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Johnny Dellasandro’s face was art.
And I let the door slam right in it. “Jesus Christ,” he said as he stepped back. His voice, pure New Yawk.
The door closed between us. Sun reflected off the glass, shielding him inside. I couldn’t see his face anymore, but I was pretty sure I’d just pissed him off.
I pulled on the handle as he pushed it open, the door’s sudden give making me stumble back a couple steps. “Oh, wow, I’m sorry!”
He didn’t even look at me, just shouldered past with a low, muttered curse I couldn’t quite make out. The edge of his paper hit my arm as he passed. Dellasandro didn’t pay any attention. The hem of his coat flapped in a sudden upswell of wind and I gasped, breathing in deep, and deeper.
The scent of oranges.
“Mom. Really, I’m fine.” I had to tell her this not because it made her worry less, but because if I didn’t say it, she’d definitely worry more. “I promise. Everything’s fine.”
“I wish you hadn’t moved so far away.” My mom’s voice on the other end of the phone sounded fretful. That was normal. When she started sounding anxious, I needed to worry.
“Forty minutes isn’t far at all. I’m closer to work now, and I have a great place.”
“In the city!”
“Oh, Mom.” I had to laugh, even though I knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better. “Harrisburg’s only technically a city.”
“And right downtown. You know I heard on the news there was a shooting just a few streets over from you.”
“Yeah? And there was a murder-suicide in Lebanon just last week,” I told her. “How far is that from you?”
My mom sighed. “Emm. Be serious.”
“I am serious. Mom, I’m thirty-one years old. It was time for me to do this.”
She sighed. “I guess you’re right. You can’t be my baby forever.”
“I haven’t been your baby for a really long time.”
“I’d just feel better if you weren’t alone. It was better when you and Tony—”
“Mom,” I said tightly. “Tony and I broke up for a long list of very good reasons, okay? Please stop bringing him up. You didn’t even like him that much.”
“Only because I didn’t think he could take good enough care of you.”
She’d been right about that, anyway. Not that I’d needed as much taking care of as she thought. But I didn’t want to talk about my ex-boyfriend with her. Not now, not ever.
“How’s Dad?” I asked instead, so she could talk about the other person in her life she worried about more than she had to.
“Oh, you know your dad. I keep telling him to get himself to the doctor and get checked out, but he just won’t do it. He’s fifty-nine now, you know.”
“You act like that’s ancient.”
“It’s not young,” my mom said.
I laughed and cradled the phone to my shoulder as I opened one of the large boxes I’d put in one of the unused bedrooms. I was unpacking books. I wanted to make this room my library and had set up and dusted off all my bookcases. Now I just needed to fill them. It was a task I knew I’d be glad I’d done after I finished but had managed to put off for months.
“What are you doing?” my mom said.
“Unpacking books.”
“Oh, be careful, Emm, you know that can kick up dust!” “I don’t have asthma, Mom.” I pulled off the layer of newspaper I’d laid on top of the books. I’d packed them not in the order I’d arrange them on the shelves, but just so they’d fit best in the box. This one looked like it was mostly full of coffee table books I’d picked up at thrift stores or received as gifts. Books I always meant to read and yet never did.
“No. But you know you have to be careful.”
“Mom, c’mon. Enough.” Now I was starting to get irritated.
My mom had always been overprotective. When I was six years old, I fell off a jungle gym at the school playground. Those were the days before schools used recycled tires as mulch, or any kind of soft material. Other kids broke arms or legs. I broke my head.
I was in a coma for almost a week, suffering a brain edema, or swelling, that doctors hadn’t been able to relieve by standard methods. My parents had been on the verge of agreeing to an experimental brain surgery when I’d opened my eyes, sat up and asked for ice cream.
The lack of coordination or loss of limb use the doctors had predicted never happened. Nor did memory loss or any discernible brain damage. If anything, I had trouble forgetting, not remembering. I’d suffered no long-term affects—at least, not physical ones. On the other hand, I’d learned to get used to the fugues.
She and my dad had thought they’d almost lost me, and nothing I could ever have told her about that time in the darkness could persuade her I hadn’t even come close to leaving. I’d tried once or twice, when I was younger, to reassure her. To get her to let go, even just a little. She refused to listen. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I had no idea of how it felt to love a child, much less fear you’d lost one.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The good thing was, my mom knew when she was getting out of control. She’d done her best to make sure I didn’t grow up a stilted, fearful child, even if it meant biting her nails to nubs and going gray before she turned forty. She’d allowed me to do what I needed to for my independence, even if she did hate every second of it.
“You could come up once in a while, you know. I’m really not that far. We could have lunch or something. Just you and me, a girls’ day.”
“Oh, sure. We could do that.” She sounded a little brighter from the invitation.
I didn’t think she’d actually take me up on it. My mom didn’t like to drive long distances by herself. If she did come, she’d bring my dad along. Not that I didn’t love my dad, or want to see him. In many ways, he was easier to get along with than my mom, because no matter what anxiety he had, he kept it to himself. But it wouldn’t be a girls’ day out with him along, and he tended to get cranky about staying too long when he wanted to be home in his recliner watching sports. I didn’t even have cable yet.
“I saw him a couple days ago, Emm.”
I paused with a large book on cathedrals in one hand. I’d have to adjust the shelves in one of the bookcases if I wanted to stand this book upright. It was meant for a coffee table, for display. I flipped through the pages, considering if I should just sell on Craigslist. “Who?”
“Tony,” my mom said impatiently.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom!”
“He looked good. He asked about you.”
“I’m sure he did,” I said wryly.
“I got the feeling he was wondering if you’d … met someone.”
I paused in unpacking, with another heavy book in my hands, this time one called Cinema Americana. Another yard-sale find. I was a sucker for a bargain, books my downfall. Even ones about subjects I had no interest in. I guess I always had the notion I’d tear out the illustrations and put them in frames to hang on the wall. Proof I really did have no appreciation for art.
“Why would he even think that?”
“I don’t know, Emm.” A pause. “Have you?”
I was about to say no, but a flash of striped scarf and a black coat filled my mind. The floor tilted a little under me. I gripped the phone tighter. The book was suddenly too heavy in my sweating hand; I dropped it.
“Emm?”
“Fine, Mom. Just dropped a book.”
No swirling colors, no citrus scent biting at my nostrils. My stomach churned a little, but that could’ve been the leftover Italian food I’d had earlier. It had been in the fridge a little too long.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing. For you to meet someone. I mean, I think you should.”
“Yeah, I’ll make sure every guy I meet knows my mom thinks I shouldn’t be single. That’s a surefire way to get a date.”
“Sarcasm isn’t pretty, Emmaline.”
I laughed. “Mom, I have to go, okay? I want to finish unpacking these boxes and do some laundry before I go to my friend Jen’s house tonight.”
“Oh? You have a friend.”
I loved my mother. Really, I did. But sometimes I wanted to strangle her.
“Yes, Mother. I have an honest-to-goodness friend.”
She laughed that time, sounding better than she had when the conversation started. That was something, anyway. “Good. I’m glad you’re spending time with a friend instead of sitting home. I just … I worry about you, honey. That’s all.”
“I know you do. And I know you always will.”
We said our goodbyes, exchanged I-love-yous. I had friends who never told their parents they loved them, who’d never said the words after elementary school. It was something I was glad I’d never grown out of and that my mother insisted upon. Even if I knew it was because she was afraid not saying it would somehow mean she’d have lost her chance to tell me one more time, I liked it.
The book I’d dropped had opened to someplace in the middle, cracking the binding in a way that made me sigh unhappily. I bent to pick it up and stopped. It had opened to chapter called “Seventies Art Films,” on a full-page, glossy black-and-white photo of an unbelievably gorgeous face staring directly at the camera.
Johnny Dellasandro.
Chapter 02
“Which do you want to watch first? What are you in the mood for?” Jen pulled open the door on what proved to be a cabinet full of DVDs. She ran a fingertip along the plastic cases with a ticka-ticka-tick and stopped at one, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you want to ease into it or plunge right in?”
I’d brought along the Cinema Americana book to show her and it lay open on the coffee table in front me, opened to the page of Johnny’s gorgeous face. “What’s this picture from?”
Jen looked. “Train of the Damned.”
I looked at it, too. “That picture is from a horror movie?” “Yeah. Not my favorite of his. It’s not very scary,” she added. “But he does get naked in it.” Both my brows raised. “Really?”
“Yeah. Not quite full frontal,” she said with a grin as she bent and plucked a movie from the shelf. “But, man, those seventies foreign movies were pretty graphic sometimes. It has a lot of blood and gore in it—will that bother you?”
I’d spent so much time in hospitals and emergency rooms that nothing much bothered me. “Nah.”
“Train of the Damned, it is.” Jen pulled the DVD from its case and slipped it into the player, then tuned the television to the right channel and grabbed the remote before taking a place beside me on the couch. “The quality’s not so good, sorry. I found this one in the bargain bin at a dollar store.”
“You’re a super Dellasandro fan, huh?” I shifted to keep the bowl of popcorn from spilling and leaned to take another look at the picture.
I hadn’t told Jen about letting the door slam in Johnny’s face, or how I’d already spent an hour staring at this photo, memorizing every line and curve, dip and hollow. His hair in the picture was pulled back into a thick tail at the base of his neck, longer than it was now. He looked younger in the picture, of course, since it had been taken something like thirty years ago. But not much younger.
“He’s aged well.” Jen peered over my shoulder as the first wobbly sounds of music filtered from the TV’s speakers. “He’s a little heavier, has a few more lines around his eyes. But mostly, he still looks that good. And you should see him in the summer, when he’s not covered up with that long coat.”
I sat back against the couch and pulled my feet up beneath me. “Haven’t you ever talked to him?”
“Oh, girl, hell, no. I’m too afraid.”
I laughed. “Afraid of what?”
Jen used the remote to turn up the sound. So far, the only thing on the TV screen had been a title dripping blood and a shot of a train chugging along a dark track winding through tall and jagged mountains. “I’d word-vomit all over him.”
“Word … ew.”
She laughed and put down the remote to grab a handful of popcorn. “Seriously. I met Shane Easton once, you know him? Lead singer for the Lipstick Guerrillas?”
“Um, no.”
“They were playing at IndiePalooza one year down in Hershey, and my friend had scored backstage passes. Ten or fifteen bands, something like that. Hot as all hell. We’d been drinking beer because cups were a dollar fifty and the water was four bucks a bottle. Let’s just say I was a little drunk.” “And? What did you say?”
“I might’ve told him I wanted to ride him like a roller coaster. Or something like that.” “Oh, wow.”
“Yeah, I know, right?” She sighed dramatically and popped the top on a can of diet cola. “Not my most shining moment.”
“It could’ve been worse, I’m sure.”
“What would be worse is if instead of never having to see him again I bumped into him all the time at the coffee shop and the grocery store,” Jen said. “Which is why I’m keeping my mouth shut around Johnny Dellasandro.”
The train—I assumed it was of the damned—let out a shrill whistle and the movie cut to an interior scene of people dressed in the height of late-seventies fashion. A woman in a beige pantsuit and huge hair, gigantic glasses covering half her face, waved a hand heavy with rings at the waiter pouring her a glass of wine. The train shuddered, he spilled it. It was Johnny.
“Watch what you’re doing, you damned fool!” The woman spoke in a thick accent. Maybe Italian? I couldn’t be sure. “You spilled on my favorite blouse!”
“Sorry, ma’am.” His voice was dark and thick and rich … and totally out of place in the movie with that New York accent.
I giggled. Jen shot me a look. “It gets better when he takes her into the sleeping car and bangs her.”
We both giggled then, and ate popcorn and drank cola, and made fun of the movie. As far as I could tell, the train became damned when it entered a tunnel that had somehow become connected to a portal to hell. There was no explanation for why this happened, at least none that I could figure out, but since at odd times the movie shifted into Italian with badly translated English subtitles—with Johnny’s voice being oddly dubbed in a much higher, swishier voice—I might easily have missed something important.
It didn’t matter, really. It was entertaining, with lots of blood and gore as Jen had promised. Lots of eye candy, too. Johnny ended up stripping out of his waiter’s uniform to battle foam-and-latex demons. Shirtless and covered in blood, his hair slicked back from his face, he was still breathtaking.
“I said, ‘Get the hell back to hell!’”
It was a classic line, delivered in Johnny’s thick accent and accompanied by the blast of his shotgun exploding the demons into tiny, dripping bits. And followed, incongruously, by a long, explicit love scene between him and the woman in the pantsuit, set to bouncy porn music and ending with the woman somehow getting pregnant with a demon baby that tore up her insides and tried to attack its father.
“So … Johnny was … the devil?”
Jen laughed and scraped the bottom of the popcorn bowl. “I think so! Or the son of the devil, something like that.”
The credits rolled. I finished my drink. “Wow. That was something.”
“Yeah, bad. But the sex scene. Hot, right?”
It had been. Even with the porny music and stupid special effects, even with the discreetly placed cushions that blocked even a glimpse of Johnny’s cock but left the woman’s hairy bush in full view. He’d kissed her like she was delicious.
“Good acting,” I said offhandedly.
Jen snorted and got up to take the DVD out of the player. “I don’t think it’s acting. I mean, I think he’s a much better artist than he ever was an actor. And the way he kisses … he fucks someone in just about every movie he’s in. I don’t think there’s much acting going on. It’s all pure Johnny.”
“When did he make all these movies, anyway?” I got up to stretch. The movie had been short, only a little over an hour, but watching it had felt like much longer.
“Dunno.” Jen shrugged. “He made a bunch in the seventies, then stopped for a while. Fell off the face of the earth. Then came back with the art and, so far as I know, only acted in one or two things after that. Mostly guest spots on TV shows. He was on an episode of Family Ties, if you can believe that.”
“Did he fuck someone?”
“He did!” Jen laughed. “But I don’t think they showed his cock. For that you have to watch … this.”
She pulled out a DVD with a plain red-and-black cover, one word on the front. Garbage. She was already putting it in the player as she talked.
“Okay. I’m not going to tell you anything about this movie in advance. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“That sounds scarier than Train of the Damned!”
She shook her head. “No. Just watch. You’ll see.”
So we watched.
Garbage had even less of a plot than Train of the Damned. From what I could tell, it was about a group of misfits living in an apartment complex a lot like the one on the TV show Melrose Place. The kind seen in so many movies shot in California—a few buildings painted teal or green surrounding a pool. In this movie, the complex was called the Cove. Run by an office manager who I was pretty sure was a three-hundred-pound man in drag, the Cove’s other residents included the slutty heroin addict Sheila, mentally disturbed porcelain figurine collector Henry, unwed mother Becky and a bunch of other random characters who didn’t seem to have names but came and went in the background no matter what else was going on.
And, of course, Johnny.
He played … Johnny. Male prostitute. The tattoo on his arm had been crudely drawn, probably inked with a homemade tool: Johnny.
“I wonder if his name’s Johnny in every movie?” I said, and was promptly shushed.
It wasn’t a good movie, if I were going to judge by the acting or writing. In fact, I couldn’t be sure there was any writing at all. It seemed mostly ad-libbed, which meant there wasn’t much acting, either. It looked more like a group of friends had gotten together one Saturday afternoon with a camera and a bunch of weed and decided to make a movie.
“I think that’s basically what happened,” Jen said when I told her my theory. “But fuck me, look at that epic ass.”
Johnny was naked for most of the movie. Something happened with a trick gone wrong, a drug overdose, a miscarriage. A body in the pool and then put into the garbage. I couldn’t have told you what happened if you’d held me down and threatened me with a live tarantula.
All I could see was Johnny Dellasandro. His ass. His abs. His pecs. His delicious nipples. He was built like an Adonis, muscular and lean … and golden. God. He was naked and sun-burnished, with just enough hair to make him manly and not so much it looked like you’d have to get a Weedwacker to get at his cock.
And he really did fuck everyone in the movie.
“Look at that,” Jen murmured. “I swear he’s really fucking her.”
I tilted my head to get a better angle. “I think … wow. That’s … Is he hard? Omigod. He’s got a hard-on! Look at that!”
“I know, right?” Jen squealed, clutching at me.
I hadn’t been this excited about an erection since my first boy-girl party in eighth grade, when I got to go in the closet for Seven Minutes in Heaven with Kent Zimmerman. My stomach dropped the way it does just before that first hill on a roller coaster. Heat stole up my chest and throat, into my cheeks.
“Wow,” I said. “That is … just whoa.”
“Girl. I know. Can you believe it? And just wait … there! Yesssss,” Jen said, falling back onto the cushions. “Full frontal.”
Just briefly, but there it was. Johnny’s cock in all its glory. He was talking as he walked and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to try and listen to what he was saying or just accept my utter, complete perviness and stare at his dick. The penis won out.
“That is some peen,” I said, my voice filled with admiration.
“You know it.” Jen sighed happily. “That man is fucking beautiful.”
I tore my gaze from the TV to look at her. “I can’t believe you’re so into him and you’ve never talked to him. Word vomit or not. It has to be worth a try.”
Jen shook her head. Johnny wasn’t on-screen at the moment, so we weren’t missing anything important. She gestured toward it.
“What would I say? ‘Hi, Johnny, I’m Jen, and by the way, I love your cock so much I put it on my Christmas list'?” I laughed. “What, you think he’d mind?” She gave me a look.
“Is he married?” I asked the more practical question.
“No. I don’t think so. Honestly, aside from the movies I don’t really know all that much about him, personally.” Jen made a frowny face.
I laughed again, harder this time. “Some stalker you are.”
“I’m not—” she hit me with a pillow “—a stalker. I just appreciate a nice body, is that so wrong? And I do like his art a lot. I bought one of his pieces,” she added, like she was sharing a secret.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “Yeah. His gallery is really cool. Lots of neat little pieces, nothing too expensive. And in the back room he has different collections. A couple years ago he was showing his stuff. He doesn’t always. I mean, he usually has his stuff included among all the other pieces, and he never displays it like it’s a big deal, you know?”
I’d never been in an art gallery, so I had no clue, but I nodded, anyway. “Can I see it?”
“Sure. I, um, have it in the bedroom.”
I laughed yet again. “Why? Is it dirty?”
I hadn’t known Jen all that long, just for the few months since I’d moved to Second Street. I had not, as yet, seen her look embarrassed about anything, or shy. She was pretty up front with everything, which was why I adored her. So when she couldn’t meet my eyes and gave that little, shameful giggle, I almost told her I didn’t need to see what had made her feel like she couldn’t share it with me.
“No, it’s not dirty,” she said.
“Okay.” I got up and followed her down the short hallway to her bedroom.
Jen’s apartment had been decorated in IKEA chic. Lots of spare, modern pieces that all matched and maximized the small space. Her bedroom was the same, painted white with matching teal and lime-green accents on the bed and curtains. Her apartment was in an old building, with walls that weren’t always quite straight. One, in fact, was curved, with big-paned windows reaching from floor to ceiling and overlooking the street. On one wall she’d hung several of her own paintings. On the opposite wall she’d hung several framed posters of prints even I, the art idiot, recognized—Starry Night, The Scream.
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.”