“I’m the only one I know,” I told her.
“You’re the only you,” my mom said, and hugged me again.
Later, after we’d said our goodbyes and she made me promise to call her soon, my mom left and Johnny arrived. He brought Thai food, fragrant and still steaming, and he set it out on my kitchen island while I grabbed plates and chopsticks. I poured us both hot tea and warmed my hands on it while I watched him open the cartons of food.
He caught me staring. “What’s up?”
“Just looking.”
He smiled and came around the island to kiss me. “Like what you see?”
“Oh, very much.” I squeezed his butt. “Feel, too.”
He looked over his shoulder at the food, then at me. “How hungry are you?”
“Depends on what you’re planning on feeding me.”
Johnny took my hand and moved it around to the front to cup his crotch. “How about some of this?”
“I’m so glad to know,” I said, “that even after several months of fucking me, you still can be so romantic.”
He rubbed my hand around in a little circle while we both laughed and kissed and parted with shining eyes and wet mouths. I hugged him then, tight against me. The day had been strange. Being with Johnny made it somehow better.
“What’s going on?” he said into my hair.
I squeezed him harder, then pushed him back so I could look at his face. “Am I too young?”
His brows went up, the corners of his mouth went down. “Kimmy been after you again?”
“No. It’s not her. I want to know what you think.”
Johnny let out a breath and let go of me to lean against the island directly across from me. “You’re young. Yeah. Or maybe I’m just old.”
“But does it still bother you?”
He looked at me very seriously. “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“No.” I wasn’t really sure what was bothering me. I wanted to kiss him, maybe unzip his jeans right then and there, take him in my mouth and make us both forget I’d ever started this conversation.
“Emm. Talk to me, please.”
I loved that he’d insist on talking about this, whatever it was. That it was important to him not to just shove awkward silences under a rug woven of mutual pretense. I loved him for so many reasons, but they were tangled and wouldn’t lay smooth.
“Does it bother you that I knew so much about you before we met?”
He laughed. “You mean does it bother me that you saw me naked before you ever saw me naked?”
“That, yes. But everything else.” He knew I’d seen his movies, looked him up on the Net, but we’d never talked about it. “Do you ever worry that I just weaseled my way into your life because of who you are?”
Johnny laughed again and moved forward to kiss me. “Emm, I want you to want to be with me because of who I am.”
“But not who you were,” I murmured.
“Same person,” Johnny said against my mouth, then stroked a hand over my hair and looked into my eyes. “Do you want to know how many lovesick girls…and boys, have tried getting in my pants because of something I did thirty years ago?”
I frowned, hard. “Not really.”
“A lot,” Johnny said, anyway. “Are you like them?”
“No!”
He shrugged and traced my lower lip with his thumb before kissing me again. He tasted good. Felt good against me. I closed my eyes and let him try to distract me, but it wasn’t working.
“I love you,” I said to him. “But…honestly, all that other stuff—the movies, the pictures, the interviews…”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s not why I love you now,” I said.
“It wasn’t why you loved me then, either,” Johnny said.
I froze. I stared at him, searching his expression for any sign he was teasing. Anything. “What do you mean?”
“When you saw me in the coffee shop that first time,” he said, “you didn’t know all the rest of that shit, did you? So let’s face it. It was my ass, wasn’t it?”
It wasn’t the answer I expected, not that I knew what I expected, but I burst into laughter. “Yeah. That was definitely it. Your epic fucking ass.”
This time, his kiss really did distract me. It wasn’t until later that I thought about what he’d said. He hadn’t hesitated in his answer, hadn’t looked like he was trying to hide something.
So why, then, did I feel like he was?
Chapter 26
“C’mon, you know I don’t know anything about art.” I ducked away from Johnny’s reaching hand and stepped back, almost knocking over a statue displayed on a pedestal. I caught it before it could fall. “See? I’m a menace.”
“You have a good eye, and I want your opinion,” he said seriously. “And this is your friend’s work, so maybe you could just give me a hand here, huh?”
“I think it looks great!” I pointed at the plain white wall where he’d already hung three of Jen’s pieces. “There’s plenty of room there for at least four more.”
“Yeah, but which ones?” Johnny sounded annoyed.
“How am I supposed to know? You pick.” I looked over the framed photos laid out on the gallery floor. I didn’t even want to come any closer, in case I accidentally stepped on one.
Johnny pointed at one of Jared taken in soft light. “That one?”
“It’s nice. It’s good, I mean.”
He pointed at another. “This one?”
“That one’s good, too! They’re all good!”
He started laughing, shaking his head. “Jesus, babe, you really don’t know art, huh?”
I feigned insult. “I told you.”
“You just think you don’t,” Johnny said. “If you let yourself go, you’d have great instincts. See a lot. But hey, it’s okay, I can do this myself. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Now you’re being a turd.”
Johnny scoffed and put up his hands. “Ooh, wow, that hurts.”
He bent back to arranging the frames. I watched him. A few days had passed since our conversation in the kitchen, and something was still niggling at my brain.
“Johnny.”
He didn’t look up. “Yeah, babe.”
“What made you decide to become an artist?”
His hands, moving over the prints, slowed. He sat back on his heels. He didn’t look up at me for a few seconds, but then did, expression guarded.
“What do you mean?”
“Well…you started off in the movies and stuff, and I know you took a break before you started doing art—”
“I was always doing art,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t show it. I didn’t try to make anyone else think I was an artist. There’s a difference between deciding to be an artist and just accepting who you are.”
“I know.” I chewed my lower lip briefly. “So…when did you?”
Johnny got to his feet, dusting off his hands. “I need a drink. You want one?”
Without waiting for me, he headed for his office. It didn’t have the best memories for me, that office. I couldn’t step inside it without remembering my embarrassment about the time I’d kissed him and he’d pushed me away.
Johnny opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a bottle of Glenlivet. He poured out two glasses and gave me one. I sipped, grimacing, and coughed.
“God,” I said.
“Nope,” Johnny said. “Just whiskey.”
He drank his back and sucked at his teeth for a second before setting down the glass. He looked at the bottle like he might pour another, but didn’t. He looked at me.
“What is it you really want to ask me?”
“I want to know what happened to you. What made you accept who you are, if you want to put it that way. Why you decided to start showing your art and keep doing it instead of just putting it away in a notebook.”
His head tilted. “You know about the notebook.”
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His reply meant I hadn’t invented it, so at least I didn’t look too crazy. “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”
Johnny poured another drink.
“I want to hear it from you, that’s all. I don’t want secrets between us. I don’t want to know details about your life that you didn’t tell me, like I know all your secrets and you don’t realize I know them. I don’t want you to not tell me stories because you think we already know them, even if I do. I need to hear them from you. That’s what I want.”
My long speech had left me a little breathless, so I finished the whiskey to keep myself from babbling more.
“What do you want to know? About the parties? About the drugs, the sex, the movies?” Johnny swirled the amber liquid around in his glass. “It was all a long time ago, Emm. You’d get a better story from one of those books or the documentaries.”
“Not just that stuff.” I ran a finger down the buttons of his shirt, but didn’t linger. “Can you tell me about what happened to you after 1978?”
“What happened after ’78, huh? I’m told it was 1979.”
I rolled my eyes and poked him. “Smart-ass.”
“Epic smart-ass, right?”
I didn’t really like my own words thrown back at me, even if he was just teasing. “After Ed D’Onofrio committed suicide at your house.”
Johnny let out a long, slow breath that sounded a little shivery. “You really wanna hear about that? Really, Emm?”
“I guess…not if you don’t want to tell me. But I know about it. At least what the fan blogs say, what the documentaries say. But that’s really all just speculation, isn’t it?” I put my glass down and put my hands on his hips. Looked up into his face, so familiar, so handsome, so beloved. “They say you went crazy.”
Johnny snorted a low, harsh laugh. “Yeah. You could say so.”
“Did you?” I put my finger on his lips before he could reply. “Before you answer, I want you to know that I don’t care if you did.”
He kissed my finger, then bit it gently before taking my wrist and moving my hand from his mouth. He tucked it up against his chest instead. “You don’t care if I went nuts and had to be locked up, huh?”
I shook my head. “No.”
Johnny sighed. “Fuck, Emm. It was a long fucking time ago, you know? Can’t you just ask me about the women I fucked? Hell, ask me if it’s true I once let Elton John blow me backstage at one of his concerts. Those are the kinds of stories you’re supposed to speculate about.”
“Did you?”
He kissed my mouth. I tasted whiskey. His breath, hot, caressed me when he spoke.
“Maybe.”
I sighed. “Johnny.”
His laughter didn’t last long and faded into weighted silence. “If I say yes, will you still want to know about the rest?”
I nodded. Then I shook my head. “If you don’t want to tell me, I guess I understand. It’s not really any of my business. I mean, you had this whole life before you met me—”
“So did you,” he pointed out. “A whole life. We both did. Mine was just longer.”
“But everything you know about me is something I told you!” The words came out louder and more vehement than I’d anticipated. We both flinched. I rubbed my palm over his heart, feeling the thump. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m sorry this is bothering you so much. Whatever you want to know, just ask. I’ll tell you, okay? If you really need to know.”
I hesitated. Did I really want that? There was so much floating around in my head, rumors and bits and pieces of history, all mingled with whatever it was my imagination had created when I went dark.
“I just want to know you,” I whispered. “Really know you. That’s all.”
“Oh, Emm. Do you think you don’t?” His hand slid to the back of my neck, cupping it. His fingers massaged the base of my skull, beneath my hair. He looked down at me, face grave.
“I don’t know.” I sighed unhappily. “It feels uneven.”
“We feel uneven?”
“Yeah. We do.”
He pulled me close to him. I pressed my cheek against his chest. The steady thump of his heart was soothing. So was his smell and the weight of his hands on my back.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
I put my arms around him, held him tight. “I love you, too.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just ask. Okay?”
“What happened in 1978?”
He sighed. The steady thump under my cheek skipped a beat, or maybe it was just my own heart I felt. He kissed the top of my hair.
“Things were nuts. We were all living in that house. My house, but they all stayed there. Candy, Bellina, Ed. Paul was coming by every coupla weeks to make those damn movies of his, you know?”
“I know that.”
“He was gonna be the next Warhol or some shit. Something big. And the pictures, they were art, you know? They were art,” Johnny said. “They still are. I’m not ashamed of what we did back then, Emm.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Me and Sandy had broke up. She was getting crazier into the drugs and shit, and she was bringing Kimmy around all this stuff. I finally told her she needed to either let me take the kid or give her to her mother.”
I pushed away to look at him. “You did? But I thought you said you weren’t there for Kimmy the way you wanted to be.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t. I told Sandy I wanted her, but I didn’t, you know? I was a kid. A stupid, fuckdrunk kid high on the attention. Life was spinning around and all these people were telling me how fucking gorgeous I was. Offering to blow me at rock concerts. Jesus Christ, what was I gonna do with a kid there?”
I couldn’t begin to imagine that life. I’d seen it when I was dark, and it hadn’t seemed real. But it had been, for him.
“So, what did she do?”
“She gave Kimmy to her mom, thank God. And she went off and spent a year in India following some maharajah or some shit, some guru. Came back all scrawny and full of parasites. But that was later. And maybe… Shit.” He sighed. “Maybe she went a little crazy herself. I think we all did. Ed was just the first one.”
Ice punched my guts at the mention of his name. “The writer.”
“Yeah. Fucking brilliant guy. Just…so fucking above the rest of us. We were all making our little shit movies, drawing shitty little life studies—”
“They weren’t shitty,” I broke in.
Johnny looked at me for a long few seconds. “You don’t know anything about art, babe.”
Technically, I also hadn’t seen his life studies or anything else; I was just extrapolating from the early pieces I’d seen on the internet and what I knew of his work now. “Nothing you do could’ve been shitty, that’s what I know.”
He smiled faintly. “If I didn’t get better, I wouldn’t be much of an artist, would I?”
“I guess not.” I didn’t want to keep pushing him; I wanted Johnny to tell me on his own terms, in his own time. Even if it wasn’t all at once, right now. I just wanted to start the conversation. I’d already learned some things I didn’t know. I was feeling better, overall.
“It was a fucking hot summer,” Johnny continued. “We were all full of this…I dunno what to call it. There was this pulsing, growing…just…this creation. We were all full of it. Knocked up. Pregnant with making art. Candy with his cooking, Bellina with her plays, Paul with the movies.”
“And Ed with his poems.”
“Yeah. He wrote books, too, did you know that?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I haven’t read any.”
“Well, he wasn’t no J. D. Salinger or anything, but his books were good. I mean, they were weird, but good. But his poems…they were art. Really art, Emm.”
“Yeah, which I can’t appreciate,” I murmured.
I thought of Ed’s face across the kitchen. The stink of him. The sound of him reading that poem aloud. It would’ve been so much prettier in my mom?
??s voice, why couldn’t I remember that instead of the fugue?
“Pffft,” Johnny said. “You keep talking like that.”
“My mother named me after one of his poems.”
Johnny went still. “Did she?”
I studied him. “Yeah. ‘In Night She Walks.’”
Johnny drank his second glass of whiskey.
“She brought me the book,” I said. “Told me she used to read me that poem over and over when she was pregnant with me. And after the accident. She said she named me after that poem, but I don’t remember her reading it to me, ever.”
“I love your name,” Johnny said.
“It’s not a nice poem,” I told him, frowning.
“It could’ve been worse. She could’ve been a big e. e. cummings fan, and then who knows what she’d have called you.”
“Were you close with him?” I asked.
“Ed? Nobody was close with him. He lived in his own head a lot,” Johnny said. “He hung out with us. But were any of us close to him? I don’t think so.”
“But when he died, that messed all of you up. Didn’t it?”
Johnny looked like he was thinking that over. Whiskey on his breath wafted over my face. “It was a big mess, yeah. Is that what you want to know?”
“What happened?”
“He was…Ed. I mean, he did his thing, you know? We all were doing our own thing. But he got into the drugs. Hard stuff. Shooting up. Not sleeping, drinking too much. Crazy shit, Emm. And he just lost it, I guess. He couldn’t deal with it. Life. Whatever.” Johnny rubbed at his eyes, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “He drank too much, shot himself up too much, then slit his wrists and jumped in the deep end of the pool after everyone was out of it. Hell, maybe he thought someone would find him. Any other night, someone would’ve been there. But not that night.”
“And…he died.”
“Yeah, he fucking died.” Johnny pushed away from me to go around his desk. Pacing. He ran both hands through his hair and linked them behind his head. “Made a fucking mess of my swimming pool, too.”
I waited quietly, my glass in my hands but not drinking from it. “Do you really still want to know what happened?” Johnny asked quietly, facing away from me.