Free Monica by CD Reiss Page A

myself, and in knowing myself, I had the confidence to bind and hit and hurt, because I’d know when to stop.
    We got home from the hospital, Monica and I, and eventually made love again. Still, I wasn’t myself. I was mostly me and partly someone else. An alien piece of meat had been lodged in me. I didn’t know what it would do. Would it beat right for me, or for the person it was meant for? Would it skip a beat at the sight of some strange woman? Would it break over a different past or a lost present? I kept dreaming it jumped out of me like a frog on a frying pan, slapping to the kitchen floor with a splat , beating on the tiles, squirting yellow plasma. Once, I dreamed it bounced out of me and landed in the pool, swimming with Sheila in a trail of curly red blood. And I laughed, in my dream, but when I woke up, I ran to the bathroom mirror to make sure I had a scar instead of a hole.
    I’d felt like a foreigner in my own skin, dragging around a sack of muscle and bone held together with medicine. Even after the doctor appointments dwindled and life returned to something that looked like normal, I still hadn’t adjusted to being two people in one body, and my wife knew it. She was drifting away like a bottle bobbing in the surf, tide by tide. She wasn’t Jessica. She’d never leave, at least not for someone else. But she’d leave with distraction and indifference. And at the thought of the lost intimacy, I felt a blade of ice cold rage so thick I had no room for a reaction or an emotion. My head was clear. The anger had pushed out all the clutter. She was mine to lose, but she was mine.
    Three days.

MONICA
    I missed two things.
    I missed freedom, and I missed slavery.
    I'd gotten myself caught in a nether region where I couldn’t come and go as I pleased, and I didn’t feel protected.
    I was being unfair and I knew it. What man could be expected to keep up Jonathan’s intensity for any length of time? No human could continue to be a raging lion after having their heart ripped out.
    So, though we burdened each other with many things, I never burdened him with my longing for my dominant Jonathan. That man was gone. I loved the man who replaced him. He was everything I almost lost in that fucking nightmare of a hospital. He was funny and thoughtful. Gracious and wise. He was still the best lover I’d ever laid my hands on.
    “Hello?” His voice was thick with sleep. The sun was just coming up over Caracas, tainting the sky brown.
    “I’m coming back early,” I said as I walked across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. Jacques waved. His temp copilot for the day took my rolling suitcase and stowed it underneath.
    “Really?” Jonathan sounded as awake as a gallon of coffee. “I have something for you.”
    “But I have to go right into the studio,” I said. “Jerry wants me to work on Forever for this sampler idea he’s—“
    “I’m sorry?”
    “I’ll walk in the door the same time as if I’d stayed here. I just wanted you to know what I was doing with your plane.”
    “Well, thank you.”
    “Don’t be mad.”
    “Goddess,” he said, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard in half a year. It stopped me on the steps up to the fuselage door.
    “Yes.” I was shocked at the small sound of my own voice.
    “I don’t give a fuck about the plane.”
    “It’ll be fast. I’ll be home by lunch.”
    “Text me where you’re going to be.”
    “Why?”
    “What?”
    Fuck. I promised myself I’d never forget what Jessica did to him, yet here I was, serial-bailing on him and giving attitude about it.
    “It’s the same studio as always,” I said, backpedalling as I snapped my seatbelt on.
    ***
    I ate a lunch of chicken fingers and a half a radicchio salad in the engineering room. I shot the shit with Jerry and Deshawn. We talked about promoting the sampler, getting beer thrown at me in Caracas as a sign of respect, the roaches in the hotel, the excellent food. Half an hour later, we were