Burn (Songs of Submission #5)(3)
Author: C.D. Reiss

Mandy cracked her gum one last time and gently spit it into a napkin. “You’re grumpy.”

Robert, who seemed to hear everything no matter who he was serving at the bar, said, “Needs a drink.” He nodded to me. “Want something before you go?”

“No, thanks.” His offer was tempting, but it was nine o’clock, and I still had work to do. “Where’s Debbie?”

“Office.” Robert flipped a bottle as a prelude to wiping it down. “Can you tell her to hurry on the schedule? I have an audition this week.”

“Nope. She hates when we nag about it, so I’m not going to do it for you. I’m asking her for time off, and then I’m going home.”

Mandy poured the mixers for the drinks on her tray. “Oh yeah? Going somewhere for Thanksgiving?”

“Vancouver the week after.”

“Ah that thing you’re doing with both your ex-boyfriends? Which you don’t think is weird?”

“It’s not weird unless you make it weird. The piece, you should see it. It’s going to make me famous.” I wagged my finger at her. The piece had to make me famous. I could be Art Girl instead of Bondage Girl. I could do abstraction. The Vancouver piece gave me a gem of hope in the seven acres of shit I’d slogged through with Eddie. Mandy rolled her eyes and went to serve Renaldo Rodriguez and his blonde entourage.

I’d just gotten a passport. It had just come in the mail, Kevin and Darren had to go to the B.C. Mod without me to take meetings and do the setup. Letting my passport expire was a stupid oversight on my part, and I promised I wouldn’t let it happen again. I would be fully present for every step from then on.

I went into the guts of the hotel to the liquor room, where Debbie’s unobtrusive little office sat. When I got to her door, I heard two voices: hers and one male, talking seriously. I knocked. Usually Sam was in there with her, as if she owned the hotel and he worked for her, not the other way around.

“Come in,” called Debbie.

I opened the door and saw Debbie first, leaning on the window ledge. Then I had the wind knocked out of me.

Jonathan sat in her leather chair in his work clothes. Blue suit, striped shirt, red cufflinks. He looked at me like the first time, when I felt as if he was drinking me through the straw of his gaze. But back then, though I’d been celibate, I had something for his eyes to drink: a piqued sexuality and availability in my heart that I didn’t realize existed until he’d awakened it. When I saw him in Debbie’s office, I felt emotionally dehydrated and sexually bloodless.

“I’ll come back later,” I said and spun on my heel before I heard the answer.

He caught me in the liquor room, by a stack of boxes piled eight feet high. “Monica.” His voice was so gentle I couldn’t ignore it. I turned. “Hey. How are you?”

“I’m fine.” My voice sounded out of tune and ill-played. He looked perfect, well rested and fed, as though my absence had had no effect on him at all.

“You look good.” He stood three feet away. Why could I feel the heat from his body? How was his gaze so physical on me?

“Thanks. You too.” He wasn’t moving away. Just standing. I couldn’t even look at him. “I get your texts,” I said.

“I know,” he whispered and raised his hand, his fingertip touching my sleeve. “You can go in to talk to Debbie. I’ll wait out here. You’re at work. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

My laugh was a gunshot on a yesterday’s bloody battlefield, so short and awkward that I cast my gaze up to see if he’d noticed. His eyes, tourmaline with blue flecks I’d see if I got close enough, had that bemused look, as though nothing happened in his purview that he hadn’t predicted, and the hurt I’d caused myself was simply something I had to get control over.

Until that look, I hadn’t wondered, or even thought about, who he was f**king now. But with his heat on me and under the pressure of his presence, I had to ask myself if he breathed her name at the height of his pleasure, if he touched her with all the violence and tenderness he’d touched me with.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Debbie had moved behind her desk. She’d been looking older lately. I’d been led to believe her real age was thirty-eight, but that was never discussed. “Sit,” she said.

I stood. I didn’t need to stay long. I didn’t want to keep Jonathan waiting outside. The thought of him existing on the other side of the wall was painful.

“I need these days off.” I handed her a slip of paper. She checked it against the calendar on her desk.

“This should be fine.” She looked back up at me. “How are you doing?”

“All right.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

She leaned back in her chair and indicated the leather chair where Jonathan had been sitting. Anyone who hadn’t been attuned to his lingering smell might have missed it. “You took it seriously, didn’t you?”

I sucked my lower lip between my teeth and nodded.

“I told you not to,” Debbie said.

“Yeah, I kinda forgot.”

“Understandable. Just keep it together on the floor. Yes?”

“I’ll be a woman of grace.”

Debbie looked at the schedule again. “Thursday, Doreen needs to leave at ten. Can you do half a shift?”

“That’s Thanksgiving.”

“Do you have plans?”

I shrugged. “I can be here.”

She scribbled my name in the schedule and dismissed me.

When I went back out into the liquor room, Jonathan was gone. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or sad.

CHAPTER 4.

JONATHAN

I don’t know what I must have looked like to her. She looked more feral, hungry, and proud than she ever had. On edge, too. I knew if I touched her, she’d calm down. If I put my lips on her face, her breathing would slow. If I put my body close to hers, she’d stop twitching.

But I had to wait. She had to come to me. And she would.

Even as we stood outside arm’s distance of each other, I felt the space between us mold into something perfectly matched. I’d thought she was on edge, but the fact was, I hadn’t felt right since she rode away in that cab. Two weeks had stretched out into an endless horizon. I was on a path getting smaller in the distance, but always staying the same in reality. She chose to walk away, and she would have to choose to come back. I was a patient man. I could wait, but I didn’t have to like it.