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  Great. I was crashing his party. What I at first thought was some sort of special reception turned out to be a regular Thursday night event, though, as I overheard one couple talking about how they’d been there the week before to pick up a housewarming gift for friends. This week, apparently, they were looking for a birthday present.

  I took my time, wandering the unevenly sized rooms. The floors of stripped and stained wood gleamed, and even though none of the walls seemed quite plumb, the soft off-white paint and windows hung with gauzy netting made up for it. Fairy lights hung on potted trees and crisscrossed the rooms with higher ceilings.

  “This place is gorgeous,” I mentioned to an older couple who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. I was glad I’d come straight from work. At least I was wearing a skirt and heels instead of jeans and boots.

  “Oh, it’s amazing what Johnny’s done with this place, isn’t it?” the woman said. “Just look at some of these pieces. Hard to believe you could find anything like this in Harrisburg, of all places. Who knew there was so much local talent?”

  “Is that what he focuses on mostly?” I thought Jen had said something like that.

  “Yes. And his own work, obviously. You’re familiar with Johnny’s work, of course.” The man with her had wandered off, maybe to refill his cheese plate. The woman waved her glass of wine in my direction.

  “Of course.”

  Truthfully, of all my internet stalking, the one part of Johnny’s life I’d paid little attention to had been his artwork. I knew a little of his history, but not much else.

  “We’re so fortunate to have an artist of his caliber, and his support of the local arts community has been so amazing.” She was a little drunk. She leaned in to me. “And what a looker, huh?”

  I drew back in distaste. “Yeah. Is he here, do you know?”

  “Johnny’s always here on Thursdays. This is his place,” she said, like I was a fucking moron.

  A foron I might very well be, but I wasn’t going to be a coward, too. I thanked her and kept moving, room by room, until I saw him. He was standing in the very back of the very last room, talking to a group of people I assumed were artists, based on their eclectic appearances.

  He was smiling, even laughing, and, oh, how beautiful he was. The wanting was a burning in my gut, sudden and fierce, but I welcomed the pain of it as what I deserved. I hung back in the doorway for a moment, watching him interact with the group surrounding him, and more jealousy speared me. Not sexual, this time. If Johnny was flirting it was subtle enough to keep me from seeing it. But he looked as if he genuinely liked the people he was with, and I wanted to be one of them.

  He looked up. Saw me. His smile didn’t fade, his laughter didn’t break. He didn’t wave me in, but he didn’t look as though he wanted me to leave, either. If anything, he looked like he’d been expecting me all along.

  I passed the time looking over the art in this room while his admirers all paid their respects and left one by one, until eventually we were the only two in the room. I felt him behind me before I turned, and I stayed staring at the piece in front of me for some long, silent moments while I tried to get up the courage to speak.

  Johnny didn’t wait. “You like that one?”

  I glanced from the corner of my eye but didn’t have the guts to face him. “It’s nice.”

  “Nice? To hell with nice. Art isn’t nice. Art’s supposed to move you.”

  I looked at him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know a lot about art.”

  Johnny laughed, not unkindly. “What’s to know? You think you need a fancy degree or, what, a beret, to get art? Nah, you don’t need any of that. You just have to feel it.”

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “I guess I’m not feeling much of anything about it.”

  “Me, neither,” Johnny said. “I just hung that there because that kid needs some cash to pay for school, and some people like that kind of thing.”

  I laughed and turned to face him. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  We both studied it for a moment longer.

  “I wanted to thank you for the clothes,” I finally said.

  Johnny said nothing. The music was fainter in this room than it had been in the others. I could still hear the buzz of conversation in the other rooms, the clatter of heels on the wooden floors. But in here, we were still alone.

  “I told you. It’s cold out there. You need a good coat.”

  “Johnny—”

  His eyes flashed, but I wasn’t going to call him Mr. Dellasandro. “It was nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Where did you get them?” I moved two steps closer, noticing that he took only one back. I didn’t want anyone to hear this. I wanted to be closer to him.

  “You left them at my house,” Johnny said.

  My gut twisted hard, and I swallowed a tinge of bitter bile. “Oh. Shit. What happened? What did I do? I mean…oh, God, this is so embarrassing. This is so—”

  Before I knew it, he had me by the elbow and had walked me through a small door into a tiny office, where he sat me on a hard-backed chair, pushed my head into my lap and drew me a paper cup of water from the cooler.

  “Breathe,” Johnny said. “And, Jesus, if you have to puke, do it in the can.”

  I didn’t have to puke, but the world had spun in an alarming way. Not like I was going to go dark, that was always more of a slip-sliding sideways thing. This was most definitely like I’d spent too much time on the merry-go-round. I sipped the water and drew in a breath.

  “You’re as white as paper. Drink more of that water.”

  I did. “I’m sorry. But I have to know.”

  “You don’t remember?” His accent deepened when he was concerned, I noticed. He lost the r at the end of his words.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He rubbed at his face, then pinched the bridge of his nose. He sat on the edge of the small desk. I was close enough to touch his knee, but I didn’t.

  “Was it…bad?” I’d spent so much time lately on the verge of raw emotion, I didn’t realize I was going to cry until the tears had already started. “Please, Johnny. Please tell me it wasn’t bad.”

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

  His embrace was warm and as familiar as his every gesture, though I knew it was my mind just filling in the blanks. I didn’t care. Shamelessly, I took advantage of his pity and pressed up against him, my cheek to the front of his shirt. I could hear his heartbeat, and it steadied me.

  Johnny’s hand stroked down my back and through my hair. “Shh. It wasn’t anything bad.”

  I shuddered against him with relief. I closed my eyes. “I’m so, so sorry for whatever it was.”

  Johnny didn’t say anything, just held me. His heartbeat sped up. His fingertips circled on my back, and my heartbeat bumped faster, too.

  I took a deep breath. My story wasn’t secret, it simply wasn’t something I told most people right off the bat. I hadn’t even told Jen yet, and she’d become the best friend I had. But I had to tell him, to explain, even though I knew it would make him look at me with pity I wouldn’t be able to stand.

  “When I was six, I fell on the playground and hit my head hard enough to knock me out. I was in a coma for a week.”

  His hand stopped moving. He didn’t move away, but I felt every muscle in his body go stiff. His heartbeat got faster, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I suffered undetermined brain damage that fortunately didn’t result in the loss of any of my motor skills or anything. But it did leave me with the tendency to…blank out. Sort of like seizures. They usually last only a few seconds but can last for a few minutes, too.”

  “Fugues,” Johnny said.

  Startled, I pulled away to look at him. “What?”

  “They’re called fugues,” he said.

  “Yeah. How did you know that?”

  “I know lots of things,” Johnny said.

  I’d m