Collide

I walked to the wall featuring her paintings. “Why not? You’re good, too.”

“And you don’t know anything about art, remember?” She said it without malice, following me to look at the pictures. “They’ll never hang in a museum. I don’t think anyone will ever make a Wikipedia entry about me.”

“You never know,” I told her. “Do you think Johnny Dellasandro knew when he was making those movies that one day he’d be famous for showing off his ass?”

“It’s a pretty epic ass.”

“Let’s go watch another movie,” I said.

By two in the morning we’d only made it through one more because we’d paused and rewound so many scenes so many times.

“Why didn’t you start with this one?” I demanded after the third time we’d watched Johnny slide down a naked woman’s body with his mouth.

Jen shook the remote at me. “Girl, you have to build up to this shit. You can’t just go in full force on this stuff, you might give yourself an aneurysm.”

I laughed, though the fact I probably did have an aneurysm that could kill me at any time, no matter what the doctors said, made the joke a little less funny. “Play it again.”

She reversed the DVD half a minute and played it again. Johnny called the woman a dirty whore, and in his accent it came out sounding like “duty hooah.” It should’ve made me laugh.

“So fucking wrong,” I said, rapt as Johnny-on-the-screen moved his mouth down her naked body again, over her thigh, then moved up to grab a handful of her hair and turn her around. “I should not like that, right?”

“Girl, just give in to it,” Jen said dreamily.

In the movie, he called her a hooah again. Told her she was dirty, filthy. That she deserved to be fucked like that, didn’t she? That she liked it, being fucked that way, by him.

“God,” I muttered, squirming a little. “That’s …”

“Hot, right?” Jen sighed. “Even with the funky seventies sideburns.”

“Definitely.”

We made it through to the end of the movie and I had no idea what the plot had been, just that Johnny had been naked for over half of it and he’d had sex with most of the other characters, men and women. Oh, and that I was in desperate, urgent need of some “alone time.”

“Another?” Jen was already getting up, but I stood, too.

“I need to get home. It’s really late. And if we sleep in too late tomorrow,” I added, “we won’t make it to the coffee shop. We might miss him.”

“Oh, Emm.” Jen blinked, looking solemn. “I’ve infected you, haven’t I?”

“If this is a disease,” I told her, “I don’t want to find a cure.”

Jen lived close enough to me that walking was no problem, at least during the day or in good weather. But in the middle of an oddly frigid Pennsylvania winter and in a neighborhood that was a little dicey, I’d driven the couple blocks. My normal spot was taken when I got home, probably by the girlfriend of the guy who lived across the street. Grumbling, eyes heavy, I drove down to the next block to take someone else’s spot and hoped I didn’t come out to find a nasty note on my windshield. Since there was very little off-street parking, the jockeying for spots could get brutal.

It was something like serendipity, however, because when I got out of my car I realized I’d parked almost directly in front of Johnny Dellasandro’s house. There was a light on upstairs, the third floor. Most of the houses on this street had the same floorplan, so unless he’d done some major reconstruction inside, that light was shining from a bedroom. In my house, someday, I intended it to be the master bedroom with an attached bath. He’d done enough work to his place that I suspected that’s what his was.

Johnny Dellasandro in his bedroom. I wondered if he slept naked. I wasn’t quite sure I was up to Jen’s standard of surfing down the street on a wave of my own come, but it was close there for a second. I definitely had a clit pulse. I fantasized happily all the way down the block and into my own house.

There’s never been any rhyme or reason behind why the fugues come. The things that set off seizures or migraines or bouts of narcolepsy in other people are only haphazard triggers for me. This is good because it means I don’t have to avoid intense emotion, or chocolate, or any of a dozen other common triggers. It’s bad, of course, because whatever causes the fugues hits me randomly and without warning, and even if I wanted to avoid whatever caused it, I couldn’t.

I hadn’t had a fugue in nearly two years, and now the scent of oranges told me I was going to have a third in less than twenty-four hours.

In the bathroom. Brushing teeth. Staring at my reflection in the mirror but seeing Johnny’s face as he made love to a woman with hair the color of mine. My eyes. My breasts under his hands, my clit beneath his tongue.

Staring at the mirror and then, like Alice … through …

“Watch what you’re doing! You spilled my coffee.” I say this in a thick accent, not my own voice, but it doesn’t feel put on. It feels right on my tongue and teeth and lips. It feels sexy.

“Sorry, ma’am.” The waiter dabs at my thighs with a white towel. His fingers brush too close to my belly, linger too long. “Lemme get that cleaned up for you.”

“I think you need to compensate me.” I say this with a straight face and flip my thick, dark hair over my shoulder.

“Ma’am?” He’s not stupid, this young man in the white waiter’s coat.

The train rocks beneath us.

“Come to my cabin later tonight and make sure you’re prepared to adequately compensate me for the ruin of my slacks.”

His only answer is a smile. I finish my meal with my own smile, making it difficult to enjoy the food. I’m not hungry any longer, anyway. Not for dinner.

In my cabin I wait for the knock at the door, and when I open it, there he is. Not in his waiter’s uniform now, but a pair of dark trousers and a yellowed white poet’s shirt. Peasant wear, but I don’t care. Peasants make great lovers.

“Just look,” I say, pointing to the dark stain on my white slacks. I’ve deliberately done nothing to clean them. “See what you did, you clumsy man?”

“I can pay for them, ma’am… .”

“That won’t do at all. These pants are pure silk, made by my personal designer. They’re irreplaceable.”

“Then what?” He’s properly challenging.

He has long, thick, dark blond hair clubbed into a tail at the back of his neck. When I loosen it from the tie, it falls over my fingers and hands. It’s rougher than silk.

“Clean them.”

With a sullen look he pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and, with a flourish, pushes me a few steps until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed, which has been turned down for the night. He swipes at the stain on my pants without looking away from my eyes. I shudder at his touch.

“No,” I say, low and throaty. “Use your mouth.”

He goes to his knees so slowly it’s like watching butter melt. He’s smiling, but his eyes are hard. He closes them just before he puts his mouth to the stain.

I can feel the heat of his breath through the thin cloth, and I shudder again. My knees want to buckle, but I put my hand on the wall to keep myself standing. I can feel the train’s vibration in my fingers and palm.

His hands move up to grab my ass and hold me still. He looks up at me, his face inches from my crotch. I wonder if he can smell me.

“That good enough?” he says.

“No,” I tell him. “Not nearly good enough.”

His fingers grip and pull. Silk shreds. I’m suddenly bare from the waist down, my slacks torn and dangling in his fists. I have only a moment to react before his mouth is on me again. My bare flesh this time. My pussy. He sucks at my clit, nuzzling, and I cry out. He slaps my ass lightly, and I don’t know if it’s to keep me still or make me cry out louder. Then I’m on my back and he’s over me, his cock pressing my lips.

“Take it,” he says. Brutish and cruel. My cunt throbs and I turn my face. He grabs my hair, holds me still. Then, gently, softly, he rubs his cock over my pressed-closed lips. “Take it.” And I do.

All of it. Thick and hot, hard. Down the back of my throat. I suck him in, greedy for it. I suck and lick and stroke, and he fucks my mouth like it’s my cunt, and I swear I get as much pleasure from it.

He’s not even touching my clit and I feel the buildup there of pleasure. Like electricity. Like fire. I’m pumping my hips and moaning around his cock. My hair is in my face and he strokes it back, then grips a handful of it to set a slower pace.

I want him to touch me but I don’t need him to touch me. I’m going to come in a minute or two. I can feel it. And then he’s pulling away, stealing that delicious cock from me, and I do more than moan, I cry out.

“Lookit you,” he says in a voice full of triumph and yet tender, too. “Lookit you. Begging for it. Such a whore.”

I love the way he says it, like it has two syllables. Suddenly, I don’t know why we’re on a train, why he’s a waiter and I’m some sort of … countess? Or duchess? Some sort of rich bitch with too much money and an itch. Everything that made sense when this started is now a jumble.

All I know for sure is that I don’t want this to end. His hand comes down to caress my cheek. His thumb slips between my lips and I suck it gently before biting. He laughs, pulls me up, settles me onto his cock like I weigh nothing. Now there’s nothing between us and he’s inside me, all the way.

The train rocks us. He rocks us. His hands, strong hands, grip my ass and move me. His mouth takes mine. We kiss for the first time, and I want to drown in the taste of him. His tongue strokes mine. Our teeth bump. He laughs again.

“You like that?”

“I like that,” I tell him. I don’t have an Italian accent anymore.

When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my face. I don’t even see our reflection, fucking so prettily on this sleeping-car bed. The mirror is more like a window, only it doesn’t look out to the passing scenery. Instead of mountains, I see walls. I see a woman.

The woman is me.

She is there, I am here; we’re the same and I look into the eyes of my lover, this waiter whose name is …

“Johnny.”

I came out of the fugue with his name on my lips and the smell of oranges so thick and cloying in my nose and mouth I leaned over the sink and gulped water straight from the tap. I stood, heart pounding, eyes wild, face dripping. I looked at the mirror, but all I saw was myself.

Chapter 03

Hallucinations weren’t new. When I was a little girl, in the first few years after the accident, I’d had a hard time differentiating between the fugue world and the real world. I could tell when I was dreaming, but not when I was having a fugue.

It didn’t help that no matter what doctors my parents took me to, none of them could figure it out, either. The brain is still a vastly underexplored landscape. I wasn’t having seizures, though in the worst fugues I did sometimes lose motor control along with consciousness. And I didn’t have pain, except for the rare few times when I fell during one of the blackouts and hurt myself.

As I got older, I learned to tell when a fugue was coming on. I never learned to notice inside of one if I was hallucinating or not, though I did learn to tell what had been hallucination once I came out of it. And I always came out of it, even if I didn’t always hallucinate. Sometimes I just stayed blank, unblinking, unmoving, for a few seconds while the world passed around me and whoever I was talking to thought my mind had wandered.

Actually, that was how I felt about it. That my mind wandered, while my body stayed behind. I’d learned to catch up quickly in conversations with people who didn’t know me well enough to realize I’d gone blank for a few minutes. I’d adapted.

Most of the time, the hallucinations were boldly colored, often loud. Often a continuation of what I’d been doing as the fugue hit, just slightly off. I could spend what felt like hours inside the fugue and come out of it within a minute, or spend a much longer time dark and have no more than a few seconds’ worth in the dream state.

I’d never, until this early morning, had such a vivid, intense hallucination of such a sexual nature.

I was taking a little time to recover. Wallowing in my bed on a Sunday wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the fact I’d grabbed my laptop and brought it under the covers with me was. Normally I kept my bed a sanctuary, a place for sleep, not work, and though I loved my laptop like it was the conjoined twin I carried in a basket after our cruel separation, I preferred using it at my desk or on the couch. Now, though, I used the track pad to scroll through another list of search results. Johnny Dellasandro, of course. I had the fever. Bad. He had a current website for his gallery. The only mention of his acting past were the three words, “independent film star” in his bio along with a rather extensive listing of his more recent professional accomplishments. There were store hours, a list of upcoming events. A photo of Johnny, smiling into the camera and looking for all the world like he wanted to fuck whoever was on the other side of the lens … thud. Be still my little horny heart.

There were other pictures of him, too, most of the handshake variety. Johnny with the mayor, with a local radio DJ, with a president of some museum. And then, a little more surprisingly, of Johnny with celebrities. Row after row of clickable thumbnails enlarged into shots of him next to some of the biggest movie stars of the sixties and seventies. Rock stars. Poets, novelists. A bunch of familiar faces next to his. In most of them, they were both looking at the camera, but there were a few more candid shots, and in those, whoever he was with invariably looked at him like they wanted to eat him. Or be fucked by him. I couldn’t blame them.

Maybe he wasn’t so ashamed of his dingle-dallying past, after all. More searching turned up a half dozen interviews done on blogs that didn’t appear to have very many readers. Not that I was surprised. Any monkey with a computer can make a blog, and even though Johnny might’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety, it was still within a fairly small realm. He didn’t sound like he regretted anything he’d ever done, at least not in the interviews he’d done in the past few years, and while those had focused more on his current work, inevitably a few questions would slip in about his early movie-making days.

“I don’t regret any of it,” Johnny told me from a video clip taken at some awards show I’d never heard of.

The film was shaky, the sound bad, and the people walking past in the background looked a little scary. Whoever was filming also asked the questions, their voice androgynous and too loud in the microphone. Johnny didn’t seem terribly interested in being interviewed, though he did answer a few more questions.

I settled back onto my pillows, laptop on my knees. Wikipedia did indeed have an entry on him, complete with links to dozens of articles in magazine and newspaper archives. Reviews of the films and entire websites devoted to discussing them. Links to places his art had hung, or was hanging. There was literally a day’s worth of research collected in this one webpage alone. If anyone Googled me—and I did myself a few times a month just to see what was out there—the only thing they’d find would be a list of accomplishments belonging to some other woman with my name. The question was not why there was so much information available about him, but how I’d lived for more than thirty years without being aware he existed.

I shut down the computer and set it aside, then lay back on the pillows to think about this. I was deep in crush, the worst I’d had since sixth grade when I discovered boys for the first time. Worse than the secret love affair I’d had with John Cusack inside my head since the first time I saw Say Anything. My feelings for Johnny were a combination of both—he was someone I’d seen in movies, therefore, not “real,” yet he lived down the street. He drank coffee and wore striped scarves. He was accessible.

“Snap out of it, Emm,” I scolded myself, and thought about getting out of my warm bed and shivering my way to the shower. I couldn’t quite make myself.

I didn’t want to think about the three fugues I’d had the day before, but thinking of the hallucination I’d had featuring Johnny in all his bare-assed glory, I had to think about the fugues, too. Two minis and one slightly larger. None had lasted long, but it was the frequency that worried me.

I was thirty-one years old and had never lived on my own before these past few months. I’d never worked farther away from a job than I could walk, because I was either not legally allowed, or was too afraid, to drive long distances. I’d spent my life dealing with the repercussions of those few, fleeting moments on the playground, but now I’d finally had a taste of the independence all my friends had been granted.

I was terrified of losing it.

I knew I should call my family doctor, Dr. Gordon, and tell her what had happened. She’d known me since childhood. I’d trusted her with everything—my questions about my first period, my first forays into birth control. But I couldn’t trust her with this. She’d be obligated to report the possibility of a seizure, and what then? I’d be back to no-driving status, and I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t.

I did, however, call my mom. Even though I’d only spoken to her the day before, and even though I’d been so happy to move out of her house, to stop needing her so much, she was still the first person I turned to. The phone rang and rang at my parents’ house, until finally the voice mail kicked in. I didn’t leave a message. My mom would panic if I did, and she’d probably just check the caller ID, anyway, note I called and call me back. I wondered where she was, though, before noon on a Sunday. She’d barely ever left the house on Sundays. I liked to sleep in. My mom liked to bake and garden and watch old movies on TV while my dad puttered in the garage.

I’d spent so many hours dreaming of days like this—waking in my own bed, my own house. Nobody around me. Just me, with no place to go and nobody to answer to. Nothing to do but my own laundry, using my own detergent, folding it or leaving it piled in the basket if that’s what I wanted to do. I’d dreamed of being an adult, living by myself, and now that I had it, I was suddenly, unbearably lonely.

The Morningstar Mocha would help with that. There I was part of a community. I had friends. I hadn’t made specific plans to meet Jen there, but I knew a quick text message would tell me if she were going to show or not. And if she didn’t, I could take my laptop and settle in with the bottomless cup of coffee or a pot of tea and a muffin. I could play around on Connex, or instant message friends who were also online.

Oh. And I could sorta-kinda-maybe-just-a-little-bit stalk Johnny Dellasandro.

A quick text to Jen settled the plans. We’d meet in half an hour, just enough time for me to shower and dress and walk to the coffee shop, including the time it was going to take me to shave my legs, pluck my brows and figure out what I was going to wear. Because yes, it was important.

“Hey, girl, hey!” Jen’s greeting made me laugh as she waved across the crowded Mocha. “I saved you a spot. What took you so long? Couldn’t find a place to park?”

“Oh, no, I walked.” My teeth were still chattering. January in Harrisburg isn’t quite the Arctic Circle, but it was cold enough to freeze a polar bear’s balls.

“What? Why? Oh, yeah. Snowplow?”

“I love that I can follow that conversation.” As if parking wasn’t enough of a hassle on my street, when the snowplow came through and covered the cars and people dug them out, leaving behind their empty spots, it could get ugly when someone took one. That wasn’t why I’d walked, though. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the back of my chair as I tried to casually scan the room for sight of the delicious, delectable Dellasandro. “But no. I just felt like walking.”

“I’ve heard of taking a cold shower, but that’s a little overboard.”

I blew into my hands to warm them and slipped into my chair. “I need to work off some of this ass if I’m going to keep eating muffins for breakfast.”

“Girl.” Jen sighed. “I hear you.”

We commiserated in silence for a moment about the collective size of our butts, though frankly I thought Jen had a supercute figure and had nothing to worry about, and I knew she thought the same of me.

“Love the top,” she said after the moment had passed. Then she laughed and lowered her voice. “I bet he’d like it, too.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you even pretend you don’t know who I mean!”

I looked down at the shirt, a simple sweater of soft knit that buttoned all the way to a pretty scoop neck. “I like the way it makes my collarbones look. And it’s not all cleavagy, like I’m trying too hard.”

“No, not at all,” Jen agreed. “And that color is awesome on you.”

I beamed. “I love your earrings.”

Jen fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Are we finished being gay for each other? Because if not, I was going to say I think your necklace is pretty.”

“This?” I’d forgotten what, exactly, I was wearing on my throat. I wasn’t usually the sort to switch out jewelry. My job at the credit union meant I had to dress nicely for work every day, with a strict dress code, and I’d gotten tired of trying to coordinate every day. As I tugged the pendant so I could see it, the chain broke and slithered into my fingers. “Oops!”

“Oh, shit.” Jen grabbed at the pendant, catching it before it could fall onto the table. She handed it to me.

“Damn.” I studied it. Nothing special, really, just a small, swirled design. I’d picked it up on the bargain table at my favorite thrift store. I cupped it now, the metal curiously warm in my palm. “Ah, well.”

“Can you get it fixed?”

“Not worth it. I don’t even think it’s real gold.”

“Too bad,” Jen said brightly. “Otherwise, you could take it to one of those places that buys gold for cash! I got invited to some home party thing my mom’s neighbor’s having. It says they’ll take gold fillings … teeth attached!”

“Gross!” I put the necklace into my coat pocket.

Jen laughed and seemed about to say something else, but her chuckle caught and broke. She looked over my shoulder, eyes wide. I knew better than to turn around.

I didn’t have to. I knew it was him. I could feel him. I could smell him.

Oranges.

He eased past us. The hem of his long black coat brushed my arm, and I turned into a fifteen-year-old girl. The only reason I didn’t giggle out loud was because my throat had gone so dry I couldn’t make a peep. Jen didn’t say a word, either, just stared at me with raised brows until Johnny’d passed.

“Are you okay?” she whispered, leaning close. “You look like you’re going to pass out. You’re all pale!”

I didn’t feel like I was going to. I didn’t feel pale. I felt redhot and blushing. I swallowed the cotton on my tongue and shook my head, not daring to look over her shoulder to watch him place his order at the counter. “No. I’m okay.”

“You sure?” Jen put her hand over mine to squeeze. “Really, Emm, you look …”

Just then, he turned around and looked at me. I mean, really looked. Not a quick glance, eyes sliding past me like I didn’t exist. Not a double take, either, like the sight of me had frightened him. Johnny Dellasandro looked at me, and I was already half out of my chair before I realized I couldn’t just get up and go to him.

Jen glanced over her shoulder, but he’d already turned back to the counter to take the plate with the muffin on it from the counter girl. He wasn’t looking at me any longer, and I didn’t know how to tell her he had been. If he had been—it was easy in those few seconds to convince myself I’d imagined it.

“Emm?”

“He is so fucking beautiful.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded hoarse and harsh and full of longing.

“Yeah.” Jen’s brow furrowed and she glanced at him again.