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  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  He turned. “Ed went crazy. We all fell apart. I guess I went a little crazy, too. I let what other people said about me, what they wanted, get in the way of what I knew I should be doing. So I went away for a while to get my head on straight.”

  I thought of the Johnny-then I’d made in my own head. Could he have lost it all? Become overwhelmed, lost his shit, gone away? Maybe.

  “To rehab?”

  He shook his head. “No. Loony bin. Straight-up state hospital, no private fruit-loop facility for me. They took me away on a stretcher. I couldn’t have paid for something fancy even if I had the sense to put myself away. By that time, the money had disappeared up my nose, down my gut, whatever. My mother was the one who did it, finally, God bless her. I’d probably have died myself, otherwise.”

  It hurt to hear this, though he said it in a matter-of-fact voice without shame, the way he’d said everything else. I wanted to hug him tight. Kiss him all over. But I wasn’t sorry I’d asked. I needed to get these things straight in my head. The real from unreal.

  “How long were you there?” I asked.

  “A year. Got out in ’79. Cleaned up, sobered up. Maybe still a little crazy.” He smiled.

  “You weren’t crazy to begin with.”

  His smile became a little sad. “No. I know that. But being in that place was good for me. Yeah, it was hard. ‘Love the sinner, not the sin’ sort of place, not that it was religious. I had a great doc, really got my head on straight. Made me think about a lot of things that had happened that summer. Made me see a lot of truths.”

  “About Ed?”

  “No, babe,” Johnny said. “About—”

  The door to his office opened and his assistant, Glynnis, stuck her head in. “Johnny, that guy from—oh, sorry. Didn’t know you had company in here.”

  She looked back and forth between us with a curious stare, but since we weren’t touching, weren’t even on the same side of the desk, at least she couldn’t have thought she’d interrupted anything embarrassing.

  “It’s okay,” Johnny said. “What guy?”

  “From that website. The blogger guy?”

  “Oh, that guy,” Johnny said with a facepalm. “Yeah, I told him I’d do an interview with him about the new show. Glynnis, can you just…fuck, I dunno, entertain him or something for a few minutes? Show him around the gallery?”

  “Sure, Johnny.” She gave me a timid smile and ducked out.

  “Sorry,” Johnny said. “I need to get back to this stuff.”

  “It’s okay. I’m glad we talked. I’m glad…well, just that we got some things out between us.”

  He gave me a curious look. “Was it that bad, Emm? Were you really that upset about it? I’d have told you anytime. I just didn’t think you’d want to really get into it. It’s all old history.”

  “I just wanted to hear it from you, that’s all.”

  From outside the office we heard voices. Johnny came around the desk and kissed me thoroughly. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  “Good.” He kissed me again, longer this time.

  I forgot where we were. Not a fugue, just lust. I laughed when he pushed his erection against me.

  “You’d better tame that thing before you go out there, or Bloggy McBloggerstein will have a lot more to say about you than he expected.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time my cock was all someone could talk about,” Johnny said as he walked backward toward the door, my hands still held in his.

  Our fingers touched until the last possible second, and then he let go.

  Chapter 27

  It was different looking at pictures of Johnny with him instead of giggling over them with Jen or even sighing over them by myself on the internet. He had a thick album full of prints, some kept neatly in place by sticky corners, others falling off their pages. Some were signed, not just by him but by others in the photos. Some had names and dates scribbled on the back. Some were formal, some were snapshots, some eight-by-ten and others in smaller sizes.

  “I haven’t looked at it in a long time,” Johnny said when a fistful of photos slipped from between the bulging pages and fell onto his thick carpet.

  I picked them up, sorting carefully. The paper was thick, the colors a little faded, but compared to shots I’d flipped through in my parents’ albums over the years, they were really well-preserved. “Why not?”

  “Do you look at old pictures of yourself naked?”

  “My mother has some hanging up on the wall,” I answered drily. “Bathtub shots. Totally embarrassing, yet there they are, for everyone to see.”

  “I’m going to have to take a good look when I go over there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, not really the same thing, is it?”

  Johnny looked at the pictures in my hand, then took one. I recognized it as one of the famous Roman statue photo shoot. I’d seen them on the internet and, of course, in my own convoluted fantasies. They looked different in his hand. He shook it a little.

  “No. It isn’t.” He leaned closer to look at the others I had in my hand. “What do you see when you look at those?”

  “I see a beautiful man,” I told him quietly.

  Johnny snorted. “Yeah.”

  “I mean it, Johnny.”

  He looked at me. “And what do you see when you look at me?”

  I kissed him. “Same thing. Just better seasoned.”

  The kiss deepened. He pulled me closer. His hands moved down my back to cup my ass, and he pulled me up tight against the front of him.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  His gaze cut to the album, then to me. “I see a kid. A young kid with his head up his ass, didn’t have a clue about life, what to do. I see a fuckup ready to show off his cock for a coupla bucks.”

  “Was that what you were?” I pushed onto my tiptoes to find his mouth with mine, then to hold his face and look into his eyes. I thought of Johnny-then, who’d been young, brash, a bit arrogant, but not a fuckup.

  Johnny’s gaze got harder for a second before he smiled. “Sure.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He studied me, something moving deep in those hazy green-brown eyes I thought I should be able to figure out but couldn’t quite. “You…didn’t know me.”

  I lowered onto my heels and took his hand, pulled him toward the couch so we could sit and snuggle. “You know what I think? It’s not really what someone says about themselves that matters, it’s what other people say about you. And what people say about you, Johnny, is not that you were a fuckup. Not that you had your head up your ass, without a clue.”

  “People,” Johnny said, slightly derisive, “don’t always have a fucking clue.”

  I dug into the box of memorabilia he’d brought and pulled out a folded movie poster. I’d seen ones just like it selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, and this one was signed by the entire cast. “‘To Johnny, with love, Marguerite. To Johnny, always ready with a joke, Bud. Johnny, thanks for all of it, you know what I mean, Dee.’”

  I looked at him. “People liked you. They gravitated toward you. And you were a generous friend.”

  “Too generous, maybe,” he said after a second, looking over the poster.

  I wondered if he was thinking about Ed but didn’t ask. “You keep in touch with them, don’t you?”

  “Some of them, yeah. Off and on.”

  “You all went off and did your own thing, you all became successful at it.”

  “Some of us more than others,” Johnny said.

  Again, I wondered if he were thinking about Ed or Bellina, or about Candy, with his own megamillion-dollar television show and cookbook empire. Or about himself.

  “I’m going to own up to my internet stalking. I read a lot about you.” I laughed when he rolled his eyes, but put a finger to his lips to keep him from answering. “A lot. From famous interviews to lowly blog discussions, and the consensus is the same, sw