I wasn’t in a coma…not quite. But I wasn’t sure how much time I had. I looked over his shoulder, but nobody was paying attention to us. They all had their own thing going on, which made sense, didn’t it? I didn’t need them. I just needed him.
“Take me upstairs,” I said into his ear, and tugged his lobe between my teeth.
“You want to split? I can dig that.”
I snickered. I couldn’t help it. “Dig it” was so quaint, so seventies sitcom. So…sort of sexy, really, when he said it, not like he was trying to toss around slang for effect but like that’s just how it came out. Natural. Everything about him was natural.
“You’re so different,” I told him in the hallway as he linked his fingers with mine.
Johnny gave me a glance. “Than what?”
“Never mind.” I couldn’t explain that I meant he was different than himself. “I like it.”
His grin lit up his face. He put his hand on the newel post and swung around a little, one foot on the stairs. “Where’ve you been, anyway? I looked all over for you. You don’t live around here, huh? You just visiting again?”
“Just visiting,” I agreed.
We stopped to kiss at the top of the stairs. My fingers tangled in the silk of his hair. I tugged the bandanna free so his hair fell over his eyes, and when I kissed him the fringes tickled my face.
“You are something, all right,” Johnny said in a low, mystified voice.
I remembered where his bedroom was, but stopped at the doorway as Sandy came out toting the baby on her hip. She paused and looked at both of us blankly. Then she shrugged and held out the baby for Johnny to look at.
“I gave her a bath and everything. Now I’m gonna feed her a bottle.”
His arm slid around my waist and held me tight against him, hip to hip. “Yeah, sure, that’s great.”
Sandy pursed her lips and shook her head a little. “Well, see ya.”
Inside the bedroom, the door closed, we made our way to the bed where I pushed him back and he fell down onto it, bouncing a little before pushing himself up on his elbows to look at me. I pulled my camisole off over my head and stood bare-breasted in front of him. I tugged open the zipper of my jeans, toed off my shoes, pushed down the denim along with my plain cotton panties and stood before him naked.
I’d never felt so beautiful as I did at that moment, with Johnny’s gaze upon me. Never before, but always, always after. When he looked at me, it didn’t matter if I felt rounder in places than I wanted to be, or if my breasts weren’t of pornstar proportions. It was the time, I thought, cupping them and flicking my thumbs over my nipples to get them hard. Back then women could be normal-size.
There was something else different about the women he was used to. Johnny’s gaze focused on my pussy, which I’d shaved just a few nights before. Not bare—I hated feeling as if I looked like a schoolgirl. I’m a woman, and women have hair. But I had trimmed my bikini area and left a landing strip, mostly for convenience rather than fashion, since I was due to get my period in a few days.
Johnny dragged his hand across his mouth, pulling at his lips and leaving them sheened with saliva. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he was at the perfect height when I moved to stand between his legs. His hands found my ass as he looked up at me, eyes a little glazed.
Drunk, I thought. But not from the beer he’d been drinking when I found him in the kitchen. Drunk on me.
I ran my hand over his head and tugged off the bandanna. I tossed it onto the bed. His hair fell over the back of my hand when I wove my fingers in it. My fingers tightened in it, and I pulled to tip his head back.
“Johnny.” I said it just to say it. Just because I could.
“Yeah, baby.” His voice was low and throaty. Full of sex.
“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny…” Laughing, I tipped his head back farther.
He laughed, too. His hands moved, stroking my ass, the dimples at the small of my back, my upper thighs. “Yeah, Emm. I’m right here.”
“So am I.”
“I see that.” When I released him from my grip, he nuzzled against my breasts and found my nipples with his mouth. He sucked gently, one and the other, and looked up with a grin when I gasped. “You like that, huh?”
“Yes.” A sudden, vivid memory of him saying those exact words in one of his films came back to me. My cunt pulsed. “Does that make me a whore?”
I said it in my Central Pennsylvania accent, hard on the r at the end. Nothing like the way he said it. Johnny paused in exploring my breasts to look up at me again, brow furrowed. “A what?”
“A…whore,” I said, my voice gone breathy with painfully urgent excitement.
“A…whore?”
Fuck. The way he said it made the Fourth of July explode in my pussy. I bit my lower lip and still couldn’t quite keep in the gasp. “God.”
His chuckle sounded perplexed. His hands stopped roaming for a moment on my rear. “Do you think you’re a whore?”
A hooah. “Christ, that shouldn’t be so fucking sexy,” I said.
Johnny blinked, ducking his head for a moment as his shoulders shook with laughter. “That turns you on, huh?”
“Yes. Say it again.”
He stopped laughing when he looked up at me. Something dark skittered in those green-brown eyes. He licked his mouth, wiped the back of it with his hand again. His voice got lower. “You wanna be a whore for me?”
I didn’t want to be a whore for anyone. I just wanted to hear him say it. I wanted to see him look at me that way. My fist tightened in his hair again. This time, he winced.
His hands gripped my hips, hard. “That it? That what you like?”
“You make me like it.”
He was stronger than I’d expected. I was on my back on the bed in half a second, my hands pinned above my head while Johnny looked down into my face. His denim-clad thigh rocked slowly on my bare cunt. The rough fabric sent shivers of pleasure throughout me—or maybe it was just his eyes, his mouth. His voice.
“You like that? Huh?”
“I like it.”
He nudged his thigh a little higher. “Does that get you wet for me?”
“Yes,” I breathed.
I never spoke out like that, but this, I reminded myself, wasn’t real. It was all fantasy. All made up. All of this was nothing more than some misfiring neurons in my mangled brain.
With the hand not holding my wrists, Johnny yanked open his belt. He shifted. I arched my back, tipping my hips, waiting for him to enter me—but he surprised me instead. Johnny moved his mouth down my body, over the slopes of my breasts and belly. He slid his hands beneath my ass and lifted me to his mouth, his tongue stroking over my clit before he fasted his lips there and sucked gently.
I shuddered and said his name. Johnny said nothing, just got to the business of eating my pussy.
I’d never seen this in any of the movies.
Oh, they’d hinted at his oral prowess. Soft-focus shots of women writhing as he lapped at their skin. Off-centered shots of his head at waist-level, then cuts of the women’s faces contorted in ecstasy, all of them crying out his name. But none of the movies had actually shown him licking and sucking between their legs. I had no images to call on.
This was all me.
He did it with his eyes closed. He made small groaning noises. The sound a man makes when he feasts on something delicious, a meal that completely sates his hunger. He sampled my clit for a while before sliding a finger inside. Then two. I cried out.
“So fucking wet,” Johnny muttered against me.
Pleasure coiled spring-tight in my belly. Heat rose, flushing up my chest and throat to my cheeks. His mouth burned on me. Electric. I shifted my hips under him, unable to stay still.
I didn’t notice how he’d pushed his jeans down, only that he had. I tasted myself on his mouth when he kissed me. My mouth was already open when I gasped as he entered me, and I drew in his breath and made it my own.
Johnny buried his face a
gainst the side of my neck and slid slowly deeper into me. He settled there without moving for a second or two, then pushed up on his hands to look into my face. He looked bemused. I smiled and pulled him down to me for another kiss.
“You are something,” he said.
Then he began to move. This was different than the first time had been, with me on top, both of us moving so frantically. This time was slower. This time took forever.
I’d never been able to come in the missionary position, not without sliding a hand down to give myself some help. Then again, I’d never been with a man who moved the way Johnny did. In, out, each thrust added to a subtle twist of his hips that hit me just right. And he kissed me, oh, God, how he kissed me. Sweet and soft, then harder, his tongue stroking, lips nibbling. I was caught up on a wave of sensual onslaught, and I gave myself up to it without holding anything back.
I came once in slow, rippling waves. I came a second time after he’d rolled us so that I lay on my back, him on his side, fucking into me at an angle. And finally, when he shifted us again so that I was on his lap, his back pressed against the headboard, my thighs pressed to his hips, I came again. I bit into his shoulder when I did, my body jerking. Sweat glued us and the scent of our fucking wiped out everything else.
He came inside me with a grunt. He stroked hands down my sweat-slick back, and pushed the tangled strands of my hair, sticking to my cheeks, off my face. He breathed out and held me close. “Johnny, I—oops!”
“Jesus, Sandy,” Johnny snapped, not bothering to grab up a sheet or make any attempt to cover us even as I cringed against him. “I told you to fucking knock before you come in here.”
“Sorry! I just needed to get my bag! Jesus, Johnny, you could’ve locked the door you know. Gawd.” Sandy huffed and went to the dresser to grab up a huge straw bag with bamboo handles. The contents clinked and shifted inside as she stuck her hand on her hip, the bag hung from her wrist. “I’m going.”
“Who’s got the kid?” Johnny looked over my shoulder, his hands keeping me still.
“I called my mother to come get her.” Sandy gave me a look. “What was your name again?”
“Get the fuck out of here, Sandy. Jesus Christ.” Johnny shifted as though he meant to push me from his lap and get up, and Sandy jumped back, hands up.
“Okay, okay! Jesus! Chill out, man. It’s all cool. I ain’t trying to mess with your scene or anything.”
“Get out,” Johnny said.
Sandy left, closing the bedroom door behind her. I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure I could move. Johnny looked up at me.
“Sorry,” he said. “She’s a moron.”
I got off him then, feeling sticky and slick. We hadn’t used a condom, and I marveled more at the details my mind was providing more than the fact I’d fucked him bareback. I settled onto the mattress next to him. I hadn’t paid much attention to Sandy before, not with Johnny in front of me, touching me. The look she’d given me, though, told me a lot.
“So. Sandy?”
“Yeah?” Johnny stretched to snatch a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand, offering me the pack and shrugging when I shook my head. He lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke, exhaling on his next sentence. “What about her?”
“Do you have something going on with her?”
“She’s my old lady.” Johnny shrugged and moved in to kiss me again. “But she’s cool, don’t worry.”
“Wait a minute.” I frowned, a hand on his chest holding him back. “Your old… You mean your wife?”
“Well, yeah. Nah. We split up a while ago, just haven’t signed the papers yet. Now she just comes around once in a while to bring the kid.”
“Wait a minute,” I said again. This hurt my brain. I took the cigarette he offered this time and took a drag. I’d only smoked a couple times before, but I managed not to kill myself with coughing. “She’s your wife. That was your kid?”
“Yeah, that’s Kimmy, my daughter.”
“You couldn’t have split up too long ago,” I pointed out. “She’s only what, ten months old?”
“Something like that. Yeah.” He took the cigarette back and eyed me through a veil of smoke. “You got a problem with that? I mean, it ain’t like we’re still together. Like I said, she’s cool with what I do. She does her own thing.”
I wasn’t sure I was cool with it, but what could I say? I came in off the street and fucked him in a house full of strangers, in a time before I’d even come into this world. I shuddered, thinking of it. Somewhere out there my parents hadn’t even met yet. I didn’t exist in this world, and Johnny’d already been married and had a kid. His daughter was older than me.
“Hey. You okay?” Johnny pushed the heavy weight of my hair off my shoulder and down my back, now not so sticky that the sweat was drying.
“Yeah, sure. I’m great. It’s all cool.” I couldn’t even be jealous, just annoyed with my mind for tossing up crap like an ex-wife who didn’t know boundaries.
“Cool.” This seemed enough for him. Naked, Johnny smoked and sighed, leaning back against the headboard. He shot me a glance. “You’re not running away this time.”
I looked around the room and drew in a long breath, but all I smelled was our fucking and his cigarette. “No. Should I go?”
He smiled and leaned to kiss me, lingering. “Hell, no. You stay here. We’ll get Candy to cook us up something good. Paul’s coming over later to do some work on a project. You should stay.”
I bunched up a couple of flat pillows—no memory foam here—and stretched out beside him. “What kind of project?”
“An art project. You like art, Emm?”
“I… Sure.” It wasn’t really a lie. I was convinced I’d like art if I could ever appreciate it.
Johnny laughed and stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the nightstand. He stretched out an arm behind me, pulling me closer to rest my head on his chest. It was a better pillow than the others had been. “What kind of art do you like?”
“Oh, umm, Van Gogh, I guess. Dali.”
He snorted. “Those guys.”
I looked up at him. “What kind of art do you like?”
He shrugged. “I know it when I see it. Anyway, Paul, he’s not doing something like that. Not painting and shit. He’s got a movie camera. He’s going to make another one of his movies or something. I dunno. I told him I’d help him out again.”
Johnny and Paul had made three or four of these homegrown art films, all even more plotless than the foreign horror films had been. I’d only caught bits and pieces of them on the internet, since Jen didn’t own them and I hadn’t yet managed to get through the entire queue on Interflix. Some of them weren’t even available on DVD.
“I’ve seen them.”
He cocked his head to look at me, curious. “You been in one of his movies? Is that your bag?”
“Oh, no. I meant… Never mind what I mean.”
“You are something,” Johnny said again. “I just can’t figure out your scene, you know?”
“I don’t have a scene.” He kissed me, then looked into my eyes like he was trying to seek out all my secrets. I pulled away. “What’s the movie about, Johnny?”
He shrugged again and yawned. “Hell if I know. I just said I’d help him out, you know? Help him do his thing. He’s got the camera and the money. He’s got some rich-ass bastard behind it, too, says he’ll get it in all the cinemas.”
At least this gave me a better idea of what year we were in. The first of Paul’s movies had been made in 1976. All of them, from what I could recall, were made over a year-and-a-half time span.
Johnny ran a hand over my hair. “Paul’s an artist.”
“So are you.”
“Me? Hell, no.” He laughed at that. Hard. “I can’t draw worth shit. Can’t sing. I’m not even a very good actor. The only thing I guess I’m good at is posing for pictures.”
Pitchahs. I laughed softly. “You are pretty.”
Johnny snorted. “Yeah, well, prett
y is as pretty does, huh? It pays the bills, I guess. And it beats stealing cars.”
“You won’t be doing it forever,” I told him.
The clock on the dresser ticked very loudly as silence fell between us. As he stared at me. Johnny’s gaze took in everything about me. He slid a hand beneath my hair, cupping my neck, but didn’t pull me closer.
“No,” he said. “I know that. You can’t think to do something like that forever, you’ll end up on the street.”
“You won’t end up on the street,” I said.
“What are you, a fortune-teller?”
“Something like that. Sure.” I took his palm and held it up to trace the lines there. I had no idea about palmistry, or cards, or any of that. But I did know his future. “I see fame and fortune in your future.”
“Good, good. That’s good.” Johnny leaned forward to stare down into the mysteries of his palm as though he could see what I wasn’t really seeing.
“And…love.” The word slipped out of me on a breath.
He looked at me. “Yeah? You see love?”
“I see love for you, yes.” My voice had gone dreamy and thick. I traced another line on his palm, making it all up and yet convinced, somehow, I was telling the absolute truth. I looked deep into Johnny’s eyes, captured by his gaze, held tight to this place and time, at least for that moment, which was maybe all I could really expect.
He pulled me closer and kissed me, long, lingering, slow and sweet. “I like the sound of that.”
We kissed for a while without urgency. Lying with him in that big bed, the pillows and sheets tangled all around us, all of this had taken on a magical soft focus, sort of like in his movies. His cock rose up hard between our bodies but he seemed in no hurry to fuck again—and that was okay. Different, unexpected, but okay. It was enough to be there with him, making out like we had no place to be and all the time in the world.
Which of course, I did not. My bladder twinged, first of all, an event that had never happened in my fugues. Laughing, I twisted from Johnny’s insistent grip and left the bed to pad on naked feet to the bathroom. I turned from the doorway to look at him. I blew him a kiss. And when I turned back and stepped through the doorway, I stumbled and fell and ended up on my hands and knees in my front hallway.