by Megan Hart
I heard music, louder in here, from upstairs. I heard voices, too. I smelled pot.
“C’mon in.” Johnny linked his fingers through mine and tugged me down the hall toward the kitchen, where a group of men and women sat around a wooden table or leaned against the counters to watch another man cooking something on the stove. “Hungry? Candy’s cooking.”
At the sound of his name, the man at the stove turned and flashed a grin of straight white teeth. He bent his head, Afro waving, as regally as any king welcoming a subject, his stirring spoon a scepter. “Welcome, welcome, sister. We got enough to feed you, if you’re hungry.”
I was hungry, intensely so. My stomach rumbled. I’d never been hungry in a fugue before. Oh, I’d eaten and drank, but never from need. I put my free hand, the one not still clutching Johnny’s, over my belly.
My clothes hadn’t changed. I looked down at the familiar friction of material under my fingertips. I was even wearing my winter coat, though it had come unbuttoned. No wonder I’d been so hot outside. No wonder everyone was looking at me so strangely.
“You can take that off,” Johnny offered.
I nodded and let him help me out of it. Women’s lib might be going strong, but Johnny was still a gentleman. He hung my coat on a hook behind the door and put his hand on the small of my back as I stood under the scrutiny of everyone in the kitchen.
“This is Emm,” Johnny said, like he brought strangers home all the time. He probably did. “That’s Wanda, Paul, Ed, Bellina and Candy’s at the stove. Say hi, everyone.”
They did, in a chorus, while I stared and tried to keep my mouth closed. I didn’t recognize Wanda or her name, but Bellina Cassidy was a playwright, her shows performed on Broadway by casts of the biggest names in theater. Edgar D’Onofrio had been a celebrated poet who’d killed himself sometime in the late seventies. Paul was probably Paul Smiths, the photographer and moviemaker who’d directed a handful of Johnny’s early movies. And Candy…
“Candy Applegate?”
Candy looked at her with a grin. “That’s me.”
“You have a restaurant,” I said. “And that cooking show on TV.”
The room bubbled with laughter. I was looking at the Enclave. I licked my mouth and tasted sweat.
“Naw, girl, that ain’t me.” Candy shook his head and dipped the spoon back into whatever was simmering so deliciously on the stove. “Must be some other Candy.”
“No, it’s you,” I said, but shut my mouth up tight before I could say the rest.
Fugues were never like dreams, which I could sometimes control. I’d never been able to fix the course of what happened when I was dark. Sometimes that meant they were scarier than nightmares. Other times, like now, I just had to remember this wasn’t real and I could do nothing about it. I could tell them I knew the future, but I’d only look crazier than I probably already did.
Johnny, in fact, was studying me. “Feed her, Candyman.”
“I’ll feed her,” Candy said.
And they did. A great, steaming bowl of some spicy, meatless stew. We all ate it over fragrant, sticky rice and sopped up the gravy with thick slices of homemade bread. I had to stop to taste everything twice, not because I was greedy or hungry, but because it tasted so, so good.
We all ate a lot. Laughing and joking. Talking about politics and art and music I knew only from history lessons or the classic rock station. They dropped names casually—Jagger, Bowie, Lennon. They dipped bare fingers into the communal pot and ate with their hands. They passed a pipe without telling me what was in it, and I smoked some of it because, after all, none of this was real.
Through it all, Johnny watched me from across the table. I watched him, too. I hadn’t asked what year this was and knew even if I did it wouldn’t matter. By the length of his hair, I guessed Johnny was about twenty-four. This made me older than him by about seven years. He didn’t seem to care.
I definitely didn’t.
We ate and talked and laughed. Someone brought out a guitar and started to play a song I was surprised I knew the words to. Something about flowers and soldiers, and where had they gone. And then they sang “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I’d never known it was about marijuana.
Sometime during all of this, our places around the table changed. I ended up next to Johnny instead of across from him. Our thighs pressed together. Our shoulders brushed when he leaned forward to grab up a slice of Candy’s bread, or to refill my glass with the kind of rich, red wine I avoided in real life.
Johnny turned his face toward me and smiled. And I kissed him. Just a brush of lip on lip, his breath warm and soft against me. He smiled into the kiss and his hand came up to cup the back of my neck beneath my hair.
Nobody noticed, or nobody cared. By that point I think most of them were drunk and high. Ed had passed out, his head on the table, snoring softly. Johnny squeezed my thigh beneath the table.
“Take me someplace,” I whispered into his ear.
He looked into my eyes for a moment, curiously. Then he nodded. He took me by the hand and led me from the table. We didn’t say goodbye, and I didn’t look back. We went up the long, narrow stairs, our hands linked loosely. My hand trailed the banister. I looked over the side, to the floor below, then up to the floor above. Stuck between, Johnny leading me, woozy from the food and whatever was in the pipe…I followed.
But at the top of the stairs, I led. I kissed him. I pushed him back against the wall, my leg cocked between his thighs, against his crotch. His belt buckle, something huge and metal, pressed my belly through my skirt. I slid my hands up his front, over the slick-smooth fabric of his ugly-patterned shirt. And I kissed him, long and smooth and hard and slow and deep.
He looked at me curiously again when I pulled back. “Who are you?”
“Emm.” I wasn’t slurring, but my voice was definitely hoarser than usual. I tasted him when I swiped my tongue across my lips.
“Emm,” Johnny said, as though considering something important. “That’s your name, all right. But who are you?”
“Nobody,” I assured him.
Our bodies pressed together. His hands fit on my hips. Downstairs, I heard the burble of laughter and music. Smelled the tang of weed. Here, up here, it was quiet.
I’d been away too long. Any minute I would start to fade from this place and wake, maybe blinking away only a few seconds of time. Maybe on my knees, or worse, my face, on the ground. Maybe I wouldn’t wake at all.
The first door in the hallway, just to Johnny’s left, was cracked open enough to show me a bedroom. I took his hand and pulled him toward it. Through the door, to the bed, which was neatly made up with a blanket of orange, ribbed fabric. My grandmother had used bedspreads just like that one. I sat on the bed and spread my legs. My skirt, too long for this era, dipped between my thighs, and I pulled it up inch by inch, watching him watch me.
I pulled the fabric up over the torn remnants of my panty hose and crooked my finger at him. “Come here.”
Johnny, grinning, was already unbuttoning his shirt. He tossed it to the floor and then crawled up over me. Our mouths locked. His tongue stroked mine. I cradled him against my cunt, my legs open wide to accommodate him. My fingers drew circles on the bare flesh of his back.
I rolled him onto his back and straddled him. I hooked fingers into my nylons and tore them to keep any barrier from between us, but his jeans were still there.
“Cock blocked,” I murmured, and tugged at his zipper.
“What?” Johnny laughed and put his hand on mine to help me pull down the zipper.
“Your jeans. They’re cock-blocking me. Take them off.”
He laughed again. I wanted to eat it up, that laughter. His mouth. All of him. I bent to kiss him with my hair hanging down all around us, and when he was naked underneath me, myself still clothed, I covered his body with my kisses.
He didn’t protest when I nipped and sucked, or when I licked. He didn’t protest when I lifted my skirt and pulled my panties asid
e to slide down on his cock. And Johnny didn’t protest when I fucked him, sweating, both of us concentrating hard, not speaking, not even kissing, as the pleasure built higher and higher and crashed over us both.
He only protested when I got up to leave, but by then it was too late. The edges of this place were fading. Shaking in the aftermath of my orgasm, I kissed him. My skirt fell down around my knees. Johnny held my hand and made a wordless noise of complaint, but I tugged my fingers gently from his and stepped backward out the door, closing it behind me.
And then I woke up.
Chapter 06
My knees hurt. Throbbed and stung. Blood oozed from several scrapes. My panty hose had indeed been shredded, but on this sidewalk now, not from me tearing them away in order to get at naked Johnny.
He had one hand on my elbow, the other at my hip, holding me in place. “You all right?”
I blinked rapidly, putting myself in place. I knew where I was. I knew who I was. Most importantly, I knew when I was.
“Fine. I slipped on the ice. I’m sorry, did I hit you?”
My breezy explanation wasn’t cutting it with him, I could tell. How long had I been dark? I hadn’t conveniently glanced at my watch before the fugue.
“You should be more careful,” Johnny warned, sounding stern.
I could still taste him. I swallowed against the flavor of his mouth and skin. We were standing too close for strangers, which is what we really were. He let go of my hip but kept hold of my elbow, and I was grateful because my legs had suddenly gone trembling and weak.
“You look like shit. You better come in here.”
Yew bettuh come in heah.
From anyone else I’d have laughed a little at that accent, but on Johnny it was utterly drool-worthy. I couldn’t say anything, could only let him pull me along and up the brick stairs, through his front door. And then I stood inside Johnny’s house.
It was beautiful, of course. I hadn’t expected anything less. I stood on his parquet wood floors, my panty hose shredded and the hem of my coat dripping. I hadn’t noticed that before, that I’d gotten wet. I looked at my feet and the growing puddle of dirty water, then at him.
“Oh, God. Sorry.”
Johnny had been hanging up his long black coat and that scarf on a brass hook on the wall just inside the door, and he turned to give me an up-and-down look that left me feeling totally lacking. “You should come into the kitchen. Get a drink. You look like you’re going to pass out.”
I felt white-faced and shivering, certain I looked like shit just as he’d said. “Thanks.”
“C’mon.” Johnny made a shooing gesture down the hall toward the kitchen, then followed me. “I’ll make you a cuppa tea. Unless you want something stronger?”
“Tea’s fine. Good. Thank you.” I sat in the chair he pointed to, at a table that couldn’t be the same one my brain had created, no matter how much it looked like the one in my fugue.
Sometimes, not every time, I did come out of a fugue this way, disoriented and a little sick. Most of the time it passed quickly. Today, I had to take slow, shallow breaths and sip at the air to keep my stomach from revolting up my throat.
Johnny moved around his kitchen in silence. He filled the kettle and settled it on the gas range. The burner hissed and sparked without lighting until he fiddled with something, and then the blue flame whooshed up, high.
“Damn thing,” Johnny said, but not to me.
Word vomit. That’s what Jen had called it. I’d laughed at her then, but understood it now. I had to clench my jaw tight to keep myself from blurting out the most random, insane thoughts crossing my mind and, even then, didn’t quite manage.
“You have a beautiful house.”
Johnny grunted as he pulled a couple of oversize mugs from a cupboard and set them on the counter. He opened a tin canister marked Tea and filled a small mesh ball with leaves. Another cupboard produced a ceramic teapot.
“You’ve done a lot to it,” I continued.
My dad was fond of saying that only a fool speaks just to fill silence. I wasn’t making my dad very proud now. Nor did I seem to be impressing Johnny.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” Johnny said finally, after he’d poured boiling water into the teapot and brought it to the table. He covered it with a knitted cozy and put the mugs beside it. He took a trip to the fridge and brought out half-and-half.
Johnny was making tea for me. This was more surreal and harder to believe than finding myself in the late 1970s had been. I sat with hands linked in my lap, watching as he sat across from me and poured the tea. He added three spoonfuls of sugar and a generous dollop of half-and-half to one mug, then pushed it toward me. I wrapped my hands around it but didn’t dare drink for fear I’d spill it all down my front and embarrass myself even more.
“It’s nice,” I said. “The house, I mean.”
He looked at me. “Drink your tea.”
I blew on it, then sipped. It was perfect, exactly the way I’d have made it myself. My stomach settled. Then it grumbled.
Johnny hadn’t drunk a sip. He got up, went to the counter, pulled out a package of cookies from a bread box and set them on the table, too. “You need more sugar.”
“I’m okay, really.”
He took a cookie from the package and set it on the table in front of me. “Eat that.”
If he’d said it with a smile, cajoling, I’d have eaten it. It was my favorite kind, and I was hungry, craving sugar. But something in his tone and look made me ornery. “No, thanks.”
Johnny shrugged and snagged a cookie from the package. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it like a magician getting ready to do a coin trick. He studied it, then looked at me. It crumbled when he bit it, and when he licked the crumbs off his lips, I had to concentrate on the mug of tea in my hands. The surface of the liquid shook the way the glass of water trembled in Jurassic Park, announcing the presence of the T. rex. I was pretty sure there weren’t any dinosaurs here.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
It was stupid not to eat it, so I did after another half minute. Sweetness exploded on my tongue, and though it might’ve been the placebo effect, my stomach instantly settled and my head stopped swimming. I licked melted chocolate from my fingertips and took a long, slow swallow of tea.
The fugue was fading, the memory of Johnny’s taste replaced by tea and chocolate. I didn’t want to let the sensations go, but they’d become slippery as a fistful of spaghetti and no more easily gripped. I sighed and took another cookie when he pushed the package toward me.
“They’re not very good.” Johnny didn’t say it like an apology, just a fact. “Homemade’s better.”
“Homemade is always better,” I agreed. “But I guess you have to take what you can get, huh?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t crack a smile. He sat back in his seat, gaze shuttered, mouth thin and straight without even the hint of curve. “You got some color back in your cheeks.”
“I’m feeling a lot better, thanks. This was just what I needed.” I lifted my mug and pointed it toward the cookies, praying I didn’t have chocolate smeared on my mouth or teeth.
“Yeah. I know. You okay now?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.”
Johnny gave an unsubtle look at the clock on the wall. “You live here, in the neighborhood?”
“Yes. I just moved in a few months ago. Down the street,” I added. “Number forty-three.”
Word vomit. I was about to fall prey to its insidiousness. Fortunately, Johnny cut me off before I could spew out anything really embarrassing, like an offer to take him home and fuck him until we both saw stars. Unfortunately, he also stood in a way that made it obvious I was supposed to leave.
I paused on the front porch. “Thanks, Mr. Dellasandro.”
He’d kiss me now, I knew it. Or I’d kiss him. He’d push me up against the wall and put his hand under my skirt. We’d fuck right there
on the stairs….
“Be more careful out there,” Johnny said, and closed the door in my face.
He hadn’t even asked my name.
“You didn’t.” Jen sounded horrified and fascinated at the same time. “He took you into his house? And gave you a cookie? Damn, girl…did he ask you to sit on his lap, too?”
“No, God, no. Too bad.”
“Really.” She shook her head and held up a skirt she’d pulled off the rack. “What do you think of this?”
“Hideously ugly.” I fingered the fabric, a polyester blend in shades of orange and green. “And yet appealing.”
“I know, right? How about this?” She held up a dress, which had been made to look like a shirt and skirt but was really one piece. “It has a matching belt.”
“And it’s half off,” I said with a glance at the tag. Wednesdays were price-reduction days at the Salvation Army. Jen and I had made it a weekly date. “Where are you going to wear it?”
“Oh. To work, I guess. With a pair of supercute boots. Maybe hem the skirt a little. I love the sleeves.”
The sleeves were pretty awesome, cuffed tight at the wrists with the rest blousy. It wasn’t a look I thought I could pull off, but it would suit her. “It’s artistic.”
“You think so?” She held up the dress again. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
She put it in the cart and we inched down the aisle. The store was always crammed with shoppers on Wednesdays, making it nearly impossible to navigate with a wonky-wheeled cart unless we both maneuvered it. I pulled out a sleek black dress with a scoop neck and an A-line hem. It also had a glittery broach. Bonus! I stuck it in the cart, even though I had no place to wear a dress like that. At five bucks, half off, I couldn’t resist.