by Megan Hart
“Don’t be mad, baby,” Johnny murmured against my mouth. “C’mon. Get undressed. Come back to bed.”
I pushed his chest until he stepped away from me. “No.”
His expression clouded. “Jesus, you chicks. The fuck’s a guy gotta do for you? You go into the bathroom all fucking smiles, you come out looking like you want to kill me.”
“How long ago?” I demanded.
“How long ago what? We split up, like, a year ago.”
“No. How long ago did I go into the bathroom?” I forced the words out across a dry tongue and numb lips.
“I don’t know. Five, ten minutes ago?”
“Oh, God.” I wasn’t just back in the world I’d constructed out of wish fulfillment and an overdose of internet stalking. I was back and forth inside it.
I stumbled into the bathroom where I bent over the sink and swallowed convulsively, sure I was about to heave up every bit of my peppermint latte. With my eyes closed I couldn’t see him, but I heard the shush-shush of Johnny’s feet on the tile and felt his hand on my shoulder. Without opening my eyes, I fumbled open the faucet and ran my fingers through cool water to press them against my forehead and cheeks.
“You okay?” His fingers made soothing circles on my back. “What’s wrong?”
“Heat. It’s the heat.” The words slipped out of me, and I wondered why I lied.
“Take a drink.” His hands kept smoothing over my back.
I did feel better with his touch, but my fingers gripped the sink and I didn’t move until I could be sure I wasn’t going to puke. Then I splashed my face again and, dripping, turned to him. “What is this, Johnny?”
“What’s what?” He took a towel from a drawer and gently wiped my face. He cupped my chin in his palm and looked into my eyes before kissing my forehead. He pulled me against his chest, his arms around me.
I didn’t care if it was too hot to snuggle, or that his bare chest beneath my cheek was sticky with sweat. I pressed my lips to the skin there. I tasted salt and sex.
“This. Us.”
He laughed. “I don’t know. What do you want it to be?”
“I want it to be everything, Johnny.” My voice broke.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, shhh.”
I didn’t quite cry, but my body shook with tension and he must’ve thought I was weeping. It was nice, him holding me this way. A nice echo of what had happened the day in his office, except that here I knew if I kissed him, Johnny would kiss me back.
“So why can’t it be?” he said after a minute.
The air in the bathroom was heavy with heat and moisture. Breathing it took effort. Speaking took effort, too.
“Because none of this is real.”
“Hey.” He pushed me gently away without letting go of my upper arms. Holding me steady. “Don’t say that. It’s real. I’m right here, you’re right there—”
“No.” I shook my head. I ran my hands over his chest and belly. “You’re not. I’m not. This isn’t real at all.”
“Then what is it?” He tilted his head and gave me a faint smile. “It feels real to me.”
He slid his hand up to cup my breast through my blouse. “This feels real.”
He took my hand and pushed it down to hold his half-hard cock. “This feels real, too.”
I pushed away from him, half turning. With the sink at my back I had no place to go. “It would feel real to you. You’re always real to yourself. The problem, Johnny, is all of this is inside my head. I’m making it up. None of it’s real. It’s all just something that’s going on in my brain.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t try to pull me closer, but he didn’t move so I could get away. “Emm. Look at me.”
I did. He was so beautiful, so young. Smooth face, unlined. Was it wrong to see such beauty in his youth, especially when I had the memory of his real face to overlay the one in front of me? The lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver at his temples, those were things about the real Johnny I found utterly delicious, but there was no denying that the man in front of me was in his yumfuckable peak.
“What’s not real about this? I know we haven’t known each other very long, but…”
“It’s not that.” I shook my head. My hair had started to slip from the clip binding it in a coil to the back of my head.
I reached up and pulled it out, then held the curved leather on my palm to show him. “This is real. I bought it because of something you said to me here. That I left it here, that is was mine.”
He looked confused. “You did? When?”
“You told me,” I said, “in the kitchen. That this was mine, though I’d never seen it. That I’d left it here. Then I saw it in the mall and I bought one like it, because it reminded me of you. That’s crazy, Johnny. Maybe I’m crazy.”
“We’re all a little crazy. It’s okay.” He smiled.
I didn’t. I threw the leather clip into the sink, where the leather turned dark with wet. I looked at him again.
“None of this is real, and it can’t last.”
“Shit.” He frowned. “Some things last. Don’t make this over before it’s even started.”
“But it is over!” I shouted.
He backed up a few steps, eyes narrowing, fists clenching just a little, like he thought I might hit him. He had been married to Sandy, a woman I could totally see punching a dude in the nuts when he was naked. I, however, wasn’t that sort of woman.
“It’s over,” I whispered. “Because it never started. Don’t you get it?”
“No. I don’t get it.”
“This isn’t real.” I threw out a hand to gesture at the bathroom. “We aren’t. Somewhere, you’re shaking…shaking…”
I was shaking, but not from nerves or a seizure, but as though a phantom hand were pushing me back and forth.
“Emm?” Johnny sounded alarmed.
“Shaking me,” I whispered hoarsely, then louder, “shaking me out of it.”
“Out of what?” Johnny cried, reaching for me. “Jesus, Emm, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”
“Shaking me out of the dark. Bringing me back.” I pushed past him. “I’m going.”
“Where are you going?” he called from the doorway as I pushed myself to walk at a steady pace through the bedroom, not knowing where I was going.
Knowing it didn’t matter.
“Are you coming back?” he cried. “Emm! Tell me you’re coming back!”
“I don’t know,” I said over my shoulder as I opened the bedroom door. “I never know.”
And then I was blinking, my vision momentarily blurred, and Johnny’s hand was on my shoulder.
“Emm,” he was saying quietly. “You have to believe me when I say I’m sorry.”
Chapter 18
“For what?” I asked stupidly. I’d missed something important. I gave a pointed look at his hand, and he took it away.
Johnny paused before answering. “You were…gone…again, huh?”
My chin went up a little. “It was nothing.”
“Sure, it’s something,” he said, but before he could say more his phone rang from his coat pocket.
He reached for it, and I took the chance to get up while he was answering. He gestured at me to wait, but I didn’t. I grabbed up my coat and bag and pushed away from the table without even tossing my trash. Let him toss it. I had to get out of there.
I took the long way home. The cold felt good on my hot face, even though by the time I got back to my house I couldn’t feel my nose. Or my toes. The sky had gotten even darker, thick with clouds. The air tingled with the promise of snow.
My phone rang as soon as I got through the front door. I had caller ID. “What do you want?”
“Is that how you always answer the phone?”
“Only when it’s you,” I told Johnny.
He laughed, and I hated that he could find humor in my anger. “I’ve never called you before.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have called me
this time, either.”
“Emm. I’m sorry. I had to talk to you.”
I clenched my fists, one at a time, switching the phone from hand to hand to get some feeling back into them. “Why?”
“You know why.”
“Actually, I don’t.” I put the kettle on, thinking to make some hot tea and decided to make cocoa instead. Then, thinking of the last time I’d made hot cocoa, I decided again on tea.
“What happened the other night…I was wrong.”
“Damn right you were wrong.” I twisted the burner on and, finally warm enough, unbuttoned my coat.
“I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “I shouldn’t have let things get that far.”
“No, what you should be sorry about is walking out afterward like I was some bargain basement hooah.” I paused, realizing I’d unconsciously imitated him.
Johnny was silent for a long few seconds. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like that, Emmaline.”
It was the first time he’d ever used my full name, though it wasn’t the first time I’d ever heard him say it. The sound of it was too strong a reminder of the havoc my brain was wreaking. I turned off the burner and poured myself a mug of peppermint tea before the water in the kettle had even boiled.
“Well. You did,” I said.
The sound of his sigh tickled my eardrums through the phone. “I’m sorry.”
“Make it up to me,” I said.
Sometimes in silence you can hear an expression, but I couldn’t this time. Was he smiling again, crinkling his eyes at the corners? Frowning, so that his brow furrowed between his eyes with that little divot I wanted to smooth away with my thumb? Or was he giving the phone that frankly assessing look he’d given me a few times?
“How?”
“You could take me to dinner, for a start,” I told him, giddy with my own boldness and yet suddenly, completely certain this was how it had been meant to go all along. “I like Italian food.”
“Dinner, for a start. And then what?”
“Let’s start with dinner. I’ll see if I’m sufficiently mollified,” I told him.
This time, I heard his smile as clearly as if I’d been able to see it. “What time should I pick you up?”
“Seven-thirty tomorrow.”
“Be ready,” Johnny said.
“You’re the one who needs to be ready,” I told him. “Ready to convince me you’re not an asshole.”
I heard the soft chuff of a laugh. “I’ll do what I can.”
“See you tomorrow, Johnny,” I told him, and hung up before he could reply.
He showed up at my door with flowers. This was one of the differences between being taken out by a man and not a boy. This was the promise of a real date, not just a hookup. Not beer and wings at a bar with some sport playing on the big screen and buddies dropping by the table every few minutes to slap my date’s hand and check me out not so surreptitiously. This was something special.
“You look nice.” Johnny handed me the bouquet of lilies and daisies, two flowers I’d never have put together in one bunch.
I lifted them to my nose. “Thanks. These are pretty. Let me put them in some water and I’ll be ready to go.”
He stepped inside my foyer. I gestured at him to come with me to the kitchen, where he hesitated in the doorway and I bit back a smile as I filled a glass vase with water and snipped the ends of the flowers before putting them in the vase. When I turned, drying my hands on a paper towel, he was looking at the chair he’d been sitting on the last time.
“Ready?” I asked.
Everything turned inside out when he looked at me.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I guess I’ll take you, anyway.”
And he did, twenty minutes away to a delightful restaurant I’d heard about but never been to. He opened the car door for me, and the door of the restaurant, and he pulled out my chair at the table. It was first-class treatment all the way, and I ate it up like it was the main course and not the delicious lasagna recommended by the waiter.
I didn’t think the conversation would flow. Johnny hadn’t exactly proven himself to be a talker—at least, not in the present, real-time. Sitting across the table from me, though, he turned out to have a lot to say on a lot of topics, and I let myself be buoyed by the rise and fall of that delicious voice.
“You’re not saying much,” he said with a pause to drink some of the excellent red wine he’d convinced me to try.
“Just listening.” I sipped wine, too, letting it roll around on my tongue before swallowing.
“How’s the wine?”
“Great. I don’t usually like red wine, but this is really good.” I took another sip, then tore a piece of thick Italian bread into pieces to dip in the flavored olive oil. “Keep talking.”
He didn’t right away. He studied me across the table. We even had a candle for ambience. The golden glow made highlights in his hair and reflected in his eyes. It reminded me of the first fugue I’d had, seeing him in sunshine.
“What?” Johnny asked.
“You,” I said. “You’re so…”
“Old?”
“Hush. You’re not old. I was going to say handsome.”
Johnny sat back in his chair, head tilted, mouth quirked. I knew that look. I’d seen it on his face in his films and in photos. I’d seen it on him in my head.
“I’m old,” he said. His phone rang from the pocket of his coat. “Sorry.”
I busied myself with dunking my bread in olive oil and my leftover red sauce from the lasagna, and with chewing and swallowing. I savored the flavor of the oil and garlic, thinking how I should’ve brought some mints or gum. I didn’t want to overhear his conversation, but did, anyway.
“Honey, listen… No. Yes, of course I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it.” Johnny frowned. “I told you the last time I couldn’t make it because… I know he does. Listen, has the kid complained? Because I talked to him just a coupla nights ago, and I asked him if he was okay with me taking him another night. He said yes…. Well, yeah, I know he might feel like he has to, but not because of anything I ever told him…. Honey…I know…. Yes. I will be there. I promise. Have I broken a promise to you?”
A pause. More frowning. I sipped wine to wash down the garlic while Johnny rubbed the edge of his thumb between his eyes.
“Within the past two years?” Pause. “Yeah, I thought so…. Well, don’t you push me, either, that’s all…. Yeah. I’m sorry, too…. I know. I’ll talk to you later.”
He clicked off the phone and put it back into his coat pocket, then looked at me with a sigh. “Sorry.”
I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “Uh-huh.”
Johnny laughed; I loved the sound of it. “You’re looking at me funny.”
“Don’t you know it’s rude to take a phone call from another woman when you’re on a date with someone?” I didn’t know where the sassiness came from, just that I opened my mouth and it came out.
“Another… Oh. Ah.” Johnny nodded, still smiling. “Well, you’ve seen me with her in the Mocha.”
I licked my lips and tasted garlic and oil. Johnny’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight. He watched my mouth.
“Oh?” I said. “Does that make it any less rude?”
“You like to give me a hard time, don’t you?”
I smiled and said nothing.
“She’s my daughter,” Johnny told me. “Kim.”
I had a flashback of a diaper-clad baby smelling of poo and spit-up. “But she’s—”
Of course she was no baby any longer. I’d read somewhere about his wife, his child. That was the explanation for why they’d shown up in my fugues. I’d never connected the blurred image of an infant in pictures with the woman who’d met with him in the coffee shop.
“I know,” Johnny said, though he couldn’t possibly have known what I meant. “Maybe you understand now why I was… Well, why I was a rude asshole.”
I didn’t, and my face must’ve shown it.
“It’s the age difference,” he said quietly, leaning forward.
“That again?” I flashed on what my mom had said, too, and frowned. “Lots of men date younger women.”
“Younger than my kid.” Johnny shook his head, looking rueful. “Kimmy’s at least a coupla years older than you are. And I’ll tell you something, Emm, I’ve only just been a part of her life again for the past coupla years. I know she’ll freak out if I bring home a girlfriend who could be her younger sister.”
This made so much sense—for someone else. Not for us, and I couldn’t even be sure why. “Let me ask you something. Is she married?”
“Yeah. Has a kid and everything. I’m a grandpa.” Johnny grinned at that, and I watched his face light up. “Great kid, too. He’s six now.”
“Did you tell her who to marry? Or comment on her husband’s age?”
Johnny looked at me straight on. “I’m not gonna lie to you. You think I’m an asshole? Well, my daughter thinks so, too. You both have reason to think so.”
I regretted making him feel bad even though I still thought it was some kind of fuckery for him to walk out of my kitchen the way he had. I didn’t comment, though. I just let him talk.
“Her mom and I split up before she was born. We were both young, figured getting hitched would be fun. When Sandy turned up pregnant, I was all for making a family, but…” He shrugged. “She’s kind of impossible to deal with. And I was working with all these people, all these women…”
“You don’t need to spell it out for me,” I said. “I’ve seen the movies.”
He didn’t look ashamed, just tilted his head to study me again. “Yeah. You know.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Do you think that would matter to me now?”
“The women? No. But the fact I didn’t make sure I was a part of my kid’s life the way she deserved me to be? The fact I let her mother take her off and expose her to all sorts of shit, even when I knew she was being dragged all over the place?” Johnny shook his head again. “No, Emm, that’s something that doesn’t get better just because it was a long time ago, or because I was young and stupid. I owed that kid something, and now I’m doing my best to pay her back.”