Collide Read online

  “Wow,” Jen said quietly. “He hardly ever says hello to anyone.”

  “‘Girls’?” I whispered, watching him, though he hadn’t done so much as glance back while he waited for his order. “‘Girls’? Like we’re twelve?”

  She laughed gently. “We are a lot younger than him.”

  I put my face in my hands and groaned under my breath. “Girls. Like we should be wearing knee socks and penny loafers with our hair in pigtails.”

  “Maybe he’s got a schoolgirl fetish thing,” she teased.

  “Gross.” I peeked at her through my fingers and watched as Johnny took his coffee to one of the back booths and settled into it, facing away from us. At least there was that. I didn’t have to make sure our eyes didn’t meet.

  “He never said hi to me before, that’s all I’m saying.” Jen gave me a lifted brow. “And he said ‘girls,’ plural, but he was only looking at you.”

  I didn’t let hope get a foothold. “Dude, I went all dead zone on him in his house, then I went to his gallery and tried to make out with him. He probably figures he’d better throw me a bone so I don’t, like, boil his bunny or something.”

  Jen laughed, loud and long. “That’s a good one.”

  “I mean it!”

  The doorbell jangled, and a few moments later, Johnny was no longer alone in his booth at the back. The woman who joined him was the same who’d been there before. Glossy, glamorous…and looking annoyed. She didn’t order anything at the counter, just sat across from him and started peeling off her leather gloves as she stared at him with a sour look on her admittedly pretty face.

  Jen had glanced up as she passed, now looked over her shoulder to see where she’d gone, and looked back at me. “He does seem to have a thing for younger women. But no wonder we’re girls, compared to her.”

  “She’s not that much older.”

  “At least seven or eight years, ten if she’s had work done, and, girl, those clothes say she has.”

  I didn’t really feel better by picking apart the woman who might or might not’ve been dating the man I was so crazy for I was actually going…crazy. “Whatever. If they’re together, they’re together. It doesn’t make anything that happened or didn’t happen with us any better.”

  “Does it make it worse?” she asked pointedly. “You said it would. If he were with someone.”

  “Only if he really wanted to be with me instead, and wasn’t because of some other woman.”

  “You know what?” Jen said with a sigh as she pushed her plate away. “I think you overthink it. Why not just get a bottle of wine, something sugary and chocolaty and take it over to his place. Wear something nice but not too nice, you know. Apologize to him for what happened, or what didn’t happen, and see where it goes from there.”

  I snorted under my breath. “Yeah. How about not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I already tried to make a peace offering. See how well that went.”

  “You’re so pessimistic!”

  It was my turn to give her a look. Jen shrugged and gave another glance over her shoulder before leaning forward to whisper, “I’m just saying.”

  “I feel like enough of an idiot as it is, Jen. No. I’m just going to avoid him. Totally avoid him.”

  “Good luck with that,” Jen said as she looked over her shoulder again before giving me another wide-eyed, brows-raised glance.

  Johnny had gotten up, his companion with him. He waited like a gentleman for her to sweep past us. She didn’t bother to even spare us a second’s attention, but he hesitated at the table. He didn’t say anything this time. Just met my eyes for the length of time it took for universes to be born from the dust of an imploding sun. In other words, half a second. Then he was gone, following her out the door and leaving me behind, breathless and sick-stomached and full of yearning.

  “Oh, girl,” Jen said sympathetically. “You are in so much trouble.”

  I didn’t get more than a few steps inside my front door when it hit me like a citrus tsunami. My eyes watered from the stench of oranges going soft and moldy. Always before, the smell had been fainter than this. Softer. Not a bad smell, for all it portended. But this was an assault on my nostrils, and I reeled from it.

  I put my hand out, blindly reaching for the newel post, but my fingers slipped past the carved wood. I stumbled forward a couple steps and clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, trying hard to keep the stench from permeating me any further. The smell was on my skin.

  Disgusted, I tore my hand from my face and rubbed it frantically on my clothes, but it only got worse. It rose all around me, a miasma. I couldn’t get free of it, because it wasn’t just around me. It was in me. It was on me.

  It was me.

  The world tipped and I went with it, onto my hands and knees, just like I’d been thrown off a merry-go-round, or jumped from a swing and landed wrong. Just like…just like…

  Just like I’d fallen.

  Chapter 14

  “Hey.”

  The soft, low voice shook me into opening my eyes. I knew that voice. I knew the touch of that hand on my arm, even though I couldn’t see him. I knew it was Johnny before I even opened my eyes.

  “Hey,” I said, blinking in the bright summer sunshine.

  Heat assaulted me, and a thousand different smells, none of them oranges. I gulped in deep breaths while struggling not to show how shaken I was, even as I wondered if it mattered. What would Johnny do, here, if I went to the ground shaking and twitching, if I babbled in a strange tongue. If I acted crazy?

  He was carrying a paper sack of groceries in one arm, and he shielded his gaze from the sun with his free hand. “You’re just in time for the party.”

  He sounded a little distant. Wary. The look he was giving me wasn’t much warmer.

  “Great!” I, on the other hand, sounded too brightly warm, too falsely cheerful.

  “You coming in?” He settled the bag on his hip, still shielding his eyes. He looked me up and down. “Get out of that coat, maybe?”

  No wonder I was sweating. I still wore my winter coat, though not the one Johnny’d returned to me. Though it was my favorite and most flattering coat, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear it instead of this one. Residual and misplaced mortification. I wore a scarf, too. And gloves.

  “Right.” My laugh was brittle. “I bet you’re wondering why I’m wearing this.”

  “Not really, no.”

  We stood there in silence while I sweated. Johnny took his hand away from his face. The sun beat down on both of us, but it lit him up like a diamond. Like the sun. Too bright and beautiful to look at head-on.

  “Come inside. Get a drink before you pass out from the heat. Jesus,” Johnny said after another half minute. “C’mon, Emm.”

  I followed him into the house and down the hall and into the kitchen, which for once was quiet and empty. It was cooler, too, though the breeze came in from the open windows, not from any artificial air-conditioning. I had to remember it was the seventies, probably during the energy crisis, when central air was a luxury even people who could afford it didn’t always use. I marveled again at the details my mind provided.

  Johnny put away the contents of his bag while I took off my heavy clothes and sighed in relief. My shirt, a thin plaid with faux mother-of-pearl buttons, was fine once I undid a couple of the snaps and rolled the sleeves up to my elbows. I fanned my face and lifted my sweat-heavy hair from my neck, wishing for a clip or a hair tie.

  “Here.” Johnny tossed me a thick piece of leather with a wooden dowel piercing it.

  I looked up at him, not sure what to say. “What’s this?”

  “It’s yours,” he said. “For your hair.”

  I’d never seen it before. I turned it over and over in my fingers, feeling the smooth leather. It had a design embossed on it, some sort of flower with a vine. I looked up at him again. “It’s mine?”

  “Yeah.” Johnny shrugged. “You left it here the last time.”