Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (26 page)

—It’s not a mixup it’s a fucking set-up Jerry never got an engineer and he’s been talking about the fucking weather do you have an engineer there?—

I glanced at Deshaun, who was tapping away at his phone. I didn’t know what to do. If I played, she’d never forgive me, and if I didn’t, I was a back-bending little sheep who walked out with nothing. A nobody. A disappointment.

“We have time for a few takes,” I said, turning off my phone and stepping into the sound room.

T
he sun was dipping below the skyline when I got back in the car and turned on my phone. There was no use pretending I didn’t see Gabby’s messages, and there was no use listening to them. I just called her.

“Mooooooniiiiiicaaaaaa…..” She was drunk. The white noise whipped like wind cut with the sound of music and laughter.

“Gabby, where are you?”

“I’m with Lord Theodore at the Santa Monica Pier. We’re on the Ferris wheel.”

“Are you okay?”

“You do the scratch cut?”

I rubbed the bottom of the steering wheel and stared at the building as if it could exonerate me, but the big green cube did nothing besides look squat and hip. “Yeah.”

“We were set up, you know. I was. He don’t want me, so they made it so you did the cut without me. You know that, right?”

She seemed okay with it, but she was wasted and on a Ferris wheel, so I couldn’t take her forgiveness for granted. “Don’t assume it was malicious, Gab.”

“Oh fuck, when did you become such a…whassa word? When you believe the best in people? Like you never lived in LA your whole life.”

“Is Theo drunk too?”

I heard the phone muffle and Gabby say, “Hey, baby, you drunk?” Then her voice got clear again. “He says he’s a little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that.”

“Great. Do you want me to come and get you?”

“Go fuck yourself, Monica.”

The line went dead.

M
y car was the only one in the driveway, but the house lights were on. I got out and went inside.

“How did it go?” Darren was in my kitchen, wiping the counter. He had a key. He might as well have moved in. Fucker. I hated him and everything. He looked up at me when I didn’t answer. “What happened?”

I had no words. I slipped my arms around his waist and held him tightly. He smelled nice.

He leaned his cheek against my head and stroked my back. “Is it the rich guy?”

“Yes and no.”

“Where’s Gabby?”

I let my hands drop and banged my forehead against his chest. “WDE set us up. It could have been a mistake, but it wasn’t. I can feel it. We ended up in different studios, and she’s with Theo right now, self-medicating.”

“At least she’s not alone. Theo’s a fuckup, but he won’t let her kill herself.” He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me away, looking into my face. “Did you do the scratch cut?”

“Yes.”

“Oh thank God, Mon.”

“I feel like I ditched her.”

He shook his head. “They’d never reschedule, but if the cut’s good, they’ll send it out, and then you have a leg to stand on.”

I dropped my bag on the floor and plopped onto a kitchen chair. “Well, we won’t have to worry about that. It was the single worst performance of my life.”

“Come on.”

“Really.”

“Because of my sister?”

I leaned on the table, lacing my fingers in my hair. “No.”

“Do you want some tea?”

“Yes, please.” I stood. “I’ll make it. You don’t even live here.”

He pushed me back into the chair. “I can boil water.” He pulled the teabags down. “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, Mon. Think about it. Are you just fighting the fraud men?”

The fraud men were the creatures that lived inside every artist’s brain, rearing their ugly heads any time something good happened and telling them that they were useless, talentless hacks who had only gotten lucky. “No, I really blew it. Couldn’t hold a note. I was… distracted.”

“By?” He plopped the teapot on the stove and turned to me, leaning on the counter with his arms crossed.

Could I tell him? And if I didn’t who
would
I tell? I took a deep breath and got ready for the red heat to rise in my face. “Jonathan’s a little kinky.”

Darren raised an eyebrow. “Oh, dear.”

“Please don’t embarrass me.”

He yanked a chair out from the table, sat, and put his elbows on the table. “Kinky billionaire meets hot waitress. It’s a cliché of a cliché. I love it. Does he make you spank him?”

The prickly heat finally hit my cheeks. “It’s the other way around.”

“
No
.”

I nodded while scratching a nonexistent piece of crud from the tabletop. “I mean, we haven’t got that far yet, but basically, that’s the nature of us in bed. He tells me to do stuff, and I do it. And he’s rough. Really rough. He wants a more, I guess,
intense
version of what’s been happening, and I’m freaked out.”

“Does he have a dungeon?”

I buried my face in my hands and gave a muffled “No” from behind my palms. I opened them. “I don’t think so.”

He paused, rubbing his chin, then leaned even farther across the table. “And he wants you to be his
official
fuck toy?”

“Oh God, Darren!”

“I haven’t heard you say that in years.”

I got up so fast the chair dropped behind me. “I’m really upset, Darren, and all you want to do is make jokes.” I turned off the burner and set about making tea. “He thinks I’m a natural submissive, which is code for like, doormat and beneath him, and yeah, it’s code for Jonathan’s little fucking fuck toy. And I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say I’m no man’s whore. And you’re right. I’m not. I’m not some submissive little kitten or his god damn punching bag. What the fuck is he thinking? And you
know
what I’m thinking.”

“I have no idea what you’re thinking.”

I held up the teapot. “Do you want some?”

“Sure.”

“Sugar?”

“Monica?”

“What?”

“You were saying something about what you were thinking.”

I poured the tea. Darren didn’t take sugar and neither did I, but I’d needed a second to avoid saying something stupid. “I can’t say it.”

“You’re no man’s whore.”

I stared at the tea as it steeped. “I know.”

“But you’re falling for him.”

The strength went out of my spine. I hated Darren for bringing it up and for seeing through me, yet I was grateful he’d said what I couldn’t. “He’s witty,” I said. “And confident and affectionate. And he looks at me like I’m the only woman in the world. And you can make fun but… the sex is…” I searched for the right word and came up with nothing adequate. “I’m a fuck toy whore, aren’t I?”

Darren got up for his tea, since I was falling down on the job. “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t like hearing someone is treating you like that. It upsets me. I’d actually like to punch him in the face a little.” He poured the hot water. “You’ve been alone too long. You’re vulnerable. You’re doing things you wouldn’t normally do.”

“Yeah.”

“If you want to date again, you should have tried dating, you know?”

“I want to rib you for not dating forever, then turning up gay. But I can’t. It’s right for you. This… I don’t think this is right for me.” I pulled the bag out of my cup and pressed it until it was a sack of damp leaves. “Too bad.”

“Gabby was triangulating him against every other person in Los Angeles, and she said she came up with something she wanted to show you. It didn’t sound good.”

“Great. Secrets. Love those.”

“Come on,” Darren rubbed my shoulders. “Let’s go watch a stupid movie and talk about Kevin’s thing. I’m bored, and I’ve decided I’d love to make that guy crazy.”

We never did speak about Kevin’s thing. We never even watched a movie. We lay on the couch and watched a string of shows about rock stars with debilitating drug addictions who redeemed themselves in their fifties. I fell asleep on Darren’s chest, where I felt as safe and comfortable as when I was with Jonathan.

I dreamed of some nether desert where the sky spoke in narrators, laugh tracks, and commercials, and I kneeled in the sand and put my hands in my pants to relieve the ache that had become water to me.

I woke up to the sound of Darren on the phone. Morning Stretch was muted. Darren’s voice squeaked, but I thought nothing of it. The fullness of my bladder pushed against some sexual part of my insides, making me feel engorged and ready. I wanted to fuck.

I went to my room, crawled into bed, and pulled the legal pad I used for middle-of-the-night ideas from the nightstand. I wrote:

What if he collars me? Slaps me? Spanks me? Bites me? Fucks me in the ass? Whips me? Hurts me? Displays me? Gags me? Blindfolds me? Shares me? Humiliates me? Ties me down? Makes me bleed? Fucks me up?

I couldn’t write any more. My imagination kept coming up with new things to do, and they got more and more horrible as I dug deeper.

I went to the bathroom and sat on the bowl, in the dark, trying not to wake up too much. I’d defined something about Jonathan during my conversation with Darren, and though I was comforted at having come to a conclusion, I was saddened at the decision.

There was a tap on the door.

“Mon?” Darren whispered.

“Use the other bathroom.”

“They found Gabrielle.” He sounded so calm I thought he meant something innocuous. “I have to identify the body.”

I stood up, my pants around my knees. “What?”

He asked softly, “Can you come with me?”

I
n my life, I’d experienced grief like I experienced love. Deeply and with very few people.

My father had been taken from me when I was nineteen. I didn’t see much of him, even when he wasn’t deployed. My mother owned him, up in buttfuck Castaic, two hours north of the den of sin and temptation I called home. The news came through her, icily framed as a happier existence with a benevolent God. I didn’t want to talk to her about how it happened. I ended up on the phone with his supervisor at Tomrock, who told me he’d taken mortar fire while escorting a Saudi prince to the central mosque in Kabul. I had told Dad he should have stayed in the military, that privatizing himself would leave him unprotected, but he was tired of listening to politically motivated orders dressed up as patriotism. If he was walking into death, he wanted it called that, and he wanted to be paid to take those risks. No fanfare. No dressing up in the flag. Dad was real. He wanted life so real it hurt. He’d been shot twice, stabbed once, and had his bell rung more than a few times in neighborhood brawls. He still held the door open for my mother after twenty years of marriage and loved her like a queen, even though she didn’t deserve it.

When he was killed, I thought I’d go insane. I felt unmoored, unsafe, orphaned. I found myself pulling the car over and checking directions to places I’d been to a hundred times. I called Darren twice as often, just to hear the voice of someone who loved me. I didn’t want to go outside if I could avoid it. The only thing that saved me, besides Darren and Gabby, was music. Dad had taught me piano. He approved of my pursuits. So when I played, especially when I played in front of people, I felt safe again. As the years passed, I found other ways to feel secure and loved, and grief slipped away so slowly I didn’t notice when it became a dull ache of memory brought on by some corner of the house or Dad’s mandarin tree in the backyard.

Grief had been hiding, ready for the next time. So when Darren and I listened to the lady cop tell us that Gabby had been found, drowned, two miles north of the Santa Monica Pier, I listened, but I was too busy trying to keep the bucket of grief from tipping. Darren needed me, and if I fell into a cacophony of emotion, I wasn’t going to be there for him.

We stood by a plexi-glass window, watching a sheet-covered gurney get wheeled into the adjacent room. I felt that bucket of sorrow tip and empty, dropping its contents from my throat to my heart. It sloshed around when I moved, and I thought I would be emptying it with a teaspoon.

I didn’t know what Darren was feeling, initially. He identified his sister, who looked bloated and blue, then turned to leave. He collapsed into my arms, weeping. I did my best to hold him up, but the lady cop with the inky curly hair had to help me get him to her desk.

Lady Cop brought us water and a box of tissues. “Was she on any medication?”

“Marplan,” Darren whispered.

“Did she mix it with alcohol?”

He grabbed my hand. “We should have gotten her. We shouldn’t have trusted Theo. Fuck. Of all people.”

I wasn’t buying it. “She was drinking, sure, but I thought she drowned,” I said to Lady Cop.

“Technically, yes. But what happens is people overdo, and because their judgment is compromised, they go for a swim. Their breath is shallower, and their coordination is poor, so they succumb.” She paused in a way that felt practiced and professional. “I’m sorry.”

We signed some papers. They wanted to know where to send the body. I gave the name of the funeral home my dad went to because I had no room in my brain for anything else, and Darren was too emotionally brutalized to make any kind of decision. I didn’t know how we were going to walk out of there, but we did, slowly, because the farther away we got from the police station, the farther behind we left Gabby. We stopped dead in the parking lot, holding hands, immovable.

“I don’t think I can go home,” he said.

“You can stay with me.”

“No.”

“What about Adam?”

Darren just stared into the distance, his face a blank. I didn’t know what to do next. He had no family except Gabby. I was
it
, and I had no idea how to help him. His gaze fixed on something, and I followed it. Theo closed the door on his Impala and came toward us, his gait a little crooked. I squeezed Darren’s hand tighter.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “Don’t try and deal with anything today.” I pulled him toward the Honda. “Please.”

He looked down at me, big blue eyes lined with webs of red.

“We have so much to do,” I said. “I need you. Please.”

He blinked as if some of what I said got through.