Read Coda (Songs of Submission #9) for Free Online

when he picked me up and carried me though the door, I forgot to worry about him at all.

chapter 7.
    JONATHAN
    I  could see this would take some time. It had taken me months to figure out we even had a problem; it wouldn’t take me that much less to solve.
    The flip side of the loyalty I loved was her stubbornness. She’d fully engaged in her submission when we started out because it was new and exciting. She’d discovered things she didn’t know about herself, and she’d watched me discover my own boundaries as well as hers. Then I got sick, and her world flipped. She had become distrustful, and to her, the stakes were life and death.
    All that made me want to fuck her harder, to drive submission back into her. While my dick was out, she was obedient and subservient, perfect as usual. In the doorway of our house, her mouth open, her chin slick with spit, waiting for me to come down her throat, she was a goddess. But once it was over, she would close her mouth and not talk about what was bothering her. She was going to simmer and worry and seethe, holding it all inside in an effort to protect me.
    It was cute. Sweet, even. In a way, her protectiveness made me love her more than I’d thought I could love anyone. She was a mother lion, even with her hands behind her back and her mascara running down her cheeks.
    And as if cued, as I carried her, I had a vision in four-dimension Technicolor, clear as reality and sharper than the truth: my heart blew through the scar in my chest, and I dropped her. The vision went whoosh when the heart flew out of me, thup when it landed on the floor, and clonk when I dropped her. I didn’t hear myself fall, because I was dead.
    This had to stop, but I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to shut it down. I shook myself free of the afterburn as I laid her on the bed. It faced the Pacific ocean, and the constant crash of the waves would make a nice backdrop over her screams of pleasure. She’d wanted to live on the beach, and I’d given her that, but I’d never given her myself. That was going to change. I couldn’t live like this.
    “I missed you,” she said, and I knew what she meant.
    “You barely knew me.” I rolled her onto her stomach. I wanted to tie her up, but I couldn’t. I had in the studio, but I’d kept thinking as I stroked her back, what if the heart rejects me and she’s tied down?
    She tucked her hands under her thighs. “How much do I need to know you to love you?”
    “Put your hands on the headboard,” I said, pulling her hair from her face.
    She stretched her arms and turned to face the big glass doors onto the patio. The beach on the other side was private, and that slice of sunset was ours alone. Her eyes were blasted light brown in the dying sun, and they followed me as I stepped back and looked at her.
    She was long and beautiful, with hair like a turbulent ocean. She was my songbird, my goddess, my slice of control in a world of chaos.
    Ten years with her was better than sixty with anyone less.
    I picked her legs up by the ankles and bent the knees, spreading them apart. Her cunt was wet, and her ass was welted pink. I looked back up at her face. Her eyes were closed tightly, wrinkles in the skin around her wet lashes, and I remembered how hard I’d hit her. Six months’ worth of frustration. I’d never hit her out of anger, only arousal, but maybe the two had gotten mixed up somewhere.
    “This hurts,” I said, hovering my hand over her ass.
    “Yes,” she said, eyes open into the sun again. “Thank you.”
    She wasn’t trained to thank me for spankings. No one had told her it was how a submissive was supposed to please their master. She simply thanked me because she’d gotten something from me she couldn’t give to herself. How could I not love her?
    “Wait here.” I kissed her cheek and went to the bathroom.
    I snapped open the medicine cabinet. I had a shaving salve and a lubricant. Abandoned hair things. Toothpaste.