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He still had both his hands on the countertop, and now his fingers twitched. “Us.”

“Ah.” I wasn’t much good at flirting, but I wasn’t any better at faking a lack of interest. “Why not?”

Johnny blinked, his smile growing infinitesimally wider. “Emm.”

My breath hitched when he said my name. I wanted to close my eyes and drift on that sound, that single syllable. I didn’t, though. I kept my gaze on his, not looking away because he wasn’t, either.

“Johnny.” I couldn’t disguise the longing in my voice, and wouldn’t have wanted to even if it had been possible.

He groaned, under his breath but still audible.

The sound shot pleasure all through me, tingly and unexpected. I felt my eyes go wide. My nipples hardened a moment later. My clit pulsed. I was glad I’d put down my mug, because I’d have dropped it, otherwise. As it was, I had to put both my hands on the island top to keep my knees from buckling. It was that intense, the sensation. That powerful.

“I should go,” Johnny said a half moment later, before I’d had time to fully process the noise he’d made.

He was half out of his seat when I moved around the island to stand in front of him. “Wait.”

He sat back in his seat like I’d pushed him, though I wasn’t even close enough to touch him. Not yet. “Emm…”

“Oh, fuck me, I love the way my name sounds coming out of your mouth,” I said without thinking.

He groaned again. His throat worked as he swallowed. He looked a little wild-eyed. I could see his pulse throbbing at the base of his throat, just once, twice, quickly.

Four or five steps separated us, at most. I took three of them, my feet sliding on waxed wooden floors, the hem of my T-shirt riding up too high for modesty. I wanted to smell him. I didn’t think about how it looked, my sudden approach. I didn’t care.

“Emm,” he said again, and this time it didn’t sound like a warning or a protest.

It sounded like an invitation.

I moved. He shifted. His chair was high enough that when I slid between his parted knees, they pressed my hips. I leaned close, eyes half-closed, and breathed deeply. Johnny didn’t move away, didn’t move closer, just stayed as stiff and rigid as stone.

I opened my eyes. I was so close to him I could see the speckles in his eyes. I could count his eyelashes. I could see the tiny speck of marshmallow at the corner of his mouth.

But I didn’t kiss him.

He kissed me.

Eager, open mouths, tongues sliding, teeth clashing. It was perfect. His hand came up to cup the back of my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair, and I gasped into his mouth at how much I wanted him. He tasted so fucking good, I wanted to eat him.

The chair rocked alarmingly when I straddled him, but his arm went around me, his hand grabbing my ass as his feet hit the floor and kept us from tipping. My shirt rode up. His belt buckle was cold against me, the denim of his jeans deliciously rough. When his hand met my bare flesh, Johnny groaned again, louder, and broke the kiss just long enough to mutter my name again.

I cupped his face in my hands and broke the kiss to look into his eyes. Our mouths were still so close that when I spoke, my lips brushed his with every word. “What about this isn’t working?”

His other hand moved down to my ass, and both squeezed gently. The chair rocked again, but I didn’t worry it would tip over. I squeezed my thighs against his hips and drew my thumb over his lower lip.

He drew it into his mouth and sucked gently before biting it lightly. “None of it. All of it. Whatever. I can’t think straight with you on my lap like this.”

“I could be on your face instead,” I said.

Johnny muttered an expletive so garbled I couldn’t be sure if he were cursing or praying. He kissed me again. His mouth punished mine, and I took it gladly. I was slipping a little, shifting on his lap as he moved to keep the chair from tipping, me from falling. It was messy and it was lovely, but I had to get off him or else find myself on the floor with him on top of me, and not in the way I wanted.

With my feet braced on the floor, our mouths still fused, I could reach between us to press my palm against the bulge in his jeans. I’d never been so bold as this, never, except with him. There…and here.

He put his hand over mine and broke the kiss. “Jesus.”

I took the time to catch my breath. I didn’t take my hand away. I looked into his eyes, his pupils gone wide with desire. There was no faking that. I licked the taste of him from my lips and remembered the flavor of him coming down the back of my throat. I shivered and the world tilted, not as though I were going dark. Just faint.

“I want you so much.” My voice broke on the edges of my honesty, and as with everything else that had happened, I didn’t care. Not about propriety, or dignity, or pride.

I turned the hand on his crotch upward, capturing the one he’d put over it. I moved it between my legs, against my hot, slick flesh. I rubbed his fingers over my clit, already hard, and down farther, sliding. I pushed his fingers inside me and shuddered, never looking away from his eyes.

“See?” I said.

Johnny moved his hand, fingers stretching me oh-so-fucking-good. Deep inside, he curled them a little, hitting some hidden spot I’d read about but never bothered with. Every nerve in my body zapped. My other hand found his shoulder, my fingers digging into him as I kept myself from falling. His thumb pressed my clit just right, just perfectly, just the way I knew he’d do it. The way he’d done it in my head.

He moved his ass to the edge of the chair so his feet more firmly met the floor. He kissed me again, fucking me with his hand as his other gripped me tight at my hip to keep me upright. I leaned against his thigh, not caring about how awkwardly I had to tilt my head to keep both his mouth and his hand working on me. I lost my focus on his dick, helpless to do anything but ride the wave of desire already getting ready to crash.

I was so wet his fingers had no trouble sliding in and out, and he moved them slowly, pushing inside, curling and withdrawing, while his thumb gave delicious counterpressure. I rocked against his touch. I sucked his tongue and took his breath when he moaned. I couldn’t keep my eyes open now; pleasure had made them too heavy. I couldn’t speak, either. I could only give myself up to this.

And he gave me all of it. His mouth, his fingers. His voice, muttering my name into my ear when he left my lips to slide his mouth along my jaw and put the flesh of my throat between his teeth.

My orgasm hit me like a freight train, hard and fast and without mercy. I buckled with the force of it, but Johnny kept me upright. I opened my eyes as it started, and my gaze found his face. He wasn’t smiling. His gaze had gone dark and heated, his cheeks flushed, lips parted and wet from mine.

As the pleasure faded, I realized my fingers had cramped on his shoulder. I let go. Aftershocks rippled through me as he withdrew his fingers and I belatedly noticed I’d been on my tiptoes. I let myself rest flat-footed, knees still weak.

“Wow,” I managed to say.

When I angled my face to kiss him again, though, he turned just enough that my lips would’ve hit his cheek if I’d been persistent enough to keep going. I wasn’t. After all that, I was smart enough to stop myself.

“I’m sorry,” Johnny said, and pushed me gently away. “I can’t.”

He stood. I moved. He left.

Chapter 16

“…and I think I might need a new suitcase,” my mom said, continuing a conversation I hadn’t been able to focus on for the past twenty minutes.

It hadn’t mattered. She’d been content to chatter on about the upcoming cruise while we wandered the mall, and I’d been content to mutter an occasional “uh-huh” when she paused to pretend she was asking my opinion. I should’ve known better than to believe I was fooling her, though. She was just waiting for the right moment to confront me, and it turned out to be over frozen yogurt in the food court.

“So,” she said, digging her spoon into a mess of vanilla and berries. “What’s going on?”

I had a dish of chocolate and fudge in front of me but so far had only painted my spoon with it instead of the inside of my stomach. “Hmm?”

“Emmaline,” my mother said warningly. “I know something’s up. Talk to me.”

I opened my mouth to spill it all. The fugues. The situation, in a much-censored version, with Johnny. Everything I’d have told her before I’d moved away hovered right there on the tip of my tongue, but my eye caught the pile of bags at her feet and I swallowed every single word.

My mom was going on a cruise with my dad. A vacation, without me. The first they’d ever had in all their years of marriage. I knew my mom well enough to suspect, if not know a hundred percent, that all it would take would be one simple sentence and she’d cancel her trip. I didn’t say it.

I said instead, “Oh, it’s boy troubles, Mom.”

She brightened. “Really?”

I had to laugh, though each chuckle hurt my heart. “Don’t sound so excited, sheesh.”

“Boy trouble means there’s a boy,” Mom said with a lick of her spoon.

“You act like I never had a boyfriend before.”

“You haven’t talked about anyone since you moved,” she told me.

I swirled my spoon around and around, making a soup of my frozen yogurt. I had no appetite for it but ate a bite, anyway, knowing that not eating it would alarm her more than anything else. I shrugged.

“So. Tell me.”

“Well, he’s not a boy, for one thing.”

My mom was silent for a minute, and when she spoke it was with forced casualness. “Is he…a girl?”

I laughed wholeheartedly at that. “Um, no.”

“Oh. Okay. Because you remember Gina Wentzel, don’t you? I think she was a year or two ahead of you in school. Her mother works at Weis Markets.”

I knew if I waited just long enough, this story would have a point. “Yeah, I knew her. She was a cheerleader.”

“
And
a lesbian!”

I laughed again. “Oh, Mom.”

“It’s true. Her mom told me herself. Said she was with some woman she met while she was working in Arkansas.”

“Because Arkansas is filled with lesbians?” I asked after a pause, trying to connect the pieces and failing.

“I have no idea,” my mother said. “I’m just telling you what her mother told me. They’re thinking of adopting a baby together.”

“Um, good for them?” I remembered Gina as a slightly slutty blonde who’d once made a rude comment about my clothes but who’d otherwise never really crossed my path.

“Oh, it’s fine for them,” my mom said with a nod and another lick of her yogurt. “It would be fine for you, too.”

“If I were a lesbian?”

My mom pointed at me with her spoon. “I’m just saying, your dad and I would love you just the same, even if you were a lesbian. I mean, imagine how that girl on the radio’s parents must feel.”

The fact I could no longer so easily follow my mom’s non sequiturs saddened me. “What girl on the radio?”

“That ‘I Kissed a Girl’ girl. Imagine what her parents must’ve thought about that.”

“I’m sure they’re proud of her, too, Mom.”

“Well, your dad and I are proud of you, Emmaline. No matter if you’re a lesbian or not.” My mom’s eyes glistened with tears, though she was smiling. “You’ve grown up so beautifully. I mean, I always hoped, but never thought… I mean, we weren’t sure…”

“I’m not a lesbian,” I said to fend off any emotional breakdowns. I was already close to an emo outburst of angsty sobbing brought on by PMS. I didn’t want to break down here in the food court or encourage my mom to do the same.

“So, boy trouble? But not with a boy. A man, then,” my mom said with a shrug as though I were merely splitting hairs.

“Well, yeah. He’s a man. He’s not a boy. At all.” I frowned, thinking of how Johnny had called me a girl.

“I guess that’s fine. You’re in your thirties now. Time to date men, I guess.” Mom smiled. “So, what’s he like?”

“We’re not dating. I mean, I like him a lot…” I sighed, clearing my throat to keep the emotion shoved way down deep. “He doesn’t like me.”

“Then he’s a jerk.”

“Gee, Mom, thanks, but I think you’re a little biased.”

She smiled again and scraped the last of her yogurt from her cup. “Doesn’t matter. I’m your mother. If I say some boy—sorry, some man—is a jerk for not liking you, I’m allowed. What’s his name?”

“Johnny.”

She scoffed. “That’s not a man’s name.”

“It’s sort of… I guess he got stuck with it early on and now everyone knows him by that. That’s all. I don’t think he’d be a John. He’s just…Johnny. It fits him, actually.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t like you?”

I thought of how he’d pushed past me, leaving me alone with my T-shirt up around my hips and my kitchen smelling of sex. “Yes. I’m sure.”

“He’s a jerk. Forget about him.”

“I’m not sure I can, Mom. He’s pretty unforgettable.”

“Any man,” my mom said with a glower, “is forgettable.”

I sighed. “Not this one.”

“Oh, Emm. Honey. I hate seeing you like this. Why do you always let yourself get so worked up?”

I laughed even though it hurt my throat. “Geez, Mom, where’s the support?”

“I said he was a jerk, didn’t I?”

I laughed again. “He
is
a jerk.”

“But you like him,” my mom said sympathetically. “I can tell.”

“He’s just…special,” I told her with another sigh. I swirled my yogurt again but couldn’t manage to eat it, even to save her from worry. “He’s different. He’s so talented. So talented, so well-traveled. He’s lived so much, Mom, he makes me feel like some backwoods bumpkin. Like…well, like a girl.”

“You
are
a girl,” she pointed out.

“I’m a woman,” I said.

She looked at me, eyes soft. “I know you are, honey. And there’s no boy…or man, for that matter, so special that you should ever feel like that.”

I really love my mom.

“I know. I can’t help it. He’s just so… Gah!” I stabbed my now unfrozen yogurt. “Stupid! He’s stupid! Stupid Johnny Dellasandro.”

My mom chuckled, then paused. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“He’s an artist,” I offered, knowing that would be an unlikely connection for her to make. “He has a gallery in Harrisburg called the Tin Angel.”

“No, that’s not it.” She pulled a package of wipes from her bag and busily cleaned each finger.

“He was…an actor,” I added hesitantly.

Her brows raised. “A famous actor? Like…Tom Cruise?”

“Not quite like that. But pretty famous, yeah,” I said, thinking of the articles, the websites, the fan pages. “A long time ago, though.”

“How long ago?” She sounded suspicious. She looked suspicious, too.

“Um…” I hedged. “In the seventies.”

My mom sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “I assume he wasn’t a child actor?”

“No.”

“Oh, Emmaline!” She stopped, brow furrowed. “Not the guy who’s in all those late-night cable movies? The ones where he shows his…you-know-whats?”

“Um…”

“Emmaline Marie Moser,” my mother said, aghast.

No matter how old you are, the use of your three names will always be shaming.

“I can’t believe you.” She hitched forward in her chair, voice lowered like we were talking about something filthy. “He’s got to be as old as your dad, at least!”

“He’s not,” I insisted. “Dad’s fifty-nine. Johnny’s only fifty-seven.”

“Oh, God. Oh, my God.” She put a hand over her heart, then shook herself. “Thank God he doesn’t like you. He
shouldn’t
like you! If he did he’d be more than a jerk, he’d be a…pedophile!”

“Mom!”

“He’s too old for you, Emmaline!”

“Mom,” I said, quieter. “I’m almost thirty-two years old. It would hardly make him a pedophile.”

“Still too old for you,” she said stubbornly.

I frowned. “You’d be okay with me dating a girl, but not an older guy?”

This stumped her. She glowered further. At least she was scolding me, not fussing over me.

“He doesn’t like me,” I repeated.

“Then he’s a jerk!”

“Oh, Mom.” I laughed, shaking my head. “Yeah. He’s a jerk. And it’s good he doesn’t like me.”

I thought of how much he hadn’t liked me when his fingers were deep up inside me, making me come, and had to study my melted yogurt very carefully. There are some things you just never want to share with your mom, no matter how much you love and get along with her, or no matter what else you could share. I forced myself to eat a bite of creamy, chocolate fudgy goodness, but didn’t enjoy it.

“You really like him, huh?” She knew me too well. It was annoying.

“Well…yeah. I told you…”

“He’s special. I know. But aren’t they all, at first?”

I looked up at her. “They don’t stay special?”

She smiled, her gaze going a little dreamy. “Some do. I mean, I still think your dad’s pretty sexy.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Um, hello, not your bestie here. That’s my dad.”

She laughed. “You asked.”

I was glad their marriage was good. I was a lucky daughter to have parents who loved each other. And it wasn’t wrong to want that, I knew it.

“C’mon. If chocolate doesn’t make you feel better, maybe some retail therapy will.” My mom got up to toss her trash, and I followed.

“Yeah, too bad I’m broke.”

“Emm, if that’s a blatant way of getting me to buy you a pair of shoes, that stopped working in eighth grade.”

I smiled and gave her puppy eyes as we gathered her packages and left the food court behind. “No, it didn’t.”

“Just don’t tell your dad. He’s already having a freak-out about this trip,” my mom counseled me.

I didn’t really want or need her to buy me anything, but it was nice to know she might be persuaded to. “What’s he freaking out about?”

She started telling me, but a kiosk just past the food court stole my attention from her. I’d passed it dozens of times without a second look, never having a need for a hand-tooled leather belt or bracelet, but today…today, as so much seemed to be lately, was different.

“Wait a minute,” I murmured even as my mom, still chatting, kept walking toward the bookstore. “Mom, hold on.”

“Hey,” said the boy working at the kiosk. He was supercute, with emo bangs over one eye and a hint of guyliner that would’ve set my heart aflutter not too long ago.

Now he just looked too young.

“Hey,” I said. “Can I see one of those?”

I pointed at the hair clips. Made of molded leather in a half circle and punctured through two drilled holes by a small, spiked dowel, they were nothing like I’d ever bought or would ever have worn. At least, not here, in this now. But apparently my mind thought they’d suit me, because it had manufactured one for me in one of the fugues.

“Sure.” He hooked one off the rack with a finger and held it out. “They can be personalized, too.”

I glanced up at him as I took the clip. I paused. He was totally giving me the once-over, and it felt good. Really good. I hadn’t been looked at like that since…well, since the last time I went dark. I frowned.

“I don’t need it personalized.” I slid the wooden dowel in and out of the holes, trying to remember if this was like the one in my fugue. I hadn’t paid much attention to it and couldn’t recall if it had any designs on it.

“It would look great on you.” He sounded sincere. “You have really thick hair.”

“Thanks,” I said after a second. I touched the ponytail hanging over my shoulder. I did have thick hair, sometimes too thick for a regular elastic band. They were always breaking at random moments. “I’ll take it.”

I paid him less than ten bucks for it, which wasn’t quite pocket change for a hair clip but was less than what I’d seen some go for. I tugged the elastic from my hair and it fell around my face and shoulders in a familiar weight before I gathered it in my fingers and twisted it on the back of my head and clipped it in place. I turned my head from side to side, testing to see if it would slip out, but it seemed to be holding firmly.

“Looks great,” he said. “Sure you don’t want it personalized? You could get a picture, or your initials. Something like that.”

“What are you buying?” my mom, back from her trip to the bookstore, said. “Oh, my God, Emm. What is that thing?”

“It’s a hair clip.”

She laughed. “I wore one just like it when I was dating your dad. Good Lord.”

I smiled. “Did you have yours personalized with your name?”

She laughed again. “I don’t think so. I think it had a flower on it. I think they all had flowers on them. Or maybe they were marijuana plants, I don’t remember.”

The kiosk guy choked laughter behind his hand. I knew I shouldn’t have been so shocked, but I was, anyway. “Mom!”

“What?” she said, all innocent. “I’m not saying I smoked it. I’m just saying there were a lot of things with that picture on them. That’s all. Emm, c’mon, it was the seventies.”

“I definitely don’t want a picture of weed on my hair clip.” I looked at him. “How much to personalize it?”

“Free,” he said. “Which is why, you know, you should do it. Because it’s included.”

“How about my initials, then,” I told him. “E.M.M.”

It took only a few minutes, but when he handed it back to me he looked apologetic. “Something got screwed up with the machine. I put in your initials but I must’ve hit the wrong code, because it came up with this.”

Flowers and vines. It was still pretty. It was familiar, and I swallowed a bitter taste. “Actually, this is fine.”

“You sure? I can make another one….”

“No.” I shook my head. “This is fine.”

He gave me the clip along with something else. His phone number. I waited until we’d passed out of sight before I tossed it in the trash.

“Why’d you do that?” my mom asked. “He was such a cute boy.”

“He was a cute boy,” I said.

But I didn’t want a boy. I wanted a man. I wanted Johnny.

Chapter 17

“Y
ou sure you want to go in there?” Jen asked. “You know there’s a shitton of other places we could go, Emm. The Mocha’s coffee isn’t
that
good.”

I set my jaw and hunched my shoulders deeper into my coat, turning my collar up against the wind. I studied the Mocha from our place across the street. I’d been standing there for ten minutes, waiting for her. I hadn’t seen Johnny go in. Hadn’t seen him come out, either.

“No. I’m not going to let that son of a bitch ruin the Mocha for me. Fuck that noise. Fuck Johnny Dellasandro, too, whoever the fuck he thinks he is,” I said grimly. The sour taste of each word clung to my tongue like the flavor of milk gone bad. Nasty.

“Sure, I get it.” Jen shivered, staring across the street.

The temperatures had dropped over the past few days, promising even more snow. The clouds couldn’t have more perfectly mirrored my mood. Since Johnny’d left me standing in my kitchen a couple days before, I’d been alternating between mortified despair and slowly simmering, self-righteous fury.

“It’s just…” She trailed off.

I looked at her. I couldn’t feel my nose. Or my toes. Or the back of my neck, since I’d pulled my hair up in my new hair clip, stupidly exposing my flesh above the security of my scarf. I didn’t want to stand on the street corner like some two-dollar whore, which is exactly how he’d made me feel. “You don’t want to go in?”

“I don’t want you to go in,” my friend said, “if it means you’re going to get upset.”

I had to answer slowly to keep my teeth from chattering. “Do you think I’ll cause a scene? Because I won’t, Jen. I’m not a scene kind of girl. But I’ll be fucked with a barbed-wire dildo before I’ll let him keep me out of our place. That’s
our
place, and it was before I ever knew he existed.”

“Ouch.” She winced and laughed.

“Up the ass without lube,” I added, not feeling much like laughing but letting a small giggle escape, anyway. “C’mon, it’s freezing out here. I don’t care if he’s in there, I just want something fattening.”

“Right on,” Jen said. “If you’re sure. I mean, a barbed-wire dildo up your ass seems pretty sure to me, but I want to be sure you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” I couldn’t hold back the chattering now, and the words bit out of me between the clatter. “Really. I don’t know what his problem is, but he can suck it.”

“Ooookay.” She howled with laughter and clapped her hands together. “Let’s go.”

He wasn’t inside, which made the whole conversation pretty anticlimactic. We placed our orders and took them to a table, where we peeled ourselves out of our layers and wrapped our hands around steaming mugs to warm them. I still didn’t feel much like laughing, but with Jen across from me, it was fairly impossible not to give in to the giggles.

“So, how’s it going with the funeral director guy?” I asked her as I licked melted marshmallow topping from the mintchocolate latte I was trying. It had a peppermint stick in it, and even a couple months after Christmas, who can resist that?

“Ohhh, girl,” Jen said. “I like him.”

“Wow. That’s good, right?”

She twirled her spoon in her latte and shrugged. “I guess so.”