“Lame,” I told myself.
It didn’t feel lame. Watching them together, it felt the way I had in eighth grade when the boy I had a crush on asked someone else to dance. I wanted to fast-forward through the movie, or at least through this scene. Even Johnny’s naked ass wasn’t enough to get me past the sick, twisty feeling in my gut.
My ice cream had melted and the heat had kicked on, making the comforter too heavy. I kicked it off and lifted the remote to scan ahead, when it happened again.
I went dark.
Chapter 11
“Hey.” Johnny’s voice turned me from the hedgerow I found myself in front of. “Where’d you run off to this time?”
If I opened my mouth, I’d babble, so I pressed my lips closed on a smile I hoped looked real. Johnny’s hair, slicked back and wet, looked familiar, as did the jeans and tank top. He came toward me with a slight grin.
“You missed Paul,” he said. “He just left. He’ll be back tomorrow sometime, says he has more to shoot.”
I couldn’t speak. I let him pull me closer and kiss me. I let him twirl a strand of my hair around his finger and tug. But I couldn’t speak.
“What? You mad about something? You ain’t mad about that stuff by the pool, are you? That wasn’t anything. That was just for the movie.”
The movie. The pool. I’d just watched Sandy put her hands all over him.
I found my voice. “With Sandy?”
“Yeah. But it was just…look, she’s still got a thing going on for me, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just at thing, you know?”
“I know.” I did know. I had a thing for Johnny myself.
“Anyway, it was just something they wanted us to do for the movie, that’s all. She wanted to make it more, make it real, but I told her and I told Paul, I’m not into that scene, you know? Not with her, anyway. But you weren’t around. Too bad, huh?” He grinned. “I coulda helped make you famous.”
“How…how long was I gone?”
Johnny shrugged. “Coupla hours? I gotta tell you, Emm, I figured you’d disappeared again, just run off. But you left your stuff behind. How’d you do that?”
He looked me over, a frown tipping his mouth for the first time since he’d seen me. “What are you wearing?”
I had on a pair of fuzzy sleep pants with Batman on them and a baby-doll T-shirt. Sick-day clothes. I’d showered but done nothing with my hair, and it hung in still-damp sheaves, heavy down my back.
“Kiss me,” I said instead of answering him. “Just kiss me.”
And he did. Long, and soft and slow and sweet, just the way I wanted it and the way I needed it. The way I knew he would kiss me in my real life, if only I could ever convince him to try. I pulled away, knowing I must look tousled and glazed. Love drunk.
Johnny cocked his head, eyes narrowed. “Emm?”
The world was shifting under my feet again. Slip-sliding away, as Paul Simon said, but I doubted he’d ever had something like this happen to him. Fuck. Had that song even been written yet? I didn’t know.
“Kiss me, Johnny,” I said.
He did again, over and over, while the world spun so fast I was sure I’d fly right off. His hands caressed me, slid up under my T-shirt to cup my bare breasts and tweak my nipples. We kissed in that garden, in the bushes, like a pair of lovers trying hard not to get caught.
I could smell the chlorine on his skin and something tropical, maybe tanning oil. I smelled the broken branches and leaves from where we’d crushed against the bush. I smelled all of this and, under it, the sick-making scent of oranges. It made bitter saliva squirt into my mouth.
“I have to go,” I told him when I could no longer fight it off.
“But you’ll come back, right? Promise me you’ll come back.” Johnny took a fistful of my hair and held me tight, leashed. “I’m not letting you go unless you promise.”
“I promise!” The words spun out of me on a gasp. “I do. I’ll be back.”
“Good,” Johnny said, and kissed me again. “So, I’ll see you?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, yes, yes, Johnny.”
I let him go, even though he was all that kept me standing. I smiled and waved. I turned and walked through the garden and out to the sidewalk in front of his house. I blinked.
My bed. TV still on, movie still playing, still showing the same scene. My nipples were still tight, my clit throbbing. My breath caught in my throat as I fell back on the pillows.
I cupped my breasts, but there was no warmth there from any touch but mine. I’d imagined him kissing me, touching me. My body had reacted and still was.
I slid my hand under my waistband and found my cunt, aching and empty and slick. My clit pulsed as I circled it with my fingertip. My hips shifted, pushing upward as I stroked myself. I stopped, staring up at the ceiling that should’ve been blocked by Johnny’s face but wasn’t. And wouldn’t ever be.
“Dammit, brain. Not fair.”
I slid my tongue across my lips and imagined the taste of him. I looked at the screen, where Johnny was now lying on his stomach, naked, on a bed with his eyes closed. Sleeping. Dreaming, it looked like, by the way his lids twitched, and he let out a moan.
Fuck. It went right through me. It was full of sex and longing, that moan, much like the one slipping from between my lips. On the TV, Johnny was dreaming, but I was awake. Not dark. This, my hand on my clit, was real. The orgasm building inside me, my belly muscles getting tight, that was real. The bed beneath me, my own slick heat coating my fingers as I fucked myself, all of that was real. And my orgasm, finally, that was real, too.
I ventured out just after five o’clock, when it no longer felt so scandalous to be up and about when I was supposed to be home in bed. The walk to the Morningstar Mocha was just long enough in the cold air to get my blood pumping, and the exercise had me feeling better after my comfort-food overload. I was going to destroy all that good effort with a piece of cake and a sugary latte, but I didn’t care. I needed the sugar and the caffeine.
“Hey.” I tossed a glance at Carlos. “Are you always here?”
“Free internet,” Carlos said with a shrug. “Saves me close to fifty bucks a month. That’s more than enough to cover the cost of my coffee and doughnuts.”
“You obviously don’t drink enough coffee and eat enough doughnuts.”
He shrugged again and pointed at the laptop. “When I sell my novel, I’ll treat you all to lattes.”
“It’s a deal.” I peeled off my gloves and shoved them into the pocket of my jacket, which was not the right weight for this weather but…well, I’d lost my coat along with my favorite pair of jeans. I looked around the almost-empty coffee shop. “Who’s been in today?”
“Not your boyfriend, if that’s what you’re hoping.” Carlos gave me a smug grin.
I ignored it. “How about Jen?”
“Haven’t seen her. You’re her bestie, not me.”
I pulled out my phone with a flourish and tapped out a text asking her if she planned on stopping by. “Do you have any friends?”
“Good one.” Carlos’s grin was nicer this time.
I gave him a smug grin of my own and went to the counter for a double white-chocolate peppermint-stick latte with full-fat milk and a slice of coffee cake. I could practically hear the buttons on my fat pants screaming in protest, but I didn’t care. Sugar and caffeine had helped in the past with the fugues. Indulging was worth a few extra hours on the treadmill.
I took my coffee and cake to a table toward the back just as my phone buzzed from my pocket. I sent up a prayer to thank whoever was the patron saint of phones that my precious iPhone hadn’t been in my pocket when I lost my clothes, and thumbed the screen to read the message from Jen. She was on her way. I wasn’t sure what I planned to tell her about Night of a Hundred Moons. I wasn’t sure I could watch it again. Maybe I could just lend it to her.
I sipped the hot, sweet coffee and picked a lump of cinnamon sugar from the top of my coffee cake. I people
-watched. The Mocha was a good place to do it, since it was on a street set in the heart of a residential district. The crowd was varied, too, young and old, trendy hipsters in line behind classy old broads with red lipstick and leopard coats. I spotted familiar faces from my few nights downtown. Harrisburg’s a city, but a small one, no matter what my mom thought.
By the time Jen arrived, pink-cheeked with sparkling eyes and a grin I had to return, I’d finished my cake and drank half my coffee. I was buzzing from both, but there was no hint of oranges. Not topsy-turvy world. Nothing shifted or slipped away from me. And, of course, there was no Johnny.
And I wanted there to be. Even if it meant going dark. The thought startled me, yet I wasn’t quite surprised.
“What’s up?” Jen said as I stood to greet her with a hug only really good friends merited. “You look confuzzled.”
“I… No, I’m fine. Just a little tired. I stayed home from work today.”
She withdrew, making a face. “Ew! Not the flu, is it?”
“No.”
She leaned closer. “Trouble in lady-parts land?”
I laughed. “No. Just tired. Bad headache. I think it was more a mental health day than anything.”
“Girl, I need one of those so bad. I’ve had it with preschool kids and their runny, snotty noses and poopy pants.”
“Wow, and here I thought the youth of the world was in good hands.”
She shook her head. “The fuck was I thinking, getting a job in a day-care center? I thought the hours would be good. And I like kids. Hell, I love my nieces and nephews, and since my womb will probably dry up and fall out before I ever meet someone to have some of my own with—”
“Oh, shut up. God. You’re what, twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“It’s all downhill after twenty-five, Emm,” Jen said so seriously I thought she meant it until she cracked up.
“Gee, thanks, so what does that make me?”
She waved a hand. “Ah, you’re fine.”
“Fine as in old?”
“How old are you?” She shrugged out of her coat and hung it on the back of her chair, but didn’t sit.
“I’ll be thirty-two.”
“Huh.” She thought on that for a minute. “Well, I guess you could always adopt.”
“Bitch,” I called after her as she headed for the counter to place her order.
Back again in a few minutes with her drink, Jen looked me over. “You know I was kidding.”
“I know. I don’t think I’ll ever have kids, either. It’s okay.”
“No? Really?” She blew on her coffee to cool it before sipping and winced, anyway, as she burned her tongue.
“No.” I hadn’t told her about the brain stuff. I wasn’t sure this was the right place or time to reveal it now. “Not that I have to worry about it.”
“You never know. You could meet Prince Charming tomorrow,” Jen said.
“Well. The same goes for you. You never know what might happen.”
She looked around the Mocha and frowned. “Yeah, well, I doubt it’s going to happen here.”
We both laughed at that and looked up as the bell jingled. I froze. Jen’s laughter eased into a happy little sigh. We both looked at each other and then away, fast, to keep ourselves from laughing.
Johnny’s coat brushed our table as he passed, and I let my fingers creep over the spot to caress it. I caught Jen looking at me. I shrugged.
“You,” she said, “have it worse than I ever did.”
“I got the movie today.” I pitched my voice low, too aware of him only a few feet away. After he’d so rudely dispatched me from his house after the cookie incident, I didn’t want him to overhear me talking about him like the sort of goggle-eyed fan he thought I was.
“Hundred Moons? Wheeee!” Jen hushed herself, though Johnny didn’t seem to have heard. “Kick. Ass. When can I come over and watch it? Oh, wait. You did already, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” I admitted. “I had to.”
“Oh, girl, it ain’t no thing.” Jen lifted her cup in my direction. “I’d have been all over that bitch the second I got it out of the envelope. So. How was it? It’s superhard to find, but it’s supposed to be amazing.”
“It was…” The truth was, I could barely remember the actual movie. “I guess if you’re an art movie critic you could probably find a lot of good things to say about it. The cinematography and stuff, or maybe the existential meaning of the plight of youth in modern society.”
“Shit like that,” Jen said solemnly, “is why we are friends.”
“No, seriously,” I told her. “It was pretty much like the others but with more random moments.”
Jen lowered her voice and flicked her gaze toward Johnny, who’d taken his coffee to a table directly opposite us on the other side of the room. “At least tell me he’s naked in it.”
“Completely.”
“Then it’s worth it,” she said. “Because damn, naked Johnny Dellasandro cannot fucking be bad.”
“His wife’s in it. His ex-wife.”
“Which one?”
“He has more than one?”
“I think he’s had three or four,” she said with another surreptitious look.
He had to know we were talking about him, or looking at him. How could he have missed it? We were worse than a pair of giggly girls in the back of the room passing notes about the hot substitute teacher.
“How did I miss that?”
“Maybe you only Googled pictures of his cock.”
I tossed a napkin at her. “Shhhh!”
Jen laughed into her hands. “Sorry!”
“He’s not married now, is he?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Dating anyone?” I asked.
Jen’s brows raised. “My stalking does have its limits. I mean, I don’t think so. If he is, he doesn’t bring her around here. Though he was with that chick last week, and I have seen him out and about a few times with her.”
“Shit.” I sounded miserable and didn’t try to hide it.
“Oh, girl,” Jen said, sympathetic. “Look at you.”
I frowned and licked my finger to pick up the last bits of sugar from my plate. “I know. Pathetic, right?”
“You should talk to him. Just say hello or something.”
I sighed and risked a glance, but Johnny was deep inside his book, the title of which I couldn’t see. “I sorta kinda did that.”
“And?”
I looked at her, coming clean. “I took him some cookies as a thank-you for that day I slipped on the ice.”
“You fucked him!” Heads turned. Not his, thank God. Jen lowered her voice to a hiss. “You fucked Johnny Dellasandro?”
“No! No, no,” I amended as my cheeks turned to infernos. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with me, actually. In fact, when I went to give him the cookies, he wouldn’t even eat one. He was a douche bag, actually.”
“No.” She sat back in her chair, slumping, defeated. “I mean, he’s always sort of standoffish, but to be a douche bag? That’s so disappointing. Did you tell him you wanted to ride his face or something embarrassing like that? Because that’s probably what I’d do.”
“No. I just made him some cookies because he’d mentioned he liked homemade cookies.”
She scoffed. “Who doesn’t?”
“Apparently, Johnny Dellasandro doesn’t. Or at least not mine. And if he won’t even eat my cookies, I sincerely doubt he’d be interested in eating my pussy.”
Jen burst into laughter, and I followed, even though I wasn’t really trying to be funny. We both guffawed until even Johnny turned to watch us. Our eyes met, his somber and mine I could only imagine as full of glee. I could’ve sobered at the look he gave me, but I didn’t. Screw him, I thought. I’m not going to pretend I’m intimidated.
“Ah, well, I have to run. Taking Grandma to the hairdresser.” Jen sighed with the last remnants of her laughter and got up. “When can I come over to wat
ch the movie?”
“Thursday?”
“That’s good with me. You want to watch it again?”
I hadn’t been sure, but I nodded, anyway. “Duh!”
“Cool. See you Thursday.” She laughed, shaking her head, and muttered, “Cookies,” as she left.
I sat there a minute or two longer, braving the energy to face the cold outside, now dark. I stalled by making a trip to the restroom. When I came out, Johnny was gone. He hadn’t gone far, though, just outside the Mocha’s front door. He was lighting up a cigarette.
I stopped when I saw him. I almost said hello, then thought better of it. Then thought again. I’d say hi to a stranger I passed on the street; I shouldn’t make Johnny be anything less. Or anything more.
“Hey,” I said, casual.
He nodded and blew smoke out into a thin stream that was whisked immediately away in the wind. The smell bit at the inside of my nose, but at least it wasn’t oranges. I gave him another look, willing myself not to leap into his arms and make a bigger fool of myself, though once my teeth started chattering it was hard to look like anything else.
We had to walk in the same direction, and without words we fell into step next to each other. It was the longest three blocks I’d ever walked, and possibly the coldest.
I never wanted it to end.
By the time we got to my house, though, I was shuddering with cold. My jaw gritted to keep my teeth from clattering. My nose raw. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I turned in at my front walk, and I thought Johnny would keep going without a word the way we’d walked the whole way home.
“You should have a better coat,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “What?”
He was almost finished with the cigarette and pointed at me with the butt. “Your coat’s not warm enough. You should have a better one.”
“I, um, misplaced my other coat,” I told him.
He studied me for what felt like a very long time. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Johnny said as he backed up a couple steps on the sidewalk, “you should get yourself another one.”