Megan Hart - Collide

In the center of those was a black-and-white photograph, maybe an eight-by-ten, in a thin red frame. The artist had painted over the photo with thick, three-dimensional strokes, highlighting the lines of the building I recognized as the John Harris Mansion from down on Front Street. I’d spent time looking at a lot of what people had determined art and wondered why on earth they thought so, but I didn’t have to spend a second pondering it about this picture.

“Wow.”

“I know, right?” Jen walked to the wall to stand in front of it. “Pretty cool, huh? I mean, you look at it, and it’s not like it’s anything special. But there’s just something about it… .”

“Yeah.” There definitely was. “And it’s not even dirty.”

She laughed. “No. I just like having it in here where I can look at it first thing in the morning. Does that sound lame? Oh, God, that sounds totally lame.”

“No, it doesn’t. Is this the only piece you have by him?”

“Yeah. Original art’s expensive, even though he’d priced this pretty reasonably.”

I had no idea how much pretty reasonable was and it seemed a little nosy to ask. “It’s nice, Jen. He’s really good.”

“He is. So you see … that’s another reason why I don’t talk to him.”

I looked at her with a smile. “Why? Because you like his art and not just his ass?”

Jen snickered. “Well, yeah.”

“I don’t get it. You think he’s superhot, you’re a big fan … why not just say something?”

“Because I guess I’d rather have him take a look at something I’ve done and think it’s good without me gushing all over him. I’d like him to respect me as an artist, and that’s not going to happen.”

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.