by Megan Hart
“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
“You 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.”
“Why just you guess so?”
She sighed. “Well, you know how it is. You like a guy. A lot. He likes you. It’s going great. I’m just waiting for it to all turn to crap.”
“Awww, why would it?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “Because that’s what happens.”
“Not always,” I said, then added, “or so I hear.”
“Yeah, I know, right? Love is sorta like Sasquatch. Or alien abduction. You hear a lot about it happening to other people, but there’s no real evidence of it. Girl, that shit’s scary.” Jen made a face.
I sighed, my smile fading along with my good humor. “So’s love.”
“Oh, Emm. I’m sorry. It sucks that he’s being such a dick.” My friend squeezed my hand. “Cute blouse, by the way.”
“Nice subject change.” I looked down at the shirt I’d picked up at the Salvation Army. It had poofy sleeves banded tight at the wrist and a matching bow at the throat. “It was fifty percent off because it’s so ugly.”
“It’s like a shirt and a vest combined. Verrrry retro.”
I laughed. “The pockets aren’t real, either.”
Jen looked over my shoulder and sighed. “So much for the subject change.”
My muscles went tight, my back straight. “It’s him, huh?”
The bell jangled. I imagined rather than felt the whisper of cold air along the back of my neck. I turned to look at him, expecting him to ignore me as usual and not going to let him get away with it without at least a little bit of guilt.
Johnny stopped at the table. He nodded at Jen but looked at me. “Emm. Hi. Can I talk to you?”
I ignored Jen’s breathless squeak and the kick she gave me under the table. I folded my hands over my mug and looked up at him without the slightest hint of a smile. “You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”
He didn’t look taken aback, or abashed, both reactions I’d have quite thoroughly enjoyed. Johnny tilted his head just a bit. “Privately.”
“I’m with my friend right now.”
“Actually,” Jen said apologetically, though I didn’t believe for one second she was sorry, “I have to get going. I promised Jared I’d call him.”
I narrowed my eyes at her but couldn’t force her to stay with me when she was already getting up and putting on her coat. “Betrayer,” I muttered.
“Nice seeing you,” Jen said to Johnny.
He smiled at her. “You haven’t been into the gallery in a while.”
She stopped, looking stunned. “I, um…”
“I’m having a new-artists show in a month or two. You should bring me something to look at for it.”
Both of us let out surprised squeaks that time. Johnny didn’t look surprised. Patiently, he waited for an answer.
“Sure, okay,” Jen said hesitantly. Her smile got wider. “Yeah, sure. I could do that!”
“Bring it by sometime in the evening this week. I’ll be there until seven.”
“Great. Okay.” She nodded and gave me a look full of wonder and excitement I wasn’t about to sully with my own pissedoffedness. “See you, Emm.”
“Later.” I waited until she’d gone and he’d slid into her seat before I glared at him. “What was that all about?”
“What?” Johnny pushed Jen’s mug out of the way and steepled his fingers together on the table in front of him. He hadn’t bothered to take off his coat, maybe not planning to stay long.
“How do you even know she’s an artist, anyway?” I didn’t want my drink anymore and spun the half-melted peppermint stick around and around.
Johnny’s brows lifted. So did one corner of his mouth. I hated that smile. It tempted me into returning it, and I didn’t want to. Silently, he pointed along the Mocha’s back wall, hung with the photos and art for sale, some of them Jen’s.
“I didn’t think you’d have noticed,” I said coolly. “Not to mention paid any attention to who she was.”
“You think I don’t know who’s in here and who’s not?” Johnny’s smile hadn’t reached full power yet, but I could tell it was on its way. “You think I just come in here and drink my coffee without noticing everything?”
“Yes. I do.” The peppermint stick snapped in my fingers and I let both pieces slide into the chocolaty coffee.
“Well,” Johnny said in a low voice, “I don’t.”
His gaze was unflinching. His smile crept up another fraction. I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to keep myself from giving in to his attempt at charm.
I smelled oranges.
Against my will, my eyelids fluttered. I drew in a swift breath, not on purpose but from unconscious reaction. The smell got stronger. I stood, push
ing my chair back with a loud scrape.
“I have to go.”
“Emm,” Johnny said, standing, too. “Wait.”
I didn’t wait. I went dark. I fell into it headlong and came up gasping, like I was kicking up from miles below the surface of a still, silent lake.
I wasn’t cold. I was hot. I was in a bathroom, porcelain sink cool under my palms, gripping it. Water running. I was sweating, salty drops of it on my upper lip when I licked it.
I cupped some water and drew it to my mouth, drinking. Gulping. I splashed my face, not caring I also wet my blouse and even got the front of my high-waisted jeans wet. I looked at my reflection. Wild eyes, dripping face.
I turned slowly, looking around. There was nothing so convenient as a calendar to show me the date but the shower curtain of red, orange and lime-green geometric patterns clued me in. Well, that and the fact that only a minute ago I’d been in the Mocha, getting ready to storm out, thinking, Fuck Johnny Dellasandro, the arrogant prick.
Now, here, I was also thinking about fucking Johnny, just not in the same way. I dried my hands on a towel that wasn’t quite clean. I pushed open the bedroom door. Johnny, naked, lounged on the bed in a tangle of sheets.
“Hey, babe,” he said, then stopped, frowning. “Why’d you get dressed?”
I looked down at my clothes. “I—”
“Shit.” He laughed. “Sandy’ll be pissed you’re wearing her clothes. But, ah, who cares? That shirt looks better on you. She doesn’t have the tits for it.”
I was still angry; this didn’t make it better. I put a hand on my hip, not caring this was a fugue and I was essentially arguing with myself. “And why are Sandy’s clothes in your bathroom, huh? Why the fuck does that bitch waltz in and out of here like she owns the place? Like she owns you? And yet you can’t give me the time of day?”
Johnny sat up, not bothering to cover himself. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I breathed hard and deep, disoriented enough to grip the doorway tight. “Her. Sandy. Your wife, remember her?”
“I told you, we split up.” Johnny got out of bed and padded toward me on bare feet.
His body was gorgeous. His hair like silk as he pushed it off his face and drew me close. He kissed me.