Collide

“Blueberry muffin. Should’ve gone with the chocolate cupcake, but I thought maybe that would be too much.” I showed her the plate with the muffin.

“Too much chocolate? As if. Be right back.”

I stirred my coffee to distribute the syrup, extra sugar and cream, then sipped, enjoying the extra sweetness most people didn’t like. Jen was right. I should’ve gone for the cupcake.

Jen had picked the wrong time to get in line. The midmorning rush had begun, customers lined up four-deep, all the way to the front door. She threw me an annoyed look and a shrug I could only laugh at in sympathy.

The coffee shop had been pretty empty when I entered, but customers who were put off by the line had started snagging tables while they waited to take their turns. I waved at Carlos over in the corner, but he had his earbuds settled deep and his laptop already open. Carlos was working on a novel. He sat in the Mocha from ten to eleven every morning before he went off to work, and on Saturdays, like today, he sometimes stayed longer.

Lisa, her backpack bulging with textbooks, took a table a few seats away and wiggled her fingers at me without noticing Jen’s semifrantic waving for me to ignore her. Lisa sold Spicefully Tasty products to pay her way through law school, and though I’d never found her sales pitches annoying, Jen couldn’t stand them. Today, though, Lisa seemed preoccupied, focusing on setting out her books and notepad, already clicking her pen as she shrugged out of her coat.

We were the Mocha regulars, like some sort of club. We met up in the mornings before work, in the evenings on the way home and on the weekends, bleary-eyed from the nights before. The Mocha was one of the best parts of living in this neighborhood, and though I’d only been a part of the club for a few months, I loved it.

By the time Jen got back to our booth with her tall cup of something that smelled both minty and chocolaty and her plate of something oozing and gooey, the crowd had settled. The regulars had found their usual spots and the people who’d just stopped in for takeout had bought and left. The Mocha was full now and buzzing with the hum of conversation and the click-clack of keyboards as people took advantage of the free Wi-Fi. I liked the hum. It made me conscious of being there, present. In the moment. This moment.

“She didn’t try to hit you up for some sort of cream-cheese spread today, huh? Maybe she got the hint.” Jen offered me a fork, and though I wanted to resist, I couldn’t help taking just a taste of her brownie.

“I actually like Spicefully Tasty stuff,” I said.

“Pffft.” Jen laughed. “Get out of here.”

“No, I do,” I insisted. “It’s expensive but convenient. If I ever really cooked, it would be even better.”

“You’re telling me. All that money for a bunch of spices I can buy two for a buck at the dollar store and mix together myself. Not that I do,” Jen added. “But I could.”

“Maybe next month.” I sipped more rapidly cooling coffee, savoring the richness of the cream. “Once I get some bills paid off.”

“You’ll have better things to … oh. Niiiiice. Finally.” Jen’s voice dropped to a murmur.

I turned to look where she was staring. I caught a glimpse of a long black duster, a red-and-black-striped scarf. The man carried a thick newspaper under one arm, which in these times of smartphones and webnews was a strange enough sight to make me look twice. He spoke to the girl at the register, who seemed to know him, and took his empty mug to the long counter where all the self-serve carafes of coffee were.

In profile, he was gorgeous. Sandy-blond hair tousled just so, a sharp nose that wasn’t overpowering. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the color of which I couldn’t see but suspected were blue. His mouth, lips pursed in concentration as he filled his mug and added sugar and cream, looked just full enough to be tempting without being too lush.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Girl,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “You don’t know who that is?”

“If I knew, would I be asking?”

The man in the black coat passed us so close I could smell him.

Oranges.

I closed my eyes against that second wave of scent, the taste of coffee so strong on my tongue it should’ve blocked out everything else but didn’t. I should’ve smelled coffee and chocolate, but I smelled oranges. Again. I bent my head and pressed my fingertips to the magic spot between my eyes that worked swell for headaches but did nothing for fugues.

But no swirling colors seeped around the edges of my vision as I opened my eyes again, and the scent of oranges faded the farther away he got. I watched the man in the black coat take a seat facing away from us. He shook out the paper, spreading it open across the small table for two, and put his coffee down to take his coat off.

“You okay?” Jen leaned forward into my range of vision. “I know he’s fucking hot and all, but damn, Emm, you looked like you were going to pass out.”

“PMS,” I said. “I get a little woozy this time of month.”

Jen frowned, looking skeptical. “That sucks.”

“You’re telling me.” I grinned to show her I was okay, and thank God I was. Not a hint of even a minor onset like the one that had hit me earlier. I’d smelled oranges because that man smelled of them, not because of some misfiring triggers in my brain. “Anyway. Who is he?”

“That’s Johnny Dellasandro.”

My expression must’ve been as blank as I felt, because Jen laughed.

“Garbage? Skin? The Haunted Convent? C’mon, not even that one?”

I shook my head. “Huh?”

“Ooh, girl, where’ve you been? Didn’t you have cable TV growing up?”

“Sure I did.”

“Johnny Dellasandro was in all those movies. They showed them a lot on those late-night cable shows like Up Past Midnight. They were slumber party standbys.”

My mom had always been too nervous about me spending the night at someone else’s house. I’d been allowed to go to the parties so long as she picked me up at bedtime. I’d had slumber parties at my house, though. “Sure, I remember that show. But that was a long time ago.”

“Blank Spaces?”

That sounded a little more familiar, but not enough. I shrugged and looked over at him again. “I never heard of that one.”

Jen sighed and looked over her shoulder at him, then leaned forward, lowering her voice and prompting me to lean closer to hear her. “Johnny Dellasandro, the artist? He had that series of portraits that became famous back in the early eighties. Blank Spaces. Sort of like the Mona Lisa of the Andy Warhol era.”

I could maybe have picked out a Warhol painting in a museum if it had been lined up alongside a Van Gogh, a Dali, a Matisse. But other than that … “Was that the guy who did the soup cans? Marilyn Monroe?”

“Yeah, that was Warhol. Dellasandro’s work wasn’t quite as kitschy, but it did go a little more mainstream. Blank Spaces was his breakout series.”

“You said ‘wasn’t.’ He’s not an artist anymore?”

She leaned forward a little more, and I followed. “Well, he has a gallery on Front Street. The Tin Angel? You know it?”

“I’ve been past it, yeah. Never been inside.”

“That’s his place. He still does his own work, and he has a lot of local artists there, too.” She gestured around the Mocha, hung with samplings of local art, some of her pictures among them. “Better stuff than this. Every once in a while he has some big name in for a show. But he keeps it real low-key, low-profile. At least around here. I guess I can’t blame him.”

“Huh.” I studied him. He was flipping pages of the paper so slowly it looked like he was reading every single word. “I wonder what that’s like.”

“What?”

“Being famous and then … not.”

“He’s still famous. Just not in the same way. I can’t believe you never heard of him. He lives in that brownstone down the street, by the way.”

I tore my gaze from Johnny Dellasandro’s back and looked at my friend. “Which one?”