.” He brushed one finger under my panties, stroking my opening. “You were so wet. So responsive. A quickie on a desk would have been such a waste.”

His finger ran circles around my wettest part, and again, his thumb touched my clit gently. When I thrust forward, he pulled it back.

“You were a bastard.” I spoke through gasps as his fingers teased me. “You could have let me come and fucked me later.”

He pushed two fingers in me. I closed my eyes and groaned.

“Look at me,” he said. I put my nose to his and tried to keep my eyes open. “I wanted you before my trip. I needed you motivated. I had to have you.”

“Have me,” I gasped as he put only the lightest pressure on his thumb while rotating his fingers in my hole.

“You were fantastic that first night. Unforgettable.”

Pulling his fingers out, he slipped them up my cleft, stroking my clit slowly, barely moving, every millimeter of movement a shot of sensation from my cunt out to my knees and waist.

“Oh, God.”

His right hand went to the back of my head. I knew he had his IV in that hand, but I wasn’t going to think about that. I only thought about the excruciatingly unhurried motion of his fingers. “Do you want to come, Monica?”

“Please let me come. I want to.”

He grabbed my hair. “I don’t believe you.”

“Please. Jonathan, please. Don’t let me walk away like this. Let me come for you.” My begging could not have been more sincere. The pleasure and tension between my legs was so intense, so heavy, it was almost painful.

“No.” He slowly dragged his fingers over my clit, then lodged them back in me and pulled them out, rolling around the outside, then pushed them back in again, all the while keeping my head still by holding a handful of my hair in his fist.

“Please,” I whispered.

“Why should I?”

“You love me.”

“I do.” But he didn’t say anything more.

“And I love you.”

“So?”

“I miss your body. I want to come for you. Please.”

He pulled the tips of his fingers over my clit. It was just enough to take me to the next level, where I couldn’t speak as the pleasure soaked my body, yet it wasn’t a full release.

“When you sing tomorrow, you wear something that reminds you of me.”

“Yes.” I would have promised him the World Series, but this, I meant. Under my clothes, he owned me. “Please.”

Rubbing my clit in earnest, he held my face close to his. “Who do you belong to?” Like a glass of water on a hot day, my cunt drank him, getting what it had craved, every inch of wet skin receiving the touch it wanted like the answer to a prayer.

“You. I am yours. Oh. I’m—”

“Come, darling.”

I bit back a cry as the orgasm ripped through me like a fire hose had been turned on, thrusting my hips forward, sending bullets of pleasure through my nervous system, squeezing the air from my lungs, shutting out every sense, but the sensation of his fingers between my legs, his breath on my face, his eyes on mine.

He slowed, but kept his hand on my stroking me down until I felt like I could think again.

“Again, goddess. And quietly.”

He pushed in me, gathering juices, then put his fingers to my clit again. The waters rose like a flash flood.

“Fuck,” I groaned, clenching, thrusting, a grunt stopped in my throat as I came for him again. My eyes closed involuntarily as I released, the fireworks between my legs taking up every sensory input.

A machine beeped. We froze. It double-beeped once, twice, then stopped. He patted my ass, and I knew what that meant.

I scurried off him and pulled my pants up, getting them buttoned just as Irene Kzowlicz, RN opened the door.

“Mister Drazen,” she said in her thick Hungarian accent. “You are okay?”

“We’re fine.”

“I didn’t know if I should be getting the crash cart again.” She joked, shuffling in on her clunky padded shoes, hands like risen dough pulling Jonathan to a sitting position so she could mess with his pillows. Her grey hair was cut short, and her lower lip seemed to extend a good seven inches from her face.

“For two beeps?” Jonathan said. “I’m going to start thinking you want me to live.”

“When I started to nurse, we had rules. No girlfriends in the room alone, with door closed. Now patients can make request. And request is like law, so I have machines beeping twice all night.”

“I don’t think it’ll beep again,” I said meekly.

She went to the computer and tapped away at it with two lightning fast fingers. “You ready for tomorrow, Mister Drazen?”

“Like any other day in paradise, Irene.”

She took his blood pressure and I sat by and held his other hand. “What’s tomorrow?” I whispered.

“Wednesday,” he whispered back.

Irene snapped the belt off his arm. “Okay,” she said, tapping his IV bags. “You’re fine.” She looked at me over her plastic trifocals. “You be a good girl.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She scuttled out.

“I love how it was my fault,” I said.

Jonathan shrugged and held his left hand out. His left side was the side without IVs or tubes, and it was the side I’d slept on since the third night of his stay. I slipped onto the mattress next to him. I couldn’t move much on my slice of bed, but I didn’t want to. He turned the light out and I rested my head on his shoulder.

“I’m selling my house,” he said.

“Why?”

“I bought it with Jessica. It’s not relevant any more.”

“I have some nice memories of that house.”

Curled up against him, I could feel his smile in the dark. “Me too,” he said, voice heavy with those same memories. “We’ll make new ones somewhere else.”

“Where were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. Where would you like to go?”

The machines whispered dreams of a future I’d given little thought to, blinking lights of hope and trepidation.

“I live in Echo Park. If you stayed close, I’d like that.”

“I’ll stay in the basin. More or less. Not the west side. Too many people I know. And it’s far from you.” He turned his head, pressing his lips to my hair.

I didn’t think he could get up and walk me down the hall without collapsing, but he still managed to make me feel protected. That hospital room, that bed, his body next to mine, had become my world in the previous week. I came at night and when he turned the light off, he was my beautiful, healthy Jonathan again, and I his goddess. The troubles of the day melted away. In that dark room, with only the light pollution of Los Angeles coming in through the windows, he told me about a losing game he’d pitched at Penn, walking in home a run in the ninth. He told me about the out of control years before his suicide attempt, he and his friends drifting their cars on rainy nights in the Valley, breaking onto schooners on the piers of Seal Beach; and Westonwood, where he got into a fistfight over a French fry his first night and, over the course of the next months, learned to maintain the tight control over himself he exhibited to that very day.

I exchanged stories of my father, who couldn’t play a note, but who made sure I had everything I needed to make music; his gardening, his lust for life, and my mother.