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Johnny buried his face against 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, pretty 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.

I was still naked.

Chapter 10

M
y phone was ringing, harsh, discordant and insistent. Shaking so hard my teeth chattered, gooseflesh like braille on my skin, I stood. Immediately, the floor shifted beneath me. My stomach lurched, too.

I made it down the hall to the kitchen where I plucked the phone from its base and held it with a shaking hand to my ear. “Hello?”

“Hi, honey, it’s Mom. Listen, I was wondering if you had that black dress we got for you to wear to that Christmas party a few years ago, because I’d like to borrow it.”

I swallowed against a surge of bile. Sometimes I came out of a fugue with an upset stomach or a sharp headache, but this didn’t feel like that. This felt like terror.

“Mom?”

“I checked your closet for it, but I couldn’t see it, so I thought maybe you took it with you.”

I slid down the wall and ended up on my cold kitchen floor, my bare ass freezing. I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them and put my face down. The phone pressed into my ear. I swallowed again and again before I could answer.

“Yeah, I think I have it. It might be in a couple of things I haven’t unpacked yet.”

“Do you think you could look for it?”

“Right now?”

“Well, whenever you get the chance,” she said.

“Sure.” My voice sounded rough and raspy. I cleared my throat. “I can do that.”

“Good. So, what else is exciting up there in the big city?”

My stomach was settling, my headache fading. I was still freezing but not quite ready to move off the floor in case I set myself off again. “Nothing. The usual. Nothing, really.”

“Well, maybe you can come down next week,” my mom said. “You can bring the dress and we’ll get some dinner. Maybe see that new Ewan McGregor movie. I hear he shows his butt.”

My laugh came out a little strangled but genuine. “He shows his butt in every movie.”

“Gotta go. Dad’s waiting. Bye, honey, love you.”

And like that, just like that, she hung up on me. My mom never hung up on me without asking me if something was wrong. Without worrying just a little.

I got up off the floor. I put the phone back in the base. I went upstairs and ran the shower as hot as I could stand it. It stung when I got in, but I was still so cold I needed the heat. I rubbed my hands together under the spray, then hunkered down in the center of my shower and let the water pound over my back until I stopped shaking. I stayed in there until the water turned lukewarm.

By the time I got out, I felt better enough to wrap myself in a thick robe and go down to my kitchen for something to eat. Toast, jam and tea. An invalid’s dinner. I didn’t feel sick. I was no longer in pain. Hell, I could barely remember how it had felt when I went to my hands and knees in my entryway, naked.

Belly full, I searched my entryway. No clothes. Hesitantly, I opened the front door and looked there, but if I’d somehow gone outside starkers and run around the neighborhood, I hadn’t left the clothes conveniently on the front porch. I’d left Johnny’s house just after 8:00 p.m. The phone showed my mom had called at 8:17. Considering the walk should’ve taken less than five minutes, I’d been dark for fewer than another ten. Not long enough to get into much trouble or get very far, and yet though I checked behind the bushes on either side of my front porch, all I turned up was some rotting leaves that hadn’t been covered by snow.