Great. I was crashing his party. What I at first thought was some sort of special reception turned out to be a regular Thursday night event, though, as I overheard one couple talking about how they’d been there the week before to pick up a housewarming gift for friends. This week, apparently, they were looking for a birthday present.
I took my time, wandering the unevenly sized rooms. The floors of stripped and stained wood gleamed, and even though none of the walls seemed quite plumb, the soft off-white paint and windows hung with gauzy netting made up for it. Fairy lights hung on potted trees and crisscrossed the rooms with higher ceilings.
“This place is gorgeous,” I mentioned to an older couple who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. I was glad I’d come straight from work. At least I was wearing a skirt and heels instead of jeans and boots.
“Oh, it’s amazing what Johnny’s done with this place, isn’t it?” the woman said. “Just look at some of these pieces. Hard to believe you could find anything like this in Harrisburg, of all places. Who knew there was so much local talent?”
“Is that what he focuses on mostly?” I thought Jen had said something like that.
“Yes. And his own work, obviously. You’re familiar with Johnny’s work, of course.” The man with her had wandered off, maybe to refill his cheese plate. The woman waved her glass of wine in my direction.
“Of course.”
Truthfully, of all my internet stalking, the one part of Johnny’s life I’d paid little attention to had been his artwork. I knew a little of his history, but not much else.
“We’re so fortunate to have an artist of his caliber, and his support of the local arts community has been so amazing.” She was a little drunk. She leaned in to me. “And what a looker, huh?”
I drew back in distaste. “Yeah. Is he here, do you know?”
“Johnny’s always here on Thursdays. This is his place,” she said, like I was a fucking moron.
A foron I might very well be, but I wasn’t going to be a coward, too. I thanked her and kept moving, room by room, until I saw him. He was standing in the very back of the very last room, talking to a group of people I assumed were artists, based on their eclectic appearances.
He was smiling, even laughing, and, oh, how beautiful he was. The wanting was a burning in my gut, sudden and fierce, but I welcomed the pain of it as what I deserved. I hung back in the doorway for a moment, watching him interact with the group surrounding him, and more jealousy speared me. Not sexual, this time. If Johnny was flirting it was subtle enough to keep me from seeing it. But he looked as if he genuinely liked the people he was with, and I wanted to be one of them.
He looked up. Saw me. His smile didn’t fade, his laughter didn’t break. He didn’t wave me in, but he didn’t look as though he wanted me to leave, either. If anything, he looked like he’d been expecting me all along.
I passed the time looking over the art in this room while his admirers all paid their respects and left one by one, until eventually we were the only two in the room. I felt him behind me before I turned, and I stayed staring at the piece in front of me for some long, silent moments while I tried to get up the courage to speak.
Johnny didn’t wait. “You like that one?”
I glanced from the corner of my eye but didn’t have the guts to face him. “It’s nice.”
“Nice? To hell with nice. Art isn’t nice. Art’s supposed to move you.”
I looked at him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know a lot about art.”
Johnny laughed, not unkindly. “What’s to know? You think you need a fancy degree or, what, a beret, to get art? Nah, you don’t need any of that. You just have to feel it.”
“Well,” I said after a moment, “I guess I’m not feeling much of anything about it.”
“Me, neither,” Johnny said. “I just hung that there because that kid needs some cash to pay for school, and some people like that kind of thing.”
I laughed and turned to face him. “Really?”
“Really.”
We both studied it for a moment longer.
“I wanted to thank you for the clothes,” I finally said.
Johnny said nothing. The music was fainter in this room than it had been in the others. I could still hear the buzz of conversation in the other rooms, the clatter of heels on the wooden floors. But in here, we were still alone.
“I told you. It’s cold out there. You need a good coat.”
“Johnny—”
His eyes flashed, but I wasn’t going to call him Mr. Dellasandro. “It was nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“Where did you get them?” I moved two steps closer, noticing that he took only one back. I didn’t want anyone to hear this. I wanted to be closer to him.
“You left them at my house,” Johnny said.
My gut twisted hard, and I swallowed a tinge of bitter bile. “Oh. Shit. What happened? What did I do? I mean…oh, God, this is so embarrassing. This is so—”
Before I knew it, he had me by the elbow and had walked me through a small door into a tiny office, where he sat me on a hard-backed chair, pushed my head into my lap and drew me a paper cup of water from the cooler.
“Breathe,” Johnny said. “And, Jesus, if you have to puke, do it in the can.”
I didn’t have to puke, but the world had spun in an alarming way. Not like I was going to go dark, that was always more of a slip-sliding sideways thing. This was most definitely like I’d spent too much time on the merry-go-round. I sipped the water and drew in a breath.
“You’re as white as paper. Drink more of that water.”
I did. “I’m sorry. But I have to know.”
“You don’t remember?” His accent deepened when he was concerned, I noticed. He lost the r at the end of his words.
I shook my head. “No.”
He rubbed at his face, then pinched the bridge of his nose. He sat on the edge of the small desk. I was close enough to touch his knee, but I didn’t.
“Was it…bad?” I’d spent so much time lately on the verge of raw emotion, I didn’t realize I was going to cry until the tears had already started. “Please, Johnny. Please tell me it wasn’t bad.”
“Hey, hey,” he said. “Don’t cry.”
His embrace was warm and as familiar as his every gesture, though I knew it was my mind just filling in the blanks. I didn’t care. Shamelessly, I took advantage of his pity and pressed up against him, my cheek to the front of his shirt. I could hear his heartbeat, and it steadied me.
Johnny’s hand stroked down my back and through my hair. “Shh. It wasn’t anything bad.”
I shuddered against him with relief. I closed my eyes. “I’m so, so sorry for whatever it was.”
Johnny didn’t say anything, just held me. His heartbeat sped up. His fingertips circled on my back, and my heartbeat bumped faster, too.
I took a deep breath. My story wasn’t secret, it simply wasn’t something I told most people right off the bat. I hadn’t even told Jen yet, and she’d become the best friend I had. But I had to tell him, to explain, even though I knew it would make him look at me with pity I wouldn’t be able to stand.
“When I was six, I fell on the playground and hit my head hard enough to knock me out. I was in a coma for a week.”
His hand stopped moving. He didn’t move away, but I felt every muscle in his body go stiff. His heartbeat got faster, but he didn’t say anything.
“I suffered undetermined brain damage that fortunately didn’t result in the loss of any of my motor skills or anything. But it did leave me with the tendency to…blank out. Sort of like seizures. They usually last only a few seconds but can last for a few minutes, too.”
“Fugues,” Johnny said.
Startled, I pulled away to look at him. “What?”
“They’re called fugues,” he said.
“Yeah. How did you know that?”
“I know lots of things,” Johnny said.
I’d m
oved away a little bit, but he was still holding me, and there was no way I was giving that up. My belly pressed his belt buckle in a way that made my knees weak. “I call them fugues, yes, though medically they’ve been diagnosed as everything from petit mal to grand mal seizures. I’d stopped having them, until a few weeks ago. They came back. That night at your house.”
“You went blank,” Johnny said. “Your face went blank.”
“Oh, God,” I said miserably. “How mortifying. And what else did I do? How did I end up—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Johnny interrupted with a flash of his green-brown eyes. “I told you, it wasn’t bad. You couldn’t help it, right?”
The last thing I wanted was for him to look at me like some sort of medical freak. Abnormal. Disabled. “No, but—”
“Then don’t worry about it. It’s forgotten.”
He hadn’t let me go. His gaze burned into mine. I’d thought I knew that intense stare, but seeing it on-screen was incomparable to being subject to it in real life. Both of us, I realized, were breathing faster. Belly to belly, his arms around me, all it took was for me to tip onto my toes so my mouth could reach his.
I kissed him.
Just a brush, I wasn’t bold enough to try for more than that, so when his mouth opened under mine and he pulled me harder against him, I gasped into his mouth. Our tongues met, slip-sliding and sideways, and the earth tilted, but I clung to him and kept myself from falling.
At least, that’s what I thought. In the next second I was a few feet away from him, my mouth still wet from his and my heart beating so fast it made thunder in my ears. There wasn’t much room for him to retreat, but he’d backed up against the desk and held me at arm’s length.
I whimpered when he let me go.
It was a stupid, raw and thoroughly embarrassing noise, but what was one more humiliation on top of all the others? I clapped a hand over my mouth, anyway. My eyes felt wide enough to see the whole damned world.
Johnny shuddered and turned half-away from me. “Go on. Get outta here.”
“But—”
“Emm,” Johnny said, startling me to silence. “I said get out. Please.”
And I did, taking two stumbling steps back to cross the threshold, standing in mute compliance when he shut the door in my face. Shaking on weak knees, the taste of him still on my tongue, my heart still beating so fast I thought I might really pass out, I turned on my heel and smiled.
He knew my name.
Chapter 13
The euphoria lasted about thirty-seven seconds, just long enough for me to remember that I’d kissed him, and he’d pushed me away. Fortunately, nobody’d seen me come out of his office, so I didn’t have to face anyone with rejection stamped all over me. I left the Tin Angel without even looking at any of the rest of the art.
Johnny didn’t come to the Mocha on Monday.
Or Tuesday.
Or Wednesday.
By Thursday, I’d convinced myself I’d scared him away for good, though I didn’t dare tell Jen. I hadn’t told her about the kiss, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was worried she’d feel like I was trying to steal something she could really claim first, or if I just didn’t want to admit he’d pushed me away. She knew something was wrong, though. Good friends can do that.
“So,” she said over sandwiches that weren’t as good as the Mocha’s morning selection of baked goods. “Spill it. What’s up?”
“Why should anything be…up?” I lifted the slightly soggy croissant and took off the iceberg lettuce. “Look at that, what a shame. This sandwich calls for nothing less than baby radicchio.”
“Uh-huh.” Jen had already taken the crusts off what the Mocha had called “PB & J for Grown-ups.” We hadn’t figured out what that meant.
I sighed. “I have something to tell you, and I don’t want it to get between us, that’s all.”
“Girrrrl,” Jen said on a sigh. “What on earth?”
“Well…”
She waited. I tried, I really did, but it was too hard to confess it. Some things are too hard to tell even a best friend.
Suddenly, her hand covered mine. “Is it something really that bad? You can tell me, Emm. Honestly. Are you sick or something?”
I turned my palm upward to squeeze hers. I wanted to tell her the truth about everything—my fucked-up brain, the fugues, ending up naked in my living room. I just couldn’t. I knew she’d understand, at least about the fugues, but I didn’t want her to have to. “No. That’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I sort of did something and I’m not sure how you’ll take it.”
“Did you put up some naked picture of me on Connex or something?”
I laughed. “No. God, no.”
“Then I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay with it, whatever it is.” Jen let go of my hand to take a bite of her sandwich. “Huh. Crunchy peanut butter and exotic jelly and costs as much as about fifty regular pb and j’s. Is that what makes it for grown-ups? I should’ve had the turkey.”
“I kissed him,” I said.
She swallowed, throat working, then rinsed her mouth with a swig of milk before finally managing to answer. “Who?”
I guess my face gave her answer enough, because her eyes went wide.
“Yeah,” I said before she could say anything else. “I was so stupid.”
“How? Where? What happened? Oh, my God, what was it like?” Her squeals turned heads.
I gestured at her to shush, and told her in a lowered voice the whole story, leaving out the bits about the hallucinations I’d had while dark. She listened without interrupting, only occasionally shaking her head. When I’d finished, I bit into my sandwich so I could keep myself from saying more.
“Oh, girl,” Jen said finally. “That is some messed-up shit right there.”
“I know,” I said miserably. “And this sandwich sucks.”
She laughed. “Yeah, you know there are a dozen other places we could meet for dinner.”
“Yeah…I guess I wanted to come here because… Well, you know.”
“I know.” She licked a smear of jelly from her thumb. “I can’t blame you. I mean, I knew you had it bad, but I didn’t know you had it for realsies.”
“It’s not for realsies,” I pointed out.
“Are you sure?”
“He pushed me away. Dudes don’t push away women they’re kissing if they’re into them.”
“Sometimes they do,” Jen said. “He might’ve had a reason you don’t know about. Maybe he’s got a girlfriend.”
I snorted. “That would actually be a worse reason than if he’s just not into me.”
“You think so?” Jen didn’t look convinced.
“Yeah. If he’s not into me, which I’m sure he’s not, I can just move on. But if he’s super into me but can’t be with me because he’s with someone else…”
“I see your point,” she said. “That would suck.”
I laughed, feeling a little better at having confessed. “And also totally unlikely. He pushed me away from him like my mouth was poison. Shit, that’s embarrassing.”
“That really is,” Jen said.
We looked at each other for half a minute before busting into cackles of entirely inappropriate laughter. It was good, though. Made me feel better than any sympathetic words or assurances could have.
“You’re not pissed off?” I asked.
“Hell, no, why would I be?” Jen looked genuinely confused. “Well…because…it’s Johnny.”
She snorted laughter again. “It’s not like we were together and he dumped me for you, or anything. I wouldn’t want to have to hire ninjas to cut holes in your favorite jeans.”
“But you liked him first.”
“What, are we in sixth grade? Girl,” Jen told me seriously, “you are going to kick me so hard for saying this, because I know you won’t believe me, but I think he does like you.”
“No way.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I think
so. I was in here one day last week when you weren’t, and he came in. He looked around. He looked at me, girl, straight on, but it was the empty seat across from me he was seeing, if you know what I mean.”
“Get out of here! Why didn’t you tell me?” I felt instantly guilty for sounding accusatory when I’d just gotten finished feeling guilty about trying to nab her crush.
“I didn’t think anything of it until you told me this, but it makes sense now.”
“I told you he pushed me away when I kissed him, and you think you remember him looking for me here?” I shook my head with a sigh. “Sorry, that’s really reaching.”
“Hey. What happened before the kiss?”
I thought about how he’d held me against him and stroked my hair. “He was just being nice.”
“You think dudes are just randomly nice like that?”
“Some are! Oh. God.” My stomach dropped out. I put my face in my hands.
“Shew, girl, it ain’t no thing!” She poked me until I looked up.
I couldn’t tell her that I had, in fact, fucked Johnny seven ways to Sunday. In my head. That it had been sweet and dirty and gorgeous, and that I’d already worried that somehow my fantasies had been spurred by something my unconscious body was doing.
The jingle of the Mocha’s doorbell made Jen look over my shoulder. I didn’t have to turn to see who it was. I could tell by the way her eyes widened and the look she gave me, her mouth clamped tight on a smile. I stiffened, closing my eyes briefly. I heard the shuffle of shoes on the floor. I waited for the brush of his coat as he passed me. I opened my eyes.
Johnny stood at our table, looking down at both of us.
Jen, to give her credit, looked barely surprised. I made sure to keep my mouth shut instead of allowing myself to gape like an idiot. We stared up at him. He stared down at us.
“Girls,” Johnny said with a nod, and moved on toward the counter.
That’s when I discovered that being acknowledged was actually hideously worse than being ignored.