“You should be more careful with these.” I spied a signature in the corner of the print. “Wow. Are these signed?”
“Yeah. Paul took those.”
I knew that, of course, though the name hadn’t risen immediately to my mind. I’d seen the first one online, the second one in cropped and grainy versions that did nothing to show off the real beauty in the picture. And the others, the sheaf of a dozen other shots, all glossy and signed, I’d never seen at all.
I looked at each one carefully, seeing more than just his body. It was luscious, yes, but there was more to it than that. The shots weren’t cheesecake, or even gay porn, though that’s where I’d seen them before, on sites dedicated to such things. I put them carefully in order. These pictures told a story, one to the next.
“You should take good care of these,” I said when I saw a shot I’d once seen in an online auction, going for close to four thousand dollars. “Signed like this and stuff.”
Johnny pushed up on an elbow. “What for? They ain’t worth nothing. I did them as a favor to Paul. He paid me a couple hundred bucks, that’s all. He hasn’t even used them for anything.”
I flipped it over and saw a poem scribbled on the back. I remembered, then, why the picture in my hand had been selling for so much money, and it wasn’t the custom-made frame and matting. “Ed wrote this?”
“Yeah, he’s always writing shit down on stuff.”
Everything’s worth more after the artist dies. Ed D’Onofrio had killed himself. He’d slit his wrists and drowned in a swimming pool. I hadn’t paid much attention to his death, just that it had spurred the breakup of the Enclave, leading its members to all pursue their own projects and achieve success or failure.
My throat dried and I looked at him. There was another bit of information I’d gleaned from my online stalking. After Ed died and the Enclave broke up, Johnny’d broken, too.
Some accounts said he’d simply holed up out of grief. Others claimed it had gone further than that. That he’d actually gotten hooked on heroin, gone to rehab, been committed to a mental facility. That he’d come out of it clean and dry and, arguably, not crazy, and that sometime after that he’d started creating art, real art, the kind critics wet their panties for. I’d never found confirmation of the rehab or institution part, though it was proven fact he’d become a respected artist in that time frame.
Johnny sat up to take the picture from me, then the book. He put them both aside and pulled me into his arms. “Don’t worry about that stuff now.”
In my real world, flirting was something I’d never really gotten the hang of. I had no trouble talking to men. My problem was more that I was too straightforward, too practical, too honest. The subtle dance of back-and-forth my friends did with potential lovers had always escaped me. I wasn’t sure it had ever stopped me from getting dates, but it had gotten me into trouble more than once when something less than bluntness might’ve served me better than being forthright. Honesty in dating wasn’t always the best policy.
Here, with this Johnny, the one with longer hair and a younger face, I discovered my ability to flirt. To vamp. I felt my mouth curve up in a saucy, sexy smile, felt the lift of my brow, the parting of my lips. Come-hither eyes.
“What should I pay attention to, then?” Even my voice shifted and went sultry.
“Me.”
“Oh, really? You?”
He was already taking my hand and putting it on his crotch, where he moved it in slow circles on his hardening cock. “Yeah. Me. Right here.”
I laughed and shifted closer to push him back on the bed and straddle him. I pinned his wrists, one next to each ear. I leaned in to kiss him but pulled away just as he leaned to kiss me back. He snapped his teeth at me, growling.
“No,” I said. “Not so fast.”
Johnny lay back, eyes flashing, but he didn’t try to get away the way I knew he could with a simple push. “What are you going to do to me?”
“What do you want me to do to you?”
“Anything you want,” Johnny said with a sly grin. “Everything you want.”
I tilted my head, looking him over, then glanced over my shoulder at the book he’d tossed aside. I let go of his wrists and sat up. “I want you to pose for me.”
He blinked, smile fading into confusion. “Huh?”
“Like in those pictures, Johnny. I want you to pose for me.”
“Are you going to take my picture?” He sounded teasing and amused.
“No. I don’t have a camera.”
“Draw me?”
I laughed hard at that. “Oh. No way.”
“So…you’re just gonna look at me?”
“Oh, yes,” I told him as my heart started up its thumping in anticipation. “And maybe some other things. But yes. Looking, to start.”
I slid off him. Johnny, still grinning, got up and stood at the side of the bed. First came his shirt, off over his head and tossed to the floor without a second glance. He was good at this. I rolled onto my belly and put my hands in my chin to watch him.
“Keep going,” I said.
Johnny ran his hands over his chest and belly. “You sure?”
“Yes,” I began, but the word turned to a shivering mess of stuttering syllables when he rubbed his thumbs over his nipples.
“You like that?”
I nodded. “Love it.”
He licked a fingertip and circled his nipple, then drew it down his belly. “That?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
His grin got broader even as his gaze heated. His fingers went to his belt buckle, and he teased it open. He slid the belt from the loops—thwap, thwap, thwap. He held it in his two hands, snapping it taut. “You like that, huh?”
“I love it.”
“You like leather?”
Leathah. I nodded. “Oh, yes, Johnny. A lot.”
He tilted his head to look at me, then tossed the belt aside to unbutton his pants. His zipper. He eased his jeans down over his naked hips and thighs. No underwear. His cock, thick and half-hard, shifted between his thighs as he pushed the denim over one foot, then the other. He stood there, naked and beautiful, and I yearned for him so fiercely my body actually ached from the wanting.
“Pose.” It was a demand that sounded like a plea.
He did. Twisted his hips, turned his face, curled his arms. Muscles worked and shifted under his sun-burnished skin. His lines became curves; curves turned to planes. He turned in place, showing me that epic ass and the dimples just above it.
I pushed myself up on my hands. “Turn around. Slowly.”
I got off the bed as he obeyed. Fully clothed, I stood in front of him. We stared into each other’s eyes. We weren’t smiling. This had become business of the most serious sort. This had become something more than play. This had become everything.
I put my hands so lightly on his hips he shouldn’t have been able to feel me, nor I him. The fine hairs on his skin stood on end, and the heat of him touched me. I drew my palms up his sides, then around and over his chest and belly, all with that microscopic distance between his skin and mine.
Johnny shivered. “Emm.”
“Shh.”
I drew my phantom touch over each of his thighs. Moving around him, his back, his shoulders, his ass. Down over the sweetness of the skin behind his knees. His calves. To his front again I moved, and cupped the air around his shins before getting to my knees in front of him.
I touched him then for real. My hands cupped his ankles. Johnny groaned. I slid my hands up his legs, shins, knees, calves, thighs. I let them rest on the backs of his thighs, just below the curve of his buttocks.
His cock was hard now. In front of my face. I wanted to taste him. Still holding him, though he’d made no attempts at moving, I leaned in to nuzzle against his thigh. I let my tongue flicker along his balls, then the base of his shaft. He twitched, and his hand came down to tangle in my hair, but other than that, he stayed still.
I took him into my mouth
slowly, savoring each inch. I sucked gently and used my hands to move him in and out of my open, willing mouth at my own pace. His fingers tightened in my hair, and he groaned.
I paused to look up at him. “You like that, huh?”
He smiled at my echo of his question. The tight hold on my hair softened and he smoothed a hand over my head, then my cheek. “Yeah. I like it.”
“Good.” I bent back to the pleasure of letting him fuck my mouth.
And it was sweet, that pleasure. It wasn’t the act, but Johnny who made it so. The way he sounded and moved, the way he said my name as though I were the most precious gift he’d ever been given.
I knew he’d had blow jobs before, maybe even some more skilled, maybe even some more enthusiastic. Yet when I looked up at him, his face twisted with his desire, I didn’t see a man who was used to this, or who was taking it for granted. Johnny looked down at me with marvel in his eyes, as though all of this were a dream. A fantasy.
Not real.
He came into my mouth, and I swallowed the hot, slick taste of him without even a wince of protest. Funny how it worked that way here. With him.
His eyelids fluttered. He murmured my name. His hips pushed forward, his cock throbbed. And wonder of wonders, I came, too, in a slow, rolling rush of sensation unlike any orgasm I’d had.
I started laughing.
There on my knees, which were beginning to hurt, and with the taste of him still on my tongue, I laughed. I nuzzled forward again, against his softening cock, and kissed him there. Then I let him help me to my feet, and I kissed him.
“Emm, Emm, Emm,” Johnny said.
“Mmm,” I whispered into his mouth. “I like it when you say my name.”
“Emm,” he said again.
He pushed me back toward the bed, but before he could lay me down and do whatever delicious, wicked things he’d planned, the door flew open. Sandy came in, already babbling. She didn’t even stop when she saw the pair of us.
“Johnny, listen, I gotta talk to you,” she finished up, putting her hand on her hip.
“Sandy,” Johnny said in the voice of a man who’s gone beyond all patience. “Get the fuck outta here. Jesus.”
“Not until you give me some money.”
“What? I got to pay more money for you? What happened to the two hundred dollars I gave you last month?”
“I’ll…just wait outside,” I told him, moving away, though he’d tried to snag my wrist.
“You, stay,” Johnny told me. To Sandy, he said, “You, go.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her lower lip, the perfect picture of a sullen pout. “No.”
“Jesus, Sandy. You’re really gonna get it, you know it?”
“You see that?” she said to me. “That’s too much. He’s threatening me. What kinda guy is that, threatening the mother of his kid? It’s bullshit, I say. C’mon, Johnny. Just give me some money and I’ll go.”
“What do you need money for, anyway? I thought you were living with your mother? And I give you money for Kimmy, don’t tell me you spent all of it already. What does that kid need, gold-plated diapers?”
“I need it,” Sandy insisted. Her gaze slid over me, calculating. “I need it for something.”
“For what?”
“For…an abortion,” she told him with her chin lifted, mouth thin but quirked on the ends like she didn’t mean to smile but couldn’t help herself.
It seemed like my cue to leave. Not from jealousy—how could I be jealous of something that was created from my own imagination? But because whatever was happening between them didn’t need to involve me, because I didn’t want to be a part of it, I moved toward the door. I couldn’t actively control what happened in here, not like taking a handful of threads and weaving them together or pulling them apart the way I might in a real dream. But if I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen, or so I thought.
Johnny tugged my arm but let go as I kept walking. “Emm. Don’t go.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “No, baby, you need to deal with this.”
It seemed like the right thing to say. His eyes lit. He grinned. He let me go. I walked past Sandy without giving her the benefit of a glance. Women know how to cut each other that way, and though I wasn’t jealous, I was definitely not interested in giving her any attention.
I walked out the door.
I ended up in my living room.
Chapter 15
At least this time I wasn’t naked.
I was, though, breathing hard. My stomach twisted. My head hurt so bad I cried out, low, and stumbled to the couch where I lay down and clutched a pillow. The world didn’t spin, thankfully, but it took a long few minutes before it settled.
I sat up slowly. “What the fuck.”
I sounded miserable. I felt it, too. Not so much physically, not after a few minutes, anyway. The damage in my brain had never made me feel bad physically, other than lately. It wasn’t my gut or head that made me feel this way, though. It was knowing that, even though the fugues were getting worse, possibly something had broken free inside my brain, that I might at this moment be bleeding out into oblivion….
I didn’t want the fugues to stop.
I liked being in a place where someone like Johnny Del lasandro was into me, where I didn’t worry about stuff like condoms and pregnancy, or hell…shaving my legs, for that matter. Or paying bills or exercising. But most of all, where Johnny put his hands and mouth all over, where he put his delicious cock up inside me, where I could touch him and kiss him and know he wanted it just as much from me as I wanted from him.
What I wanted right now, though, more than anything, was another hot shower. I stayed in there a really long time and felt only a little better when I got out. I combed my hair, slathered my face with cream. Pulled on a faded T-shirt that hit me midthigh and was thin enough to cling to every ample curve the mirror insisted on showing off. I studied my reflection, side to side, smoothing my hands over my breasts and belly and hips. I never wanted to hate my body the way so many of my friends seemed to, the way movies and television urged us normal-size gals to do.
“Work out harder,” I advised myself, sucking in my belly and cheeks to give an illusion of shadows. But I knew I wouldn’t. I knew that even if I did, there’d be one too many muffins in the Mocha, too many scoops of sugar in my coffee, because sugar and caffeine had always done what pills had only sort of stopped.
My wet hair had dripped all down my back, giving me a chill. I threw on a Lebanon Valley College sweatshirt and a pair of thick, rainbow-knit knee socks and went downstairs to make myself a cup or three of hot chocolate. I had a book and a bed in my future, if not a movie playing on my laptop at the same time. A quiet evening in.
Then the doorbell rang. I didn’t believe my ears at first, convincing myself it had been the neighbors’ bell even though I’d never mistaken theirs for mine before. When it rang again, followed moments later by a knock, I took my cell phone from where I’d left it charging on the counter and gripped it tight in my palm, ready to thumb in a swift 9-1-1.
I’d clearly been watching too many horror movies.
I didn’t have a peephole or whatever they called those fancy windows to the side of my door, though it did have an annoying and useless transom window above it. I vowed to remedy all that as soon as I could, not that it did me any good now, standing in my foyer with wet hair and no panties on, with the night sky pressing in on the transom and a stranger knocking so persistently.
The knock came again. Phone in hand, I slid back the chain lock and then the dead bolt. I cracked open the door. And then I swung it wide.
“Hi,” Johnny said, looking supremely uncomfortable and totally handsome in his long black coat with the scarf that made me want to wrap myself in it.
I found my voice faster than I thought I would. “Hi.”
We stared at each other, neither of us moving.
“Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”
&
nbsp; “I… Yeah, yes. Of course! Sure!” I stepped aside to let him in, along with a swirl of air the temperature of snowflakes, and closed the door behind him.
He turned to look at me. “I know it’s late.”
“It’s not that late. It just gets dark so early now. It’s not too late. Really.” I forced myself to shut up.
Why couldn’t I be with real, present-time Johnny the way I was with his imaginary-past counterpart? What had happened to the vixen, the vamp who knew how to flirt and how to take control of the situation? Instead, I stood and stared and practically scuffed the tile with my rainbow-clad toes and muttered, “Aw, shucks.”
“You mind if I take off my coat?”
“Of course not. I’ll hang it up for you.” I took it from him, then had no place to put it. We stared at it in my hands, silence awkward and brittle between us. Finally, I hung it carefully over the stair railing where the newel post would keep it from falling off.
“Do you want to come in? I was making—” the kettle whistled “—hot chocolate.”
It was what a girl would drink, I thought, trying to see what Johnny thought and finding nothing on his face but the beauty time hadn’t faded. I thought about offering him something more sophisticated. Like a liqueur, or something fancy I whipped up all casual like, with special tools and ingredients I just happened to have on hand.
“Sure. That’d be great, thanks.”
He didn’t move, waiting for me to lead. So I did, wondering too late if my shirt was too short, if my ass cheeks were hanging out. If he was looking at them if they were.
“Make yourself at home.” I gestured at the bar stool set up along the raised island I loved so much. “Do you want hot chocolate? Or something else? I could get you, um, juice or…a beer?”
“Nah. Hot chocolate sounds great. Good for a night like this.”
“Yeah, the temps have really dropped, huh?” I took powdered milk and cocoa from my cupboard. Sugar. Vanilla. Marshmallows. Chocolate chips.
Johnny watched as I assembled the ingredients along the counter. “That’s some setup.”
It was easy to smile at him, and somehow smiling took some of the edge off. “I call it lazy man’s gourmet cocoa. Except, well, I’m not a man. And it’s not really gourmet…”