“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
“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.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” he’d asked.
“She doesn’t approve of me, and I won’t change into something I’m not to please her.”
“You live in her house. You could say hello.”
“It was by default. I was already there when she called Kevin a seducer and a slimeball. I just kept paying the rent and she kept cashing the checks.”
“It’s unlike you to be so passive.”
Every word expressed in that bed was said and heard without judgment, an unspoken rule that I’d been able to obey without trouble, until Jonathan implied I should see my mother. He’d felt me stiffen, and tightened his arm around me.
“It’s true,” he’d said. Back then, a few days before, his voice had been weak and breathy. He’d had oxygen tubes in his nose, and talking was difficult.
He sounded so much better now. Almost like his old self. Soon, they’d give him the surgery he needed, and he’d walk out with a healthy heart. I could go back to work. He’d fuck me blind as often as I let him. All this would be over.
CHAPTER 4.
MONICA
Another nurse came at the 2am shift change to kick me out. She took Jonathan’s blood pressure and tapped on the computer. This happened every night, as if he didn’t need a full night’s rest. I slid off the bed, kissed him goodbye and left.
My studio time started at 11am, and I wanted to be fresh. I tried to pick up another hour of sleep, but succeeded in two things. Worrying about Jonathan’s arrhythmia, which would postpone his graft yet again, and thinking of new ways to add percussion to Collared, which needed some kind of thump with the stringed hum.
So freshness was a fail, but punctuality didn’t have to be. I decided to conserve the gas in the car by getting ready early and taking the bus to the studio. This would have been considered a major faux pas, unheard of, even shocking by most of my friends. One simply didn’t
But it was a straight shot across Sunset, and I found looking out the window while someone else drove meditative enough to make it worth my while, and it wasn’t rush hour, so I wouldn’t be late. I didn’t need to bring anything but my vocal chords and my viola, so I didn’t need to lug instruments in the trunk. Just me, and my thoughts, and Los Angeles lumbering by my window.
I was imagining Jonathan naked, and tapping my thumb to a song without words, the tempo an expression of his curves and edges, the notes colored by the flavors of his skin, the dynamics became his voice when he commanded me for his pleasure. My mind curled into itself, conjuring a song from his body as the bus lurched and heaved to its own time, drawing me to a state of melancholy contentment.
The phone rang. I considered letting it vibrate my hip until it went to voice mail, but it kept ringing, and the
