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Collide
Megan Hart
A childhood accident left Emmaline vulnerable to disturbing fugue states that last minutes but feel like an eternity. The blackouts are unsettling but manageable. . . until she meets Johnny Dellasandro. The painter gained fame in the '70s for his debauched lifestyle and raunchy art films. His naked body achieved cult status, especially in Emm's mind, she's obsessed with the man, who's grown even sexier with age. Today he shuns the spotlight and Emm. . . until she falls into a fugue on his doorstep.In that moment she's transported back thirty years, crashing a party at Johnny's place. The night is a blur of flesh and heat that lingers long after she's woken to the present. It happens again and again, each time-slip a mind-blowing orgy, and soon Emm can't stop, though every episode leaves her weaker.She's scared by what's happening, but she's even more terrified of losing this portal to the Johnny she wants so badly. The one who wants her and takes her every chance he gets.




About the Author
MEGAN HART is the bestselling and multi-published author of more than thirty novels for Spice and MIRA Books. Megan lives in the deep, dark woods of Pennsylvania with her husband and two children, and is currently working on her next novel for the Spice line.
You can contact Megan through her Web site at www.MeganHart.com.

Author’s Note
I could write without listening to music, but I’m so glad I don’t have to. Here’s a partial playlist of some of the music I listened to while writing Collide. Please support the artist through legal sources!
“Breathe Me”—Sia
“Bulletproof Weeks”—Matt Nathanson
“City Lights”—Mirror
“Closer”—Kings of Leon
“Collide”—Howie Day
“Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover”—Sophie B. Hawkins
“Don’t Pull Your Love”—Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds
“Dream a Little Dream of Me”—The Mamas and the Papas
“Ghosts”—Christopher Dallman
“Goodbye Horses”—Psyche
“I Think She Knows”—Kaki King
“I’m Burning for You”—Blue Öysters Cult
“If”—Bread
“If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out”—Cat Stevens
“Incense and Peppermints”—Strawberry Alarm Clock
“Je t’aime moi non plus”—Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
“Joy to the World”—Three Dog Night
“Kiss You All Over”—Dr. Hook
“Labor of Love”—Michael Giacchini’s Star Trek
(Music from the Motion Picture)
“Lascia ch’io pianga Prologue”—Antichrist Soundtrack
“Life on Mars”—David Bowie
“Purple Haze”—The Cure
“Shambala”—Three Dog Night
Collide
Megan Hart








www.spice-books.co.uk (http://www.spice-books.co.uk)
First, to JNB—HAYYY GURLL HAYYYYY!
Thanks for the late-night streamin’ marathons
and the mutual appreciation of all the things that
make us a pair of duty hooahs.
To DPF for putting up with me.
And, of course, to Joe. Without you this book wouldn’t exist.

Chapter 01
Oranges.
The smell of oranges drifted toward me. I put a hand on the back of the chair nearest me and searched the countertop for fruit in a basket. Something, anything, that would explain the smell, which was as out of place in this coffee shop as a Santa suit in the sand. I didn’t see anything that would explain the scent, and I drew in a deep breath. I’d learned a long time ago there was no point in trying to hold my nose or my breath. Better to breathe through this. Get it over with.
The smell passed quickly, gone in a few blinks, a couple of heartbeats, replaced by the stronger odor of coffee and pastries. My fingers had tightened on the chair but I didn’t even need the support. I oriented myself before letting go of the chair to finish moving toward the counter where I’d been heading to add sugar and cream to my coffee.
It had been almost two years since my last fugue. That one had been equally as mild, but the fact this one had been barely a blip didn’t offer much comfort. I’d had periods in my life when the fugues had come hard and fast and often, essentially crippling me. It was too much to hope they would go away, but I didn’t want to go back to that.
“Hey, girl, heyyyyyy!” Jen called from the booth she’d snagged just inside the Mocha’s door. She waved. “Over here!”
I waved and finished adding the sugar and cream, then wove my way through the jumble of chairs and tables to slide into the booth across from Jen. “Hey.”
“Ooh, what did you get?” Jen leaned forward to peer into my coffee mug as though that would give her some idea about what was in there. She sniffed. “German chocolate?”
“Close. Chocolate Delight.” I named one of the two featured coffees. “With a shot of vanilla-bean syrup.”
Jen smacked her lips. “Mmm. Sounds good. I’m going to choose mine. Hey, what did you get to eat?”
“Blueberry muffin. Should’ve gone with the chocolate cupcake, but I thought maybe that would be too much.” I showed her the plate with the muffin.
“Too much chocolate? As if. Be right back.”
I stirred my coffee to distribute the syrup, extra sugar and cream, then sipped, enjoying the extra sweetness most people didn’t like. Jen was right. I should’ve gone for the cupcake.
Jen had picked the wrong time to get in line. The midmorning rush had begun, customers lined up four-deep, all the way to the front door. She threw me an annoyed look and a shrug I could only laugh at in sympathy.
The coffee shop had been pretty empty when I entered, but customers who were put off by the line had started snagging tables while they waited to take their turns. I waved at Carlos over in the corner, but he had his earbuds settled deep and his laptop already open. Carlos was working on a novel. He sat in the Mocha from ten to eleven every morning before he went off to work, and on Saturdays, like today, he sometimes stayed longer.
Lisa, her backpack bulging with textbooks, took a table a few seats away and wiggled her fingers at me without noticing Jen’s semifrantic waving for me to ignore her. Lisa sold Spicefully Tasty products to pay her way through law school, and though I’d never found her sales pitches annoying, Jen couldn’t stand them. Today, though, Lisa seemed preoccupied, focusing on setting out her books and notepad, already clicking her pen as she shrugged out of her coat.
We were the Mocha regulars, like some sort of club. We met up in the mornings before work, in the evenings on the way home and on the weekends, bleary-eyed from the nights before. The Mocha was one of the best parts of living in this neighborhood, and though I’d only been a part of the club for a few months, I loved it.
By the time Jen got back to our booth with her tall cup of something that smelled both minty and chocolaty and her plate of something oozing and gooey, the crowd had settled. The regulars had found their usual spots and the people who’d just stopped in for takeout had bought and left. The Mocha was full now and buzzing with the hum of conversation and the click-clack of keyboards as people took advantage of the free Wi-Fi. I liked the hum. It made me conscious of being there, present. In the moment. This moment.
“She didn’t try to hit you up for some sort of cream-cheese spread today, huh? Maybe she got the hint.” Jen offered me a fork, and though I wanted to resist, I couldn’t help taking just a taste of her brownie.
“I actually like Spicefully Tasty stuff,” I said.
“Pffft.” Jen laughed. “Get out of here.”
“No, I do,” I insisted. “It’s expensive but convenient. If I ever really cooked, it would be even better.”
“You’re telling me. All that money for a bunch of spices I can buy two for a buck at the dollar store and mix together myself. Not that I do,” Jen added. “But I could.”
“Maybe next month.” I sipped more rapidly cooling coffee, savoring the richness of the cream. “Once I get some bills paid off.”
“You’ll have better things to … oh. Niiiiice. Finally.” Jen’s voice dropped to a murmur.
I turned to look where she was staring. I caught a glimpse of a long black duster, a red-and-black-striped scarf. The man carried a thick newspaper under one arm, which in these times of smartphones and webnews was a strange enough sight to make me look twice. He spoke to the girl at the register, who seemed to know him, and took his empty mug to the long counter where all the self-serve carafes of coffee were.
In profile, he was gorgeous. Sandy-blond hair tousled just so, a sharp nose that wasn’t overpowering. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the color of which I couldn’t see but suspected were blue. His mouth, lips pursed in concentration as he filled his mug and added sugar and cream, looked just full enough to be tempting without being too lush.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Girl,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “You don’t know who that is?”
“If I knew, would I be asking?”
The man in the black coat passed us so close I could smell him.
Oranges.
I closed my eyes against that second wave of scent, the taste of coffee so strong on my tongue it should’ve blocked out everything else but didn’t. I should’ve smelled coffee and chocolate, but I smelled oranges. Again. I bent my head and pressed my fingertips to the magic spot between my eyes that worked swell for headaches but did nothing for fugues.
But no swirling colors seeped around the edges of my vision as I opened my eyes again, and the scent of oranges faded the farther away he got. I watched the man in the black coat take a seat facing away from us. He shook out the paper, spreading it open across the small table for two, and put his coffee down to take his coat off.
“You okay?” Jen leaned forward into my range of vision. “I know he’s fucking hot and all, but damn, Emm, you looked like you were going to pass out.”
“PMS,” I said. “I get a little woozy this time of month.”
Jen frowned, looking skeptical. “That sucks.”
“You’re telling me.” I grinned to show her I was okay, and thank God I was. Not a hint of even a minor onset like the one that had hit me earlier. I’d smelled oranges because that man smelled of them, not because of some misfiring triggers in my brain. “Anyway. Who is he?”
“That’s Johnny Dellasandro.”
My expression must’ve been as blank as I felt, because Jen laughed.
“Garbage? Skin? The Haunted Convent? C’mon, not even that one?”
I shook my head. “Huh?”
“Ooh, girl, where’ve you been? Didn’t you have cable TV growing up?”
“Sure I did.”
“Johnny Dellasandro was in all those movies. They showed them a lot on those late-night cable shows like Up Past Midnight. They were slumber party standbys.”
My mom had always been too nervous about me spending the night at someone else’s house. I’d been allowed to go to the parties so long as she picked me up at bedtime. I’d had slumber parties at my house, though. “Sure, I remember that show. But that was a long time ago.”
“Blank Spaces?”
That sounded a little more familiar, but not enough. I shrugged and looked over at him again. “I never heard of that one.”
Jen sighed and looked over her shoulder at him, then leaned forward, lowering her voice and prompting me to lean closer to hear her. “Johnny Dellasandro, the artist? He had that series of portraits that became famous back in the early eighties. Blank Spaces. Sort of like the Mona Lisa of the Andy Warhol era.”
I could maybe have picked out a Warhol painting in a museum if it had been lined up alongside a Van Gogh, a Dali, a Matisse. But other than that … “Was that the guy who did the soup cans? Marilyn Monroe?”
“Yeah, that was Warhol. Dellasandro’s work wasn’t quite as kitschy, but it did go a little more mainstream. Blank Spaces was his breakout series.”
“You said ‘wasn’t.’ He’s not an artist anymore?”
She leaned forward a little more, and I followed. “Well, he has a gallery on Front Street. The Tin Angel? You know it?”
“I’ve been past it, yeah. Never been inside.”
“That’s his place. He still does his own work, and he has a lot of local artists there, too.” She gestured around the Mocha, hung with samplings of local art, some of her pictures among them. “Better stuff than this. Every once in a while he has some big name in for a show. But he keeps it real low-key, low-profile. At least around here. I guess I can’t blame him.”
“Huh.” I studied him. He was flipping pages of the paper so slowly it looked like he was reading every single word. “I wonder what that’s like.”
“What?”
“Being famous and then … not.”
“He’s still famous. Just not in the same way. I can’t believe you never heard of him. He lives in that brownstone down the street, by the way.”
I tore my gaze from Johnny Dellasandro’s back and looked at my friend. “Which one?”
“Which one.” Jen rolled her eyes. “The nice one.”
“Oh, shit, really? Wow.” I looked at him again. I’d bought one of the brownstones on Second Street. Mine, though it had been partially renovated by a previous owner, still needed a lot of work. The one she was talking about was gorgeous, with completely repointed brickwork, brass on the gutters and a fully landscaped yard surrounded by hedges. “That’s his place?”
“You’re practically neighbors. I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
“I barely know who he is,” I told her, though now that she’d been talking about it, the title Blank Spaces sounded more familiar. “I’m not sure the real estate agent mentioned him as a selling point for the neighborhood.”
Jen laughed. “Probably not. He’s a pretty private guy. Comes in here a lot, though I haven’t seen him lately. Doesn’t talk a lot to anyone. He keeps to himself.”
I drank the last of my coffee and considered getting up to take advantage of the bottomless refills. I’d have to walk right past him, and on the way back I’d get a full-on view of his face. Jen must’ve read my mind.
“He’s worth a peek,” she said. “God knows all of us girls in here have made a trip past him a few times. So has Carlos. Actually, I think Carlos is the only one he’s ever talked to.”
I laughed. “Yeah? Why? Does he like guys?”
“Who, Carlos?”
I was pretty sure Carlos was straight, judging by the way he checked out every woman’s ass when he thought they weren’t looking. “No. Dellasandro.”
“Oooh, girl,” Jen said again.
I liked the way she called me that, like we’d been friends for a long time instead of only a couple months. It had been hard moving here to Harrisburg. New job, new place, new life—the past supposedly left behind and yet never quite gone. Jen had been one of the first people I’d met, right here in the Mocha, and we’d fallen into friendship right away.
“Yes?” I studied him again.
Dellasandro licked his forefinger before using it to turn the page of his paper. It shouldn’t have been quite as sexy as it was. I was letting Jen’s excitement color my impression of him, which had been really too brief for it to be so intense. After all, I’d only had a glimpse of his face and had been staring at his back for less than fifteen minutes.
“You have to come over and watch his movies. You’ll see what I mean. Johnny Dellasandro’s like … a legend.”
“He can’t have been that much of a legend, since I’ve never heard of him.”
“Okay,” Jen amended. “A legend in a certain crowd. Artsy people.”
“I guess I’m not artsy enough.” I laughed, not taking offense. I’d been to the Museum of Modern Art a few times in New York City. I definitely wasn’t the target audience.
“That is a sad, sad shame. Really. I’m pretty sure watching Johnny Dellasandro movies ruined me for regular boys forever.”
“That’s not exactly a compliment,” I told her. “As if there is such a thing as a regular boy, which frankly I’m beginning to doubt.”
She laughed and dug again into her brownie with another glance over her shoulder. She lifted her fork, heavy with chocolaty goodness, in my direction. “Come over tonight. I have the entire DVD box-set collection, plus the earlier ones, and what I don’t have we can stream from Interflix.”
“Ooh, fancy.”
She grinned and bit off the brownie from her fork. “Girl, I will introduce you to some seriously good shit.” “And he lives right here, huh?”
“I know, right?” Jen glanced over her shoulder one more time.
If Dellasandro had any idea we were so scrutinizing him, he didn’t show it. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to anyone, as a matter of fact. He read his paper and drank his coffee. He turned the pages one at a time, sometimes using a finger to scan down the print.
“I wasn’t sure it was him, you know? I came in here to the Mocha one morning and there he was. Johnny fucking Dellasandro.” Jen gave a happy, entirely infatuated sigh. “Girl, I seriously almost surfed out of here on a wave of my own come.”
I’d been drinking when she said that, and started laughing. A second later, choking when the coffee went into my lungs instead of my stomach. Coughing, gasping, eyes watering, I put my hands over my mouth to try and shield the noise, but it was impossible to be entirely quiet.
Jen laughed, too. “Hands up! Put your hands up! That stops coughing!”
My mom had always said the same thing. I managed to get one hand halfway up and the coughing eased. I’d earned a few curious looks, but none, thank God, from Dellasandro. “Warn me before you say something like that.”
She blinked innocently. “Like what? Wave of my own come?”
I laughed again, this time without the choking. “Yeah, that!”
“Trust me,” Jen said. “After you see his movies, you’ll understand what I mean.”
“Okay, fine. You have me convinced. And pathetically, I have no plans for tonight.”
“Girl, if not having plans on a Saturday night makes you a loser, I’m one, too. We can be losers together, eating ice cream and squeeing over old soft-core art movies.”
“Soft-core?” I looked past her to where Dellasandro had nearly finished his paper.
“You wait and see,” Jen said. “Full frontal, baby.”
“Oh, wow. No wonder he doesn’t want to talk to anyone here. If I were famous for dangling my dingle I might not want anyone to notice me, either.”
It was Jen’s turn to burst into laughter. Hers turned more heads than mine had, but still not Dellasandro’s. She drew a finger through the chocolate on her plate and licked it off.
“I don’t think that’s it. I mean, I don’t think he likes to brag about it or anything, but he’s not ashamed. Well, he shouldn’t be. He made art.” She was being serious. “I mean, for real. He and his friends were known as the Enclave. They’re credited with changing the way art movies were viewed by the general public. They made art movies that actually got shown in mainstream theaters. X-rated theaters, but even so.”
“Wow.” I didn’t know anything about art but that sounded impressive.
And there was something about him. Maybe it was the long black coat and the scarf, since I’m a sucker for men who know how to dress like they don’t care what they look like and yet manage to look damned good. Maybe it was the way he’d smelled of oranges as he passed me, not a scent I normally liked—in fact, one I despised because of the way it usually preceded a fugue. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the fugue itself, minor though it had been. Often after experiencing one I found the “real” world went brighter for a little while. Kind of intense. Somehow, even when the fugues were accompanied by hallucinations, coming out of them was even more intense. I hadn’t had one like that in a long time, hadn’t had even a hint of anything similar in this last one, but the feeling now was much the same.
“Emm?”
Startled, I realized Jen had been talking to me. I didn’t have a fugue to blame for my inattention. “Sorry.”
“So, tonight? I’ll make margaritas. We can get a pizza.” She paused, looking distraught. “That is sort of pathetic, huh?”
“You know what’s pathetic? Getting all dressed up and going to a bar hoping to get hit on by some loser in a striped shirt who smells like Polo.”
“You’re right. Striped shirts are so 2006.”
We laughed together. I’d gone out with Jen to the local bars a couple times. Striped shirts were still pretty popular, especially on young frat boys who liked to buy Jell-O shots from scantily clad girls because they hoped those girls would think they were playahs.
Jen glanced at her watch. “Crap. Gotta run. Meeting my brother to take our grandma out grocery shopping. She’s eighty-two and can’t see well enough to drive. She makes our mom crazy.”
I laughed again. “Good luck.”
“I love her, but she’s a handful. That’s why I need my brother to come along. See you tonight, my place. Around seven? We don’t want to start too late. Got a lot of movies to watch!”
I couldn’t imagine wanting to watch more than one or two of the films, but I nodded, anyway. “Sure. I’ll be there. I’ll bring dessert and some munchies.”
“Great. See you!” Jen stood and leaned in close to say, “Dare you to get a refill now! Quick, before he leaves.”
Dellasandro had folded his paper and stood. He was putting on his coat. I still couldn’t see his face.
“I dare you to casually wait until he leaves and you go out just after so he has to hold the door for you,” I said.
“Good plan,” she said. “Too bad I can’t just casually wait around for him. I have to dash. You do it.”
We both laughed and Jen headed out. I watched her go, then watched Dellasandro return his empty mug to the counter. With his paper tucked under his arm, he headed for the restroom in the back of the Mocha. It was a good time for me to get a refill, since I’d paid for them, but I wasn’t really in the mood for more coffee. I had no plans—the day stretched out before me with nothing to tempt me away from the Mocha, and yet I’d forgotten to bring something to read or even my computer to surf the Net. I had no reason to stay and a house full of unpacking and cleaning to finish. I probably had a message from my mom to return, too.
I put my own mug on the counter and let my lustful gaze roam over the pastries. I’d bake some brownies at home instead. They’d be better from scratch, anyway, even if the ones at the Mocha did come with a half-inch-thick layer of fudge frosting I had no idea how to replicate. My stomach rumbled despite the muffin I’d had. Not a good thing.
“Get you something?” This was Joy, one of the tersest people I’d ever met. She certainly didn’t live up to her name.
“No, thanks.” I hitched my purse higher on my shoulder, thinking I’d better head home and make myself an egg salad sandwich or something before I got hypoglycemic. Going without food not only made me cranky, it could tempt a fugue, and after the one this morning I wasn’t about to do anything to bring on another. Caffeine and sugar helped fend them off, but my empty stomach was effectively counterbalancing the oversweetened coffee.
Dellasandro reached the Mocha’s front door only seconds after I did. I’d pushed open the glass-fronted door, making the brass bell jingle, and felt someone behind me. I turned, one hand still holding the door so it wouldn’t swing shut, and there he was. Black coat, striped scarf, wheaten hair.
His eyes weren’t blue.
They were a deep green-brown hazel. And his face was perfect, even with the crinkles of time at the corners of his eyes, the glint of silver I could see now at his temples. I’d thought he was maybe in his late thirties, a few years older than me when I’d first seen him, though obviously his career in the seventies meant he was older than that. I wouldn’t have guessed it even now, knowing. His face was beautiful.
Johnny Dellasandro’s face was art.
And I let the door slam right in it. “Jesus Christ,” he said as he stepped back. His voice, pure New Yawk.
The door closed between us. Sun reflected off the glass, shielding him inside. I couldn’t see his face anymore, but I was pretty sure I’d just pissed him off.
I pulled on the handle as he pushed it open, the door’s sudden give making me stumble back a couple steps. “Oh, wow, I’m sorry!”
He didn’t even look at me, just shouldered past with a low, muttered curse I couldn’t quite make out. The edge of his paper hit my arm as he passed. Dellasandro didn’t pay any attention. The hem of his coat flapped in a sudden upswell of wind and I gasped, breathing in deep, and deeper.
The scent of oranges.
“Mom. Really, I’m fine.” I had to tell her this not because it made her worry less, but because if I didn’t say it, she’d definitely worry more. “I promise. Everything’s fine.”
“I wish you hadn’t moved so far away.” My mom’s voice on the other end of the phone sounded fretful. That was normal. When she started sounding anxious, I needed to worry.
“Forty minutes isn’t far at all. I’m closer to work now, and I have a great place.”
“In the city!”
“Oh, Mom.” I had to laugh, even though I knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better. “Harrisburg’s only technically a city.”
“And right downtown. You know I heard on the news there was a shooting just a few streets over from you.”
“Yeah? And there was a murder-suicide in Lebanon just last week,” I told her. “How far is that from you?”
My mom sighed. “Emm. Be serious.”
“I am serious. Mom, I’m thirty-one years old. It was time for me to do this.”
She sighed. “I guess you’re right. You can’t be my baby forever.”
“I haven’t been your baby for a really long time.”
“I’d just feel better if you weren’t alone. It was better when you and Tony—”
“Mom,” I said tightly. “Tony and I broke up for a long list of very good reasons, okay? Please stop bringing him up. You didn’t even like him that much.”
“Only because I didn’t think he could take good enough care of you.”
She’d been right about that, anyway. Not that I’d needed as much taking care of as she thought. But I didn’t want to talk about my ex-boyfriend with her. Not now, not ever.
“How’s Dad?” I asked instead, so she could talk about the other person in her life she worried about more than she had to.
“Oh, you know your dad. I keep telling him to get himself to the doctor and get checked out, but he just won’t do it. He’s fifty-nine now, you know.”
“You act like that’s ancient.”
“It’s not young,” my mom said.
I laughed and cradled the phone to my shoulder as I opened one of the large boxes I’d put in one of the unused bedrooms. I was unpacking books. I wanted to make this room my library and had set up and dusted off all my bookcases. Now I just needed to fill them. It was a task I knew I’d be glad I’d done after I finished but had managed to put off for months.
“What are you doing?” my mom said.
“Unpacking books.”
“Oh, be careful, Emm, you know that can kick up dust!” “I don’t have asthma, Mom.” I pulled off the layer of newspaper I’d laid on top of the books. I’d packed them not in the order I’d arrange them on the shelves, but just so they’d fit best in the box. This one looked like it was mostly full of coffee table books I’d picked up at thrift stores or received as gifts. Books I always meant to read and yet never did.
“No. But you know you have to be careful.”
“Mom, c’mon. Enough.” Now I was starting to get irritated.
My mom had always been overprotective. When I was six years old, I fell off a jungle gym at the school playground. Those were the days before schools used recycled tires as mulch, or any kind of soft material. Other kids broke arms or legs. I broke my head.
I was in a coma for almost a week, suffering a brain edema, or swelling, that doctors hadn’t been able to relieve by standard methods. My parents had been on the verge of agreeing to an experimental brain surgery when I’d opened my eyes, sat up and asked for ice cream.
The lack of coordination or loss of limb use the doctors had predicted never happened. Nor did memory loss or any discernible brain damage. If anything, I had trouble forgetting, not remembering. I’d suffered no long-term affects—at least, not physical ones. On the other hand, I’d learned to get used to the fugues.
She and my dad had thought they’d almost lost me, and nothing I could ever have told her about that time in the darkness could persuade her I hadn’t even come close to leaving. I’d tried once or twice, when I was younger, to reassure her. To get her to let go, even just a little. She refused to listen. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I had no idea of how it felt to love a child, much less fear you’d lost one.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The good thing was, my mom knew when she was getting out of control. She’d done her best to make sure I didn’t grow up a stilted, fearful child, even if it meant biting her nails to nubs and going gray before she turned forty. She’d allowed me to do what I needed to for my independence, even if she did hate every second of it.
“You could come up once in a while, you know. I’m really not that far. We could have lunch or something. Just you and me, a girls’ day.”
“Oh, sure. We could do that.” She sounded a little brighter from the invitation.
I didn’t think she’d actually take me up on it. My mom didn’t like to drive long distances by herself. If she did come, she’d bring my dad along. Not that I didn’t love my dad, or want to see him. In many ways, he was easier to get along with than my mom, because no matter what anxiety he had, he kept it to himself. But it wouldn’t be a girls’ day out with him along, and he tended to get cranky about staying too long when he wanted to be home in his recliner watching sports. I didn’t even have cable yet.
“I saw him a couple days ago, Emm.”
I paused with a large book on cathedrals in one hand. I’d have to adjust the shelves in one of the bookcases if I wanted to stand this book upright. It was meant for a coffee table, for display. I flipped through the pages, considering if I should just sell on Craigslist. “Who?”
“Tony,” my mom said impatiently.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom!”
“He looked good. He asked about you.”
“I’m sure he did,” I said wryly.
“I got the feeling he was wondering if you’d … met someone.”
I paused in unpacking, with another heavy book in my hands, this time one called Cinema Americana. Another yard-sale find. I was a sucker for a bargain, books my downfall. Even ones about subjects I had no interest in. I guess I always had the notion I’d tear out the illustrations and put them in frames to hang on the wall. Proof I really did have no appreciation for art.
“Why would he even think that?”
“I don’t know, Emm.” A pause. “Have you?”
I was about to say no, but a flash of striped scarf and a black coat filled my mind. The floor tilted a little under me. I gripped the phone tighter. The book was suddenly too heavy in my sweating hand; I dropped it.
“Emm?”
“Fine, Mom. Just dropped a book.”
No swirling colors, no citrus scent biting at my nostrils. My stomach churned a little, but that could’ve been the leftover Italian food I’d had earlier. It had been in the fridge a little too long.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing. For you to meet someone. I mean, I think you should.”
“Yeah, I’ll make sure every guy I meet knows my mom thinks I shouldn’t be single. That’s a surefire way to get a date.”
“Sarcasm isn’t pretty, Emmaline.”
I laughed. “Mom, I have to go, okay? I want to finish unpacking these boxes and do some laundry before I go to my friend Jen’s house tonight.”
“Oh? You have a friend.”
I loved my mother. Really, I did. But sometimes I wanted to strangle her.
“Yes, Mother. I have an honest-to-goodness friend.”
She laughed that time, sounding better than she had when the conversation started. That was something, anyway. “Good. I’m glad you’re spending time with a friend instead of sitting home. I just … I worry about you, honey. That’s all.”
“I know you do. And I know you always will.”
We said our goodbyes, exchanged I-love-yous. I had friends who never told their parents they loved them, who’d never said the words after elementary school. It was something I was glad I’d never grown out of and that my mother insisted upon. Even if I knew it was because she was afraid not saying it would somehow mean she’d have lost her chance to tell me one more time, I liked it.
The book I’d dropped had opened to someplace in the middle, cracking the binding in a way that made me sigh unhappily. I bent to pick it up and stopped. It had opened to chapter called “Seventies Art Films,” on a full-page, glossy black-and-white photo of an unbelievably gorgeous face staring directly at the camera.
Johnny Dellasandro.

Chapter 02
“Which do you want to watch first? What are you in the mood for?” Jen pulled open the door on what proved to be a cabinet full of DVDs. She ran a fingertip along the plastic cases with a ticka-ticka-tick and stopped at one, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you want to ease into it or plunge right in?”
I’d brought along the Cinema Americana book to show her and it lay open on the coffee table in front me, opened to the page of Johnny’s gorgeous face. “What’s this picture from?”
Jen looked. “Train of the Damned.”
I looked at it, too. “That picture is from a horror movie?” “Yeah. Not my favorite of his. It’s not very scary,” she added. “But he does get naked in it.” Both my brows raised. “Really?”
“Yeah. Not quite full frontal,” she said with a grin as she bent and plucked a movie from the shelf. “But, man, those seventies foreign movies were pretty graphic sometimes. It has a lot of blood and gore in it—will that bother you?”
I’d spent so much time in hospitals and emergency rooms that nothing much bothered me. “Nah.”
“Train of the Damned, it is.” Jen pulled the DVD from its case and slipped it into the player, then tuned the television to the right channel and grabbed the remote before taking a place beside me on the couch. “The quality’s not so good, sorry. I found this one in the bargain bin at a dollar store.”
“You’re a super Dellasandro fan, huh?” I shifted to keep the bowl of popcorn from spilling and leaned to take another look at the picture.
I hadn’t told Jen about letting the door slam in Johnny’s face, or how I’d already spent an hour staring at this photo, memorizing every line and curve, dip and hollow. His hair in the picture was pulled back into a thick tail at the base of his neck, longer than it was now. He looked younger in the picture, of course, since it had been taken something like thirty years ago. But not much younger.
“He’s aged well.” Jen peered over my shoulder as the first wobbly sounds of music filtered from the TV’s speakers. “He’s a little heavier, has a few more lines around his eyes. But mostly, he still looks that good. And you should see him in the summer, when he’s not covered up with that long coat.”
I sat back against the couch and pulled my feet up beneath me. “Haven’t you ever talked to him?”
“Oh, girl, hell, no. I’m too afraid.”
I laughed. “Afraid of what?”
Jen used the remote to turn up the sound. So far, the only thing on the TV screen had been a title dripping blood and a shot of a train chugging along a dark track winding through tall and jagged mountains. “I’d word-vomit all over him.”
“Word … ew.”
She laughed and put down the remote to grab a handful of popcorn. “Seriously. I met Shane Easton once, you know him? Lead singer for the Lipstick Guerrillas?”
“Um, no.”
“They were playing at IndiePalooza one year down in Hershey, and my friend had scored backstage passes. Ten or fifteen bands, something like that. Hot as all hell. We’d been drinking beer because cups were a dollar fifty and the water was four bucks a bottle. Let’s just say I was a little drunk.” “And? What did you say?”
“I might’ve told him I wanted to ride him like a roller coaster. Or something like that.” “Oh, wow.”
“Yeah, I know, right?” She sighed dramatically and popped the top on a can of diet cola. “Not my most shining moment.”
“It could’ve been worse, I’m sure.”
“What would be worse is if instead of never having to see him again I bumped into him all the time at the coffee shop and the grocery store,” Jen said. “Which is why I’m keeping my mouth shut around Johnny Dellasandro.”
The train—I assumed it was of the damned—let out a shrill whistle and the movie cut to an interior scene of people dressed in the height of late-seventies fashion. A woman in a beige pantsuit and huge hair, gigantic glasses covering half her face, waved a hand heavy with rings at the waiter pouring her a glass of wine. The train shuddered, he spilled it. It was Johnny.
“Watch what you’re doing, you damned fool!” The woman spoke in a thick accent. Maybe Italian? I couldn’t be sure. “You spilled on my favorite blouse!”
“Sorry, ma’am.” His voice was dark and thick and rich … and totally out of place in the movie with that New York accent.
I giggled. Jen shot me a look. “It gets better when he takes her into the sleeping car and bangs her.”
We both giggled then, and ate popcorn and drank cola, and made fun of the movie. As far as I could tell, the train became damned when it entered a tunnel that had somehow become connected to a portal to hell. There was no explanation for why this happened, at least none that I could figure out, but since at odd times the movie shifted into Italian with badly translated English subtitles—with Johnny’s voice being oddly dubbed in a much higher, swishier voice—I might easily have missed something important.
It didn’t matter, really. It was entertaining, with lots of blood and gore as Jen had promised. Lots of eye candy, too. Johnny ended up stripping out of his waiter’s uniform to battle foam-and-latex demons. Shirtless and covered in blood, his hair slicked back from his face, he was still breathtaking.
“I said, ‘Get the hell back to hell!’”
It was a classic line, delivered in Johnny’s thick accent and accompanied by the blast of his shotgun exploding the demons into tiny, dripping bits. And followed, incongruously, by a long, explicit love scene between him and the woman in the pantsuit, set to bouncy porn music and ending with the woman somehow getting pregnant with a demon baby that tore up her insides and tried to attack its father.
“So … Johnny was … the devil?”
Jen laughed and scraped the bottom of the popcorn bowl. “I think so! Or the son of the devil, something like that.”
The credits rolled. I finished my drink. “Wow. That was something.”
“Yeah, bad. But the sex scene. Hot, right?”
It had been. Even with the porny music and stupid special effects, even with the discreetly placed cushions that blocked even a glimpse of Johnny’s cock but left the woman’s hairy bush in full view. He’d kissed her like she was delicious.
“Good acting,” I said offhandedly.
Jen snorted and got up to take the DVD out of the player. “I don’t think it’s acting. I mean, I think he’s a much better artist than he ever was an actor. And the way he kisses … he fucks someone in just about every movie he’s in. I don’t think there’s much acting going on. It’s all pure Johnny.”
“When did he make all these movies, anyway?” I got up to stretch. The movie had been short, only a little over an hour, but watching it had felt like much longer.
“Dunno.” Jen shrugged. “He made a bunch in the seventies, then stopped for a while. Fell off the face of the earth. Then came back with the art and, so far as I know, only acted in one or two things after that. Mostly guest spots on TV shows. He was on an episode of Family Ties, if you can believe that.”
“Did he fuck someone?”
“He did!” Jen laughed. “But I don’t think they showed his cock. For that you have to watch … this.”
She pulled out a DVD with a plain red-and-black cover, one word on the front. Garbage. She was already putting it in the player as she talked.
“Okay. I’m not going to tell you anything about this movie in advance. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“That sounds scarier than Train of the Damned!”
She shook her head. “No. Just watch. You’ll see.”
So we watched.
Garbage had even less of a plot than Train of the Damned. From what I could tell, it was about a group of misfits living in an apartment complex a lot like the one on the TV show Melrose Place. The kind seen in so many movies shot in California—a few buildings painted teal or green surrounding a pool. In this movie, the complex was called the Cove. Run by an office manager who I was pretty sure was a three-hundred-pound man in drag, the Cove’s other residents included the slutty heroin addict Sheila, mentally disturbed porcelain figurine collector Henry, unwed mother Becky and a bunch of other random characters who didn’t seem to have names but came and went in the background no matter what else was going on.
And, of course, Johnny.
He played … Johnny. Male prostitute. The tattoo on his arm had been crudely drawn, probably inked with a homemade tool: Johnny.
“I wonder if his name’s Johnny in every movie?” I said, and was promptly shushed.
It wasn’t a good movie, if I were going to judge by the acting or writing. In fact, I couldn’t be sure there was any writing at all. It seemed mostly ad-libbed, which meant there wasn’t much acting, either. It looked more like a group of friends had gotten together one Saturday afternoon with a camera and a bunch of weed and decided to make a movie.
“I think that’s basically what happened,” Jen said when I told her my theory. “But fuck me, look at that epic ass.”
Johnny was naked for most of the movie. Something happened with a trick gone wrong, a drug overdose, a miscarriage. A body in the pool and then put into the garbage. I couldn’t have told you what happened if you’d held me down and threatened me with a live tarantula.
All I could see was Johnny Dellasandro. His ass. His abs. His pecs. His delicious nipples. He was built like an Adonis, muscular and lean … and golden. God. He was naked and sun-burnished, with just enough hair to make him manly and not so much it looked like you’d have to get a Weedwacker to get at his cock.
And he really did fuck everyone in the movie.
“Look at that,” Jen murmured. “I swear he’s really fucking her.”
I tilted my head to get a better angle. “I think … wow. That’s … Is he hard? Omigod. He’s got a hard-on! Look at that!”
“I know, right?” Jen squealed, clutching at me.
I hadn’t been this excited about an erection since my first boy-girl party in eighth grade, when I got to go in the closet for Seven Minutes in Heaven with Kent Zimmerman. My stomach dropped the way it does just before that first hill on a roller coaster. Heat stole up my chest and throat, into my cheeks.
“Wow,” I said. “That is … just whoa.”
“Girl. I know. Can you believe it? And just wait … there! Yesssss,” Jen said, falling back onto the cushions. “Full frontal.”
Just briefly, but there it was. Johnny’s cock in all its glory. He was talking as he walked and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to try and listen to what he was saying or just accept my utter, complete perviness and stare at his dick. The penis won out.
“That is some peen,” I said, my voice filled with admiration.
“You know it.” Jen sighed happily. “That man is fucking beautiful.”
I tore my gaze from the TV to look at her. “I can’t believe you’re so into him and you’ve never talked to him. Word vomit or not. It has to be worth a try.”
Jen shook her head. Johnny wasn’t on-screen at the moment, so we weren’t missing anything important. She gestured toward it.
“What would I say? ‘Hi, Johnny, I’m Jen, and by the way, I love your cock so much I put it on my Christmas list'?” I laughed. “What, you think he’d mind?” She gave me a look.
“Is he married?” I asked the more practical question.
“No. I don’t think so. Honestly, aside from the movies I don’t really know all that much about him, personally.” Jen made a frowny face.
I laughed again, harder this time. “Some stalker you are.”
“I’m not—” she hit me with a pillow “—a stalker. I just appreciate a nice body, is that so wrong? And I do like his art a lot. I bought one of his pieces,” she added, like she was sharing a secret.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “Yeah. His gallery is really cool. Lots of neat little pieces, nothing too expensive. And in the back room he has different collections. A couple years ago he was showing his stuff. He doesn’t always. I mean, he usually has his stuff included among all the other pieces, and he never displays it like it’s a big deal, you know?”
I’d never been in an art gallery, so I had no clue, but I nodded, anyway. “Can I see it?”
“Sure. I, um, have it in the bedroom.”
I laughed yet again. “Why? Is it dirty?”
I hadn’t known Jen all that long, just for the few months since I’d moved to Second Street. I had not, as yet, seen her look embarrassed about anything, or shy. She was pretty up front with everything, which was why I adored her. So when she couldn’t meet my eyes and gave that little, shameful giggle, I almost told her I didn’t need to see what had made her feel like she couldn’t share it with me.
“No, it’s not dirty,” she said.
“Okay.” I got up and followed her down the short hallway to her bedroom.
Jen’s apartment had been decorated in IKEA chic. Lots of spare, modern pieces that all matched and maximized the small space. Her bedroom was the same, painted white with matching teal and lime-green accents on the bed and curtains. Her apartment was in an old building, with walls that weren’t always quite straight. One, in fact, was curved, with big-paned windows reaching from floor to ceiling and overlooking the street. On one wall she’d hung several of her own paintings. On the opposite wall she’d hung several framed posters of prints even I, the art idiot, recognized—Starry Night, The Scream.
In the center of those was a black-and-white photograph, maybe an eight-by-ten, in a thin red frame. The artist had painted over the photo with thick, three-dimensional strokes, highlighting the lines of the building I recognized as the John Harris Mansion from down on Front Street. I’d spent time looking at a lot of what people had determined art and wondered why on earth they thought so, but I didn’t have to spend a second pondering it about this picture.
“Wow.”
“I know, right?” Jen walked to the wall to stand in front of it. “Pretty cool, huh? I mean, you look at it, and it’s not like it’s anything special. But there’s just something about it… .”
“Yeah.” There definitely was. “And it’s not even dirty.”
She laughed. “No. I just like having it in here where I can look at it first thing in the morning. Does that sound lame? Oh, God, that sounds totally lame.”
“No, it doesn’t. Is this the only piece you have by him?”
“Yeah. Original art’s expensive, even though he’d priced this pretty reasonably.”
I had no idea how much pretty reasonable was and it seemed a little nosy to ask. “It’s nice, Jen. He’s really good.”
“He is. So you see … that’s another reason why I don’t talk to him.”
I looked at her with a smile. “Why? Because you like his art and not just his ass?”
Jen snickered. “Well, yeah.”
“I don’t get it. You think he’s superhot, you’re a big fan … why not just say something?”
“Because I guess I’d rather have him take a look at something I’ve done and think it’s good without me gushing all over him. I’d like him to respect me as an artist, and that’s not going to happen.”
I walked to the wall featuring her paintings. “Why not? You’re good, too.”
“And you don’t know anything about art, remember?” She said it without malice, following me to look at the pictures. “They’ll never hang in a museum. I don’t think anyone will ever make a Wikipedia entry about me.”
“You never know,” I told her. “Do you think Johnny Dellasandro knew when he was making those movies that one day he’d be famous for showing off his ass?”
“It’s a pretty epic ass.”
“Let’s go watch another movie,” I said.
By two in the morning we’d only made it through one more because we’d paused and rewound so many scenes so many times.
“Why didn’t you start with this one?” I demanded after the third time we’d watched Johnny slide down a naked woman’s body with his mouth.
Jen shook the remote at me. “Girl, you have to build up to this shit. You can’t just go in full force on this stuff, you might give yourself an aneurysm.”
I laughed, though the fact I probably did have an aneurysm that could kill me at any time, no matter what the doctors said, made the joke a little less funny. “Play it again.”
She reversed the DVD half a minute and played it again. Johnny called the woman a dirty whore, and in his accent it came out sounding like “duty hooah.” It should’ve made me laugh.
“So fucking wrong,” I said, rapt as Johnny-on-the-screen moved his mouth down her naked body again, over her thigh, then moved up to grab a handful of her hair and turn her around. “I should not like that, right?”
“Girl, just give in to it,” Jen said dreamily.
In the movie, he called her a hooah again. Told her she was dirty, filthy. That she deserved to be fucked like that, didn’t she? That she liked it, being fucked that way, by him.
“God,” I muttered, squirming a little. “That’s …”
“Hot, right?” Jen sighed. “Even with the funky seventies sideburns.”
“Definitely.”
We made it through to the end of the movie and I had no idea what the plot had been, just that Johnny had been naked for over half of it and he’d had sex with most of the other characters, men and women. Oh, and that I was in desperate, urgent need of some “alone time.”
“Another?” Jen was already getting up, but I stood, too.
“I need to get home. It’s really late. And if we sleep in too late tomorrow,” I added, “we won’t make it to the coffee shop. We might miss him.”
“Oh, Emm.” Jen blinked, looking solemn. “I’ve infected you, haven’t I?”
“If this is a disease,” I told her, “I don’t want to find a cure.”
Jen lived close enough to me that walking was no problem, at least during the day or in good weather. But in the middle of an oddly frigid Pennsylvania winter and in a neighborhood that was a little dicey, I’d driven the couple blocks. My normal spot was taken when I got home, probably by the girlfriend of the guy who lived across the street. Grumbling, eyes heavy, I drove down to the next block to take someone else’s spot and hoped I didn’t come out to find a nasty note on my windshield. Since there was very little off-street parking, the jockeying for spots could get brutal.
It was something like serendipity, however, because when I got out of my car I realized I’d parked almost directly in front of Johnny Dellasandro’s house. There was a light on upstairs, the third floor. Most of the houses on this street had the same floorplan, so unless he’d done some major reconstruction inside, that light was shining from a bedroom. In my house, someday, I intended it to be the master bedroom with an attached bath. He’d done enough work to his place that I suspected that’s what his was.
Johnny Dellasandro in his bedroom. I wondered if he slept naked. I wasn’t quite sure I was up to Jen’s standard of surfing down the street on a wave of my own come, but it was close there for a second. I definitely had a clit pulse. I fantasized happily all the way down the block and into my own house.
There’s never been any rhyme or reason behind why the fugues come. The things that set off seizures or migraines or bouts of narcolepsy in other people are only haphazard triggers for me. This is good because it means I don’t have to avoid intense emotion, or chocolate, or any of a dozen other common triggers. It’s bad, of course, because whatever causes the fugues hits me randomly and without warning, and even if I wanted to avoid whatever caused it, I couldn’t.
I hadn’t had a fugue in nearly two years, and now the scent of oranges told me I was going to have a third in less than twenty-four hours.
In the bathroom. Brushing teeth. Staring at my reflection in the mirror but seeing Johnny’s face as he made love to a woman with hair the color of mine. My eyes. My breasts under his hands, my clit beneath his tongue.
Staring at the mirror and then, like Alice … through …
“Watch what you’re doing! You spilled my coffee.” I say this in a thick accent, not my own voice, but it doesn’t feel put on. It feels right on my tongue and teeth and lips. It feels sexy.
“Sorry, ma’am.” The waiter dabs at my thighs with a white towel. His fingers brush too close to my belly, linger too long. “Lemme get that cleaned up for you.”
“I think you need to compensate me.” I say this with a straight face and flip my thick, dark hair over my shoulder.
“Ma’am?” He’s not stupid, this young man in the white waiter’s coat.
The train rocks beneath us.
“Come to my cabin later tonight and make sure you’re prepared to adequately compensate me for the ruin of my slacks.”
His only answer is a smile. I finish my meal with my own smile, making it difficult to enjoy the food. I’m not hungry any longer, anyway. Not for dinner.
In my cabin I wait for the knock at the door, and when I open it, there he is. Not in his waiter’s uniform now, but a pair of dark trousers and a yellowed white poet’s shirt. Peasant wear, but I don’t care. Peasants make great lovers.
“Just look,” I say, pointing to the dark stain on my white slacks. I’ve deliberately done nothing to clean them. “See what you did, you clumsy man?”
“I can pay for them, ma’am… .”
“That won’t do at all. These pants are pure silk, made by my personal designer. They’re irreplaceable.”
“Then what?” He’s properly challenging.
He has long, thick, dark blond hair clubbed into a tail at the back of his neck. When I loosen it from the tie, it falls over my fingers and hands. It’s rougher than silk.
“Clean them.”
With a sullen look he pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and, with a flourish, pushes me a few steps until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed, which has been turned down for the night. He swipes at the stain on my pants without looking away from my eyes. I shudder at his touch.
“No,” I say, low and throaty. “Use your mouth.”
He goes to his knees so slowly it’s like watching butter melt. He’s smiling, but his eyes are hard. He closes them just before he puts his mouth to the stain.
I can feel the heat of his breath through the thin cloth, and I shudder again. My knees want to buckle, but I put my hand on the wall to keep myself standing. I can feel the train’s vibration in my fingers and palm.
His hands move up to grab my ass and hold me still. He looks up at me, his face inches from my crotch. I wonder if he can smell me.
“That good enough?” he says.
“No,” I tell him. “Not nearly good enough.”
His fingers grip and pull. Silk shreds. I’m suddenly bare from the waist down, my slacks torn and dangling in his fists. I have only a moment to react before his mouth is on me again. My bare flesh this time. My pussy. He sucks at my clit, nuzzling, and I cry out. He slaps my ass lightly, and I don’t know if it’s to keep me still or make me cry out louder. Then I’m on my back and he’s over me, his cock pressing my lips.
“Take it,” he says. Brutish and cruel. My cunt throbs and I turn my face. He grabs my hair, holds me still. Then, gently, softly, he rubs his cock over my pressed-closed lips. “Take it.” And I do.
All of it. Thick and hot, hard. Down the back of my throat. I suck him in, greedy for it. I suck and lick and stroke, and he fucks my mouth like it’s my cunt, and I swear I get as much pleasure from it.
He’s not even touching my clit and I feel the buildup there of pleasure. Like electricity. Like fire. I’m pumping my hips and moaning around his cock. My hair is in my face and he strokes it back, then grips a handful of it to set a slower pace.
I want him to touch me but I don’t need him to touch me. I’m going to come in a minute or two. I can feel it. And then he’s pulling away, stealing that delicious cock from me, and I do more than moan, I cry out.
“Lookit you,” he says in a voice full of triumph and yet tender, too. “Lookit you. Begging for it. Such a whore.”
I love the way he says it, like it has two syllables. Suddenly, I don’t know why we’re on a train, why he’s a waiter and I’m some sort of … countess? Or duchess? Some sort of rich bitch with too much money and an itch. Everything that made sense when this started is now a jumble.
All I know for sure is that I don’t want this to end. His hand comes down to caress my cheek. His thumb slips between my lips and I suck it gently before biting. He laughs, pulls me up, settles me onto his cock like I weigh nothing. Now there’s nothing between us and he’s inside me, all the way.
The train rocks us. He rocks us. His hands, strong hands, grip my ass and move me. His mouth takes mine. We kiss for the first time, and I want to drown in the taste of him. His tongue strokes mine. Our teeth bump. He laughs again.
“You like that?”
“I like that,” I tell him. I don’t have an Italian accent anymore.
When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my face. I don’t even see our reflection, fucking so prettily on this sleeping-car bed. The mirror is more like a window, only it doesn’t look out to the passing scenery. Instead of mountains, I see walls. I see a woman.
The woman is me.
She is there, I am here; we’re the same and I look into the eyes of my lover, this waiter whose name is …
“Johnny.”
I came out of the fugue with his name on my lips and the smell of oranges so thick and cloying in my nose and mouth I leaned over the sink and gulped water straight from the tap. I stood, heart pounding, eyes wild, face dripping. I looked at the mirror, but all I saw was myself.

Chapter 03
Hallucinations weren’t new. When I was a little girl, in the first few years after the accident, I’d had a hard time differentiating between the fugue world and the real world. I could tell when I was dreaming, but not when I was having a fugue.
It didn’t help that no matter what doctors my parents took me to, none of them could figure it out, either. The brain is still a vastly underexplored landscape. I wasn’t having seizures, though in the worst fugues I did sometimes lose motor control along with consciousness. And I didn’t have pain, except for the rare few times when I fell during one of the blackouts and hurt myself.
As I got older, I learned to tell when a fugue was coming on. I never learned to notice inside of one if I was hallucinating or not, though I did learn to tell what had been hallucination once I came out of it. And I always came out of it, even if I didn’t always hallucinate. Sometimes I just stayed blank, unblinking, unmoving, for a few seconds while the world passed around me and whoever I was talking to thought my mind had wandered.
Actually, that was how I felt about it. That my mind wandered, while my body stayed behind. I’d learned to catch up quickly in conversations with people who didn’t know me well enough to realize I’d gone blank for a few minutes. I’d adapted.
Most of the time, the hallucinations were boldly colored, often loud. Often a continuation of what I’d been doing as the fugue hit, just slightly off. I could spend what felt like hours inside the fugue and come out of it within a minute, or spend a much longer time dark and have no more than a few seconds’ worth in the dream state.
I’d never, until this early morning, had such a vivid, intense hallucination of such a sexual nature.
I was taking a little time to recover. Wallowing in my bed on a Sunday wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the fact I’d grabbed my laptop and brought it under the covers with me was. Normally I kept my bed a sanctuary, a place for sleep, not work, and though I loved my laptop like it was the conjoined twin I carried in a basket after our cruel separation, I preferred using it at my desk or on the couch. Now, though, I used the track pad to scroll through another list of search results. Johnny Dellasandro, of course. I had the fever. Bad. He had a current website for his gallery. The only mention of his acting past were the three words, “independent film star” in his bio along with a rather extensive listing of his more recent professional accomplishments. There were store hours, a list of upcoming events. A photo of Johnny, smiling into the camera and looking for all the world like he wanted to fuck whoever was on the other side of the lens … thud. Be still my little horny heart.
There were other pictures of him, too, most of the handshake variety. Johnny with the mayor, with a local radio DJ, with a president of some museum. And then, a little more surprisingly, of Johnny with celebrities. Row after row of clickable thumbnails enlarged into shots of him next to some of the biggest movie stars of the sixties and seventies. Rock stars. Poets, novelists. A bunch of familiar faces next to his. In most of them, they were both looking at the camera, but there were a few more candid shots, and in those, whoever he was with invariably looked at him like they wanted to eat him. Or be fucked by him. I couldn’t blame them.
Maybe he wasn’t so ashamed of his dingle-dallying past, after all. More searching turned up a half dozen interviews done on blogs that didn’t appear to have very many readers. Not that I was surprised. Any monkey with a computer can make a blog, and even though Johnny might’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety, it was still within a fairly small realm. He didn’t sound like he regretted anything he’d ever done, at least not in the interviews he’d done in the past few years, and while those had focused more on his current work, inevitably a few questions would slip in about his early movie-making days.
“I don’t regret any of it,” Johnny told me from a video clip taken at some awards show I’d never heard of.
The film was shaky, the sound bad, and the people walking past in the background looked a little scary. Whoever was filming also asked the questions, their voice androgynous and too loud in the microphone. Johnny didn’t seem terribly interested in being interviewed, though he did answer a few more questions.
I settled back onto my pillows, laptop on my knees. Wikipedia did indeed have an entry on him, complete with links to dozens of articles in magazine and newspaper archives. Reviews of the films and entire websites devoted to discussing them. Links to places his art had hung, or was hanging. There was literally a day’s worth of research collected in this one webpage alone. If anyone Googled me—and I did myself a few times a month just to see what was out there—the only thing they’d find would be a list of accomplishments belonging to some other woman with my name. The question was not why there was so much information available about him, but how I’d lived for more than thirty years without being aware he existed.
I shut down the computer and set it aside, then lay back on the pillows to think about this. I was deep in crush, the worst I’d had since sixth grade when I discovered boys for the first time. Worse than the secret love affair I’d had with John Cusack inside my head since the first time I saw Say Anything. My feelings for Johnny were a combination of both—he was someone I’d seen in movies, therefore, not “real,” yet he lived down the street. He drank coffee and wore striped scarves. He was accessible.
“Snap out of it, Emm,” I scolded myself, and thought about getting out of my warm bed and shivering my way to the shower. I couldn’t quite make myself.
I didn’t want to think about the three fugues I’d had the day before, but thinking of the hallucination I’d had featuring Johnny in all his bare-assed glory, I had to think about the fugues, too. Two minis and one slightly larger. None had lasted long, but it was the frequency that worried me.
I was thirty-one years old and had never lived on my own before these past few months. I’d never worked farther away from a job than I could walk, because I was either not legally allowed, or was too afraid, to drive long distances. I’d spent my life dealing with the repercussions of those few, fleeting moments on the playground, but now I’d finally had a taste of the independence all my friends had been granted.
I was terrified of losing it.
I knew I should call my family doctor, Dr. Gordon, and tell her what had happened. She’d known me since childhood. I’d trusted her with everything—my questions about my first period, my first forays into birth control. But I couldn’t trust her with this. She’d be obligated to report the possibility of a seizure, and what then? I’d be back to no-driving status, and I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t.
I did, however, call my mom. Even though I’d only spoken to her the day before, and even though I’d been so happy to move out of her house, to stop needing her so much, she was still the first person I turned to. The phone rang and rang at my parents’ house, until finally the voice mail kicked in. I didn’t leave a message. My mom would panic if I did, and she’d probably just check the caller ID, anyway, note I called and call me back. I wondered where she was, though, before noon on a Sunday. She’d barely ever left the house on Sundays. I liked to sleep in. My mom liked to bake and garden and watch old movies on TV while my dad puttered in the garage.
I’d spent so many hours dreaming of days like this—waking in my own bed, my own house. Nobody around me. Just me, with no place to go and nobody to answer to. Nothing to do but my own laundry, using my own detergent, folding it or leaving it piled in the basket if that’s what I wanted to do. I’d dreamed of being an adult, living by myself, and now that I had it, I was suddenly, unbearably lonely.
The Morningstar Mocha would help with that. There I was part of a community. I had friends. I hadn’t made specific plans to meet Jen there, but I knew a quick text message would tell me if she were going to show or not. And if she didn’t, I could take my laptop and settle in with the bottomless cup of coffee or a pot of tea and a muffin. I could play around on Connex, or instant message friends who were also online.
Oh. And I could sorta-kinda-maybe-just-a-little-bit stalk Johnny Dellasandro.
A quick text to Jen settled the plans. We’d meet in half an hour, just enough time for me to shower and dress and walk to the coffee shop, including the time it was going to take me to shave my legs, pluck my brows and figure out what I was going to wear. Because yes, it was important.
“Hey, girl, hey!” Jen’s greeting made me laugh as she waved across the crowded Mocha. “I saved you a spot. What took you so long? Couldn’t find a place to park?”
“Oh, no, I walked.” My teeth were still chattering. January in Harrisburg isn’t quite the Arctic Circle, but it was cold enough to freeze a polar bear’s balls.
“What? Why? Oh, yeah. Snowplow?”
“I love that I can follow that conversation.” As if parking wasn’t enough of a hassle on my street, when the snowplow came through and covered the cars and people dug them out, leaving behind their empty spots, it could get ugly when someone took one. That wasn’t why I’d walked, though. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the back of my chair as I tried to casually scan the room for sight of the delicious, delectable Dellasandro. “But no. I just felt like walking.”
“I’ve heard of taking a cold shower, but that’s a little overboard.”
I blew into my hands to warm them and slipped into my chair. “I need to work off some of this ass if I’m going to keep eating muffins for breakfast.”
“Girl.” Jen sighed. “I hear you.”
We commiserated in silence for a moment about the collective size of our butts, though frankly I thought Jen had a supercute figure and had nothing to worry about, and I knew she thought the same of me.
“Love the top,” she said after the moment had passed. Then she laughed and lowered her voice. “I bet he’d like it, too.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you even pretend you don’t know who I mean!”
I looked down at the shirt, a simple sweater of soft knit that buttoned all the way to a pretty scoop neck. “I like the way it makes my collarbones look. And it’s not all cleavagy, like I’m trying too hard.”
“No, not at all,” Jen agreed. “And that color is awesome on you.”
I beamed. “I love your earrings.”
Jen fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Are we finished being gay for each other? Because if not, I was going to say I think your necklace is pretty.”
“This?” I’d forgotten what, exactly, I was wearing on my throat. I wasn’t usually the sort to switch out jewelry. My job at the credit union meant I had to dress nicely for work every day, with a strict dress code, and I’d gotten tired of trying to coordinate every day. As I tugged the pendant so I could see it, the chain broke and slithered into my fingers. “Oops!”
“Oh, shit.” Jen grabbed at the pendant, catching it before it could fall onto the table. She handed it to me.
“Damn.” I studied it. Nothing special, really, just a small, swirled design. I’d picked it up on the bargain table at my favorite thrift store. I cupped it now, the metal curiously warm in my palm. “Ah, well.”
“Can you get it fixed?”
“Not worth it. I don’t even think it’s real gold.”
“Too bad,” Jen said brightly. “Otherwise, you could take it to one of those places that buys gold for cash! I got invited to some home party thing my mom’s neighbor’s having. It says they’ll take gold fillings … teeth attached!”
“Gross!” I put the necklace into my coat pocket.
Jen laughed and seemed about to say something else, but her chuckle caught and broke. She looked over my shoulder, eyes wide. I knew better than to turn around.
I didn’t have to. I knew it was him. I could feel him. I could smell him.
Oranges.
He eased past us. The hem of his long black coat brushed my arm, and I turned into a fifteen-year-old girl. The only reason I didn’t giggle out loud was because my throat had gone so dry I couldn’t make a peep. Jen didn’t say a word, either, just stared at me with raised brows until Johnny’d passed.
“Are you okay?” she whispered, leaning close. “You look like you’re going to pass out. You’re all pale!”
I didn’t feel like I was going to. I didn’t feel pale. I felt redhot and blushing. I swallowed the cotton on my tongue and shook my head, not daring to look over her shoulder to watch him place his order at the counter. “No. I’m okay.”
“You sure?” Jen put her hand over mine to squeeze. “Really, Emm, you look …”
Just then, he turned around and looked at me. I mean, really looked. Not a quick glance, eyes sliding past me like I didn’t exist. Not a double take, either, like the sight of me had frightened him. Johnny Dellasandro looked at me, and I was already half out of my chair before I realized I couldn’t just get up and go to him.
Jen glanced over her shoulder, but he’d already turned back to the counter to take the plate with the muffin on it from the counter girl. He wasn’t looking at me any longer, and I didn’t know how to tell her he had been. If he had been—it was easy in those few seconds to convince myself I’d imagined it.
“Emm?”
“He is so fucking beautiful.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded hoarse and harsh and full of longing.
“Yeah.” Jen’s brow furrowed and she glanced at him again.
He’d moved to a table toward the back and looked up at the sound of the bell over the door. Jen and I both looked, too. A woman about my age, maybe a year or two older, moved directly toward the back of the room without stopping even at the counter. From my place at the table it was easy to see her slide into the chair across from Johnny and to watch her lean forward so he could kiss her in greeting. My stomach dropped all the way down to the toes of the boots I’d spent twenty minutes agonizing over.
“Well, fuck,” I said miserably.
Jen looked back at me. “I don’t recognize her.”
“No. Me, neither.”
“She’s not a regular,” Jen continued, affronted. “Jesus, at least he could go with a regular!”
I didn’t feel like laughing but I couldn’t help it—her logic was so very flawed. “Why don’t you go over there and challenge her to a dance-off or something.”
Jen shook her head and looked at me seriously. “I don’t think so.”
I opened my mouth to protest that I was kidding, but the way Jen looked again back at Johnny and the woman, then at me, stopped me. She wasn’t smiling. I felt studied. A different kind of heat crept up my throat and cheeks, somehow guilty this time.
“No,” she added. “I don’t think so.”
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out. “It’s my mom.”
“Go ahead and take it. I’m going to grab some coffee and a piece of cake or something. You want a muffin and a bottomless cup, right?”
“Yeah, thanks.” I dug in my purse for a ten-dollar bill she waved away, and I couldn’t argue with her because I was already thumbing my phone’s screen to take the call. “Mom. Hi.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong—why do you always think something’s wrong?” I should’ve felt more annoyed by her question, but the truth was, it was good to hear the concern in my mom’s voice. It was good to be so loved.
“You called me before noon on a Sunday morning, that’s why I think something’s wrong, Emmaline. You can’t lie to your mother.”
“Oh, Mom.” Sometimes she sounded so much older than she was. More like a grandma than a mother, and yet I knew from photos and stories that she’d been a true child of the sixties. More so even than my dad, who wasn’t above getting a little tipsy at Christmastime and who’d confessed to me once that he thought pot should be legal. “So. Tell me?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I assured her. My eye caught Johnny again, but he wasn’t looking this way. He was in intense conversation with that woman, both of them leaning in toward each other in a way that could only mean intimacy. I tore my gaze from them and focused on my call. “I just thought I’d see what you’re up to.”
“Oh.” My mom sounded nonplussed. “Well, your dad and I went out to breakfast at the Old Country Buffet.”
“You … went to breakfast?”
At the counter, Jen was only a few feet away from Johnny, but she didn’t even look like she was trying to take a peek, much less not-so-casually overhear their conversation. It was still going full-force, based on his expression and the set of his companion’s shoulders. I couldn’t see her face, but her body language told me everything I needed to know.
“Sure. Why, aren’t we allowed?” My mom sounded a little strange, a little shorter in her response than I was used to.
“Of course you are. Mom, are you feeling okay?”
“I’m supposed to be asking you that,” she said.
And there it was, the subject that would never go away. It wasn’t fair to call it an elephant in the room. You were supposed to be able to ignore those.
For one long instant I thought about telling her. Not the bits about the sex on the train and being some sort of 1970s Italian movie queen. I was sure my mom didn’t want to hear about that. But the small blank moments, the scent of oranges. I didn’t, though. Not only because I didn’t want to worry her, but because I didn’t want to prove her right.
“I’m fine, Mom. Really.” My throat closed on the lie, and my eyes smarted. I was glad we had the distance of satellites between us. I’d never have been able to get away with it face-to-face.
“Where are you? I hear a lot of noise.” “Oh. The coffee shop.”
My mom laughed. “Again? You’re going to turn into a cup of coffee soon.”
“Better that than a pumpkin,” I told her as Jen wove her way back to our table balancing two plates and two empty mugs. “People who love coffee say they can’t live without it. Pumpkins just get made into pie.”
“Oh, you crazy girl,” my mom said fondly. “Call me tomorrow?”
“Sure, Mom. Bye.” We disconnected just as Jen sat down, pushing my plate and mug toward me.
“Your mom must be pretty cool,” she said.
“She can be. Oh, God. Chocolate fudge chip with fudge icing? This isn’t a muffin. This is a new pair of jeans in a bigger size.”
Jen licked a fingertip. “It’s what he likes.” I didn’t have to ask her who “he” was. I wondered if I’d ever have to ask again. “Yeah?”
She grinned. “Some stalker you are.”
Our conversation turned from the tantalizing topic of Johnny Dellasandro, maybe because he was actually there and could’ve overheard us, or because he was with a woman, therefore making any fantasies about him sort of lame and pointless. Or maybe because we had other things to talk about, me and Jen, like our favorite television shows and books, about the cute guy who delivered pizzas in our neighborhood. About all the things good friends talk about over sweets and caffeine.
“I should get going,” I said with a sigh when I’d polished off that sinful muffin and finished my third mug of coffee. I patted my stomach. “I’m going to burst, plus I have laundry to do and some bills to pay.”
“Nice quiet Sunday afternoon.” Jen sighed happily. “The best kind. See you in the morning?”
“Oh, probably. I’m sure I’ll swing by here for a coffee to go. I know I should make my own at home, but … I can’t ever get the brew to taste right. And it seems like a waste to make a whole pot when I can only have one cup.”
Jen grinned and winked. “And the eye candy here is so much nicer.”
There was that, too.
She ducked out before I did, and not because I was lingering overlong trying to get a look at Johnny. I did take one last glance over my shoulder at him as I pushed the door and made the bell jingle. I was hoping he’d look up, but he was still locked deep in conversation with that woman, whoever she was.
It wasn’t until much later that night—bills paid and laundry washed, dried, sorted, folded and put away—that I thought to look for the necklace in my pocket. I searched them all, even the ones of my jeans, though I knew I hadn’t put it in there. No necklace. Somewhere, somehow, I’d lost it.
Like I’d said to Jen, it was no big deal. It wasn’t a piece I’d had any sentimental ties to, and I was sure it hadn’t been expensive. Still, the fact I’d lost it disturbed me. I’d lost things before. Put them down when I was having a fugue and didn’t remember it. I’d found things that way, too. Once, I’d walked out of a store clutching a fistful of lip balms I must’ve grabbed up from a bin. I’d been too embarrassed to tell my mom I stole them. Every once in a while I found one in a pocket of a coat or a purse. They’d lasted me for years.
I hadn’t lost the necklace in a fugue, I was almost certain of that. I’d walked home from the Mocha with the wind so cold in my nostrils it had frozen my nose hairs, making it possible but not likely I’d missed any scent of oranges. On the other hand, it was possible I’d had a fugue without that warning sign. Lots of people with seizure disorders never had any warning, or memory, of what had happened.
This thought sobered me faster than a high school kid pulled over by the sheriff on prom night.
Blinking fast to keep the tears suddenly burning my eyes from slipping out, I took a long, slow breath. Then another. By the time I’d focused on the third, in and out, I felt a little calmer. Not much, but enough to slow the frantic pounding of my heart and quell the surging boil in my guts.
I’d discovered alternative medicine a few years ago when traditional techniques could no longer diagnose whatever it was the fall had done to my brain. I was tired of being stuck with needles and taking medicine that often had side effects so much worse than the benefits they provided, it wasn’t worth taking them. Acupuncture couldn’t diagnose my problem any better than Western medicine could, but I found I’d rather use it than fill my body with potentially toxic chemicals day after day. Guided imagery and meditation didn’t get rid of my anxieties altogether, but the practice of them definitely kept me in a better mood. And since I’d discovered through lots of trial and error that I was more likely to experience a bad fugue when I was overtired, overstimulated, overstressed or overanything, I’d incorporated meditation into my daily routine as a preventative measure.
I thought it worked. It seemed to, anyway. I’d been fugue-free for the past two years, anyway, until just lately. And even these three had been so minor, so inconsequential …
“Ah, shit,” I said aloud, my voice harsh and strained.
My reflection in my bedroom mirror showed pale cheeks, shadowed eyes, lips gone thin from the effort of holding back a sob. The fugues had never been painful, yet having them hurt more than anything in my life.
I blew out another breath, concentrating while I changed quickly into a pair of soft pajama bottoms and a worn T-shirt with a picture of Bert and Ernie on it. I’d bought it at Sesame Place when I was in junior high and had only rediscovered it while packing to move here. It fit a little tighter than it had back then, but it was comfortable in more than the size. It was a piece of home.
Changed, I settled onto my bed with my legs crossed. I didn’t have a fancy mat or any sort of altar, and I didn’t light incense. Meditation wasn’t so much spiritual as it was physical for me. I’d studied a lot about biofeedback over the years, and while I doubted I’d ever be able to consciously control my heart rate or brain wave patterns the way some accomplished yogis did, I believed meditation did help. I could feel it.
I rested my hands on my knees, palms up, thumb to fingertips. I closed my eyes. I didn’t chant the traditional Om Mani Padme Om or even any of the other traditional phrases. I’d found something that worked better for me.
“Sausage and gravy on a biscuit, yum. Sausage and gravy on a biscuit, yummmmm.”
I let the words flow out of me on each exhalation. With each inhalation, I tried to stop myself from testing the air for the scent of oranges. It took me a lot longer than it usually did to put myself into a state of calm. At last my muscles relaxed. My heartbeat slowed to its normal rate.
I let myself fall back onto the pillows. All brand-new. The comforter was, too, as was the mattress and the bed. My new bed, one I’d never shared. I uncrossed my legs, stretching without opening my eyes. Cradled in the softness of the bed, loose and relaxed, it seemed natural for my hands to drift over my belly and thighs. My breasts.
I thought of Johnny. I’d memorized every detail of his face from seeing him at the Mocha, and every detail of the rest of him from the movies Jen and I had watched and the photos online. He had dimples at the base of his back and one dimple on his left cheek, just at the corner of his mouth. I’d like to lick those dimples.
My breath soughed out of me as my fingers slid across the skin of my belly, bare from where my shirt had pulled up. I didn’t usually need visual aids to bring myself pleasure. Porn was all right, I had no problem with it, but it all seemed sort of random and senseless to me. Even supposedly woman-oriented porn didn’t make much sense to me. I got more turned on reading sensually explicit novels or even listening to music than I ever did watching dirty movies or looking at pictures.
Now, though, I fixed on the image of Johnny’s face. His golden brows, arched over those yummy green-brown eyes. That mouth, a little thin but easily quirked into a smile. At least, in his movies, that was. I hadn’t yet seen him as much as quirk the corner of his lips in real life.
“Johnny,” I whispered, thinking I should be ashamed or embarrassed to be saying his name aloud to myself this way but not feeling anything but warmth.
Even his name was sexy. A boy’s name, a nickname, not a name for a grown man who was, I realized, probably my dad’s age. I groaned and clapped a hand over my eyes.
It didn’t stop me from thinking about him. He might be the same age as my parents, but I had no trouble imagining him as a lover. I’d never had a fetish for older dudes—if anything, I freely admitted to a certain amount of ogling of younger men on a daily basis. My office overlooked the campus of a local college, and my coworkers and I often enjoyed our lunches while watching the boys on their way to class. But Johnny’s age didn’t matter. Intellectually, I knew he was “too old” for me. My head knew it.
My body was another matter.
My hand stroked down my belly to cup between my legs, the heel of my palm pressing my clit. I sighed. I used a finger to idly stroke myself through the soft material of my pajamas, then slid my hand inside the elastic waistband. This was my pleasure, solo.
It was Johnny I thought of, obviously. Scenes from his movies knitted with still shots and the sound of his voice. I wondered how it would sound if he said my name. Would he groan it the way he did on film, fucking the actress with whom he’d had a child? Would he whisper it against my skin, his tongue working its way down my body to center on my clit the way my fingertip circled just now?
I wanted to undress him. Strip away the long black coat, the scarf. Use it to cover his eyes while he laughed and, patiently, allowed me to unfix the buttons of his shirt from their holes and slide his arms from the sleeves. To unzip and unbutton his pants and slide them down those long, muscled thighs. I wanted to kneel in front of him and nuzzle at the softness of his pubic hair, golden and darker than the hair on his head. I wanted to take that nice, thick cock in my mouth and suck until he got so hard I couldn’t fit him all the way in.
My hand was moving faster. My cunt wet. I slipped a finger down to get it slick, then up again, while my other hand cupped a breast and pinched at my nipple. I thought of Johnny while I made love to myself. His eyes, nose, ears, mouth. His delicious nipples. I wanted to lick and bite them. I wanted to hear him say my name, and beg me to fuck him.
“Yes,” I murmured.
My back arched, hips pushing upward against the sweet pressure of my hand. I wasn’t easing toward climax, more like hurtling toward it. I hadn’t done this in a long time. Since before the last time I’d had sex, as a matter of fact, and that had been about three months ago. I didn’t want to think about that now. I wanted to think about Johnny.
“Emm,” he said in my ear, and I didn’t startle. My eyes didn’t open. I breathed in the scent of oranges and gave myself over to his touch.
My hands found the spindles of my headboard and I grabbed them. The wood creaked at the strength of my grip. It was slick under my palms, my fingers slid, but I held tight. The bed dipped beneath his weight.
He kissed me.
Openmouthed, slow and sweet and hot, just the way I’d imagined it. Johnny tasted like nothing and everything I’d ever loved or wanted. I breathed him in, sucking gently on his tongue. Our teeth bumped, sending sparks of sensation through me, and a giggle. My eyes fluttered, but he gave a warning noise.
“Don’t,” Johnny said, and I kept my eyes shut tight.
When wet heat centered over my clit, I let out a noise of my own. Low and urgent. I said his name. He laughed against me, and it was just the way I’d imagined it. His lips pressed me through the thin material of my pajama bottoms. He worked my clit with his lips, and the barrier of cotton only enhanced the pleasure.
I wanted to feel him on me. Skin on skin. I wanted him inside me, balls deep. I wanted him fucking me while I drew gouges in his back with my nails and urged him on.
None of that happened. Johnny used his mouth and fingers to stroke me toward orgasm, and that turned out to be pretty fucking good enough. Pleasure filled me. Overflowing. Electric. I jerked with it and let go of the headboard so my fingers could find that thick, beautiful hair and burrow into it.
I came from Johnny’s mouth and hands, and with his voice murmuring encouragement, but when my hand reached down I found nothing but my own body. Orgasm arced through me. My eyes opened. I cried out, wordless and yearning, and my voice slid into a moan.
I swallowed the taste of him.
I was alone.

Chapter 04
I looked like shit. Hair lank, shadows under my eyes, skin blotchy. I’d managed to leave the house with mismatched socks, too, a fact I was hoping nobody would notice unless I pulled up the legs of my trousers to show off the mistake. I’d slept terribly, my night filled with dreams that were nothing like fugues.
I sat at my desk, gripping a mug of cooling coffee and staring at my computer screen without doing much. I had an appointment with my acupuncturist after work and didn’t see much point in pretending to accomplish anything for the next hour. Fortunately, I had nothing too pressing waiting for me. I’d been expecting a lot more work when I took this job at the credit union, but compared to my days as a teller, then assistant bank manager, my new job was as easy as a two-dollar hooker who takes coupons.
I did rustle up enough energy to check my personal email. Among the forwards of stupid jokes and pictures of strange street signs my mom sent, there was a message from Jen. The subject read simply, “Read This.”
So, like Alice being offered a piece of the caterpillar’s mushroom, I did.
It was a link to a blog specializing in reviews of obscure horror movies. It had an entire section devoted to Johnny’s films, even the ones that weren’t horror. I was surprised to see he’d made only fifteen movies, total, as the wealth of information on the internet had made it seem like way more than that. Reading through the descriptions, I realized it was because so many of them had been recut or released under alternate names, or in foreign versions. There was a clickable list for each one, each link leading to a separate page with still pictures, video clips and information about the movie. Also, Buy links. Some of the movies were readily available, if you knew where to look, and at dollar-bin prices. Others …
“Whoa.” I said this with respect and awe.
One hundred and seventy-five dollars for a dubbed DVD of some obscure film I hadn’t ever heard of. Plus shipping. I slid my tongue over my teeth as I contemplated this, and then the triple-digit number (not including the decimals) currently in my checking account.
$175 for a J.D. movie. I texted to Jen.
Can u believe it? She answered almost instantly.
I believe it, bb. Which one?
Night of A Hundred Moons.
Holy shit! Grab that shit up, girl. Nobody ever has a Hundred Moons!
Then, a second later:
(I)
It took me a minute to figure out what that was, but when I did, it made me laugh. It was a moon of the bare butt variety, not the celestial. Nice.
Have u seen it?
I typed.
Never. Not even in bootleg clips.
Do u want to?
R u kidding? YES!!!
One hundred and seventy-five dollars could be a lot or a little bit of money, depending. It wasn’t much for a car repair, for example, though it wasn’t a little, either. It was just about right for a really tiny television set, a bit too much for a pair of shoes and a ridiculously reasonable amount for a week’s vacation at the beach.
It was way too fucking much for a DVD.
I was already clicking on Add to Basket. My heart hung up when the website froze, the small scroll bar at the bottom stuck just an eyelash width from the end. I clicked, clicked again. Nothing happened.
It took me two or three frantic, sweaty moments before I realized I had to click the My Cart link to see that I had, indeed, managed to add the movie. I added the shipping, which was frankly outrageous, as well as some other random handling fee. I couldn’t even look at the total as I typed my credit card number into a definitely unsecured website, risking my entire identity just to get my hands on what would assuredly turn out to be a crappy copy of a bad movie.
I printed out the receipt and made sure a copy of the order had also appeared in my email before I dared to navigate away from the site. Then I sat back in my desk chair, heart still pounding, palms still sweating. I felt like I’d run a mile pursued by dogs. Or zombies. Or worse, zombie dogs. I felt wrung out and anxious and something else, too. Unreasonably excited. I texted Jen.
Bought it.
Get the fuck out!
Yes. Girls’ night when it comes?
It won’t be the only thing coming. Call me when you get it.
I said I would and slipped my phone into my purse so I could head out for my appointment. It took me only ten minutes to get from my office to the alternative medicine center, a trip that had taken me forty-five when I lived with my parents. In another five I was in the quiet room on my back, a soft pillow beneath my head.
I have eclectic musical tastes, but “spa” music usually didn’t do it for me. Yet I couldn’t deny it was relaxing, the soft chimes and woodwind instruments. That was the point, after all. To relax the patients. And I tried, I really did, but the harder I tried to put everything out of my mind, the more I thought.
I knew the treatment would help even if I couldn’t stop the hamster wheel of my brain from spinning. I just didn’t want to be there, stiff and aching, anxious. I wanted to melt into the table and let the needles do their work the way they’d done for the past couple of years … and then I was thinking again, worrying again, that this time the treatment would fail. That I’d be back to suffering through the insult of a brain that made me see, hear, smell and touch things that weren’t there. Or worse, that gave me blank spots in my memory, moments in which anything could’ve happened. I wasn’t sure which was worse, experiencing things that hadn’t happened, or not remembering things that had.
The music changed from the soft tinkle of water and a flute to something low, almost moaning. I’d never noticed vocals in any of the music the office played. Now I couldn’t ignore them.
A cello. A woman’s breathy voice. The plucking of strings.
And then, though I’d always specifically requested no aromatherapy treatments during my acupuncture … the inevitable scent of oranges.
“No,” I muttered, and clung to consciousness with every single brain cell I had.
When the fugues had first started, I hadn’t known how to determine one was on the verge. As the years had passed, I could predict the onset with enough time—sometimes only barely, but usually enough—to prepare for it. I had never yet mastered fending one off. In fact, I’d learned it was better not to try, because they seemed to last longer and be more intense, with a longer recovery time, if I fought them. I couldn’t help it now, though. It was the worst betrayal to go dark here, with the needles in my shin and collarbone, supposedly aligning my qi and keeping me centered in this world. My muscles strained, defeating the purpose of everything I’d come here to do.
There was nothing I could do. The scent of oranges swirled around me. I closed my eyes, tense, and waited for my world to shift and change or simply go black around me. I gripped the table and felt the needles in my side shift and pinch.
Nothing happened.
I pressed my eyes closed tighter, my senses heightened. I heard the squeak-squeak of wheels, the soft click of the door opening. I opened my eyes, turned my head toward the sound. It was Dr. Gupta, who greeted me with a smile and a pat to my shoulder.
“I apologize for being a little late to remove the needles, Emm,” she said. “We had a little accident out in the hallway. Someone came to clean it up, but there’s quite a mess. Be careful when you go out there.”
She plucked needles from my skin as she spoke, slipping them into the red sharps container marked with the biohazard symbol. Then she took hold of my arm and helped me sit. She handed me a paper cup of water.
“How do you feel?”
I didn’t want to tell her about the fugue I may or may not have fended off. I breathed in. The scent of oranges had faded, though not disappeared. My mouth squirted saliva, lips puckering at the memory of the citrus taste. I hadn’t eaten oranges in years, unable to stomach them, but this gustatory illusion was unusual. Mostly I just smelled the oranges, I didn’t taste them.
“Tired,” I said.
“That’s to be expected. Are you dizzy? Drink some water.”
I did, not because I was dizzy but to wash away the lingering taste of citrus. She took the cup from me and tossed it in the trash, then gripped my elbow to help me off the table. I waited half a minute, used to the way the floor sometimes tilted at first when I’d just finished a treatment. It didn’t today, but I rested a moment longer than normal, anyway.
“Emm. You sure you’re all right?” Dr. Gupta is a tiny, dark-haired woman with big dark eyes. She reminds me of that old newspaper cartoon Dondi.
“Sure. Fine.” I gave her my brightest smile to convince her.
Dr. Gupta didn’t look convinced. She drew another cup of water from the cooler and handed it to me. “Drink that. You’re a little pale. I think next time we’ll concentrate on a super Ming Men instead of the Shen Men. We’ll do some energizing in addition to the tranquilizing.”
I’d been having acupuncture treatments for three years now, but that didn’t make me anything like an expert. In fact, I was more of the “I don’t need to know how it works” school of thought. I’d never studied the mechanics of it, or the philosophy.
“Sure,” I told her.
She laughed. “You have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s okay, so long as it works, yes?”
“Yes.” I drank the water, though by this point my back teeth were swimming.
She patted my shoulder again. “I’ll see you in a month, unless you have something you need taken care of before then.”
She left me to rearrange my clothes. Standing in the quiet room with the soft music playing, I should’ve been way more relaxed after a treatment. Instead, I felt electric. Buzzing. Not bad, exactly. And not the way I often felt after having a fugue, sort of fuzzy and disoriented for a few moments.
This feeling was more like an ache in my chest. An anticipation, not quite anxiety. No pain. There was never pain associated with any of this.
When I left the office, the smell of oranges once again assaulted me. I braced myself in the doorway, jaw clenched … until I saw the cleaning cart and the jug of citrus-scented cleaner, cap open, and the floor still gleaming from it. The woman at the cart saw me look and smiled apologetically.
“We spilled almost the whole jug,” she explained, holding up a mop. “But it’s okay, you can go past now.”
She couldn’t have had any idea about why I was laughing, but she laughed, too. I wanted to give her a high five as I passed her, but restrained myself. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face, though, as I stopped at the front desk to make my co-pay and book my next appointment.
“This is what I love about my job,” said Peta, the receptionist.
“Taking my money?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Seeing how people come in here full of pain and leave full of peace.”
I paused with my checkbook still in my hand. “That’s a great way of saying it.”
She dimpled. “Maybe I should put that on an inspirational poster, huh?”
“Maybe. But … it’s true, isn’t it?” I felt more at peace, certainly, once I’d learned the smell hadn’t been the harbinger of a fugue, after all.
“It really is. Take care, Emm, see you next month.”
I waved at her as I went out, my steps more springy and my heart lighter. Behind the wheel of my car I took a few more deep breaths to center myself out of habit. When you’ve had your license taken away because the authorities fear you might spaz out and cause an accident while you’re driving, you tend to better appreciate your ability to drive yourself when you are allowed. But as I pulled out of the parking lot, I realized the buzzing, churning tumble in my chest hadn’t really gone away, just faded.
Bad tacos for last night’s dinner, maybe. Too much coffee on an empty stomach. I gripped the wheel and checked my eyes in the rearview mirror. A little wide, but the pupils weren’t pinned or anything funky like that. My vision wasn’t blurry. I wasn’t smelling anything but my own cologne from where it had rubbed into my scarf.
Nevertheless, I drove slowly. Carefully. Taking no chances at yellow lights or intersections. By the time I got to my street, my fingers ached from gripping the wheel and my back hurt, too, from my too-tense posture.
“Motherfucker,” I muttered when I saw that someone had once again taken my spot. I really needed to get some lawn chairs and set them up when I left, the way my neighbors did.
I drove farther down the street and found an empty spot. The last time the plow had gone through, a thigh-deep pile of snow had been pushed into someone’s shoveled spot. The vehicle that usually parked there, a blue SUV, could no longer fit. I spotted it parked a block farther down and felt no guilt at squeezing my much smaller car into the space. I considered it karma.
The fact I’d once again parked in front of Johnny’s house was a nice little bonus, one that had me humming under my breath with glee and buzzing in an entirely different way. I paused after I’d closed my car door to study his house. When had I ever felt this way before?
The answer was, never. I’d had crushes before, plenty of them. In seventh grade I’d thought I would die unless a sophomore named Steve Houseman liked me back. I hadn’t died. And even then, when I’d gone to sleep every night wishing on every star I could see that he’d look at me like I was a real girl and not some junior high geek, I hadn’t ever felt like this.
The curb was icy, but the sidewalk in front of Johnny’s house was bare and well-salted. Unfortunately, his neighbors weren’t as conscientious. I was so busy trying to peek through his windows without making it obvious I was a pervert, I didn’t pay attention to where I put my feet. I hit a slick patch and slid, arms wheeling. I’d never been a gymnast, but I managed a pretty nice split that had me gasping in gratitude I was wearing a skirt, even though I tore my stockings.
So focused on keeping myself from totally wiping out and doing a face plant into the pile of filthy snow, I didn’t pay attention to the man who’d just crossed the street and stepped up onto the curb in front of me. I caught a flash of a black coat, a striped scarf. I had time to think, Oh, shit, it’s him, before I took another step and slid with that one, too.
We collided hard enough to snap my jaws together. I caught my tongue between my teeth and tasted blood. I looked into Johnny’s face, those green-brown eyes so close I could count his lashes. He had a mole at the corner of one eye I’d never noticed before. He grabbed my upper arms.
I smelled oranges.
I was falling.

Chapter 05
“Hey, foxy mama.”
The man in front of me gripped my upper arms to keep me from falling. I’d tripped on a loose piece of concrete in the sidewalk. I stared at it, thinking there was something wrong.
And then I knew.
Holy shit, it was summer. The man in front of me, Johnny. And he was … young.
“You okay? You having a bad trip or something?” He laughed and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Trip. Sorry.”
The moment Dorothy steps out of her black-and-white house into the Technicolor glory of Munchkinland is one of the greatest in movie history. I was Dorothy now, my eyes wide, legs trembling. I looked around at the way my world had changed and ducked instinctively in case a house was getting ready to fall on me. I’d have fallen if Johnny hadn’t held me up.
“Chill, little sister,” he said in a kind voice, and led me to the porch stoop where he eased me onto the heat-soaked concrete and sat beside me, my hand in his.
The colors were all so bright. I heard music, the steady disco thump of a song my mother had sung to me when I was a kid. A woman in short shorts and a tube top roller-skated past us, jumping effortlessly over the crack that had tripped me up. Her hair flew behind her in a long, gleaming wave.
A garbage truck rumbled past on the narrow street lined with wide cars all in shades of brown and green. It said New York City Municipal Services on the side, and I swallowed a sudden rush of saliva.
Bright sunshine. Heat. And yet I shivered, teeth chattering even as my butt scorched against the steps. The backs of my calves were worse, having no protection but my ripped panty hose. I hissed and shifted.
“Chill,” Johnny said again, soothingly.
I didn’t smell oranges. I smelled car exhaust and the faint whiff of sewage, probably from the alley next to this house or the garbage cans lined up along the curb. I smelled sun-baked concrete. I smelled him, too.
I leaned closer without thinking to take a long, deep breath of his neck. His hair tickled my cheek. He smelled like a man should—not like cologne but clean skin, a little bit of summer sweat, fresh air. He smelled better than I’d ever imagined he would, and I’d imagined he’d smell pretty fucking fine.
“Hey,” Johnny said softly.
Blinking, I pulled back, the heat in my cheeks and throat having nothing to do with the summer sun beating down all around us. I’d just sniffed him like a dog testing out a fireplug. During my fugues lots of things happened that didn’t in real life; I behaved in ways I’d never have done while conscious and never felt embarrassed about it the way I did now.
“Sorry,” I managed to say, and tried to pull away, but his hand holding mine kept me anchored onto the step.
“No sweat. What’s your name?”
He was even more beautiful than he’d looked in pictures. It wasn’t fair to compare this young Johnny to his older version, but I couldn’t help it. This Johnny smiled at me, while the older one never had. He ducked his head a little now, peering at me from the silky fringe of long bangs.
“You have a name, right?”
“Emm,” I said. “My name’s Emm.”
“Johnny.” He lifted our hands and shook them before letting them drop, this time to his thigh.
I felt his skin beneath the back of my hand. I shivered again. I blinked and breathed. This was a fugue. I was imagining all of this. Somewhere else I’d gone dark.
“Oh.” The word eased out on a moan and I closed my eyes. “Johnny.”
I meant the one in winter, in the black coat. The one I’d run into and was now likely making a fool of myself in front of.
“Yeah. That’s me.” He shifted, our thighs touching. “I don’t know you, but you seem to know me. How’s that?”
This was a fugue, I reminded myself. It wasn’t real. But no matter how hard I tried, I could sense nothing but this now. This place. This man in front of me. No glimmers of anything else, even though I knew it had to be there, in front of me, if only my brain would let go of me long enough to get back to it.
I didn’t want to get back to it, I realized, looking at Johnny’s smile. It was for me, that grin. So was the appreciative gaze he swept over me, his eyes lingering on my breasts a second too long before he focused briefly on my mouth and licked his lips. When his gaze swept up to meet mine again, I got lost in those eyes.
“You don’t talk much, huh?”
“I just … This is a little …” I couldn’t explain.
He laughed and stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. “You must be on some pretty good shit. But you should be more careful. This neighborhood, it ain’t so great. I mean, I live here and all. But you don’t. I’d have seen you around here before. Are you new, or just visiting?”
“I was just walking past.” It wasn’t a lie.
“You want to come inside? Gotta bunch of friends over, just hanging out. Having a little party. C’mon,” Johnny said, as though I needed any persuasion. “You’ll have a good time, I promise.”
He stood, tugging me onto my feet. The earth didn’t rock. I didn’t spin. With Johnny holding my hand, I wasn’t going anywhere but wherever he took me.
His house here in 1970s New York was a tall brownstone a lot like the one in present-day Harrisburg. It had to be newer, but it wasn’t as nice on the outside. Inside, it was so similar to my own I let out a low murmur of surprise as we entered the foyer. Stairs in front of us led up, a long and narrow hall pointed toward the kitchen and an arched doorway to our right led into a formal living room. A beaded curtain hung in the archway.
I heard music, louder in here, from upstairs. I heard voices, too. I smelled pot.
“C’mon in.” Johnny linked his fingers through mine and tugged me down the hall toward the kitchen, where a group of men and women sat around a wooden table or leaned against the counters to watch another man cooking something on the stove. “Hungry? Candy’s cooking.”
At the sound of his name, the man at the stove turned and flashed a grin of straight white teeth. He bent his head, Afro waving, as regally as any king welcoming a subject, his stirring spoon a scepter. “Welcome, welcome, sister. We got enough to feed you, if you’re hungry.”
I was hungry, intensely so. My stomach rumbled. I’d never been hungry in a fugue before. Oh, I’d eaten and drank, but never from need. I put my free hand, the one not still clutching Johnny’s, over my belly.
My clothes hadn’t changed. I looked down at the familiar friction of material under my fingertips. I was even wearing my winter coat, though it had come unbuttoned. No wonder I’d been so hot outside. No wonder everyone was looking at me so strangely.
“You can take that off,” Johnny offered.
I nodded and let him help me out of it. Women’s lib might be going strong, but Johnny was still a gentleman. He hung my coat on a hook behind the door and put his hand on the small of my back as I stood under the scrutiny of everyone in the kitchen.
“This is Emm,” Johnny said, like he brought strangers home all the time. He probably did. “That’s Wanda, Paul, Ed, Bellina and Candy’s at the stove. Say hi, everyone.”
They did, in a chorus, while I stared and tried to keep my mouth closed. I didn’t recognize Wanda or her name, but Bellina Cassidy was a playwright, her shows performed on Broadway by casts of the biggest names in theater. Edgar D’Onofrio had been a celebrated poet who’d killed himself sometime in the late seventies. Paul was probably Paul Smiths, the photographer and moviemaker who’d directed a handful of Johnny’s early movies. And Candy …
“Candy Applegate?”
Candy looked at her with a grin. “That’s me.” “You have a restaurant,” I said. “And that cooking show on TV.”
The room bubbled with laughter. I was looking at the Enclave. I licked my mouth and tasted sweat.
“Naw, girl, that ain’t me.” Candy shook his head and dipped the spoon back into whatever was simmering so deliciously on the stove. “Must be some other Candy.”
“No, it’s you,” I said, but shut my mouth up tight before I could say the rest.
Fugues were never like dreams, which I could sometimes control. I’d never been able to fix the course of what happened when I was dark. Sometimes that meant they were scarier than nightmares. Other times, like now, I just had to remember this wasn’t real and I could do nothing about it. I could tell them I knew the future, but I’d only look crazier than I probably already did.
Johnny, in fact, was studying me. “Feed her, Candyman.” “I’ll feed her,” Candy said.
And they did. A great, steaming bowl of some spicy, meatless stew. We all ate it over fragrant, sticky rice and sopped up the gravy with thick slices of homemade bread. I had to stop to taste everything twice, not because I was greedy or hungry, but because it tasted so, so good.
We all ate a lot. Laughing and joking. Talking about politics and art and music I knew only from history lessons or the classic rock station. They dropped names casually—Jagger, Bowie, Lennon. They dipped bare fingers into the communal pot and ate with their hands. They passed a pipe without telling me what was in it, and I smoked some of it because, after all, none of this was real.
Through it all, Johnny watched me from across the table. I watched him, too. I hadn’t asked what year this was and knew even if I did it wouldn’t matter. By the length of his hair, I guessed Johnny was about twenty-four. This made me older than him by about seven years. He didn’t seem to care.
I definitely didn’t.
We ate and talked and laughed. Someone brought out a guitar and started to play a song I was surprised I knew the words to. Something about flowers and soldiers, and where had they gone. And then they sang “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I’d never known it was about marijuana.
Sometime during all of this, our places around the table changed. I ended up next to Johnny instead of across from him. Our thighs pressed together. Our shoulders brushed when he leaned forward to grab up a slice of Candy’s bread, or to refill my glass with the kind of rich, red wine I avoided in real life.
Johnny turned his face toward me and smiled. And I kissed him. Just a brush of lip on lip, his breath warm and soft against me. He smiled into the kiss and his hand came up to cup the back of my neck beneath my hair.
Nobody noticed, or nobody cared. By that point I think most of them were drunk and high. Ed had passed out, his head on the table, snoring softly. Johnny squeezed my thigh beneath the table.
“Take me someplace,” I whispered into his ear.
He looked into my eyes for a moment, curiously. Then he nodded. He took me by the hand and led me from the table. We didn’t say goodbye, and I didn’t look back. We went up the long, narrow stairs, our hands linked loosely. My hand trailed the banister. I looked over the side, to the floor below, then up to the floor above. Stuck between, Johnny leading me, woozy from the food and whatever was in the pipe … I followed.
But at the top of the stairs, I led. I kissed him. I pushed him back against the wall, my leg cocked between his thighs, against his crotch. His belt buckle, something huge and metal, pressed my belly through my skirt. I slid my hands up his front, over the slick-smooth fabric of his ugly-patterned shirt. And I kissed him, long and smooth and hard and slow and deep.
He looked at me curiously again when I pulled back. “Who are you?”
“Emm.” I wasn’t slurring, but my voice was definitely hoarser than usual. I tasted him when I swiped my tongue across my lips.
“Emm,” Johnny said, as though considering something important. “That’s your name, all right. But who are you?” “Nobody,” I assured him.
Our bodies pressed together. His hands fit on my hips. Downstairs, I heard the burble of laughter and music. Smelled the tang of weed. Here, up here, it was quiet.
I’d been away too long. Any minute I would start to fade from this place and wake, maybe blinking away only a few seconds of time. Maybe on my knees, or worse, my face, on the ground. Maybe I wouldn’t wake at all.
The first door in the hallway, just to Johnny’s left, was cracked open enough to show me a bedroom. I took his hand and pulled him toward it. Through the door, to the bed, which was neatly made up with a blanket of orange, ribbed fabric. My grandmother had used bedspreads just like that one. I sat on the bed and spread my legs. My skirt, too long for this era, dipped between my thighs, and I pulled it up inch by inch, watching him watch me.
I pulled the fabric up over the torn remnants of my panty hose and crooked my finger at him. “Come here.”
Johnny, grinning, was already unbuttoning his shirt. He tossed it to the floor and then crawled up over me. Our mouths locked. His tongue stroked mine. I cradled him against my cunt, my legs open wide to accommodate him. My fingers drew circles on the bare flesh of his back.
I rolled him onto his back and straddled him. I hooked fingers into my nylons and tore them to keep any barrier from between us, but his jeans were still there.
“Cock blocked,” I murmured, and tugged at his zipper.
“What?” Johnny laughed and put his hand on mine to help me pull down the zipper.
“Your jeans. They’re cock-blocking me. Take them off.”
He laughed again. I wanted to eat it up, that laughter. His mouth. All of him. I bent to kiss him with my hair hanging down all around us, and when he was naked underneath me, myself still clothed, I covered his body with my kisses.
He didn’t protest when I nipped and sucked, or when I licked. He didn’t protest when I lifted my skirt and pulled my panties aside to slide down on his cock. And Johnny didn’t protest when I fucked him, sweating, both of us concentrating hard, not speaking, not even kissing, as the pleasure built higher and higher and crashed over us both.
He only protested when I got up to leave, but by then it was too late. The edges of this place were fading. Shaking in the aftermath of my orgasm, I kissed him. My skirt fell down around my knees. Johnny held my hand and made a wordless noise of complaint, but I tugged my fingers gently from his and stepped backward out the door, closing it behind me.
And then I woke up.

Chapter 06
My knees hurt. Throbbed and stung. Blood oozed from several scrapes. My panty hose had indeed been shredded, but on this sidewalk now, not from me tearing them away in order to get at naked Johnny.
He had one hand on my elbow, the other at my hip, holding me in place. “You all right?”
I blinked rapidly, putting myself in place. I knew where I was. I knew who I was. Most importantly, I knew when I was.
“Fine. I slipped on the ice. I’m sorry, did I hit you?”
My breezy explanation wasn’t cutting it with him, I could tell. How long had I been dark? I hadn’t conveniently glanced at my watch before the fugue.
“You should be more careful,” Johnny warned, sounding stern.
I could still taste him. I swallowed against the flavor of his mouth and skin. We were standing too close for strangers, which is what we really were. He let go of my hip but kept hold of my elbow, and I was grateful because my legs had suddenly gone trembling and weak.
“You look like shit. You better come in here.”
Yew bettuh come in heah.
From anyone else I’d have laughed a little at that accent, but on Johnny it was utterly drool-worthy. I couldn’t say anything, could only let him pull me along and up the brick stairs, through his front door. And then I stood inside Johnny’s house.
It was beautiful, of course. I hadn’t expected anything less. I stood on his parquet wood floors, my panty hose shredded and the hem of my coat dripping. I hadn’t noticed that before, that I’d gotten wet. I looked at my feet and the growing puddle of dirty water, then at him.
“Oh, God. Sorry.”
Johnny had been hanging up his long black coat and that scarf on a brass hook on the wall just inside the door, and he turned to give me an up-and-down look that left me feeling totally lacking. “You should come into the kitchen. Get a drink. You look like you’re going to pass out.”
I felt white-faced and shivering, certain I looked like shit just as he’d said. “Thanks.”
“C’mon.” Johnny made a shooing gesture down the hall toward the kitchen, then followed me. “I’ll make you a cuppa tea. Unless you want something stronger?”
“Tea’s fine. Good. Thank you.” I sat in the chair he pointed to, at a table that couldn’t be the same one my brain had created, no matter how much it looked like the one in my fugue.
Sometimes, not every time, I did come out of a fugue this way, disoriented and a little sick. Most of the time it passed quickly. Today, I had to take slow, shallow breaths and sip at the air to keep my stomach from revolting up my throat.
Johnny moved around his kitchen in silence. He filled the kettle and settled it on the gas range. The burner hissed and sparked without lighting until he fiddled with something, and then the blue flame whooshed up, high.
“Damn thing,” Johnny said, but not to me.
Word vomit. That’s what Jen had called it. I’d laughed at her then, but understood it now. I had to clench my jaw tight to keep myself from blurting out the most random, insane thoughts crossing my mind and, even then, didn’t quite manage. “You have a beautiful house.”
Johnny grunted as he pulled a couple of oversize mugs from a cupboard and set them on the counter. He opened a tin canister marked Tea and filled a small mesh ball with leaves. Another cupboard produced a ceramic teapot.
“You’ve done a lot to it,” I continued.
My dad was fond of saying that only a fool speaks just to fill silence. I wasn’t making my dad very proud now. Nor did I seem to be impressing Johnny.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” Johnny said finally, after he’d poured boiling water into the teapot and brought it to the table. He covered it with a knitted cozy and put the mugs beside it. He took a trip to the fridge and brought out half-and-half.
Johnny was making tea for me. This was more surreal and harder to believe than finding myself in the late 1970s had been. I sat with hands linked in my lap, watching as he sat across from me and poured the tea. He added three spoonfuls of sugar and a generous dollop of half-and-half to one mug, then pushed it toward me. I wrapped my hands around it but didn’t dare drink for fear I’d spill it all down my front and embarrass myself even more.
“It’s nice,” I said. “The house, I mean.” He looked at me. “Drink your tea.”
I blew on it, then sipped. It was perfect, exactly the way I’d have made it myself. My stomach settled. Then it grumbled.
Johnny hadn’t drunk a sip. He got up, went to the counter, pulled out a package of cookies from a bread box and set them on the table, too. “You need more sugar.”
“I’m okay, really.”
He took a cookie from the package and set it on the table in front of me. “Eat that.”
If he’d said it with a smile, cajoling, I’d have eaten it. It was my favorite kind, and I was hungry, craving sugar. But something in his tone and look made me ornery.
“No, thanks.”
Johnny shrugged and snagged a cookie from the package. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it like a magician getting ready to do a coin trick. He studied it, then looked at me. It crumbled when he bit it, and when he licked the crumbs off his lips, I had to concentrate on the mug of tea in my hands. The surface of the liquid shook the way the glass of water trembled in Jurassic Park, announcing the presence of the T. rex. I was pretty sure there weren’t any dinosaurs here.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
It was stupid not to eat it, so I did after another half minute. Sweetness exploded on my tongue, and though it might’ve been the placebo effect, my stomach instantly settled and my head stopped swimming. I licked melted chocolate from my fingertips and took a long, slow swallow of tea.
The fugue was fading, the memory of Johnny’s taste replaced by tea and chocolate. I didn’t want to let the sensations go, but they’d become slippery as a fistful of spaghetti and no more easily gripped. I sighed and took another cookie when he pushed the package toward me.
“They’re not very good.” Johnny didn’t say it like an apology, just a fact. “Homemade’s better.”
“Homemade is always better,” I agreed. “But I guess you have to take what you can get, huh?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t crack a smile. He sat back in his seat, gaze shuttered, mouth thin and straight without even the hint of curve. “You got some color back in your cheeks.”
“I’m feeling a lot better, thanks. This was just what I needed.” I lifted my mug and pointed it toward the cookies, praying I didn’t have chocolate smeared on my mouth or teeth.
“Yeah. I know. You okay now?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.”
Johnny gave an unsubtle look at the clock on the wall. “You live here, in the neighborhood?”
“Yes. I just moved in a few months ago. Down the street,” I added. “Number forty-three.”
Word vomit. I was about to fall prey to its insidiousness. Fortunately, Johnny cut me off before I could spew out anything really embarrassing, like an offer to take him home and fuck him until we both saw stars. Unfortunately, he also stood in a way that made it obvious I was supposed to leave.
I paused on the front porch. “Thanks, Mr. Dellasandro.”
He’d kiss me now, I knew it. Or I’d kiss him. He’d push me up against the wall and put his hand under my skirt. We’d fuck right there on the stairs… .
“Be more careful out there,” Johnny said, and closed the door in my face.
He hadn’t even asked my name.
“You didn’t.” Jen sounded horrified and fascinated at the same time. “He took you into his house? And gave you a cookie? Damn, girl … did he ask you to sit on his lap, too?”
“No, God, no. Too bad.”
“Really.” She shook her head and held up a skirt she’d pulled off the rack. “What do you think of this?”
“Hideously ugly.” I fingered the fabric, a polyester blend in shades of orange and green. “And yet appealing.”
“I know, right? How about this?” She held up a dress, which had been made to look like a shirt and skirt but was really one piece. “It has a matching belt.”
“And it’s half off,” I said with a glance at the tag. Wednesdays were price-reduction days at the Salvation Army. Jen and I had made it a weekly date. “Where are you going to wear it?”
“Oh. To work, I guess. With a pair of supercute boots. Maybe hem the skirt a little. I love the sleeves.”
The sleeves were pretty awesome, cuffed tight at the wrists with the rest blousy. It wasn’t a look I thought I could pull off, but it would suit her. “It’s artistic.”
“You think so?” She held up the dress again. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
She put it in the cart and we inched down the aisle. The store was always crammed with shoppers on Wednesdays, making it nearly impossible to navigate with a wonky-wheeled cart unless we both maneuvered it. I pulled out a sleek black dress with a scoop neck and an A-line hem. It also had a glittery broach. Bonus! I stuck it in the cart, even though I had no place to wear a dress like that. At five bucks, half off, I couldn’t resist.
“Cute,” Jen commented. “But listen, tell me more about Johnny. What’s his house like? Did he come on to you?”
“Gorgeous. And no way. If anything, he couldn’t wait to get me out of there.”
“Bummer.” Jen pulled a blue sleeveless tank dress from the rack. “This is a great color.”
“Yeah. I guess I couldn’t be surprised. I mean, I did nearly knock him over on the street like a huge, giant doofus.”
Jen laughed. “But you managed not to ask him if you could bite his epic ass, right?”
“At least there’s that. Hey, I’m heading over to the shirts.” I couldn’t look at any more dresses. I’d end up spending twenty bucks on vintage finery I’d never wear.
I have a theory about thrift-store shopping. I’ve spent hours going from store to store in search of something specific, but I’ve never gone away from a thrift store empty-handed. For whatever reason, whenever I shop at a thrift store, no matter what I want, I find it. When I wanted an emerald-green cardigan sweater, an item that was both out of season and not in a trendy color, I found the perfect one at the Salvation Army. When I needed a jean jacket to replace the one I’d left behind in a hotel, I had my choice of ten or so from the local church bargain basement store. I think there’s some higher consciousness involved, or maybe it’s a matter of perception that allows your eyes to be opened at just the right time. To see things you wouldn’t have noticed before.

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