“Bedroom only?”
“To start.”
Outside, the band stopped.
We reacted immediately. He got his dick in his pants, and I dropped my skirt and got my shirt arranged. He gathered the fork, the bag, whatever. Against the clatter of a pre-encore band coming down the hall, Jonathan unlocked the door. I thought nothing of it, because it should be unlocked before they got their hands on the knob.
But when it opened and the guys were right there, I realized why Darren raised his eyebrow before he said hello.
I still had the collar on.
thirteen.
JONATHAN
They say men and women don’t communicate about their problems because women just want to feel and men just want to fix.
I’d never given that much thought.
But I wanted to fix Monica’s problem with her voice, and she just wanted to go through the wringer. I was suggesting she submit her problems with her art not necessarily to me, but just in general. Overall. To do the job without worrying about what other people thought about it. She could give up this idea she was a fraud if she blocked out everyone but me, the one person who loved her whether she sang on key or not.
That made perfect sense in my head.
Also, that collar.
It elongated her neck, made her submission into an aesthetic. She became a work of art. My work of art. The sight of it put gravity-strength pressure on my balls, and when I pulled on that ring, I nearly came from seeing it in the mirror.
But when her friends entered the room, she put her hand on her throat as if that would hide it. If they knew we had been fucking, she wouldn’t care. But the submission thing? That bothered her. And being collared in public was always a sticking point.
I wanted to rip the thing off before we left the dressing room, but it had a lock, and ripping something off her in front of everyone would have been quite a spectacle.
“Hi,” she said, hand to throat.
They didn’t even look at her. Darren murmured something. Harry said hello but was focused on getting his bass into the bag. The drummer punched my arm, and the other guy glanced at her and thanked her for opening the set.
The girl singer looked me up and down in the way women sometimes do, but their chatter was about the set, the songs, a patois of terms I didn’t understand but knew had nothing to do with Monica’s neckwear. She turned to me, smiled, and held out her hand.
I snapped up her bag, grabbed her hand, and walked out.
fourteen.
MONICA
I was bone tired. The drive home was gentle and almost meditative. I’d held his hand, feeling the soreness between my legs like a reminder of all the good in my life.
We didn’t talk about my horrid performance. We didn’t talk about the collar. We just sat in peace, and it was perfect.
In front of the bathroom mirror, naked from the waist up, I looked at my collar. It was nice, as collars went. Didn’t look doggish. Didn’t look slavish. It looked like a really nice piece of jewelry with a lock on the front. The ring in the back was a giveaway though. But the chain mail made it conform to my movements and even, dare I think it, made it comfortable.
“Jonathan?” I called. I could hear him puttering around the bedroom.
“Yeah?”
“Where’s the key to this thing?”
“In the box it came in.”
“Which is where?”
I didn’t even finish the sentence before he was in the bathroom, holding out a black jewelry box. I opened it.
My tuning fork was inside. That wasn’t right. I put it on the counter and lifted the velvet panel that the fork rested on. No key hid in the bottom of the box.
“Shit,” I said.
“Where was the tuning fork supposed to go?” he asked.
“A little black box. Okay, they got switched. It’s around. Let me check my bag.”
My phone dinged just as I got there. It was Darren.
—You left a black box with a key in the dressing room. I got it but we’re on the flight to Nashville—
I showed Jonathan the phone. “You put the tuning fork away.”
“No, you put it in the box.”
“And you put the box in your pocket.”
“Thinking it was the box with the key.”
“And I was responsible for the tuning fork. Goddamnit! I’m so stupid,” I said.
“I can have it sawed off your neck.”
“Go to hell, Drazen.”
He put his hands up as if he was dealing with a crazy person. “I’ll have someone fly to Nashville to get the key. I can’t have it here by morning, but I can have it off you before Dodger Stadium.”
“I’m so mad.”
“I know.”
“Just free-floating mad.”
“I don’t want to deflect but—”
“But what?”
“Between your anger, the no-shirt thing, and the collar? You have never looked so fuckable.”
My shoulders drooped, and the rage fell right out of me. I held my arms up, and he wrapped himself around me and just hugged me for all it was worth.
fifteen.
MONICA
Jonathan’s gaze was a continuous companion. He owned me with it. He called his pilot to go to Nashville with his eyes on me. He undressed me slowly by the brightest lamp and made love to me so tenderly it hurt. He touched my neck all the time, drawing his fingers over the bumps in the collar and his thumb over the lock. The next morning, his gaze peeled me open from across the room, and he watched me go out the door as if in a state of utter gratification.
I worried on the way to Mrs. Yuan’s that everyone was looking at me with hunger. I felt undressed.
She had a pink hibiscus in her hair. I’d seen them growing outside, and I resisted the urge to touch it to see if it was real.
“Is that going to constrict you?” was the first thing she asked. Not a surprise.
“I don’t think so.”
She turned to Sherri. “Was she wearing it last night?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well,” she said, turning back to me, “from what I understand, we have nowhere to go but up.”
My face got hot. Sherri wouldn’t look at me even when my eyes burned holes into her.
“It was pretty bad,” I said.
“Good,” she said, surprising me. “I’d hate for you to peak too soon. And it’s out of your system. You survived it. Nothing can hurt you now.”
I felt inexplicably relieved, as if she’d given me some sort of indefinable permission I’d been unable to give myself. Not permission to succeed or fail. Permission to just do the thing without calling it a name.
She removed her fork from the box. “Let’s start with some scales. Then work on our transition to banner.”
I tilted my head right then left, feeling the collar bend with me.
“You will be good,” she said.
I lowered my lids, as if I had to see her through a narrower opening. Had she said something nice? “I’m still not Whitney Houston.”
“No, you are not Whitney Houston. You’ll do it without changing the phrasing.”
She tapped her fork before I could absorb what she’d said, and I hit the note, working back and forth as we’d done for two weeks.
The rehearsal was light and more positive than usual. Mrs. Yuan had more exhortations up her sleeve than I’d given her credit for, and she didn’t look at the collar once more. But she and Sherri were the only ones to see me, and I’d made plans to be in public that afternoon to get my mind off the evening.
Once in the car, I checked my texts.
Yvonne: