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  Or not asleep.

  Chapter 20

  I turned in a bed, tangled in sheets that weren’t mine. I heard the sound of a toilet flush, the pad of bare feet, and in moments Johnny slid into bed beside me. Naked. I was naked, too.

  “You awake?” Johnny ran a hand down my body.

  I rolled toward him. “Yes.”

  “You thinking again?”

  “Again?” I laughed softly, snuggling in closer. “Always.”

  “Whatcha thinking about?”

  “You,” I said. “This. Us. Everything.”

  His hand rested flat on my belly. “What about us? This and everything?

  “Just that…” I sighed and rolled to face him. I slid my thigh between his to press us as close together as possible. “I don’t know how long it will last. That’s all.”

  “You can never be sure anything will last.”

  “That’s the sort of thing you find easy to say in the dark,” I told him.

  Johnny laughed. “It is dark. And it’s true. What, do you want it to end? This, us, everything?”

  “I don’t want it to. But it does. It will.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make the most of it, won’t we?”

  As his cock nudged between us, my laugh turned to a sigh. “Yeah. I guess we will.”

  He kissed me, and I blinked. I ran my hands over his body, over broad shoulders, down a smooth chest. Over his ass, which was no longer naked but covered in soft cotton. “Johnny?”

  “Yeah, babe.” It was Johnny-now talking to me. I could tell by the rougher timbre of his voice.

  “I thought you said…” I didn’t want to cry—I wasn’t sad, but my breath hitched in my chest. “I thought you said you didn’t want to…”

  “Oh, Emm.” His hands slid over my body, beneath the hem of my T-shirt, over my bare flesh. “How could you ever think I don’t want this?”

  He moved over me, pressing me into the mattress. He took my hands, moved them over my head, our fingers linked, to hold me still. I wasn’t trying to move, but I liked when he did that, anyway.

  We kissed for a long time. Soft and slow. The kisses got deeper and more desperate, but never sloppy. Johnny wasn’t a sloppy kisser. He moved his mouth over my face, my throat. He let go of my hands to push up my shirt over my head. He kissed my breasts, sucking gently at my nipples until I couldn’t breathe. Then down over my belly, the rough hint of his stubble scratching at my thighs.

  When he kissed between my legs, I gasped and put my hand on top of his head. He paused. The bed shifted.

  “This is how you like it,” Johnny murmured against my skin.

  He was right.

  He made love to me with his mouth, tongue and lips moving over all the secret parts of me. His fingers slipped inside, stroking. I tilted my hips, giving him access.

  My first orgasm rolled over me in slow, shuddering waves. When he kissed me, I tasted myself on him. I pulled him down close, feeling his cock thick and hard through his briefs. My mind mushy with passion, I whispered in his ear, “Condoms in the drawer.”

  He paused and pushed himself up on his hands to look down into my face. I had a sudden worry he’d protest the use of a rubber—and how disappointed I’d be if we couldn’t make love because he refused. But Johnny only shook his head a little and reached into the nightstand for the box of condoms I couldn’t even be sure hadn’t expired.

  We wriggled together, moving, taking off his briefs. Putting on the condom. He got on his knees, getting ready to push inside me, but I put a hand on his chest.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  Johnny kissed me. “I’m sure.”

  Then he slid inside me, all the way, and we moved together until I came again, this time with a gasp and a cry. He followed me, saying my name over and over again.

  This time, when I closed my eyes, I didn’t open them until morning.

  “Morning,” Johnny said from my doorway. He was already showered and dressed. His hair looked good slicked back from his face. He hadn’t shaved, but he still looked good. He wore different clothes. “What time do you have to leave for work?”

  I scrubbed at my face, sitting. “I have to be there by nine. Leave by eight-thirty. What’d you do, go home and come back?”

  “Time for breakfast, then.”

  I looked at him and laughed. “You did the walk of shame.”

  “How else was I supposed to get something else to wear?”

  “You woke up early, though. Got up in the dark?” I laughed again and got out of bed. He didn’t pull away when I stood on my toes to kiss him. “You were embarrassed.”

  “I always get up that early.”

  “You didn’t used to,” I said, not sure where that came from.

  “I used to go to bed a lot later.” His hands settled on my hips. “Don’t you think you should get dressed?”

  “Are you going to make me breakfast?”

  “Do you want me to?” He laughed. “No. I’m a fucking bad cook.”

  “Then you’d better take me to the Mocha,” I said.

  It was a test. I half thought he’d fail it. But Johnny only nodded and looked me up and down.

  “You’d better hurry it up, then. So you’re not late for work.”

  I showered and dressed and put on my makeup, but when I thought to twist up my hair and secure it with the leather clip I’d bought, I couldn’t find it, though I searched through my jumbled drawer of hair ties and bobby pins.

  “Emm! C’mon!”

  “Coming!” I left it, putting my hair in a braid instead and skipping out to follow him.

  When we walked into the Mocha together, it was a little like being the prom king and queen entering the gym. Everyone looked. Everyone stared. And Johnny took my hand, our fingers shielded by gloves but still linking tight.

  “Hey,” he said to Carlos, who hadn’t yet set up his laptop. “How’s it going?”

  “Morning, Carlos.” I beamed. It sort of felt triumphant, maybe a little catty, but I didn’t care.

  Carlos nodded at both of us. “They got pumpkin spice lattes on the board today. They’re good.”

  “I know what I’m getting,” I said.

  Johnny squeezed me next to him. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  He drove me to work and it felt a little strange, but not too much. He kissed me in the parking lot and told me to call him half an hour before I needed to leave work.

  And that was how it started.

  That. Us. Everything.

  And it was good. Really good. Johnny was a man, not a boy, just like I’d told my mother.

  He did what he said he was going to do. If Johnny told me he’d be there to pick me up from work, he wasn’t late. If he promised to pick up something for dinner, he did that, too. Because he worked his own hours, he had more flexibility than I did, which worked out well in my favor, since he insisted I either go to the doctor or voluntarily give up my driving privileges. I accepted his offer to be my chauffeur.

  We didn’t talk about the fugues, and I was glad for that. If sometimes I caught him looking at me with a curious expression, I ignored it. What we had was good, and real, and it worked.

  Johnny’s daughter, Kimmy, was a different story. As he’d warned me, she wasn’t exactly welcoming. She was, I thought, her mother’s daughter, even if I only had my imagination to tell me what her mother was like.

  It was Johnny’s day to take his grandson, Charlie, who ran through the front door and into Johnny’s arms in a whirlwind of small boy, then ran off again just as fast into the TV room to play with the Wii on the big screen. Kimmy stayed in the doorway like she needed to be invited in, something I knew wasn’t true.

  “Emm, I want you to meet my daughter, Kimmy. Kimmy, this is Emm. I told you about her.”

  Kimmy looked me up and down with a sniff, then said to her father, right in front of me, “They keep getting younger, Dad.”

  “Maybe you’re just getting older.” It probably wasn’t the best res